The Paris Review's Blog, page 13

On Helen Garner’s Diaries

From Claudia Keep’s portfolio, Interiors, in issue no. 246 of The Paris Review.

What secret desires and resentments are tucked inside the people we love? A little girl’s diary, with its tiny lock and key, testifies to the impulse to keep parts of ourselves hidden, but it’s impossible to look at a locked diary without imagining breaking it open.

What to do then, with the published diary? With its lock removed, its interior offered to the world not only as exposure but as form: a genre beholden to the insight that rises from immediacy rather than retrospection. Many writers’ diaries have been published, but far fewer have been published in their lifetimes—and none carry the singular acuity, wit, and electric grace of Helen Garner’s. An Australian national treasure known for her novels of domestic nuance and entanglement (Monkey Grip, The Children’s Bach) and journalism of grand sorrow and fierce controversy (The First Stone, This House of Grief), Garner has given us diaries that read like they are inventing a new language made from utterly familiar materials: fresh, raw, vibrating with life. “Like being given a painting you love gleaming with the still wet paint,” as the writer Helen Elliott put it. They are seductively loose and nimble, delivering shards of experience rather than an overdetermined narrative, pivoting from sharpened skewers of observation (“The writers’ festival. It’s like being barbecued”) to a clear-eyed claiming of pleasure (“tear meat off a chicken and stuff it into her mouth”), swerving from deep reckonings with romantic intimacy and dissolution to sudden, perfect aphorisms hidden like Easter eggs in the grass: “Sentimentality keeps looking over its shoulder to see how you’re taking it. Emotion doesn’t give a shit whether anyone’s looking or not.”

The writer Catherine Lacey once brilliantly described the difficulty of writing about experiences you’re still living as “trying to make a bed while you’re still in it,” but as I read Garner’s diaries, I kept thinking that perhaps not every bed needs to be made. Sometimes we want the unmade beds, with messy sheets and sprawled out bodies stretching and spooning, the fossils of curled hairs on the pillow, the faint salt of dried sweat.

Far from reading like B-roll footage, these diaries feel magnificent and sui generis, beholden to no rhythms or logic but their own, simultaneously seductive and staggering, a blend of pillow talk, bar gossip, and eavesdropping on therapy. They offer an intoxicating, astute account of the deep emotional movements of Garner’s life over two decades— two marriages and divorces, the flowering of her literary career, and her daughter’s coming-of-age—but they always live in the weeds, built of the grain and texture of her days. No small part of their brilliance stems from their faith that there is no meaningful separation between these realms of inquiry: that reckoning with human purpose and the anguished possibilities of human love always happens within, and not above, the realm of “trivial” daily experience. Which is to say: in their form as well as their content, they reveal where meaning dwells in our lives (everywhere), and how we might excavate it. “In my heart,” Garner has said, “I always liked my diary better than anything else I wrote.”

Between entries, Garner pivots deftly and unapologetically from interior to exterior, gravity to banality, existential rumination to lively anecdote: love affairs and therapy sessions, but also hot wind, big moons, salt air, a sunset cloud “ridged as neat and fine as salmon flesh” and “the rodent flowing of squirrels” across grass; the sting of a terrible review, the satisfactions of friendship, the beautifully naked bodies of aging women at bathhouses. In these pages, we find all the facets of living beautifully juxtaposed, as they are in life: gossip, sex, parenting, plate smashing rage, trips to the dentist. “Crazy about the way Proust uses physical objects to keep his huge, billowing sentences grounded,” she writes, and her prose does the same. We are returned to the concrete stuff of life: the single pubic hair she finds in the quiche at a dinner party, and politely tucks away; the half-dead tree carved up for a bonfire; the copy of Paradise Lost stashed in her outdoor toilet; a friend describing his wife’s homemade bread: “the sort of bread you want to peel open and lie down in.” Even her description of a Thai meal on her fifty-fifth birthday is a minor revelation, and an ode to the pleasures of surprise (Garner loves surprise as a daily, creative, and even ethical force): “just as you think you know the taste, a note of some other herb or spice breaks through, as clear as a beam of light through a cloud.”

When people talk about personal narrative as a literary form, there is almost always a bias toward the insights made available by hindsight. But what can you see as you are coming down the road? “Story is a chunk of life with a bend in it,” Garner has said, inviting us to consider the possibility that there’s not necessarily a direct correlation between time passed and insight gained, as if you will necessarily “know” the most about your own life at precisely the moment just before you die. You know things as you move through experience, and sometimes the fervent immediacy of this sort of knowing actually diminishes across time. Once you know how things play out, you cannot absolutely re-create all you felt inside of them: that sensation is gone for good. Garner’s diaries are full of this intimate entwining of knowing and feeling, like two lovers tangled up in the sheets of an unmade bed.

***

Garner’s first volume of collected diaries, Yellow Notebook, spans the years 1978 to 1987 and was first published in 2019. It begins when her daughter, M, is just nine years old, still living at home. Garner’s first novel, Monkey Grip, has just won a major prize, but Garner is wrestling with whether her writing is too “small” in its scope. “Everyone’s talking about Apocalypse Now,” she laments. “My work seems piddling, narrow, domestic.” This first volume tracks the disintegration of her volatile relationship with F, her second husband, and the beginning of her affair with a married writer she calls V (the novelist Murray Bail) who will eventually become her third. “One day I’ll have to burn this book,” she writes. “I use as buckets of cold water thoughts of his wife’s preparations for Christmas.”

The second volume, One Day I’ll Remember This (1987–1995), tracks Garner’s deepening affair with V, as well as Garner navigating M’s leaving home: “This state is like a second labour. I’m struggling to let her be born,” she writes. A friend tells her, “A brand-new abyss. I envy you. Don’t fill it up with old things.” Eventually V leaves his marriage to be with Garner, and she leaves her life in Melbourne to live with him in Sydney. At their wedding, her father predicts trouble: “They’re both writers, though,” he says, predicting one of the major subplots of the pages still to come. Things are already bumpy in these early years, but V and Garner are allies through the bumpiness: “When we see couples who are cheerfully loving we exchange sad, wry glances.” Resilience shows up like a glimmering, essential thread through all three volumes: Garner coming back to art, and to herself as an artist, through the frustrations of the writing process, the daily trials of love and grief, and the slings and arrows of critical reception—at one point Garner girds herself to “accept that I have enemies, and be robust about it.”

The title of Garner’s third volume, How to End a Story (1995–1998), refers not only to its place as the final movement of a triptych but to its account of the prolonged and messy dissolution of Garner’s third marriage. By this point, the diaries have come to assume the velocity and integrity of a novel. Two of the major forces pressurizing the end of their marriage are V’s relationship with X, a painter, and Garner’s relationship with her analyst, who points out that she often lies on the couch in a fetal position, sometimes clutching her scarf “like a comforter, or a bottle.” V worries that analysis will threaten her artistic life, that it promises to too neatly solve or defuse the “family unravelling” that fuels her work. But he need not have feared: there is plenty more unraveling ahead. (And eventually, delightfully, Garner manages to claim her therapy expenses as “professional development” on her taxes, her triumph at this accomplishment so fervent it gets italicized, “they allowed it!”)

We meet X at her fortieth birthday party: “She uses her body expressively, in ways that are un-Australian—turns of the head, graceful arm and hand gestures.” Earlier in the diaries, Garner has wondered if the world is made of triangles rather than couples, and X will eventually become the third point in the triangle of Garner’s marriage as X and V develop a consuming friendship that Garner suspects has become an affair: “If you’re a man’s second wife you know for a fact that he’s capable of anything.”

One of the great hardships of V’s intimacy with the painter X is not just the sting of romantic betrayal but the fact that jealousy obstructs Garner’s relationship with her own powers of observation: “I didn’t know any more how to be happy or to enjoy, for example, the glorious beauty of the ocean and the summer sky.” But her jealousy eventually becomes an artifact to be investigated, an object on which Garner can train her furious insight, and an enemy to be subdued by “turning away to something more interesting.” In their constant pivots, the diaries often offer a version of this relief from claustrophobia, turning from domestic conflict to the world outside—the city, friends, work, daughter—like opening a window in a dim, stale room and letting in fresh breeze, oxygen, sunlight or moonlight, or the smell of rain.

As ever, Garner is attuned to both the existential depths of romantic conflict and the banal surfaces of how these conflicts play out. “Since we were writers, each of us had a horror of being engulfed by the other,” she writes, “and had to fight against it.” But so often these deep conflicts express themselves through the materials of petty grievances: “Contest between me and V about what each of us has done to keep the soap from going mucky in the bathroom.” There’s catharsis in the moment when Garner finally discovers the draft of a love letter to X, confirming all her suspicions of an affair. She documents the wild scene with vigorous specificity: smashing V’s espresso machine on the floor, grabbing his expensive cigars from the humidor and jamming them into the beetroot soup she made for him, stabbing a draft of his novel with his Mont Blanc fountain pen until the nib is smashed and bent. (Later, she feels solidarity with a schoolgirl who has cut the laces of her brother’s expensive new running shoes. “I long to say, ‘Sweetheart. I have cut up a straw hat with scissors and drowned cigars in soup. We are sisters.’ ”)

Garner takes her heartbreak with her to Buenos Aires (“I trudge up and down the avenidas lugging my smashed and bleeding heart”) and then to Antarctica for a travel piece (“I wish I could have a clean heart. Mine’s like an ashtray. Full of Cohiba butts and spit”). She finds the air so clean and cold it’s like a numbing agent—“inside of my head is an ice landscape, an element of brutal clarity, like the first snort of cocaine”—and a sense of wonder and gratitude in pushing her face into the “tight, springy moss-pads” left in the wake of an ancient glacier: “The concrete inside me started to soften and give way.”

***

The Künstlerroman, a bildungsroman that focuses on the development of an artist, is a genre traditionally associated with youth and coming of age, but anyone who has ever tried to make art knows the process of becoming an artist never ends. In Garner’s diaries, we find, among other things, a stunning Künstlerroman of middle age. Here is an artist expanding and evolving across the middle of her life, in thrilling and unexpected ways. Over and over again, we witness Garner reaching through various kinds of grief and frustration (divorce, artist’s block, maternal guilt) to keep falling in love with daily life, her family, her city, strangers on the streets and in the baths, finding in her art a well of power that cannot ever be taken from her. “Nothing can touch me,” she writes, in the midst of consuming marital conflict. “The power of work. Art, and the huge, quiet power it gives.”

We also watch the emergence of Garner as a journalist, starting to investigate extreme manifestations of human darkness and tragedy. After an interview with an arsonist, she writes, “I begin to think of violence, death, burning, what people do to each other, to their children. And to think that I need to find out about these things.” In toggling back and forth so dynamically between her own interiority and other peoples’ lives, these diaries give lie to the assumption that being interested in yourself necessarily means you are less interested in other people. Garner’s diaries—indeed, the arc and range of her entire career—suggests another truth entirely: that deep introspection and outward curiosity are often symbiotic.

Garner writes with vivacity and precision about the process of writing itself, a subject that often drives writers into the clutches of self-referential tedium. (She is also wonderful on her own dreams, another thematic Bermuda Triangle, describing a dead body stuffed full of pens, or a woman nursing a large red bell pepper: “A slit opened in the capsicum’s side and it began to suck voraciously.”) She nails the frustration of unproductive writing sessions (“now that I’m sitting up in bed, pen in hand, on a rainy Saturday afternoon, all my little stored-up treasures turn their backs and hide in the shrubbery”) and confesses the sting of not being included in the Oxford Anthology of Australian Literature, but she gives us the good stuff, too, like the triumphant sensation of finding the right place in a novel for a detail that’s been “dogging” her for a decade. If Horace coined the term ars poetica to describe a poem that explains the art of poetry, then perhaps Garner has given us an ars diarium—insofar as these diaries skillfully, glintingly, make a case for their own mattering, a quicksilver manifesto sewn like a glimmering thread through these pages: “Meaning is in the smallest event,” she reflects. “It doesn’t have to be put there: only revealed.”

At one point near the end of their marriage, Garner writes, “V says that women’s writing ‘lacks an overarching philosophy,’” and records her own brisk reply: “I don’t even know what this means. Also, I don’t care.” Tonally, this is pure Garner: colloquial and self-possessed, jaunty and winking, supple and wry—but not huffy. And while it’s true that there’s nothing I would call an “overarching philosophy” spanning these diaries, they give us something far better, with a slyer and more inviting architecture: not overarching but subterranean, deftly emerging from the rough terrain of experience.

What are the tenets of this subversive, subterranean philosophy? It has more to do with cleaning the dishes, or making breakfast for a grandson, or sitting down for tea with a friend than it does with the utterly silent lunches Garner recalls the composer Igor Stravinsky demanding from his family. At its core, this subterranean philosophy believes that the obligations and distractions of daily life are not distractions at all: they are the conduits through which we arrive at profundity; they are midwives of grace and insight. It believes that humility and surprise are the cornerstones of both rigorous self-knowledge and moral action. The more willing we are to be surprised by ourselves, other people, and experience, the more we are capable of honesty, discovery, care, and transformation. Garner feels a deep kinship with the nun who says, “I love intellectuals who hesitate.” She is fascinated by a man who keeps but doesn’t read his parents’ letters to each other: “Perhaps he doesn’t want to lose the state of having a secret from himself; or to reach the end of the mystery, the bottom of the bag.” One senses Garner doesn’t really believe in the bottom of the bag; instead, she believes in the generative understanding that she can’t ever fully understand herself. “What is the point of this diary?” she asks. “There is always something deeper, that I don’t write, even when I think I’m saying everything.”

These diaries are not only generous with the soaked sponge of daily life, they are also generous with the reader, inviting and rewarding many different modes of reading. You can disappear into them for hours, like swimming deep into the ocean of another person’s life. But you can also read them in tiny doses—just a few entries at a time, in moments stolen from precisely the kinds of obligations and relationships the diaries document—without feeling you are betraying them. Moving in and out of the diaries, tunneling into them for a few rapt moments, then being called out again feels like inhabiting their native ecosystem. I found myself reading the entirety of 1983, the year of my own birth, in stray moments on a weekday afternoon, waiting for the results of a strep test at an urgent care clinic, and then curled in a corner of the living room while my daughter played a game that involved laying out an imaginary banquet for fairies who were deciding what ages to remain for the rest of their lives. “Ludmilla will be forty-nine forever!” she cried. These diaries do the incredible thing that great literature can: they create a mood and a field of resonance that reaches far beyond the act of reading them. They offer to return us to our own lives with more curiosity and keen attention.

 

From the introduction to Helen Garner’s How to End a Story: Collected Diaries, 1978–1998, to be published by Pantheon this month. Read our Art of Fiction interview with Garner here.

Leslie Jamison is the author of books including Splinters and The Empathy Exams. She teaches at Columbia University.

An earlier version of this essay misidentified the Oxford Anthology of Australian Literature. It has been updated.

The Living Death Drug

Photographs courtesy of Lisa Carver.

My cousin Lorrie invited me on a ten-day retreat in Peru where we would partake in ancient ceremonies involving the Living Death Drug ayahuasca and—

“Don’t tell me anything more,” I interrupted. “The answer is yes!”

I never watch the trailer before going to the movie. I don’t want to ruin the surprise. Even if sometimes that means the surprise ruins me. I met a big-personalitied Frenchman while traveling and did not take time to get to know him before marrying him and moving into his house in Paris. I guess I don’t feel any proprietary rights over my destiny. I allow the Parisian shopgirls to choose my outfits, and now I will let the Peruvian shamans choose my insides. Whatever they’ve got has to be better than what I got going on now.

Lorrie and I tried to figure out when was the last time we’d seen each other. Thirty-six years ago, when she visited me in Philadelphia!

“I was nineteen in my second year of missionary school,” she remembered.

“And I was eighteen in my first year of peripatetic hedonism.”

“I know,” she groaned. “I was terrified coming from my little Christian school to your filthy, vile apartment with your weirdo roommates. It was furnished with things you had literally dragged out of people’s trash.” She recalled the ‘art’ nailed on the wall above the couch where she slept: a shit- and blood-stained plastic music box in the shape of a church. The music-making part was broken and squawked at random all night long, she said. “And it was so cold my Walkman froze.”

“Hahaha, your Walkman froze!” I couldn’t stop laughing. I don’t know why I thought that was the funniest thing I’d ever heard.

“Well, I loved you anyway,” she sighed.

“And I you,” I said. “Did I tell you I’m Catholic now?”

“Yes. And I’m a witch now.”

We’d traded weirdness levels, and we still loved each other the same as we always had. We were the only ones who believed each other about the stuff that had happened in our family. Well, we were the only ones who said it out loud, the only ones who didn’t care about the money, and fucked them all off.

 

Day One

The taxi that met me at the airport in Cusco climbed higher and higher into the mountains until the road became dirt, and then more like dust. Finally, we arrived at Casa de la Gringa, a sprawling retreat center encircled by a tall wall painted every bright color imaginable, ensuring that whatever went on within would remain secret. A giant door opened and my cousin came running; she hugged me in a way I’ve never felt in my life. What a feeling. Then she showed me around the grounds: acres of gardens with pavilions and all kinds of nooks and sculptures made of stone and jewel and rusted metal. We talked for ten hours straight, cross-legged on our respective beds in our small shared room. We’d been talking on the phone for thirty-six years no matter where we each relocated all over the globe. You’d think you’d hear someone’s voice more clearly when you couldn’t see them, but on the phone I was concentrating on her words, their meaning, not hearing her in the way I could now. Her voice was the same as when we were kids: strong and stubborn and loving. I love her New England accent. The bark and nasality of it, the ends of words bitten off, r’s dropped where they’re supposed to be and placed randomly where they aren’t. She sounds like she’s telling the truth.

