The Paris Review's Blog, page 171

Loneliness Is Other People

I’d never met Ian in person; we matched on a dating app in January, one week before he flew to China to start teaching cultural studies at a university in Hong Kong. We continued to message, and it was Ian who, on Valentine’s Day, first introduced me to the term social distancing. His school had recently moved to online learning, around the time that shops and restaurants began to shutter, and he was lonely; he described life in Hong Kong as a kind of super future, one in which the social fabric had broken down and citizens were living on a fault line. He lamented the impossibility of making new friends or dating in what he called the old analog style; he sent me an article from the South China Morning Post about the way we wither without touch. He appeared relatively cheerful, though, and he had come to embrace the life of an ascetic, running twenty kilometers a day through the verdant hills of Hong Kong and mastering his split-legged arm balance with the help of Fiji McAlpine, his virtual yoga instructor.

Back then the virus had seemed, to me at least, a threat unique to China. Social distancing would make a good novel title, I joked, never imagining that Americans would be doing the same in a matter of weeks, that the phrase would soon be joining so many others—community spread, an abundance of caution, flattening the curve. But then the book event for which I had driven to my mother’s Rhode Island summerhouse was canceled, and with it much of life in New York City, and while I was used to, even thrived on, long solitary stretches—the previous winter I had opted to seclude myself for sixty days, leading an existence that was almost indistinguishable from my existence now—the growing realization that this time around I had no choice gave rise to a powerful, panicky loneliness. Coronavirus and the isolation it imposed, coupled with uncertainty about the future, about how long such radical withdrawal would last, was the clearest distillation yet that, some four and a half years after my divorce, I was still utterly alone.

Let me be clear about the myriad ways in which I was luckier than most. As a writer and tutor in my late thirties, I wasn’t concerned about my own health or my own finances—as my boss had put it in an email, online education was one of the few industries that was actually thriving. My seventy-four-year-old mother was self-isolating in her native Australia, a country that seemed to be faring relatively well, and I had access to her house on the water and daily walks along the river. As I gorged myself on virus coverage, spending upwards of five hours a day refreshing the live feeds of the Washington Post and New York Times, I worried for the millions of workers who had lost their jobs, for the 750,000 New York City public schoolchildren who did not have enough to eat, for the fact that one day soon our health care workers would be performing triage in our hospitals. But recognition of one’s own good fortune does not keep loneliness at bay, and it was a new kind of pain to talk to my friends during my river walks and realize that while we were all lost and scared, they at least had access to another human being or two whom they could hold close at night.

I couldn’t bear the onslaught of social media posts about all the adorable quarantine activities that seemingly everyone I knew was undertaking with their partners and their children—making ravioli from scratch, reenacting famous paintings, mastering the art of kintsugi. I felt foolish when I sent increasingly heretical invitations to my coupled friends to join me by the seashore, and they wrote back kind but noncommittal text messages. I took perverse pleasure in newspaper articles about China’s spiking divorce rates, in increasingly desperate dispatches from parents who had failed at homeschool. Having a child to educate would have been nice, though: I had given myself until forty to fall in love again and thus hold off on single motherhood, and it was distressing to think that the eighteen months remaining had now shrunk to almost nothing. Worst of all, one of my two elderly cats, Oscar, was rapidly losing weight; the vet suspected intestinal lymphoma, but the tech was home with corona symptoms, and there was no one in the office who could administer an ultrasound.

“I’m lonely!” I wrote to Ian on Day 3. “(((HUG))),” he replied, which felt more comforting than you might think, and then, “I hear you, isolation sucks.” He himself was on Day 60, and he sent me a selfie of his quarantine beard, which was thick and coppery and set against his immaculate apartment, full of Aesop products and red lacquered furniture. He was heartened to hear that I liked his new look—the Hong Kongers had been largely unenthusiastic, he said, expecting more of a banker aesthetic from their expatriates. He also sent me, long before it was cool, a Surviving COVID playlist, with songs like “Let’s Move to the Country” and “No More Airplanes,” which made me laugh. Under normal circumstances the eight thousand miles between us might have seemed a bridge too far, but as the days passed, we corresponded more and more. He told me all about his family—the person who made barrels on the Mayflower was a direct ancestor—and his years abroad in Istanbul and Dublin; I told him all about my writing and my ailing cat. He often reached out during his usual breakfast of coffee and almonds, and eventually he proposed we do one of those “weird FaceTime first date things.” I agreed, stipulating that ordinarily I would never, and we set up a plan for that coming Friday—my Day 14 and his Day 71. I had the sense that Ian in real life was too wholesome for me, and too peripatetic, but I was really looking forward to it.

*

Unlike Ian, I had adopted a decidedly un-ascetic response to isolation. Yes, I had signed up for a free fifteen-day trial of YogaGlo and roasted twenty pounds of vegetables, but I was also sleeping till ten, developing a costly online shopping habit, and making my way through my mother’s freezer at an alarming rate, defrosting one by one those very items—a honey-baked ham, a blueberry tart, stewed peaches, and smoked whitefish—that just a month before I had deemed too weird or too unhealthy. I was also drinking with abandon, looking forward with rather too much urgency to my nightly gin and tonic, which I drank beneath a blanket on the deck at sunset and most often chased with half a bottle of wine. (Ian “wasn’t much of a drinker anymore,” he told me, but he had offered to partake of his nonalcoholic aromatic spirits for our date.) By the time the sun had sunk beneath the trees across the water, and I had caught up with the latest news alerts—“Italy surpasses China’s death toll, becoming world’s highest”; “New York tells nonessential workers to stay home”—I felt lackadaisical and hazy, and distinctly intrigued by the prospect of texting with one of the several men in my life with whom I was now fixed in time. Indeed, for the single among us, the advent of coronavirus was like the sudden silence in a game of musical chairs; in an instant, the people we were casually dating—many of whom we had already deemed incompatible, and no doubt vice versa—were the people we were stuck with.

