Winter 2016 - Danger Issue - The Harvard Advocate

REPRINTED FROM 1921 ISSUE



 



It is an ungenerous platitude and a true one, to say that by far the greater part both of our actions and our thoughts have for their roots noting but dogma and cant. It is as true of politics as it is of religion; and it is becoming daily truer of the hitherto untrammeled field of criticism. In politics we have had our Robespierres, and we are still suffering from the effects; the political market is glutted with *liberté, egalité, fraternité*. Mr. Wilson has succeeded Jean-Jacques, and Lenin is still with us. In religion Bossuet has followed has followed hard on the heels of Luther, only to be displaced by the sing-songs of “independent morality” and the emasculated doctrines of modern Sunday schools. But literature, all through the ages, has made a strong stand and fought a brave fight against the Scylla and Charybdis of cant and dogma.



 



 



It was not till, weakened and unmanned by the terrible inroads of Taine and Brunetiére  that our modern criticism succumbed to the temptation to make of literature an exact science. Not until the shade of Sainte-Beuve had been laid to rest, that the French mania for classification took firm hold upon us. Today we could no more “appreciate” Shakespeare without applying certain scientific laws to the progression of his genius, without dividing him into as many compartments as there are stages in literature, without splitting him up into a “before and after,” than we could thoroughly enjoy the movies without music. It is as much an essential of our literary self-consciousness as fur coats are of our social standing. We could no more attribute the proper “literary emphasis” to Charles Lamb or William Hazlitt without first knowing what prenatal influences shaped their minds, without placing them in the wake or the beginning of a classic or romantic movement, than our literary consciences would allow us to split infinitives. Even in our moments of larger recklessness we cannot altogether forgive a dramatist’s transgression of the “law of time and place.” Voltaire is as unintelligible to us as Zeno if we do not know that “he marks the transition from the sixteenth to the seventeenth century”; French classicism would be a hopeless riddle to us if M. Lanson did not tell us that it is a “combination of rationalism and aesthetic taste.”



 



In short, literature would be a complete waste of time if we could not seat ourselves before it as we would before a vivisection table, dissecting here a phrase or a general movement, scrutinizing there a “tendency” or the fulfillment of an immutable law. In our mad rush to classify, to make literature “accessible to every home,” personality and style go by the board. Whatever cannot be made to fill a text-book on the “Origin and Development of the Novel” or the “Evolution of the Drama,” whatever, in sort, is real literature we cheerfully ignore. It has no vendible character; it cannot be spouted in a classroom—it has not even value as erudition. All that can be expected are a few workable rules, a few “literary tests” which can be indiscriminately applied and unswervingly followed. This is criticism; this takes the place of appreciation.

Some facts about risk:



 



* Recklessness is not a consistent trait. According to Elke U. Weber—the man who is to risk what Pavlov was to obedience—there are five domains of risk-taking, and our propensity to take risks differs across these domains. In other words, being an inveterate gambler makes you no likelier than the next person to enjoy skydiving, or to take back a cheating significant other.





 



* The amount of risk we feel comfortable with is fixed, and we will modify our behavior to make up for changes in risk-level. The paradigmatic case is the driver who buys better brakes: He’s no less likely to end up in an accident because, to compensate for the lessened risk of his brakes failing, he’ll tend to drive faster.





 



* People in committed relationships are less likely to take risks because the pressure is off to woo potential mates with flashy gestures.





 



* Driving is objectively risky. It is one of the riskiest things we do on a regular basis. It accounts for about 30,000 deaths per year, in the United States, and is the leading cause of death for Americans aged five to 34. It is perfectly reasonable to fear that we will die in a car crash. Over the course of a lifetime, one in 108 Americans does.





 



But we don’t fear it. Vehophobia is rare—much rarer than aviophobia, even arachnophobia. It is so generally un-feared that articles about risk will cite it as the foil to activities that tend to inspire anxiety: You are much more likely to die in a car accident than in a plane crash, of a rare disease, of a shark attack, etc.



 



The reason we don’t fear driving is a product of evolution. Generally speaking, we are programmed to fear what early man feared: that which we can’t control, that which seems to pose an immediate threat to our safety (Picture a highly agential tiger coming right at you.) A correlative to this is that fear strengthens memory. So, when a fear-inducing event is covered in the media, our brains latch onto it, and perceive it as being likelier to befall us than it is.



 



Driving fills none of these criteria. The danger at a given moment seems small. Car crashes receive little news coverage. There were no cars in the veld. In fact, the instincts that make us fear what early man feared incline us to act foolishly in the face of vehicular peril: When something is speeding toward you, your brain—sensing an animal predator—tells you, freeze.



 



In Kolkata, where I spent this past January, you are roughly 1.6 times as likely to die in a traffic accident as you are in America. My rock and a hard place were a bus and a concrete road divider, usually inhabited from the backseat of a three-wheeled, open frame auto-rickshaw. The backs of the autos said, “Obey The Traffic Laws.” The backs of the buses said “Danger!” But even though I was more attuned to the perils of driving than I normally am, I couldn’t truly fear it.



 



At first this was frustrating. Not because I wanted to fear a thing I couldn’t avoid—Kolkata is emphatically non-walkable—but because I have a tendency to fear things that, statistically speaking, I shouldn’t. The preceding weeks had offered striking proof of it. Spending the holidays in Harrison, New York, I realized I’d developed a fear of movie theaters shootings: a receptacle for a broader anxiety about mass shootings that I worry might eventually make me fear all public spaces.



 



In terms of its status as a potential danger, mass shootings are the opposite of driving: low risk, high fear. Going into a public space will never be “risky.” In order for an incident to qualify as a mass shooting (acc. the US government), three or more victims must die in an “indiscriminate public rampage.” Six shootings from the past year fit the bill—not a small figure by any means, but many fewer than The Washington Post’s “more one mass shooting per day” headlines suggests. In 2015 in the US, 367 people died in mass public shootings, slightly fewer than the number who died falling out of bed.   



 



But unlike driving, a shooting pushes all of our evolutionarily-programmed fear buttons. It is immediate, literally as fast as a speeding bullet. It is intentional: another person deliberately trying to hurt us. It is outside of our control and has what Don DeLillo in 1993 called an element of “shattering randomness.” And when it happens, it’s news. It rides that fear train straight to the hippocampus, and sticks.



 



The upshot of all this is that fear and risk, complementary though they might seen, in fact have nothing to do with each other.



 



There is a positive side to this: For every non-risky thing we do fear, there’s a risky thing we conveniently don’t. In Kolkata, it was heartening, even thrilling, to be greeted daily by my inability to fear a risky thing—to know precisely how much danger I was in, to know it to be a higher risk threshold than I am used to, and yet not feel fear.



 



Unfortunately, prescriptions for dealing with the other side of this neurological coin often fail to account for the discord between fear and reason. A typical method for tackling a so-called irrational fear is to appeal to reason—to tally the hard facts amassed in our corner and tell ourselves that the feared occurrence is extremely unlikely to occur. In other words, to evaluate the risk. Not the way our brains do make when faced with a hungry tiger, but consciously, a fact-based calculation that yields an objective, non-instinctual assessment.



 



But treating fear like risk is an ineffective means of assuaging it. Because we haven’t falsely assessed a risk. We don’t believe that the feared event is more likely to occur than it is. We’re just scared—the victim of our brains reacting in ways that made sense, back when the latest technology was fire.



 



This method of fear-management—providing ourselves with information that belies a faulty assessment of risk—might actually make matters worse. If you consider yourself a rational person, reassuring facts can act on the brain like a placebo pill: I expect myself to respond positively to this kind of data; so, when facts fail to ameliorate my fear, I feel, at best, stupid, at worst, crazy.



 



It’s likely that several of my friends have experienced this too. But I don’t know, because we don’t talk about this kind of thing. Because while I can find articles in which Anne from Connecticut confesses to not being able to enter a movie theater without scrutinizing her fellow audience members for signs of derailed-ness; while I can form an imaginary alliance with the 35 percent of survey respondents who said there should be bag checks at movie theaters, I cannot confess this fear to a friend without fearing that they will be put off by it—will judge me the way I judge myself.



 



This view of “irrational” fear is insidious in the extreme. Because a crucial component of the misery that attends an “irrational” fear is shame: feeling like you’re wrong to fear the thing you do, because objectively, virtually risk free.



 



Admittedly, mere awareness of why we fear the things we do does little to stanch anxiety. But I believe that if we took the placebo pill out of the equation, if we stopped trying to quell our “irrational” fears on our own, we might stand a better chance of beating them. If we felt comfortable expressing these fears, with the expectation that our feelings will be validated and possibly shared, we might be able to escape the mental prison that an unvoiced fear can be. And then, perhaps, we could go see a movie together.  



 



 1. For more on the interesting politics of calculating shooting statistics, see Mark Follman’s coverage of the issue on Mother Jones.



 2. According to the Gun Violence Archive, which uses the definition “four or more shot and/or killed in a single event, at the same general time and location, not including the shooter” to qualify events as mass public shootings.



3. <http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1887/the-art-of-fiction-no-135-don-delillo>



 4. Specific relaxation techniques—e.g. breathing exercises, frequently prescribed by psychologists—can be an effective means of mitigating anxiety. But this is professional advice, not common sense.



 5. <http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/16/business/mass-shootings-add-anxiety-to-movie-theater-visits.html>



 

The reputation of today’s college students has, by now, been raked through the mud in the pages of most of America’s prominent publications. We’re coddled, spoiled, out of touch, addled by an overdose of political correctness, desiring nothing other than to be swathed in comfort, shielded from anything our social-media fueled, reactionary hysteria might deem “unsafe.” Heralding the death of both free speech and American excellence, pundits and writers of op-eds have sounded the alarm on what they see as a veritable epidemic; the prognosis is dim.



For the generation raised in an era dominated by apocalyptic climate-change predictions and the post-9/11 discourse of terror, this may come as no surprise. All signs point to doom and destruction, and we are reminded tragically and frequently that danger is still unequally apportioned along age-old lines of identity and privilege. Can we be blamed for running to safety?



In 1866, The Harvard Advocate was founded to run in the opposite direction: For 150 years, Dulce est Periculum has been our magazine’smotto, rendering danger—not beauty or truth—the value by which we orient our writing and art. As President and Publisher, we have found that our organization lies in a disjointed cultural position: far from aligned with the op-ed pundits, but sensitive to their appraisal; a step out-of-sync with undergraduates and administrative deans who discount the real merits of danger. It’s an uncomfortable spot.



And it has lead us to believe that these warring factions have conflated two forms of safety. On the one hand there is physical harm, slander, discrimination, perils that tasted sweet to the wrong people in the past and must never do so again. On the other there is intellectual insecurity and combative debate, the grit of a challenge. To banish the second in name of the first robs undergraduates of the risks we need to both better ourselves and tackle more ambitious, collective pursuits.



The millennial generation has long been derided for ignoring such challenges. Before the reign of the “coddled” epithet, we were “apathetic.” To prioritize the perfect selfie angle over issues of global importance signaled our narcissism, we were told. But as we have turned our attention from Instagram feeds to more pressing social movements—Black Lives Matter, Occupy and its offshoots, the newly prominent campaign against campus sexual assault—a different source for our apathy has surfaced: fear. Cautioned and discouraged by the inability of our predecessors to adequately and definitively succeed, we worry about stepping on each other’s toes, panic at the thought of leaving someone out. When so many things are problematized, the scope of our ambitions narrows, and we begin to focus on small, immediate, and—in the grander scheme—relatively trivial concerns.



And nowhere does triviality seem so trivial as at our crimson-colored bastion of American academic elitism. Harvard, as understood by administrative envoys and Crimson editorials, applies too much pressure with its comps and cut-throat classes, generating an exclusive, hierarchical, and unsafe environment. This is sound reasoning, but reasoning that has come to inflate the relative smallness of collegiate pressure—and to ignore its many merits. As any top-rate athlete knows, if we want to improve, we must work hard, usually very hard. A small group of admission officers did not grant those who matriculate a carte blanche of permanent validation, and sometimes, we will deserve a C. Sometimes we will not want to hear a Marxist professor invalidate our future professions. Sometimes we will be cut. Insecurity in these moments, in a classroom or comp, can be a productive sort of discomfort.



But something about the Harvard bubble has obscured this logic, letting us equate personal invalidation with structural injustice and, most insidiously, ignore actual injustice. True, there remains on this campus a cornucopia of traditions and organizations tinged with distasteful remnants of archaic power structures, and there is much to be reformed within Harvard if it is to uphold its promises. Progress starts small, and it starts at home. But something is wrong when every student opines on exclusivity in Harvard’s elite social clubs, while remaining silent on issues far more central to our global future. We argue more about the politics of an introductory comp meeting than about actual politics. These conflations, these slidings of scale, arise from the same fear: a fear of offending each other, of potentially disagreeing, of confrontation. When we hold back, we stop talking, we stop listening, and we stop connecting. Very often, we stop acting.



Over the past four years, the two of us have seen a rise of that paralysis at 21 South Street: a tendency to swap sweet danger for bland cordiality, to keep meetings serene lest one undergraduate provoke another. Too often, the Advocate’s members say no to perils before tasting their flavor, closing their ears to each other and falling prey to suspicions that fracture meetings before they have begun. This fear of real engagement is particularly disquieting when it bears on relations to the broader Harvard community. Amidst the best intentions for organizational improvement, the Advocate find itself caught up in obsessive analysis of its own culture—in examining a minute position on this campus and trying to divine the mental states of all who perceive it. A quote spoken at the wrong moment, a candle misplaced—these are the details that have become invested with the greatest weight. Constant inward-facing dialogue has inflated our membership’s sense of self-importance beyond reasonable proportion. Hyper-concerned with imagined complaints, many become deaf to valid criticism and distanced from the magazine’s actual purpose.



As we bid farewell to the Advocate, we hope those left behind will recall that purpose’s primacy: This magazine should serve as a space for fearless debate over literature and art, our aesthetic risks ideally playing a small part in a campus culture that boldly demands not just extracurricular and dormitory justice, but racial, gender, sexual, environmental, and economic justice. The fear that narrows our focus to trivialities and personal affronts should impede neither pursuit, so we must remain vigilant to differentiate between species of fears, and of safeties.



To fuel that vigil, we return to our timeless motto, and to the firm belief that beyond its appeal as a decent spot for a cocktail, the Advocate still holds a commitment to one or two lofty ideals. On its sesquicentennial, this magazine—be it a victim of Comstockery, an organ of responsible criticism, or great organic zilch—has something to teach us muck-raked millennials: Danger, when shaken right, is still sweet.

Among the theories that abound as to the authorship of Elena Ferrante is the suggestion that she is, in fact, a collective of writers. As with all matters surrounding the continually posed question of why she remains anonymous, Ferrante has an arsenal of analogies for such occasions. But we accept that Elsa Morante wrote both *House of Liars* and *Aracoeli*, she observed in the *Corriere della Sera*; Joyce, *Dubliners*, *Ulysses* and *Finnegans Wake*, in the *Paris Review*. We happily interpolate a career’s coherence where we are given someone to pin it to; in its absence, we flounder. Mercifully, the best recent criticism has been more attentive in conceiving of a kinship between Ferrante’s works that shouldn’t be difficult to see. In fact, Ferrante intimated a kind of unifying vision behind her early works over a decade ago in “La frantumaglia,” the last chapter in her non-fiction book of the same name (forthcoming in English this year). Reading those words now, with the Neapolitan quadrilogy behind us, offers another way to conceive of Ferrante’s evolution over time—lends it the appearance, even, of inevitability.



 



In 2003, Giuliana Olivero and Camilla Valletti of *Indice* wrote to Ferrante. They observed that her protagonists till then—Delia of *Troubling Love* and Olga of *The Days of Abandonment*—seemed to come from myths and models of Mediterranean femininity from which they had extricated themselves only in part. Was their suffering, the editors asked, “the result of this intermittent rapport with their origins, of this difficult and never resolved estrangement from traditional roles?”[1] Ferrante responded that she found their theory intriguing, but that to engage with it she couldn’t proceed from their vocabulary: “*origin* is too loaded a word; and the adjectives you use (*archaic*, *Mediterranean*) have an echo that confuses me.”[2] She proposed instead a word of Neapolitan dialect, inherited from her mother: *frantumaglia*. Though not standard Italian, it seems to follow a recognizable rule: *frantumi* means fragments or shards; the *-**aglia* suffix turns feminine plural nouns into pejoratives.



 



Because Ferrante suggests that she never asked her mother what was meant by the word, her initial sketches of what *frantumaglia* is work backwards, drawing inferences from childhood memory: “At times it made her dizzy, gave her a taste of iron in the mouth… it was at the origin of all suffering not attributable to a single obvious reason… it woke her in the middle of the night… suggested to her indecipherable tunes to sing under her breath that soon extinguished themselves with a sigh."[3] (Though Ferrante never states it, *frantumaglia* is clearly a femininely-coded affliction.) However, as she acknowledges that nowadays the word has more to do with her own conception than her mother’s, her definitions become increasingly abstract, though often related to a fear of losing the capacity for self-expression. It is the painful realisation of life’s incoherence and to confront the ugly frailty of bodies. It is both what causes suffering and what those who suffer are destined to become; it is an “unstable landscape” that violently reveals itself as your “true and only interiority.”[4] Drawing on a discarded passage of *Troubling Love* where a young Delia hacks off her hair in filial revolt, Ferrante summarized the effect of *frantumaglia* as the small movement that causes a tectonic shift. That moment, she wrote, dissolves distinctions of linear time, schematic ideas of before/after, past/present or myth/reality; sinks us into the primordial depths of “our unicellular ancestors” and “mutterings… in the caves,” all while we suppose ourselves anchored to the computers at which we sit.[5] What lends coherence to Ferrante’s vertiginous piling-on of definitions is the convenient fact that it functions in the same way as the concept itself: the ordinary opens out—in a sudden and not completely explicable way—onto the cosmic.



 



To consider what *frantumaglia* offers that “archaic,” “myths of Mediterranean origin” and settling accounts with the past to become “women of today” do not is an interesting proposition. In fact, it makes sense of the leap between the compact early novels and the sprawling Neapolitan cycle. First, that the series returned directly to Naples and to girlhood, depicting the course of a life rather than adult women in exile. Archaic can simply mean very old, but it also implies an element of incongruity—an antique object out of place in a prevailing present. Olivero and Valletti suggested an “intermittent rapport” with one’s past and origins, a failure to conform to or properly dispose of “traditional roles” as the source of suffering. Their phrasing implied adult women removed in time and space from their origins, and the management of their relationships to this past as the problem. Yet Lila and Lenù suffer in girlhood not from the residue of an unreconciled past either personal or abstract-historical, but in response to their immediate surroundings: protracted episodes of malaise “not reducible to a single obvious reason.”



 



As if to underline the fact that *frantumaglia* belongs not solely, or even first, to the upwardly mobile, middle-class protagonists of Ferrante’s first novels, *My Brilliant Friend* also features an expanded cast of Neapolitan women. Figures who had heretofore been peripheral—appearing only to Delia, Olga and Leda as threatening visions of fates narrowly avoided—became full and important characters in their own right. The dead Amalia of *Troubling Love *is supplanted by Lenù and Lila’s living mothers, Immacolata and Nunzia; Melina Cappucio is the *poverella* of *The Days of Abandonment*, minus drowning. Beyond the strictures of motherhood or marriage, Maestra Oliviero crucially steers Lenù towards a high school education, and Manuela Solara presides over the neighborhood with the secrets aggregated in her ledger of debts. Dayna Tortorici argues in n+1 that one of Ferrante’s strengths is her ability to lucidly incarnate concepts of feminist theory like entrustment and the “symbolic mother,” her gift to literary women “books that speak to them in a language their mothers can understand.” What Tortorici observes of Ferrante’s novels in general is also true here: *Frantumaglia* is a word legible to the women who would most identify with the experience it describes. In declining the editors’ lexicon and supplying her own, Ferrante rejects what might be considered “obfuscating theoretical language,” however well-intentioned it may be. Lenù’s mother openly resents her daughter’s intellectual pretensions. These women would sooner identify as Neapolitan than Mediterranean; Lila, by choice, never leaves Naples in her life. *Frantumaglia* is a formulation they might embrace, even if “myths of Mediterranean origin” is not.



 



By supplanting abstract terms with a very specific one, Ferrante was paradoxically suggesting a broader scope to her concerns and signaling the extent of what David Kurnick called in *Public Books *her “grand novelistic ambition.” Ferrante concluded that her problem with the kind of theory suggested by Olivero and Valletti was its neatness. The past, in her view, is urgent; it is not something that can be superannuated, but only possibly redeemed. Delia’s achievement is not to put distance between herself and her mother but to realise that she had “been” Amalia. Olga overcomes her abandonment only by realising the constitutive role the *poverella* has played in her life and according it its proper place. Ferrante, defining *frantumaglia *and her theory of female suffering in an ever more expansive and associative way, begins with her mother sighing and weaves around it an atmosphere of intangible menace, explaining and interpreting until that first image is of a piece with the collapse of time and the contemporaneousness of all history. Even if Ferrante had not yet thought to write them, it gives some account, perhaps, of the scale of her Neapolitan novels-to-be, and their deft interweaving of the personal and the political.



 



[1] “Il dolore è il risultato di questo rapporto intermittente con le proprie origini, di questo faticoso e mai risoltato distacco dai ruoli tradizionali?”



[2] “origine è un vocabolo troppo affollato; e l’aggettivazione che usate (arcaico, mediterraneo) ha un’eco che mi confonde.”



[3] “A volte le dava capogiri, le causava un sapore di ferro in bocca... era all’origine di tutte le sofferenze non riconducibili a una sola evidentissima ragione… La frantumaglia… la svegliava in piena notte… le suggeriva qualche motivetto indecifrabile da cantare a mezza bocca che presto si estingueva in un sospiro.”