At dinnertime we staggered back down the stairs. Not only does the high altitude in Cusco make your head balloon and you talk like a tweaker, but it makes your legs feel like they’re sewn on from an old man cadaver.

The owner of Casa de la Gringa, a South African named Lesley, was seventy with long white hair and a long white dress, sweet-faced and gentle-voiced and rather drifty. She kept starting to do something or go somewhere and then would forget what it was and sit back down, unbothered. Whatever needed to happen would happen, her attitude promised, and whatever didn’t happen never needed to at all. Two short, brown, kind-eyed women served a simple, unspiced soup and hard bread. They didn’t speak a word of English except lady. As in, “Lady!” and a gesture at the pot of soup with their chin, meaning: Would you like more soup?

Lesley urged us to join the six other guests gathered around the picnic-style table, and we all introduced ourselves, but not in the usual way of trying to appear attractive and successful. We flung our lives naked onto the table. As tales of woe and hope unfurled, I pictured us as a bunch of pirates, except with pieces of our spirits missing instead of limbs and eyes.

As Lesley has very little interest in worldly things like computers and money, she allows anyone who feels like it to organize retreats at her place and pocket most of the dough. The captain of our troupe was Travis, a young, muscular bald man from Seattle. He was trying so hard to be helpful, but there was something about him that felt … separate … or pushing. No one listened to him—a mutiny had begun at our very first assembling! He quickly turned sweaty and unnerved.

Xavier was between worlds: from India but lives in America, raised Hindu but recently switched to Catholicism. He felt a little sacrilegious given what we were about to do, which was some kind of Inca magic.

Scott was a tall, skinny psych nurse bearing the weight of the world on his narrow shoulders, and it was like he kept trying to literally roll the world off by twisting his body; he couldn’t sit still.

Angela was sixty-seven, Peruvian, married to a Norwegian. She spoke in a little-girl voice. She and I instantly connected.

Lorrie, unmistakably lesbian, was fifty-six but could have been mistaken for someone decades younger with her clean, chubby face and impish energy.

Laura, an emergency room nurse, was thirty-two with a pixie haircut and a fairy face; I wanted to protect her, but I also sensed a chained tiger inside her … I told myself not to underestimate her.

Cindy’s birthday was the next day. She was turning sixty-six and had never had a birthday party. Her mother was schizophrenic and abandoned her at nine months old; she thought Cindy was going to kill her. Social services said if they had found her one hour later, she would have been dead of dehydration. There was something off-putting about her. She was so shining and wanting to give—it made one suspicious, even annoyed. It’s a terrible thing that the people who need love the most repel it the most. I pulled Lesley aside and asked for craft supplies so I could make her a card we could all sign, and a present; Lesley said she’d get a cake and candles; Cindy was going to have her first party.

And then there was me. When my daughter was twelve or thirteen, she described me as “someone you can tell used to be good-looking.” Like Cindy, no one has ever given me a birthday party. Or a welcome-home party, or a congratulations-on-having-your-book-translated-into-Italian party. There must be something repellent about me, too, something too shining that makes the people turn away at some point. There’s something not believable about me.

 

Day Two

We gathered in a circle in the largest tepee I’d ever seen and each stated our intention while Lesley poured our cups of “Grandfather”—liquid cactus, San Pedro, which tastes like the scrapings of the bottom of a kiln. She told us to expect the effects to kick in within a half hour and to last about ten hours. She said that Grandfather is intense yet gentle; he wouldn’t take us anywhere we didn’t want to go.

To her left perched a tiny shaman in boots two sizes too big and something like paper clips holding his teeth together. He was so beautiful, and he grew ever beautifuller as Grandfather gradually enhanced my sight. His face had excellent lines and had the color and warmth of red clay earth in the sun. We took turns letting him whoosh bad stuff off or out of us with a feather while saying prayers in a language I’d never heard before. He spoke no English and maybe even no Spanish. When he wasn’t whooshing, he sat placidly, smiling and chewing coca leaves, looking like he had all the time in the world. When I thought of my husband, Bruno, being an apologist for, or at least diminishing the destructiveness of, colonialism, it became so obvious that I couldn’t be with a man like him any longer. I wasn’t exactly thinking I should be married to this little fellow instead, but something close to it. (Later, when I wasn’t high, I realized it wouldn’t be long before I’d get irritated with his constant coca-leaf chewing and too-big boots and paper-clipped teeth. I may as well stop thinking others—well, Bruno—are the ones making me cranky.)

We were instructed to each find our own perfect spot on the grounds. I found a little cabana where I lay down with a great view of the cloud show. Each cloud was a curtain and would peel back to reveal what was behind it: another cloud curtain, which would do a little dance and then be parted by the wind to reveal another, and so on. The leaves and limbs of the trees were moving quite a lot. I don’t know why we think trees are stationary. They were racing the sky!

Someone had told me that plant medicine is nature trying to protect itself by turning into a telephone with which it can let the humans know that they (plants) are alive and feeling and don’t want to die. But I’m already an animist. I said to Grandfather: “Thank you very much for the cloud-and-leaf show, but that’s not where I need to go. I need to go down. There’s someone I need to meet.”

It was me. I could see myself at four just as clear and separate from me as if there were an actual, living girl walking up to me. A slip of a girl. Stick-straight limbs, stick-straight hair that was brown in the shade, golden in the sun, as she moved out of the … the corner of me where she’d been hiding. It wasn’t exactly a corner. It was just her life—her room, her pets, her Raggedy Ann doll, her parents, the politics and the music and the feel of 1973. To me, it was like she’d been trapped in a filmstrip loop. To her, she was just living. Waiting. She’d been holding on so tight to existing—riding the line of not getting so lost she’d never be found, yet remaining unfindable to anyone but me—that she could never relax. She had become so brittle in maintaining her balance that if anyone put their hands on her, she might collapse into dust. She had to hold on for fifty years straight. And she was only a little girl! Fifty years is a long time to play dead.

“I knew you would come for me,” she said. I ran to her and took her in my arms. I was crying. Imagine the faith it took to wait that long, never doubting. God, it feels good to be believed in. And she was right. I didn’t leave her behind. I was always looking for her, always.

“We’re going to have so much fun,” I said, releasing her just enough so that I could look into her bright blue eyes. “Wait till you see everything I have now—money, power. I want to introduce you to everyone. We can go anywhere. Everything I have is yours. We can buy you dresses.”

“I don’t want anything,” she said. Wow … She really is me! “I just want to be free. I want to play. With you.”

I’ve never played. I was even uncomfortable with other people being playful. It seemed an inscrutable practice. Dangerous even. But now it sounded … just … of course. Of course let’s play! What could be easier?

I took Little Lisa by the hand and leapt up the stairs (in the real world) to show her my room. I held her and cried with joy—a lot, a lot.

The sky joined in: a monsoon erupted. We listened to it lashing every surface as we snuggled under the covers, safe.

 

 

Day Three

“I cannot sleep in a room with a bunch of men in it, I told you that,” I insisted to Travis. We were all standing at the giant door, about to leave our compound for Lesley’s neighbor Kush’s compound, as today we would embark on an ayahuasca trip, which can feel violent, and that’s just not Lesley’s thing. Kush leads the ayahuasca part of the program.

“We’re good guys,” Travis said.

“Yeah, I know,” I said. “I don’t care.”

“Well, you really need to sleep in Master Kush’s dome anyway so you can hear the words from the master in the morning. His wisdom will help you. Maybe that you can sleep in a room with men is the lesson you came here to learn. Let the process happen.”

I felt hysteria rising in me. “My father prostituted me,” I said, “starting when I was a baby.”

“You don’t have to say this in front of all of us,” Scott said, his psych-nurse caretaking impulse rising in him.

“Yes I do,” I insisted. “He drugged me and sold me and made pornographic films of me. They’re still out there, men are still watching them. How many men have seen me when I can’t see them? I cannot sleep—on a drug—with men in the room!”

“You’re not the only one all that happened to,” Travis said. He sounded annoyed. “Every day for me from the age of three till six. Why do you think any of us are here?”

Lorrie stood up, took me by the hand. “I’ll walk back to our room with you tonight when the medicine wears off, Leese. We can sleep here.”

“But that’ll be 3 A.M.,” Travis protested. “There’s no one to let you in at that hour. It’s all locked up.”

Angela grabbed me by the other hand and yanked. “C’mon,” she said. “Where there’s a lock, there’s a key. You and me are gonna find it.”

***

A few hours later, Master Kush, two Peruvian female shamans, and a Polish helper gave us cups of ayahuasca, which was almost as sludgy as the San Pedro, along with murmured instructions I didn’t understand. I felt safe on a mat between Lorrie and Angela, touching the key to Casa de La Gringa in my pocket, which the night watchman had lent to us, for comfort. Within minutes, geometric shapes paraded in the air above us. The shapes wanted to show me something but they only made me madder. I don’t want to stupid hallucinate, I griped inside my mind. Is this what Travis was so eager for—a bunch of dancing quadrilaterals? I stared at him on his mat across the room and started thinking straight at him, loudly: I paid you to be my guide and you are so selfish you would rather take another psychedelic trip to the point where you can’t walk me back to Lesley’s. You’re willing to have a second paying customer truncate her trip to walk me back instead of you. How many trips have you been on already, Travis? Ridiculous!

I was getting angrier and angrier. The hallucinated shapes took on my furious rhythm and got all slashy. I got to thinking how similar Bruno’s way of talking to me is to Travis’s. Then I realized: He’s not talking to me. Bruno, I mean. I wouldn’t be hurt by his inanity. He’s bullying a four-year-old. That’s who comes out at the first sign of abuse to absorb it, because she knows how. Little Lisa sacrifices herself for me. Horrible. Horrible. He should be ashamed. So should I. The next time Bruno puts me down, I’m going to say, “I renounce you.” And I’m gonna. I’m gonna renounce him.

As for the bully Travis and my current circumstances … well, I decided to ask Little Lisa. “What do you want to do?”

She said, “I want to leave.”

So we did.

I waited till Lorrie took her second dose, knowing it would incapacitate her. I didn’t want my cousin to miss out on her experience because of me. No more sacrificing! I gathered Little Lisa in my arms and struggled to get up; the shapes kept pushing me back down. I batted at them and crawled through them to my coat and shoes. From the moment I left my mat, a tremendous murmuring started building. Now everyone who could move—the lady shamans, the master, and the helper—rushed forward, saying, “Oh no, you can’t leave.”

I said, “Oh yeah?” And I grabbed the door.

It was locked from the inside.

The Polish man, the one with the most English, warned, “You’ll be sick, you’re going to be calling begging to come back.”

I knew I wouldn’t be sick. And I sure as hell wouldn’t be begging. I got me now. I felt good.

And angry. Wow. I had never felt this. When I’d thought I was angry before, I’d go into a red-out, get possessed by a demon, remember nothing and feel shame if anyone told me later what I’d done or said. Now I stood there calm and cold with my hand on the door, letting the anger fill me. Anger feels like eating a healthy meal packed with calories you’re now burning and turning into muscle. Travis staggered over, greenish-skinned and wild-eyed. “Let a woman talk to her,” he suggested to Kush.

And so I was left alone with one of the woman shamans. We just looked at each other, her with her no English and me with my no Spanish. Her brown eyes were kind, humane.

On an off chance, I ventured, “Parlez-vous français?” And she nodded! I was able to explain to her that I’m not crazy, I’m not having a bad trip. It’s just right for me to leave. I’m taking care of my girl.

She didn’t answer, just stood up, went to the master, and came back with the key. She walked me home, still no words—only smiles—and I noticed her feet made no sound on the rocks either. Dressed all in white, she was very floaty. But there was no question of her not really being there. I don’t know if I’ve ever felt anyone as “there” as I felt her then.

 

Day Four

In the morning, our group of pirates compared experiences. Everyone but me had second or even third cups, and they all had wild times except for Xavier, who saw, felt, and heard nothing. The spirits were silent, and they’d been with the San Pedro too. But, he said, Kush had blessed him. He was pretty psyched about that. Xavier seems to be searching for a father. And I’m searching to lose mine!

Then Xavier blurted out, “Lisa, you have never liked sex. This thought came to me. Is it true?”

“How would I know?” I answered. “I was never there.”

We went to an exotic animal sanctuary. It felt so good to be with these well-treated creatures. We admired a puma rescued from a disco and a toucan from a hotel where people would grab him by the bill and carry him around roughly until it cracked and crumbled apart. The sanctuary gave him a prosthetic beak. The animals form unusual pair bonds—say, a monkey and a hawk. And all the couples are toxic. A single rescued bird or animal will be docile and allow itself to be treated. But once they find a mate or best friend, they’re diabolical. One of the animals will distract the human caregiver while the other spits and kicks or bites or pecks at the human’s testicles! If one of the pair is well again and gets released into the wild, then the one left behind—their feathers or fur will fall out, they won’t eat. And the released one will find their way back to them, no matter the distance. Now they only release them in pairs. And sometimes, once they’re both healed, a pair will just escape together in the night.

Maybe Bruno and I are two injured birds and I’ve been somewhat healed for a while now; I keep releasing myself and I keep flying back. I’m waiting for him to be somewhat healed, too.

 

 

Day Five

After I was promised that I could sleep behind the female shamans, I agreed to stay the night for our second ayahuasca trip at Kush’s. We took turns saying our question for Mother Aya before drinking from our cup, and Kush would praise the choice of question, or say a line from a poem it called to mind, or prod the questioner to set their intention deeper. Everyone but me. Prompted by Xavier’s comment, I asked, “How do I have sex? I mean as me, not as a role. How can I stay and not float away?” Kush was silent for an uncomfortably long time and then he muttered to the Polish fellow, who said to me, “He says that’s personal. He doesn’t want to say anything.” I got the feeling he was sparing me the full translation.

The master didn’t like me.

And I didn’t care!

Because I’d be staying, I decided to take the big cup. The geometric shapes knew better than to mess with me this time. Mother—that’s what they call ayahuasca, like San Pedro is Grandfather—came straightaway. I think of mothers as tender, but this one was awesome in the terrifying sense of the word. For me at least. Cindy later described her experience as riding a rainbow to the sun and touching the seed of God. I think Mother knew that Cindy had had enough rotten times in this life and needed something nice. And she knew that I am stubborn and think I’m so-o-o smart, so she would need a hammer to crack this nut. Besides … I don’t know what a God seed is, but touching it is definitely not on my to-do list.

I got right to the point. “Mother Aya, how do I have sex with Bruno? The more I become myself, the more I don’t know how. We haven’t done it in, like, six months.”

She said, “You idiot! You have everything you need. Just do it—whatever it is you will do.”

I wasn’t offended by her tone. She wanted to give me everything hard and fast because she knew I wouldn’t be in Peru again. I never go to the same place twice. I ran for the toilet as she continued yelling: “Everything is happening already. It’s not up to you to start or stop anything, or do or not do anything; just open your eyes to what is already and be it. Trust. You don’t trust anyone, not even yourself. The opposite of trust is control. Starting or stopping things is control. Control shuts the door and closes you in. No one comes in, no one comes out.”

As if to illustrate her words, all this stuff was pouring out of me uncontrollably into the toilet for like an hour. Where had I been storing it? Four times I thought it was over and I’d stand up and … oh!

I said to Mother, “After everything Bruno’s done, how can I trust? I don’t even feel comfortable holding his hand on the couch watching a movie! I thought he had to prove himself or something first.”

She answered, “That wasn’t your thought. None of your thoughts are yours. They are parasites. Someone put them in you. They grow every time you obey. Don’t listen to them or act on them and they will starve and die. There are no thoughts. Only is and is not. Which are you?”

Finally I made it out of the bathroom and back to my mat, but unfortunately I was paralyzed. Tears fell from my eyes and snot from my nose that I couldn’t move my hand to wipe. I was drooling too, the prevomit kind of drool. I was afraid the vomit would spill out of my mouth and onto my pillow because I couldn’t get to the bucket that had been conveniently placed next to my mat.

“Ask for help,” Mother chastised me. “This is your chance.”

“But I can’t speak,” I protested. “My vocal cords are paralyzed. I’m trapped inside myself. This is so horrible.”

“Of course you’re trapped inside yourself. Isn’t this what I have been telling you? Now I’m showing you. Open the door!”

I started praying: “Please let it be over, please let it be over.”

The same shaman lady from the night before heard my silent prayer and helped me onto my bucket. I laid the full weight of my head on the rim, drooling into it, but nothing came up. They’d told us before the ceremony that we were supposed to purge. I felt like a failure. It seemed even my throw-up muscles were paralyzed. The shaman pushed the back of my head with her hand. It felt like her hand went into my skull, like it was a magnet drawing it—the toxic shit in my head, as opposed to what earlier had come out of my gut—up and out because she understood my mouth portal was inoperable.

Gratefully, I collapsed back and willed myself to sleep. But without the prescription pills I’d been addicted to for thirty years, without even an audiobook to take me out of myself and into someone else’s story, there was only me. I couldn’t face any more me. And that is exactly what I did, all night long, until at last dawn padded in through the cracks at the bottom of the dome and eased the dreadful mirror out of my rigor-mortised fingers and released me, my limbs and my mind. Shake it off.

Outside: Mountains on every side, and so much sky, escorted us on our walk home. The sunrise was not orange and red and yellow like it is in Nevada. It was cool blue and purple and there were distinct beams like giant fingers pointing from behind the mountains.