Take, for instance, Paul, a painter with whom I first corresponded back in 2016 and whose name I have changed for obvious reasons, along with several other names in this essay. At the time, he had failed to follow up on not one but two dates, first because he’d lost my number while “reformatting his phone,” and next because he had “crushed his phone in the studio.”

“Wow, you sure do have a lot of phone problems!” I wrote, a message to which he replied some four years later when we finally matched again on Bumble. “He’s a contested figure for sure,” said my friend who knew him from the art world. “Slippery comes to mind? But he’s always been very nice to me.” Later, another mutual acquaintance would describe him as a “bottom feeder.”

Paul and I had seen each other twice before I’d unwittingly decamped to Rhode Island, encounters dominated by talk of Walter Benjamin and postcolonialism; every so often I tried to ask about his mother or his childhood, but the conversation always pivoted to Big Ideas. He looked like a very beautiful lesbian, to the point that I braced myself for a surprise when we first took off our clothes, and he was very serious and self-absorbed, thrice sending me unsolicited links to a short film he had made and asking for my feedback. When at last I did watch it, penning what I thought was a generous response, he didn’t reply for four days. (Some day, when this is all over, I’ll write a homage to Rebecca Solnit called “Men Send Their Art to Me.”)

Even so, I was wildly attracted to him, and I was disappointed when the Rhode Island university at which he taught predictably sent its students home and he texted to say he was no longer coming for the weekend. In the following week, he reached out every day or so, sending me more art to praise—“We started a sound cloud!”—and links to articles I had already read because, again, I was consuming five hours of coverage a day. His own response to the virus skewed toward the paranoid; he was forever demanding to know why Facebook was removing everyone’s COVID-19 posts, why the media wasn’t reporting on the bleakest epidemiological models, why a freight train’s worth of tanks was heading westward to the city on the Long Island Rail Road. Still sitting on the deck, I would sip my cocktail and text back encouragement and validation—as I looked out over the water, breathing in the night sky’s pinks and yellows, it was almost impossible to believe we were at war. On Day 8, stirred by fantasies of a doomsday tryst, I invited him to come self-isolate with me. “Thank you!” he wrote. “I may take you up on that when the cities fall apart.”

On other evenings I reached out to Steven, a sweet, hirsute creature who was arguably even less of a match than Paul. The previous summer, for our first and only date, he had asked me to meet him at an abandoned fire station he was transforming into a bar and hostel—its location was so suspect that my mother, who had driven me there, pulled into a McDonald’s parking lot and kept watch from afar. Over beers in the communal kitchen he struck me as wayward and impoverished, so I was surprised when he later drove us to dinner in a smoke-steeped Lexus and made mention of both a recent Galápagos trip and a private charitable foundation; a quick Google search in the bathroom revealed that his family was worth $14 billion. Before the night was over, he introduced me to the nightclub that he owned, the existence of liquid cocaine, his beloved tabby cat, and the magical, labyrinthine loft in which he lived, one whole wing of which was given over to experiments in S&M—by two in the morning, I was lying prone and naked on his sex swing while he, fully clothed, affixed suction cups to both my nipples.

At the time I had decided that Steven was a little too frightening for my taste, but on a whim I had invited him to the now-canceled book event and we had since started checking in on each other from afar. One night he sent me a crying cat emoji and then apologized—he was in a mood, he said, having just left his parents in Connecticut; he had been bored all weekend, but then started bawling when it came time to say goodbye. Now he was just bored at home, for the state had closed his club and hostel bar. His plan was to drink his way through isolation, he said, while also finding time for home improvement and metalworking in his studio. When I said I was impressed that he was working, that I was having trouble focusing, he was full of good suggestions. “Perhaps a little mind adjustment like LSD could get you inspired,” he offered. “Or some relaxing sensual stimulation.”

Then, on Day 10, my best friend, Helen, who had underlying health issues and had been complaining of a sore throat, was admitted to a New York City hospital because she couldn’t breathe. I was walking through the woods when I heard, and I remember the sudden cold that passed through my body. It was the first time I had been able to actually conceive of the disease that had been obsessing me for weeks now, and the first time, too, that I realized that we would—every single one of us—be intimately touched by it in one way or another. I tried for a moment to imagine a world in which Helen no longer existed, in which I could no longer call her up to say hello, in which her two sons grew up without a mother, and then I tried to multiply that desolation by 14,443, which was the current global death toll, though of course I failed—our minds aren’t built for such vast numbers.

Afterward I went to the grocery store for the first time in two weeks, staring with fascination at the bottles of disinfectant in the vestibule, at the ravaged produce aisle, at the cashiers wearing masks and plastic gloves. I had been working my way through American history with a high school junior that semester, guiding her through the devastations of the Civil War and Great Depression, and it was startling to recognize in that faintly apocalyptic supermarket scene an approximation of the black-and-white images that decorated her textbook. I had never felt so much a part of history before, nor understood so acutely how little there was to separate us from the men and women of the past, how we had always just been people. I smiled at the other customers as we wheeled our shopping carts around one another in six-foot circles—“the waltz of the trolleys,” my mother’s friend calls it—feeling toward them such an odd blend of solidarity and distrust; I imagined us as the partygoers at Prince Prospero’s ball, soon to be dropping like flies. On my way home, I finally got a flu shot.

