The Paris Review's Blog, page 137

The Art of Distance No. 35

In March, The Paris Review launched The Art of Distance, a newsletter highlighting unlocked archive pieces that resonate with the staff of the magazine, quarantine-appropriate writing on the Daily, resources from our peer organizations, and more. Read Emily Nemens’s introductory letter here, and find the latest unlocked archive selections below.

“Thanksgiving will feel different this year. With so many of us unable to gather around tables with friends and family, I thought it might be nice to spend some time with literature that brings us together for memorable meals: sumptuous dinners, rollicking celebrations, and even some awkward dining room discussions. May we vicariously sit at these crowded tables, even as there may be empty seats at our own. Sam White’s poem ‘Memo’ captures what I hope these stories, poems, and interviews can offer during this strange week. The poem, which starts with a demolition, ends with a holiday meal. The closing lines: ‘Come sit by me. Before it gets cold. / Here is something. / You’d better start.’ And while fewer of us will be taking planes, trains, and automobiles this week, I cannot forget Frederick Seidel’s memorable Thanksgiving journey: the time he took a bus to see Ezra Pound. Read that story and many others in Seidel’s Art of Poetry interview. Dig in, dear readers. This year I’m grateful for writers and readers and how literature has helped carry us through. Have a happy, healthy holiday.” —EN

When I think of raucous meals among friends, I don’t know who would win the cook-off: the epic brunch in Deborah Eisenberg’s “Taj Mahal” or the Russian banquet in Andrew Martin’s “Childhood, Boyhood, Youth.”

Dinner, in the case of Alexandra Kleeman’s “Fairy Tale,” takes a strange turn, with unanticipated guests arriving to break bread (and wield knives).

The poet Robert Hass values cooking and sharing meals with friends and family. In his Art of Poetry interview, he says, “The humbling participation in the food chain is right at the center of human existence, and either we turn it into a ceremony and a feast or we’re doomed.”

Feel nostalgia for dinner parties with this poem about nostalgia for dinner parties by Donna Stonecipher.

The inimitable travel writer Jan Morris died last week at the age of ninety-four. Her Art of the Essay interview includes a glorious Australian picnic with George Molnar: “He crunched the bread in sort of a lascivious way. He spread the pâté kind of unguently. He almost slurped the wine. I thought it was so marvelous.”

 

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Staff Picks: Mammoths, Magazines, and Mysterious Marks

João Gilberto Noll. Photo courtesy of Nectar Literary.

This past week, when my roommate asked me about the plot of the João Gilberto Noll novel I was reading, Harmada, I struggled to even begin. “A man wakes up in the muck and encounters a child. He spits on the child’s wound to cure it, then walks away, eventually happening upon a play featuring two actresses. Then he has a threesome with the actresses, which eventually turns into a foursome with the company’s director, and by the way, one of the actresses is a single mother and has a baby, don’t forget. Then the man is in some kind of asylum or halfway house, remembering his life before, when he was a director and his wife abandoned him after he proved to be infertile. Then this baby, who’s now a teenage girl, is also there, and he helps her become the most famous actress in the city of Harmada. Eventually there’s a celebration, and I think this all might be a metaphor for the creative process and also Brazil, but maybe not … ” I’m still not entirely sure, but what I do know is that Harmada, translated from the Portuguese by Edgar Garbelotto, made me laugh out loud as much as it perplexed me, its boisterous absurdity and dreamlike logic making for a delightful way to spend an afternoon. —Rhian Sasseen 

There is a wide variety of work in “Weeping Willows, Liquid Tongues,” a show by Shahzia Sikander at Sean Kelly Gallery: massive, rough-edged mosaics; graphite drawings; videos; even a sculpture in bronze, in which a devata modeled on one in the Met balances atop a Venus based on a Bronzino painting. This could have lapsed into chaos, but the works are bound together by the idea of mixture, mingling, boundaries—between places and eras, between languages or media, between people or within them—made porous. One particularly striking work is titled simply X, and I’ve looked at it on my computer for hours now, trying to figure it out. The painting is made up of text, neatly printed Urdu (and I think I see some English in the back) written over and over to form a red X on smoky black, the words legible in places but lost in others. The shape and the colors appear to indicate “stop,” like a warning or something being forbidden, but the separations seem a trick of the eye. So maybe it is another kind of X—strips of tape holding something together, or bandages, or perhaps the X that marks the spot. The text, a quote from Ghalib, points in that direction: “If the divine lives within earthly instruments and the music they produce, where is then the locus of divinity?” —Hasan Altaf

 

César Aira. Photo: Nina Subin. Courtesy of New Directions.

 

This week I took a look at Katherine Silver’s translation of César Aira’s Artforum, which immediately enchanted me with its farcical combination of comically obsessive narrator and hyperfixation on the mundanity of things. Most of the chapters concern themselves with one man’s religious, relentless search for new issues of the titular art magazine or his anxieties as he irrationally hopes for missing issues to arrive at his doorstep after many months’ postal delay. In between, Aira sprinkles a few equally comical short stories about other objects—like coins and clothespins—and the forms and meanings they take on through personal or societal perceptions. Ultimately, what are these objects but tools? And what is Artforum (the magazine) but a simulacrum of art? But perhaps they are art as well? This novella leaves a lot of these theoretical questions unanswered, but they’re all enriched by Silver’s wonderful, tongue-in-cheek translation. —Carlos Zayas-Pons

The pile of books designated “read next” is reaching precarious heights at my bedside, scaling up the wall, a thin mosaic of pink, blue, yellow, and white, hardcovers and paperbacks alike. New additions arrive frequently, and the unread from months ago remain, a catalogue of things I almost had time for taunting me in semi-chronological order, saying, Remember April? September? June? Hovering at the top these days, however, is a mammoth volume of the collected stories of William Faulkner, which I’ve been parsing my way through for, admittedly, years. But I’m coming back to it more earnestly now, more intentionally. Between the few finished books that make it off my bedside and onto the bookshelf, I come back to the dense latticework of Faulkner’s prose. There’s not much to be said about Faulkner that doesn’t feel reiterative and not much praise I could give that Faulkner didn’t give himself, but reading his stories is a practice in patience that I appreciate. When I finally reach the back cover—which will be years from now, I’m sure—I see myself starting again. And if I don’t, I’ll likely try a similar exercise in slowness. Usually one to barrel through books in the middle of the night, sacrificing sleep and sense, I’m glad I pulled out the book from the bottom of the pile, where it had lain almost abandoned, earlier this summer. Being forced to savor each sentence and watching my postcard-turned-bookmark slowly make its way closer to the last page are small joys, but they delineate the days a little, and I savor that feeling, too. —Langa Chinyoka

Returning home for the holidays (somewhat early this year) also means returning to familiar bookshelves. A few books glare at me, a reminder that I placed them there last winter and have yet to read them. Most of them, however, are in their usual, comfortable spots, and these make the best company. Late last night or early this morning (interminable jet lag), I took one down and sat with it for a while. It was Peter Levi’s debut collection, The Gravel Ponds, from 1960. I wanted to find a poem I’d remembered, one in which a narrator reflects on an imagined apocalypse. (Apocalypse stuff is a bit of a draw these days.) The poem opens: “Three counties blacken and vanish, / rivers run unlighted and silent, / lamp by lamp of the city came, went, / into the utter dark, which was my wish.” Ah, and here’s the line I was looking for: “Leaves fall. Blood runs cold in the wrist.” I hadn’t remembered it was the last line—an odd thing to forget. And here’s another misremembered thing: I had thought the title was some riff on guillotine, but no, it’s “L’Aurore Grelottante,” or “The Shivering Dawn.” Which clearly illustrates that I never understood this poem at all, because despite the malevolent speaker visualizing the destruction of everything he sees, dawn is coming. Despite that in his “scarred thought this city / burns to ruin under the visiting air,” dawn is coming. Whether he likes it or not. Yes, given the state of the world right now, that seems worth remembering. And what’s more, the poem was first published in The Paris Review. Worth remembering, too. —Robin Jones

 

Cakes and Ale

Read Ayşegül Savaş’s story “Layover” in our Fall issue.

The club has six members. Maks and I bring the cake. Beth brings drinks. Talia sets out chairs in front of the bookshop. Penelope carries the metal grill and turns the shop sign to CLOSED. Follie, the black dog, goes wild. She jumps and licks and runs in circles. Then she goes in search of an empty bookshelf to curl into. We have a joke about Follie reading all the books inside while the club congregates on the shop terrace, across from the gates to the Luxembourg Gardens. It’s really not that funny. But somehow at a gathering, it can become hysterical.

The club is called Cakes and Ale. That might be my favorite of Maugham’s books, though it’s Penelope who came up with the name. She’s been a bookseller for thirty-five years, which means that she’s a master punner. She is also a master judge of character. It seems too obvious that a bookshop owner named Penelope, with her long hair and wool cardigans, should also be an eccentric. I’ll say, then, that she’s like a favorite childhood book: with unexpected turns and wicked humor, a meandering narrative that nevertheless knows where it’s headed.

Maks is best among us at keeping Penelope on track when she tells stories. Not long ago, as Penelope told us a long story about Bach, a jazz pianist, and a brunch gone awry, Beth and Maks shouted in chorus: “Penelope get to the point!” So Penelope delivered: “She died.”

Ours isn’t a book club. It’s not even a friends’ club, exactly, given how little we know about one another, far less than we do about friends with whom we have long and deep conversations, building constantly toward an unshakeable alliance: to share everything, to hold the same values, to have the same orientation in life. This one, if anything, is a humble pandemic club: we are, simply, neighbors. Before, we’d share a drink whenever we stayed past the shop’s closing time. Sometimes, feeling bad about our constant lingering, we’d come with a bottle and snacks. But now we have room for routine and we make no objection to sitting outdoors in the cold, on stools. It’s an old-fashioned gathering we wouldn’t have maintained in the old world, with travels and appointments and engagements, all the different groups we’d like to be a part of, the constant tailoring of our social circle to our own tastes and likeness.

After Follie, our youngest member is Talia. She works at the shop four days a week and in the future she’ll direct theater. At one gathering, she reads out a list of plays she’s compiled— a personal curriculum. We can barely get through the list, with Penelope’s punning and all our suggestions for everything else Talia should include. The cacophony is another constant member.

Beth’s basket might be filled with jars of hot cider or margaritas, wine or gin tonics. Her life always seems a bit fictional to me—the practicalities mere scaffolding for the good stuff. She lives in an attic room without a bathroom but with a view of the towers of Saint-Sulpice church. Her downstairs neighbor is the novelist Patrick Modiano, whose foggy prose I’ve imitated for years. One night, as we’re carrying an oak table up six flights of stairs to Beth’s, Follie stops to pee on his doorstep. “Not a fan,” Beth tells us.

She bikes all around the city collecting chairs and beds from flea markets. She stores most of them in the garage of her building then sands and varnishes and upholsters them in the courtyard. She once found a hand-painted folding piano for the bookshop, but by the time Penelope told her to get it, the seller was breaking it apart with a hammer. Beth nearly cries when she tells us the story.

These gatherings belong to the tangible world: of objects and foods, furniture and books, the bag of extra scarves Beth brings for all of us when the season turns. We all love the blue shop, its brass chandelier, the garland of newspaper dolls on the door, the round cherry table, the rotating shelf of blue-gray Persephone books. During these gatherings, we are not so much a group of bookish people as a group of bookshoppish people.

Penelope would be upset if I said that the books at the Red Wheelbarrow aren’t quite the type I’m usually drawn to. But that’s a good thing. How else would I ever have picked up Nell Dunn’s hilarious, heartbreaking Poor Cow, about a single mother in sixties London, or Sylvia Townsend Warner’s The Corner That Held Them, that strange book of slow and vast time, about a Benedictine convent during the Black Death?

If there is any purpose to the club, it’s that moment when Talia gathers enough wine-crusted glasses from the back room, Penelope finds the corkscrew hiding by the cash register, Beth shouts at everyone to sit down already and we cut the cake, still warm. It’s often too sweet or not enough; a bit moist or overbaked. But it’s cake, after all.