Angela fell in beside me. She’d had a vision of my mother. I’d told her that my mother was orphaned as a teenager and then lived with the people her parents had been servants for. Even with all that hardship she graduated top of her class with a full scholarship to a prestigious college. Yet the only nice thing her adoptive parent said to her when she went back to her seat after receiving her diploma was: “You had the best posture of all the girls.” My mother would often repeat that story as her crowning achievement or something. She never realized she deserved more. All that pain and discomfort she bore from Crohn’s disease, the nausea. She’d go into the hospital for days or weeks on end. My mother had no friends and my father was in prison and we always moved so we were always the new kids in town, and there was no one to take care of me, so there was also the constant threat of CPS taking me away if they found out. No one ever loved or helped my mother. Not even I did. I wanted to, but I couldn’t—she would have swallowed me.

Angela said she had a vision of my mother as a thoroughbred. She said, “That’s what the posture comment was recognizing. There was something so upright about her spirit. Her body was breaking down, but she stayed alive just until you had a baby, so that you would still have family after she died. Not all thoroughbreds are healthy and strong. But they’re still thoroughbreds. That was your mother. And that is you too.”

 

 

Day Six

We had a burning ceremony. The brother of the little shaman with the too-big boots presided. We were given a sheet of paper on which to write down our wishes—mine was to laugh more, think less—and one by one we brought them to the shaman. He scattered items on a blanket to represent things—like alphabet-soup letters for wisdom. Finally he added our wishes, then gathered it all up in the blanket and led us to the fire pit. We were instructed to watch him throw the sack into the fire, and immediately turn our backs and walk away. Once the paper burned, it was in the air, everywhere, so it wasn’t a wish anymore. A wish is something that waits for you and only you to make it real. Now it was out there in the world—ash on wind—for anyone to grab. We felt some urgency to do the grabbing!

Lesley’s son led us to Heart Rock. They’d been doing excursions like this every evening while I stayed in my room. I needed time alone to think. Or so I thought. Suddenly the space in me where fear had been camping was emptied out. It hadn’t been fear so much as vigilance—searching for signs of someone wanting to trap or torture or trick me. I didn’t need to do that anymore. Of course someone may trick me still. So what? And another thing. I didn’t hear anymore the words on repeat in my head: Liar. Liar. You made it all up. You just want attention. Hardly anything happened, you’re being dramatic. I brought it up to Lorrie, and she said, “Same.” Same words she’d been hearing her whole life long, and same silence now. Fighting that voice every single day took so much energy. The fight gave Lorrie migraines and me insomnia. We didn’t realize how constant the voice was until it wasn’t there anymore; we didn’t even understand that we had a voice in our head—it was just the way life was. Past tense. Now we’ve got all this extra energy.

“What will we do with it?!” I asked Lorrie.

“Well,” she said, “I guess we just walk straight into the rest of our lives and find out.”

“Starting with Heart Rock.”

I’m social now!

Heart Rock is where, for thousands of years, people have pressed their heart against a cliff, giving and receiving energy while concentrating on what they hope for. We each took a turn hoping while the rest of the pirates visualized our hopes coming true. My hope was the same as my wish. I want to lay my burdens down and be light. I’m tired of intensity and meaning. I want to find things funny again. Afterward, we one by one crawled and climbed down and up a narrow cave crevice, because we don’t alchemize only through hoping but also through difficult journeying. It was dark and creepy in the crevice, and when I emerged a glorious sunset had come to meet me!

A few minutes later, Xavier made it through too.

“The answer came to me,” he announced. “Why you don’t like sex. It’s because you’re holy. In coitus, the less holy person absorbs the more holy person’s energy. So sex drains you, and you protect yourself from it by disappearing.”

I’d never been called holy before. At first it made me feel shy, but here anything felt possible, and I thought: Why not? Why shouldn’t I be holy, too?

Next to make it through the crevice was Scott. And wow! I could see men now! Before, I’d put like a fragmenting lens over their faces. I thought if I couldn’t see them, they couldn’t see me. I could look in their eyes and exchange words with them, but I was blurring their eyes and voices the whole time. In this moment, I could see and hear Scott bright as day. I saw someone tremulous, flawed, full of confidence and doubt. Someone in the act of becoming. And someday he would die. And people would miss him. I never thought of men as dying. Starting with my father, I saw men as unchangeable, unkillable, like the devil. But Scott I could picture in his coffin someday, surrounded by loved ones. And now that I believe men die, I can believe men live.

All these revelations are so simple: Like, of course men are people too! Maybe this is stuff other people understand in childhood or young adulthood. But instead of growing up, I made intellectual ribbons and bows out of everything. Now I can just untie them.

 

Day Seven

It was our free day.

Xavier asked Travis to take him when he went to see Kush, but we could all tell Travis was going to ditch Xavier and hog Kush all to himself.

“Call Kush yourself!” we encouraged him. “Make your own date with him.”

“I can’t,” Xavier whispered.

“Grab the bull of life by the horns, Xavier!”

We asked Lesley to arrange the visit, and she did.

Later, we found Xavier glowing with happiness. Kush had told him plant medicine and mysticism are not his path. That’s why he had no visions and heard no voices. But it’s right that he came, Kush added, because now he knows. Knows he is on the right path—being a dutiful husband to a wife who doesn’t understand him, a dutiful servant to a Catholicism that he doesn’t understand, and a dutiful citizen of a country that doesn’t appreciate him. He must live a life he sees no meaning in, with honor. This is how he will love God.

That’s a pretty shitty destiny, I thought, but to Xavier it made perfect sense. He was at peace.

 

Day Eight

After distributing doses of our second San Pedro, Lesley again instructed us to find the right place to be alone. I looked everywhere for it. I even walked into the cook’s house by accident. The last place I looked was the cabana I’d stayed in the first time, where I’d found Little Lisa. I thought, Oh great, I’ll be able to spend more time with her! But I couldn’t find her. You know why? She grew up. It’s me. I’m her.

I thought it was terror of my father that kept me tethered to the past. No. It was me. And now that I freed Little Lisa, the teetering structure I’d built of how to exist collapsed into rubble, and I stepped out of it, clean.

I stepped out of my father. All my life I fought him by saying into the wind: “You don’t own me.” All my life I left him by leaving other men. But every time I left a man, I reinforced the idea that freedom is in fleeing. And every time I disputed being owned, I reinforced the idea that it’s even possible for one to own another. No one is owned, no one is owed. The fever has broken. The father question is answered. The answer is: There is no father question.

Well! Where will you take me now, Grandfather? Where do I need to go?

Nowhere but right here. You can live now. Go see your friends. They’re waiting for you. Enjoy.

Indeed, Laura, Angela, and Lorrie were waiting for me on a terrace. How did you know, Grandfather?! They were huddled under a giant blanket even though it was warm out: Three consternated faces poking out. Still lost in the trip, fragile, unsure. “Oh you poor babies,” I said, flopping down next to Lorrie. “I’ll take care of everything. Grandfather kicked me out, I’m me again, and I’m ready to rumble. Whose ass should I kick?”

Laura held out a daisy. Lesley’s shaman (my friend with the too-big boots) had given it to her, saying—Angela translated the Quechua—that Laura is innocent and virginal like this flower. She was almost crushing the flower, muttering, “If one more word is spoken about my virginness and my womb …” It seemed that in Kush’s words of wisdom I’d missed after the first night of ayahuasca, there was much discussion of Laura not fully inhabiting her potential motherhood and not opening to the sex that gets you there. “I can’t take any masculine energy right now,” she said.

As if on cue, the shaman came over smiling and went to sit right next to her. I said, “You got this?” with my eyes. She said softly (with her mouth), “It’s okay.”

“Okay is not good enough!” I bellowed, probably obnoxiously. “It’s yes or nothing!”

“It’s … not yes,” she said.

I turned to Angela. “Can you translate?”

Angela looked uncertain. It’s nearly impossible to turn domineering men away, but the gentle ones are even harder—we might hurt them. But why should anyone be hurt by what’s simply true? I asked her to say to him, “No, it’s not the time to sit here right now.” Angela did, embarrassed, and he went away. (Later, we told him what had happened and thanked him and said he’d honored us.)

Then Scott wandered in our direction, cigarette in hand, and this time Laura did the bellowing. “Get away from here with that stinky smoke!”

He got away.

We were amazed at how easy no is. All these years we had allowed our consideration for others to destroy consideration for what’s true in us, and we vowed henceforth to destroy what’s true in us no more! We all got high on no, we yelled it at everything: our pee before we flushed it, a vine in our path on our hike, a cloud we didn’t like the look of. We noed ’em all. No is funny, no is joyful, no is the revolution where no one dies and all are freed, even the oppressor.

An Irish fellow named P.J. had joined our group for this one ceremony, and Laura got a vision that he had a seven-year-old daughter out there he doesn’t know about and hesitated about whether to tell him. I said, “Just give him the information.” She thought she shouldn’t but said “Okay.” “No,” I cried. “If it’s no, don’t okay me. NO me!” And she did. She looked in my face and proclaimed NO.

 

Day Nine

For our last night together, we gathered around the bonfire, thrilled to hear, after a week of soup, that Travis had ordered pizza. But when it came … CAN YOU BELIEVE IT WAS ONE LITTLE PIZZA AND HE ATE IT ALL HIMSELF?? I am against the idea of anyone going to prison for any reason, but I would make an exception in this case.

We did impromptu karaoke on Xavier’s smartphone. He belted out a passionate Michael Jackson song—I did not know he had it in him! I requested Salt-N-Pepa but stopped halfway through when I saw all the bummed-out faces. They were not in the vibe to push it, push it real good … or in any other manner. Someone requested the Disney song “Let It Go” and everyone sang along except me. I thought I would die. This was even worse than riding a rainbow to kiss a God seed. But the lyrics surprised me. Some were downright Nietzschean: “No right, no wrong, no rules for me, I’m free!”

P.J. got out his guitar and sang a Rumi poem from 1272: “Lover of leaving, it doesn’t matter. Ours is not a caravan of despair. Come, even if you have broken your vow a thousand times. Come, yet again, come, come.” Laura joined in, and she had the voice of an angel. Crystalline. She said she had never sung in front of anyone before. I could see why she would want to protect that voice from the world. Till now.

I was crying and crying. It was the combination of P.J.’s and Laura’s voices, one soft like bedding, one piercing like starlight … It was like Rumi had crossed hundreds of years to whisper the lines right into my ear and to each of us sad lovers of leaving. All my life I kept trying to find a home, and I kept failing, leaving every home and everyone behind. I could neither be one nor the other—homed, nor content to be a wanderer. Rumi told me it’s okay; break your vow another thousand times. Come again, come again. You can’t come unless you’re also leaving. Come. Into the arms of the Lord, the arms of the mother, of the self, of the home, yes even of the leaving—again and again, always forgiven, always embraced. I have only to come.

 

Day Ten

Sweating under the midday sun in the middle of a field, our guide Arnold described to Lorrie and me the personality of each of the horses out there so that we could pick the one that would best mesh with ours. For me that was the most sensitive horse, because I hate to kick a horse to go faster, and I can’t bear to yank the bit in his mouth to get him to stop. Imagine someone doing that to you.

“Horses are different from us,” Arnold said. “We shouldn’t master them to obey or be like us. For example, we must understand that certain things could frighten them that wouldn’t frighten us. We must communicate with them so that they can understand, and we must learn to understand them. Reciprocity. There is no need for brutality or even training. Who are we to train horses?”

Lorrie and I grew up riding our grandmother’s horses. And I’ve ridden all over the world. Never once did a guide introduce horse and rider as equals.

“It is the same with people who are different from us,” Arnold continued. “Schizophrenia, autism—these we celebrate in our Inca traditions. They are blessed with direct communication with the spirits, no need for ayahuasca, no need for San Pedro. When it becomes clear that someone has these conditions, we protect them. They are getting so many messages, it can feel like too many. They need guidance in interpreting them and finding ways to let it all pass through, to let go. We train them for shamanism, we value them, and we help them. Schizophrenia can be a burden, and people experiencing life through those lenses do suffer. But suffering is considered a blessing, because it helps you understand others’ pain, which allows you to better serve them, to heal them. And that is the highest value in life.”

I thought of how different life would have been for my son, Wolf, who is schizoaffective, if he had grown up here, cherished and believed.

We mounted our horses and Arnold spoke as we rode. He gave the best blueprint for healing I’ve ever heard. In trauma, he said, part of your soul escapes your body. It’s lost out there; it’s scared. You are not whole. To heal, that piece of your soul need to come back. But if you were a terrified escaped-soul piece, would you want to come home to an angry, ignorant, blaming person? No way! So don’t be one. Don’t depend on the government or your parents or anyone to fix anything for you—only you can do the work inside yourself to make you a welcoming place for your soul to come home to. Build a fire, bake a cake, sing a song, and the lost, shivering remnants of you will have no fear about coming in from the cold and joining you.

Arnold said love is a bridge across which we send and receive offerings, between person and person, between ancestors and the living, between a being and nature, and between self and self. “Because I love you,” he said, “I would die for you, suffer for you. Because I love myself, I will sacrifice for myself.” He used to drink a lot of Coca-Cola and he thought he was loving himself by giving himself pleasure. But it’s not good for his health, so he told himself, “Arnold, I love you so much, I will sacrifice Coca-Cola for your well-being.”

And with that, I understood that because I love my son so much, I would sacrifice my need for him to keep fighting to stay alive. He visited me in Paris right before this trip, and I was still in shock. He has deteriorated so much, physically and emotionally. He didn’t want to visit anything. I made him go to one castle and he needed a wheelchair. I sent a flurry of messages to his caretaker, his guardian, and his home healthcare agency, saying I thought he needed orthopedic shoes, maybe try vitamin B injections, and other unasked-for advice. I was hysterical. I secretly felt like he was dying, and I could not accept it—I blamed, I forced, I fought.

Here in this untouched nature, with this feeling of harmony, with Arnold’s little dog, Tina, following us the whole way, her legs not much more than an inch high each, yet she kept up with the horses … in the midst of all of this just-so-ness, I said out loud for the first time, to Arnold: “My son is dying. And I can stop stopping him.”

This strange and beautiful man, my son, has always known what’s right for him, has always gotten messages. He has struggled his whole life to “get back to” the place where he will be whole, where there will be none of the brutality that he finds so unbearable. When he was at his craziest, at eight or nine, he was trying to burn a hole in the earth with a bottle of insect repellent he thought was acid, so he could fall through the earth back to heaven where he belonged. Maybe there are some people so shot through with trauma, it’s easier for their selves to go home to the lost pieces of soul floating out there than to do it the other way around. I think maybe Wolf was wiser than me, and every doctor and every program and every teacher and therapist and aide who have fought him. We’ve all tried to make him like us, who belong here. We’ve tried to make him stay. I want to vomit when I think of how I participated in some of the terrible methods, like holding him down weekly for painful and frightening ear treatments while he screamed and writhed. We were sure we were right to try to hold on to his hearing instead of just not torturing him and letting him go partially deaf. Then he could have gotten hearing aids … or not. If he can’t hear that well, is it the end of the world? But if his own mother holds him down so grown men can hurt him, again and again and again, maybe that is the end of the world. And after twenty-nine years of it, his body and spirit are so worn down, they’re shutting down, they’re helping him back there to the place where he will be whole.

I won’t try to hold on to him selfishly anymore. Maybe he won’t die but just spend more and more time in bed, in a dream, his body atrophying. Wherever you want to go now, go with love, my love.

 

 

An adapted excerpt from Lover of Leaving, out this month from Pig Roast Publishing.

Lisa Carver published the nineties zine Rollerderby and has written twenty-four books, including The Pahrump Report and No Land’s Man. She lives in Paris and Pittsburgh.

How Do You Write an Opera Based on Moby-Dick?

Gene Scheer. Photograph by Kate Russell.

In early March, a new production of Moby-Dick will open at the Metropolitan Opera. In some ways, Moby-Dick already has everything an opera needs: narrative drama, memorable characters, high stakes, and even the high seas. But to adapt Herman Melville’s classic text—sometimes called the most famous novel no one has ever read—into a three-hour stage production was no small feat. (Remember, after all, all those chapters in the middle about whale anatomy and theology?) Gene Scheer wrote the libretto for Moby-Dick, and composer Jake Heggie wrote the music; it was originally commissioned by the Dallas Opera. It was first performed there in 2010, and has since gone on to audiences in San Francisco, San Diego, Calgary, and elsewhere. We talked to Scheer about the process of adapting Moby-Dick into an opera—and doing the same for Michael Chabon’s novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, which comes to the Met in September. We touched on the nuts and bolts of staging whaleships, borrowing from and changing Melville’s language, and the surprising similarities between opera and silent film.

 

INTERVIEWER

Were you at all overwhelmed by the prospect of adapting Moby-Dick?

GENE SCHEER

When the composer, Jake Heggie, said to the Dallas Opera, “We want to do Moby-Dick,” the artistic director Jonathan Pell asked, “Is there anything else you’d like to do?” So, yes. It was a daunting prospect, and it took a long time to figure out a way into it. For the first six months of the process, I just read and reread the book, which I hadn’t done since high school—and back then I probably skipped some chapters. I was also reading criticism about it. I was concerned not just with how to cut it down but also with how to really adapt it for the stage. The nature of Moby-Dick, or any novel, is that it’s telling a story. The narrator is very prominent. In the theater, we’re in the business of showing a story. Rather than what the characters are saying, it’s a question of what they’re doing and how the action can bring life to the story. But I could also see the possibilities immediately for the adaptation. There’s so much about Moby-Dick that is operatic—the language, the themes, and the power of the story. Throughout the book, there are these dramatic, incredibly poetic passages that I could imagine being sung, especially if they were distilled down. And the thing about Moby-Dick is that while it is a very long book and one that’s deep and dense, it does have a very compelling adventure story at the center of it. I knew we could exploit that.