*

On Day 13 my phone buzzed with a WhatsApp message from Elliot, another man I had first met four years before. At that time we had gone on two dates, marveling at the series of coincidences by which we were connected—we were both citizens of England, Australia, and America, for instance, and while he was an expert in Sudanese conflict resolution, my grandmother had been the first white baby born in Khartoum Hospital. We almost certainly would have gone on a third date had I not broken my neck in a car accident and been confined to a hospital bed; when I texted five months later to say that I was finally neck-brace free, he announced that he had moved to Jordan.

It was with some excitement, then, that we had reconnected a few months back. Though we both had reservations about the other—I thought him too ornery, and he thought me too promiscuous—I was nonetheless disappointed when he left for Africa for a monthlong work trip. But then the virus began its exponential climb, the whole globe went on lockdown, and now he was texting to say that he was self-quarantining at a temporary rental apartment in Melbourne, having managed to escape just as he and his fellow diplomats were being pulled out of the region. He was trying to look on the bright side, he said, mainly having to do with net gains for environment and people learning how to be alone again, though he also lamented—in classic ornery fashion—that they would now load up on social media. I said I doubted the environmental lessons would last, unfortunately, adding that I had already been pretty good at being alone. “Your dating run notwithstanding,” he said, a dig that I let slide.

There was something about our last sexual encounter that he had found epiphanic, he continued, having to do with the way in which his head had already been on a plane to Africa and yet had returned to the bedroom once we started fantasizing about my coming with him to Nairobi. “It was the starkest illustration of the psychological component of sex,” he said, “that I have ever had.” This discovery didn’t strike me as remarkable at all, frankly, but I went with it, suggesting that we shared the same breed of fantasy, one rooted in the prospect of intimacy and future connection. Then he sent me eight dick pics in a row; it was only three in the afternoon in Rhode Island, but I nevertheless climbed the stairs to my bedroom and shut the blinds to the construction workers who were somehow still employed in building a new sewer line outside the house. I hadn’t shaved my legs in nearly a month and my underwear was left over from high school and full of holes, so when he asked for a visual I went quickly fumbling through the archive, pressing send and waiting for his affirmation. “This may be out of order,” he wrote instead, “but I definitely prefer your body now.” I looked again at what I’d sent him and started laughing—it was a date-stamped screenshot that made it very clear those were my breasts of four years earlier.

I told this story later that day at my first ever Zoom happy hour, now laughing at Elliot’s bafflement when I’d expressed my dismay that he thought Body 1 and Body 2 so dramatically different. Even so, I said to the faces on my computer screen, it was a pity that he and I had been so star-crossed, thwarted first by a broken neck and next by a global pandemic; for all the irritation he aroused in me, I couldn’t help daydreaming of what might have been, of how we might have learned to forgive each other our shortcomings had the world not been turned upside down. And I think that he agreed with me: “It’s a bit of shame not to have been able to come back,” he said before we finished texting. “I wouldn’t have minded trying to get you off the market.”

I was sitting on the deck as I spoke, holding Oscar in my lap and taking unanticipated pleasure in the sight of my high school friends, who in reality were spread from coast to coast. Helen had returned from the hospital, thank goodness, and was lying on her couch in Brooklyn as her husband fed the kids; she still had a fever, and a sharp pain in her lungs, but that terrifying shortness of breath had disappeared some days before. Jessa was quarantined in Echo Park, where she was now living with her newish boyfriend—the private chef to a television producer, he had filled her driveway with rented industrial freezers and refrigerators. His boss had approximately zero qualms, she told us bitterly, about sending him off to seven different grocery stores a day in search of kumquats and oat milk while all the rest of California sheltered in place.

Rachel and her husband had spent their isolation microdosing mushrooms and emptying their Pacific Palisades home of any and all objects that brought them displeasure, including chairs, tables, photographs of ex-lovers, gifts from in-laws, and every single diary that Rachel had ever kept. This last filled me with alarm—I could still picture how she had looked at fifteen, filling notebook after notebook with her lovely, loopy script—and yet she was adamant; she said that she and Simon, sobbing, had already built an enormous pyre overlooking the ocean. When the four of us hung up, they planned on performing an elaborate burning ceremony that would rid them of the past and pave the way for new beginnings. Helen asked if she would show us the pile, carrying her computer outside as Jessa had done to reveal the refrigerators, but Rachel demurred. No, she said, she would not give those hateful things that power.

Before leaving the deck that night, I sent a flare to Daniel, another relic from the past and one I might have fallen for had he not brightened when I inadvertently introduced him to the term “ethical non-monogamist” on our first date—he was so delighted, he said, to have finally found the words he needed to define himself. According to Instagram, Daniel was hunkering down somewhere in the American Southwest with what appeared to be a lifetime supply of garbanzo beans; he had befriended a shy bobcat, and there were lots of wildflowers and cute little birds among the cacti. He was doing great, he said when I asked, he was in a really good place, and yet he also admitted that some companionship would have been nice. “We should probably sext or something,” he said. “For our health.”

“Sure,” I said. “But right now I need to finish making dinner and watch Homeland.” As a token of goodwill, I sent him the same picture that I had to Elliot, making sure to crop it properly this time.