I’ve forgotten to say that there is an argument at most gatherings. Just a few weeks ago was a particularly bad one, concerning national stereotypes. The type of argument that breaks friendships apart. We’re all from different places, all a little shaky about our sense of belonging. We didn’t reach any sort of agreement and the club dispersed gloomily. In the nontangible world, I would never have returned. Because, in the nontangible world, things disappear in one stroke: a flawed opinion, a single disagreement, an unfollowing. It’s easier to throw things out at the slightest imperfection, rather than to mend them or live with blemishes.

I’ve been thinking recently about the homogeneity of ideas, the binary debates. The more the world is stripped of its diversity, I say to anyone who’ll listen, the more our guts are stripped of microbes, the more our ways of thinking, too, are mono-cropped. Everyone is adamantly for or against that One Big Topic. Everyone’s reading the same thing, and they either love it or hate it, and they congregate in the nontangible world to make one of those two proclamations.

But here I wanted to say something about the tangible, about not wasting it, not starting each time from scratch. About sanding and scrubbing and finding use, of sitting down together at makeshift tables.

We met up again the following week after the argument, our last gathering before France’s second lockdown. We were a little shy around one another. Even Follie barked at us. Then Penelope started one of her stories and we exchanged glances, wondering where she was going. The cake was ricotta and chestnut. Beth had brought beers.

 

Read Ayşegül Savaş’s story “Layover” in our Fall issue.

Ayşegül Savaş is the author of Walking on the Ceiling. Her second novel White on White is forthcoming from Riverhead Books. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Granta, the Guardian, and The Dublin Review, among others.  

 

Feminize Your Canon: Forough Farrokhzad

Our column Feminize Your Canon explores the lives of underrated and underread female authors. Read Forough Farrokhzad’s poems “After You” and “Window” in our Summer 2020 issue.

Forough Farrokhzad in 1965 (wikimedia commons)

In 1954, a nineteen-year-old poet walked unannounced into the office of the literary editor of Roshanfekr (The Intellectual), one of Iran’s most prestigious magazines. Her fingers were stained with green ink, and she trembled with nerves as she handed over three poems. One of them, the twelve-line “Sin,” described in explicit detail her affair with the magazine’s editor in chief. Different translations give different nuances to the opening of the poem: “I have sinned a rapturous sin / in a warm enflamed embrace,” (Sholeh Wolpé) or “I have sinned, a delectable sin, / In an embrace which was ardent, like fire” (Hasan Javadi and Susan Sallée) or “I sinned / it was a most lustful sin / I sinned in arms sturdy as iron, / hot like fire and vengeful.” (Farzaneh Milani) Across these variations, there are a few scandalous constants: the heat, the embrace, the pleasure, and the boldly unashamed I. The speaker declares herself as a sinner, but there is no repentance in the poem, no punishment. She is not her lover’s victim, but a joyous coconspirator, exhilarated by her power to arouse him: “Lust enflamed his eyes, / red wine trembled in the cup, / my body, naked and drunk, / quivered softly on his breast.” (Wolpé)

The magazine printed the poem. At a time when many Iranian poets wrote under pseudonyms, the author of “Sin” not only used her real name, but her poem appeared alongside her photograph and a short biography, which revealed her to be a married mother of a two-year-old son. It also described her physical appearance, in sexualized terms, drawing attention to her “disheveled hair” and “penetrating eyes.” Here was a young woman confessing to a sexual awakening in the arms of a man who was not her husband, a deliberate “reversal of a thousand years of Persian literature” written by men about their lovers, at a time when autobiographical writing by women was nonexistent in Iran. The biography collapsed any distance between the loving wife and the libidinous poet, implying that this was not a work of imagination, but a report on experience—making readers wonder what their own wives might be getting up to.

Few poetic debuts can have exacted as high a price as Forough Farrokhzad’s. Men in Iran were free to take other wives and lovers, but an adulterous woman was taking her life into her hands—she could be killed for her transgression and her killers barely punished. Even if she escaped violence, she could be punished in other ways, as Farrokhzad would discover. When she divorced her husband not long after, the decision cost her custody of her son, Kamyar. The stress pushed her to a breakdown and suicide attempt, after which she spent a month in a psychiatric institution and underwent electroshock therapy. She was forced to choose, in effect, between her child and her art. The anguished 1957 “Poem For You,” dedicated to her son, ends with the hope that their connection can somehow live on through her poetry: “You will search for me in my words / and tell yourself: My mother, that is who she was.”

Farrokhzad is sometimes called the Persian Sylvia Plath, as she overlapped her in era, style, and untimely death (in Farrokhzad’s case, a car accident at age thirty-two.) Although the two poets did not read each other’s language, scholar Leila Rahimi Bahmany argues that both were tormented by the gulf between their ideal “self-image as artists” and their cultures’ reductive and repressive visions of women. In their poetry, Plath and Farrokhzad register the struggle to hold onto the artistic self under the pressures of marriage and mental illness. Both deploy the ambivalent image of the mirror, a gendered symbol of vanity as well as a deceptive tool for self-examination. In Farrokhzad’s poem “The Forgotten,” the mirror symbolizes the despair of a woman seeking her own identity in a world organized by male desire:

As long as his eyes are not amazed by my face

What use is this beauty to me?

O Mother, break this mirror

What do I gain by adorning myself?

This conflict between appearances and value, between the eyes of the world and the truth of the soul, would mark Farrokhzad’s work and life.

*

A pretty, rebellious child, Forough Farrokhzad was born into an upper-middle-class family in Tehran in January 1935, one of seven surviving children of a strict military-minded father and his much younger wife. She went to a co-ed elementary school, unusual for the time, and then a technical high school, where she studied painting and dressmaking. Her mother was obsessed with dolls, surrounding herself with them in the home and petitioning (unsuccessfully) to be buried with her favorites. Dolls were later to be the subject of one of Farrokhzad’s most powerful poems, “The Wind-Up Doll,” which ends:

Like a wind-up doll one can look out

at the world through glass eyes,

spend years inside a felt box,

body stuffed with straw,

wrapped in layers of dainty lace.

With every salacious squeeze of one’s hand,

for no reason one can cry:

Ah, how blessed, how happy I am!

Like the mirror, the doll evokes the superficial beauty and docility demanded of women in a patriarchal society. The doll’s enforced blindness and silence, the claustrophobia of her lace-trimmed confinement, is made grotesque by the obligation, through it all, to be pleasant and grateful on demand.

The Iran of Farrokhzad’s childhood was a world whiplashing between medieval and modern. Tehran was “a city of mosques and cabarets, designer clothes and chadors.” For women, this era of rapid change was especially disorienting. Just after Farrokhzad was born, the Shah’s pro-Western regime passed a law banning the hijab, and schools and universities began to open their doors to women. But even as the possibilities for women expanded, patriarchal ideas and systems lingered. Marriage was still meant to be the main goal of a woman’s life, although it meant dependence and domestic seclusion. As a teenager, Forough fell in love with her older neighbor, a distant relative of her mother’s, a satirist and cartoonist who worked for the ministry of finance. The couple married over the objections of both families, and Farrokzhad later said “that ridiculous marriage at the age of sixteen destroyed my future life.”

Her first poetry collection, Captive, did not include the incendiary “Sin,” but still spoke openly, and shockingly, of the struggle between artistic freedom and domestic confinement: “O sky, if I want one day / To fly from this silent prison, / what shall I say to the weeping child’s eyes: / forget about me, for I am a captive bird?” The poems are addressed to unnamed men, the captive’s loving jailers, who are at once objects of desire and emblems of imprisonment. In the book’s afterword, she wrote that she expected her poems to be controversial, “[p]erhaps because no woman before me took steps toward breaking the shackles binding women’s hands and feet.” But isolated controversies only build into sensations, moments into movements, through many voices. Women all over the world were beginning to identify that same sense of confinement, that same longing for freedom, even if they did not yet have the words for it. In America a few years later, Betty Friedan would call it “the problem that has no name.” But naming the problem did not change the balance of power between men and women. Farrokhzad dedicated The Wall, her second collection, to her former husband, calling the book a “worthless gift” that she hoped he would receive as a token of her gratitude. If the self-abasing gesture was intended to soften him, it didn’t work—he and his family continued to enforce Forough’s separation from her son, cutting off her visitation rights.

Farrokhzad left Iran soon afterward, scraping together the money to take a cargo plane to Italy and then to Germany, where she studied languages and poetry. The relative cultural freedom she felt over several months in Europe was liberating, and her next poetry collection, Rebellion, shows her laying claim to a bolder poetic identity that fused her experience as a woman with her Persian literary heritage. But it was hard to shake the weight of her scandalous beginnings. When she published a series of articles about her journey to Italy, a thoughtful and self-reflective travel narrative, she found herself once again attacked as a licentious hedonist, even though her articles were hardly a diary of indulgence.

In 1958, missing her own language and people and in need of money, Farrokhzad returned to Iran. Through mutual friends, she met the filmmaker and intellectual Ebrahim Golestan, who offered her a job filing and answering phones at his large studio in northern Tehran. Golestan was married, but a few months after she began working for him, they began an intense relationship that would continue for the rest of her life. Now ninety-seven, Golestan has lived in England since leaving Iran in 1975. In 2017, he broke a fifty-year silence to speak about his relationship with Forough. “We were very close, but I can’t measure how much I had feelings for her,” he told The Guardian. “How can I? In kilos? In metres?” Golestan has often been credited with influencing Farrokhzad’s best poetry and inspiring her interest in film, but he denied this, saying “she had the biggest influence on herself.” Farrokhzad herself once claimed to respect poetry “in the very same way that religious people respect religion,” and Golestan likewise compared her to a “seminary student,” dedicated monastically to her art. “I never saw her in a state of not being productive,” he said.

While she was working at Golestan’s studio, Farrokhzad developed the project that would result in her short 1962 documentary, The House Is Black, made in collaboration with a leprosy charity. The film would prove transformative both creatively and personally. After an initial visit to a leprosarium in Tabriz County, she returned three months later with a five-man crew and lived among the residents for twelve days, observing and capturing their lives on film. Her immersion in the colony was such that she adopted a young boy, Hossein Mansouri, while she was there (he now lives in Germany and has translated her poetry into German.) The twenty-two-minute film (available on YouTube) is intimate and unflinching, reflecting Farrokhzad’s interest in states of imprisonment and the lives of social pariahs. In long takes training the camera on faces of all ages, she invites the viewer to see the people instead of their condition. The film opens with the image of a veiled, disfigured face reflected in a mirror edged with flowers, a continuation of the mirror imagery that appears throughout Farrokhzad’s poetry. The voice-over narration poses philosophical and religious questions about the nature of ugliness, before giving a more straightforward account of the symptoms and treatment of leprosy. Emphasizing that the disease is made worse by poverty and can be managed by hands-on care, the voice-over plays over uncomfortable images of patients undergoing treatment. But then the visuals change in tenor, showing us physical therapy, children and babies playing, music and celebrations, and women preparing food, brushing one another’s hair, and applying heavy kohl. Through the tight focus on a small group of people in a strange, isolated world, Farrokhzad manages to gesture at the much larger story of how societies function, how people thrive in communities, and how beauty can grow out of deprivation.

The poetry collection she published two years later, titled Another Birth (Reborn in some translations), is dedicated to Golestan and is considered, by critics and by Farrokhzad herself, to be her most accomplished. In this collection, her intensely personal gaze widens to encompass society at large—“the center of gravity shifts,” according to one critic. The long poem “O Bejeweled Land!” takes its title from a patriotic song, and satirizes government bureaucracy and the reduction of human life to a name and number on an ID card: “long live number 678, precinct 5, Tehran.” Everything is reduced to this number 678: poets, nightingales, plastic roses, “faddish electric kebab grills,” Rolex watches, and “678 lungs-full of air smelling / of shit, garbage, and piss.” In an interview, Farrokzhad explained her impulse to present an unvarnished picture of the world around her. “When I want to talk about a street which is full of the smell of urine, I can’t put a list of perfumes in front of me and choose the most fragrant one to describe this smell. This is deceit, which man first practices on himself and then on others.”