INTERVIEWER

Where did you begin?

SCHEER

If there’s a trick to writing a libretto, it’s thinking first about what’s happening onstage and not about what characters are saying. With that in mind, I realized early on that since the novel is narrated by Ishmael many years after the fact, I needed to change the dynamic of the story so that we’re watching Ishmael get on that boat as the only person who’s never been on a whaleboat before. This is why I call him Greenhorn. And we’re watching him as he’s taking in everything that happens—and ultimately, we watch him take on various perspectives on how to live one’s life. So my first decision, made together with Jake, was to make the first line of the book the last line of the opera, with the idea that since Ishmael has had this experience, which we’ve shared with him, he can go off now and tell the story. At the end of the opera, when the captain asks him, “Who are you?” he says, “Call me Ishmael.” I really wanted to tell the story in what I call “real time,” not as a memory someone was narrating. Then you can see things come to life. I wanted the audience to watch it all just take place, to watch Ishmael experience this adventure, which, again, prepares him to be able to tell the story of how his life changed.

INTERVIEWER

I noticed that the stage directions seem to do more work in this libretto than in others I’ve read, possibly because there’s so much action in the novel and thus the opera. How did you distill the narrative into those directions?

SCHEER

There were many more stage directions in earlier drafts. When this process started—and this is what I normally do—I wrote a forty-to-fifty-page treatment, which no one ever saw, of how the opera would unfold. And then I got that down to fifteen pages, which the composer saw, and then ten pages, which the dramaturge, Leonard Foglia, saw. It ultimately wound up being seven or eight pages and served as an outline for the work that I ended up doing later. But it started with a forty-to-fifty-page account of how each of these moments would unfold.

For instance, early in the opera, after Ahab has rallied the crew to hunt down Moby-Dick, they take their harpoons and drink out of them, as they do in the book. Starbuck, the first mate, gets this young Greenhorn-Ishmael character and instructs him on his duties as a tub-oarsman in a whaleboat. But while he’s explaining, he becomes so overwhelmed with thinking about the possibility of not seeing his children again, and what’s at stake here, that he hands off the responsibility to Queequeg. Then Queequeg and Ishmael continue, and their relationship develops. None of that is in the text of the libretto, or the stage directions, but I wrote it down before I began.

INTERVIEWER

Some of the text of the libretto comes directly from the novel. How did you approach that assemblage of Melville’s work and yours?

SCHEER

If there was any text that I could use from the book, I would use it. Sometimes I would use a key phrase from the book and then write around it. And in other places, there are long passages that are just really edited down from the book. Sometimes I changed certain things and kept others. In the first act, when the crew first sees a pod of whales and Ahab refuses to lower the whaleboats Moby-Dick isn’t among them—that’s not in the book. But it’s a way of distilling the conflict between Ahab’s desires to kill Moby-Dick and the crew’s desires to make money. Later, Starbuck says, Look, these guys have to earn some cash. There’s going to be a mutiny if you don’t allow them to go. And so Ahab says, “They pant like dogs for cash.” This draws from a line in the novel, about how “cash would soon cashier Ahab.” I used that line as a point of departure. It’s like when you throw a stone into a pond. But one of the things that’s so profound about Moby-Dick, is that when you drop the stone into the pond, it ripples out in an asymmetric way. Certain things are highlighted and certain other things aren’t. So the cetology, the history of whaling, all the stuff that is woven into the text of the novel—I’m trying to get that feel, all while telling this story of adventure and story of conflict that happens if you try to control the world, which ultimately is beyond anyone’s control.

INTERVIEWER

How did your collaboration with Jake Heggie work in this instance?

SCHEER

Our collaboration mirrored what has been traditional in opera—the writing happened first. When you think of La bohème, for example, that libretto was written completely before the music was composed. It took two years to write it, and Puccini was very demanding of the two guys who were writing it, but he didn’t really compose the music until it was done. That’s what happened here as well. I did my six months of—call it research. I had notes, which I shared with Jake, about how the story might unfold, and then we went to the Nantucket Whaling Museum together, and we started talking more about it. Then I wrote a draft of the opera libretto, which I shared with Jake, two or three scenes at a time, to get his input. Things changed based on the back-and-forth between us. And then when we had a draft done, we shared it with the dramaturge, Lenny, and we met in San Francisco at Jake’s studio, the three of us, and just went through it, dramatic beat by dramatic beat.

INTERVIEWER

Tell me a bit about the visit to the Nantucket Whaling Museum. What were you looking for there?

SCHEER

It really was a pivotal moment. I had done my due diligence and read lots of books on whaling. I read a fantastic book from the late forties, probably the most important book I read, called The Trying-out of Moby-Dick by Howard Vincent, about the sources Melville assembled in order to write the novel. But there’s something about being in the museum and seeing the models and the actual whale boats. There were so many things that found their way into the opera based on that visit. And one, which was absolutely crucial, happened when I was looking at a model of a whaling ship. I saw that there are three mastheads with crow’s nests. I had just missed this in my reading. I assumed that there was one guy or two guys on a single masthead who would be on lookout. But there were three. And then I thought, Oh my God. Queequeg gets sick on the ship and has Ishmael make a coffin because he assumes he’ll die. I knew he had to get sick, but I didn’t know when. Looking at this model, I saw what would happen if these two close friends were on two mastheads when Queequeg gets sick, and Ishmael is unable to reach him because he is on the other masthead. It was a very theatrical way of depicting what’s happening. Imagine two close friends, and one of them is going to fall off the masthead because he is convulsed with pain, and his friend is unable to help him. It’s a very dramatic point of departure, even without words.

INTERVIEWER

We keep returning to the challenge of dramatization without language. How do you think about that when writing a libretto?

SCHEER

Ironically, the art form that opera has the most in common with is silent film. In silent films, the gestures are so much larger than in later films. The subtlety in a silent film comes principally from the cinematography. With opera, it’s very similar. Think of the operatic gesture, the broad dramatic gesture. In the opening act of La bohème, Mimi is coming up the stairs, holding an unlit candle. And Rodolfo sees her and lights the candle, and then she drops her key on the floor. He takes the key and puts it in his pocket, because he doesn’t want her to go, and then he pretends to be looking for the key, and he takes her hand. All of that is part of the libretto, not part of the staging. Then Rodolfo sings, “Che gelida manina,” or “How cold your little hand is.” He sings the aria, but everything is set up by the action I just described. You can imagine that in a silent film all of this could happen without any words—a person comes up to get her candle lit, the guy sees her, she drops the keys on the floor, everything.

With the silent film as my North Star in a way, I was imagining Ishmael-Greenhorn on top of one mast, Queequeg on top of the other, and Queequeg gets deathly sick, and he’s reaching out for Ishmael-Greenhorn. You see Ahab on the deck saying, “Hold your post; don’t come down.” And Ishmael-Greenhorn says, “But my friend.” All of this could happen with almost no text, just with pictures, right? If you look at every scene in Moby-Dick, you really could break it down as a silent film. That’s part of writing the action for the libretto. Then, of course, the magic sauce is the music. In the end, the subtlety and depth opera comes from the music, and my job is to set it up so that the music can win the day. That’s what cinematography does for a silent film, and what music does for opera.

SCHEER

You also wrote an adaptation of Michael Chabon’s novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. Did you approach the scenes in a similar way?

INTERVIEWER

It was a very similar process, with a similar but unique challenge. I was overwhelmed with the task of Kavalier & Clay, in a way even more so than with Moby-Dick. It’s true that Moby-Dick is a very long novel, and yes, a very profound and deep novel, and there’s a lot about portraying whale hunts and so forth that is challenging, but the story is very concentrated. It’s very focused. The whale bites the guy’s leg off, and he wants to get revenge, you know? The challenge with Kavalier & Clay, right from the get-go, was the length of time that the story takes to unfold. I had to be very bold in terms of compressing it, because I didn’t want to tell a story that took place over fifteen years. The story in the libretto takes place over four years or so. And once you change that one thing, you change lots of things. So it required not just cutting but also finding ways of reinventing the story.

INTERVIEWER

How did you deal with that challenge of time?

SCHEER

With Kavalier & Clay, the big aha moment for me was to bring three different worlds to life, each of which had distinct musical styles, distinct looks, and distinct textures. First, there is the world of the Holocaust, the world of Europe. The composer Mason Bates and I brought this to life with a harsher tone that depicted what was going on in Europe in the thirties. And then when the protagonist, Joe, comes to New York after the war, it’s the Superman comic-book world, it’s the Chrysler Building, it’s the energy of these immigrants who are arriving. It’s the Jazz Age. It’s swing music and warmth and life and the energy that was going through the world, clearly in response to the war, but also just as part of America blooming into a new age. And then the third world was that of the art itself, the world of the comic-book characters that is being created by Joe and his cousin. Mason created this electro-infused musical style to animate that world. We have these three distinct musical and visual worlds, so that when Joe discovers that his sibling has perished and his entire family is gone, and he runs away from Rosa without any explanation because he’s so distraught and lost, we have a way of depicting it by letting these three musical worlds collide. And that’s what happens.

INTERVIEWER

How do you think about your role in writing a libretto?

SCHEER

There’s an old Spencer Tracy line—he told Burt Reynolds, “Don’t let them catch you acting.” It’s a bit like that with writing a libretto. The problem with many librettos, especially those written over the past thirty years or so, is that they depend too much on language to tell the story. They become scripts rather than librettos. And then you have a lot of words dancing on top of chords. That is not, I think, the most winning formula for writing a really compelling opera. What you want is to distill it down so that the music can really convey the emotional stakes, and the reality of these characters. Which is not to say a great turn of phrase can’t be really important, and I hope I have been able to provide that in both of these pieces. But the thing that ultimately is going to dictate the power of these operas, or any opera, is how the music succeeds in telling the story. Because in the end, why sing? That’s one of the big questions. Why are these people singing instead of speaking? And it’s because they need music in order to express what’s going on in their hearts and what’s at stake in their lives. And that’s why stakes are usually very high in operas—so we have to distill whatever those are down into text, down into scenes, so that the music can be the marrow of the operatic experience.

 

Sophie Haigney is The Paris Review’s web editor.

I Once Bought a Huge Wrap in a Walgreens in Manhattan

The interior of a Walgreens in Orlando, Florida, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC0 1.0.

I think buying a wrap in a pharmacy is incredible. I once bought a huge wrap in a Walgreens in Manhattan. It came with a sachet of extra mayonnaise tucked into the packaging even though it was already heavy with mayonnaise. I bought it and a thin can of Coke Zero and ate and drank while walking, like an actor. It’s usually a kind of chicken prep inside the wraps I like but it’s so unrecognizable to the mouth and the eye as to be moot, the name, the food question, and likewise the preparation who knows. A wrap is chopped foods folded up in a bib of parcooked very flatbread. Once folded, it looks like a handmade food tube with hospital corners at the ends to stop the food tumbling out when it’s lifted vertical to eat. I eat it, or someone else eats it, and thinks of drastic things coolly. The best wraps are cave fish and peter forever outside time. That goes for a lot of what’s happening when I’m inside of a big pharmacy. I feel outside of time and outside of my life. I go into a big pharmacy when it’s dark outside. I buy a wrap and a fizzy drink with my earbuds in listening to my music. My music lends the whole thing a cinematic thing. I’m the crushed protagonist buying a corpse-like wrap and a thin can of Coke Zero on another planet the same as this one. I’ll take my earbuds out to pay unless there’s a self-checkout. A self-checkout’s good for buying food at the pharmacy. The fantasy ennobles whatever and lifts what from the outside looks miserable but is not. When I have food in that’s bad for me I’ll bolt some of it then bin the rest and pour bleach over it in the bin so I can’t fish it out later and eat it, then I’ll smoke the first cigarette from a new pack then go to the sink and hold the rest of the pack under the cold tap on full or I’ll have a first few pulls on a cigarette and pluck it from my mouth and flick it some irretrievable place. The expression on my face won’t change; when there’s no one around I needn’t be convincing. This is very realistic; my feelings happen internally. I’ll have half a glass from a bottle of wine then upend the rest of the bottle into the sink. I like making whatever bad thing irredeemable because I don’t trust future me to be consistent with current me. I know I’m inconsistent and this can be frightening. Self-love is an unobservable phenomenon that cavils forever. I should be punished but not killed outright. I bought a big bag of Doritos in Blackheath in the morning and started eating them in rough stacks outside the shop. I then sharpish turned and emptied the rest into a bin there and used the empty Dorito bag as a shiny mitt to force the Doritos deep into the bin, then. Everything else in the bin groaned and shifted downward. When I’m alone I’ll buy processed foods and unrefrigerated premixed alcoholic drinks. Once, my mouth was full of Dorito pulp and room-temperature vodka maracuja drink outside a späti in Berlin in the summer, great. Cool Original Doritos have a remarkable savory flavor I can’t place. The bag has a lot of blue and black on it, as well as dramatic photos of the Doritos. Blue and black are inedible executive colors. They mark the contents as exclusive and ambitious. I think it’s Cool Ranch flavor in the U.S., a thick dressing. I like processing Doritos with my mouth. Saliva piddles moisten while molars pound to a paste. I compress the paste between my tongue and the roof of my mouth to make now Dorito-flavored and colored spit leach from it and get into me via ducts. The paste remainder forms a curved cast and this is a remarkable temporary food object. I cut the soft cast object into neat nothings with my teeth then and swallow it easily. I’m just getting rid of shapes down a chute. The thing we all go to Doritos for is the intense flavor and astonishing color. Dorito flavor is staggering. It can be easily decoupled from the corn medium inside my mouth. The flavor and the color of Doritos cheers me up no end and the lurid smut on my fingers. I like eating all kinds of cheese puffs. They don’t pique my loathsomeness much as they’re just aerated packing material, a deniable foodstuff at the far end of edible. I eat cheese puffs with an urgency that from the outside looks like mechanical efficiency but isn’t it’s just noise in me, it’s squirming almost nothing perhaps pleasure’s dust there’s nothing to it. The cheese flavor of cheese puffs varies within a small window only, whereas actual real cheeses have many different ones. When an ideal of course ghosts I toss the future after it. Silk Cuts are okay when they’re customized: cover over the perforations with a torn-off glue strip from a cigarette paper or you can clamp two fingers over the perforations while you smoke to make it proper strength. I do something similar with my vape nowadays. I part-block a valve near the mouthpiece of the vape with my fingertip and in this way I can throttle the vapor. The vape mouthpiece is musical-feeling, like a child’s first wind instrument. Stuff from my mouth and lips comes off on the mouthpiece and can gather in the breathing hole but I can always get a pin or a sharp pencil and gouge the stuff out and wipe it on a trouser leg. I keep the vape in one of my two trouser pockets. Sharp lint from my pocket can get in the breathing hole and shoot into my unsuspecting throat when I vape it. I like vaping all of the time. My vape provides me with my home planet’s gas mix without which otherwise I’d suffocate on Earth’s mix. As with my voice my exhalation made visible by vape in it is an aspect of me that flees me to be with the world and never to return. I like that there’s formaldehyde in vapes but I don’t like popcorn lung. When the juice runs out I taste burning metal. When the juice leaks into your mouth sometimes oh, it’s very obviously poison I’m pulling in. I know about formaldehyde from alien fetuses and big decapitated heads in jars of it but I don’t know about popcorn lung. It’s a very evocative name and an ominously fun euphemism I won’t look up the reality of. I secretly vape on planes, in cinemas, in concert halls; everywhere you can’t vape you can actually very easily vape without discovery. I palm the vape like an inmate. I ensure the little glowing display’s hidden. I look straight at anyone nearby so if they try looking at me they’ll be met by my gaze before they see that I’m vaping so that they’ll immediately look away. This sort of preemptive gaze is weird, it repulses other’s sight; it relies on being there first, looking first, and on protocol. I pull on the vape and hold it in for as long as possible so that the vapor dissipates in me. By the time I breathe out there’s no giveaway vape opaquing my breath. In circumstances where vaping’s not really okay to do I take care to pull on it when I’m quite sure it won’t be my turn to talk or laugh for about twenty seconds, which is about how long the vape takes to entirely dissipate in me. During this time I smile and nod while I hold it in. I can do it. I presume it’s fine to vape everywhere or I don’t care if it is or it isn’t. I have the gall to do it in someone else’s house just in front of everyone midconversation without asking. If someone says something I feel terribly guilty. I feel for myself via remembered stilled machines still warm to the touch. I’m shadowing myself through a history of my own impersonal sentimentality the pining for which electro-plates the meaningless with a rose zirconium-like. I sat alone on a low stool at a low table in a pub lounge and customized a Silk Cut. The table and the stool were genuinely small. There was an empty blue glass ashtray and a drained pint glass marbled with beer foam scum on the small table which was round and a brown metal spackled with little hammered divots. My hands are seen from an instructional isometric perspective and my concentrating face is in close-up which in this sequence bravely allows itself the ugly repose of the unobserved. I gave an unaffected performance with my jaw slackened. I bulged some. No visible musculature and no visible veining on my arms. What was I? I’d a pad of green Rizla, a purple-and-white Silk Cut ten-pack and a black plastic lighter with a silver cuff. I got a cigarette paper and tore the glue strip off it. I licked the glue strip and wrapped it around one Silk Cut’s midriff to dress the perforations that make it healthy, closed. Then I took up the lighter and ground the striking wheel slowly with my thumb, moving the lighter up and down just above the Silk Cut, milling invisible flint bits over it. Then I smoked the Silk Cut and the flint bits once caught spat glum sparks when the lit tip was on them. The sparkles and the blued smoke dawdling around my head made my head look like a monument to something on the night of its national holiday. This was when you could smoke inside pubs in the UK. When I run out of cigarettes I collect the squashed butts from the ashtray, split them open along the middle with my thumbnail-like minnows, and empty the stinky spent tobacco into a new cigarette paper to smoke. The catch when smoke goes haltingly past my epiglottis is abject but I could be wrong to use those words—abject, epiglottis. The catch resumes disbelief and with it my body happens in my embrace by myself of it. I know it’s a turnstile, I know it admits smoke or not, I know it’s not the pink teardrop. People start smoking for different reasons. I started smoking when I was twelve I rolled Tony and his flunkies’ cigarettes at Sophie’s party in a barn in Wootton and everyone drenched in Lynx or Impulse. I slipped away and walked home when the little brick of Golden Virginia ran out, purposeless. I often walked the many miles home through the countryside in the middle of the night as a teenager, blank I can’t remember feeling anything. There was no one else anywhere. We’d two welcome pedophiles in the village. Jim had no toes but I loved acting. The image of my future radicalizes and pillories my present. I abuse myself in ways. I like eating tinned hot dog sausages drooped onto sliced white, scribbled with ketchup. I like the iron-blood taste of tinned hot dog sausages and their cold makes them seem found, eaten speculatively. I like modeling balloons pumped with blood meal, it seems. Hot dog sausages are a more appetizing prospect than recognizable meats if you’re like me. I eat ultra-processed meat products as a cannibal. The main ingredient in ultra-processed meats is the ultra-processing, the ultra-processing’s culture and its technologies and histories rather than the beautiful pig in the past. Cannibalism is the correct way to be.