*

The days continued to pass, and it became increasingly difficult to distinguish between them. Friends would call, and we couldn’t remember whether we had spoken two hours or two weeks ago. The virus colored everything, giving birth to alien emotions, blurring boundaries between the real and the imagined. I felt blind fury when our president suggested that the churches must be full by Easter, stabs of anxiety when the characters in the book I was reading walked into a crowded room. My teenage clients were sleeping till two and bursting into tears when I asked if they had finished fifteen pages of The Bluest Eye. One boy would only FaceTime as he wandered the streets of Manhattan like a hooded flaneur, and the sight of my city’s painted eaves and bright blue sky, joggling with his every stride, filled me with homesickness. Another client, a freshman, had spent days building the most splendid of forts in her bedroom, hanging from the ceiling every towel and blanket she could find, sleeping, eating, and conducting all her classes there, until one morning it had outraged her with its messiness and she had torn it down. “What am I doing with my life?” she wailed. “I can’t just be building forts all day!” My mother had started penning daily emails that doubled as absurdist literature—had I heard that the dogs in Italy were getting quite exhausted, she asked, now that their owners were lending them to all their petless friends and they were being exercised for hours? Another time she sent a picture of a present she had made for her sister, a six-foot-long walking rope with handholds at either end. “Why,” asked my friend Nellie, “is everyone on the internet baking bread?”

On Day 20 I drove Oscar to an emergency vet that I had found in Massachusetts. Pet mothers were no longer allowed inside the clinic; instead you had to call from the parking lot and a technician wearing a face mask and plastic gloves would retrieve your animal from the passenger seat. While I waited, I read an essay by Ian on political fatigue and recovery—finally, an artwork that I had actually solicited! Ian and I still hadn’t FaceTimed, mainly because I was too lazy to wear real clothes or put on makeup, but we had spent three and a half hours on the phone the previous Friday, when I had found him charming and considerate. He had the deep, clear voice of a radio personality, and all the years he’d spent at Trinity had given him the traces of an Irish accent. Since then, I realized, he had become the person I wanted to tell things to, the person I wanted to text when I was sad. Then Oscar was returned to me trembling, his belly shorn, and I spent the rest of the day trying to make a list of reasons why it would be all right if he had cancer.

It was that same day, I think, that I finally broke my quarantine for William, a college basketball player turned environmental activist whom I had tried to break up with in the fall. His obsession with sexting and single-use plastics, coupled with his failure to ask me a single question about myself, had made me want to scream. I eventually told him as much and he responded by buying my book on Kindle, but things went downhill from there. “I’m just confused,” he said of the preface, “because it kind of reads like a memoir.”

“It is a memoir,” I said.

“Oh.” He was silent for a moment. “I guess I just thought from the title”—which includes the words “Woolf” and “Virginia”—“that it would be all about Jane Eyre.”

Now he arrived at the door with a bottle of wine; he had been taking a life-must-go-on approach to the virus, but he still humored me by consenting to sit outside and apart in thirty-degree weather until the light had left the sky. Then we ordered pizza, opened more wine, and retired to opposite ends of the couch. I told him about my fears of single motherhood, and he suggested we become co-parents. I tried to explain why I couldn’t raise a child with a man who was indifferent to literature, just as he couldn’t raise a child with a woman—me, as I had just demonstrated in the kitchen—who didn’t know that you couldn’t recycle the greasy side of a pizza box. I was mean to him, I’m ashamed to say, punishing him for the fact that I was all alone in a pandemic, that he hadn’t been born a completely different person, that try as I might I couldn’t mold any of these men into the shape of a soulmate. La solitude, I kept thinking, c’est les autres. We argued for a while, and then we started fucking, leaving me with a tremendous sense of guilt at having endangered all humanity.

That night I dreamed of two strangers, one of whom had peeled off the other’s skin and worn it like a mask. When I woke, I realized I had been clenching my fist in my sleep—embedded in my left palm was a row of little bloody half moons, and William was gone.

*

I have been alone for over a month as I write this. One by one, all my future plans have been canceled, and it has come to seem of little consequence whether I will be quarantined through May or November or the following May. As with my car accident, when the preoccupations of my “real life” were voided in an instant, I find myself in a kind of continuous present, with the distinction that this time around almost all the world’s people are in the same boat. There are mornings when I wake to the sunlight that filters through the wooden slats and feel almost happy; it’s only when I check the headlines that have piled up like bodies overnight that the catastrophe comes flooding back.

Every day I talk to friends across the country and the globe, collecting their own tales of quarantine—the virus has invaded human life the way it does the human body, it seems, latching on and wreaking havoc. There is Samantha, a cancer survivor who will soon be having a baby with a surrogate; the surrogate lives in Ohio, and Samantha was just told that she and her husband won’t be allowed in the delivery room. There is Eliza, a working mother in the midst of an acrimonious divorce whose husband just moved back home to watch the kids full-time. There is Sean, who recently had a baby from a one-night stand and then went to quarantine in the mother’s family compound on the outskirts of Buenos Aires; for months, he swore that he and she were only friends, but now they’re drinking wine in cornfields and falling steadily in love. There is Sean’s friend Dom, who invited a girl he barely knew to join him for a weekend in Seville and now finds himself domesticated and attached, and Bethany, another single mother who fears she is becoming abusive to her children—“No, really,” she says when I protest, “they run away from me when I so much as look at them.”

There is my uncle Robert, a English bachelor whose lifeline was the pub and who just doubled his dosage of antidepressants, and Laura, a dermatologist who is learning for the first time how to intubate a patient, and Eva, who has decided to wait it out alone in Costa Rica and just adopted a new puppy. It will be interesting to see, Sean and I agreed when we last spoke, he in his Argentine cornfields, me beside my river, all the ways in which this contagion will bring us together and rip us apart. “Just think,” said my single friend David as we looked for silver linings, “of all the new divorcés who will soon be flooding the market.”