[4] “La frantumaglia è un paesaggio instabile… che si mostra all’io, brutalmente, come la sua vera e unica interiorità.”



[5] “Il dolore ci sprofonda tra le antenate unicellulari, tra i borbottii rissosi o terrorizzati dentro le caverne… pur tenendoci ancorate - mettiamo - al computer su cui stiamo scrivendo.”



 



 



 



 



 

*The Advocate* was a major part of my experience at Harvard, and a generally enjoyable one. I was a mostly unpublished poet then (that's a somewhat complicated story which I won't go into here) and suddenly I was provided with a venue and could expect to see my poems in print not long after I wrote them. It all came about through Kenneth Koch, whom I met in the fall of 1947, my junior year. He and I exchanged our poems and found we liked each other's work very much. Kenneth proposed nominating me for the *Advocate* editorial staff. But there was a catch: sometime during WWII there had apparently been a homosexual scandal at the *Advocate*, and the university had closed it down at the behest of a trustee in Boston who provided a lot of their funding. When it reopened after the war there was an unwritten stipulation that no homosexuals need apply.



My sexuality was known on campus, and the editors told Kenneth it would be impossible to appoint me. Kenneth, who didn't know about my orientation and who was a bit naïve about such matters, got angry and said that if I was elected and turned out to be gay, he himself would resign. This strong-arm approach ultimately worked: I was elected to the board and soon discovered that several other of its members were gay too.



Having scaled that hurdle, I settled into the board's activities and enjoyed myself very much. One aspect that was particularly agreeable was soliciting Frank O'Hara for material. I had known about him and knew him by sight on the campus, but had never spoken with him, since he had a somewhat intimidating look. I found that this image was misleading, and that Frank was one of the most open and welcoming people I had ever met. Although it was only about six weeks before I graduated, I started seeing a great deal of him and he ultimately became a wonderful friend and colleague. He, Kenneth and I would, along with James Schuyler and Barbara Guest would someday emerge as the so-called New York School of poets. Also on the board were future soon-to-be famous poets like Donald Hall and Robert Bly. Adrienne Rich was at Radcliffe at the time. I think we published her poetry but I'm not entirely certain. Other poets who were sort of “passing through” were Robert Creeley, Richard Wilbur and Ruth Stone. For all of us, I think, the Advocate, then located on Bow Street on the second floor over a dry-cleaning establishment facing the *Lampoon* building, was an island in a storm.

REPRINTED FROM DECEMBER 1986 ISSUE



 



My experience on *The Harvard Advocate* seems to me to be in some ways emblematic. And though I would like to think that we are living now in more enlightened times than those, the so-called liberated 1960s, I fear that there are many readers—mostly younger, mostly female—who may recognize something of their own histories in the following:



Early in my freshman year at Radcliffe, I attended an introductory meeting at the* Advocate*. A few days later, I got a call from an upperclassman I’d met at the meeting. On our first date, he informed me of his ambitions: First, he wanted to be a poet. Second, he wanted to be President of the* Advocate*. And third, he had wanted me ever since he saw my wan, follow-cheeked and rather gloomy photo in the Radcliffe freshman register. What I understand now is that this photo was the very image of a pre-Raphaelite poet’s mistress. Not only did he want to be a poet—he wanted a girlfriend who looked the part.



And so we began going out. As I remember, it took him somewhat longer to ask about my ambitions. By then, I had given up all thought of being ‘a writer,’ which is what I had wanted to be throughout high school. The slot had, so to speak, been taken. How could I be a writer if my boyfriend was a writer? I’d never even heard of most of the famous poets with whom he seemed to be on a first name basis. So I announced—and decided on the spot—that I wanted to be ‘an artist,’ that is, a visual artist, something for which I had absolutely no talent, my output until then being limited to dreadful, sentimental, badly drawn linocut-Christmas cards I sent to family and friends.



Sometime during that year, my boyfriend was in fact elected President of the *Advocate*. He promptly appointed me Art Editor. (My memory is vague on whether such an editorship existed before). I was delighted. Not only did I have an important boyfriend, I had an important job. I immediately began adorning the magazine with examples of my own beastly awful (I am not being modest about this) artwork, with the somewhat more accomplished doodlings of other.



Sadly, and for reasons irrelevant here, I was less delighted with my boyfriend. And sometime over the summer between freshman and sophomore year, I told him so. The next fall, I fell in love with someone else—an artist as it happened—and immediately appointed him to be my one-man art staff. My original boyfriend was understandably upset, but was hardly in a position to accuse anyone of nepotism.



Meanwhile I faced a new problem: How could I be an artist if my new boyfriend was an artist? Perhaps I should go back to being a writer—though this is not the story of how I eventually did. In any event it was all becoming very confusing. And editorial board meetings—with their constant potential for psychodrama—were beginning to be a strain. So sometime during that year, or the next, I stopped going, and began instead putting down the *Advocate* staff for being stuffy, retro literary types with nothing to do but debate which superannuated British poets to give readings. My friends and I, so I thought, had better uses for our time, and while some of these things—protesting the war in Vietnam and Harvard’s stockholding in South Africa, for example—still seem worthwhile, others—taking mind-altering drugs, listening to James Brown and the Rolling Stones—appear, in retrospect, pleasurable but less urgent.



Looking back, I am saddened by how reactive, how (in the psycho-parlance of those times) outer/ other-directed my decisions were. At the same time, I feel enormous compassion and sympathy for my younger self: her misplaced priorities, her confusions, her stupefying insecurities. Even so, I am a little embarrassed by what I realize now to have been my complete inability to distinguish between art, power, and sex—which isn’t to say that later life revealed these distinctions to be always reliably uncomplicated and clear-cut.



I thought about all this again when I learned that the President and Managing Editor of the *Advocate* are women, and I wondered how much has and hasn’t changed.

Against the tyranny of time and politics, imagine us the way we sometimes didn’t dare to imagine ourselves: in our most private and secret moments, in the most extraordinarily ordinary instances of life, listening to music, falling in love, walking down the shady streets or reading Lolita in Tehran. And then imagine us again with all this confiscated, driven underground, taken away from us. - Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran



 



In closed societies, free speech and inquiry are dangerous. The cost of speaking out is shutting yourself in: drawing the curtains, turning down the lights, and speaking in whispers.



America isn’t one of those societies. It’s a place where the protection of speech—however unpopular—gets first mention in our Bill of Rights. By law, speaking your mind in America shouldn’t be a risky endeavor.



But Brown University student Christopher Robotham would beg to differ.



In 2014, Robotham felt compelled to start an underground, invitation-only student club where his fellow Ivy leaguers could discuss controversial opinions, or even play devil’s advocate to uncontroversial ones. Robotham said some students and administrators had become increasingly hostile toward truly open discourse on campus, with mere debate on topics like race construed as, in itself, racist. Some went so far as to label the discussions literal acts of violence.



Robotham’s group was, in other words, a “safe space” for free speech.



Around the same time, another Brown student, Katherine Byron, was working with other student volunteers to organize a different kind of safe space: one specifically designed to shield students from the purported dangers of that sort of free expression.



With a controversial debate on sexual assault set to occur on campus, Byron told The New York Times that she worried the event might “invalidate people’s experiences” and be “damaging,” so she organized a soothing room where students could retreat if the rhetoric of the debate proved too much. It would have pillows and blankets and Play-Doh. Even a video of frolicking puppies.



A student who used the room told the Times’ Judith Shulevitz why: “I was feeling bombarded by a lot of viewpoints that really go against my dearly and closely held beliefs.”



Safe Space Thinking



The phrase “safe space” was first used to describe gay bars of the 1960s as a physically safe and socially accepting environment for LGBTQ people. Recently, it has morphed into something more troubling: the creation of ever-larger spaces where anyone who is subjectively offended by anything can opt out of the conversation altogether.



The arguments for safe spaces use the same misguided justifications used by those who have advocated for censorship throughout the ages: That shielding ourselves from intolerant, dissenting, or merely confusing viewpoints protects us from those viewpoints and those who hold them.



That is precisely the argument University of Iowa administrators used in 2014 when they removed a piece of art by Turkish-born faculty artist Serhat Tanyolacar, who sought to facilitate campus discussion about race relations by creating a Ku Klux Klan robe out of newspaper clippings about racial violence. Instead of discussion, he got censorship, with university officials calling his piece “divisive, insensitive, and intolerant.” In short, the administration missed the point.



What’s different—and scarier—about safe spaces is not just that they can provide students with an easy-out echo chamber (complete with treats!), but that their advocates often accuse those who would insist on having difficult conversations of being violent aggressors.



One Tufts University student even told the Times’ Judith Shulevitz that her article criticizing Byron’s safe space at Brown amounted to “verbal violence.”



Conflating emotional safety and physical safety exponentially raises the stakes for those seeking to tackle controversial topics on campus through art, debate, or other means.



The examples of the power of the “safe space” mindset to shut down campus debate are numerous. Consider, for example, the case of Ashley Powell, a graduate student in fine arts at SUNY Buffalo. Last September, Powell—who is black—placed “White Only” and “Black Only” signs around campus. Students found them on water fountains, benches, and bathroom entrances, and were troubled to find these vestiges of pre-civil rights America seemingly alive on their campus.



According to a New York Times report, students opposed to the artwork seemed to conflate conceptions of emotional safety and physical safety, and did so to an extreme. One Twitter user wrote of Powell’s work, “Not only is [it] a hate crime, but it is also an act of terrorism.”



According to SUNY Buffalo’s independent student newspaper, The Spectrum, Powell addressed a large crowd at the school’s black student union in the aftermath of the controversy:



“I apologize for the extreme trauma, fear, and actual hurt and pain these signs brought about,” Powell said in the statement. “I apologize if you were hurt, but I do not apologize for what I did. Once again, this is my art practice. My work directly involves black trauma and non-white suffering. I do not believe that there can be social healing without first coming to terms with and expressing our own pain, rage, and trauma.”



Powell later told The Atlantic that the reaction students had to her piece was precisely the reaction she intended: “The signs are a reminder that just because you can’t see racism around you doesn’t mean it’s not there … I wanted people to feel something. I wanted people to realize they must confront racism and fight against it in their daily lives.”



While SUNY Buffalo did not completely censor the art, it demanded Powell place explanatory placards on the signs, diluting the emotional power she intended her message to convey and preventing the very revelation on which the artistic experience hinged.



This raises the question: Should campus artists be permitted to produce and display provocative and perhaps disturbing artwork like the piece at SUNY Buffalo, or must their work be made “safe” for college students’ consumption by dampening its emotional impact with a disclaimer? What about those on campus who welcomed Powell’s art and the conversation it produced? What did they lose? As Frederick Douglass reminded his audience in an 1860 speech, “To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker.”



Sanitizing speech—through censorship, advisory warnings, or other means—never accomplishes its intended goals. In fact, it can backfire, creating martyrs for a cause and a larger platform for the controversial message.



Andres Serrano’s 1987 photograph “Piss Christ,” depicting a crucifix submerged in urine, would never have garnered the attention it did had critics—including those at universities—not called for its censorship. The same can be said of Powell’s art, which, after demands for its censorship, received media coverage across the country. This phenomenon has come to be known as the “Streisand Effect,” named for what happened in 2003 after singer and actress Barbra Streisand attempted to censor photographs of her Malibu, California, home and instead drew more attention to it.



Play-Doh Fortresses



What might ultimately be the greatest loss in sanitizing speech for public consumption is not a larger platform for those views, but the power that comes from understanding the world as it actually exists. Suppressing controversial speech does not actually do away with controversial viewpoints—it just hides them from view. If we censor speech, or hide from it, how would we know with whom we need to engage in dialogue? How would we even know when that dialogue is working?



Truth, of course, is what we should all be after.



Given this, the fact that the safe space movement is largely taking place on the modern university campus—a place that is meant to exist for the purpose of truth-seeking—is perhaps most troubling.



Higher education should provide an atmosphere where ideas are discussed, divisions created, biases tested, and offenses provoked. To be offended is to experience a necessary byproduct of a true education. If you attend college for four years and never listen to a contentious debate, see a piece of controversial art, or encounter an idea that provokes within you deep outrage, you should ask for your money back.



Offense is what we experience when we step outside of our echo chambers and encounter people who think differently than we do.



To shield ourselves from different viewpoints presumes that we have found ultimate truth. That we’ve reached the end of history.



But history is full of examples of people who falsely believed, as John Stuart Mill wrote, that “their certainty is the same thing as absolute certainty” and that no more debate or discussion is necessary. Even if a viewpoint seems objectively wrong, we still create a greater conception of truth through its confrontation with that error. Truth is like a muscle; it must be exercised to remain strong. That is how we maintain a living truth, rather than a dead dogma.



If we wall ourselves off from that process in the name of protecting our own beliefs and biases, we simply create a Play-Doh fortress with many enemies outside its illusory gates.



As for Christopher Robotham, the Brown student who started the underground free speech group, he thinks students shouldn’t try to avoid offense, but actively grapple with it.



“Intellectual discussion is worthwhile and, in its own right, enjoyable,” he said. “Open discussion and freedom of speech have tangible use in progressing society. I think that that has been forgotten is unfortunate.”



We live in an increasingly diverse society, where many people have remarkably different beliefs and outlooks on life. A “safe space” that shields us from that diversity offers us a place to forget—or willfully ignore—that fact.



Free speech in the name of seeking truth asks that, for the sake of humanity, we remember.



 



*Nico Perrino is FIRE’s Associate Director of Communications.*



*Alex Morey is Editor-in-Chief of FIRE’s award-winning news vertical, The Torch.*

REPRINTED FROM DECEMBER 1893 ISSUE



 



The study of Feminology is, perhaps, the most interesting branch of scientific research. Now, although investigations in this science are made by most of us between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five, yet, in general, our attention is so absorbed by the concrete phenomena of single specimens, that a comprehensive knowledge of the subject is hardly ever gained.



My purpose, in this exposition, is to give the reader such an accurate general knowledge of this subject as an analytical observer like myself may well have. To accomplish my purpose, it is necessary to divide my work into three heads. First, to summarize the different classes of the genus *femina*; second, to describe a specimen of each class; third, to state those underlying characteristics which the whole genus possesses.



The genus *femina* is divided into two great families: *femina modesta* and *femina vulgaris*. In the latter family, the specimens haunt such loathsome dens, and exhibit such disgusting traits, that I cannot speak of them here. Suffice it to say that, since the unhappy creatures are generally the victims of circumstance, they are rather to be pitied than to be blamed.



The family *femina modesta* may be roughly divided into three species: first, *puella quieta*; second, *puella masculina*; third, *puella inconstans*. Though a few other species exist, they are so insignificant as to be unworthy the attention of the experienced feminologist. Such, for example, is the species vulgarly termed “pills.” These are so appalling in their dulness that one shrinks from observing a single specimen.



Let us return to the important species. The first of these, *puella quieta*, through her excessive shyness and reserve, affords an almost insurmountable obstacle to the investigations of the feminologist. However, if the feminologist have the good fortune to secure the regard and confidence of one of this species, his task of analytical observation becomes, comparatively speaking, easy.



In the winter, for instance, specimens of *puella quieta* habitually avoid observation. They are rarely to be found outside of their dwelling places; and even when so found, their timidity renders analysis impossible. In the summer, on the contrary, when, with the rest of their kind, they migrate either to the mountains or to the sea-coast, they become bolder. At such times they flit gaily about in herds; and it is then that the feminologist, if he be lucky enough to be on familiar footing with one or two specimens, may without trouble pursue his investigation.



The second species, *puella masculina*, is far more susceptible of scientific analysis. Indeed, since specimens rather seek than shun observation, the feminologist, in collecting data, finds no difficulty whatever. The specimens are abundant at all times and in all places: they roam on the public highway: they frequent public amusements: they are, in fact, a trifle too pertinacious in thrusting themselves upon the public gaze.



The principal characteristic of* puella masculina*—from which she receives her name—is her inordinate fondness for adopting the various forms of men’s dress. Indeed, the raiment which covers the upper part of her body is eminently masculine. In protecting the lower limbs, however, she has up to this time conformed to those rules which custom prescribes for the genus *femina modesta*: but, since she is of an impatiently aggressive nature, it is a question of anxious conjecture among feminologists, whether she may not in the future break through these laws of custom and adopt throughout the apparel of man.



Thirdly comes the species known as *puella inconstans*. This, of all three species, is perhaps the easiest to observe superficially and the most difficult to analyze thoroughly. At first easy of approach, *puella inconstans*, grows more and more elusive as the investigation continues,—till at last the feminologist, unless very ardent, is fain to give up in despair.



The species, puella inconstans, numbers among its specimens some of the most beautiful examples of the genus *femina modesta*. Although, as I said before, all these specimens seem at first easily accessible, yet each specimen is in itself so intricate that a thorough examination of it would be the work of a lifetime. The feminologist will find infinite difficulty in such investigations; because his most profound inductions and his most careful deductions are likely as not to be rendered valueless by a single act of a single specimen of this eminently capricious species.



I have briefly described each species of this interesting genus. Let me now state the principal characteristics of the genus as a whole. To do this I cannot do better than to quote the distinguished feminologist, Guy de Maupassant, whose remarks on this branch of the subject are practically final.



*“Je parle,” *he says, *“des femmes vraiment femmes, douées de cet esprit à triple fond qui semble, sur la surface, raisonnable et froide, mais dont les trois compartiments secrets sont remplis: l’un, d’inquietude feminine toujours agitée; l’autre, de ruse colore [sic] en bon foi, de cette ruse de dévots, sophistique et redoubtable; le dernier enfin, de canaillerie charmante, de tromperie exquise, de délicieuse perfidie, de tous ces perverses qualités qui poussent au suicide les amants imbécillement [sic] crédules mais ravissent les autres.”*

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



 



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



 



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



 



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



 



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



 



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



 



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



 



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



 



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



 



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



 



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



 



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



 



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



 



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



 



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



 



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



 



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



 



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



 



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



 



As a little Kahuna, I had new responsibilities.



 



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



 



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



 



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



 



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



 



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



 



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



 



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



 



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



 



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



 



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



 



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



 



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



 



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



 



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



 



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



 



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

I stood in the backyard in Berkeley (behind the tree, next to Marion’s easel and paints) and flicked off the little red safety.



Marion was inside, in our dirty kitchen, heating water for pasta while dicing sausage for sauce. *If I don’t come back in a few minutes*, I had told her, *something is wrong*. She had laughed at me.   



I pointed the capsule towards the ground. I offered a licked finger to the wind, but it didn’t cool. It was a still July evening in the East Bay. *Check for a breeze*, my boyfriend Jared had told me, and then you can test it. *You won’t be able to use it when you need it if you don’t test it. *



I wrapped the capsule’s Velcro handle around my fingers, and pushed the trigger down.



Not much happened. A stream of liquid coursed out. Fixated, I held the plastic down a little too long, then pulled my finger up too slowly at the end—the fluid dribbled, pooled on the ground. A successful test, and now I knew. It only took one press of the button: brief, decisive. The packaging said the capsule contained 20 sprays, and that one had been worth maybe 2. At the end of the summer, I still had 18 left.



I flicked the little red safety on, and went back inside the house. I tucked the capsule into a pocket of my purse, easily accessible to desperate hands, and went into the kitchen to help Marion with the sauce.  



 



***



 



The active ingredient in pepper spray is oleoresin capsicum, an oily resin that makes eyes burn and swell shut. It’s the same stuff that makes a good salsa. Last spring, chopping jalapeños for chili, I got a little juice on my hands and forgot to wash them. Thirty minutes later, after an absentminded rub of the eyes, I found myself bent double over a gushing sink, trying desperately to pry my eyelids open so I could flush them out. It felt like I was going blind. Even when I managed to force my lashes up, light and air made my whites and pupils sizzle, my vision blur. This pain came down to capsaicinoids, the compounds that make up oleoresin capsicum and determine its strength. The habeñero pepper rates 350,000 Scoville heat units. Pepper spray rates over five million.



A 1994 US Department of Justice report makes a strong argument for pepper spray as a weapon. It’s more potent than mace, affecting not only on the eyes, but the breath— inhaled spray swells mucous membranes along airways. Pepper spray rarely kills but almost always incapacitates, providing a viable alternative to guns and even tasers. Unlike tear gas, it works just as deftly on the drugged and drunk. It doesn’t linger on clothes; ventilation, soap, and water clean it right up. It’s great for riot control but banned in international war.



Civilians have access to the same caliber of pepper spray that law enforcement officials do. Sometimes it’s misused, but not often. Another Department of Justice report, last updated in 2011, documents 63 cases of death in police-civilian interactions where pepper spray was involved. Of these cases, most credited the cause of death to heart conditions or drug overdoses. In the few cases where pepper spray did link closely to victim death, causing positional asphyxia, it did so by exacerbating pre-existing asthma or other respiratory conditions.



 



***



 



I bought the spray last summer while working in the Tenderloin, a pocket of San Francisco named for an analogous neighborhood in New York City. Urban myth credits the name to a ‘hazard pay’ bonus for law enforcement officials, cash that the cops put towards fine cuts of meat. There are other namesake rumors: paid-off bribes (more money to eat well) and prostitute thighs (a different kind of flesh).   



Bad things happen everywhere. This is what I tell my nervous grandparents every time I pack a suitcase. One gathers stray caresses in Prague public squares, shares bedrooms with suspicious strangers in São Paulo hostels. But men also follow footsteps in the heart of affluent Cambridge, and malls get shot-up in my own small Oregonian town. Really, no city is immune. One must travel anyway.



The Tenderloin’s statistics, while troubling, are brighter than Rio’s or Harlem’s. And yet, this place shook me; it scared me.



The first day I went into the office, I mistakenly exited BART a few blocks too far from the building. To get where I needed to be, I had to cut through Civic Center-UN Plaza.