The year before her death, Farrokhzad wrote to Golestan to tell him, with a kind of ironic prescience, “I love you to an extent that I am terrified what to do if you disappeared suddenly. I’ll become like an empty well.” In the end, it was Farrokhzad who disappeared, killed in a car accident on the way home from her mother’s house on February 14, 1967. Her work survived, passed around in secret after the 1979 revolution, when it was banned and then heavily censored. In recent years, her status as a rebel icon in Iran has only risen. And, as with Plath, iconic status can lead to distortions, which Farrokhzad’s biographers and translators continue to untangle, trying to find a truer reflection of this remarkable poet.

 

For more on Farrokhzad, the author suggests consulting Farzaneh Milani’s 2014 talk at the Library of Congress, and her book Veils & Words: The Emerging Voices of Iranian Women Writers, Amir-Hussein Radjy’s New York Times Overlooked column, Sholeh Wolpé’s translation of Sin, Susan Sallée and Hasan Javadi’s translation of Another Birth and Other Poems, Leila Rahimi Bahmany’s Mirrors of Entrapment and Emancipation, and Forugh Farrokhzad, Poet of Modern Iran, edited by Dominic Parviz Brookshaw and Nasrin Rahimieh.

Read Forough Farrokhzad’s poems “ After You ” and “Window” in our Summer 2020 issue.

Joanna Scutts is a cultural historian and critic, and the author of The Extra Woman: How Marjorie Hillis Led a Generation of Women to Live Alone and Like It.

Long Live Work!

Photo: Dragiša Modrinjak. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Factories demand

Workers must command

—Primer, 1957

A Bulgarian grocery store opened for business in my Amsterdam neighborhood. On the inside of the plate-glass window they hung a Bulgarian flag, making the store highly visible from the outside, but dark inside. They sell overpriced Bulgarian groceries. And the same can be said of almost all the ethnic markets. First come the migrants, and after them—the markets. After a time the ethnic food markets disappear, but the migrants? Do they stick around? The number of Bulgarians in the Netherlands is clearly on the rise; two Bulgarian markets have opened recently in my neighborhood alone. And as to those with a “Balkan tooth,” they have famously deep pockets as far as food is concerned; they’ll happily shell out a euro or two extra to satisfy gourmandish nostalgia. The markets sell Bulgarian wine, frozen kebapcheta and meat patties, cheese pastries (banitsas), pickled peppers and cucumbers, kyopolou, pindjur, lyutenitsa, and sweets that look as if they’ve come from a package for aid to the malnourished: they are all beyond their shelf dates. The store is poorly tended and a mess, customers are always tripping over cardboard boxes. Next to the cash register sits a young man who doesn’t budge, more dead than alive, it’s as if he has sworn on his patron saint that nobody will ever extract a word from him. The young woman at the cash register is teen-magazine cute. She has a short skirt, long straight blond hair, a good tan. Her tan comes from her liquid foundation; her cunning radiates like the liquid powder. She files her nails, and next to her stands a small bottle of bright red nail polish. The scene fills me with joy. She grins slyly. I buy lyutenitsa, Bulgarian (Turkish, Greek, Macedonian, Serbian) cheese, and three large-size Bulgarian tomatoes. Dovizhdane. Довиждане.

I know that every European right-wing heart warms to this description. True, the “Easterners,” the Bulgarians, Romanians, Poles, not only steal, drink, and lie, but they bring with them their own pickles, their own swill. They can hardly wait to milk our welfare system, move into our subsidized housing, which they then sublet to others while they go back to their houses and lounge and laze around with the money they’ve ripped off from us taxpayers. Of course the Bulgarians, Romanians, and Poles think the same of their Roma; and until recently the Bulgarians thought likewise of their Turks. Ever since educated Bulgarian women have been rushing off to Turkey in droves, however, to earn a little pocket money as housekeepers, the constellation of products and the erosion of stereotypes has shifted to the advantage of the Turks.

*

The division into those who work and those who do not—the hardworking and the indolent, the diligent and the ne’er-do-wells, the earnest and the couch potatoes—is hardly new, but over the last few years it has become the basic media-ideological matrix around which revolve the freethinkers of the general public. Joining the category of the indolent, ne’er-do-wells, and malingerers are the ranks of the jobless (for whom the employed claim they are simply incompetents and bumblers), along with the grumblers, indignants, and the groups defined by their country, geography, and ethnicity (Greeks, Spaniards, Romanians, Bulgarians, Serbs, Bosnians—all shiftless riffraff!), anticapitalistic elements, hooligans, vandals, terrorists, and Islamic fundamentalists.

In response to the question of how to become a multimillionaire, one of the wealthiest Russian oligarchs replied, “Don’t you forget, I work seventeen hours a day!” The very same answer is given by criminals, thieves, politicians, porn stars, war profiteers, celebs, mass murderers, and other similar deplorables. They all say seventeen hours a day, my career, and my job with such brash confidence, not a twitch to be seen. On Meet the Russians, a TV show broadcast by Fox, young, prosperous Russians, many of them born, themselves, into money, fashion models, fashion and entertainment industry moguls, pop stars, club owners, and the like, all use the following phrases: I deserve this; everything I have, I’ve earned; my time is money; I work 24/7; I never give up.

The media (they, too, work 24/7!) have managed to persuade the nonworking majority that this is so. And while the lazy majority has no career, or profession, or first and last name, or even a face, the faces of the hardworking minority are with us twenty-four hours a day. As far as women go, of course, the ass often replaces the face. The ass has its (ethnic) identity, and a first and last name (Guess whose gorgeous ass this is?—a regular headline in Croatian newspapers). And meanwhile the ne’er-do-wells have become Earth’s burden, they slow its rotation, nobody knows how to jettison them, and they’d be best off taking matters into their own hands. This is why the movie Ilo Ilo, directed by Anthony Chen, begins with the unambiguous fall of an anonymous body from the balcony of a Singapore apartment building. The movie speaks about the impact of the Asian financial crisis on the “indolent”: they turn to drink, plunge from their balconies, kill themselves.

*

Short news items, such as a report from Rexecode, the Parisian center for monitoring macroeconomic development, sometimes snatch a little column space in the media in places like Croatia and Serbia, tucked in between the bigger headlines such as: “You won’t believe the gorgeous asses vacationing this summer on the Adriatic beaches.” The results shown by the Rexecode research project on the hours people work in Europe show that the lazy Romanians are the absolute record-holders in terms of the number of hours they spend on the job. The lazy Greeks come in second, and the lazy Bulgarians, third. After them come the Croats, Poles, Latvians, Slovaks, Estonians, and Cypriots. Working the least are the diligent Finns, while the legendarily industrious Germans are somewhere mid-scale. Such news flashes do little, regrettably, to uproot the deep-seated prejudices, in fact they reinforce them. The diligent have won the day, not only in real terms, but symbolically as well. The indolents are despised by all, and most of all by the indolents themselves. They themselves look up to, even deify, the hard-workers (meaning: the superrich). The news that there are no more than two hundred hard-workers in little Croatia, while everybody else is indolent (whether jobless or working, they are all equally hungry) has prompted Croatian legislators to propose a new labor law, with the blessings of the hard-workers; the new law apparently strips the indolents of all rights, except the right to the barest of existences.

*

The native armed with bow and arrow, railway line, village, town, may the country thrive and grow, long live, long live work. These are the lyrics of a song that was sung during the Socialist period, when workers’ rights were much greater than they are today. I confess I never made sense of these verses, perhaps because I didn’t try. What possible connection could there be between a native armed with bow and arrow and railway lines, villages, and towns, unless the lyrics are an anticipatory tweet about the eons of history of the human race: in other words, thanks to the appeal of hard work, natives traded in their bows and arrows for railways, villages, and towns. Or, perhaps, it’s the other way around: without the redeeming balm of work, those same natives would have to return to the age of bows and arrows, while weeds would engulf the railway lines, villages, and towns. Although the everyday life of socialism in ex-Yugoslavia was like a hedonistic parody of the everyday life in other communist countries, Yugoslavs shared with them a packet of the same values, a set of common symbols, and their imaginary. And at the center, at least as far as symbols and the imaginary go, was work. Work was what persuaded the native armed with bow and arrow to evolve from the ape, and the “peasant and worker” and “honest intellectuals” evolved thereafter from the native. “The workers, peasants, and honest intellectuals” were the pillars, in the socialist imaginary, of a robust socialist society and were cast in a powerful positive light, especially because the honest intellectuals were separated from dishonest intellectuals just as the wheat is winnowed from the chaff. The “bureaucracy” was the necessary evil, the “bureaucracy” flourished, while feeding, parasite-like, on the people. In any case, the word “work” was heard everywhere: in the news shorts that played before films in Yugoslav movie theaters, in the images of eye-catching, sweaty, workers’ muscles, in my elementary school primers where the occupations were unambiguous (male miners, female nurses, male blacksmiths, female backhoe-operators, male construction workers, female teachers, male engineers, female tram-drivers), in the movies, and in the First-of-May parades—pagan-like rites, honoring the god of labor as tons of sacrificial steel, coal, wheat, books were rolled out. The heroes of the day were the record-breakers, the men and women who went above and beyond the norm. The heroes of today are pop stars, Marko Perković Thompson and Severina, and the many clowns who surround them.

*

Today the vistas I see are post-Yugoslav. Perhaps the view is better in the postcommunist countries like Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary … I hope representatives of other postcommunist countries don’t hold against me my geopolitically narrow focus. Everything I’ve said refers only to little Croatia, little Serbia, little Bosnia, little Macedonia … And this crumb of badness in the sea of postcommunist goodness can easily be ignored, can it not? Although to be honest, research from 2007 shows that fewer than half of the Germans living in what used to be East Germany were pleased with the current market economy, and nearly half of them desired a return to socialism. As a return to the previous order is now unimaginable, the lethargic East German grumblers have been given a consolation prize, a little nostalgic souvenir, a MasterCard and on it the face of Karl Marx, designed and issued by a bank in the city known today as Chemnitz, though earlier it was called Karl-Marx-Stadt.

*

The Russian oligarch who said “Don’t forget, I work seventeen hours a day!” seems to have forgotten a lesson he’d imbibed in his earliest years. In Russian fairy tales, Ivan the Simple earns his happy ending and wins the kingdom and the queen. Does he do this by working seventeen hours a day? No he does not. He does this thanks to his cunning and his powerful helpers: a horse able to traverse miles and miles at lightning speed, a magic shirt that makes him invincible, a fish that grants his wishes, Baba Yaga who gives him sly advice, and powerful hawks and falcons for brothers-in-law. Even our hero—Ivanushka, grimy, ugly, slobbering Ivanushka Zapechny, he who is the least acceptable, who lounges all the livelong day by the tile stove—even he, such as he is, wins the kingdom and the princess without breaking a sweat. Our modern fairy tale about the seventeen-hour workday has been cooked up as consolation for the losers. Who are the majority, of course.

The young woman at the cash register in the Bulgarian market knows all this; she files her nails and waits for one of the hard-workers who will turn her from a frog into a princess. Her seventeen-hour workday at the cash register at a neglected ethnic grocery in Amsterdam will not deliver her the transformation she’s hoping for.

In the movie This Must Be the Place, Sean Penn plays the role of a rich, aging rock star who says: “Have you noticed how nobody works anymore and everybody does something artistic?”

—Translated from the Croatian by Ellen Elias-Bursać

 

Dubravka Ugresic is the author of seven works of fiction, including The Museum of Unconditional Surrender and Baba Yaga Laid an Egg, along with seven collections of essays, including Thank You for Not Reading and Karaoke Culture, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. She has won, or been shortlisted for, more than a dozen prizes, including the NIN Award, Austrian State Prize for European Literature, Heinrich Mann Prize, Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, Man Booker International Prize, and the James Tiptree Jr. Award. In 2016, she received the Neustadt International Prize for Literature (the “American Nobel”) for her body of work.

Ellen Elias-Bursać has been translating fiction and nonfiction by Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian writers since the eighties, including novels and short stories by David Albahari, Dubravka Ugresic, Daša Drndić, and Karim Zaimović. She is the coauthor of a textbook for the study of Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian with Ronelle Alexander, and author of Translating Evidence and Interpreting Testimony at a War Crimes Tribunal: Working in a Tug-of-War, which was awarded the Mary Zirin Prize in 2015.