I haven’t heard from Paul or Steven in weeks, nor from Elliot or Daniel or William—perhaps, like me, they realized after our initial flurry of communication that it is actually lonelier to grasp at some simulacrum of intimacy than it is to try and make peace with one’s solitude. In the years since my divorce—a rupture that clarified just how fully I had lost myself in marriage—I have struggled between the desire to rebuild my sense of self and the desire to re-dissolve into another human being; never has that tension felt more acute than during this period of isolation, though, when on some days the pain of singledom is like an open wound, and on others I revel in my own autonomy, hugging it to me like a flesh-and-blood companion. I have continued to lean on my mother and my friends, spending many more hours on the phone than I used to; at the same time, I have become almost covetous of my seclusion, often canceling Zoom dates at the last minute simply so my cats and I can sit outside and watch the water. (Oscar’s ultrasound came back clear, though the mystery of his dwindling continues.) Yesterday my mother sent a picture of a zucchini loaf that she had baked—“Oh, I wish I could be there to cook for you!” she said, and I panicked at the very thought of it. And yet I do still talk to Ian in Hong Kong. Sometimes we FaceTime in the mornings or the evenings, and I find myself soothed by his strong face and his radio voice. Perhaps he will be able to fly home some day and I will once again begin that process of dissolving into someone else, or perhaps we only like each other because we’ve never met.

A little while ago I talked to Jon, the only man aside from my ex-husband whom I have ever loved. He and his girlfriend are holed up in Chicago with his mother, and every weekend they drive to the mother’s house on Lake Michigan and walk along the sand. He had been worried, he joked, thinking of my proclivity to solitude, that they were going to lose me to this pandemic—that I would become so enamored with my own disappearing act that no one would ever see me again. As he spoke, I was watching a white-haired man in a white dinghy; every afternoon in summer, he rows out to his sailboat in the middle of the basin, but now that it was winter and all the moorings empty, he was simply rowing south. I wondered where he was going. He was moving with the current—even if he had set down his oars, he would have been making good progress—and once he passed the old stone bridge, the river would widen and there would be nowhere left to land. Don’t worry, I said to Jon, I’m not going anywhere.

 

Katharine Smyth is the author of All the Lives We Ever Lived: Seeking Solace in Virginia Woolf. A graduate of Brown University, she has worked for The Paris Review and taught at Columbia University, where she received her M.F.A. in nonfiction. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Staff Picks: Creations, Croissants, and Crutchfields

Alia Volz.

California is rife with personal histories of various sorts—so many that one wonders if there’s anything yet to be discovered about the Golden State. Enter Alia Volz’s new memoir Home Baked: My Mom, Marijuana, and the Stoning of San Francisco, a beautiful evocation of the Bay Area in the years before tech bros and big money changed the city. During the wild and woolly seventies, Volz’s mother founded Sticky Fingers Brownies, a company responsible for delivering upward of ten thousand illegal cannabis edibles per month to San Francisco consumers. Like Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday, this is a narrative about a time that is now gone: San Francisco as circus, where pot was both ubiquitous and as illegal as heroin. Under Volz’s careful attention, all of it—the era, the place, and her own parents—is rendered clear, bright, and beautiful. —Christian Kiefer 

During the past three weeks, one new album has never been far from my turntable: Saint Cloud, the fifth full-length from Waxahatchee, a.k.a Katie Crutchfield. Crutchfield began her musical career in the late aughts, playing a kind of melodic punk with her twin sister, Allison, in the band P.S. Eliot. She started Waxahatchee to evolve a mellower, more folk-inspired sound. Her previous record, the break-up album Out in the Storm, is about as noisy and hard as she was willing to get, and Saint Cloud, which was written in the aftermath of her giving up drinking, is willfully mellow, countrified in the manner of Crutchfield’s hero Lucinda Williams. It took me a few listens to like it, and then I fell in love. These songs engage in a sustained self-reckoning, taking stock, owning regrets, and setting mistakes to music: “I’ll keep lying to myself / I’m not that untrue / I’m in a war with myself / It’s got nothing to do with you,” she sings in “War,” an upbeat rocker. Crutchfield’s voice is inflected with a quiet Southern lilt; it’s not that her voice is unique, but you can always tell it’s hers. You feel her whole self—disappointed, humbled, but not without excitement or hope—in every syllable. You’d know what these songs are about even if you didn’t speak English. This may be her best record—it’s certainly her most grown-up—and it’s great company in lonely, yet not unhopeful, hours that seem to be turning into days, weeks, months. —Craig Morgan Teicher

 

Haim.

 

Leslie Jamison, from the depths of a trying quarantine, puts into new words the most familiar of platitudes: “the grass is always greener” suddenly has become “sure, I sometimes wish my quarantine was another quarantine.” The turn had me musing about the equalizing aspects of coronavirus (this is happening to all of us), which are as boggling in their novelty as the inequalities are in their painful familiarity (the happening is harder for some). Through my quarantine, I’ve been listening to Haim. Although the sisters who make up the band are roughly my age, until recently I’ve thought of their music as being for younger, more carefree listeners. The Steps, their newest effort, is a damn good EP that serves as a prelude to their third studio album, their first in three years. In the time of internet attention spans, such a delay could have easily dimmed the buzz of a less confident group. But Haim are as dominant as they are infectious. Their sound is a little Fleetwood Mac and later Paul Simon meets Warpaint and something a little sweeter. There are as many music videos as tracks on the EP, and the limitless talents of Paul Thomas Anderson and Danielle Haim make the video for the title track smart, puzzling, and rewatchable. The Muses—and now I mean those other sisters—tempt us in part because of their storytelling power. The strong California vibes given off Haim’s music made me feel oddly eligible to wear the snake-print slingbacks that have been waiting for their moment in the sun—just in my own living room. And for a moment I could imagine that my biggest problem was that the pool couldn’t be serviced, so that when ennui drove me back in, past nightfall, a few leaves and a moth or two would catch in my hair as they sailed into the lights—someone else’s quarantine. —Julia Berick