Civic Center-UN Plaza is officially the home of the glistening San Francisco United Nations building, bounded on one end by a city hall on a hill. Unofficially, it’s home to a huge encampment of homeless men, women, and children. There are needles in arms, wheelchairs, rooted up trash cans, women in short skirts soliciting, women in long skirts screaming. There is hunger there, the pervasive smell of urine. Cops with large guns stand outside the government buildings, surveying the squalor with guns slung across their chests. It’s far from a slum. There are theaters in the Tenderloin, and restaurants, and schools. Still, it is something to break a heart: to watch the men with briefcases and women in blazers walking at a clip, brushing off need like a pesky fly; to crane a neck at those government palaces, looking down on their Americans with chilled apathy.



The first day I went to the office, I was wearing a knee length skirt. That day I would learn that this look was too formal for the office’s casual vibe—and also, that this was much too much leg to go incognito. I had my phone in my hand (big mistake) cluelessly staring at a map. By the time I got to the center of the Plaza, and realized that I should have traced the perimeter, it was too late to stop.



“Hey beautiful,” a man leered, lurching in front of me. Whistles sprouted from points on the square. The sun was bright. I vaguely processed, heart throbbing, that I was getting too much attention. Too many eyes were on my legs, and on my purse. It was 10 am (I had been asked to come in late that day) so no other employee was out on the street. I was being followed, surrounded. Stubble floated in and out of my vision, deep voices in and out of my ears. I tried to decide: Should I smile? Should I frown? Which would provoke less of a response? I made it to the door of the building, fumbled with the lock. When the surly security guard let me in, I was sweating.



My least favorite part of each day was walking to and from work. Sitting at my cubicle, time ticking towards 4 o’clock release, I would shiver at the screams wafting up from the sidewalk—the cries of one woman, the same each day. My second day, walking from office to BART with a fellow intern, I made eye contact with a woman sitting on the ground. She stood, yelled, and pitched trash at me, hitting the side of my face. I covered my head with my purse and power walked for the BART entrance. The next week, I watched a man pick up a needle and inject it into his arm at the bottom of the subway stairs.



To get to and from my house in Berkeley, I walked down Shaddock Avenue, away from the tourist ice cream shops and into quieter residential areas. A man got down on his knees and proposed, citing my smile and eyes as rationale for wanting to marry me. A man on a bike shrieked as he careened into my path, shirtless and wild-haired. Two men called out to me as I strolled to work; when I didn’t look back at them, they whispered “bitch, you bitch” and wove through the crowd to keep up with me. I picked up my pace. That was usually my tactic: move faster.



I hate to admit how scared I was—I, who carry a stamped passport, I, who know the tactics to defend myself—a poke to the eye, a knee to the groin—and the right words to yell—‘Fire!’ or ‘Get away from me!’—and the wrong things to do—no solo taxi rides late at night, don’t wear your flashiest jewels on BART, don’t engage anyone on the street in conversation. The experiences I catalogued were disconcerting, but I know (and knew then) that they were far from true horrors.



I felt elitist in my fear, petty for wanting to protect myself. These were people without access to toilets or nutritious food, people with yellow eyes and sallow skin. Most of those who yelled at me were obviously out of their minds—schizophrenics, or deranged from drugs. My fear didn’t strip me of compassion, but it did make it impotent. Instead of handing out bottles of water and Band-Aids, I was scuffing past the debris, secluding myself in a cubicle, getting away from it all at any cost. On the train, I thought about the Gospel healings—equating the lepers and spirit-possessed screamers of Galilee to the junkies in the Tenderloin. What a thing it would be to make illnesses jump into pigs, to make this nation well.



 



***



 



Pepper spray is legal in all 50 states. In some, like my home Oregon, that’s a general ‘go ahead;’ in others, it’s qualified. In California, I could order a capsule on Amazon, provided I was over 18 and purchasing less than 2.5 liquid ounces. Most of the regulations are of the non-minor, non-felon sort. Many states restrict carrying in public places like schools. Of course, abuse is a crime, and pepper spray cannot be carried onto planes.



When I returned to Boston with spray in hand this fall, a local told me I was a criminal, that you needed a firearms permit to carry pepper spray or mace in Massachusetts, and that you could only purchase them from a registered firearms dealer. That regulation has changed, though; the local was ill-informed. As of September 2014, a provision in a new piece of state gun legislation makes it no longer necessary to carry a permit to buy. (Massachusetts had previously been the only state with such a rule in place.) You still have to buy from a dealer, and you can’t order through the mail.



The other interns in my office carried pepper spray. My parents advised me to get some. But ultimately, I ordered a capsule of Sabre because Jared asked me to. He came to visit me for a week, walked my streets. We ate yellow curry in Berkeley, hiked from Ghirardelli Square to the Golden Gate Bridge. We also went to my office together. After his plane ride home, I received an email. It contained several links to Amazon pages.



*Please, please buy at least one of these. They cost practically nothing and they're a good investment for you even post-San Francisco, since you'll almost certainly be jogging and commuting in urban environments.I do think it will make you feel a little more secure and empowered. *



*I want you to get serious about learning to defend yourself. *



 



***



 



Growing up, my dad kept a baseball bat under my parents’ bed. He has retained all his muscles and used to play shortstop in high school. I have no doubt he could seriously wound or even kill an intruder with a few fell swings.



When I walk through a parking lot after a late night movie, I hold my car key between my fingers, ready to enter into an eye or slide up a nostril. In middle school, us girls sat on the gym floor with the physical education teacher and identified other common purse items that could be used as weapons: a comb, an uncapped pen.



My grandfather has owned guns all my life. He takes them to the Alaskan wilderness to hunt, hangs the heads of the animals around his pole barn.



But baseball bats are for baseball, keys are for driving, combs for brushing, pens for writing, and in this case, guns for hunting. There was something different about buying this spray.



What does it mean to carry something meant for hurting, and only for hurting? To carry it from a house in Berkeley, through the stiff air of the subway, down the blocks of the Tenderloin, into Celtic Coffee to get a Thai iced tea, and into a law school where women wear pearls?   



On a practical level, it would mean simply this: if someone came at me with a knife, or a gun, or a bicep, on my way to work or going home or going out, I would have a few extra seconds to escape, to shout for help, to get out my phone and dial three numbers. And that felt good. That’s why women buy this little container of liquid: to keep us out in the streets, going to work for legal think tanks, and having fun with friends.



On a philosophical level, it felt strange, even wrong. Nothing happened to me that summer in San Francisco except those catcalls—at most, there was the incident with the trash. I always walked to work in daylight. I never witnessed any crimes.  



And yet, I learned to avoid the inconvenience of others’ suffering—even though doing so made my conscience groan. I always picked a man in a suit to follow. I covered my wide eyes with sunglasses, and cast them down. I converted my nervous smile to a flatline frown. I never held my phone outside of my bag, and I clenched that zippered bag under an arm. I wore pants instead of skirts. I took the shortest way around the block. I held my breath to keep the urine stench out. I waited eagerly for market days, where the plaza was filled with stalls of zucchini and berries and I was assured an undisturbed walk. And I had that little canister in my purse: tested, ready to really hurt someone, someone on the kinds of drugs and with the kind of lung conditions one acquires from living outside that, with oleoresin capsicum in the mix, could maybe, it’s possible, result in death.



 



***



 



There are plenty of make-it-yourself pepper sprays on the Internet. Most recipes require crushed chili peppers and ground black pepper, heated and strained. Some claim Tabasco sauce will do the trick. Generally, the comments are more horrifying than the instructions.



 



*If a man dares to hurt me or rape me then I would do everything I could and if he goes blind he deserves it. He's evil and should be punished. If he's blind he will never do it again that's for sure.*



* *



*A knife would be backup to the pepper spray in case that does not subdue them.*



* *



*This pepper spray is a good one to use on incoming border crossers btw.*



 



There’s fear here, and perverted righteousness, too. I don’t trust the administrators of that justice—including myself.



 



***



 



As we strolled from a Tenderloin theater, a man grabbed my friend Ben by the arm, clung to it like a child, and wished him Happy Birthday again and again. The week before I arrived, Civic Center bloodied with an afternoon shooting and a woman named Kate was killed on the piers. One July day, there was a stabbing on the BART line I took to Berkeley; someone had knifed a transit employee while he stood post in his booth.



Nothing out of the ordinary for a city, but just enough to sustain my fear. It fed on of urban myths about meat and newspaper headlines about violence, on the worries of those who loved me, on possibilities. Fear settled itself over innocents, fogged my judgment. Nothing happened to me, and I did nothing. I rode BART in guilt. Women slumped in their seats trying to sleep, men with black garbage sacks mumbled songs to themselves, and I tried to focus on my book. Making eye contact would probably be okay—but what if it wasn’t? So I didn’t.



The pepper spray felt ridiculous. Could I even whip out the capsule in time, flick off that safety, press the button for the right duration and with the right force, when I really needed to? I wasn’t sure if I could. I was glad that I had it, sometimes: when the sky got dusky, or I heard the “bitch” whispers snaking behind me. The pragmatist rejoiced at those moments. Of course, I could hurt them if I needed to. I could and I would, I told myself. It was legal, I was exercising my shot at self-defense. But the idealist was saddened by my acquiescence to fear—my impulse to fight off the dangerous world with tooth, nail, and spray. I couldn’t tell how justified that impulse was.



 

REPRINTED FROM 1980 MARCH ISSUE



 



*Gabriel García Márquez was born in Colombia in 1928. His *No One Writes to the Colonel and Other Stories* was published in America in 1968. *One Hundred Years of Solitude* followed in 1970; *Leaf Storm and Other Stories* in 1972; *The Autumn of the Patriarch* in 1976;* Innocent Erendira and other Stories* in 1978; and *In Evil Hour* in 1979.*



* *



*The following interview was arranged by Adam Nossiter, and took place on December 2, 1979.*



* *



*This is a direct transcription from the Spanish; *The Advocate* is grateful to Rodrigo Garcia for his kind service as interpreter.*



* *



**Advocate**: I’ll begin by asking how you started writing.



 



**García Márquez**: By drawing.



 



**Advocate**: By drawing?



 



**García Márquez**: When I was very little, before I could read or write, I would draw stories in cartoons.



 



**Advocate**: You then went on and became a journalist. How do you feel your training in journalism affected your writing?



 



**García Márquez**: I think they’re complementary activities. Working in journalism on an every-day basis lets you get loose and lose that timid respect you have toward writing, in the beginning, that is, when you begin doing journalism or fiction. Then you get to a point where journalism *has *done exactly that: enabled you to get used to writing, easily and every day. And then fiction gives you ideas for your journalism. So they are complementary activities. And, very important, journalism was a way of living, to make money while writing. In the long run, fiction has enabled me to improve the literary quality of my journalistic work, and journalism has helped me to be aware of every-day events, or every-day life, which is helpful for my fiction. With time, literature and journalism—which so far have been parallel activities—with time they will converge. Right now I am looking for a synthesis, similar to what Truman Capote did with *In Cold Blood*. That’s simply an example; I don’t consider it an influence. The ideal thing right now would be to find an event in every-day life that I could deal with from a literary point of view, in order to prove that there is very little difference, a very small gap, between journalism and literature. Also to prove that every-day events, that reality has the same literary value as, for example, poetry.



 



**Advocate**: Is that actually what you are working on now?



 



**García Márquez**: Right now I still haven’t come across that event to work on. So what I am doing is writing short stories based on true experiences of Latin Americans living in Europe. I am dealing with these events, these experiences not from a journalistic point of view, or as memoirs, but simply from a literary point of view, giving them a *literary *value. In any case, in all my books, in my entire work, I can demonstrate that there is not one single line, not one single sentence, that is not based on real life. I consider my great problem to be that I lack imagination. If life doesn’t give me a fact, I am unable to invent one. I am perfectly willing and able to prove that, line by line, sentence by sentence, in every single one of my books. If I had the time, I would consider writing a book in the form of memoirs, talking about the origins of every single fact and adventure in my books. This book would let me make fun of all the critics and analysts of my books, who come up with facts that have nothing to do with what is written.



 



**Advocate**: How did the extraordinary popularity of *One Hundred Years of Solitude *affect your writing? I think there’s a certain break there: *The Autumns of the Patriarch *is very different in style and theme.



 



**García Márquez**: Do you know *Leaf Storm*?



 



**Advocate**: Yes.



 



**García Márquez**: I’m not sure if people have noticed this, but I feel there is a very close relationship between *Leaf Storm *and *The Autumn of the Patriarch* my first and last books. A lot has been said to the effect that *One Hundred Years of Solitude* was the culmination, the climax, of all the books that came before. I feel that the culmination of my work thus far has been *The Autumn of the Patriarch*. The book I was looking for from the very beginning was *The Autumn of the Patriarch*. I’d even started *The Autumn of the Patriarch *before *One Hundred Years of Solitude*, but I’d found there was a sort of wall, something stopping me from actually getting into the book. The thing that stopped me was *One Hundred Years of Solitude*. I have the impression that every book is an apprenticeship for the next. There’s a progression from book to book—but it’s a progression that can be in one direction or another. Not really a progression, in fact, but an investigation, which takes place from book to book. In parentheses, within my own process of investigation and evolution, I believe that one book is the best of them all, and that is *No One Writes to the Colonel*. I say sometimes, jokingly, but I do believe it, that I had to write *One Hundred Years of Solitude *so that people would read *No One Writes to the Colonel*.



And with respect to the change in style between *One Hundred Years of Solitude *and *The Autumn of the Patriarch*, I found it easy for two reasons—no, three reasons. First of all, there was the relaxation created by my having written *One Hundred Years of Solitude*. I was less scared of any literary adventure. Secondly, *The Autumn of the Patriarch *was a very expensive book to write. I wrote for seven years practically every day. On lucky days, I’d be able to finish three lines the way I liked them. So in fact *One Hundred Years of Solitude* financed *The Autumn of the Patriarch*. The third reason for the different approach in *The Autumn of the Patriarch* was that the theme demanded it. Written in the rather linear fashion of *One Hundred Years of Solitude* or the other books, *The Autumn of the Patriarch *would have turned out to be just another story of a dictator. It would have been a very long story, and much more boring than it actually is. All the literary resources I used in *The Autumn of the Patriarch*, among which were flagrant violations of Spanish grammar, enabled me to say more in a shorter space and penetrate more deeply into all aspects of the book, because you don’t go down straight as in a lift, but in a sort of spiral.



The relationship between *Leaf Storm *and *The Autumn of the Patriarch* is that they are both basically on the same theme: they are both monologues around a corpse. When I wrote *Leaf Storm*. I had had very little literary experience, writing experience. I wanted to find a way of telling a story that happened within someone. At that time I found only two models to help me with this. One was Faulkner’s *As I Lay Dying*. The book is a series of monologues, in which each monologue is preceded by the name of the character it belongs to. I liked Faulkner’s method, but I didn’t like the fact that he had to pinpoint each of the characters; I think character has to identify itself in the course of the monologue. The second model was *Mrs. Dalloway, *though I realized that the technique of interior monologue in Virginia Woolf’s work required an extraordinary literary training, which I didn’t have at the time. I found a compromise between these two models, a formula for monologue that lets you recognize the characters without having to be given their names. That of course is a limitation, because in order to avoid confusion I had to deal with only three characters. I chose an old man, whose voice was recognizable because hew was old, his daughter, whose voice is easily recognized. Mixing together these monologues and leading the reader around, that was my approach in structuring the novel. Twenty-five years later, with five books behind me, and with the security from every point of view which *One Hundred Years of Solitude *had given me, I could plunge into the adventures of *The Autumn of the Patriarch* without fear of breaking my head. It’s a multiple monologue, where it no longer matters who is speaking. It arrives at what I’d been looking for for twenty years, which is a social monologue. What is talking in the books is the whole of society; it’s everyone. They just simply pass the words from one to another: it does not matter who is speaking.



 



**Advocate**: Which suits the subject, because it is to such a large extent a political novel.



 



**García Márquez**: I feel a theme like that cannot be treated in any other way. I can tell you about the other formula I had for *The Autumn and the Patriarch*, which I didn’t use.



 



**Advocate**: Please do.



 



**García Márquez**: Many years before writing *One Hundred Years of Solitude* I started writing *The Autumn of the Patriarch *as a very long, single monologue, that of the dictator as he was being put on trial. The first line of the book was “Before we begin, take those lights away from here!” That monologue enabled me to explore the whole of the dictator’s life, but it had many problems. First, I was subject to only one point of view—that of the dictator. I was also subject to the style of the dictator, and worst of all, to the cultural level of the dictator, which is very low, like that of all dictators. So of course that didn’t work for me, because I was not so much interested in what the dictator thought as in what the whole of the society under the dictator thought.



 



**Advocate**: What is in Latin American history, od you feel, that lends itself to literary transmutation? All your works are set very specifically in the Latin American experience, and yet they’ve been internationally popular. To what do you attribute that?



 



**García Márquez**: I am an enemy of all theoretical speculation. What is amazing about critics is how from one point, which they declare a starting point, they draw all sorts of conclusions. For example, the critics tell me that my books have a universal value. The fact that the books are very popular throughout the world the world probably proves this is so. But if one day I realize why my books are internationally popular, I will not be able to keep on writing, or I will have to keep on writing for purely commercial reasons. I feel that literary work has to be done honestly and in order to write honestly you have to have an enormous unknown, unconscious zone. Hemingway talked of what he called the iceberg, because above the water you can see only a tenth of an iceberg, but that tenth is there only because the other nineteenths are underneath, holding it up. Even if I could explore what all the unconscious factors in my work are, I wouldn’t do it. I feel there is something intuitive that partly accounts for my popularity. When a writer writes about things that actually happened to people, then people all over the world want to hear about them, regardless of culture, race, or language. I feel that man is the center of the universe, that he is the only thing that matters. I remember reading, when I was very young, an interview with Faulkner in which he said that he believed man was indestructible. At that time I didn’t exactly understand what he meant, but now I am convinced he was right. When you think in terms of an individual, you realize that the individual has an end with death, but if you think in terms of a species, you realize that the species is eternal. This conviction obviously leads to a political belief and it also leads to a literary belief and whoever has this conviction can write literature of universal value.



 



**Advocate**: Are your books—I know you say they are based on reality—at all influenced by folklore and fairy tales> In structure, at least, there is a resemblance.



 



**García Márquez**: Not folklore. Folklore is a word that is badly baptized. It shouldn’t be used like that. Folklore is a word employed by the English to describe manifestations of other peoples, of other cultures, which probably aren’t manifestations of those people at all. It ends in tourism. I’d rather not talk about folklore at all. With popular legends, it’s different. My original influences, in fact, are from popular legend. Every popular legend has already had a literary evolution, and it incorporates two realities. All of my books have their source in reality, but definitely by way of those popular legends. I don’t know if it’s a reality or not that the dead sometimes come out of their tombs, but it’s a reality that people believe it. So what interests me is not whether it happens, but the fact that some people believe it does. And if you just add up these beliefs you can create a whole new universe.



 



**Advocate**: So the distinction between folklore and legend is that folklore has an element of condescension?



 



**García Márquez**: Worse than that, commercialization.



 



**Advocate**: When Americans think of Latin America, they see it as very religious, and I’m interested in what seems to me the small role that organized religion plays in your works.



 



**García Márquez**: Americans are right when they think of Latin America as very religious, but you’re wrong if you think of it as very Catholic, or very Buddhist, or any other official religion. People are very religious in Latin America because they live in such a state of forsakenness. For many years, they have been expecting the Coming- of some natural force. And the force they are waiting for is probably within themselves. But until they discover the force, they will have to fall back on all kinds of religious help. My books are charged with that sort of religiosity. In general, the main religion is Catholicism as you can see in my books, but also present is the inadequacy of the religion to answer the questions one asks oneself.



 



**Advocate**: You’ve chosen to leave Colombia, and you’ve led a somewhat nomadic life ever since. Why is this, and has the perspective gained helped [sic] your work?



 



**García Márquez**: I left Colombia for purely casual reasons. I didn’t decide to leave. When I was very young, after having finished my first book, I had political problems—the only ones I’ve ever had in Colombia. So little by little, I just stayed away from Colombia. It wasn’t a decision, ever, really. I just realized after many years that I’d been living abroad. The fact that I left Colombia had a great effect on me, not merely from a literary point of view, but also a personal one. From Europe I acquired a totally different perspective not only on what Latin America was but on what the whole of America was. From that perspective I realized that although I come from a specific country, the most important thing is to belong to the whole of the continent. From Europe I saw the whole of America, including the United States, like a huge ship, a huge ocean liner, with first class, economy class, cellars, sections for sailors, with great injustices between the different classes, and I have the conviction that if this ship sinks, everyone sinks with it in Colombia, I knew only Colombians. In Europe, sitting at a café, I met the whole continent. All frontiers of America and Latin America disappeared when regarded from abroad. All the countries across the ocean seemed the same.



 



**Advocate**: Can one take this one step further and transcend all national and geographical boundaries? Or is the American experience so very different from anyone else’s?



 



**García Márquez**: No, I can’t transcend. I can only go so far. I am always conscious that, in that ship, I belong to the tourist class. And Sartre said that class consciousness begins when you realize that you can’t change class—you can’t move from one to the other. But to go back to your question, the Americas are definitely coming together. It’s a historic process that cannot be stopped. And ultimately the continent will unite. There’s a very evident process of trans-culturalization. There are conscious efforts on the part of the United States to impose a certain culture on Latin America. I don’t like the ways in which this culture is being imposed, I also don’t like the aspects of this culture that are being imposed, rather than those that I consider more important. I like, for example, the influence Latin America music has gotten from jazz. I don’t like the way people say the spark of life is Coca-Cola. That’s what they say in Spanish ads. But you can’t create a wall to stop all flow of culture in Latin America. Similarly, the United States can’t create a wall to stop what is happening in the other direction. Even with the enormous resources the Untied States has, it hasn’t been able to stop Spanish from being spoken more and more within the United States. Candidates for presidency must have in mind, more and more each day, the Spanish and Latin American vote within the country. And when a Latin American author comes to this country, American journalists want to interview him. These are just symptoms of a fusion that will take place—speaking in very broad historical terms. This will be a very dramatic process, a very hard one for both countries, but one that is fated. Personally, I am happy it will happen like that. Europe interests me less and les every day.