 

From Flower , to be published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in April.

Ed Atkins is a British artist based in Copenhagen who is best known for his computer-generated videos and animations. He is the author of A Primer for Cadavers and Old Food.

I Killed Wolf’s

A history of sandwiches. Drawing by Todd McEwen.

It was California, so, sandwiches. I sat by the window overlooking Balfour Avenue, at our kitchen table. Its plastic cloth, gray, with a fringe of white yarn. (How did she ever wash that thing?) My mother was moving between the sink and the stove, framed in the doorway to the dining room. Outside was a big lantana with orange moths in it. I remember this as the time when we started to talk to each other a lot. Was I four? I said to her that I was glad I didn’t have to go to school yet. “Oh, yeah?” she said.

The sandwich dear to me in those days was Monterey Jack with mayonnaise and lettuce on Van de Kamp’s sliced white bread.

MY WHOLE LIFE HAS BEEN MAYONNAISE

There was a perverse ancillary reason that I liked this sandwich: an ancient cartoon that returned again and again, on Sheriff John’s Lunch Brigade on KTTV, which I never missed. In this, one of the hundreds and thousands of characters from the early days of commercial animation—Sparky? Inky? Horny? Drecky?—ate a sandwich that looked like mine and smacked his lips loudly while he did it. Of course, I could only smack my sandwich this way when I was in front of the TV and my mother was out of the room, and out of earshot. But it did make it taste better.

A grilled cheese sandwich, made on our aluminum griddle with the rounded corners. Same bread, same cheese. Maybe Tillamook cheddar once in a while. Perfect. Golden. A big hand for my mom, folks.

Honey sandwiches. Van de Kamp’s white bread, butter, and Sue Bee whipped honey. I still have a horror of honey you squeeze out of a bear.

I liked peanut butter and jelly. Everyone does. But while Welch’s grape jelly was the national standard, I accidentally discovered that I also liked peanut butter and Rose’s lime marmalade, something my parents had around from a trip to Canada. What a little snob! But you should try it.

I liked baloney OK, but I really liked liverwurst. My father was particular to call it braunschweiger. Oscar Meyer, or, better, Farmer John. My dad would add raw onion. A step too far for me at that time. But when I later encountered the liverwurst sandwiches at McSorley’s, packed with onion and mustard that blows your head off, I found that I was, in fact, prepared.

***

Later in life I developed a real taste for Bermuda onion sandwiches. Just onion. Out of simple human compassion, I try to eat these when no one else is home. One day however I had just polished off an entire purple beautiful onion on pumpernickel when the phone rang. It was the dentist—where was I? I’d gotten the day wrong, something that often happened when I was using diaries from Ordning and Reda, who print them in such an ultra-cool light gray that you can’t see what fucking day it is. “But I’ve just eaten an onion sandwich,” I said. “Oh, that’s OK—come on over. Come on now.” I brushed my teeth three times, which ruined the heady experience of the sandwich, and ran over there. I opened my mouth and they were truly amazed at how I could fill up their entire practice, really the whole building, with this essence of one onion. They’re still talking about it.

I was once alone in winter in a house on Long Island. The salient features of this house were a big dining table at which I could work, a faulty wood stove that almost killed me one evening, and a closet full of the owner’s Ballantine’s scotch and Pall Malls (I more or less replaced them as I used them). There were also a lot of books by Simenon and Bemelmans. What I brought to this solitary party were onions, cheese, ham, and beer, from a little shop I could cycle to on the ice (this was pretty Buster Keaton sometimes).

There was a week or so in deep winter when it was so frozen that I had to stay indoors. There were cardinals on the fence. After I finished working for the day I would select a handful of Simenons, pour a glass of beer, and sit at the luxuriously large table and read in the heat of the stove. Each time Maigret ordered a glass of beer from the bar in the Place Dauphine and drank it in front of his stove, I drank one too. If he ordered a sandwich, I had a sandwich. When he smoked his pipe, I smoked mine.

Was this any way to pass the coldest part of the winter? Yes. It was. I kept myself alive, kept the villagers at a distance. After all, I was “trying to work,” the phrase that I’ve used against everyone I’ve ever known. I have to.

Sometimes it got a little nuts because there was a radio station in Bridgeport that played the most adorable R&B records on Saturday night and I’d bop around the living room and then zoom back to the big table for another sandwich and a glass of beer and then drowse, until the whapping of the mousetraps in the kitchen awakened me—there was nothing to eat in there but the detritus of my sandwich-making and a big bar of Ivory soap. They would run across the floor to get at it.

***

An autumn lunch in Edinburgh. Drawing by Todd McEwen.

My dad had a laboratory accident in high school where his hair caught fire and the inside of his nose was scorched. After that he couldn’t taste or smell much (his hair survived). His gustatory life was muted from that period. He liked strong tastes, though now that he’s ninety he only likes candy. Where he got a taste for German and Jewish stuff I don’t know—he grew up French Catholic, eating baked beans and pancakes in the middle of nowhere, and in the Navy he was stationed in Nassau. Once in a while he’d take me to LINDEL’S, on Lincoln Avenue in Anaheim. There I’d watch him eat gefilte fish and pastrami and sauerkraut. This place was owned by a rotund, jovial man who always came over to our table. My father seemed really grateful to this man for selling food that had flavor in Orange County, California, in 1958. One day my dad asked him if he was Mr. Lindel? (Pronouncing it like “kindle.”) The man said, “In a manner of speaking, sir. The name of my restaurant means ‘Lincoln Delicatessen.’ ”

(My parents are, in actual fact, the last people in the world who eat baloney. After a twenty-four-hour airplane trip it’s a real treat to be offered one of their quite dry one-slice baloney sandwiches and to be told “We forgot to buy beer.”)

***

In 1964, we moved to a more genteel, more sophisticated town. I’m not proud of it and I don’t like mentioning it. It was Palo Alto, California. New place, new sandwiches. The real discovery was the VILLAGE CHEESE HOUSE, a large deli with elegant stuff—my grandmother used to send me chocolates from there that had baby ants, bees, and caterpillars in them. They were dead. Crunchy.

This shop was run by Europeans. Their preferred breads were pumpernickel and rye, and they put heaps of meat and cheese onto their sandwiches, along with mayonnaise, mustard, and PICKLES, which I had never agreed to and I thought I’d probably hate, but I didn’t and now I MUST have them.

My mother spent most of her life in the frozen food section of the supermarket. There she found “Larry’s” frozen poor-boy sandwiches. These came wrapped in silver mylar and you put them in the oven for half an hour. They fascinated me because they had mayonnaise in them along with ham and baloney (I guess) but the mayo became nice, not horrid, even though it was hot and had once been frozen. Mayo, mayo, mayo. I coveted these but only got one every couple of months.

***

A HAMBURGER USED TO BE CALLED A HAMBURGER SANDWICH

When my father had to go out of town, our mother would take us to MOORE’S BURGER HUT, which sat practically right on the railroad tracks. It was built of cinder blocks and it was very smoky inside and the hamburgers were great. N.B.: the construction of MOORE’S BURGER HUT was identical to that of KIRK’s, in Los Altos—was there a guy driving around California building the exact same burger joint everywhere? Beige cinder block, linoleum, beams, the grill half indoors and half outdoors?

HIPPO, Menlo Park. Funny murals, big fat hippopotamuses waddling around and enjoying hamburgers. No one needs funny murals if you have good burgers. My father always threatened to order a Cannibal Burger, which was steak tartare, but he never did. He just liked hearing us squeal.

Hamburgers, the smell of bad ones, pervaded Third Street in San Francisco. Walking from Third and Townsend up to Market Street was like crawling commando-style through a vat of frying onions. You still smelled like it the next day. My mother hated this.

In North Beach there were all these family Italian places along Columbus Avenue and they sold giant hamburgers on San Francisco sourdough, stuffed with onions and sautéed green peppers and garlic.

***

Various pleasures of sandwiches. Drawing by Todd McEwen.

New York City. Now that is a sandwich town. WOLF’S. ZABAR’S. CARNEGIE DELI. THE STAGE DELI. KATZ’S. B&H. BARNEY GREENGRASS. MURRAY’S? Forget it. I’m not even going to talk about bagels. It’s just too huge.

In my neighborhood there was TA-KOME FOODS—“Home of the Hero.” Far from it, I’d say. The rolls were not nice and the place smelled. It could have been cat piss or mouse piss or roach spray. Or all three. Bigger men than I swore by their meatball heros. (I’ve never eaten a meatball hero, and hope I never have to.) I preferred ROUND sandwiches to LONG sandwiches. A WUSS.

There was something kind of urine-y about all their sandwiches, come to think of it. They did that thing of sprinkling every sandwich with oil and vinegar, whether you wanted it or not. Everything at TA-KOME was slightly obscured, like it was an aquarium, because of the steam tables and because they never really wiped the splash guards. Or anything, really.

MAMA JOY’S was cleaner and tastier, and more expensive. The cheeses were much better. The main experience was the enormous guy with the enormous mole on his face, the Ham-and-Salad-Tub Man.

The bread and rolls were better here—I don’t think TA-KOME had real rye at all and they certainly didn’t have pumpernickel. At Mama’s the lettuce and tomatoes were fresher. We could buy Bering cigars, our pipe tobacco (Sobranie and Mac Baren), and stuff like that. We experimented with Tijuana Smalls. IDIOTS.

I went through a period when I ordered everything on whole wheat. But that gets tiring, no?

One day Isidor and I decided to invite our professor to lunch. He was very late and we finally phoned his office—he’d probably been hoping that we’d forgotten about it. Anyway he finally came down the street and he seemed pretty unimpressed by the grilled cheese sandwiches I made (just like Mom’s) and the Campbell’s tomato soup, I mean he was about as impressed as he was with us as scholars.

Isidor was not a sandwich type of guy. So whenever I went over to his and Mary-Ann’s place on the east side, I would stop at this deli on his corner and pick up a baloney and Swiss on a roll. Just to annoy him.

***

I surprised myself by getting a 1000% Celtic Girlfriend. She was Scottish and Irish AND Welsh!

Her pop was a guy who used ham sandwiches as a way to avoid his family. He was on a totally different schedule from the rest of them, on a different plane entirely—even though he made it appear that he lived among them. He always had soup for breakfast, and six days a week he took a very early train into the city. He left his office on Third Avenue just as rush hour was ending and arrived at home about seven thirty, when most commuters had already had dinner. As his wife prepared their meal, he had three big scotches. Then he ate a little bit, asked a few polite questions about how everybody was, and went to bed.

Sunday was the one day he was literally, inescapably at home, and he struggled with that. When things got too familial, too American, who knows, too CELTIC, he retreated to the kitchen. Dads always retreat. They can’t bear to see what they’ve wrought. He had these stoneware beer steins in the refrigerator that said Löwenbräu on them. He’d fill one up with a can of beer and eat a ham sandwich. The ham sandwiches were made by his wife, and they appeared always to be in the fridge, waiting. Enviable arrangement. Day or night, he stood at the kitchen sink, looking out at the backyard. Like a Hammershøi painting of a scene from Updike.

This kind of thing really works as a break for MALES, but MALES don’t really need, or deserve, a break.

***

There is nothing to be said about Boston, except that they had excellent tobacco and there were two sandwiches, both in Cambridge. One was MR. BARTLEY’S, where the hamburgers are very like KIRK’S. The other was a totally fake but quite magical German restaurant, the WURSTHAUS, where the sandwiches were generous and tasted like those at the VILLAGE CHEESE HOUSE. Maybe it was the pumpernickel or maybe I was just missing my family.

Durgin-Park didn’t have sandwiches, and even if they did, you’d have had to get some big guys to help you shove a ton of prime rib to the other side of the room even to find them. Jacob Wirth’s had sandwiches, and good ones—corned beef, tongue, Westphalian ham, even sardines—but I only ever had hot bratwurst with beans and sauerkraut.

***

Breakfast. Drawing by Todd McEwen.

The tramezzini of Rome. There is something slightly strange about them. They’re surrounded by a kind of oily glow; they look like they’d come apart in your hand. I’ve never seen anyone eat one, either, yet there are always piles of them. There is a certain sense to this: it’s ROME. What do you need a sandwich for?

They say you can’t get a bad meal in Paris. This is a stupid and pathetic thing to say, because I’ll tell you exactly where you can get one: at a blue-colored café on the rue de l’Odeon. They have the most awful, inept, disgusting salmon sandwiches ever made. Write me and I’ll give you the address.

Isidor and I were wandering around London. We passed a pub where there was a sign announcing

FRESHLY CUT SANDWICHES

This incensed Isidor, who stood looking at this sign in fascination, saying, “Do you get this? This implies there’s some kind of art, or technique, to merely …”

On Calle del Laurel, in Logroño, Rioja, the street of vendors of tapas and pintxos, roasted calamari, pulpo, tuna, cigalas, patatas riojanas, olives, meatballs, mushrooms, manchego, idiazabal, bacalao, anchovies, morcilla, chorizos, croquetas, torreznos, patatas bravas, tortillas and padron peppers, they don’t need no steenking sandwiches.

***

Sandwich dimensions. Drawing by Todd McEwen.

What is called the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland should not be, because there’s nothing united about it. There are cucumber sandwiches, but bleccch. There were the historic duck-paste sandwiches that killed a lot of people in Scotland. Bleccch. There are chains that try to imitate American delis, but bleccch.

What the English call a ham sandwich contains only the faintest memory of ham.

I had to resort to working at an English university, out of poverty. Of imagination. And money. This was a dire wholesale reentry into the domain of the sandwich. At the university there was nothing to eat BUT sandwiches. They appeared at any and every meeting, seminar, class, WHATEVER, from a secret location, and they were always damp. The cheap, sweet mayonnaise (don’t ever visit England) made me nauseous and the margarine gave me diarrhoea (that’s how they spell it!). The fillings tasted like they were scooped up off the floor.

Just when I’d finished one sandwich, the one I couldn’t imagine how I was going to swallow, I’d have to go to a MEETING, where there would be PLATTERS of sandwiches, the same silly, terrible ones I’d just paid money to GAG DOWN because I was working a ninety-hour week and had no time to go anywhere for decent food. Not that there was any. It was ENGLAND.

They RAMMED these platters and platters of sandwiches at me, and down me, until I had to QUIT.

***

Wolf’s. Drawing by Todd McEwen.

WOLF’S: “Every Meal a Memory,” it said on the matchbook.

We liked to walk around Midtown. She favored the east side for its boutiques and galleries, while I favored the west side and its theaters, broadcasting companies, beer, and tobacco shops, which she didn’t give a damn about, though she was nice about it. She bought me an avocado-green sake bottle to put my pipe cleaners in.

Wolf’s wasn’t kosher. They had everything: all kinds of bread, meat, fish, cheese, no problem. The sandwiches were about eight inches high. I had consumed a number of them during the course of our romance, but one day my attention was arrested by the sight of a CHEF’S SALAD on the arm of a waiter. From that day on, all I ate at Wolf’s were these chef’s salads: two kinds of lettuce, Swiss cheese, cheddar, even a little scoop of farmer cheese; batons of ham, turkey and tongue, tomatoes, radishes, black and green olives, hard-boiled eggs, cucumbers, carrots, the whole drenched with “bleu” cheese dressing or Thousand Island and topped with the dill, dill, DILL of the seventies. Where has it gone?