Although I read Kate Zambreno’s Drifts (out May 19 from Riverhead Books) before the Paris Review office started working from home, it’s a perfect book for the quarantined. In a series of photos and prose fragments, Zambreno’s narrator avoids working on her novel, reads, teaches, plays with her dog, worries about money, looks at art, and eventually, surprisingly, finds herself pregnant. It’s a work that wears its influences on its sleeves—as in all of Zambreno’s books, the references to other artists and their work fly fast and thick—and one that captures the fitful stops, starts, shame, joy, and boredom that go into creating a work of art. —Rhian Sasseen

Before we were sent indoors, my fellow intern and I kept a running list of the best croissants in Chelsea. La Colombe boasts a reliable almond, and Bottino serves a utilitarian plain that’s best when toasted. Sullivan Street Bakery, however, rises about the rest. Their croissants are cloaked in a mysterious, sugary glaze, light enough to accentuate the quality of the pastry without overpowering it. With the sudden drop in my croissant intake, however, I’ve turned to my own culinary devices. After weeks of research, I selected a traditional recipe from Poilâne, a cookbook by the pastry chef Apollonia Poilâne. She’s an elegant Franco American and the CEO of Poilâne Bakery in Paris, where each loaf of sourdough is delicately inscribed with her last initial. She adroitly demonstrates how recipes are a form of storytelling, each page of her book interwoven with personal anecdotes and culinary histories. Poilâne’s croissant recipe is a meditative process, its simple steps spanning three days of worthwhile labor. I measured the hours of these endless days by the various stages of laminating, chilling, and proofing the dough. The result: a neat set of fourteen croissants and an aroma of warm yeast and butter filling the house. I even tried to emulate Sullivan Street Bakery’s shiny, sweet exterior, consulting a chef friend who believes the glaze is a wash of egg yolks and heavy cream. I had whole milk, which nearly did the trick. Don’t fear if you have neither the wherewithal nor quantities of flour to replicate these croissants yourself: Poilâne Bakery is shipping worldwide. —Elinor Hitt

 

Elinor’s croissants. Photo: Elinor Hitt.

The Phony Warrior

The below is an excerpt from The Swamp, the first in Drawn and Quarterly’s new series of books by the acclaimed comics artist Yoshiharu Tsuge (translated from the Japanese by Ryan Holmberg). In keeping with the customs of manga, both the panels and the text are intended to be read from right to left.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yoshiharu Tsuge was born in Tokyo in 1937. Influenced by the adventure comics of Osamu Tezuka and the gritty mystery manga of Yoshihiro Tatsumi and Masahiko Matsumoto, he began making his own comics in the mid-’50s. He was also briefly recruited to assist Shigeru Mizuki during the explosion of his popularity in the sixties. In 1968, Tsuge published the groundbreaking surrealistic story “Neji-shiki” in the legendary alternative manga magazine Garo. This story established Tsuge as not only an influential manga-ka but also a major figure within Japan’s counterculture and art world at large. He is considered the originator and greatest practitioner of the semiautobiographical “I novel” method of comics making. In 2005, Tsuge was nominated for the Best Album Award at Angoulême International, and in 2017 a survey catalogue of his work, The World of Dreams and Travel, won the Japan Cartoonists Association Grand Award.

Ryan Holmberg is an arts and comics historian. He has edited and translated books by Seiichi Hayashi, Osamu Tezuka, Sasaki Maki, Tadao Tsuge, and others.

The Swamp , by Yoshiharu Tsuge, translated by Ryan Holmberg, will be published April 28. Excerpt courtesy of Drawn & Quarterly.

How Pop Music Broke the Gender Binary

Ma Rainey in 1917. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

The gender binary cannot really be broken because the gender binary has never been whole. It has always limped along in pieces, easily cracked by a brief foray into the historical record. The Christian colonialist construction of men as inseminating subjects and women as reproductive objects does not extend into ancient history, nor does it govern every facet of the present. Masculinity and femininity, so much as they refer to certain strategies for moving through the world, have never neatly corresponded to the two types of bodies defined in the opening passages of the Bible. Even human bodies don’t hold true to the popular myth of strictly dimorphic sex, as anyone in the intersex community can tell you.

There have always been more than two genders, and music and gender nonconformity have gone hand in hand since long before pop music emerged as a product—since before the concept of “product” existed. But the patriarchal order, in order to survive, needs to brand threatening ideas as artificial, superimposed, harmful, and new, so as to distract from the underlying truth: that patriarchy itself is artificial, superimposed, harmful, and not nearly as ancient or universal as it pretends to be. Hardly the natural order of the human being, patriarchy relies on the illusion of its own inevitability to survive.

The notion that only two genders exist, and that each gender prescribes specific behaviors, movements, and relations, has always been undercut by a thriving spectrum of deviant expressions that white capitalist patriarchy seeks to erase. When European settlers devastated the Americas, they “looked to the existing sexual and gender variance of Indigenous people as a means of marking them as racially inferior and uncivilized: a justification for a forever unjustified genocidal conquest,” wrote Michael Paramo. During the era of American slavery, white men and women similarly clung to the gender binary to distinguish themselves from the racialized people they were brutalizing, stamping out expressions of gender that didn’t fit into the white Christian patriarchal mold as part of a long campaign of hellish state-sanctioned violence.