 



**Advocate**: Although you are setting your latest stories there?



 



**García Márquez**: These stories will demonstrate what I am trying to say. After many years of experience in Europe, Latin Americans have realized that they can never actually get to Europe.



 



**Advocate**: One of the most important causes of this trans-culturalization has been the blossoming of Latin American writing in the last thirty years. Do you see yourself as part of this development in Hispanic literature, or, influenced by Faulkner and Woolf as you’ve said, do you like to think of yourself in a broader international context?



 



**García Márquez**: I consider Faulkner a Latin American writer.



 



**Advocate**: Why?



 



**García Márquez**: Because he writes of the Gulf of Mexico, of Louisiana, and his books are filled with the black element. I don’t consider myself more international than other Latin American writers. All of us have been influenced by Faulkner more than by each other—those who haven’t ben influenced by Faulkner have been influenced by other writers, usually Hemingway.



 



**Advocate**: It’s been said that *One Hundred Years of Solitude* is the *Don Quixote* of South American literature, that one can look to a steady progression of Spanish literature. Do you agree with that, or do you think there is something unique in Latin American writing?



 



**García Márquez**: I’d like to make a correction. I didn’t mean Faulkner was a writer of Latin America; he is a writer of the Caribbean. Of course, I feel that Latin America literature is a branch of Spanish literature. I feel that that relation is more obvious in Latin America with regard to Span than it is in the United States with regard to England. There are moments in Hispanic literature when it is very difficult to distinguish who is Spanish and who is Latin American. In any case, we are all ultimately descendants of Cervantes, and of the heritage of Spanish poetry. And something that has always influenced this literature is that there are two ways to go. The Latin Americans influenced the Spanish writers as much as the Spanish influenced the Latin Americans. There is a unity in the development of Spanish literature, which starts with the first anonymous poetry, and which goes as far as today’s Latin American literature. Speaking in these terms, I am part of this big current, just as I am not part of a current beginning with Shakespeare or with Fielding, although I may have been influenced by them. I also believe I have been influenced by Greek classic theatre.



 



**Advocate**: You use an epigraph from “Antigone” for *Leaf Storm*.



 



**García Márquez**: I feel there’s something from Sophocles in all my books, because of what we were saying at the beginning, that every great writer’s main concern is what happens to people.



 



**Advocate**: I’m not sure this question can be answered, but can you say what characterizes or defines that current of Spanish literature?



 



**García Márquez**: It’s very complicated. For a complicated question I’ll give you a complicated answer. And for a grandiloquent question I’ll give you a grandiloquent answer. The main value of Spanish literature is the quest for true identity.



 



**Advocate**: What sort of differences do you see, then, between contemporary Latin American writers and Spanish writers? It’s been said that the Latin Americans are much more fertile and imaginative.



 



**García Márquez**: In any case, because of the development of two different geographies and of the two different countries—because what has happened to Spain and what has happened to Latin America is so different—there is a clear divergence. Spanish writers nowadays are still concerned with getting out of the drama of the Civil War and then out of the swamp which was the Franco regime. Whereas in Latin America, there’ve been many different political and social movements for many years—they’ve forced writers to ask themselves “Who the hell are we?” Literature is a social product, even if its elaboration is individual. I can’t think of a Latin American writer who today would think of writing “Hamlet”, for instance. Or for that matter a Spanish writer who could write *Pedro Paramo *by Juan Rulfo. In spite of the differences between Latin America and Spain that are due to certain political and historical events, Hispanic literature as a whole still has a certain continuity. Maybe Latin American literature is richer and more interesting than that in Spain. Although Spain had the Arabic influence in the Middle Ages—which is reflected still and will continue to be reflected forever in Latin America—Latin America has had the great black element, and the great contributions of immigrants from all the countries of the world. It’s been said that Latin American nations are made up of all the wastes of Europe. Of course, this makes Latin America different, but there can be no question that there is one single, united Hispanic culture.



 



**Advocate**: I’d like to ask a simpler question, and that’s merely what contemporary writers you admire?



 



**García Márquez**: There are many and varied ones, because there are many different reasons and motives for my admiration. Whenever I’m asked that question I have the fear, not of making mistakes with the ones I name, but of making the mistake of not naming many others. And sometimes I am scared that what I say about other writers might be more influential than I’m aware of. Within the Latin American context, the one I admire most is the one who has written the least, and that is Juan Rulfo from Mexico. What do you think of Graham Greene?



 



**Advocate**: I like some of his novels very much.



 



**García Márquez**: I mention him because he is the only living, great English novelist that comes to mind. I think he is one of the greatest novelists of this century. But there are not many good English writers now. Their ninetheenth-century [sic] achievement was what was most remarkable. No one’s ever equaled that. The Americans were the only people to come close. With Hawthorne, Poe, Melville, and *el loco de Mississippi*.



 



**Advocate**: Mark Twain?



 



**García Márquez**: Mark Twain. And the next generation, with Hemingway and Faulkner. But no one’s ever come up to the English.



 



**Advocate**: What about the nineteenth-century Russians?



 



**García Márquez**: There are simply more English novelists—the total mass is so much greater. And that means there is more flexibility, more variety. The Russians have surpassed the English on some themes, on some particular topics, but not in everything, or even most things. They’re like the Americans, specializing in certain things. Is Melville read in America, outside of schools? He is full of splendid things. I think he was the greatest writer America has had.



 



**Advocate**: Do you have any advice for people beginning to write?



 



**García Márquez**: The only possible advice is to keep on writing, to continue and continue to write. 



 

*Mark Chiusano is a Features Board alumnus who, during his time on The Advocate, published six feature articles in the magazine, as well as six short stories. Following Chiusano’s graduation from Harvard in 2012, his creative thesis, the short story collection Marine Park,was published by Penguin and received an honorable mention for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Mark is currently an editorial writer for Newsday and amNew York (you can read his column at [www.amny.com/amexpress](http://www.amny.com/amexpress))and is at work on his second book. *



 



**You were able to professionally publish your creative thesis, the short story collection Marine Park. What is it like to have succeeded so quickly?**



So many of these things are luck. It was kind of…I was in the right place at the right time, having a book that was finished, and usually agents don’t want to waste their time on you unless you have a finished book to show them. The nice thing was, I was doing stories, but they were fairly linked stories, and it kind of formed a somewhat comprehensive whole, so I had a full project to show people. But you know, it was amazing. It’s one of those things that kind of happens in little leaps before bounds, I guess. By the time the book comes out you kind of forget how awesome it is. But the whole thing was so much fun, and so lucky.



 



**What kind of relationship does it put you in with other writers your age, who are still trying to get published for the first time?**



I think that most people understand that there’s no rush to getting published. Actually, a handful of mentors of mine, and friends, advised me not even to try to get this first book published…saying that it’s best to wait and make sure you get going with your best foot forward. But I kind of felt that this was what I had at the moment that was worth putting out. I think that it’s…very near a competitive game, but it’s better to avoid that sense of competition. Hopefully, one person is publishing your book, and another person is publishing another person’s book.



 



**You’re not currently pursuing an MFA. How do you feel about MFA programs?**



I thought I was going to try for an MFA. I was going to take a year after college [to apply]. I took the GRE, which was a horrible waste of time. And sadly, I think my GRE scores are about to evaporate. But I think, when I was graduating from college, I sort of wanted a break from the workshop environment, which I love, and which really helped me a lot. But at some point you have to go out on your own and make terrible, terrible mistakes, and not really have anyone to point them out so quickly. The other thing to say is that most of your readers in an ideal world aren’t college students or MFA [students] or in an academic environment. They’re usually in a working place environment. So it’s useful to have a sense of what actual occupations are like…what an office job is like. So I was kind of interested in going into the “real world,” or work world, and learning what that was like. The thing about the MFA is it gives you time to write, but through the Advocate I had already had that for two, three years.



 



**How do you balance having a real job with having time to write?**



It’s a constant struggle, and I’m figuring it out as I go along. But what I did from the beginning was do my writing first thing in the morning, for as long as I could—half an hour, an hour—then essentially forget about it for the rest of the day. Which is useful when you have a full time job. For a while I would write at nighttime when I got home from work, but that was just really depressing. You know, I would be tired, I would want to go out and meet friends. And if you do it at the end of the day, it’s easy just to decide not to do it, whereas if you do it in the morning it’s kind of out of the way.



** **



**Have your literary tastes evolved since leaving college?**



I think in college I was reading pretty much exclusively fiction. And after I left college I started working at a publishing house for a nonfiction editor, so I started reading a lot more nonfiction. That’s kind of what I’ve been floating toward these days. So I probably read about 50 percent fiction, 50 fifty percent nonfiction. I feel like we read so little nonfiction in English [at Harvard], which makes sense. But now I’m sort of catching up from college.



 



**Is that more because you enjoy reading it, or because you think it has a positive influence on your writing style?**



It is definitely very crucial for research. I read a ton of nonfiction for the fictional characters I’m writing. But I also think there’s also something to be learned from the prose style of nonfiction writers—very simple, very to the point, just getting across the information. And it’s good to have that in your arsenal.



 



**What’s the trend that poses the greatest threat to literary fiction today? What do you hate about contemporary fiction?**



I think there is a trend in contemporary literary fiction to be preaching to the choir...and the fiction that I like the most is the fiction that feels most urgent, and speaks to the broadest population. I worry that if writers screw themselves even more into academia and the MFA path and are writing for those people… The last line of *MFA vs NYC *says something like, “eventually we’ll make writers of us all.” So, if you have everyone with an MFA that’s fine, and you can write totally toward MFA students, but right now I work as a journalist and I think that that informs my writing a lot. I enjoy being out of the world, thinking of real problems, if not all problems.



 



**Who are some contemporary writers that you enjoy reading, and why?**



I just finished Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s *Americanah*, and I really like her. [Americanah] is in one sense a phenomenal inward-looking story. It’s a beautiful love story, but it’s also a fantastic picture of race relations in America, and also of immigration patterns in both England and America. So there’s so much in it; it’s such an outward-looking book, in addition to having characters who are incredibly real.



 



**After you started working as a professional writer, what is the first thing you realized about the real world, that Harvard insulates us from?**



I think that at Harvard I was a lot more interested in aesthetic concerns…character, how beautiful a sentence was, etc. I read the Jennifer Egan book, *A V**isit from the Goon Squad*...I always really liked that book, but I think that what I liked about it changed after I graduated. In college…there’s one story that’s in the second person, and is very technically impressive, and I love that story. Then the last section of the book goes into the future and talks about this strange world controlled by corporations…. In college I sort of thought, well, whatever, unrealistic, that doesn’t have anything to do with me. But after graduating and being in the real world, and seeing what “real people” worry about, it became much more powerful. What you focus on does change, when you have to make money. I think that both sides of that real world divide are very valuable.



 



**What is the best thing that you’ve read all year?**



A really fantastic thing that I read recently is the Jimmy Breslin autobiography,  *I Want to Thank My Brain for Remembering Me*, which I have been sort of reeling from ever since. He’s a columnist, a New York columnist, one of the very first newspaper columnists, as we think of them now, and it’s a memoir about being sick and recovering. And he has a great line about the way he wrote this very famous column right after JFK was killed. He had to cover it, and the way he decided to cover it was to talk to the gravedigger. It’s a great story about journalism from the inside, and looking at a different perspective, which I think is useful in journalism class, but very useful for fiction as well.



 



**One of the reviews quoted on your website says, “Chiusano’s voice isn’t fresh. It is knowing.” What do you think of this description? How would you characterize yourself as a writer?**



What I feel like that person was trying to get at was that [Marine Park] is not a flashy collection, but ingrained in place and neighborhoods, and I do agree that that’s very important…that focus on the people I’m writing about, the places I’m writing about, that I’m trying to get at knowledge of them as opposed to a superficial, flashy picture.



 



**Do you think you will continue to write about similar things? Or will you ever take on a project that’s wildly different?**



In terms of the book I’m working on now…it’s mostly set in New York but is definitely much larger than the neighborhood of Marine Park. It sort of jumps back and forth in time…and even includes something outside of New York entirely. So who knows, if I’m lucky enough to finish a third book, maybe I’ll be outside of America. It’s important to keep changing and keep writing, but I am finding that I do always return in some way to Marine Park or to that part of the world.



 



**Do you find the challenges of writing a novel different from those of writing a short story?**



It is definitely a struggle. I think the hardest thing is continuing day after day…continuing to write the same story day after day. One thing I like about short stories is that you can follow your interest. Obviously there is a certain amount of time that you’re working on a short story, but maybe that’s two weeks, and then if you have a really good idea for a new story, you can just run down that rabbit hole for a while. With a novel…I’ve been trying to channel what I’m interested in into writing the novel, but you do still have to open that page of the novel, where you are at the novel.



 



**What do you think distinguishes the emerging generation of writers from previous generations? **



One thing, maybe, is a hopefully more inclusive group of writers… We’re hearing from more voices, or we should. I wonder…if there will be a move away from the small, precise short story collection—the idea of writing that first and then moving on to a novel. I wonder if people will be working on big entertaining novels from the beginning, depending on how tastes change. I wonder, are novels going to become something that’s for very few, almost like poetry in some ways…or will novels be this very important thing that people search out, because it’s the only form of media that lets you kind of drop into it without the interruptions of Twitter, or whatever. Maybe that’s the direction.



 



**How has being a young, published writer impacted your social life?**



I’m not so much in the sort of published writers scene, partially because I haven’t been invited into it yet. I worked in a NY publishing house for a while, so most of my friends were editors. Really most of my close friends are journalists…which is great because I think journalists are probably the smartest people in the world. You can so much from listening to journalists.



 



**Is there anything that happened at the Advocate while you were there that you would like us to remember happened?**



I love the *Advocate*, first of all. There were two readings in particular that I loved for different reasons. The first one was a Denis Johnson reading. He was the hero when we were there. He came and read…and someone asked him about his process, how he wrote. And he said that he made a pledge to write every day. He started out writing three minutes a day, that’d be his minimum. Some days only three minutes, sometimes more. But he could always find three minutes. And after I heard that I tried the three minute a day rule, and it totally works. It’s incredible. It’s a really good way to get yourself started. And I’ve written at least three minutes a day ever since then. The other one was a Jim Shepard reading…. I was the one who organized it, and he sent me a funny email on the before, asking if we were advertising for it, will there be any people there, and I said no worries, there would definitely be people there. But then I started to worry. So I started telling all my friends, go to the reading. And I got to the reading, and was letting him in, and was still kind of worried, and…you couldn’t move, there was standing room only… And he read his story “Boys Town” from the *New Yorker*, which is a pretty long story. He read the whole story, it was like 45 minutes long, and everyone was so into it. It was such a great example of how if you’re a great writer and a great performer you can hold a room captive by doing nothing else but reading your words.



 



**Do you have any advice for current Advocate members who want to pursue similar things?**



First of all, you’re in a really good place for it. I learned a ton from other *Advocate* members. I would learn a lot from them when we were in fiction classes together, but also on the side, reading each other’s work. Personally I borrowed techniques and tactics from other writers, and I’m sure they did same with me….But I think that really it’s just finding a way to keep writing. I mean it’s easy to not do it. So I really do think that writing everyday is a good tactic. Just keep going, and don’t worry so much about how much you’re doing, or if it’s good or bad. It does add up after a while…you look back, and you have a couple months’ work that really gets you somewhere.



 



**In honor of the issue theme, what is the most dangerous thing you’ve done recently?**



I as a rule am pretty danger averse. This is a good example of how risk averse I am: For a long time I wanted to jump into the tracks at the subway. It’s a fascination I have; almost every day I think about it. And a couple of nights ago I was waiting for a train, and you know, the garbage train comes by, there are workers on track. So there were probably no trains coming. And I thought to myself, this is the time! I can jump on the tracks, and pretend like I did this successfully, and you know, take care of that. And I was kind of bending down, giving it a shot, about to do it, then a worker looks at me and is like “what are you doing,” and I was like “sorry, I’m so sorry,” and I just walked away.



 



 

EXCERPTED FROM 1868 WINTER ISSUE



 



Whenever one takes up a paper now-a-days, or goes into a public meeting, or attends a party, he is met by the words, Woman’s Rights. Most people, I fancy, have a very vague opinion as to what is meant by these words; but so much the more, perhaps, do they absorb public attention, to the exclusion of other topics, which the *mens vacua *(do not translate this by *vacant mind*, for you would be wrong) is apt to regard more pressing, if not more interesting. Reconstruction and finance hardly receive more discussion, or are more persistently forced upon us, will we, nill we. The end of a political crisis, such as we have just passed through (shall I say?) is, perhaps, a favorable time for originating and circulating all sorts of theories and excitements; and we may hope that, when things reach a more settled state, Mrs. Susan B. Anthony, Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Miss Anna E. Dickinson, will step aside for—what I hope I may be pardoned for calling—more attractive objects.



But, meanwhile (and this is my reason for writing this article), I do not think that they have the wrongs all on their side. Even my personal acquaintance with women teaches me so much. And how small an acquaintance with woman a student in Harvard has, who lives out of Massachusetts, and knows no one in town, only those can know who are themselves in like unhappy plight. But there are some women that even we have to meet; and by these women, I do not hesitate to say, our rights, as men and humans, are shamelessly and constantly invaded.



First, there is the Goody. Coming to your room soon after breakfast, the following scene invariably takes place. You sit down to take a last hasty and necessary look at your early recitation. Enter the Goody; who proceeds to inveigh, perhaps, at your practice of taking a daily morning bath. If you suggest considerations of cleanliness and hygiene, she retorts, conclusively, of course, —women always do,— that your water, after you have emerged from your bath, is yet tolerably clear and free from dirt. Meaning, apparently, that there is no occasion to bathe until you are – excuse the word—filthy. Which opinion, even backed as it is by her example, you have some objections to adopting. Again, if it is near Christmas, she torments you with plaintive allusions, and delicate hints, and sprightly anecdotes, apropos of nothing, as to how J.B., or P.Q., or X.Z., once presented her with a turkey, or a barrel of flour, or some money, or some other confounded remembrance, that affords her text for innumerable and endless sermons. If you gently remonstrate with her, because she doesn’t dust your room more than once a month, of course you have the assurance that, when she goes into the next room, she rails incoherently, for, every once in a while, she regales you with a tirade against the man overheard, who said,— and is, —and does,— and will be – Heaven knows what all. If you indulge her by answering her, or speaking to her, she finds fresh inducement to continue. If you say nothing, she still mumbles and mutters all the time she is in the room; and so, the only way, generally (for you cannot swear of course), is to grin and bear it, and dead, as well, from want of the half-hour destroyed by this woman.



Then there is one’s washwoman. When, as is frequently the case, you find, on counting your wash, that in place of the seven collars put in, only four have come out, you get no satisfaction in attempting to reason with her on her arithmetic; for she, passing over the superficial loss of three collars, goes to the root of the matter directly, and with much bitterness of language, directed at you apparently, and with that rare logical mind found in woman occasionally, proceeds to inform you that her rent has been raised, which of course settles the matter, and leaves no more to be said. If you suggest that you have no desire whatever to to appropriate Mr. S.’s shirts, a laughing allusion to the depth of the snow, or the price of provisions, again clears the matter up.



Then, as if those women whom you have to meet were not enough, you are constantly liable to encounter some dragon in the cars, on the street, at the theatre, who makes life, for the time, a burden. On one occasion, having been in town to transact some business, I took my seat quietly, and began looking around at my fellow-passengers. After a short time, my attention was aroused by an altercation going on between the conductor and the woman next me. It appeared that she had offered some ticket, or money, which the conductor refused to take. Now, it is the firm belief of these women that they know every one’s business, and no man his own. Consequently, they dispute every official act or statement with a coolness and positiveness that, to the weak mind of man, are wonderful. The woman in question said it should be good, and the conductor said it was not good, whereupon followed an every-day version of the dialogue between Lear and Kent –



*Lear*. No.



*Kent*. Yes.



*L*. No, I say.



*K*. I say, yea.



*L*. No, no; they would not.



*K*. Yes, they have.



*L*. By Jupiter, I swear, no.



*K*. By Juno, I swear, ay.



This discussion having gone on some time, the few cents were finally paid; and then, to my boundless disgust, fright, dismay, and confusion, she turned round full on me, and read me, to whom the controversy had not the remotest interest, a lecture, which was divided into three heads. I. An expression of her disregard for the money, and interest solely in the principle of the thing; II. The duties of horse-car officials in general; and, III. Of the Union R.R. Co. in particular. All of which, by directing the attention of the whole car on me, covered me with shame, and interrupted a very pleasant flirtation I was successfully conducting.



I have noticed, in general, that the loudest and longest talkers are the strongest advocates of woman suffrage, and all its “heritage of woe.” In view of this fact, I have hit on a brilliant plan, that will cut one way at least. Let us give the suffrage to all women who will for ever after, to put it plainly, hold their tongues; and I think the advantage would be cheap at the price. And our own particular lady friends need not be alarmed, for this would have no bearing on them. But things being as they are, if we hear much more of Woman’s Rights, we shall have good reason to avail ourselves of our chance to raise a counter-cry of Man’s Wrongs.



ADOLESCENS.

It is a gauzy autumn morning when he stands aloft and declaims.



On a balcony above a square where soldiers stand in haphazard arrangement,  he poses in martial livery—brass buttons agleam down the green felt fetch of his coat—and calls for many things. To a soldier or two, they seem atavistic adjurations, though for now they keep these thoughts to themselves. The current constitution, imposed by foreign powers, should be annulled, the man says, and the emperor, long deposed, should be restored to his former glory.