One day we were feeling cozy and happy in Wolf’s—I say cozy but really it was a very hot day, so we were feeling reverse-cozy in the blast of their really powerful air-conditioning. I had my chef’s salad and Heineken, she her blini and iced tea. And in the icy coziness, talking, laughing, she relaxed and put her feet up on the empty chair opposite her. But this waiter passing our table looked down at her and said, “Miss! Please!” Now, this was a very well-brought-up, ladylike girl. And she blushed. Deep. And after that I wasn’t so keen on Wolf’s. And their subsequent history was checkered: the place started getting regular red flags from the health department. An altercation between kitchen workers ended in a stabbing.

But perhaps their troubles really began the day I deserted the sandwich for the salad.

 

Todd McEwen is the author of several novels including Who Sleeps with Katz and The Five Simple Machines, and Cary Grant’s Suit, a book about the movies. He lives in Scotland.

More from Scraps

Ann Craven, Moon (Paris Review Roof, NYC, 9-19-24, 8:40 PM), 2024, 2024, oil on linen, 14 x 14″. From our Winter issue, no. 250.

Abdulah Sidran (1944–2024) was born to a family of Bosnian Muslims during the occupation of what is now Bosnia and Herzegovina by the Croatian fascist Ustaše. After World War II, the region became, under Tito, a part of the new socialist republic of Yugoslavia, and Sidran’s father, Hasan Sidran, became a Communist Party functionary. After Yugoslavia’s break with the Soviet-led alliance known as Cominform, Hasan became one of the suspected Soviet sympathizers arrested en masse by Tito’s government. The following excerpt recounts a “family meeting” in the years after Sidran’s father returned from his imprisonment  in the forced-labor camp of Goli Otok, a formerly uninhabited island in the Adriatic Sea. You can read more of the Review’s selections from Sidran’s memoir, Scraps, in our new Winter issue, no. 250. 

The roof was leaking again. Dad stopped coming home, and Mom lined the floor with bowls and pots and pans and other dishes everywhere the water was dripping. Because the water dripped so much, Mom got up in the night to empty the containers and returned them to the same places. We always heard when she got up in the night, and we knew what she was doing as soon as she put the dishes back and the drops of water sounded different, falling into the now empty containers. The worst was when the roof leaked over our beds. We had to move them wherever and however just so the water wouldn’t drip on them. Mom said, My God, what have I done wrong? Whenever we heard Mom crying at night, we knew Dad had come home. Mom said, At least don’t wake the kids. Can you promise? Dad pretended not to hear her and said, Conference. Women to the other room. So we had to get up and go over to the table, and Mom took Dina to the other room. Dad sat at the table and cracked his knuckles. Ekrem, Edo, and I sat in silence, waiting for Dad to talk. Dad said, Lest you think I’m drunk, Ekrem will lead the meeting. Ekrem asked what was the agenda, even though it was nighttime, and then Dad took the floor and spoke about his life and communism. You boys will live to the year 2000. By then communism must prevail, you got that? We got that even though we were sleepy. Have you read Germinal, he asked me, and I lied that I had. He told us how he’d gone to school with nanule on his feet and how we had no right to ask for anything beyond that, even though we didn’t ask for anything. While talking, Dad walked around the room, and then he sat down again at the table or on the couch. When he waved a hand from the couch, we knew the meeting was over. To these meetings, he always brought new words. Always a different one. One night he kept saying pretermit, others, permanently or withdrawal. We didn’t know what those words meant, but we used them to tell one conference from another. Ekrem said, You know, that night he kept sayin’ competent. I said, I know.

Mom was crying in the other room, but you could barely hear it because she held a pillow over her face. Dina asked, Why are you crying, Mom? We’ll be happy one day, too. Everyone has to be happy one day. Mom said, When the soil covers me, that’s when I’ll be happy.

Translated from the Bosnian by Ena Selimović.

Abdulah Sidran (1944-2024) was a writer of poetry, prose, and screenplays, including the Palme d’Or winner When Father Was Away on Business.

Ena Selimović is a founding member of the translators’ collective Turkoslavia. Her translation of Maša Kolanović’s Underground Barbie is forthcoming from Sandorf Passage in spring 2025.

My Ex Recommends

Jezebel Parker [2], CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

I fell in love with my best friend in high school because he was the first boy who could plausibly love me back. Angsty boys always had a way of catching my itty-bitty shoegaze heart. My love—it was a crush, but my nostalgic instincts want to call this love—blossomed to my awareness only after he came out, the summer before all our friends and I went off to different campuses in the University of California system.

He was cooler than me. He shopped at Hot Topic. He had the look of a tortured artist without having to make any art. He was the first person who introduced me to the Postal Service, in his bedroom; he said it was a new genre called electronic music, which I had never heard of. He adored the Blood Brothers, which I pretended to like but couldn’t stand. The Unicorns was about as far as I could get with the screaming-into-the-mic bit. The Blood Brothers, with their Satanic-sounding band name, were twitchy and manic on the vocals, bringing to mind some skeletal epileptic, screaming as he’s strapped by his wrists and ankles to a gurney before electroshock therapy. Alone, when I listened to the album Crimes, which came out my sophomore year, my mind would just flood with STOP, STOP, STOP. I couldn’t last the two minutes and twenty-three seconds of the opening track.

It’s a good soundtrack if you think that high school was supposed to be the best four years of your life and everything was downhill after senior year. I almost want to say that high school was the worst years of my life, but that isn’t true—those were my Saturn return. When I listen to “Love Rhymes with Hideous Car Wreck” now, it isn’t as intolerable as I remember it. I kind of like it. I seem to remember their songs as being devoid of melody, but this one has some discernable arpeggios amid the glossolalia, a sound that conflates the intensity of high school love with indie glamour. The song still smells like a white crew sock with last night’s dried cum.

—Geoffrey Mak

I have a copy of Through the Looking-Glass that once belonged to my ex. I would like to have read it. But when I finally got around to cracking it open, a photograph slipped out from the pages. The image was of children’s faces and a cake. I recognized a name written in icing on the cake and then my ex’s ex in one of the children’s faces. I don’t remember what I did with the photo. It felt weird to have it but also weird to throw it out.

I saw the woman in the photo a few years ago, sitting a few rows ahead of me at a performance in a SoHo loft. Right before the performance started, someone else trickled in and chose the only empty chair, which was in the first row. Immediately, another smartly dressed woman approached to explain the seat wasn’t available, then sat in it herself. It became apparent that this woman was the author of the work. She seemed to take herself very seriously. She watched the whole thing leaned forward, mouthing the actors’ lines along with them. The performance took itself very seriously. My ex’s ex, who also takes herself very seriously, seemed to enjoy it. My ex, on the other hand, has a sense of humor.

It makes sense to me that Through the Looking-Glass is a book that both a person who takes themselves very seriously and a person with a sense of humor would recommend. But what do I know; I’ve never read it.

—Whitney Mallett

Elizabeth Taylor, the great British novelist and short story writer, well knew the plot that recurs in any life, which is that one had planned on having one’s dignity, but, alas, no. Suddenly, disaster. A great scramble ensues. Shame, failure, illness, pain, regret, death: so much effort expelled to prevent any and all of these from happening, as happen they will. If this isn’t life, what do we mean, then?

Taylor’s last novel (but for the posthumous Blaming) is Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont. It is the story of Laura Palfrey, recent addition to a small cohort of elderly tenants at London’s Claremont Hotel. My wife—who was also for a very short time my ex-girlfriend—recommended the book to me. I read it for the first time two years ago. At the time, I was getting over norovirus. I had fallen asleep on the couch, and when I woke up, I saw that the book was on the edge of the low coffee table, threatening to topple off. In the novel, Laura’s husband is dead. His memory haunts her the way old lovers sometimes do. Laura often recalls the time they spent together in Myanmar, where they lived as agents of the empire. But now it’s the sixties. When Laura’s grandson, her only relative in London, fails to pay her a visit, she nurses a private shame at being forgotten. “We poor old women have lived too long,” her pal Mrs. Arbuthnot informs her. On a walk one day, Laura falls down and hurts herself, and a young aspiring writer named Ludo Myers comes to her rescue. Ludo works at, not for, Harrods, where he writes all day long in the banking hall. They become true friends. She helps him. He helps her. It’s love and nothing more.

Obviously, Elizabeth Taylor has the same name as the actor Elizabeth Taylor. The writer had one husband. The actor had seven. Who’s to say who was happier? In Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont, the writer Elizabeth Taylor does something rather mean that makes all the sense in the world. One of the first characters we meet in the novel is a Mrs. Burton (as in the wife of Richard, who married the film star Taylor twice). Mrs. Burton is an old alcoholic (“The drink has really taken its toll,” says Mrs. Arbuthnot). She is also a snob (“Before this I was at the Astor. Do you know the Astor?”). She is a lonely old woman who spends too much money at the hairdresser and sings to herself when she’s drunk. All of that is a bad turn for the writer Elizabeth to give to this movie-Elizabeth stand-in, but in the end, it’s Mrs. Burton who comes to Laura’s aid the last time Laura falls. It must have been hard for Elizabeth to see the other Elizabeth on screens and in magazines and to hear her name dropped everywhere she went. But what could she do about it? People have the right to live and be called what they want.

—Dan Bevacqua

I have an ex who until recently had never met anyone I know. We had only dated long-distance, approximately a hundred years ago. Then, last year, I introduced him to a friend as a setup—for a sublet (she was looking to temporarily fill her apartment; he was hoping to spend some time in New York). 

The three of us had lunch together, and there at the restaurant, the friend referred to my ex aloud as that: “Natasha’s ex.” Each of us froze: Is that what he is to me? “Ex” is a useful shorthand for people I’d rather anonymize, like the letter x, an unknown variable. He only has one “ex,” though. He was married, and so he has an ex-wife; the rest of us are women he has known and may continue to know. To me, now, he is a person who encourages me to write and to read, as these activities are basically all he ever does himself. 

He and my friend became close straightaway. They were first in touch over the apartment but then got to know each other by talking about the books she has there (and, presumably, me). During one of their phone calls, he recommended a book to her: The Unprofessionals, by Julie Hecht. She read it and, obsessed, proceeded to find every other work by the author. 

I read it later and experienced the distinct joy of appreciating both the book itself and the fact that I had introduced such compatible people. Hecht speaks like her, and like him, and so I like her, them, a certain type of person: sometimes manic, demanding sophistication, and fascinated by the behaviors of others as if on safari. He should have recommended The Unprofessionals to me first, of course, but then maybe he did, and I ignored the suggestion because I was in the type of mood that doesn’t respond well to recommendations from an ex.   

—Natasha Stagg

Love, Beyond Recognition

Marc Lehwald, The Mirror Project, Keukenhof, the Netherlands, 2014, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 DE.

My very first memory takes place at the local Blockbuster store, where I went one night with my father to rent a movie. I was four or five years old. He let me run ahead of him through the aisles, and I remember a rare, if not completely novel, feeling of independence. Turning a corner, I saw a man wearing glasses and light-wash jeans, with a brown beard and brown hair, standing with his back toward me, facing the shelves. He looked exactly like my father. I hugged him around his legs. When the man turned around, I realized that he was not my father but rather another man, a stranger, whom I had mistaken for my father. And the stranger seemed displeased with my affection. I exploded into tears. This is not only my first memory but also my first experience of terror.

Lately, I have been having nightmares in which my ex-girlfriend J.—whom I was with, off and on, for more than ten years—treats me like a stranger. These dreams are so disturbing that I wake up from them in the middle of the night. I write them in my journal as soon as possible:

Dreamed I contacted J. and went to her house, which was not her house. She was clearly preoccupied. I asked if she wanted me there. She said she didn’t care. I left.

Dreamed I met J. at a coffee shop with communal seating. I asked for a kiss and she said, “I’m not gonna do that.” Turned out she had a new job. Couldn’t believe I didn’t know about the change.

Dreamed J. came to my building, my floor. I couldn’t see her, because of blinding sunlight from behind. She did not look back at me as she walked away.

***

Meanwhile, in August 2024, my favorite tennis player, the twenty-one-year-old phenom Carlos Alcaraz, played what seemed to be, on paper at least, a routine U.S. Open second-round match against the seventy-fourth-ranked Dutch journeyman Botic van de Zandschulp.

Not only is Alcaraz my favorite tennis player, he is, in my opinion, among the greatest artists currently working in any medium. He is an instinctive genius, his game a scintillating blend of ferocious power and silken touch. From the baseline, he can trade massive ground strokes with the heaviest hitters on tour, until suddenly he perceives even the slightest opening, which may or may not even exist. Then, with a primal scream, he unleashes his devastating forehand in triple-digit miles per hour, quick as the hardest-throwing ace pitcher’s fastball, leaving his opponent stumbling in the lurch. Due to the threat of this forehand, Alcaraz’s opponents tend to retreat at the mere windup of his racket, expecting peak firepower, at which point Alcaraz alters his grip subtly, almost imperceptibly, at the very moment when he is about to strike the ball. The result, a sumptuous drop shot, sends his adversaries straining futilely to scamper forward in an attempt to reach the ball before the double bounce. Alcaraz can play every shot possible, and he can play any shot at any time. Aside from his technical mastery, his most extraordinary gift is his imagination, which engenders patterns and sequences almost never before witnessed in the sport.

On this particular night, though, Alcaraz was unrecognizable. He missed routine shots by wide margins, shanked the ball off his racket frame, and, most startlingly, let van de Zandschulp, the far less dominant player, dictate play. Alcaraz looked to be in a daze, as though he himself could not believe what was happening. Once in a while, he would do something Alcaraz-like—for example, he’d construct the perfect point by moving his opponent from side to side before hitting a wickedly angled winner—and then react in an Alcaraz-like way—pumping his fist, yelling “Vamos!” and putting his finger to his ear, signaling to the crowd to let him hear it. But these moments were few and far between.

The television commentators, like all those watching, kept expecting Alcaraz to return to his usual self. Even van de Zandschulp himself seemed not to believe that he would triumph. He showed little affect throughout the contest. “Actually,” he said on the court after winning the match, “I am a little bit lost for words.”

For days, I could not stop thinking about Alcaraz’s performance. Memories of it troubled me to such an extent that they kept infiltrating my meditation, when my intention was to concentrate on koans.

“Who are you standing here in front of me?” Emperor Wu of Liang asked the first Zen ancestor, Bodhidharma, as one koan, in part, goes.

Bodhidharma replied: “I do not know.”

***

Sometimes, when I catch a glimpse of myself in a mirror, I think: I am just a giant monkey. But, no, that is not right—even they would not accept me in their ranks.

The ability to recognize ourselves and others has been crucial for our survival as a species. Over millions of years, the human brain has evolved a special area to recognize faces, as distinct from other objects. Studies have shown that this area, known as the fusiform gyrus, is one of many brain regions that are dedicated to other specific, essential tasks, such as the detection of written words, the perception of vocal songs, and the understanding of language. According to researchers, newborns prefer to look at familiar faces. At two and a half months, babies can respond to smiling faces by smiling back; by six months, they can distinguish familiar faces from the faces of strangers. Yet, despite having normal vision and neither brain damage nor cognitive defects, some people suffer from a disorder called prosopagnosia, also known as face blindness.

In his 2010 New Yorker essay “Face-Blind,” the neurologist and bestselling author Oliver Sacks describes his experience of the disorder, as well as the experience of others like him. A severe prosopagnosic, Sacks explains, may be unable to recognize her spouse or child. “I have walked past my husband, while staring directly at his face, on several occasions without recognizing him,” a woman writes to Sacks. Sometimes, prosopagnosics cannot recognize themselves. “On several occasions,” Sacks writes, “I have apologized for almost bumping into a large bearded man, only to realize that the large bearded man was myself in a mirror.” Prosopagnosics learn to recognize faces by studying their most unusual features, such as protruding ears or an oversize nose. In fact, it was easier for Sacks to recognize a caricature than a photograph. I wonder whom prosopagnosics dream of.

On the other hand, some people are genetically predisposed to recognize faces. These “super recognizers,” who make up 1 to 2 percent of the population, can remember 80 percent of the faces they see, whereas the general population can remember 20 percent. British police forces have recruited these individuals, who can glimpse a pixelated face in a low-resolution image and identify someone they came across years earlier. In one year alone, according to the Guardian, the so-called super recognizers unit helped solve more than twenty-five hundred crimes. One super recognizer identified a wanted man by his eyes, revealed only through a slit between a hat and a bandanna. In 2018, from tens of thousands of hours of CCTV footage, super recognizers were able to identify the two Russian men who poisoned former double agent Sergei Skripal. In some circumstances, super recognizers can match faces better than computer systems.

***

Like it or not, it has become easier than ever for all of us to be recognized. Most of us have long become accustomed to the software that allows users to log into devices by pointing the screen at their face, in lieu of entering a password. Facial-recognition technology software can, through a complex process of mapping and analysis, verify the identity of a face in a photograph or video. The technology has proved to be useful, experts have pointed out, in diagnosing certain diseases and in designing targeted advertising. The average human being can recognize thousands of faces; in certain circumstances, artificial intelligence can now recognize more faces than we can, with similar efficiency.

Facial-recognition technology is controversial, as one might expect. In 2018, the Chinese tech giant Huawei and the artificial-intelligence company Megvii confidentially developed technology called Face++ that set off alarms whenever it detected members of the Uighur minority. At checkpoints in the Xinjiang autonomous region, the Chinese government has employed facial-recognition cameras to monitor Uighurs and detain them in reeducation camps. Since then, governments from Uganda to Myanmar have purchased and installed Chinese surveillance equipment with the similar aim of controlling and oppressing their citizens. Over several years, an American company called Clearview AI has scraped billions of photos from social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Venmo, and now claims to have a database of more than fifty billion images. The company’s motto—a rather dystopic one—is “Building a secure world, one face at a time.”