The gender binary, which seeks to clearly label who can get pregnant and who can’t, who should have power and who shouldn’t, has served white supremacy for as long as white supremacy has existed. But cross-dressing, homosexuality, and fluidity of form sparkle throughout history. It’s just that the powers that be still need the binary to persist to keep cis white men in charge and cast aside everyone else, and so they rigorously shutter the light that leaks in from just outside their cage.

Music shelters gender rebellion from those who seek to abolish it. In music, drag is not an aberration but a form of play. Women can sing with masculine bravado and men can adopt transcendent femininity: poses that were often dangerous to display offstage and outside the recording studio for people of all genders. Drag queens such as Julian Eltinge sang in vaudeville revues to broad acclaim while homosexuality was still illegal in the United States during the first decades of the twentieth century. Queer, trans, and gender nonconforming artists similarly populate the history of blues, R&B, jazz, and rock and roll. There’s no pop music without artists who reveled in lashing out against the gendered expectations levied upon them from on high.

The blues as a cultural product begins with Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, the Southern singer who in 1923 signed a record deal with Paramount and soon became famous throughout the United States for her powerful, androgynous voice. Her friend and collaborator Bessie Smith, who had auditioned for Rainey’s band in 1911, similarly became a star after signing to Columbia Records. Both women were black and queer, and both sang about lesbian love via barely coded lyrics. Rainey’s song “Sissy Blues” also playfully celebrated feminine gay men: “My man’s got a sissy / His name is Miss Kate / He shook that thing like jelly on a plate,” she sings. In prewar America, major record labels were willing to sell gay records so long as they came from black women, whose voices and presences already deviated from mainstream norms.

“The blues songs recorded by Gertrude Rainey and Bessie Smith offer us a privileged glimpse of the prevailing perceptions of love and sexuality in postslavery black communities in the United States,” wrote Angela Davis in 1998. “Both women were role models for untold thousands of their sisters to whom they delivered messages that defied the male dominance encouraged by mainstream culture. The blues women openly challenged the gender politics implicit in traditional cultural representations of marriage and heterosexual love relationships. Refusing, in the blues tradition of raw realism, to romanticize romantic relationships, they instead exposed the stereotypes and explored the contradictions of those relationships.”

Rainey and Smith, along with fellow blueswoman Lucille Bogan, set the stage for pop music’s tendency to incubate androgyny, queerness, and other taboos in plain view of the powers that would seek to snuff them out. They were joined by Gladys Bentley, the stone butch blues singer who performed in a top hat and tails throughout the Harlem Renaissance in New York and whose deep, gritty voice foreshadowed the guttural howls of rock stars.

In 1938, the gospel guitarist Sister Rosetta Tharpe laid her music to tape for the first time at age twenty-three. Throughout the following decades, she would develop a style of playing electric guitar that would influence generations of rock musicians to come. Tharpe, too, was queer, and she adapted a phallic symbol of masculinity—the electric guitar—to her own gender-breaking whirlwind of a stage presence. “In that day it was still unusual to see a woman guitarist, in gospel or in any musical field,” wrote Gayle Wald in a 2007 biography of Tharpe. “Not merely to play, but to wield the instrument with authority and ease, was to subvert convention and expectation.” Tharpe was doing the windmill on her guitar while Pete Townshend of the Who, the white man with whom the gesture is most commonly associated, was still learning to walk.

Reach further back in time and you’ll find a long and varied history of third, fourth, and other alternate genders—people who slip between the poles of the Western binary, often in keeping with musical and ceremonial traditions. Among indigenous Americans, Two-Spirited individuals manifest both male and female qualities. In India, third-gender Hijras who recently won the right to their own legal gender marker appear in ancient sacred Hindu texts, such as the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. In Bolivia, the China Supay—a devil character historically embodied by transfeminine performers—plays a key role in the Carnaval de Oruro festival. Contemporary electronic musician Elysia Crampton dedicated her 2018 self-titled album to Ofelia Espinoza, “one of the mariposas, or butterflies, who forever altered the costume of the china supay in the 1960s and 1970s, the Aymara femme devil performed by queer and trans bodies in the street festivities, which, though now formally Christianized, can be traced back to before the conquest,” she said in a 2018 interview. These identities only mirror the contemporary model of “trans” when viewed through a colonial lens. Within their original contexts, they do not mark a journey from one gender to another, but are natural and frictionless ways of being in their own right.

Many disruptive gender identities have deep ties to music. In Italy, for hundreds of years, a third gender was biologically created for an expressly musical purpose. From the sixteenth century until the early twentieth century, castrati sang in a third voice, neither male nor female. Castrated before puberty so that their voices would never drop, these singers paired the unthickened vocal cords of the soprano with the deep lung capacity of the baritone, resulting in a distinctively androgynous vocal quality. “Although the pitch may have been similar to that of a female, the timbre of the voice was different,” wrote J. S. Jenkins. In 1799, a French music critic “described the castrato sound as being ‘as clear and penetrating as that of choirboys but a great deal louder with something dry and sour about it yet brilliant, light, full of impact.’” For centuries, these voices were popular in opera and in Catholic choirs, though the practice of creating castrati was outlawed in the nineteenth century as industrialization and its attendant social values swept Europe.