From The Age of Skin , by Dubravka Ugresic, translated by Ellen Elias-Bursać. Used with the permission of Open Letter Books.

(Dead) Birds of America

“I’ve always had a thing with birds,” said the artist Ida Applebroog in a 2016 interview. A few years ago, inspired by John James Audubon’s ornithological paintings , she began a series of works that foreground her longtime fascination with all things feathered. Unlike Audubon’s birds, which were brought beautifully to life on paper after being shot, eviscerated, and splinted into position by the naturalist himself, Applebroog’s birds don’t hide their mortality. A bluebird lies belly up, its ruddy breast exposed. An owl sprawls out with its eyes closed. A pair of gray woodpeckers dip their heads back, beaks pointed toward a sky to which they’ll never return. “Applebroog Birds,” a new show devoted to the artist’s avian works, will be on view at Hauser & Wirth’s Twenty-Second Street location through December 19, 2020. A selection of images appears below.

Ida Applebroog, Cardinal, 2018, ultrachrome ink on mylar, 52 1/2 x 40″. © Ida Applebroog. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Emily Poole.

 

Ida Applebroog, Bluebird, 2018, ultrachrome ink and gel on mylar, 22 5/8 x 42 1/2″. © Ida Applebroog. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Emily Poole.

 

Ida Applebroog, Woodpecker, 2018, ultrachrome ink on mylar, 53 7/8 x 44 7/8″. © Ida Applebroog. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Emily Poole.

 

Installation view, “Applebroog Birds,” Hauser & Wirth New York, Twenty-Second Street, 2020. © Ida Applebroog. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Thomas Barratt.

 

Ida Applebroog, Portraits (Canary), 2019, ultrachrome ink and gel on mylar, 50 x 48″. © Ida Applebroog. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Emily Poole.

 

Ida Applebroog, Specimens (Ruby Throated Hummingbirds), 2018, watercolor, plaster, burlap, copper wire, twine, paper, and wood, 19 3/4 x 8 1/4 x 2 1/8″. © Ida Applebroog. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Emily Poole.

 

Ida Applebroog, Owl, 2018, ultrachrome ink and gel on mylar, 83.8 x 111.8 cm / 33 x 44″. © Ida Applebroog. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Emily Poole.

 

“Applebroog Birds” will be on view at Hauser & Wirth’s Twenty-Second Street location through December 19, 2020.

The Secret of the Unicorn Tapestries

Original illustration by Jenny Kroik

This puzzling quest is almost at its end. —James Rorimer, 1942

Nobody knows who made the Unicorn Tapestries, a set of seven weavings that depict a unicorn hunt that has been described as “the greatest inheritance of the Middle Ages.”

Without evidence, the La Rochefoucauld family in France asserted that the tapestries originate with the marriage of a family ancestor in the fifteenth century. The tapestries did belong to the La Rochefoucauld in 1793, before they were stolen by rioters who set fire to their château at Verteuil. The family regained possession sixty years later, when the tapestries were recovered in a barn. The precious weavings of wool, silk, gold, and silver were in tatters at their edges and punched full of holes. They had been used to wrap barren fruit trees during the winter.

In late 1922, the Unicorn Tapestries disappeared again. They were sent to New York for an exhibition, which never opened. A rich American had bought them and transferred them to his bank vault before anyone else could see them. In February 1923, John D. Rockefeller Jr. confirmed from his vacation home in Florida that he was the American who had acquired the tapestries for the price of $1.1 million. The tapestries were transferred to Rockefeller’s private residence in Midtown Manhattan.

Fourteen years later, Rockefeller donated the tapestries to the Cloisters, a new medieval art museum he had funded as a branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The mysterious works were to be on regular public display for the first time in their five-hundred-year history. James Rorimer, the first curator of the Cloisters, had the intimidating task of interpreting them.

On July 26, 1942, the New York Times reported that Rorimer had identified symbols that proved the key to the mystery, among them a knotted cord, a pair of striped tights, and a squirrel. He identified these as symbols in a system that pointed to Anne of Brittany as their owner and decided the tapestries had been made to celebrate her marriage to Louis XII in 1499. No one who read the news that Sunday was able to see the Unicorn Tapestries for another two years. The weavings were moved to a secret location following the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

Rorimer was drafted into World War II, and served with the Monuments Men to recover works of art stolen by the Nazis. An assistant curator named Margaret Freeman took over at the Cloisters and eventually wrote the definitive book on the tapestries, published in 1976, which undid Rorimer’s cord, tights, squirrel theory. She posited that while it was possible the tapestries had been woven to celebrate a marriage, Rorimer had interpreted the symbols incorrectly. She wrote:

The squirrel of the tapestry may be intended to be symbolic, or it may be present merely to call attention to the tree in which it sits.

The next edition of the museum guidebook scrubbed Rorimer’s interpretation. Since then, the Met’s most eminent scholars have debated the finer points of the tapestries, each time removing more and more from the guidebooks and wall labels. Today at the Cloisters, the wall label for each of these tapestries, the most famous works in the museum, among the most famous works in the world, is only about one sentence long.

*

I first saw the Unicorn Tapestries in first grade, in the opening credits of The Last Unicorn, which animates the first scene in the cycle of seven tapestries. Twenty years later, I would find myself working at the Cloisters, explaining the tapestries to surly high school students, Brazilian tourists, Franciscan monks from the Bronx, and anyone else who attended the afternoon tour.

Constructed during the Great Depression, the museum is a feudal fantasy composed of fragments from five medieval French cloisters built around a steel-framed tower. It’s a secular sanctuary of flowers and stained glass, a peaceful oasis for stressed-out New Yorkers, though few people in the neighborhood go. Generations of Washington Heights residents have believed it’s an abandoned church.

The architecture imposed a monastic culture upon the staff. The director’s office was at the top of the tower and peeked out from Fort Tryon Park’s dense foliage. Built over a rock on one of Manhattan’s highest points, the office had 365-degree views, exceptional on an island where good views sell for millions. The bathroom had only a urinal.

The next most important curator had the entire floor below, then the third-ranking curator, followed by the library and the educational and administrative offices in descending order. Uniformed security guards paced across the museum, hands stuffed in their polyester pockets or clasped behind their backs. CB radios hooked on their belts burped out instructions from supervisors.

Guards could direct visitors to the gardens or the bathroom, but were forbidden to speak about the art itself. If a visitor ensorcelled by the Unicorn Tapestries approached a guard to ask why the hunters wanted to kill the unicorn, the protocol was to send them to the main hall, where they had purchased their ticket. Phone calls would ascend the tower in search of someone willing to come down and answer the question. If no one was available, the visitor was reminded that they could purchase the audio guide.

My first job at the Cloisters was behind the oak desk in the octagonal main hall, where I processed admissions tickets, untangled the audio guides, and listened to the chants of Hildegard von Bingen’s “11,000 Virgins,” which played on repeat from the gift shop for at least ten years. I wanted to ascend to lecturer, an opportunity that became available to me as I neared completion of my master’s in art history.

I spent my free time in the museum’s library, reading through several dozen books and articles assigned to prospective lecturers. The task was to digest the scholarly material written about the collection, then condense and transform it into a one-hour “highlights of the collection” tour. My lecture had to explain the collection in a way that was accessible to the general public while maintaining the highest levels of academic integrity.

I became fixated on the Unicorn Tapestries, the artwork that made visitors gasp when they suddenly recognized it in the dark gallery. My palms were damp before every tour I gave, worried my boss was hovering near the doorway, ready to reprimand me for my pronunciation of Rochefoucauld.  The sheer size of the Unicorn Tapestries required me to use my entire five-foot-three body to draw a narrative line through them.

First the unicorn is discovered in front of a fountain, dipping his horn into a stream that flows from a fountain. I swooped my left arm in an arc to reveal the twelve hunters surrounding it.

“What does the number twelve remind you of … yes, twelve apostles, because the hunt for the unicorn is also an allegory of Christ’s Passion.”

I pointed to the next scene, making everyone quickly turn their heads to see the hunters grab their weapons and chase the unicorn across a stream. To see the third scene, I took visitors on a slow walk across the gallery, a strategic pause before the violence started. I jabbed my pointer finger at the hunter about to stab the unicorn in the rear end, then to the almond-shaped gash the unicorn tore with his horn into the side of the dog. I pointed to the rose forming from the dog’s bloody wound, a detail I had never even noticed until an eighth-grade boy asked me about it. Stunned that I hadn’t seen the rose before, I asked my boss, a twenty-five-year veteran of the museum, if she had. She hadn’t, but told me it wasn’t worth considering as it had never been mentioned in any of the official scholarship on the Tapestries.

The fourth scene was placed above the door that led to a gallery of much older tapestries. In two small fragments it was possible to see how the unicorn had been trapped in an enclosed garden by a maiden. I looked directly at the visitors and enjoyed seeing them nod when their gaze fell on the unicorn’s supplicant face.

“He’s smiling so much you can see his gums,” I said, eliciting their own smiles, then pushed their gazes toward the regal hand of the woman stroking the unicorn’s mane.

The fifth tapestry had two scenes in one weaving.

“Look at the unicorn being murdered,” I said, my voice ferocious. The visitors winced as they observed the hunter’s spear jammed into the unicorn’s side, his tongue falling out the side of his mouth and his eyes rolling backward. Then I’d lift my arm, bringing their gazes softly downward, to hover over a cute squirrel who seemed to watch the dead unicorn presented to a group of royals. In this scene, fairy tales come to life. Men and women in royal garb stand in front of a castle, swans swim in the surrounding water, guardsmen look out from the crenellations, and there is the proverbial lady locked in the tower.

Hanging on either side of the gallery’s windows are two additional tapestries, which look wildly different from the rest,but share the same cipher of an a and a backward e tied together with a cord. They should be initials, but haven’t been found duplicated in any other painting or manuscript. The most beloved tapestry, the unicorn surrounded by a golden fence, provides the happy ending the tour needs. The unicorn has somehow transcended the hunt, and is now chained to a tree ripe with pomegranates, a fertility symbol. Scholars hypothesized that it was made to hang behind the bed of a noble couple on their wedding night.

*

In 1992, Howard Comeau circled an advertisement in the New York Times for security guards at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He needed a steady paycheck after losing his job teaching Latin in a local high school. He was happy to be assigned to the Cloisters, which was so close to his apartment that he could walk to work. Howie, as most people called him, never took a course on medieval art, but fell in love with Giotto and Filippo Lippi while hitchhiking around Italy in the late sixties. Howie’s mastery of Latin and his rigorous Catholic education made learning the Met’s collection easy.

His first day at Fordham University, Howie had discovered the word aesthetics, defined as the science of the beautiful. It was a concept that shaped the rest of his life. But halfway through a Ph.D in classical philology, he felt too overwhelmed to write his dissertation. His time in Italy, where strangers had invited him into their homes to share meals, opened him up to how easy and beautiful life could be. He abandoned his doctorate and taught Latin in Westchester and Connecticut high schools for the next twenty-five years.

Security guards were stationed in different galleries throughout the day on assigned rotations. Howie enjoyed being posted near the Unicorn Tapestries. He was supposed to stand in the doorway, but he couldn’t resist moving deeper into the dark gallery to hear the lecturers give their tours.

He was amused that the lecturers frequently contradicted one another, and it bothered him that few ever seemed to look at the tapestries, that they took no joy in them. Their explanations to an enraptured audience were just an academic exercise of enforcing the museum’s sanctioned scholarship. He began to look deeper at the tapestries, especially at the symbols related to the allegory of the unicorn as Christ, and grew more curious about them.

On his days off, Howie visited the Rose Main Reading Room at the New York Public Library to learn more about the era associated with the tapestries, and one day when he requested three books about Charles VIII, he found a piece of information that electrified him. When the French king made his ceremonial entry into Reims, along the carriage route were tableaux vivants, allegorical and historical “living pictures” performed by actors and designed and choreographed by court artists. Howie had the idea that maybe the designers of the Unicorn Tapestries had used imagery from performances, which is why no one had been able to locate similar scenes in manuscripts or paintings.