Beneath the man’s uniform, his body is solid and imposing, evidently cultivated along the lines of a foreign aesthetic. His words are forceful, belted, believed, but the message they carry is too much, and so, of course, the soldiers below, having overcome their kneejerk obeisance to barked speeches, begin to laugh in waxing waves, which give way to jeering, to open ridicule.



Unfazed, the man on the balcony finishes his speech like a dutiful prophet (now we see that he has been reading from a script, no wonder his delivery had been so plumb), turns surely about, and walks with practiced elegance (elegance in spite of strength) back into the commandant’s office of the Eastern Command of Japan’s Self-Defense Forces, where members of his private militia are waiting to assist his ritual suicide.



 



\_\_\_\_\_\_\_



 



            Published in 1968, just two years before the famed and much awarded Japanese author Yukio Mishima (a pen name adopted by Kimitake Hiraoka) committed seppuku after a failed coup attempt on November 25, 1970, *Sun and Steel** *(which, depending on the printing, bears or bears not the subtitular extension *Art, Action, and Ritual Death*), his memoir-cum-manifesto, would be expected by modern readers to offer an inimitable window into the maelstrom of passion and theory that produced Mishima’s spectacular end. But the text—vatic, dogmatic, lousy with logical abysses that one imagines Mishima leaping over, buoyed aloft by his fanaticism—provides no such insight, offering only a refinement of his particular madness. It reinforces the view that his call for a coup and military extremism were merely condign veils for the intensity of his real purpose, which sought to fructify an aesthetic-nihilistic worldview in an exhibitionistic end: Regardless of the outcome of his speech—and indeed, in the absurdity of its demands it nearly begged to be flouted—Mishima intended to commit suicide that day. The martial ornaments of the staging were merely the outward forms beneath which his madness could coalesce.



            Above all, *Sun and Steel*’s coiling argumentation and sense of obsession darkly-fed bolster a point that, though evasive and hardly satisfying as a characterological precis, has nevertheless been long accepted: Mishima is a winking void, beyond interpretation—or, we should add, *satisfactory** *interpretation, because in the years after his highly stylized and orchestrated death, a veritable industry of interpretation sprang up, a self-generating mechanism that chewed and spurted and coughed thick clouds of smoke and ended up describing his downfall as, variously, a purely political act, a grandstanding display of narcissistic romanticism, the final discharge of repressed psychosis, even a spectacular admission of his closeted though oft-rumored homosexuality. (A twenty-four year old follower of Mishima’s, long supposed to be his lover, was the only other individual in the commandant’s office to commit suicide that day.)



            Because the center is missing, little sticks, and everything is permissible, although we should point out that these were the hypotheses of Western commentators, and while that cadre of exoticizing pens was happy to flitter and fumble and fling their wanton analyses at the enigmatic obelisk of Mishima’s reputation, critical voices within Japan tended to avoid the subject—and the man, and the work—entirely. For many years after his suicide, Mishima’s final works, by latterday consensus among his best, went undiscussed by the Japanese critical establishment, although this lacuna, like Mishima’s final act, is difficult to account for. Was it an unwillingness to prod too maliciously at the image of an insane man? A desire not to honor his fringe fanaticism by admitting even tacitly that its output could bear aesthetic merit? Was Mishima’s ideological recidivism too much of a national embarrassment, with Japan poised to become a global power? Or, almost paradoxically, considering his final demands, was it the fact that in one of his last works he had criticized the emperor, and that institution was still too valued, the respect for it inculcated so deeply that besmirching it would warrant ostracism?



            Probably a little of that all.



 



\_\_\_\_\_\_\_



 



 



Mishima was a weak child. Slender, asthenic, sensitive, his own youthful habitus provided the model for those of his protagonists, themselves effete, long-lashed, porcelain-skinned delicates in which the twinned concepts of elegance and corruption are intractably twined. While inly Mishima cultivated his thoughts and allowed the world to filter into the dark chamber of his mind, his outer form, subject to preternatural phthisis, diminished, and utterly escaped his own notice.



Perhaps it’s only an instance of colorful *ex post facto* attribution, but, regardless, Mishima’s explanation for this withering in Sun and Steel is deeply felt, fully believed by the writer. “In the average person, I imagine, the body precedes language,” Mishima writes. “In my case, words came first of all; then—belatedly, with every appearance of extreme reluctance, and already clothed in concepts—came the flesh. It was already, as goes without saying, sadly wasted by words.” Wasted because words, for Mishima, are inherently corrosive; they eat away at reality, and in so doing, like the etchant on glass, are weakened themselves. Thus, as he attests, were he to successfully pursue his desire to write, it would be necessary to counteract this undesired function of language, “to encounter reality in some field where words should play no part at all.”



So Mishima, as a young man, set out to “cultivate” his physical form, taking as his primary implements in this endeavor the titular sun and steel—the sun being the sun in the sky, the steel being the heavy metal tools of weightlifting: dumbbells, barbells, kettlebells. The ideal body, as Mishima saw it, was defined by two traits: “taciturnity” and “beauty of form.” The “form” he pursued was the classical, sculptural ideal, of Greek statues and Renaissance paintings; the desire for “taciturnity” sprang from his setting “the wordless body, full of physical beauty, in opposition to beautiful words that imitated physical beauty.” And from the very first, his pursuit of the ideal body was ineluctably tied up with death.



 “I cherished a romantic impulse towards death,” Mishima writes, “yet at the same time I required a strictly classical body as its vehicle.” Were death to come upon a flabby body, an ill-cultivated body, the death itself would become ignoble, shameful, a grand embarrassment. There was no honor to be found in a flabby decease.



            All of this is readily comprehensible, easily digestible; in death, we are reduced to bodies, and hence a beautiful death requires a beautiful body. The commingling of aesthetics and nihilism is nothing too radical. But within *Sun and Steel* Mishima quickly loses himself in a wild arborescence of themes and motifs. As a corollary of his desire for the ideal body, he longs to possess the the “pure sense of strength,” a discarnate sensation which requires no object on which to discharge itself. Whereas words can only exist relationally, by interacting with what we perceive as reality, this ideal of strength would allow Mishima to grasp ultimate reality. But what, in Mishima’s tilted cosmology, is ultimate reality?



An ardent practitioner of kendo and karate, Mishima longed to experience “that which lay at the end of the flashing fist, and beyond the bow of the bamboo sword…just a hairsbreadth beyond the reach of the senses,” for “there, above all, lay the essence of action and power.” Antagonistically minded, Mishima dubbed this higher sense of reality the “opponent.” Though arrived at by curlicues of argumentation, the “opponent” is not an “idea,” but a “thing,” an apparent entity that ever stares back at one. “Ultimately,” Mishima concludes, “the opponent—‘the reality that stares back at one’—is death.” 



\_\_\_\_\_\_\_



 



Mishima, not surprisingly, liked to pose. A prominent novelist from a very young age, he parlayed this early success into chary careers in modelling, acting, and singing. His work in film was simple, vulgar, unrefined, and, along with his singing, served only to gain him popular exposure; his starring role as a gangster in 1960’s *Tough Guy* was received by the Japanese press as unimpressive. By and large, this role objectifies a blunting of Mishima’s novelistic concerns: His character, clad in a leather jacket, moves about like a brute; there is fawning, camera-conscious chest-bearing; and, in the end, Mishima’s character dies in a hail of bullets. Intending to make the film a complete spectacle, Mishima insisted on singing its theme song.



His modelling, by nature static and “taciturn,” is more sensitive, more sincere. The early photos—traditional images, largely commercial, designed to capture pedestrian scenes of beauty—are for the most part uninteresting. But as the years advanced and Mishima slowly crept, knowingly or not, to his death, the images became more artistic, more private, more beautiful. They centered more and more around Mishima’s body, which was edging up against that terminal asymptote of perfection which would make his eventual suicide—at least in his eyes—noble.



With a dark line of trimmed conifers in the background, Mishima, clad only in a sparing white loincloth, kneels in a pristine blanket of February snow. Facing the camera, he gazes off to his right, where a katana extends from his right arm; it is difficult to say just where the focus of his eyes lies, whether he is staring at the minatory tip of the steel, or far beyond it, at a carnate enemy somewhere hedged black against the white, out of frame, or whether still his eyes fumble for some nebulous zone just beyond the edge of the blade: a pocket of air, a worming distortion. In a different image, captured by the same photographer, Mishima, in the same garb, stands in casual contrapposto before a shōji, his torso bedight with gems of sweat, a sheathed katana resting against his right hip. Ears akimbo, hair trimmed tight, he looks into the camera without an expression—there is only an impression of great force, of a terrible energy seething forth from the eyes.



These later photos edged constantly towards the violent, the martial, the morbid. In September of 1970, only a month before his suicide, Mishima arranged for a modelling session with the young photographer Kishin Shinoyama. Mishima had planned the images, the shots, the scenes—he intended to call the final series of photos “Death of a Man.” In the pictures, Mishima faces various grim demises: He wallows, expiring, in mud; a hatchet cleaves his skull and tickles his brain; he is crushed beneath the wheels of an industrial truck. Most interestingly, though least surprisingly, he poses as Saint Sebastian, hips girdled by a white cloth, wrists gambreled up by a thin rope, strung against a tree, his torso oiled and agleam, his gaze upflung and ruminative, divested of any expression of pain. Three arrows pierce his skin, at the hip, beneath the ribcage, and directly in the armpit.



In Confessions of a Mask, Mishima’s self-professedly autobiographical second novel published in 1949, the narrator admits to first masturbating to a reproduction of Guido Reni’s Saint Sebastian, the sublime “beauty of form” of the martyr, and the pure ecstasy apparent in his visage contributing to the first instant of sincere arousal. Perhaps the most famous passage in Mishima’s oeuvre, it achieves a startling conflation of the sacred and the profane, the sensual and the terminal, of pain and pleasure. But this highly idiosyncratic and almost ungraspable melding of sensations, once experienced from the side of the desirer, evidently captivated Mishima enough to assume the other role, to become the object of this dark and obscure desire.



Perhaps Reni’s original is an image of torture and pain, of execution, yet Mishima’s reproduction, consciously crafted in opposition, shifts the power. Luxuriating in death, it becomes his own.  



\_\_\_\_\_\_\_



 



“According to my definition of tragedy,” Mishima writes in *Sun and Steel*, “the tragic *pathos* is born when the perfectly average sensibility momentarily takes unto itself a privileged nobility that keeps others at a distance, and not when a special type of sensibility vaunts its own special claims.”



            Mishima glorified the Greeks. In the early 1950s, as a reporter for the *Asahi Shinbun*, he spent several weeks in Greece, finding there exactly what he wanted to find—exactly what he *expected* to find, as John Nathan attests in *Mishima: A Biography*:



…the lesson he learned from what he beheld was the lesson he required, a liberating lesson; that “beauty and ethics were one and the same”; that “creating a beautiful work of art and becoming beautiful oneself were ethically identical.”



Mishima was well-acquainted with the entirety of Greek tragedy; he attempted to rewrite several of its sterling exemplars in his own plays. And yet no play strikes so much of a resonance with Mishima’s work as *Hecuba*, by Euripides.



In it, Troy has fallen, and Hecuba, erstwhile wife of King Priam, already savaged by sorrows, is informed that her daughter Polyxena will be sacrificed on the tomb of Achilles. Wailing is heard, pleas are made and then ignored, and eventually Polyxena bravely steps forward, avowing that she would rather die than live a slave. She is hauled away, hidden by a shroud, and in only a few minutes’ time we learn of her death from the chorus.



            They had not wanted her to die, she was so beautiful, and, as she was placed upon the tomb of Achilles, she cried for her sentinels, her captors, to loose her; freely, of her own will, she tore off her cloak, baring her youthful breasts. She gave her neck to the sword, and, if it hesitated in that precarious pressured moment, the steel rung up against the impermeable guard of doubt, she worked some magic, some mysterious lure upon its bearer: she invited the steel, and welcomed its kiss with a meretricious fluttering of her lashes, and when she fell, incruent angel in the dust of her conquered home, it was a graceful fall, a sensuous decease, composed and conscious, crumpling finally like a lurid lily, grasping itself as it dries upon the grass.



            Polyxena is destined to die—it is no longer her choice. And yet, somehow, she converts this death sentence, arrived at by supernatural decree, into a form of suicide, of willed death. Her instrument in this alchemical process is the aesthetic; the only way she has of controlling her life, of dictating the entirety of her existence, is by turning it into art. 



\_\_\_\_\_\_\_



 



            In 1985, fifteen years after Mishima’s death, the BBC produced *The Strange Case of Yukio Mishima* for its documentary series, Arena. An hour in length, the documentary features clips of interviews with Mishima himself, along with interviews with prominent Japanese intellectuals, who most frequently turn down their noses at Mishima and his death, explain why, in their opinions, the self-created ending to his story was a failure, artistic or otherwise.



            Nagisa Oshima, the lauded filmmaker whose movies, like Mishima’s fictions, scouted the precarious terrain between death and sensuality, considered his coeval’s death rash and tasteless melodrama. “He wanted to dramatise the end of his life in a beautiful way,” Oshima said. “But it was an over-elaborate gesture, which failed to satisfy our Japanese aesthetic."



            Most of the posthumous evaluations end with some sort of societal catch-all commentary like the above, but the testimony of Nobuko Lady Albery, a writer, while striking the same thematic notes—of the overextension of the gesture—refrains, delicately, from condemnation: “As a clown, as an actor, as an impostor, as a gangster, as an aristocrat—in every little thing he tried to be, he over-existed.”



It almost seems a shame to point out that after Mishima rammed a short sword into his left side and tore it across his abdomen, his presumptive lover twice failed to decapitate him. Finally the sword was handed off to an assistant, who finished the job with a third stroke—which didn’t exactly rectify the botching.

I may or may not have flown to Toronto, Canada on July 18.



At which point I may or may not have stayed with a friend named Erik, and borrowed his car to drive to the Mount Pleasant Cemetery, where I may or may not have searched for the tombstone of someone who had died between the ages of four and ten.



I may or may not have found the eight-inch-high headstone of Peter Reynolds, beloved son of Nancy and Jerry Reynolds, born July 2, 1977, died May 18, 1987. I may or may not have written the information down on a notepad.



I may or may not have then gone to Citimail Box Rental on Queens Street and taken out a mailbox in the name of Peter Reynolds.



I may or may not have gone to the website of the Office of the Registrar General and downloaded an application for a replacement birth certificate, visited a genealogy website to find the birth dates and cities of Nancy and Jerry Reynolds, and filled out the form.



I may or may not have called the Vital Statistics Agency to make sure they didn’t store birth and death certificate information on the same system, and then sent them my form along with a money order for thirty-five Canadian dollars.



The birth certificate may or may not have been waiting for me in the mailbox when I next returned to Toronto, at which point I may or may not have sent a copy along with an application form to the Social Insurance Registration office.  



A social insurance number and card may or may not have been waiting for me in the mailbox when I returned a month later, after which I may or may not have gone to the Ontario Ministry of Transportation and taken a written test to obtain a learners’ license.



I may or may not have taken Erik’s old University of Toronto identification card, peeled off the lamination, changed the name to Peter Reynolds, replaced the photo with one from my old college ID, and relaminated it.



At this point, I may or may not have gotten passport photos taken, had one of the photos signed by both the photographer and Erik, and sent my original birth certificate and copies of my learners’ license and school ID, with Erik serving as a guarantor of my identity, to the Passport Canada office.



“I hope you know what you’re doing,” Erik may or may not have said. “My mother’s gonna kill me if I get sent to jail.”



After taking all these steps, I may or may not have received a Canadian passport with my picture on it over the name of a dead child.



Not a day goes by that I don’t think that, somewhere in Toronto, there is a mother who loved and lost her child. And, to her, I apologize. What I may or may not have done was wrong, not to mention risky. But there are situations, and there are places, where not being American can mean the difference between life and death.



We are at war, you may or may not have realized. It is a world war. And it’s not one that we are winning. We haven’t won a war in more than fifty years. That is, if you believe that anybodyactually *wins* wars.



 

My mother doesn’t believe in medicine. It doesn’t matter if it’s a prescription for antibiotics, some life-saving vaccination, or even the most basic level of psychotherapy.



“Why would you want someone digging into your private life?” she says, wrinkling her nose as my sister and I watch marathons of HBO’s *In Treatment*. In my head I replace the word* life *with *parts*. If you take your vitamins, you won’t need to go to those kinds of people.



“Magnesium, especially,” she reminds us in the morning, “to stay soft inside, and regular.”



I am. But I’m in pain.



“You know what, maybe you should go to a gynecologist,” my best friend Lili says. She tells me casually, like it’s something you do without thinking hard about it, like brushing your teeth. *You know, maybe you should just brush your teeth. Maybe drink some water.*



I hate drinking water. I may be dehydrated, and maybe that’s why it hurts.



“What are you doing?” she asks me.



“Nothing. Talking to you.”



Whenever I talk on the phone I start pacing figure eights around the kitchen, the dining table, my bedroom, and back to the living room. It doesn’t hurt now. Maybe I don’t exercise enough.



Lili sighs. “You’re a woman now. When you get your period, you need someone to make sure the hormones and shit are working right. It’s like growing a new organ. Has to get examined, like everything else.”



“Is it a man? I read a book where this girl went to a gynecologist and it was a man.”



“Books don’t tell you anything true, they just freak you out.”



She pauses. I hear chewing on the other line and try to visualize her: bed, green polka-dot comforter, pizza on a paper towel, and a laptop on her thighs. I’m always telling her to put a pillow underneath because you can kill your eggs that way, the free radicals burning into your ovaries. Lili doesn’t believe it.



She is new to this; she’s only had her period for three years. She got it when we were thirteen, in Maryland at her auntie Bintu’s house. She called me the next morning to tell me everything: the sheets in the middle of the night (stained), the pad her cousin had given her (Kotex brand), and her dad’s reaction (shock). My mom’s reaction was sorrow. I was in sixth grade and on my way to the dreaded weekly piano lesson when I felt the wetness in my new jeans and turned back towards the bathroom door. She cried. Then she tried not to cry and was happy for some days, left gifts on the table for me, bought me a cake. Sometimes she got angry and came up with all these reasons—I was lazy, I ate too much junk, I was failing math and spending too much time reading manga on the computer.



“Nobody gets it at this age,” she said. “You should be ashamed of yourself.”



So I was ashamed. And am ashamed, again, when I think about sitting on her bed in the dark, explaining the shooting pains, how she’ll shake her head at me as if I don’t know what really matters. In West Africa nobody has gynecologists or anything, and they live longer than we do here. Apart from the famine and disease and violence that kill people. If not for those things, Africans would live longer than all of us here, she says.



“It doesn’t matter whether the gynecologist a guy, honestly.” Lili doesn’t get it because she’s only half Senegalese, on her dad’s side, and he’s barely ever around. “They’re there to do a job and that’s it.”



Lili doesn’t have experience of her own, she just hears things. She got a pamphlet from the nurse’s office at school, did a check on her breasts, and found a bump. It’s shaped like a crescent moon and flat enough to pass as a birthmark. I think it’s a scab, like she got injured from a wire in her bra, but apparently it doesn’t work like that.



“You don’t know, you don’t even wear bras,” she says. “It could be something serious.”



She wants us both to go to the clinic, her with the spot on her boob, me with my restlessness. The conversation’s nearly done but we seem to have forgotten how to end the call. I do pirouettes in front of the refrigerator as we waste the next ten minutes trying to convince each other that everything’s fine, it’s not as bad as we think, we’re only sixteen and we eat vegetables at home and drink filtered water, not tap. I take vitamins.



“Have they been helping you?” Lili asks.



“With this?” I think hard even though I really don’t have to. “This, um, I don’t know.”



“Nena.”



“I don’t *think *so.”



“Nena,” she says irritably. “Just look up the place. Make an appointment.”



The website looks like it was designed in the nineties. Dr. Something-or-Other, an OB/GYN who graduated from a university I’ve never heard of. Female, thank God. I turn up the volume on the TV and change the channel to Cartoon Network, a lineup I no longer recognize. She takes insurance, but I don’t know where my cards are, don’t even know which company owns them. I hook my phone into the charger and stare at the TV screen. The bright colors make me feel safe. Surely if I sit here and watch this rainbow cartoon I’ll get better. If I just give it time, rest a little bit, forget about exams. It’s about stress.



My mother preaches stress. When she sees the president on the cover of *Time*, gray-haired and wrinkled. When one of us gets sick.



“It’s because you’re stressed,” she says. “It’s because you didn’t take your vitamins.”



There is a photo of the gynecologist on the upper right corner of the webpage. She’s got this seductive smile and long dark hair that hugs the curves of her face. *Come to my office. Come sit on my examining table.*



I have never been to the doctor without my parents. Lili hasn’t either, but she made up the plan: She’ll say we’re going to the mall, pick me up from the house in her dad’s Jeep, and drive us to the women’s health center at LIJ. She’s told her mom about the bump, but her mom is a stubborn person and believes it’s just a deflated pimple.



I don’t even know what I would tell the gynecologist—I realize I can’t identify all the regions of my body, don’t know what I mean when I wave towards the lower half of my stomach. We don’t believe in anatomy, either. When I was in fourth grade, *The Care and Keeping of You *appeared on the floor by magic; my mother had slipped it under the bedroom door with some of the pages stapled together. My sister and I took the staples out and hollered over the drawings of uteruses, covered our eyes at the watercolor vagina with its matching blue tampon. We just knew private parts, two words, imageless.



“Other people aren’t supposed to see this,” my mother would teach us in the bath, among all the warm water and duck-shaped washcloths and suds from Johnson’s baby soap. “Other people aren’t supposed to touch.”