Initially, Clearview AI began selling its database, surreptitiously, to law enforcement departments and corporations. Last year, a Massachusetts senator accused Clearview AI of violating Americans’ civil liberties and privacy and asked the company to let American citizens remove ourselves from Clearview’s database. Multiple lawsuits have been filed against Clearview AI, including by the ACLU. At first, Clearview invoked a First Amendment defense before finally settling one of the lawsuits, which resulted in certain restrictions across the United States against selling its “faceprints,” the visible characteristics of a face that are automatically analyzed and translated into a unique mathematical representation of that face. Clearview AI advertises that its facial-recognition technology saves victims of child exploitation, helps ensure the safety of Ukrainian citizens and military personnel, and distinguishes between enemy and friend.

Sometimes, when I have felt most alone, I have imagined that I recognize people everywhere I look. In the end, though, they all turn out to be strangers.

***

Recognition is essential to the formation of identity, German idealist philosophers said. Around the turn of the nineteenth century, Johann Gottlieb Fichte argued that in order to posit itself as an individual, a consciousness must be “summoned” into awareness by other individuals, a process he called gegenseitige Anerkennung, or “mutual recognition.” Mutual recognition requires two equally free self-consciousnesses, each of which limits its free activity so the other can exercise its own. In his classic 1807 work The Phenomenology of Spirit, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, a contemporary of Fichte’s, proposed that “self-consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another; that is, it exists only in being acknowledged.” Two consciousnesses, then, must engage in a process of “recognizing themselves as mutually recognizing one another.” Only through mutual recognition can we be at home in the “other,” whether that be the world itself or another person.

When I met J., it was as though I already knew her, and as we lay in bed sometime later, J. described the same experience, of feeling as though she recognized me.

Sometimes the recognition of self and other is uncanny, even disturbing. In 1903, a criminal named Will West arrived at Leavenworth Penitentiary in Kansas. The record clerk was in disbelief; he could have sworn that he had already admitted the man. The clerk took West’s Bertillon measurements, based on a formula for physical features that was standard at the time. He searched his files and found one with practically identical numbers under the name William West, and the picture appeared to show the man standing before him. Will West grinned in amazement. “That’s my picture,” he said, “but I don’t know where you got it, for I have never been here before.” It turned out that William West had been admitted two years earlier to serve a life sentence in Leavenworth for murder. The two prisoners were not identical twins, or related at all. And neither knew the other one existed.

In Krzysztof Kieślowski’s The Double Life of Véronique, a Polish woman and a Frenchwoman somehow, intuitively, recognize that they are doubles. “I have a strange sensation,” Weronika says. “Like I’m not alone in the world.” “All my life I’ve felt I was in two places at the same time,” Véronique says.

***

It was while J. and I once made love that I truly recognized myself for the first time. When she said my name, I realized I was that person, that he is who I am, or I am who he is. I remember, after J. had left the room, lying on the bed by myself, looking down at my naked right leg, thin and hairy, and understanding that this is my body. It had never occurred to me in such a way before. I became aware of the time and place—J.’s apartment, her bedroom—and for the first time in my life, the fact that I had found myself somewhere, here, made some innate, unspeakable sense. At the same time, despite the intimacy of the experience, I did feel, beyond a doubt, some estrangement from myself. I noted that my body is the body of a man, like the bodies of other men I had seen, my father and all my ancestors, which meant that, despite what I still thought or wished, I was no longer a child, and also that, one day, I was going to die. When J. and I met, I was twenty-five years old. I believed I could become anybody. Now I am thirty-seven, and after J. and I broke up last year, having finally ceased to recognize each other, there is no more mistaking myself for anyone else.

I live and train at a Zen Buddhist temple. During a recent ceremony, called jukai, a lay ordination, I publicly vowed to live my life according to what are called the sixteen Boddhisatva precepts, the Zen Buddhist ethical code. The precepts are not apodictic rules, like the commandments of the Bible, but rather guidelines to be worked with over time, integrated into one’s natural way of being. Here are some: “There is no separation between self and others,” reads a version of the precept called Do Not Misuse Sexuality. “Realize self and other as one,” reads a version of the precept called Do Not Elevate Yourself and Blame Others. A common slogan in precept study is “Self and Other are not two.” According to Zen Buddhism, in the absolute sense, the self, like all conditioned phenomena, is without intrinsic existence. Everything exists interdependently; because this occurs, that occurs, as the Buddha said. And, conversely, when this does not occur, that does not occur. Only when self and other are recognized as empty will enlightenment be realized. Upon hearing “The Heart Sutra,” a fundamental Mahayana Buddhist teaching that points repeatedly to emptiness, several of the Buddha’s followers are said to have suffered heart attacks and died.

There is a koan based on an old Chinese ghost story, “Senjo and Her Soul Are Separated.” Senjo falls in love with her cousin Ochu, but her father betroths her to another man. Senjo and Ochu are heartbroken. Ochu leaves the village on a small boat, and as he leaves, he sees Senjo running along the riverbank, waving to him. Senjo joins Ochu, and they travel to a far-off land, where they marry and have two children. A few years later, Senjo longs to see her father and ask for his forgiveness. She and Ochu return to the village, and Ochu tells her father the story.

“Ochu,” Senjo’s father says. “What girl are you talking about?”

“Your daughter Senjo,” replies Ochu.

“My daughter Senjo?” her father says. “Ever since you left, she’s been sick in bed, unable to speak.”

 As Senjo approaches her parents’ door, the Senjo who has been sick gets up from her bed and rushes out. When the two Senjos meet, they merge into one.

“I cannot tell which was really me,” Senjo says. “The one that went away in the boat, or the one that stayed at home.”

Master Goso, as the koan goes, asks: “Senjo was separated from her soul. Which was the real Senjo?”

The beauty of the koan is that it hints at a truth beyond duality, a way of living so that there can be no separation. Perhaps we never come together; perhaps we never part.

***

During many of my waking hours, I fantasize about running into J. One night, after waking up from one of my nightmares, I opened a new document on my computer, which I titled “Ways of Running into You,” and typed up the fantasies. Some include shunning her, the way that, in my dreams, she shuns me. However, others hint at a different response, a certain recognition, either mutual or solely on my part, an acknowledgment of what we shared, which is implicit in what we lost:

I date every pretty girl I meet on the dating apps. I take each one to the burger joint in your neighborhood, and you see me every time. You get the impression that I have really moved on from you. Clearly, I have. Yet soon after you see me with them, I break up with them.

I run into your brother at a Thai restaurant. He’s still rail-thin and frazzled, even though he’s in his late thirties. How old does that make us? He offers up that you are pregnant. I tell him that I didn’t want to know that. Nonetheless, I am overjoyed. Thank you, I think. Thank you. I am so relieved.

You once told me that if the world were ending, like in Melancholia, I am the person you would want in your hut of sticks. Well, the world is ending. You have a realization. You leave your new boyfriend, the one I imagine you with. You come to me. We take the cyanide pills together, holding hands.

In our favorite bookstore, you are browsing. I come up behind you and say, “But have you ever read Calvino,” because Calvino is our favorite, because we talked about him on our first date. You turn around, beaming, and practically leap into my arms. We are so happy to see each other, we cannot contain ourselves in public. I have no idea if you have found anyone else. Neither of us has to imagine the other. We are just happy in that moment, as happy as the moment we met.

 “Touch me,” writes the poet Stanley Kunitz, “remind me who I am.”

 

Benjamin Ehrlich is the author of The Brain in Search of Itself. His short story “The Master Mourner” was included in The Best American Short Stories 2023.

Briefly a Hawk

Photograph by Sam McPhee.

I live with my family in the mountains of western Montana, near the small railroad town of Alberton. A week ago I found a dead hawk on my front porch. Flight feathers and bristle had been torn from the body, and scatters of down were fluttering in place or tumbling away, light as ash. But there was no blood anywhere, not even on the carcass. My five-year-old daughter, June, was there with me. We were on our way out to the car, on our way to school. The morning sunlight was rich and cold. Then I saw a tiny down feather dabbed to the pane of one of our front windows. A point of impact.

How sad, June said.

Yes. It’s rare to see a hawk up close, I told her.

We looked at the bird for a moment, as if to pay it our respects.

When I returned home an hour later, the hawk was still there on the porch. No scavenger had come for it. I called a taxidermist in Frenchtown. He was driving when he answered my call, and his truck was full of wind. He shouted his hello. I asked him if he did birds, and he said, Yeah, laughing to himself, I do birds. But when I told him the bird was a hawk, he said, Let me stop you right there. I can’t touch that bird. You can’t touch it, either.

I told him that it flew into my window. The hawk will just go to waste, I said.

He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, I would love to do it for you, and his voice was different now, almost mournful. But I can’t touch a hawk.

I had known, of course, that hawks were federally protected, and I suppose I could have inferred, had my mind not been left breathless in the presence of that hawk, that the state of Montana would necessarily have to protect its perished birds if it wanted to protect its living ones. What’s to be done, then, with a protected bird in this condition? The condition of accidental death. I called Fish and Wildlife, but its menu options were a maze, a loop, and I hung up. My dad, a painter, would want to see this hawk. That was my instinct. Send the bird along to someone trained in the appropriate act of salvage. If not to a biologist, a carcass goes to a taxidermist, and if not to a taxidermist, then a photograph goes to a painter. My dad once pinned a departed woodpecker by its wings to the wall of his studio and did a series of pencil sketches and then a few watercolor studies. A beautiful graphite rendering of that woodpecker hangs in my brother’s house.

All afternoon I wondered what to do with the hawk. When June came home from school, she and her sister Heidi played with their old, ratty Barbies out on our porch. They watched me with no special interest as I lifted the carcass up with a shovel and carried it across our wide concrete porch, out from the shadow of our house, and set it down gently in the sunlight not far from where they were playing. Wearing nitrile gloves, I conducted a primitive examination, pulling the wings out to their full span. This hawk did not especially resemble itself, not anymore. Bereaved of the air, the bird was so unlike a hawk, very small, clenched. The feathery lids of its tiny eyes had fallen delicately closed. The beak was also surprisingly small. Only the slender tip of a beak was visible.

The melancholy I felt while I held this hawk in my hands had more to do with an undeserved proximity than with the hawk’s death. I often feel a minor sadness when I see a wild animal up close. To see a hawk in the sky or on the post of a fence is to regard it as you would a celebrity; celebrity is, if nothing else, a finely tuned distance. Whereas to hold a hawk in your hands is to cross a threshold, beyond which the hawk betrays its famous appearance. The hawk’s body was not as light as I had expected it to be. Its body was dense yet springy. It was a cage of quills. From a great height this hawk had spotted a low, shimmering portal of sky. In the final moments of its life, its reflection had welled up in that windowpane. Its last glimpse of the world would have been a glimpse of itself. It crashed into its own appearance.

I felt very distant from this compact alien in my hands. I laid the hawk gently down on the concrete. It resembled June’s drawing of a small, stumpy owl. It was a feathered cylinder with feet punctured into its lower end. I took a few photographs of the hawk, but none of them captured its appearance. The only photograph I liked was of its profile, of its head curled into the plumage of its chest.

I moved the hawk so that June could ride her bike. I carried it in the bowl of our shovel over to the grass by the propane tank. The hawk lay there, and night fell. I had thought a coyote would come for it in the dark, but the hawk was still there in the morning.

I sent two close-ups of the hawk to my dad. One of them was a close-up of the plumage and the other was the close-up I liked of the hawk’s profile. When I pressed Send, the photographs flew—but one moment before they did, I saw the bird as it was. I recognized the bird.

It was not a hawk.

It was clearly a female ruffed grouse.

How could I justify this error, knowing as I did, and knowing thoroughly well, the appearance of a hawk?

Foolish eyes. Black bears often wander out from the woods in the early spring, and even though I expect them to appear down by our barn, rarely do I see a bear and think, at the instant of seeing it, That is a bear. For one moment, it is a thing before it is a bear. It is a thing with black or blond fur. My perception reverts to that of infancy. A shape of great obscurity has appeared in the center of an otherwise-sensible landscape—grass, trees, sky, all of it is appropriately labeled. Then the thing lifts its head, and my eyes attune themselves, and the truth envelops me. That is a bear.                     

In the case of this non-hawk, my foolishness lasted an exceptional length of time. I had looked at my own photographs closely and also at published photographs of confirmed rough-legged hawks and light-phase red-tailed hawks, and still I didn’t see it for what it was.

It was a spell, a madness. It was as if my brother Joe had come to visit me, and, a few hours into his stay, I had looked at him and realized that he was in fact my brother Patrick. My mind cleared, and my eyes opened. I could suddenly see the petiteness of the beak, a beak that nibbles at leaves and catkins, and I could see the little bowling pin head, and I could remember, even, the feet, which were not yellow and did not have talons. They were feet like a chicken’s.

So a hawk was spared last week. It was spared by a labeling error.

***

Now that spring has arrived and the weather has turned warm, the saxophonist has come back to Petty Creek. I saw him a few days after the grouse died. He parks his car under the overpass at my exit. He is tall and bald and he plays into the cavern of the overpass, leaning against the passenger’s-side door of his small car as if that door were the shard of an alley wall. He is a familiar, unfamiliar landmark for me. He is familiar because he is often there, and he is unfamiliar because he is a saxophonist in the middle of nowhere, playing for nobody. The nearest fragment of civilization, Missoula, is twenty-five miles to the west. On either side of his overpass are miles and miles of wilderness. But the scene is partly recognizable. A lonely saxophonist blows his horn underneath a bridge. But the river is not the Seine. The Clark Fork runs its wide and shallow course to the left of him, and flyfishermen cast their lines, and out beyond the river cougars glut themselves on does.

How many times must I have driven past him without seeing him as he was? Does anyone else see him there? He is not hiding from anyone or anything, but he is hidden. In what sense is he hidden? Cars pass overhead, and none of the drivers or passengers know he is there. I suspect many people drive right by him without recognizing what it is he’s doing—he’s too strange to see. We see a man leaning against a car. A flyfisherman, perhaps. Or he must have a flat. Or he must be having a smoke. Or we don’t notice him at all.

I am always thrilled to see him there. I descend the exit ramp on my way home from June’s school, and when I arrive at the stop sign, I look left, and if he is there, the day is made. I roll down the windows on his side of my car, though not necessarily all the way down, because I don’t want him to know I am listening. I drive as slowly as I can without calling his attention to my slowness.

When I saw him the other day, I announced his presence to June and Heidi. He’s here!

Who’s here? June said.

The saxophonist.

What’s the saxophonist? she said.

Saxophonist? Heidi said.

He’s here all the time, I said. Look, that’s him.

As we drifted slowly past him, I surveilled a few seconds of his playing through the sonic keyhole of the passenger’s-side window. I can never tell what he’s playing, but his playing is big and fast, like Coltrane’s. He’s accompanied by a rhythm track blaring out from a small speaker set on the roof of his car.

When I see him, I suppress the instinct to stop my car and ask him who he is. I almost broke our mutual anonymity once. I spun my car around—but I drove past him without stopping.

***

Wild animals, both predators and prey, are most familiar to me when the distances from which I see them are themselves familiar; the distance is a part of the animal. Hawks of one species or another appear hawklike when I see them from a distance of between ten and one thousand feet; at ten-plus feet away, they are reliably hawks, which is to say: the mediating distance, being familiar in itself, no longer ensures a creature its proper resonance. A familiar span of air mediates a hawk in somewhat the same way as a cliché mediates an experience. Familiarity has emptied of its elemental power a phrase as beautiful and vivid as “My heart is breaking.” From ten-plus feet away, a hawk is a kind of cliché. That is a hawk is a thought unworthy of a hawk. Better to think, for one moment, That is a grouse, and then to see the bird come out of the grouse, as if out of a chrysalis. The hawk pumps its wings, and the dust on the ground flies first. Then the hawk ascends the air.

Hawks are justly famous for their very un-grouse-like qualities—their mythic beauty, their cunning, their precision, their brutality. A hawk flies and hunts and kills with total impunity. The field is its solipsistic dream. The mice are there in the field as if by the hawk’s decree. The hawk dreams the mice’s termite turns. It permits me to slow my car and roll down my window. It is, to my eyes, if not also to the eyes of a mouse, flagrantly continuous with its chosen fence post.

Before my encounter with the grouse, I would have said that I would prefer, on any given day, to see a raptor. But my mistake has sparked in me a love for this modest stranger, and I have developed a respect for the grouse that rivals my respect for a hawk. To be fascinated by a grouse is to be fascinated by hiddenness. A bird in the sky is necessarily an unhidden bird; the sky is open, unabashed, arrogant, whereas the ground lies hidden beneath cheatgrass and rotten logs, tiny thickets of saplings, sleeping deer. In the spring, I hear a male ruffed grouse. A pent-up male cups his wings and beats a drum of air somewhere in the wilderness just behind our home. I know approximately where he is. He lives and drums in a bright, grassy thicket of second-growth Douglas fir and ponderosa. He mounts a log or a crumbling stump, and he drums. He sounds like a motorcyclist hitting the road. But his drumming is less like a sound than a feeling. He is a rush of adrenaline, felt in my ears. He addresses himself only to my ears.