He became obsessed with studying the tapestries. He read through everything the French court would have read at the time: the Bible, chansons, and the Grandes Chroniques of French history, and tried to understand how the artist’s mind worked. Still loath to write, Howie made a mental matrix of symbols relevant to the French court around 1500, then used every opportunity he had during the workday to stare at the tapestries as though they were the night sky, searching for constellations.

Guards were forbidden to talk to visitors about the artwork, but Howie found it irresistible. When he overheard two women giggling in front of the Unicorn Tapestries, he walked up behind them and said, “Please don’t ridicule the art,” with an exaggerated British accent.

The women spun around, relieved to see the bearded security guard grinning. They fell into a discussion about the tapestries.

His boss fielded complaints from the staff and told Howie his job was to protect the art, not to explain it. A rumor spread that the lecturers had been forbidden to talk to him.

In the break room, he’d pepper other guards with his ideas while they stared into the vending machine, trying to decide how long the chicken salad sandwich had been sitting in there. Servers from the diner on Dyckman Street asked for Howie in the main hall. He had told them all about the tapestries over breakfast and invited them to come up to the museum so he could show them.

Only one lecturer willingly listened to Howie’s ideas. Martha Easton recalled that at times he seemed obsessed and also frustrated when he couldn’t find all the symbols in a system he wanted to prove was in the tapestries. On his breaks, he’d stop by her little office near the library vaults. She once she suggested a book he should read about Georges de la Tour. She thought many of Howie’s ideas were as legitimate as the formal scholarship, but understood why scholars felt proprietary about their credentials. Howie was an amateur, a disparaging word in academia, though it derives from the Latin root amare, to love.

On the first day of summer in 1997, Howie transferred to the evening shift. By twilight, the Unicorn Tapestries gallery was completely dark. Whenever he had a new idea about the tapestries, he stole an extra two minutes while passing through on his inspection tours to look closer. Five-hundred-year-old gold threads, too tarnished to be seen during the day, sparkled under Howie’s flashlight.

*

Between 2001 and 2014, the West Dean Tapestry Studio in England was contracted by Historic Scotland to weave a replica of the Unicorn Tapestries for Stirling Castle. The project was inspired by an old inventory of the castle of a hundred tapestries that belonged to James V, including a set described as “unicorn tapestries.” The weavers made periodic visits the Cloisters to study the originals.

On a Monday when the museum was closed to visitors, I wandered up to the Unicorn Tapestries gallery and saw that folding tables had been set up across the oak floors, and on top were maps of the tapestries. Every plant, flower, and figure was drawn in black pen, delineating all their shapes. I leaned over and looked at one leaf among thousands, divided into segments, marked with numbers to indicate the different shades of green wool required to weave it. It was like staring at the motherboard of a computer.

I watched as one of the weavers stood only a few inches from the scene of the unicorn in front of the fountain, staring at just one small section on the far right side. She stood there for over ten minutes. I couldn’t resist asking her what she was doing.

“Counting knots,” she replied, smiling and opening her eyes wide. She understood an entirely different language of the tapestries, one spoken only by a small group of artists.

It inspired me to stop looking at the tapestries through the lens of what I had read about them.

*

I first met Howie late one afternoon, when I was still working at the admissions desk. The gift shop manager shut off the stereo, and the “11,000 Virgins” halted. I was waiting for the last visitor in the galleries to return the audio guide they had rented. Head in hands, I rested my elbows on the desk.

“I found you in your past life.”

I looked up to see a security guard with a smile and a shaggy beard that seemed at odds with his uniform.

He slid a postcard across the time-softened wood of the desk, landing it just beneath my gaze. I recognized the postcard image as a painting of Jusepe de Ribera’s The Holy Family, with a Virgin Mary who has pale skin and dark hair tied back, a lot like mine. His eyes flickered with anticipation, but he snatched the postcard away before I reacted. He winked, then danced off into the galleries.

The shift supervisor looked up from a leather-bound logbook, as medieval-looking as the manuscripts on display, and told me I had just met the infamous Howie. Be warned, he said, Howie has lots of theories about the Unicorn Tapestries that he’s always going on about.

Five years later, I decided I was long overdue to have a chat with Howie.

“You know I have a mark on my head,” he said when I asked to hear his theories, tapping his mop of straight hair, then pointing upstairs to the tower. “It will be career suicide for you if your bosses know that you’re talking to me”

Because my little office was in the basement, next to the public bathrooms, where only the cleaning staff treads, no one ever knew.

When I opened my office door, I didn’t recognize Howie for a moment. Instead of his guard uniform, he wore jeans and a white button-down shirt, and had a black three-ring binder tucked under his arm. Now that he was in his own clothes, the beard made him look like a groovy college professor.

“The Unicorn Tapestries are a repository of symbols made for the education of the young members of the French royal court,” he declared after settling himself into a chair I had pulled up next to my desk. He smiled and held his palms apart as though he was welcoming me into his church for the first time. “Oh, I’ve got so much to tell you!”

Over the next several months, we discussed all of his ideas about the tapestries. In addition to all the reading we had both done, Howie had regularly traveled to France for more research. He pulled index cards from his pockets, prompts for the ideas he kept stored in his mind, but encouraged me to write it all down.

“Each flower, gesture, or accessory was like a prop from a play, all meaningless unless you know what these people were thinking and reading, and I do.” Howie leaned forward in his seat. “Think of the tapestries as a stage that has been pushed flat against the wall, like bleachers in a gymnasium.”

“You read the article by James Rorimer that proclaimed he had solved the mystery of the tapestries, right?” he asked me. “Remember that squirrel he said was a symbol related to Anne of Brittany?” Howie’s eyes flickered. “The squirrel is a hidden portrait of Jean Fouquet, one of the artists.”

I frowned and swiveled toward my computer to look up Jean Fouquet while Howie explained that fouquet meant “squirrel” in the language once spoken around Tours.

“Fouquet died in 1480, way too early to have worked on the tapestries,” I barked at Howie. I feared he was using the tapestries like a giant Rorschach test, seeing symbols in ways that could never be proved or disproved, and I tried to swat away the ideas I thought strayed too far.

Howie smiled and opened his binder. He leafed through the laminated pages, then turned the binder around. “How do you explain that?”

I looked at a color photocopy of a manuscript illumination by Fouquet of a castle encircled by swans, a castle very similar to the one behind the group of royals in the tapestries. Guardsmen peeked out from the crenellations, and there was a lady locked in the tower.

“Several artists worked on the tapestries, and they borrowed designs done for other works and recycled them.”

Howie squinted his eyes to see the time in the corner of my computer screen, then stood up to leave and go change into his uniform.

“God bless you,” he always said as he gently closed my office door.

*

Before he was the Met’s director, Thomas Campbell was known among his colleagues as Tapestry Tom.

Campbell’s 2002 entry in the Tapestries and the Renaissance catalogue summarized the scholarship concerning the one unicorn as an allegory for Christ’s Passion. I asked Campbell, who is now director and CEO of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, for his take on Howie’s proposal that the Unicorn Tapestries were a repository of symbols used to teach young members of the royal court. He hesitated, then said no—not because it would be outside the realm of possibility, but because the Unicorn Tapestries are among the finest sets of tapestries of their time.

“It is among the greatest visual poems that I know. It is alluring and elusive like the unicorn itself,” said Campbell. “I have no doubt that people will be spinning stories and interpretation for generations to come.”

However, Scott Miller, the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Met, said yes. Court artists in fifteenth-century France were multimedia artists. Mystery plays and court spectacles were part of the common visual culture and “developed mutually informing visual tropes.” A court painter would work on everything—panel paintings, sculpture, interior decorations, pennants for processions, theater sets, tableaux vivants and tapestry designs.

Miller described how the owners of the extremely expensive Unicorn Tapestries would have seen them infrequently. They would have been kept wrapped in canvas and stored in padlocked boxes where the silk, gold, and silver threads couldn’t be reached by greedy fingers. There are records of shipments of tapestries from stockpiles kept at major castles that track with the locations of the dukes and barons who owned them. Tapestries would be on display during grand events and public spectacles, mixed and matched to communicate whatever propaganda needed to be told.

The Unicorn Tapestries would have appealed to the tastes of the late-medieval ruling class in France, who loves the marvelous and the strange. The story of a mysterious creature from a faraway land could also “privilege playfulness and ambiguity in the visual arts, aspects that flatter the wits of viewers by presenting visual puzzles that are difficult to unravel,” Miller said.

If the tapestries were displayed at a betrothal ceremony, they would be read far differently than if they were shown on Easter. Court poets would have understood the literary references, pious nuns would have adored the Passion, and ordinary citizens in the cheap seats might have reveled in a violent unicorn hunt.

Miller believes that to better understand the tapestries, we must stop looking only at the weavings and look at the environment in which they existed, from the locked boxes where they spent most of their time to the political and social spectacles where they would have been used strategically.

*

Hank Martinez shared the night shift with Howie for fifteen years.

“We were like monks—unmarried men, going around in circles in the dark,” said Hank, dissolving into laughter. “ The only thing is there was no silence vow. We talked a lot and listened to music.”

Before supervisors watched everyone’s activity on cameras, night guards carried small radios or reading lamps. Howie had a boom box that he stored in his overflowing locker.

One evening, Hank told me, Howie waited until seven, when everyone in the tower was surely gone, then carried the boom box upstairs into the gallery, where a twelfth-century Romanesque apse from Spain had been transplanted to the Cloisters. He had already placed a CD inside, Polish composer Henryk Górecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs.

Hank was at his assigned post in the main hall when he heard music coming from the gallery.

He sighed, tucked a piece of paper into his book, and walked halfway from the oak desk to where he could see Howie dancing in the bit of light that stretched toward the apse from the adjacent gallery.

Howie raised his arms straight out from the sides.

Hank lifted his flashlight to the crucifix hanging overhead, a spotlight on Christ’s face suspended in darkness.

Howie dropped to his knees, like a priest bowing down before the Holy Sacrament. He sat down on his heels then rolled gently to the ground and lay flat on his back.

“Come on, Hank!” he called out from the floor.

Hank carefully lowered himself to the ground, flopped over, and gave in to the mystical experience that Howie had engineered. A private concert for two, lying on their backs, as a soprano’s voice soared through a twelfth-century apse.

Every night, Howie inspected the director’s office at the top of the tower. He would always call Hank at his post, urging him to come upstairs to see a beautiful sunset or a blood moon. On 9/11, he told Hank he saw Mars in the sky—of course, the god of war. Howie was always looking for connections.

Over fifteen years, Hank heard all of Howie’s ideas about the tapestries. They discussed it over dinner in the break room, looking at the pictures in the book sold in the gift shop. Whenever Howie found something new, he’d use his flashlight to illuminate that corner of the unicorn’s forest for Hank before they returned to their assigned posts.

Hank and Howie walked home together at the end of their shifts. The stairs down to Dyckman Street were the quickest route, but they chose the much longer horseshoe path because it gave them more time to talk. Yellow light burned inside the lamps that lined the park paths, making it feel like they were walking through the foliage of the tapestries.

On their walks home, they discussed the religion and philosophy, but their favorite topic was the first century in Alexandria. They imagined how thrilling it would be time-travel there and see the intermingling of religious beliefs and ideas, the beginning and end of things from which so much of our heritage comes, in ways that we can no longer understand.

“We have a canonical version of how these things went,” Hank said, “but we can’t really ever know.”

Once, when they left the museum at the beginning of a snowstorm, Hank left the first tracks, all very close together as he tried not to slip and fall. Howie, more than twenty years his senior, ran straight out, yelling wahooo, then turned to his side and surfed down the powder paths.

One evening, Howie called the shift supervisor to let him know he would submit his retirement papers. The other guards didn’t even have the chance to throw him a customary goodbye party, with bottles of soda, cupcakes, and a tray of macaroni and cheese. A rumor spread that he had cancer.

Hank doesn’t look at the Unicorn Tapestries anymore. He had had no great interest in them before meeting Howie, and without his friend to light them up, the tapestries became opaque.

*

“I forgot what you look like,” Howie said to me on the phone. “So I put ‘Jusepe de Ribera’ into Google and there you were!”