And here I am making plans to bare my parts to Dr. Whomever, to a sterile room at the women’s clinic, to the entire world. I close the browser and take my hands off the keyboard, my eyes on the window scanning the empty driveway. *Before she comes home, I will be fine.*



I change the channel again, back to the Food Network. Lili sends me another message: *when do you wanna go?*



It hasn’t hurt since I got off the phone. I text her: *forget about it lol. tbh realized it was nothing.*



*Lol*, she texts.



*Lol*, I answer.



She starts typing something else, but I’m too embarrassed, and I move my phone to the far side of the couch so I don’t have to look at it anymore.



My mother’s car pulls up in front of the house, flashing its white and yellow lights through the windowpanes. I don’t have to tell her. It hasn’t hurt since the beginning of the day, I think. Maybe even since last night.



There’s no reason to tell anyone, or go anywhere at all. I watch Guy Fieri stuff his mouth full of pork loin and wait to hear the sound of the key turning into the lock.



 

REPRINTED FROM 1996 COMMENCEMENT ISSUE



 



**An Entertainment of Doubts**



 



T. S. Eliot (whose symbolist poetics and whose feeling for desolation, though not whose dour humor, John Ashbery seems to have inherited) once said that Henry James (whose anfractuous syntax the omnivorous Ashbery has likewise picked up) that James had a mind too fine to be violated by any *idea*. The same must be said of Ashbery himself, whose entire career has been an exercise in the evasion of certain certainties in favor of an attention to exquisitely, unrepeatable specific: “The moment a monument to itself/ No one would ever see or know was there,” as an earlier poem has it. Ashbery has a slippery but unmistakable poetic manner (you can always see the same hydra-headed Mr. Nice Guy smiling and pouting at you through the haze of his lines); it is a farrago of that Eliotic imagery, that Jamesian syntax, and whatever else you care to think of, evoking, in *Flow Chart*, as Helen Vendler says, “the entire orchestral potential of the English language.” “Perhaps no other recent lyric poet has so swallowed the entire range of the spoken and written language of his time,” Vendler writes in her essay on the poem: “Ashbery has taken the modernist experiment to its end point: to boilerplate, advertising, doggerel, obscenity, technology, media talk—the subliterary of all kinds. At the same time he adds … archaisms, the dated language of flappers and lounge lizards, quotations from the canon, ancient children’s books, nursery rhymes.” Did she mention the kitchen sink?



Not only is the vocabulary all over the place, but Ashbery’s style refuses to hold on for long to any single topic, narrative, argument, or tone. Even a consistent use of the personal pronouns is refused. (Frank O’Hara once famously claimed that the paradigmatically obscure and inviting Ashbery line was “It wants to go to bed with us.”) Ashbery’s first long poem,“The Skaters,” describes well the feeling of reading him:



 



the carnivorous



Way of these lines is to devour their own nature, leaving



Nothing but a bitter impression of absence, which as we



know involves presence, but still…



 



The way of Ashbery’s lines has established nothing so solidly as the sense that, for him, the crystallization of image and idea that is the staple of so much poetry is but so much falsification. Proteus will not be bound and made to blurt out the truth; this is what the critic must have meant who complained that *Flow Chart* was too much flow and not enough chart.



Indeed, as its first critics noted, one would be hard pressed to say just what *Flow Chart* is about. We can locate the poem’s beginnings: in December 1987 Ashbery’s friend Trevor Winkfield suggested that Ashbery write a 100 page poem about his mother, who had died in January of that year, and finish it on his birthday. By July, 1988, sixty-one years to the day after his mother gave birth to him, a draft of the poem was complete. This pre-established deadline has a special aptness for *Flow Chart*, charting as it does a stream-of-consciousness whose only limits, moral and arbitrary, are the body’s own. Ashbery’s 100-page typescript (“Of course, it’s not about my mother,” he has said) became, edited and revised—and accidentally missing page 33 of the typescript—our 216 page poem. So we can locate the ending of the poem as well. But its conclusion? On page 214: “I have seen it all, and I write, and I have seen nothing.”



Whatever subject *Flow Chart* sets its eyes on, it dissolves in a corrosive, if genial, skepticism. The self, the past, morality, love and friendship, even the world of objects—none of our most crucial coordinates withstands Ashbery’s entertainment (for it’s a hilarious poem) of doubts. At, yes, 216 pages of “absurdly long lines” (Vendler again), *Flow Chart* is Ashbery’s longest and most doubt-ridden meditation, rife with the implication that the longer you think about anything the less tenable, and rosy, become your beliefs: “As far as I’m concerned, it’s a draw, a decent one at that/ if you keep your mind off it.” The trouble is that in *Flow Chart* Ashbery can’t keep his mind off anything.



 



**The Music of Wha-What Happened? **



 



Whatever else life is about, it is about how it feels as it passes. Alongside and hand in hand with *Flow Chart*’s skepticism—“the casual/ whirlwind that vaporizes moods and intensity of expression”—runs a persistent sense of temporal discontinuity and the irretrievability of lost time. The ephemerality here of scene and topic and character—any one of which is no sooner sighted than it vanishes again—by itself implies how little Time seems, to us, to admit of habitation. But Ashbery often enough takes up the problem explicitly. “It’s impossible to keep abreast of the times,” he says. Impermanence, indeed, is the stock gag of clownish Time: “Then the next thing explodes,/ like a cigar or a vase of flowers. Left in the rubbery wake one still keeps/ meaning to be around both before and after, not necessarily during,/ since there is no fruitful rest there . . . .” And here is a passage that ascends, after the muses clear their throats, to a different and particularly lovely statement of the theme, showing that Ashbery understands how difficult it is to be there *during* as well:



 



Yet it would be nice to think that afterwards one might have



a good laugh about it.



and that assurance is precisely what we lack today. The fact



is that one even cares



what it’s all about. They see only shoe-leather



thinning into the future, and the inexorable dawn



shading into dusk, and know that’s what they’re made of,



like it



or not. That’s what everybody’s made of,



and it comes as no shock to find that the present is, after all,



brittle



as glass in a burning conservatory. Listening to the dance



music from outside



is all that matters. Really. Stockings are of secondary



importance.



 



The attractive rationalization that, whatever goes wrong today, eventually “one might have a good laugh about it,” depends on a solid sense of the future—that the fifth act’s turning out tolerably will confer the sense of comedy on all that went before. But “that assurance is precisely what we lack today,” since for us contemporary folk the temporal middle-distance which shows how the present might become the future has been abolished. “For us,” Fredric Jameson has written in one of his recent essays on post-modernity, “time consists in an eternal present and, much further away, an inevitable catastrophe, these two moments showing up distinctly on the registering apparatus without any overlapping or traditional stages.” It is as if we see, and are made of, only the threshold hours of dawn and dusk and have no notion of how, by way of daylight, one state becomes the next; we consumers can hardly see past our feet or at least past the mayfly duration of footwear fashions, “only shoe leather thinning into the future.” This temporal discontinuity renders the present “brittle as glass in a burning conservatory” (with a pun on conserve, no doubt), an instant the succeeding moments do not annex into a cohesive development but which, so different are they, they shatter “the sparse,/ shattering seconds,” as Ashbery says earlier.



 



**Life Sentences**



 



Stories do not hold up well in this amnesiac climate. Though *Flow Chart* contains many passages of great thematic consistency, the longest sustained narrative I could find carries just from page 111 to 112, and concerns, aptly, the visiting of a haunted house, since in Ashbery scenes so quickly acquire the fugitive, immaterial but undeniable, quality of ghosts. “It was the cutest darn house you ever saw,” as if there has come to be something naïve and countrified about any narration at all.



But the story line isn’t the only thing that’s impossible to follow. So are the sentences. And, while Ashbery’s line breaks are hardly arbitrary, “the dominant measure of *Flow Chart* . . . is not the line but the sentence” (John Shoptaw). It’s not that as with James or Proust or Faulkner you sometimes have to reread these sentences. It’s that certain sentences, such as this particular doozy—



 



I would assemble



landscapes from insect-tunneled wood and go live in a hole



somewhere



lest pleasant anomalies impose bumptious charades promot-



ing peace to others and to all comers,



seal it in a chest, rip it open, scatter the powder of life on the



dead sawdust



to watch it blink, and then pound with my fists as hard as I



can on the saga of



the sheep girl and her friend the pelican merchant: how they



became friends long



after ceasing to know each other, when both were blind and



living in unfatally dingy



circumstances somewhere near Clapham Common when



autumn flickers, curves in



on the unfinished lunch, may it rest established early.



 



can, I think, no more be re-read to the point of clarity than rotating a kaleidoscope can ever give us a truer idea of the light. Moreover, what we witness in sentences like these is the end of the sentence as a single unit of thought. If in “some of Beckett’s narratives . . . a primacy of the present sentence in time ruthlessly disintegrates the narrative fabric that attempts to reform around it” (Jameson), here coherence has been lost within the sentence itself.



The effect is of thinking several things at once, a kind of grammatical perspectivism. To take a fairly bountiful instance:



 



So it goes, and my



goodness, I don’t see how we are expected to live with it, but



the fact of the matter



is we do and might even consider ourselves improved in



respect to the way we were



quite recently, if only we could remember how we looked



even this morning, forget



last year or even two more years ago, so quickly do they pass



even in the formal chronologies and chronicles, I’m



not even talking about the sloppy kind of record-keeping



that goes on all the time



without anyone there to be aware of or compliment it.



 



Here, as so often, Ashbery implies the possession of perspectives whose possibility he at the same time denies. How can we tell that our past selves are improved upon if we can’t remember them? Is it then knowledge or memory that we lack? If no one is aware of the “sloppy-record keeping,” how is it mentioned here? And does its very sloppiness deserve a complement because it allows us the freedom to re-invent ourselves that a stricter account could not? What does it matter, anyway, that it’s sloppy if no one is aware of it? Is this situation worthy of lamentation (“if only . . .”) or praise? I suppose this perspectivism of the emotions is what we call ambivalence.



So Ashbery fends off the violation of an idea whenever one threatens. It is a vertiginously telescoped dialectic, theses and antitheses overlaid to no end; or one gets the impression, as sometimes with deconstruction, of someone sitting on a branch he has just sawed out from under himself.



 



**The Leopard Man Himself? **



 



Very naturally this incoherence of narration and temporality and even at times the sentence brings about the disintegration of a recognizable ego, as one can no longer square life’s details with the image of a certain self: “I don’t see how/ a bunch of attributes can go walking around with a coatrack labeled ‘person’ loosely tied/ to its apron strings. That blows my mind.” Obsessed with the incoherence and multiplicity of one’s selves, Ashbery’s fractious monologue descends in this from the novels of Proust and Beckett. As Beckett says in his monograph, *Proust*, acerbically explicating his master:



 



We are not merely weary because of yesterday, we are other,



we are no longer what we were before the calamity of yesterday. . . .



The aspirations of yesterday were valid for yesterday’s ego, not for



today’s. We are disappointed by the nullity of what we are pleased



to call attainment. But what is attainment? The subject has died—



and perhaps many times—on the way. For subject B to be disappointed



by the banality of an object chosen by subject A is as illogical as to expect



one’s hunger to be dissipated by the spectacle of uncle eating his dinner.



 



Not only this, but other people—*physically* other people; for the moribund gallery of Beckett’s *Three Novels* demonstrates what a crowd a single skull can pack in—other people are as little help as introspection is. In a passage reminiscent of Keats, who claimed that walking into a crowded room threatened his self with dissolution, Ashbery writes:



 



I don’t know where this one came in—but wait,



it is of myself I speak, and I do not know! But the looks I got



convinced me I was someone



else as I walked in, not at all sure of myself or (rightly, as it



turned out) of



the reception I would be getting.



 



Later on (in the poem, at least) “some quite close friends . . . accused me of being ‘the leopard man’ who had been terrorizing/ the community by making howl-like sounds at night, out of earshot/ on the dance floor.” With friends like these, who needs enemies to give you trouble in shoring up the boundaries of your identity? In *The Divided Self*, his classic study of schizophrenia, R. D. Laing (himself fond of quoting Beckett) tries to set down the basic elements for the preservation of a coherent self; one fo these is that people see us roughly as we see ourselves, that my interlocutor “recognizes me as to be the person I take myself to be.” And if they say you are the leopard man?



 



**“Of those so close beside me, which are you?” **



 



One of the social parts of the Ashbery complex is the impossibility of true society, one’s inability to know or be known by other people. Presumably the same conditions of subjectivity—the same sort of diremptions, slippage, contradictions, mysteries—obstain for thee and for me, and i it is so difficult as it seems in *Flow Chart* to know thyself, how much more so to know other people. Here is Ashbery on who to know and how:



 



But remember, one isn’t obliged to love everything



and everybody, though one ought to try. One way is to



accept the face they



present to you, but on consignment. Then you may find



yourself falling in love



with the lie, sinister but endearing, they fabricated to win



acceptance



for themselves as beings that are crisp and airy, with an un-self-



conscious note of rightness



or purpose that just fits, and only later take up the guilt behind the



façade



in the close, humid rooms of whatever goes down in their struggle



(or hundreds



of struggles) against fate, and perhaps buy that too someday



when their manners are out of the way. I have obtained gratifying



results in both instances



but I know enough not to insist, to keep sifting a mountain of



detritus



indefinitely in search of tiny yellow blades of grass.



 



This is another instance of Ashbery’s chatty brutality: an acquaintanceship progresses by “sifting a mountain of detritus” for the “tiny yellow blades of grass” that are someone’s worthiness; and even should intimacy result, it is intimacy only with the “guilt” that lies behind the gilt “façade” the poor wretch shows to the world. Nor does *Flow Chart* spare us an image of romantic love: “Once two were saddled with each other’s lies which became as a sacramental trust/ for them. They listened, they put forth feelers, they pouted on cue, but in due/ course banshees exploited the situation. And once the climate of trust is destroyed/ only lust for vengeance can take its place . . .” *Worstward Ho! *for not only is the “sacramental trust” made of theatrical lies (“they pouted on cue”), but even so shoddy a product as this falls apart, as “lust for vengeance” replaced lust of the other variety.



 



**“ . . . so that understanding may begin/ And in doing so be undone.” **



 



Unless, of course, one ought to bid good riddance to such relationships. In *Flow Chart*, what might be called social epistemology—getting to know other people—recapitulates the ambivalent dynamic of Ashbery’s general quest for and avoidance of knowledge, and it is hard to know whether to be glad or sad that a love or a friendship has foundered. Like a scared animal between patches of cover, *Flow Chart* shuttles between the twin terrors of reification and its opposite, “the blooming buzzing confusion” of a total mental openness. On the one hand, it is attractive to have done with judgment and wondering, and to really, truly *be* somewhere: “One wants to to like, but to live in, the structure of things, and this is/ the first great mistake, from which all the others, down to tiniest/ speck, bead of snot on a child’s nose, proceed . . . .” On the other hand, don’t the certainties we inhabit come to imprison us? Best to stay on the run:



 



It wasn’t bad while one stood,



but as soon as you sat down you appeared vulnerable; issues



were raised; and from feeling



it all a mild annoyance but a mere formality, as when a



stranger stops to ask you directions



and begins asking pointed questions about your religion, it



quickly escalated



into a nightmare that waking would not heal. Retreat,



retreat!



 



How much of Ashbery’s poetics results from this simultaneous flight and pursuit! His marvelous fluidity—and with *The Wave*, *April Galleons*, then *Flow Charts*, as Christopher Benfrey says, “Ashbery’s recent titles have turned liquid”—escapes all containmnet, yet at the same time *Flow Chart* is a *Domesday Book* of contemporary America, a exhaustive if chaotic census of our forms of language and thought, carried out inside a single head. *Flow Chart* has encyclopedic dreams: “Sometimes one’s own hopes are realized/ and life becomes a description fo every second of the time it took.”



This vacillation between representation and the resistance to it distinguishes Ashbery from many of his more tedious postmodern contemporaries, for whom the world has perished and left the glad babble of texts in its stead: “Yet not one [of the words]/ever escapes the forest of agony and pleasure that keeps them/ in a solution that has become permanent through inertia. The force/ of meaning never extrudes.” But not because it, and Ashbery, isn’t trying, and this is what makes for *Flow Chart*’s immaculate ambivalence, its virgin “forest of agony and pleasure.”



 



**“Of those so close beside me, which are you?” (Reprise)**



 



After this detour through *Flow Chart*’s constitutive dilemma—as if it were not endless!—we now return to our previously scheduled programming. When we last left our hero among other humans, he was decidedly uncertain about how and whether to love or befriend them. Towards the end of the poem, he appears to reach some kind of understanding with himself:



 



And so I am never



off the hook; I look at others and reflect their embarrassed,



sheepish grin: all right,



 



can I go home now? But I know deep in my heart of hearts I



never will, will never want to,



that is, because I’ve too much respect for the junk we call



living



that keeps passing by. Still, I might be tempted



to love or something if the right person came along, or the



time were right;



I know I would. But I can’t be tempted, so far. I’m too



pure, like the nature



of temptation itself, and meantime fans stand back and



wonder what to admonish



the players with, and I sit here empty-handed, my breast



teeming



with unexplained desires and acrostics. I’ll go on like this…



 



The permanent dialectic continues. Love is courted but never consummated, for it is temptation that one wants, not its fulfillment, yet we must not tell ourselves so—the right person may yet come along, we must insist; or the time be finally right—lest desire lose its pretext. So hunger and solitude gorge themselves on the chimera of a social fulfillment, and sometimes happily mistake their privation for a certain meager satisfaction. “I’ll go on like this”—not a rousing conclusion, but not dispirited either. *Flow Chart* begs to be read in the light of the novel as well as the lyric, not only by virtue and vice of its prosaic quality, its copiousness, and its sheer length, but especially because of its commitment to portraying our life’s social dimension.



 



**Soliloquy with a Bullhorn**



 



A great part of Ashbery’s genius is to have found a voice that is both private and collective, “trying one’s hand at vanity in order to catch everything else.” As John Koethe has written, “The referential and temporal vagaries of his poetry are simply incompatible with this speaker’s being a real person in the world, with a particular, individualized biography.” Ashbery himself has said: “These are not autobiographical poems, they’re not confessional poems. . . . What I am trying to get at is a general, all-purpose experience—like those stretch socks that fit all sizes.” Yet *Flow Chart*’s wealth of obscure and misrepresentative details and its frequently occult association of ideas give it an insurmountable air of privacy. Few readers will not glimpse the heart of the matter in a given passage; but equally few will be convinced that they make of Ashbery what others do. We begin to suspect any situation that materializes out of the layering of metaphor of being itself just another metaphor—but for what?



This is a poetics perfectly adapted to an age in which just about all that feels collective and representative about us is our solitariness and atomization. In the “all-purpose experience” Ashbery devises, each person, thinking of himself, herself, confirms a prison: “weave, and it shall be unraveled; talk, and the listener response/ will take your breath away, so it is decreed.” Or: “I have the feeling my voice is just for me,/ that no one else has ever heard it, yet I keep mumbling the litany/ of all that has ever happened to me, childish pranks included . . . .” But our unity in isolation is spelled-out most clearly in one of *Flow Chart*’s most authoritative passages:



 



Although we mattered as children, as adults we’re somehow



counterfeit



and not briefed as to what happened in the intervals to which



this longing led us,



which turns out to be not so tragic after all, but merely baroque,



almost functional.



Yet there can be no safety in numbers: each of us wants and



wants to be



in the same way, so that in the end none of us matters, and in



different ways



we cannot understand, as though each spoke a different language



with enough cognates



to make us believe in deafness—*their* deafness—as well as in our



own reluctance



to dramatize, leaving our speech just sitting there, unrinsed,



untasted, not knowing us,



or caring to.



 



A baroque solipsism, the young Beckett once called it, and the phrase describes Ashbery’s work better than his own: “the grand regularity of the insides, spoilt by a profusion of ornament” is Ashbery’s term, “my main contribution to the history of sitting and licking.”



 



**A Eulogy, I Confess**



 



So you will find yourself, and find yourself all alone, inside *Flow Chart*. You will also find very much more than these notes have been able to indicate, much less explore. One might find any of ten thousand other things in *Flow Chart*; it often feels as if nothing is not there. But anyone who cares about what’s going on in American literature must sit down, sometime before the millennium, and read the poem through. One of the reasons that Ashbery is so obsessed with an irrecoverable past may be that he anticipates a time when he will have become unreadable:



 



My Collected Letters will I somehow



feel vindicate me but even there the onion skin cannot be split



and I’ll go on



being a postscript in invisible ink until some centuries from now



when they open a time capsule and enthusiastic fresh air will



rush out to inform



the world and one can rise from one’s nap in time for bed.



 



“Where,” Ashbery goes on to wonder, “are the children now who wanted to hear that story? Why the youngest of them passed away years ago . . . .” In 1988, when Thomas Pynchon’s *Vineland* was published, some critics worried that the novel’s enthusiastic appropriation of pop culture ephemera would render it incomprehensible to coming generations. While Ashbery’s canonization over the past twenty years assures us that he is here to stay, no one will ever be in a better position than we are to appreciate this poetry that rings the changes on all manner of contemporary idioms, many of which are, but for their presence here, thankfully poised for extinction. (E. g. “They were like super-gullible.”) Catch *Flow Chart* while you can. It is, as all the above must have suggested, a grim poem, but—“Nomenclature being its own reward,” as Ashbery writes in his most recent collection—the poem is also, and chiefly, a delight.



Still, *Flow Chart* is a poem to which not even its ideal reader can ever be adequate. For all it says so clearly and so well, its devices function as a kind of mute, spluttering deixis, and instance of “the hysterical sublime,” gesturing madly at everything at once. This is, in the strict, Kantian sense of the term—the insufficiency of our faculties to what they contemplate—a large part of *Flow Chart*’s sublimity. The end and the beginning of the poem show Ashbery recognizing this function of his work: *Flow Chart*’s last words have him pointing, “that way,” and on the first page we read:



 



We know life is so busy,



but a larger activity surrounds it, and this is something



we can never feel, except occasionally, in small signs



put up to warn us and as soon expunged, in part



or wholly.