There is one place on the mountain, near the summit, where, on two or three occasions, I have accidentally startled into flight what I assume to be the same female grouse. She is a feathery land mine, a practical joke. She inherits her ownhiddenness when I walk past her. She loses her cool and blows a hole in the brush, and my heart thrashes in its own identical panic.

***

A classification is both a shelf and a lens, but it is a lens first; the lens creates the shelf. Creatures as laughably different as a blue whale and a shrew are nevertheless on the same shelf only because their classification instructs us to see meaning in similarities such as having warm blood and giving live birth. A classification is beautiful for its capacity to gather together unlike creatures.

A taxonomy of local hiddenness would include the ruffed grouse, the morel, the gray wolf, and the saxophonist.

Without his saxophone, he wouldn’t be hidden, he would be just another guy standing on the side of the road at the edge of wilderness. To stop and say hello, or to stand somewhere nearby and listen to him play, would risk his hiddenness. He would acknowledge me. He would say hello. And what should I say then?

I would want to ask him, Why do you play here?

He would look at me for a moment with slight disappointment in his eyes. Then he would say, I like the sound, which I could have guessed. Or he would say, I’m on my way home from work, which I could have guessed. Or, My brother died in a car wreck on this overpass, which I could have guessed.

Why are you here? is a question for which there is no satisfying answer. He is not hiding, but he is hidden.

For now, I don’t want to break this spell that he doesn’t know he has cast.

***

Only once have I encountered a grouse that didn’t take flight or dart away. Two springs ago, at Fish Creek, I stumbled into a shady honey hole of morels, and while I snapped those mushrooms free of the thicket’s loamy floor, a grouse watched me. She was watching me when I saw her; she had been aware of me long before I became aware of her. She surprised me; the ground had eyes. She remained hidden inside her stillness. My eyes distinguished her from the ground; my eyes settled into her. She was a grouse disguised as a grouse; only her eyes were alert to me. She regarded me with ferocity and terror. I had never been looked at like this before. A hawk couldn’t have matched her stare. A hawk is chastened by nothing and no one. The intensity of a hawk is worthy of respect, but such intensity is proportionate to my expectations. The grouse in the thicket was smaller than a chicken, but her perfect stillness and her sublime terror sharpened and enlarged her ferocity. I was inside her hiddenness. She was in possession of the thicket. She had wrapped it around herself.

Yes, it’s rare to see a hawk up close, I had told my daughter.

We looked at the bird for a moment, as if to pay it our respects.

She was briefly a hawk; she was lying dead in the bowl of my shovel when she became, once again, a grouse. She lay there in the shovel for three days. Maggots came, and she was animate; she was gently simmering. Then she collapsed. Then she was gone.

She was briefly a grouse.

 

Sam McPhee’s writing has appeared in ZYZZYVA and is forthcoming in The Georgia Review. He is currently at work on a memoir. 

The Erotics of (Re)reading

John La Farge, The Relation of the Individual to the State, 1905. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Plato’s Phaedrus begins at the edge of the city of Athens, in the countryside, as we would say today. Enter Socrates and Phaedrus, his younger friend. Phaedrus has just come from the house of Lysias, his master and erastēs (older male lover).

SOCRATES: Dear Phaedrus, wither away, and where do you come from?

PHAEDRUS: From Lysias, Socrates … and I am going for a walk outside the wall [of Athens].

Earlier that day, Phaedrus says, Lysias had given him a speech in which he described the erotic relationship that a master can have with a young disciple whom he does not love, with whom he is not in love.

PHAEDRUS: Lysias has represented one of the beauties being tempted, but not by a lover; this is just the clever thing about it; for he says that favors should be granted rather to the one who is not in love than to the lover.

This report does not satisfy Socrates. Dying to know more, he is determined not to let Phaedrus out of his sight; he will follow him everywhere, hound him until he agrees to read Lysias’s speech to him. At the very threshold of the reading scene there thus emerges a close and complex connection between loving and reading, two verbs, two gerunds, between which, for reasons that will soon become apparent, it makes sense to leave open all the possible punctuation marks, including the possibility that there be none (as though one wrote them in scriptio continua, with no space between them, which was a common scriptural practice in Plato’s day). Loving()reading could then be read (or connected) at least in two different ways:

1. Lovingreading or loving-reading (a double verb, conjugated as transitive, where what one loves-reads is someone or something, Lysias or the book).

2. Loving reading (in which case, it is reading that one loves).

For Phaedrus, loving()reading is, above all, loving and reading, in a single verb, someone. Loving and reading are intertwined in this reader who loves the voice to which he listens in the text to which he lends his own body. And it is thus under the sign of this hyphen (trait d’union), the hyphenated loving-reading, that Plato’s Phaedrus opens. It is as though this feature, the line contracting the space between the two verbs, some sort of silent bond where a contractual relationship between them takes place, has brought them together or joined them together in order to express the union of love and reading in the act of uniting with the one who speaks in the text.

One can indeed suppose that Phaedrus, Lysias’s disciple, had already granted his master favors and is now prepared to love-read him again, for Socrates. He would have thus offered himself to Lysias without being loved in return since such seems to be the “clever” nature of the pederastic and pedagogical contract suggested in the speech that we, the readers of this dialogue, are about to hear in turn. And Socrates cannot wait to witness a sort of second playing out, a reproduction of this free union, with neither jealousy nor possession. He is burning with the desire to hear Phaedrus let himself be penetrated again by Lysias’s speech or voice, by Lysias’s logos.

Yet the actual act of reading, that act that many Greek and Latin inscriptions describe in openly sexual terms, is long in coming. Phaedrus first doubts his own ability to “tell from memory” Lysias’s speech, whereas Socrates insists that he do so in a few remarkable lines, lines in which, in some sense, he splits his reticent interlocutor:

SOCRATES: O Phaedrus! If I don’t know Phaedrus, I have forgotten myself. But since neither of these things is true, I know very well that when listening to Lysias he did not hear once only, but often urged him to repeat; and he gladly obeyed.

It seems, then, that Lysias read his speech to Phaedrus several times; it was not a hapax. And in the space of this singular rejoinder, Phaedrus, who will soon read and reread it for Socrates (and thus also for we who read him), moves from the second person singular—the place of interlocution or address in a dialogue—to the third. For a moment, through these sentences addressed to him, rather than you, he appears to be absent from the scene, as though he were already taking leave or disappearing in order to read, that is, to lend his voice, his body, to the words of another. Before he really starts to read, before giving himself over body and soul to the one who will speak through him, Phaedrus is already no longer quite himself, is already partly another. Socrates continues, still speaking of Phaedrus to Phaedrus as though the latter were not really there: “Yet even that was not enough for Phaedrus, but at last he borrowed the book [the scroll, to biblion] and read what he especially wished.” In a sort of hyperbolic repetition, Phaedrus, one Phaedrus or the other, has thus taken hold of Lysias’s writing to carry it off, to read and reread it elsewhere, outside the city walls.

What a strange manner Socrates has! What a strange way of addressing Phaedrus by splitting him in two! For when Socrates has to insist that Phaedrus actually get on with reading (Phaedrus needs to be begged), he goes literally as far as asking Phaedrus to ask Phaedrus to do it: “So, Phaedrus, ask him [Phaedrus] now to do what he will presently do anyway.” Why this insistence on addressing Phaedrus both as you and as him? It is as though Socrates already perceived, already heralded, the division that the imminent scene of reading would set up in Phaedrus, splitting him between his reading voice and the voice of the text that speaks through him.

While Phaedrus thus divides himself, as though in preparation for reading, what excites Socrates’s curiosity is the biblion: that’s what he wants to see, the hidden object of desire that is “in your left hand, under your cloak.” “Come now, show it”—there is undeniable eroticism in Socrates’s request, as though after having split his interlocutor, he now wanted to undress him. The attraction of the roll that carries the text of the speech, a sort of metonymy for Lysias that Phaedrus hugs, might evoke a magnificent later epigram (second century C.E.), one attributed to Strato:

Fortunate little book, I am not jealous of you [meaning “would not be, even if you deserved it”]. Reading you, a boy will touch you, hold you close to his cheek or press you to his lips, or perhaps he will unfold you upon his tender thighs, O most fortunate of books! Often you will be carried within his shirt or, flung down upon a chair, you will dare to touch those particular things without fear. You will speak much with him, alone with him.

Once the biblion has thus been seen or glimpsed as an object of erotic substitution, Phaedrus and Socrates set out in search of a place where they can sit together or lie down together to read it. Plato describes the place they ultimately find, in the shade of a plane tree, as a charming place, covered in gently sloping grass. When they arrive there, Socrates and Phaedrus take up their positions or poses. Paraphrasing the stage directions of another great text on reading and love (Sade’s Philosophy in the Bedroom), we might say that the disposition is effected, the posture is assumed, in a way that prepares for loving-reading Lysias:

SOCRATES: So now that I have come here, I intend to lie down and do you choose the position in which you think you can read most easily, and read.

PHAEDRUS: Hear then.

Lying down, Socrates lets himself be penetrated by Phaedrus’s reading as Phaedrus offers himself vocally to his master, Lysias. The two of them loving-reading under the plane tree is, of course, actually a threesome.

In the middle of this triangulation, it is hard to concentrate on Lysias’s rather boring and poorly constructed speech, which, through Phaedrus, talks about their pedagogical and pederastic (pederastagogic) contract based on free love, that is to say, love without love. The long argument aims to show the erōmenos (the younger male, the “loved one”), who is himself reading it to a prone Socrates, that a disciple has everything to gain by giving himself over to a master who does not love him.

However, we, who, like Socrates, no doubt, are more interested in Phaedrus as he reads than in what he is reading, are tempted to turn away from this arduous demonstration and toward the fascinating underlying paradox, namely, that when Phaedrus reads, when Phaedrus is in the middle of loving-reading his master, for those of us who read him reading, he is not reading anymore. I mean that in the text, when Phaedrus gets to the point of reading, there is no longer any representation of him reading. In other words, the structure of the reading point is such that it appears only as it disappears, that it manifests only intermittently, where it is interrupted, where it is being prepared or set up, where reading is going to begin or begin again.

Indeed, it is when Phaedrus has finished reading that we again see him reading, that we go back to reading him as he was when he was reading (since we cannot read him reading), through the words and gaze of Socrates, who listens:

PHAEDRUS: What do you think of the discourse [logos], Socrates? Is it not wonderful, especially in diction?

SOCRATES: … I am quite overcome by it. And this is due to you, Phaedrus, because as I looked at you, I saw that you were delighted by the speech as you read.

As he is reading, Phaedrus does not only radiate Lysias’s logos, the logos that penetrates him and passes through him. He also radiates the pleasure he gets from reading. As Socrates had sensed in the dialogue before the reading scene, Phaedrus splits or duplicates his reading, draws attention to it through the pleasure he takes in it, a pleasure that we can read. But for us, as we read what he reads, these marks or traces of his reading—of the activity of his reading rather than of what he reads—can be discerned only after the fact, with Socrates’ retrospective comments (“while you were reading, you seemed …”).

***

The rest of the Phaedrus has been glossed so many times that I will only summarize it, pausing on what matters to us here, namely, as we will see, rereading.

Having taken it upon himself to critique Lysias’s speech, which he has just heard, and responding to Phaedrus’s insistent request, Socrates gives a better, more inspired version of the speech under the spell of an enthusiasm that, he explains, possesses him (enthousiasō). Then, full of remorse when he hears his daimon’s voice, Socrates launches into improvising a second speech, one that will be the exact opposite of the first, in order to correct what he now sees as sacrilegious or impious with respect to the god of Love (Erōs): “I am afraid of Love himself,” he explains to Phaedrus, and so he “wish[es] to wash out the brine from [his] ears with the water of a sweet discourse.”

Through this speech-washing (one logos wiping out another), Socrates inaugurates a general movement of inversion in the dialogue that will become a hymn to the mania of love and all its positive effects on the soul. Phaedrus, the erōmenos, finds himself in a novel role facing his erastēs, Lysias. As Sade would say, the posture is dissolved, the attitudes are dissolved, and, in the ensuing permutation, Phaedrus is given an unexpected place in the loving-reading scene: “When you have spoken the praise of the lover, Lysias must of course be compelled by me to write another discourse on the same subject.”

Everything gets turned around here, as though Phaedrus, who now promises to dictate his future speeches to Lysias, had become the latter’s erastēs while becoming henceforth erōmenos to Socrates, his erastēs. There is a circulating revolution in this threesome that carries them to loving-reading each other backward or upside down.

Socrates once again addresses Phaedrus in the third person, but this time as a love object, the object of a love contract that Phaedrus seems to countersign similarly through an oblique pronouncement, speaking of himself as of another:

SOCRATES: Where is the youth to whom I was speaking? He must hear this also, lest if he do not hear it, he accept a non-lover. …

PHAEDRUS: Here he is, always close at hand, whenever you want him.

But why, on the threshold of the big speech Socrates is about to improvise to celebrate the delirium brought on by love—this mania that, as he will put it, is the anamnesis of true beauty, when souls recover memories of contemplating essence and truth (ousia and alētheia), glimpsed as they reach the end of their journey on the outer surface of the heavens—why does Socrates again make use of this strange way of addressing his interlocutor as though he were both present and absent, both here and elsewhere, both himself and another?

You may have guessed that my hypothesis is that Phaedrus, both as a reader and then as the auditor of another’s speech (Lysias’s and now Socrates’s), is indeed double, divided: as he prepares to read or to listen, Phaedrus splits into the erōmenos (the passive Phaedrus who makes himself into a pure transparent vehicle for the voice that speaks through him) and the erastēs (the Phaedrus who reads or listens to that voice, in the most active senses of those verbs). And it is precisely because there are two Phaedruses, so to speak, because one Phaedrus hides another, that the permutation, the cycling revolution of loving-reading can take place, one Phaedrus taking over from the other.

I would like to take this one step further: the doubling that Plato stages as though it were the precondition of any reading (as I read, I split into my reading voice and the voice that I read), this division is intrinsically—albeit subterraneously—connected to what is perhaps the most quietly remarkable event of this dialogue, namely, that Socrates soon asks Phaedrus to reread Lysias’s speech. He actually suggests rereading several times only to observe in the end, together, that they do not like this logos, the dry, rather weak speech that advocates not loving.

Both of these rereadings take place after Socrates holds forth for the second time, when the dialogue is moving toward a debate no longer about beauty in general, or beauty in love, but about the beauty of speeches, a beauty that also supposes knowledge of truth. Lysias’s speech is first evaluated according to this criterion:

SOCRATES: Then, my friend, he who knows not the truth, but pursues opinions, will, it seems, attain an art of speech, which is ridiculous, and not an art at all.

PHAEDRUS: Probably.

SOCRATES: Shall we look in the speech of Lysias, which you have with you, and in what I said, for something which we think shows art and the lack of art? … Read me the beginning of Lysias’s discourse.

Phaedrus obliges, rereading the lines we have already read with him. However, as though once were not enough, as though it were necessary that a rereading, like a reading, not remain a hapax (to use the term that you will remember Socrates uses at the very beginning of the dialogue), Phaedrus will have to reread again, reread a second time: “Socrates: Read, that I may hear Lysias himself.”

Rereading here is not at all passive. The passivity of reading flips into an active rereading, given that, as it is reread, Lysias’s speech is judged, analyzed, criticized, that is it is also disassembled, decomposed, dismembered into its constituent parts:

SOCRATES: [Lysias] certainly does not at all seem to do what we demand, for he does not even begin at the beginning, but undertakes to swim on his back up the current of his discourse from its end.

Indeed, contrary to Socrates, Lysias did not proceed in an orderly fashion, defining love at the beginning. That is why, being upside down, his speech does not follow the rule that would take the beauty or the harmony of the body as a model:

SOCRATES: Every discourse must be organized, like a living being, with a body of its own, as it were, so as not to be headless nor footless.

Diagnosing what now seems to them to be a clumsy inversion of the organic parts of the speech, Socrates and Phaedrus turn around, or upside down, the erotics of power in loving-reading. In other words, as their critical judgment spins the speech around, the corporal postures of the reading scene are also rearranging themselves. Lysias, whom Phaedrus could already imagine—as Socrates was about to begin his second speech— being forced to write under his dictation, now is clearly in the position of the one suffering the reading. In other words, and to put it crudely (that is, in the terms of many Greek and Latin inscription or epigrams, such as the one attributed to Strato), whereas during the first reading, Lysias was penetrating Phaedrus, who was penetrating Socrates, this time Socrates penetrates Phaedrus, who penetrates Lysias.

Rereading thus foreshadows the possibility of reshuffling the roles: not only the members of the discursive organism, the parts and articulations of the corpus of the text that is read, but also, above all, the bodies of those who read and the relationships of domination in which they are caught are rearranged. This is the chance for a change, an exchange of positions or a swapping of partners in the pederastic psychagogy of reading.

It is, of course, an open question what remains of the Phaedrus/Socrates/Lysias threesome, what happens to their switching triangle, when reading goes silent. Might it be that they resurface in us every time we read? Might it be that we carry them in us, throughout the subvocalizing mumbling that is tacitly active in our inner selves as readers?

 

An adapted excerpt of Powers of Reading: From Plato to Audiobooks, translated from the French by Olivia Custer, to be published by Zone Books in March.

Peter Szendy is the David Herlihy Professor of Humanities and Comparative Literature at Brown University. His four books include For an Ecology of Images; The Supermarket of the Visible: Towards a General Economy of Images; Of Stigmatology: Punctuation as Experience; and All Ears: The Aesthetics of Espionage.

Olivia Custer is a scholar and the author of L’Exemple de Kant.