Hank told me that Howie had moved to the Midwest to live with family. I imagined his eyes twinkling above his shaggy beard and, though he explained that a minor stroke had aged him, his baritone voice was still round with joy. He tried to push away the rest of questions about his health and location and began swimming in the perfect picture of the tapestries he held in his mind.

“Let’s pick up where we left off,” he suggested.

Howie shared a greater intimacy with the Unicorn Tapestries than perhaps anyone in their history. Over twenty-four years, he reveled in the mysteries that are an inextricable piece of their history. In them, he found allegories and metaphors for his own life.

“Can you take one more story?” Howie asked.

He told me about a trip to Paris twenty years ago, and a visit to the Louvre. It was near the end of the day and he needed to use the bathroom, but decided to have one last look at the late medieval galleries. He discovered the self-portrait of Jean Fouquet that he had seen in many books but hadn’t realized was kept at the Louvre. He looked directly into his eyes.

“It blew my mind,” Howie explained. “I said to him, Jean, nobody knows what you gave the human race, but I know, I’m on the trail, and I’m gonna finish your job. I walked away and I started to cry.”

Howie remembered he had a flask of cognac with him. He walked back to the portrait, then looked right and left to make sure no security guards were watching him.

“Here’s to us, Jean,” he said just before he took a swig. And he swore that he would never rest until Jean’s name got out there.

 

Danielle Oteri is the founder of Arthur Avenue Food Tours and Feast on History Food & Wine School. Her work has appeared on BBC Travel, NPR, Conde Nast Traveler, Gothamist, Grove Dictionary of Art, Roads & Kingdoms and the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s blog. 

Redux: You Would If

Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter.

José Saramago. Photo: Sampinz at Italian Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/...), via Wikimedia Commons.

This week, The Paris Review is celebrating the birthdays of three different writers. Read on for José Saramago’s Art of Fiction interview, Isaac Bashevis Singer’s short story “The Murderer,” and Margaret Atwood’s poem “Frogless.”

If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? Or take advantage of our new subscription bundle, bringing you four issues of the print magazine, access to our full sixty-seven-year digital archive, and our new TriBeCa tote for only $69 (plus free shipping!). And for as long as we’re flattening the curve, The Paris Review will be sending out a new weekly newsletter, The Art of Distance, featuring unlocked archival selections, dispatches from the Daily, and efforts from our peer organizations. Read the latest edition here, and then sign up for more.

 

José Saramago, The Art of Fiction No. 155

Issue no. 149, Winter 1998

In the end, I am quite normal. I don’t have odd habits. I don’t dramatize. Above all, I do not romanticize the act of writing. I don’t talk about the anguish I suffer in creating. I do not have a fear of the blank page, writer’s block, all those things that we hear about writers. I don’t have any of those problems, but I do have problems just like any other person doing any other type of work. Sometimes things do not come out as I want them to, or they don’t come out at all. When things do not come out as well as I would have liked, I have to resign myself to accepting them as they are.

 

 

The Murderer

By Isaac Bashevis Singer

Issue no. 228, Spring 2019

They all knew him although no one in Bałtów spoke to him and he spoke to no one. Maryan Skiba had served a prison term of eight years for killing his girlfriend, Zocha, because he caught her in bed with a city hall official. Maryan was a fisherman. After his release from the Lublin prison he returned to his former trade. There was a lake around Bałtów that had carp, pike, and tench. It belonged to a nobleman who permitted the fishermen to fish there for a fee. All day Thursday, and Friday until noon, Maryan would stand in the marketplace beside his tub of live fish. It was impossible to haggle with him, as he had almost ceased speaking. He muttered the cost and no one could get another word out of him. His price was slightly lower than the other fishmongers’ and he generally sold his catch. Sometimes when there were more fish than customers, the others lowered their prices, but not Maryan. It was said that he threw the unsold fish back into the water.

 

 

Frogless

By Margaret Atwood

Issue no. 117, Winter 1990

The sore trees cast their leaves

too early. Each twig pinching

shut like a jabbed clam.

Soon there will be a hot gauze of snow

searing the roots.

Booze in the spring runoff,

pure antifreeze;

the stream worms drunk and burning.

Tadpoles wrecked in the puddles.

Here comes an eel with a dead eye

grown from its cheek.

Would you cook it?

You would if …

 

And to read more from the Paris Review archives, make sure to subscribe! In addition to four print issues per year, you’ll also receive complete digital access to our sixty-seven years’ worth of archives. Or take advantage of our new subscription bundle, bringing you four issues of the print magazine, access to our full sixty-seven-year digital archive, and our new TriBeCa tote for only $69 (plus free shipping!).

No Walk Is Ever Wasted

André Breton. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

What are the politics of walking in the city? What are its poetics?

In Nadja (1928), André Breton’s great surrealist novel, his autobiographical narrator at one point describes bringing a pile of books to a bar where he has made an arrangement to meet Nadja herself, who is fast becoming the object of his strange, not to say obsessive libidinal and spiritual investments. This pile of books includes a copy of Les pas perdus (1924), The Lost Steps, Breton’s first collection of essays, which he no doubt brings, along with the first Manifesto of Surrealism (1924), in an attempt both to educate her and aggrandize himself. “Lost steps?” Nadja exclaims on seeing its title. “But there’s no such thing!”

There’s no such thing as lost steps! If one were to search for the principle that epitomizes what, in an echo of the title of a book by the late Marshall Berman, might be called “modernism in the streets,” one could probably find it in this exclamation. It informs the writings of all those authors who consistently sought to make the cities with which they were familiar seem new or strange by traversing them aimlessly, sometimes desperately, on foot, in a state of heightened susceptibility to the relentless stimuli of the streets. But it is also a doctrine that, almost a century later, still resonates in the cities of today.

Certainly, it is the article of faith according to which, as a committed, even devout pedestrian, I like to live. No walk, as far as I am concerned, is ever wasted. In contrast, for example, to a car journey. In a city—especially one dominated by cars, by individualistic rather than collective, private rather than public modes of transport—it is walking that habitually makes me feel alive. It makes me feel both vitally connected to the city’s ceaseless circuits of energy and, at the same time, delicately detached from them. Stimulant, then, and narcotic.

In the twenty-first century, in cities that are the site of acutely disorienting cycles of creative destruction, where pedestrians are increasingly inured to the environment they more and more mechanically inhabit, not least because of their dependence on the technology of smartphones and other handheld devices, we need another modernism of the streets. And we need to celebrate some of those embattled individuals for whom, in the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries, at the high tide of industrial modernity, this activity was a sort of spiritual imperative; a vocation.

*

There’s no such thing as lost steps … Nadja does a lot of loitering on the streets of Paris, so her reaction to the title of Breton’s essay collection, which I take to be spontaneously triumphant rather than merely defensive, is understandable. If you wander around the city, or hang about at street corners, things happen.

Of course, people might think as a result that you’re a pimp or a prostitute or some other undesirable, and if you’re a woman you’ll be especially exposed to demeaning assumptions of this sort; but things still happen. With any luck, in fact, you might encounter a surrealist, as Nadja does. Or, thirty or forty years later, a situationist. These avant-gardists are committed to the idea that it is the street, above all other venues, that provides what Breton, in the essay that opens Les pas perdus, calls the “surprising detours” that shape a life in the conditions of capitalist modernity.

“The street, with its cares and its glances, was my true element,” Breton declares: “there I could test like nowhere else the winds of possibility.” The street, site of the most routine practicalities, such as shopping, is also a social laboratory in which all sorts of utopian potentialities can be tested. The street is the domain of the trivial; but—as the etymological origin of this word suggests, derived from the Latin for a place at which three roads meet, typically at the volatile margins of the city where immigrants of all kinds congregate and circulate—it is also a site of dynamic social experiment. It is a point of intersection, criss-crossed with restless feet, bristling with creative possibilities for collective life.

Breton, it can safely be assumed, agrees with Nadja that there are no lost steps. For her, as he formulates it in a sentence that Walter Benjamin later cited as the epigraph to his essay on “Marseilles” (1929), the streets are “the only region of valid experience” (“la rue, pour elle seul champ d’expérience valable”). And walking, implicitly, is the only valid means of traversing this region or, better, “field” of experience (it is surely important, paradoxically, not to erase the ancient pastoral associations of this phrase). More specifically, that errant, meandering form of walking that is often classified as wandering is the only valid means of traversing this field of experience.

Like other surrealists, and indeed like other modernists of every stripe, Breton believed that the footstep, as Michael Sheringham puts it, is the “emblem of the free everyday.” The footstep is an opportunity to escape the logic of abstraction, the logic of exchange-value constitutive of those modes of transport with which, in the industrial metropolis, the walker must compete, from automobiles to buses to trains. Every footfall, then, in contrast to the revolution of a set of wheels that travels along roads or tracks, is an adventure. A flight. It is open to “surprising detours.” And it is, at the same time, a faint imprint, on the pavements and other surfaces of the city, of these necessarily individual escapades.

It is in this sense that the lost steps shaping the essays in Breton’s Les pas perdus are not in fact lost steps at all. They are affirmations of the surrealist’s freedom simply to drift through the streets and through the corridors of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century French literature, opening himself up to the everyday excitements of chance experience. The polemics, reviews, and sketches of comrades associated with Dadaism and surrealism that comprise Les pas perdus don’t go anywhere immediately obvious. They are diversions, meaning both deviations from the predictable or prescribed route and distractions. Recreational distractions that, as deviations from normative expectations, are in some fundamental sense re-creational …

In so far as Breton’s collection, both its title and its surrealist spirit, was subsequently “modified in the guts of the living,” to echo Auden’s poem about Yeats, it certainly proved creative and regenerative: the Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier’s Los pasos perdidos (1953), The Lost Steps, in some respects a postcolonial critique of surrealism, brilliantly explores not only what it means to get lost in the jungle but also just how difficult it is both to move on foot in the streets of a city and to live according to the “laws of collective motion” that prevail in them. As individual pedestrians, isn’t this what we are all trying to do in our everyday lives? Aren’t we fighting, in effect, to coordinate the city’s “laws of collective motion”? Like a conductor who arrives at their podium halfway through the fourth movement of the symphony?

Les pas perdus includes the account of an adventure Breton and Louis Aragon had on a Parisian street when, to absolutely no narrative consequence, they became intrigued by an enigmatic and oddly disorientated woman. This passante, the object of those “cares” and “glances” apparently legitimated, in a patriarchal society, by the sight lines and the sexual-political dynamics of the street, is a Baudelairean passerby who unlike Nadja resists with considerable insouciance the surrealists’ more or less predatory attempts to recruit her to their schemes. Refusing to audition for the part of Nadja the two men are effectively hoping to cast, this anonymous woman ignores or, still more gloriously, remains completely unconscious of them: “Louis Aragon and André Breton,” the piece concludes, “unable to give up the idea of finding the key to the riddle, searched through part of the sixth arrondissement—but in vain.”

But Breton’s article, titled “The New Spirit” and first published in 1922 in the surrealist periodical Littérature, is itself proof that their search was not in vain. For the surrealists, all experiences on the streets take the form of experiments, and no experiments are unsuccessful. Furthermore, if the point of this sketch is that it goes nowhere, Breton himself was clearly confident that he was going somewhere. The essays and fragments collected in Les pas perdus, which announce an arrival and a departure, function as important preparatory exercises. After all, the Manifesto of Surrealism, representing a signal departure for the avant-garde, appeared in the same year. There are no lost steps.

In French, the phrase pas perdus, “lost steps,” recalls the phrase salle des pas perdus—the common, peculiarly rich name for the waiting room of a railway station. At once drearily prosaic and poignantly poetic, it evokes the aimless, restless pacing of those who kill time before the departure of their train, tracing a circular, almost self-canceling movement that collapses walking into waiting, the active into the passive. But, read with a different inflection, the phrase les pas perdus can also mean “the not lost.” It connotes the unlost (the poet Paul Celan once referred to himself, in a beautiful if painful formulation, as “unlost amid the losses”).