 



It seems to me (I who have “read little and understood less,” as Stephen Dedalus—who had read and understood a great deal more than *I* have—puts it to a fellow undergraduate), it seems to me that Ashbery’s long poem is—I think of it alongside Beckett’s trilogy and Proust’s continuous novel—one of twentieth century writing’s great *testaments*. I have mentioned Joyce, Proust, and Beckett not only because I think Ashbery belongs, by his greatness, in such company, but because he has set down here, as well as I imagine can be done, a up-to-date record of what has always been his great concern, “the experience of experience,” as he’s called it, and if our understanding can never be quite adequate to *Flow Chart*, then perhaps our admiration can be.

*Quiero que mires por la ventana y me digas lo que veas,*



*gestos inconclusos, objetos ilusorios, formas fracasadas...*



(I want you to look out the window and tell me what you see,



unfinished gestures, illusory objects, failed forms…)



Alejandra Pizarnik











“She’s certainly falling.”



“It’s only a dance.”



“Her face is gray and frightening. She is looking down at us from her great height. She is falling, but she will take us down with her.”



“She’s not falling. It’s called *flamenco*. That’s how people move.”



“I didn’t know arms could twist like that. Like snakes.”



“She’s holding her dress up with one hand to reveal the footwork. She’s leaning back at the same time, tapping her feet and twirling her arms. Asymmetry is important in flamenco. Asymmetry is important in painting.”



“There’s a cloud of red on her side. Look. She’s bleeding. Perhaps that is why she’s falling.”



“You’re looking too closely. That paint is unrelated.”



“Paint is not unrelated. The woman is dancing. On her black shawl, green specks flicker like dust. The shawl exists because it is flung uncontrollably by brushstrokes. It merges with the shadows because it is black. The shadows are paint. The dancing is paint. Light is paint, too.”



“The light comes from projectors we do not see. They are at the front of the stage. It is this light that illuminates her, projecting shadows onto the wall.”



“The light unites her cheek and neck. Below, her body is dark. She is being beheaded by light.”



“You’re exaggerating.”



“The other figures retreat into darkness. They are stuck against a wall. There is an explosion of light on the dress where the dancer is holding it.”



“Yes. Her dress is the whitest element in this painting.”



“At the same time she leans dangerously toward the earth.”



“She’s not dancing on soil. It’s a hard surface.”



“I don’t know. When I look at this painting I feel close to the earth.”



“You’re not listening. It’s a stage. There is a timeline for this. Flamenco started as an improvisational art. Spanish gypsies danced in their homes. They sung, they clapped their hands, they beat sticks against the ground. They were marginalized and oppressed. It was when the Romantics emerged, and with them a fascination for the mysterious, that flamenco was brought into the public sphere. It was wild. It was erotic. It was unusual. *Café cantantes* opened. There was dancing, singing, drinking, excess. Sargent visited Spain in 1879. That was the golden age of flamenco. It was a period of professionalization and theatricality. Sargent understood this. Look at the woman’s dress. He made it up. It’s not a gypsy’s outfit. It’s artifice.”



“The dress is white and blown up like sails. It looks like she has stolen her mother’s bed sheets.”



“That is part of the dramatic effect. The woman seems clothed in marble. Sargent is merging the world of Antiquity and the world of raw passion. Look at the marks on the wall, to the left, almost hidden. The shape of a hand and some representation of a quadruped. This is the heritage of the first humans on earth. The impulse to touch. To decorate. To represent reality. She’s a nineteenth-century gypsy moving like a Grecian goddess.”



“What’s this called?”



“The coalescing of dualisms.”



“No, the painting.”



“It’s *El Jaleo*. Jaleo. Ruckus, uproar, racket. Mess, confusion. Disorder. Commotion. Cheering. Pandemonium, uproar, din. Etc. But this is not a ruckus. Nor is it *jaleo de jerez*, the dance with castanets. It is not mindless cheering. *Jaleo* describes fellow performers’ accompaniment of the dance. They scream *“**olé!**”* They snap their *pitos*. They clap their *palmas*.”



“Is this orientalizing?”



“Who knows what it is. All we know is we are shown a row of performers sitting behind the dancer. They seem detached from her because she takes up all the space, but they are tied to every one of her movements.”



“She is a terrifying chunk of an animal.”



“Yes. The painting ‘sins in the direction of ugliness.’ That’s Henry James. And notice direction. The performers in the background constitute a horizontal foundation. The dancer, oblique, cuts through it beyond the midpoint, leaving two thirds of canvas to the left, one third to the right. To the left, a row of men, seated, some playing guitar; to the right, a man and two women, clapping.”



“To the left, the men are wearing black circles plopped straight onto the canvas.”



“Those are hats. They have shadows.”



“There is a man behind the dancer. He sits against the wall with his mouth open, as a frog would. He is asleep. He is meditating. He is dreaming. He is in pain. There might be drool sliding down his cheeks. You could stick pencils in his nostrils and they would gush forth horizontal.”



“He’s not sleeping. That’s the *cantaor*, the singer. He’s singing *cante jondo*—“deep singing,” the most solemn and authentic form of flamenco.”



“His voice must be hoarse. He is singing with the earth. The earth is his song.”



“You’re obsessed with this earth imagery.”



“I’m trying to hear the music.”



“I think you’re being affected by *duende*.”



“What’s that? Crippling fear? Disease?”



“No.”



“Love? Seasickness? Visual overstimulation?”



“It’s a mystery, a sensuous charm. The poet Federico García Lorca quotes Goethe to characterize it as ‘a mysterious power that everybody feels and that no philosopher can explain.’ There you go. “All we know,” Lorca writes, “is that it burns the blood like powdered glass; it exhausts; it rejects all the sweet, learned geometry.” *Duende* is tied specifically to flamenco, but it is a spirit that can also inhabit art, or writing, or anything tragic. It is the quality of death brought back into life.”



“There are certainly many mysteries. The woman is possessed. We do not know who she is. What does she want? What does she hear in that single ear of hers? Is she making the music?”



“You stopped in the middle of your breath.”



“Everything is so quiet.”



“This is a painting. Things are still.”



“We cannot hear the music.”



“We are the only ones making noise. We are raising a ruckus.”



“All these bodies are quiet. Look at the hands. The woman’s are lumps of flesh glued to wrists where dark rivers stream. The guitarists have ghost hands. They are caught in their own movement. They are only probabilities.”



“There is an orange on the chair. That is for sure.”



“You are not asking the right questions. That woman’s arms point outwards, but they indicate something inside herself. She is closing her eyes. She is dancing. What are we looking at? Where are we?”



“We are not clapping.”



“She is going to fall. She does not tell us why she is bleeding.”



“We know there are eight figures sitting in a row behind her. There is an empty chair.”



“She will not answer. She is raising her own shadows like one raises a glass. We do not know where she is going. Her eyes are slits. She stares into darkness, and she is going to take us down with her. She pretends not to care. She is exhausting. I would like to sit down.”



“There is an orange on the chair.”



“To the right a man claps. His face is illuminated. A skull. His hands rise like reflected flames on the wall. There is a lot of noise. The flames are the shapes of wolves. Their mouths are open. They rise on the wall.”



“That’s too much.”



“The wolves are howling straight from the man’s hands. After a while everything howls. Everything is dark but the dress is white. There is a moon somewhere.”



“You are inventing things. You are not describing the painting.”



“It is big. It is rectangular.”

I am that comet you all have cursed,



in the dark void drifting aimless and unsettled.



Love me like an avenger's lost



last chance at revenge.



 



I am that person whose shadow was carved on the tree,



and from that day on taken for dead.



Love me like a hallucination



in a crazed killer's fevered brain.



 



I am that wheat that Heaven too has singed with fire,



that has shivered even from the dog days' sunlight.



Love me like a masochist.



As you cherish reason when the unreasonable surround you.



 



I am that wolf whose cold bright bones the witch doctor holds in her hand.



To soil, to air, to flame, to water I will scatter like a spell.



Love me like miracles not seen even when sun and moon align



in the sixth degree under the sign of the ram.



 



August 25, 2004, Ürümchi



 



 



*Translated from the Uyghur by Joshua L. Freeman. See another of his translations *



*in the Advocate [here](../../../../article/563/old-era-or-wolf-girl/).  *



* *

1 The resistance dissolved: 2 salt in the wound was found suitable 3 to augment

the rations; 4 sleeping dogs, presumably dead, bloated the black markets. 5 It was

a confusing time. 6 The machine constantly rearranged 7 the files: no one knew 8 who

owned their lungs or 9 to whom they’d pledged 10 their children. 11 Even the

wrenchmen—the once-compilers 12 of the abuses, 13 the once-builders 14 of the

catalytic Arc— 15 started missing the touch, 16 the directive fingers 17 of the machine

18 lapping 19 at their wrists, 20 always present 21 to refasten a flailing barcode

or 22 implant new gears. 23 This was when the people 23 backslid, 25 forgot

6 it’d been the machine 26 who scooped up 27 their only brother, appropriating him,

28 save that one 29 good rib 30 which was nailed 31 to the doorpost

REPRINTED FROM 1908 ISSUE



 



Around her fountain which flows



With the voice of men in pain,



Are flowers that no man knows. 



Their petals are fanged and red



With hideous streak and stain;



They sprang from the limbs of the dead.—



We shall not come here again. 



 



Panthers rise from their lairs



In the forest which thickens below,



Along the garden stairs



The sluggish python lies;



The peacocks walk, stately and slow,



And they look at us with the eyes



Of men whom we knew long ago. 



 



 



 

 



**The Friday evening gas explosion in Springfield leveled a strip club next to a day care.**



I remember the breeze right before…



Burs of—was it willow—slant-falling.



The gray sidewalk, schist granules, scattering.



A brown dumpster lid smushing its green plastic, sandwich meat.



A rat made its debut, but for a moment.



 



I remember an awning string’s knotted tip soft-thudding a windowpane



—tympani’s uneven beat.



The rustle of stray trash—bass strings, almost rising



—but never.



And the chopper, the chopper—spittletatootling, spittletatootling—



A proud boot landing on obedient asphalt.



The stern, uncrying chrome.



The flighty flames decorative gas tank.



 



I can’t forget the beryllium blue sunshades



—orange hued at a glance.



And the stars and bars, starched, pressed, bandana.



Nation Idol Gorge



But for a moment



Then



Boom.



 



 



**The Friday evening gas explosion in Springfield leveled a strip club next to a day care.**



Spartacus sprinklers (top rail)



Serial no. 21809A



Inspector 480F



Jiangxi Quality Products



Night Hawk Importers, San Bruno, CA



Roman Roads Distributors, Phoenix, AZ



Port of entry, Tacoma, WA



Tankard 10179.03



Inspector 4201



ILO quarterly report:



Case study 1142



Tingting Liu, 23, female



I.D. 41732



Platform 12, line 8, station 4



Muscular skeletal paralysis



3rd metatarsal taped to 2nd   phalangeal



4th proximal splinted to 5th distal



OSHA Region 1 final report:



Incident 2267, explosion (gas)



Inspector 505F



Sprinklers inoperable



Logic Tree branch 20



System of Safety failure



Mitigation device



16 drill holes stoppered



Weld burs not filed



Citation: 29CFR.1910.159(c)(12)



Notes: inspector 505F on leave



DOL budget sequestered



PUB.L. 112-25



District 2, 112th Congress



United States of America



 







**The Friday evening gas explosion in Springfield leveled a strip club next to a day care.**



I remember the plume right after…



Orbs of—was it cinnamon—black-rising.



Vapor gray whitening shingle powder rain.



A dumpster lid sheered off a gravestone’s angel face.



A hawk’s claws claimed the stump.



 



I remember two spouts of thin flame, blue, making an X



—mind’s waking dream.



The hissing of gurgling plastic, supplicant—sick



—stomach’s inner eyeball.



And the bathtub, the bathtub—sittin’ pretty—sittin’ pretty—



The hysteric roof flopping on an unfazed floor.



The wise, ever-wakeful steel beams.



The cheery glass—beaming—everywhere.



 



I can’t forget that purple doorknob



—horny at a glance.



And the plump couch stuffing foam, blazing, angry.



City’s Final Chorus



But for a moment



Then



Shsh.



 







**The Friday evening gas explosion in Springfield leveled a strip club next to a day care.**



Spartacus Sprinklers (top rail)



Serial no. 21809A



Scrap metal yard F-2



Stripped steel tankard 28



Sampson Recyclers Ltd., Pittsfield, MA



Steelworkers local 4-12026



Smelting furnace 48



Slab beam rollout batch 81.2014



Semper Fortis Steel Precision Corp, Brooklyn, NY



Steelworkers local 4-200



Section cutting station no. 12



Steel cylinder hollow type 2b



Store & send department 4



Spirit of 76 Commercial Furnishing Corp, Slidell, LA



Steelworkers local 3-275



Sargon Sprinklers (bottom rail)



Serial no. 321911B



Sink coating station 12



Sanding unit 25



Seal testing station no. 7



Sprinklers standard specification 29CFR1910.159(b)



Station inspector 13



Sales packaging room H



Sort and storage garage 4



Second incidence of forklift crushing worker’s toes



Spirit of 76 Personnel Motivation Free Cupcake Fridays director, Chet Baker



Steelworkers local 3-275 chief steward, Marynella Fernandez



Section 5, clause 2 “Management shall comply with all state and federal standards”



Safety committee grievance no. 78: unannounced station rotations / inadequate training



Staff training regulation arbitration hearing 501.P.36



Sargon Sprinklers 1st annual wet t-shirt contest



Super Sonic Dance Club, 3rd Floor, Picayune, MS



 



 



**The Friday evening gas explosion in Springfield leveled a strip club next to a day care.**



I don’t remember the very moment…



Flashes of—was I daydreaming—Biloxi Bound.



The termite swarm at dusk, balling up, sprinkling.  



A skeeter swirling in its hotel pool—for the first time.  



A no-see-um bug popped out from nowhere—but for a moment—to romp.  



 



I can’t say I recall Cleopatra’s hairpiece flying off in a speeding four-cylinder vehicle



—Empire of the Great Somewhere, but never.  



And the flying fish, the flying fish—hither-flopping, hither-flopping—



The carefree palms, twerking, injured.  



The bald, unyielding sun, giddy.  



Tentative feet in knee high water, gripping.



 



Have I forgotten the name of that triple IPA—something like



—Rondez The Moon à la Batshit.



And the ample sized black pockadots—in my eyes, twerking, carefully.



Empire of the Great Somewhere



But for a moment



Then



Then



 



 



Explosion Rocks Springfield* is Rodrigo Toscano's new book. It is even wilder and weirder than these*



* sections suggest, and you can pick up your copy **from [Amazon](http://www.amazon.com/Explosion-Rocks-Springfield-Rodrigo-Toscano/dp/0986437344), [Powell's](http://www.powells.com/book/explosion-rocks-springfield-9780986437342), or your local poetry shop. *



*Only the first four of these sections appeared in the magazine. *



* *

*[Text spawned from YouTube's closed captioning attempting to render sound materials*



*being generated by analog modular synthesizers into text.  Also, occasionally the *



*uploaders of the videos use various complex technical language to discuss the analog *



*modular synthesizers' computational patch networks, and the CC system fails to render *



*that text properly, and furthermore, it frequently fuses that spoken language with the *



*abstract electronic sonic material and attempts to hybridize the two into text.  Each *



*poem corresponds to a different video.]*



* *



**RENEE**



Patch the stutterer we’ve got pulses



Going into the next NY clock agency



Then they’re jumping around



Now we’re going to use



Shoes



On around realmente more



On



Notice that I’m taking the mall says Alan



Vs and the y and trolling



Dominance



The big boys and Guatemalan



The lone hand game



Driving



More and gate



With do the polls is created by the



GEX and why changes every time you see it



Jane between X you know why I’m had earned did sent out



Dragon



The appropriate output denied using the quantized for the job done on my muslim



Armies



You know driving a white male voters William



Do



On



No one’s done



Particular no 1



Game



On



Game



Done



On



Would be gig



This week thru was another borders we do



The whiteboard in little bit be



Game



Gelder written and created by game



On



Ok



On



Been



Been



On



Would be



0



And other margins as parched



This has been a must but I’m general barrel see you next time



 



**MATHS**



Fun why switched West West West West West wash swore she fight as



Aldrich wash some like bill source to realize recall



Extra extra extra extra extra extra what’s



All what’s all what’s



All Whites how what’s



All what’s how what’s



All rights all what’s



All what’s all what’s here



All scale from



Swenson



Affected on swatched rest rest rest rest rest rest rest rest rest rest rest from



At once rest rest rest rest rest rest rest rest



Fun speech



On washed strum washed trial



Wash told on



More as I said mint in your murder I can use my bilbao



Now but on



Mmmm



On



Wash home what be watched time



Watched strom watched what



Telephoto functions



On Washington



What that I liked it and read my maths



Ag’s 2003 strips



What a lot of people that can be used on is how to use the someone in the or



Or some and or on



Are just a combination on a ball the channels



We’re going to use the Sunburst which is literally wanted by just said before



Buttressed spend this faced



Stretched in one thing to note about something



Did you login Suman



Actually both the some and the organ



Wires on



Mar watch



Trust what what what what Bob removing the signal



Be white wash wash wash wash wash wash wash wash wash wash



While did be



Don’t only difference between jails one-dimensional



More on is the bad on



His head enterprise mourning dove sei con



On so one so perhaps this inhuman



It starts fallen



Bez based lube generator on



On on



On mmm



Mmm on



I hope this video was explain some other basic functions and the Mets



Wall the Walkman Walkman Walkman the



More more more more



Maw whalk while law



My my



Make a mouse on mars wheeler



 



**SYSTEM 0**



Another way to open her yeah love



Strike at Boeing



Then a patch from the mast channel one in your eyes good out for



The Optimus is channeled to strike



To make noise mister ron is a dual



Is expected trigger a cave are also normal together



Show when using only one striking go to be struck Sam



Using the normalization between the two x8 institute an Israeli strike from both



Simultaneously which means I’ll track church together



On the pitch now be set for counterclockwise astronomers



K to impose must be said to great than first-century



Physical modeling fascist life



Mutation deputes 0 the wild hearted good



And quantize murder mister I’m



 



 



*These are selections from a longer series of procedurally generated poems. You can *



*see the **rest of them at the artist's website [here](http://samwolk.info/text/). *

 



 *Day 1*



 



             A metaphor appeared,



    a form of action, while we were reading



just below the trees. It made



             a human & nonhuman meaning....



      (*not sure what nonhuman meaning means*)



So, here we are now.         Unknowing beauty among



    the brutal days.   All year they sat out



reading, each to the other, in their skins.  Days



                                          of             drought in the west,



                            written    of.            Writers



   are stressed most            of             the time, trying



with many forms                 of             life to make energy among.



             Dry months           of             people reading, greenshield



              lichen reading                       to the fence. Indicator



species. Indicators              of             health, in the twilight



                                          of             a terrible year, *crepuscular*—



a Stevens word.   Acts        of             gather & burn  (what now



       is called                       *the          undercommons*). Rosa Parks &



Róża Luxemburg,                the           violence they endured



             amid                      the           infinite failures, unbearable



             if you read             the           histories.  To keep a little



 hope but how:                    the           young. Not to drown while



trying to register                  the           forms of suffering beyond



             or in                      the           *the*, as Stevens wrote,



   the mixture of                  the           dump. To love, despite



             collapse,               the           life forms



             reading to             the           wood... frayed ends of



         days. Days in            the           mind. Wood mind. Science



      also  reading to            the           dream—



           ,    , , ,     , ,    , , , , ,



    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~



========================= (*log*)



Some people think lichen looks dead but it is alive in its



dismantling. Some call it moss. It doesn't matter what you call



it.  Anything so radical & ordinary stands for something.



 



 



*Day 2*



 



              A simile sets up space for you to doubt



          ever getting past the suffering...Rilke



    *Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn* staying mostly



                       in his room          & where if they cried out,



                *Who, if i cried out could hear* the children killed...



    A figure of destruction came to us & said,



such admirable life forms on the street as if love



                grew black threads... To be with friends



   you finally see, inside the grief year,



class grief, race grief, loss of love & rain. Ruffle lichen



   spreading near the lake like similes.



                (~i~ had not checked my phone...)



  We need to talk. Wood mind. It’s not just about your



own little darling, the wife of the decomposers said...



                Remember summer the poets



read aloud inside their skin *where the undead meet the dead*



                 Voices sliced across the dusk,  black cilia,



                                           to            read to each other



in beauty in the dusk.           to            see black-edged



life forms on fences              to            lean against



                                                          ovals of energy



while people said listen in the modest dusk,



                                           to            register the horror



                                then     to            pass energy across.



Cortex K+ yellow, medulla K-, KC+ red to orange,



  looks like punctuation while growing along, knowing



                almost nothing, there are twin



                sides to everything  & the beautiful



wrong side is always listening...



 



 









*These two 'journal poems' are from Brenda Hillman's series "Metaphor and Simile—24 poems *



*at year's end."** You can read more from this series in *Lana Turner *[here](http://www.lanaturnerjournal.com/home-8/from-metaphor-simile-journal-poems-at-year-s-end). That *Lana Turner *page*



*also includes several intriguing epigraphs and dedications for the series as a whole. *

*358° of *Universe



 



I am Marion Delgado. Amarillo ramp. We begin to notice gangs of women roaming about the city. I had



forgotten that summer was an emotion. This is the stage of anti-imperialist struggle. Herons wading in the



shallow water. My points are extended, their borders provisional. A great din at the ocean’s bottom.