Breton’s essay collection is, then, about an intellectual and spiritual elect: Apollinaire, Duchamp, Jarry, Lautréamont, Rimbaud, Vaché, et cetera. This elect, moreover, which is comprised of the not-lost, or the sort-of-saved, is implicitly recruited from the ranks of those who aimlessly pace the streets in pursuit of adventure. Wanderers. Fugueurs. For Breton, and for friends such as Aragon and Philippe Soupault, themselves the authors of fine surrealist novels driven by the logic of what the situationists will subsequently call the dérive, or psychogeographic “drift,” people who loiter or pace or wander are precisely not lost. On the contrary, they are preoccupied, consciously or unconsciously, with finding themselves.

And they do find themselves—in contrast, for example, to the inhabitants of that infernal cylindrical salle des pas perdus at the center of Samuel Beckett’s The Lost Ones (1970), where the tortured relationship between waiting and walking acquires both mathematical and mythical overtones. Beckett’s vision is shaped in part by Dante’s account of the dead massed on the banks of the Acheron in the third canto of the Inferno. Perhaps it is also a recollection of the night he spent in the waiting room of Nuremberg station in 1931, an incident that informed a scene in his novel Watt (1953). Certainly, it is a vision of the damned: “Abode where lost bodies roam each searching for its lost one.”

Breton’s more redemptive vision is of the not-damned. Those who, like him, inhabit the immense salle des pas perdus that is the metropolitan city might look like lost bodies, lost souls, but they are secretly the chosen ones. For they discover the marvelous in the everyday, reveal enchantment in the disenchanted spaces of urban life, find redemption in everyday forms of perdition. No doubt there are lost soles in the city, just as there are discarded gloves such as the one Breton’s autobiographical narrator fetishizes in Nadja; but there are no lost souls. The street redeems everyone. Indeed, its least bourgeois inhabitants, the bohemians, bums, and criminals, are for Breton and the other surrealists its saints and martyrs.

In the city, then, for the surrealists and other “modernists of the street,” every aimless step counts—precisely because it cannot be counted. The more aimless the better … The American novelist Henry Miller, who made the streets of Paris his home throughout the thirties, offers an almost programmatic statement about the opportunities that open up to those who drift through the city on foot when, on the opening page of his novel Black Spring (1936), he announces that “to be born on the street”—as he himself claims he was because of his origins in working-class Brooklyn—“means to wander all your life, to be free.” “It means accident and incident, drama, movement,” he elaborates. “It means above all dream. A harmony of irrelevant facts which gives to your wandering a metaphysical certitude.”

 

Matthew Beaumont is a professor in the department of English at University College, London. He is the author of Utopia Ltd.: Ideologies of Social Dreaming in England 1870–1900(2005) and the coauthor, with Terry Eagleton, of The Task of the Critic: Terry Eagleton in Dialogue (2009). He has edited or coedited several collections of essays: As Radical as Reality Itself: Essays on Marxism and Art for the 21st Century; The Railway and Modernity: Time, Space, and the Machine Ensemble; Adventures in Realism; and Restless Cities.

From The Walker: On Finding and Losing Yourself in the Modern City, by Matthew Beaumont. Used with the permission of the publisher, Verso Books. Copyright © 2020 by Matthew Beaumont.

We Are Built to Forget

Sarah Stone, Sir Ashton Lever’s Museum, 1785 (State Library of New South Wales)

When Raymond Carver died, he left a folded paper in his pocket, a list of what he did not want to forget:

eggs

peanut butter

hot chocolate

Australia?

Antarctica

*

My old friend Robin called last week to tell me that our high school classmate was reminiscing about being on the basketball team with me.

“You have to be kidding,” I laughed. “Can you picture me playing basketball?”

“Well,” my friend said. “You did. I can send you photographs from the yearbook. You were on the team all three years until you got kicked out of school. You weren’t any good at it. Graceful but no killer instinct.”

So, apparently, I was on the high school basketball team for three years until I was expelled from school, a pregnant sixteen-year-old girl. How is that something I could forget? The forgetting causes me great unease. I don’t want to see the photographs.

*

We remember and we forget. Lots of people know that marijuana makes us forget, and researchers in the sixties and seventies wanted to understand how. They discovered that the human brain has special receptors that perfectly fit psychoactive chemicals like THC, the active agent in cannabis. But why, they wondered, would we have neuroreceptors for a foreign substance? We don’t. Those receptors are for substances produced in our own brains. The researchers discovered that we produce cannabinoids, our own version of THC, that fit those receptors exactly. The scientists had stumbled onto the neurochemical function of forgetting, never before understood. We are designed, they realized, not only to remember but also to forget. The first of the neurotransmitters discovered was named anandamide, Sanskrit for bliss.

*

The morning light through the dusty old screens is fractured into tiny squares across the table. My grandmother, Twila, and my brother and I are the only ones awake. My parents and my sister and my brother and my grandmother’s old mother and her sisters and their husbands sleep on sagging beds and sofa beds and cots in all the rooms in the tilted little camp my grandmother rents each summer. The lake is silver. I have yanked my bathing suit from the line and pulled it, cold and still wet from last night, up over my warm skin. I am very young, maybe five, and I love this place and my grandmother and my parents and the sleeping people and the silver lake and the hatched yellow light on the old table.

Twila comes and stands close to me. She peels the skin from a ripe peach with her small knife, then cradles the fruit in her palm and slices glistening sections into my bowl. Thick golden juice drips between her fingers onto the table. She pours milk over the peach and pushes the bowl gently toward me.

I said “parents.” Was my father there? I think so. But there is no way to know. What I remember is the peach.

*

People suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder are often unable to forget the causative trauma. What if we could simply erase that moment, expunge it as if it never happened? Researchers are working to develop drugs that will mimic the cannabinoids produced in the brain, pharmaceuticals that will find their way to those waiting receptors and lock in—click—a perfect fit. Release from memory. Oblivion. Bliss.

Scientists with hard hearts can create mice with unusually high and unusually low levels of cannabinoids. In one experiment, the mice were subjected to a loud sound followed by an electric shock to their feet. The mice with low levels of cannabinoids remembered what was coming. An echo in their tiny brains warned them of harm on its way. They froze at the loud sound, with apparent dread. But the mice with high levels of cannabinoids didn’t freeze. The shock that followed was news each time. Which is the blessing—the memory of pain and with it the dread, the ability to make adjustments to keep ourselves safe? Or the bliss of forgetting, never imagining the harm that is coming?

*

There are not many stories to tell:

My parents divorced when I was ten.

My father, unsurprisingly, was absent before and after.

Unsurprisingly, I loved him.

I got pregnant when I was sixteen. It was 1965.

I was expelled from school.

My mother kicked me out.

My father and his new wife took me in.

My baby was given away.

Later, I argued with my father’s wife.

She kicked me out, a permanent exile from my silent father.

I was ten, I was sixteen, I was nineteen. Now I am sixty-five. All of this was a long time ago.

There.  I have named everything you need to know.  I have told these stories in other places, for other reasons, and am reluctant to say them again. I was on a basketball team. I am simply looking for that lost fragment.

I still can smell the peach. My grandmother’s voice, silent for thirty years. What was she saying to me? Did she say, Don’t be afraid? Did she say, Hush, everyone who loves you is sleeping? Did she say, Remember these hands cutting this ripe peach for you. This moment is important.

*

I also remember:

My mother said, “Well. You can’t stay here. Get out.”

My baby cried, a call I hear still like an echo from a distant mountain.

My father’s wife said, “Don’t you ever come to our house again.”

My father said nothing.

*

We need to forget. Imagine remembering every fractional moment of every morning, as you showered, fed your children or made your coffee, pulled the door closed and turned the key. Like bad narrative writing, every moment would be equally important, the golden juice dripping through fingers as significant as walking out of my high school in shame one cold winter day. What meaning could we make if every second asked for our full attention?

We must forget in order to make room for remembering. We now have a metaphor for this process: delete. Here is oblivion. But here, too, is our hunger to know the full story. Our forgetting is the saboteur of that hope. I was on a basketball team with friends and classmates for three years. If we practiced or played games for one hundred twenty minutes five days of the week, for ten weeks of the season, where are those eighteen thousand minutes?

Maybe we are lucky if we produce a lot of cannabinoids. Wash the brain with forgetting. But what happens if we delete what lies near the center of our story? I remember, one day, running to the girls’ room to throw up again after lunch in the cafeteria. I remember moving past the school nurse, hunching over my five-month belly. Somehow later I was at her desk, and somehow I had in my hand a green expulsion card. I have it still, so I know this is memory, not fiction. I remember taking my mittens and jacket from my locker, walking down the long quiet hall, linoleum and echo, and past the big window in the office. The secretaries stared at me. I don’t remember any of their names. I remember the long walk home, and I remember terror. I remember a giving in, an understanding that this, finally, here, was the beginning of something too big and too sad.

And yet, I played basketball in high school as my secret belly swelled.

*

The Lakota of our Northern Plains kept “winter counts,” large pieces of buffalo hide or cloth on which the count keeper painted lists of images, each representing one event that marked the year. They recorded unusual weather, tribal interactions, births and deaths. Each winter, the count keeper consulted elders who chose the symbol they would use in that year. The event chosen was not necessarily the most important occasion of the year, but the most memorable. In 1701, a man was wounded in the side by an arrow while he hunted buffalo. In 1833, stars shot across the predawn sky. In 1889, a woman walked to a river many miles away. Each year, the keeper repainted every fading image, a holding out against forgetting.

*

I had forgotten all of it. No, I had remembered it, but all wrong. My father’s new house. Me, his daughter, ten, maybe twelve years old. The house my father built for his new wife was large, a vision of glass, its roof a great wing. It was a house of passions. My father and his wife disappeared for hushed afternoons into their room upstairs, or heaved chunks of firewood across the room at each other. “Catherine!” my father once called out to the night woods. “Christ, Catherine! For Christ’s sake! Come back inside this minute! There are bears out there!” The land was wild, the glistening lake far away, down a shaded slope. A cardinal flower, the first I had ever seen, bloomed by the stream. I was a child, encountering unrestrained love and untamed beauty for the first time.

Last summer, I found my way on a web of dirt roads back to that New Hampshire lake. My family has been gone from this place for forty years. Whoever spends summers there now was away for the winter. Tarps covered lawn mowers and molding firewood and piles of old bikes. I had remembered it all wrong. The house was small, badly crafted, its roof a rain funnel rotting the walls, and the slope to the lake short and steep. The door was canted, stuck but unlocked. I pushed my way into the dark.

In the corner were the raised bunk and little desk below that my father had once built for me. I had forgotten. The paint he laid on, bright blue, a gift, still holding.

I remembered everything wrong—too big, too wild, too beautiful. But what I did not remember was here, perfectly preserved. Longing. Dread of something terrible coming. Father. Father. Father.

*

When I was twelve, Mr. and Mrs. Jameson asked me to babysit their daughters, four and two years old, every Saturday night. I came to feel something like love for the girls. The Jamesons lived near the beach in a modern apartment above their garage, the rooms flashy and urban in our ordinary little town. Each time Mr. and Mrs. Jameson walked down the outside stairs to their big car waiting below, I felt that something in this house was not good. They were handsome, eager to be gone, speaking to each other of the night ahead, not seeming to see their children, who watched them silently. I was kind to their daughters. I felt sorry for them, although I could not say why.

One night fire trucks raced past my house toward the beach. In the morning someone at school told me that Mr. and Mrs. Jameson had escaped a fire. The girls got caught in their room, waiting, perhaps, for their beautiful and distracted parents to come through the smoke for them. My mother never spoke to me about these little girls dying, and so no story was ever made. I cannot remember their names, their faces, their legs that must have stretched along mine when we played games on the floor. I only remember the long stairs down to the ground, the car facing away, the swish of dress coats, his hand on her elbow.