Patrick climbed into his Chinese drag. Memories of my mother’s mother. A specific tasted, like chewing a



pencil. Tho it was too crowded to see the front of the bus, I could see the sun-illumined faces of the



boarders, the light in their hair, reflected on the inside of a window a few seats ahead of me. This means



defining with precision every class and every sector within every class, and how each sector lines up at



each stage in the struggle against imperialism. I am Marion Delgado. This is not so complicated. Amarillo



ramp. Rough squares had been cut from the seat cushions of the bus. We begin to notice gangs of



women roaming about the city. She was a visitor. I had forgotten that summer was an emotion. Trucks,



cattle dry grass, the moon in the morning sky. This is the stage of anti-imperialist struggle. As the sun set



they cooked dinner on Bolinas beach. Herons wading in the shallow water. Come Sunday morning, we



brunched in the cafes. My points are extended, their borders provisional. I am Marion Delgado. Calm, as



tho stunned, we performed our functions. A great din at the ocean’s bottom. Amarillo ramp. These flowers



bloom in fog. Patrick climbed into his Chinese drag. We begin to notice gangs of women roaming about



the city. A tunnel under the river that would take you from Detroit to Canada. Memories of my mother’s



mother. I had forgotten that summer was an emotion. Woman in a pink pantsuit, head tipped forward,



asleep. A specific taste like chewing a pencil. This is the stage of anti-imperialist struggle. I am Marion



Delgado. In the rear of the bus a man bottlenecked a guitar as two others wrestled silently in the aisle.



Tho it was too crowded to see the front of the bus, I could see the sun-illumined faces of the boarders, the



light in their hair, reflected on the inside of a window a few seats ahead of me. Herons wading in the



shallow water. Amarillo ramp. Here is a question of truth in fiction. This means defining with precision



every class and every sector within every class, and how each sector lines up at each stage in the



struggle against imperialism. My points are extended, their borders provisional. We begin to notice gangs



of women roaming about the city. My friends were all unhappy and confused over the pill, the diaphragm,



and the I.U.D. This is not so complicated. A great din at the ocean’s bottom. I had forgotten that summer



was an emotion. I am Marion Delgado. There was my life as a form of fact. Rough squares had been cut



from the seat cushions of the bus. Patrick climbed into his Chinese drag. This is the stage of anti-



imperialist struggle. Amarillo ramp. The fog burns off. She was a visitor. Memories of my mother’s mother.



Herons wading in the shallow water. We begin to notice hangs of women roaming about the city. Able to



apprehend the object of my perception. Trucks, cattle, dry grass, the moon in the morning sky. I am



Marion Delgado. A specific taste, like chewing on a pencil. My points are extended, their borders are



provisional. I had forgotten that summer was an emotion. Small speckled eggs. As the sun set they



cooked dinner on Bolinas beach. Amarillo ramp. Tho it was too crowded to see the front of the bus, I



could see the sun-illumined faces of the boarders, the light in their hair, reflected on the inside of a



window a few seats ahead of me. A great din at the ocean’s bottom. This is the stage of anti-imperialist



struggle. Woman asleep behind dark glasses. Come Sunday morning, we brunched in the cafes. We



begin to notice gangs of women roaming about the city. I am Marion Delgado. This means defining with



precision every class and every sector within every class, and how each sector lines up at each stage in



the struggle against imperialism. Patrick climbed into his Chinese drag. Herons wading in the shallow



water. Anyone with a bullhorn and a red armband was a leader. Calm, as tho stunned, we performed our



functions. I had forgotten that summer was an emotion. Amarillo ram*p. This is not so complicated.



Memories of my mother’s mother. My points are extended, their borders provisional. Fuck with fear.



These flowers bloom in fog. I am Marion Delgado. This is the stage of anti-imperialist struggle. WE begin



to notice gangs of women roaming about the city. Rough squares had been cut from the seat cushions of



the bus. A specific taste, like chewing on a pencil. A great din at the ocean’s bottom. Ideology is for



everyone. A tunnel under the river that would take you from Detroit to Canada. Amarillo ramp. Herons



wading in the shallow water. I had forgotten that summer was an emotion. She was a visitor. Tho it was



too crowded to see the front of the bus, I could see the sun-illumined faces of the boarders, the light in



their hair, reflected on the inside of a window a few seats ahead of me. I am Marion Delgado. Patrick



climbed into his Chinese drag. Over cocktails, relaxed, taking in not one but several conversations at



once, I tended to mix the various responses. Woman in a pink pantsuit, head tipped forward, asleep. We



begin to notice gangs of women roaming about the city. My points are extended, their borders provisional.



This is the stage of anti-imperialist struggle. Trucks, cattle, dry grass, the moon in the morning sky. This



means defining with precision every class and every sector within every class, and how each sector lines



up at each stage in the struggle against imperialism. Amarillo ramp. Memories of my mother’s mother.



The pelican flew alongside the car, accompanying us over the bridge. In the rear of the bus a man



bottlenecked a guitar as two others wrestled silently in the aisle. I am Marion Delgado. I had forgotten that



summer was an emotion. A great din at the ocean’s bottom. As the sun set they cooked dinner at Bolinas



beach. This is not so complicated. We begin to notice gangs of women roaming about the city. A specific



taste, like chewing a pencil. The two girls traveled with their mother, a professional shoplifter, from suburb



to suburb, Kansas, Missouri, Texas, somewhat ahead of the cops. Here is the question of truth in fiction.



Amarillo ramp. This is the stage of anti-imperialist struggle. Patrick climbed into his Chinese drag. I am



Marion Delgado.

REPRINTED FROM THE 1982 SUMMER ISSUE



 



Translated from the French by Robert Fitzgerald



 



Une montagne en mal d’enfant



Jettait une clameur si haute



Que chacun, au bruit accourant



Crut qu’elle accoucherait, sans faute,



D’une cité plus grosse que Paris:



Elle accoucha d’une souris.



 



Quand je songe à cette fable



Dont le récit est menteur



Et le sense est véritable,



Je me figure un auteur



Qui dit: “Je chanterai la guerre



Que firent les Titans au maître du tonnerre.”



C’est promettre beaucoup; mais qu’en sort-il souvent?



Du vent.



 



A mountain mountainous in parturition



Broke all the windows of a valley neighbor



Who tumbled on the run to view her labor,



Thinking a mountain in such huge condition



Might bring forth Hell itself: a town: at least a house.



The mountain was delivered of a mouse.



 



This story, if I’m sober when I read it,



Strikes me as somewhat tall, if not gigantic:



Yet even for the most approved Romantic



Its literary sense is clear: concede it.



Think of the poet who begins his piece,



“I sing the lords of night and the day’s release,”



From which impressive pangs what issue do we find?



A little wind.











 



Found lately among papers of 1931, when I was a Sophomore and taking Professor Irving Babbitt’s course in the History of French Criticism. —R. F.



 

Upon a time,



thin black stalks meet the slope



turn into



                          a lean boar



                          runs into pine



                          hide hide hide



                          the hunters drop red coals



                          will cut shaft in heart vine



                          a needle hole



                          for tapestry            



                                          embroidery



                                          pressed against the wall



                                          since century thirteen



olive grove infested with strange worms



unpleasant, expressing



                          discord, plucked, shaved, sanctified



                          by Murasaki, beloved of Genji



                          Murasaki who knows the turn



                          of a dull knife



                          who knows the ill luck of the tide



                          kamikaze wind blots



                          port



O is the yaw O is the yaw



which is open O is the bowl



which is open and which will put



O is the jaw which will put and out



will spill



                          ears. They look nothing like the ocean.



                          In memory of Sindbad:



                          the steel bite beats



                          around aft yellow



cannonballs ping hollow



floorboards the adam



apple slides over



cut glass and peels



                          Adonis with premature wrinkles. Time to take



                          the epigraph? No, there is a lake



                          yet, lotus bending over reflection



maps across landmass. Shoreline



more complex upon closer inspection



is a fractal to follow is twine



linking cheek to cheek will meet



at nose. Treasure trove of Atlantis



hidden at the keel.



                          Call tort



the Queen’s strong men



witches brew and bad stepmother



the golden hen



forgotten brother



had been wronged



prosecution stand behind the tooth



tongue and court



fore, aft, head, heel



it’s cracked



                          but cured by pumice and lime



                          a slick volcano does smooth



                          lines cut fissures make no mark



                          but imprints in ash the last



                          amphoras



Coast of Sicily



siren sets up keen incessant



keening spiral through



a plane



which meets



filigree frame



at ninety degree bend



                          Once upon a time,



                          again gold, again young, again



                          twelve princesses spiral underground



                          feet by feet wearing shoes



                          for dancing the tambourin



                          follow reed across lake



                          follow whisper of worms



                          lost their way lost their men



                          no good anyhow



                          each sister the face of



                          another



                          each eye its own color



                          each eye its own specter



                          drops from the vine



                          never found



                          blinks black in dark



                          the end



 

you are still pericles—



wailing nations of id,



you will assure them,



 



‘just chemicals’



even,  that all that greens



inside your bulbs—it rancid,



it dastardly savor. narrowing



 



nations, and you got that



itch to dance crushing



underfoot infant



nodes of energy. they compelled to



 



death-wish undertow, they



hide themselves—in the ruins—



 



if you don’t do well with



diorama, this earth is not



for you.



 



this has always



been the same—



ajax showed you, continuity



 



is a cult of personality and you



will subscribe.



 



onion-headed or not.



 

I don’t want to bring it up



but I must bring it up



 



when certain ghost seem



to pass quiet as rain



 



just before dawn



how you wake



 



to a wet lawn with no



memory of the storm



 



that’s what the blood



is like, you point



 



to it & ask how it got there



you can’t imagine



 



a storm you can’t see



even if the winds



 



are ripping my body



into fifths, even if



 



your body is the lightning



I seek shelter from.



 



if tomorrow is my turn



to be the body on the news



 



will you mourn me or



blame me? will I be a tragedy



 



or a tradition? will you



retweet me? will you



 



change your profile pic



to my gentlest headshot?



 



will you bother



to learn my name?



 



will you elegy me? am I



the right shade of your mourning?



 



do you only feel sadness



when the victims are white?



 



who do you pray for



& what color is your god?



 



do you believe God



loves your country more?



 



do your dreams taste like



pie & oil & blood?



 



tell me the difference



amongst the bones

You secretly try to howl my heart,



a thousand years I've lain listening as you howled among bones.



Our souls were two bullets shot at each other,



when our corpses like buried cities are half uncovered,



you secretly try to howl my heart.



 



You secretly try to howl my heart,



ruins flow through veins like a dead man's lost body.



Our tunnels back to you were choked up with mud and clay,



when the peal of a bell breaks through the wine cup,



you secretly try to howl my heart.



 



You secretly try to howl my heart,



Oghuz Khan followed you here in dark nights bending toward the moon.



Our oval heads did battle before the flag,



in the window dusk when we blind each other like mindless birds,



you secretly try to howl my heart.



 



You secretly try to howl my heart,



what broken and clumsy corpses we are!



The last ladies in waiting, king and manservants bury us,



and in that arrowhead where our souls find peace,



you secretly try to howl my heart.



 



*Translated from the Uyghur by Joshua L. Freeman. See another of his translations*



*in the Advocate [here](../../../../article/564/burning-wheat/).  *



* *



 

REPRINTED FROM 1966 ISSUE



 



1.



A man who touches a cabbage is seldom sorry.



 



2.



The feeling is mutual.



 



3.



The same goat has three blind eyes.



 



4.



Cecilia! You are wearing an American flag!



 



5.



Witches ride when brooms go empty.



 



6.



It is better to bend a strawberry.



 



7.



Never tie a left-handed horse to a wet rubberplant.



 



8.



You are stepping on my garterbelt.



 



 

Few understood the fire

and no one warned those

who walked toward it

or the spectators that gathered

on rooftops and balconies to watch

the wind carry it in dull waves



Every light becomes a celebration

at night when time worn thin

rips under the weight of measuring hands



The beams and walls of houses

now diminished outlines

left open welcoming late guests



Around the fire pit

the air regains its shape

and rests a heavy coat

the relief when darkness gives you warmth

and in its hold there is no need



To be seen a shadow or a body

When they ask “What are you working on now that the elements



are finished” i say the elements are never finished; in China they



have metal, in India they have ether, in the West we are short on



time. Wood has also been named as an element. In Euro fairy



tales, children are sent into the woods, probably the Black Forest,



carrying baskets covered with cloth made by child laborers just as



factories are beginning. When i first read the Frost snowy woods



piece as a desert child in the 60s, i experienced a calm as he enters



the whose woods these are he thinks he knows, though i didn’t



know that many woods in Tucson or a little horse thinking it queer



or a village. What would it have been like to be sent out with a



small covered basket if you were a peasant child into what we now



call the ecotone, the region between two environments— a marsh



with striped frogs for example— then on into the woods where a



peasant uprising is being planned.



                     We have sent them all into the woods



                     We have sent them all into the woods



                     We have sent them all into the woods



& we know exactly whose thin logged-out woods these are. What



do people need from poetry during the changes? The changes are



immeasurable. Perception, form, & material locked into the



invisible. Many need calm poetry, especially at weddings where



they feel uneasy, & i would certainly write that way if i believed



calm were key to any of it, but if what woods are left are lovely,



dark, deep, they are also oblique, obscure, magical, owned for



profit, full of fragile unnamed species, scarce on time, time that



barely exists though people base their lives on imagining it does. i



hoped to find some wisdom to send back to you & that is what i



am working on now, my present hopeful wild & unknown



friends…



 



 



 



 



*(This poem is an* ekphrastic haibun*.)*

Winter, at 21 South Street, is nesting season. We cozy up to archives and take stock of the aging boiler; frigid winds keep us cloistered indoors, so we indulge in extra macaroons and some retrospective navel-gazing. This year, though, we have a good excuse: 2016 marks The Harvard Advocate’s 150th Anniversary. In recognition, we revisit our founding motto—Dulce est Periculum—for our sesquicentennial winter issue theme: Danger.



 



You might wonder why our magazine’s founders swore allegiance, not to truth or beauty, but to this less examined value. In fact, they had an immediate reason for doing so. As we remind every incoming class, “the Advocate was lucky to survive a year. Its precursor, the Collegian, had barely drawn breath enough to pronounce an attack on mandatory chapel attendance when the faculty, scandalized no doubt by a certain freedom of expression at a university, had the publication closed. The Pegasus which rose from the ashes retained, however, the Collegian’s motto.”



 



Since then, the aphorism has taken on a semantic and symbolic life of its own. We invited contributors and invite you to interpret Danger broadly, but offer a few framing remarks: Danger dwells and broods, skirts institutional logic and peers in with a critic's eye. Then, in a moment, it lashes out, and the paradigm shifts. It is not always good, not always correct--but it is an opening. Never staying liquid for long, it soon crystallizes into the very structure it aimed to shift. As such, danger can be a historical metric, a way to take the pulse of the past. We have a sense of what was comic in 1866, but how well do we grasp a nineteenth-century peril?



 



To both commemorate and critique that century-and-a-half-long lineage, Danger includes some additional self-regard: excerpts from our archive and reflections on the magazine’s history. Our Anthology Committee has paired selected submissions with previously published works that link up thematically across generations. At times, these pieces can be jarring, even distasteful, but rather than leave them buried, we’ve chosen to expose juxtapositions both provocative and harmonious. Our intention is to track and illuminate important moments of transformation, aesthetic and social, in the Advocate as both publication and institution.



 



Columns showcase that institution at its most contemporary. They trace Elena Ferrante’s authorial persona, mediate today’s polemics on coddled millennials, and question conceptions of “irrational fear” in the wake of recent mass-shootings.



 



The Features Board, on the other hand, recalls danger from a safe distance. For them, it can be found in the retelling of past events, mobilizing words to encroach on the reader's sense of security. In doing so, they hope to convince you that language is the most dangerous weapon of all, containing the power to free, shackle, or conjure hidden perils at will. Acts of dancing, spraying, hooping, thinking, being, and watching happened as written in the issue, or at least they believe they did.



 



The Fiction Board is somewhat less epistemically flimsy, and in each selection, danger of a distinct kind lurks. Plumbing mortal, financial, social and narcotic perils, the pieces highlight the variability of both fear itself and writers' attempts to represent it. Together, their diverse terrors form a paean to fiction’s ability to make our spines feel like they’re made of soft-soap—whether the fear is born of a dead body or an alarming bank statement.



 



The Art Board eschews economics to locate danger in questions of territory, performance, the body politic, and the increasingly-problematized self. Garrett Allen’s hog-tied Cocoon fidgets against the page, while Ellen Gallagher’s Dew Breaker floats, a palimpsest of marine forms and hues. Traversing grounds luminescent and eerie, the forty-odd images curated here confront precariousness in process and materiality.



 



Speaking of precarity, The Poetry Board is anxious about the difference between representations and reality of the vanguards of aesthetic and political action. Do Danez Smith’s political blows seem more like an example of real poetic force, or are Hillman and Toscano better able to claim the edginess of danger using wilder formal invention? Perhat and Abduwéli, from Xinjiang Province in China, force us to be more careful about our model of literary history: Uyghur poems have a markedly different past to reckon with.



 



Some works might not strike as openly dangerous: Maria P. Vassileva's dreamlike, strangely moving interlude; Faye Yan Zhang's delirious, witty meditation on narrative; Lev Mamuya's jazzy and cryptic stuttering shuttle; and Alyssa Moore's dystopian and scriptural chapter. But Wordsworth's private lyric was only "reactionary" relative to the social, economic, and political context in which his words were written. As Clare Cavenaugh points out, in the Soviet Union, public, political poetry was the officially sanctioned form, and writing personal, apolitical poems was punishable by marginalization, exile, and death. The Poetry Board points out that if we think danger is a genuine aesthetic value—if our art should be dangerous—then the right question might be: dangerous to what, or to whom?



 



Archive pairings for each section offer some clues to answering that question. Some selections uncover how we have navigated and discursively defined identity—both in its primary construction and later reconstructions. For example, “Feminology” and “Private Parts,”essays that vary greatly in their historical moments and authorships, provide different lenses into how we conceptualize and discuss the feminine body. Similarly, reflections from John Ashbery and Francine Prose charting the sexual and gender attitudes at the Advocatemay at once upset, confirm, and color the alluring satire of “Hoopla.” Next to such pairings, Henry Miller’s legendary “Glittering Pie” reads like a revelatory testament to a singular historical moment. A peerless case study for “Nico Perrino and Alex Morey’s “Censorship with a Smile,” Miller’s text remains in need of both critical unpacking and sensual appreciation.



 



Other matches draw attention to formal concerns. The playfully restrained sarcasm of Jean de La Fontaine’s “La Montagne qui accouche,”translated by a young Robert Fitzgerald, augments the raw, imagistic impact of Joshua L. Freeman’s translations of Uyghur poetry. We place T.S. Eliot’s underwhelming juvenilia next to Lev Mamuya’s “post-snap” and dare you to say our most laureled alum does not find himself bested by a sophomore. In a more complementary vein, Louise Bourgeois’s palpably intimate diptychs and Gabriel García Márquez’s interview with The Advocate remind us of art’s implacable tendency toward the personal and the geographically specific—a tendency explored and unmasked in Simon Dybbroe Møller’s homage to D’Angelo’s love affair with the camera and Mark Chiusano’s interview comments on his short fiction. The Anthology Committee hopes that these pairings make for engaging reading and conversational fodder among friends—but also that they help to elucidate the Advocate’s complicated past, and where we would like to go as we careen, publish, and celebrate art in the next 150 years.



 



Speaking of the future, our Technology Board has successively integrated our blog, Notes from 21 South Street, into our redesigned website. Visit it to find more information on our ongoing Capital Campaign and 150th Anniversary Fundraiser Event in New York this May.



 



As our editorial board retires—today’s crème de la crème souring before its time—we hope that Danger tempts you to be a bit more perilous, to risk a walk in the latest gales and newest galas, to step outside into freedom’s square. After all, new seeds are taking root and, come next year, those saplings will yield sweet golden apples.

Perhaps the most infamous piece ever published in The Advocate’s pages was Henry V. Miller’s “Glittering Pie,” a re-titled excerpt of what would become Aller Retour New York. Its controversial history is recounted below in a piece that accompanied its 1965 reprinting. Remarkably, even the 1935 original included extensive self-censorship, marked by a smattering of em-dashes. Even those details left behind, however, were deemed aesthetically and morally depraved enough to incite resignations and other dramatics. For Danger,** we have footnoted what we presume to be the originally-intended crass words as recovered from Aller Retour New York. By doing so, we hope to offer a more complete historical picture of what Miller and his contemporaries considered to be risky writing.*

Phaedra Byrd, or Faye, likes to get high on PCP. She picks up from Cowboy, who spends nights hanging near the Carver Terrace stairs. Sometimes when she gets high, she looks at pictures of herself and her younger half-sister as children. Now, attempting to text a man with a black SUV who lives in the suburbs, Faye accidentally sends a video message of herself mumbling “You like it, babe?” to her half-sister.

The teacher’s husband had been missing for two weeks and everyone imagined that this caused the teacher immense grief. Of course, you couldn’t tell—she continued to take mid-morning walks around the port as though her husband were still out at sea for the day, his return promised by ritual—but people began to fear, we all did, that one afternoon the boats might begin their daily caravan into the harbor and she would recognize for the first time that they did not bring him with them.

Crimson flyers feather the mailboxes on both sides of Up River Road. There are acres of tall blue-stem grass sprawling between the houses, but the emptiness seems to have contracted with the chilled air. November in Texas. In the morning sun, the hills are ochre and rust and dry green. My husband is already at work, an hour’s drive away. My son and I have come out to scatter corn and sunflower seeds for the deer. They’re waiting in the brush, over a dozen of them, mostly whitetail doe and their fawns, but also bucks and dark, huffing Sika. Maybe Uno is with them, maybe not. When Old Man Landry drives by in his pickup, the flyers lift and fall like they’re on disturbed water. If he waves to us, I miss it.

EXCERPTED FROM 1996 SPRING CONTEST ISSUE

“Anoche te vi,” sang Deniz, dancing a self-absorbed salsa in the aisle.