*

In 1806, the Leverian Museum in London, an enormous wunderkammer, or chamber of wonders, sold its entire collection. These chambers of wonder emerged during the Renaissance as precursors to museums. Wealthy men collected curious and wondrous artifacts and exhibited them, displaying their personal sense of taste to the world. Enormous buildings with dozens of crowded exhibition rooms, they were sometimes called memory theaters. The Leverian auction listed:

1052    Curious cast of an ammonite

1056    Pine cone in an iron nobule

1078    Elegant oval agate cup

1080    Large jaspachtes snuff-box, mounted

5401    Large sleeping stool, and a meat dish

5412    An idol carved in fine green stone; a syrinx, and another

5419    A most superb feather hat

5420    Black spotted snake

5425    Curious egg, one shell being formed within the other.

*

One day I drove five hours to my father and Catherine’s house, a house where my sister and brother often slept, a house I had never seen. No one was home. I saw:

A rusted wheelbarrow leaned against a barn

Half-full bird feeders

Dog’s water bowl on a porch

A chair by the fireplace; a man’s brown sweater on the arm

Binoculars on a windowsill

A note in Catherine’s hand, taped to the door: Albie, please check the sump pump

A large table for eating, with mail and magazines, chair pushed away.

*

Solomon Shereshevsky, “S,” was a Russian journalist working in the early 1900s who could memorize vast amounts of information and recall it years later. Every number, every word embedded in his memory as an image. Thymesis: Greek for remembering. Hyperthymesis: extreme memory. He scored in the average range for intelligence and was socially shy and awkward. But S could, in a few minutes, memorize vast lists of complex mathematical formulas or poems in a language he did not speak. No one was ever able to present S with a memory test he failed. He became a celebrity, performing his curious feats in public. But S perceived too much and could forget nothing. He had trouble recognizing familiar faces or voices on the phone because he observed every detail of expression; even slight changes in tone or emotion made it difficult for him to recognize the person as someone he had previously known. His life as a performing mnemonist created great distress and confusion in his life, and he finally chose to abandon the stage. Tormented with his inability to forget, he tried writing everything down, everything, and burning it all, a systematic deleting.  It didn’t work.

S said, “The things I see when I read aren’t real, they don’t fit the context. If I’m reading the description of some place, for some reason the main rooms always turn out to be those in the apartment I lived in as a child.” Is it always about home? A peach in the hand of a grandmother. A mother, turning away. A small blue desk a father made for his child. A sweater tossed across his chair.

Another man who remembered too much, VP, memorized, when he was five years old, a map of all the streets in his city of Riga, Latvia, and its rail and bus timetables. As an adult, VP could play up to seven matches of chess simultaneously, blindfolded, and at least sixty correspondence games of chess with no notes. He could recall long lists of nonsense syllables and vast sequences of numbers.

Frederic Bartlett was an early researcher in neuropsychology. He believed that there was more to memory than recording and retrieving details. He wrote a fable with subtle illogics and non sequiturs, and invited subjects to read it. No matter how many times they were invited to read the story, when they were asked to repeat it, they forgot Bartlett’s fable and, inevitably, changed the specifics to fit their own knowledge and experience.

But VP made no such revisions. He was able, after two readings, to recite it perfectly. Asked again several years later, he still could recite the story in perfect detail. 

“The War of the Ghosts,” by Frederic Bartlett:

One night two young men from Egulac went down to the river to hunt seals, and while they were there it became foggy and calm. Then they heard war-cries, and they thought: “Maybe this is a war-party.” They escaped to the shore, and hid behind a log. Now canoes came up, and they heard the noise of paddles, and saw one canoe coming up to them. There were five men in the canoe, and they said: “What do you think? We wish to take you along. We are going up the river to make war on the people.” One of the young men said: “I have no arrows.” “Arrows are in the canoe,” they said. “I will not go along. I might be killed. My relatives do not know where I have gone. But you,” he said, turning to the other, “may go with them.” So one of the young men went, but the other returned home. And the warriors went on up the river to a town on the other side of Kalama. The people came down to the water, and they began to fight, and many were killed. But presently the young man heard one of the warriors say: “Quick, let us go home: that Indian has been hit.” Now he thought: “Oh, they are ghosts.” He did not feel sick, but they said he had been shot. So the canoes went back to Egulac, and the young man went ashore to his house, and made a fire. And he told everybody and said: “Behold I accompanied the ghosts, and we went to fight. Many of our fellows were killed, and many of those who attacked us were killed. They said I was hit, and I did not feel sick.” He told it all, and then became quiet. When the sun rose he fell down. Something black came out of his mouth. His face became contorted. The people jumped up and cried. He was dead.

VP told and retold this illogical story over many years, changing nothing. He was unable to delete even nonsensical details, to carve out a story that reflected a sense of his own life and understandings. Denied the gift of forgetting, the stories he retold were memory lists, useless details without meaning.

*

I have written and written about a baby I walked away from in a very large building with too many rooms.

Readers ask me, “How do you remember so much?”

I am surprised. What I remember is so acute. I write memory. “It’s all movies in my head,” I say. “I just look at the movies. What do you remember?”

But, apparently, my father made a small desk and painted it blue. The smoke rises, obscuring my mother’s face.

*

I am in the village of Kyparissi on the Peloponnese in Greece. It is nearly midnight. I have entered the cemetery behind the big church, drawn by one hundred flickering lights. I feel like a trespasser, but I am astonished by what I see, and I want to stay. Every tomb—each a great block of white marble—has a small oil lantern on it, and every one is lit. By whom? Who comes here as the night draws in and lights a match to these lamps? Such an attentive remembrance.

Beside each lamp is a photograph of the deceased person, and usually a vase of fresh flowers. His or her name is cut into a wooden cross rising high above the tomb, and the age at death: eighty-nine, ninety-six, ninety-one. Old people, loved, held here in this graveyard against forgetting.

Ringing the base of each tomb and the outer walls of the cemetery are small marble boxes, the size of chests for traveling. Some have photographs, and lanterns. Some of the lanterns are lit. Bone boxes, I learn. Each family gets to keep their loved one in a tomb for five years. Then, the bones are moved to a bone box to make way for the next villager’s body.

And then what? The problem is clear: there isn’t enough room for everyone. In the end, the bones are moved to the bone house, a small whitewashed shed in the rear corner, tight against the old stuccoed walls. I make my way among the tombs in the flickering lamp light. Behind the door in the unlit shed is a marble bone box, lantern lighted, photograph smiling. I turn on my small flashlight. The floor is dirt. Gardening tools—rakes, shovels, clippers—are tossed in a pile by the door. In the middle, old cardboard boxes collapse in a pile. They are filled with long brown bones, memento mori, that lean into each other—thick thigh bones and arm bones. Inside the top box, two smooth skulls, tawny and dull, sit on a heap of small bones, hands and feet and ribs. Other memories stay, but a time comes when the body can be cast aside.

In the morning I return. I want to see the skulls in the searing Mediterranean light. But there is a woman cleaning a tomb, praying in a soft chant as she works. She shuffles through the gate. I am suddenly ashamed to be here. She approaches me, a tiny woman, and speaks rapidly in Greek. I can’t understand, I say. She takes my hands and holds them against her heart and weeps, looking into my eyes. Are we mothers, together here, our child gone? Daughters of a father, dead to us? Who has been lost?

*

My childhood home. The pink and yellow honeysuckle outside my bedroom window. My mother reads on her bed. Then evening comes. Then dark, and crickets sing.

*

The Leverian auction:

3721    Monster pig, with a proboscis

3722    Four monster chickens, with double heads

3728    Feet and hands of an Egyptian mummy

3729    Cat, found starved to death with a rat in its mouth

3731    Injection of a male subject, aged five years

3734    Leg and feet bones of a boy, whose feet and leg were burnt whilst he was in a state of lethargic sleep

3741    A human foetus, aged about six months

3762    Human hand, in the act of grasping.

*

Another man with an extraordinary brain, HM, died recently—on the same day of the year my mother died, December 5. My mother, who sent me away from her when I was a pregnant girl, my mother who remembered that story however she might, my mother who never spoke of what happened—whether she forgot or carried or rewrote the story, I will never know. HM suffered from perpetual amnesia all his life.  My father must also know some sort of perpetual amnesia. My father who must remember me as a girl. My father who knew me for nineteen years and then sent me away from him, my father who is now old and will soon die.

This other amnesiac, HM, Henry Gustav Molaison, suffered from severe and life-threatening epilepsy. On September 1, 1953, when he was twenty-seven, a surgeon performed experimental brain surgery to relieve the seizures, removing most of the hippocampus and the amygdala. The surgeon did not relieve the seizures. But he did discover the parts of the brain that allow short-term memories—the moments of our days—to be committed to long-term memory, the story. HM spent his life caught in the constant present, unable to remember breakfast or a friend’s visit or the beautiful music that had made him weep a moment before.

HM could recall all that was stored in his long-term memory before the surgery, and so he also lived in a constant past. A past unmitigated by the losses and joys that accrue over a lifetime. New experiences couldn’t call back to his early memories to revise his understanding of them. There could be no working toward wisdom. From twenty-seven until he died an old man, HM forgot everything. But then this: he often said that he was a happy man. Bliss.

 

*

My recollection of “The War of the Ghosts”:

A man and his new wife went to the shore. They built a big house with a roof like a wing above the water. But while they were there, the man’s children arrived. They slept in a bedroom below. There were no stairs to the place where the father and his wife talked above them. The man and his wife tangled together every day, fighting and whispering, fighting and kissing. One night the wife slammed the door and wandered among the bears in the black of night. The man yelled into the dark woods. She returned by morning and they kissed again. Later, the wife took the father away, so he said, but really he walked away with her. The daughter never saw him again, although the other children saw him often. The girl remembered everything. Now, she opens her mouth and stories come out, filled with the shadows of the forgotten.

*

Or maybe this:

A girl had a baby by a river that flowed into the sea. Her mother sent her away. She was frightened and alone. She left her baby there by the river in a big building made of many rooms. The child had to make his way without his mother, a boy warrior alone in a great canoe. Later, they met again, and they told each other all the stories they each had made, moment to moment. But the stories were like ghosts. All that existed was here, now.

*

I write. I hit delete. It disappears, but maybe it is not gone, and someone with great knowledge of digital encoding can still retrieve it. S, the Russian mnemonist, wanted desperately to be able to forget. When he tried to burn the endless lists, he could see in the flames words that triggered more words that triggered more words. “No,” he cried. “This is too much! Each word calls up images, they collide with one another, and the result is chaos. I can’t make anything out of this.” The past is always here, remembered or not.

Artists Doug Goodwin and Rebecca Baron wanted to see—to really see—what is lost when analog film is translated to digital form. A moment-to-moment translation of an average 35 mm film would require four hundred DVDs. What happens when all that information is reduced to a single DVD? A lot of information is left out.

Goodwin and Baron studied motion in their “Lossless” series, manipulating the compression of information and exposing the residual effects of that process. Lots of frames had to go. Most had to go. How do we see an uninterrupted flow of movement, then, if most of the image is missing? Using John Ford’s classic film The Searchers, starring John Wayne, Goodwin and Baron translated the analog film to digital form and then retrieved what was lost in the process. The result is a strange, beautiful run of smeared and melting images of men and horses tearing across a desert. We can make out the men, the horses, the churning legs and upraised cowboy arms brandishing guns. But the images fracture, hesitate, jolt, and smear again. What are we seeing? Memory. Most of the original images are allowed to be forgotten. That leaves a lot of emptied frames, blanks waiting to be written. Then, Goodwin says, “these frames look backward and forward in time to paint the resolved image … We toss out the keyframes and let the file try to connect the intermediate frames.”

What I see is whole sections of story tossed out, forgotten, and the ghosts of the forgotten, lingering. What was lost becomes visible, and it is beautiful.

*

My father’s voice was playful, silly, teasing.  I used to be able to hear him if I sat quietly and listened inwardly. That is gone now. When he dies, I will light the lantern, sweep the tomb, move the bones.

We are built to forget. I played on a basketball team. I walk the old route through the great chambers, retrieving all I have saved there. A cry from a baby. Juice from a peach. My mother’s book lying open, waiting for her to come in from her garden. Water flowing from the river through the lakes to the sea. An old man’s sweater on his chair. These vast rooms.

 

Meredith Hall is the author of the new novel Beneficence (Godine, 2020). Her memoir Without a Map was a New York Times best seller and named Best Book of the Year by Kirkus and BookSense. Her work has appeared in Five Points, The Gettysburg Review, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, the New York Times, and many other publications.