The figure of the castrato and the invention of music recording technology briefly overlapped: only one castrato was ever known to make solo recordings. The last surviving Sistine castrato, Alessandro Moreschi, recorded a handful of songs on wax cylinders in 1902 and 1904. The recordings are remarkable. Moreschi’s voice, reportedly past its prime at the time, has a coarse, rippled quality to it. He hits soprano notes with a guttural grain. The texture of his voice, combined with the ghostly quality of the recording, lends a spectral aura to the music. Moreschi does not sound like a combination of male and female vocal traits, but like a supersession of the gender binary altogether.

The availability of musical playback devices surged at the same time that the last of the castrati died. Recorded music, played at first within the inner sanctum of the home, severed the voice from the gendered body. The gramophone had no perceptible gender, and while commercially sold music often reinscribed conventional gender roles, it also frequently dismantled them. In his 1993 book The Queen’s Throat, Wayne Koestenbaum theorizes a connection between the proliferation of recorded music and the articulation of homosexuality, with its associated androgyny, as a social category. “The category of ‘homosexuality’ is only as old as recorded sound,” he notes. “Both inventions arose in the late nineteenth century, and concerned the home. Both are discourses of home’s shattering: what bodies do when they disobey, what bodies do when they are private.”

In the first half of the twentieth century, black American musicians gave rise to new and dangerous genres, including jazz, rhythm and blues, and rock and roll. The history of American music is the history of black music, and since the gender binary is inextricably tied to whiteness, pop music’s story necessarily begins slightly outside its parameters. It begins with queer black women like Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Billie Holiday; Ma Rainey, Lucille Bogan, and Bessie Smith, who wove references to lesbian sex into their lyrics; and Big Mama Thornton, who wore suits and ties while singing rhythm and blues. It begins with queer black men like Esquerita and Little Richard, early American rock performers who wore their hair fabulously high and swung their silky falsettos up to meet it. These artists formed the musical base that would give rise to the exceptional popularity of postwar white thieves such as Elvis Presley and the Beatles, who gave white record executives the opportunity to re-create old colonial dynamics by taking well-established cultural forms created by black people, feeding them through the throats of less talented white performers, and pretending that they were brand new.

Both Big Mama Thornton and Little Richard “cut their teeth as singers in the late 1940s in traveling troupes, where queer acts were part of the foundation of the early rhythm and blues music played to black southern audiences,” wrote Tyina Steptoe. These artists, some of the most influential in early rock history, made gay music from the start. Though they ultimately had to “dilute the queer content of their performances” while making mass-produced records, the vocal strategies they employed in their most brazen performances stayed with them: Richard’s irreverent “woos” and Thornton’s guttural croaks both broke out of the boundaries surrounding their assigned gender, and both vocal gestures made it to the recording studio. These musician’s racialized and gendered voices, audibly othered and yet free in their otherness, influenced generations of singers to come.

Sanitized white covers of songs first performed by black musicians tended to sell better than the originals in midcentury America, and in the fifties the recording industry capitalized extensively on this phenomenon by creating Elvis, whose cover of Thornton’s “Hound Dog” became his best-selling single. If we take Elvis to be the first pop product, the first instance of musical monoculture whose open sexuality scandalized older generations of listeners and gave the nascent white teenager a foothold for its new identity, then the pop star, as a mythic figure, has always been somewhat androgynous. Elvis threaded together the vocal quirks of both male and female singers while bridging the black genre of R&B with the white country world. He was a prism of disparate influences and varied gender expressions; his broad success depended on his ability to be anything to almost anyone.

Elvis’s breakthrough caused a stir among the old guard of music critics, who dismissed his performance style as too sexual and therefore too feminine. White men in postwar America were not supposed to exhibit so base an emotion as lust. In 1956, New York Times critic Jack Gould panned Elvis using the same language that many male writers still use to criticize female singers, effectively characterizing him as a male bimbo. “Mr. Presley has no discernible singing ability. His specialty is rhythm songs which he renders in an undistinguished whine; his phrasing, if it can be called that, consists of the stereotyped variations that go with a beginner’s aria in a bathtub,” Gould wrote. “His one specialty is an accented movement of the body that heretofore has been primarily identified with the repertoire of the blonde bombshells of the burlesque runway. The gyration never had anything to do with the world of popular music and still doesn’t.”

It’s difficult, in the twenty-first century, to conceive of Elvis as an androgyne, an effeminate threat to the gendered order. His iconography, sexual as it might be, looks purely masculine in retrospect. He sold so astonishingly well that American culture could not squeeze him out of its vision of maleness; unable to cast Elvis aside as a deviant distraction, mainstream America instead ate him up. If it can’t get rid of them, patriarchy tends to devour its threats. Given enough time and financial motivation, normative masculinity will absorb even its boldest disruptions.

*

Why has music so often served as an accomplice to transcendent expressions of gender? Why did “Is he musical?” become code, in the twentieth century, for “Is he gay?” Why is music so inherently queer?

In the nineteenth century, the first glimmering of the modern gay rights movement cropped up among writers who theorized the existence of the Uranian or Urning—a third-gender person assigned male at birth who housed a feminine spirit. English author Edward Carpenter suggested that music was the form of expression most closely allied with the Uranian—that is, that music might be the gayest art possible. “As to music, this is certainly the art which in its subtlety and tenderness—and perhaps in a certain inclination to indulge in emotion—lies nearest to the Urning nature,” he wrote.

Music’s ambiguity also enables the covert expression of queer desire and identity. “Historically, music has been defined as mystery and miasma, as implicitness rather than explicitness, and so we have hid inside music,” wrote Koestenbaum. “In music we can come out without coming out, we can reveal without saying a word.” Because music is a language of subliminal expression, because it hides in paradox and contradiction, it has historically served as a safe house for manifestations of nonnormative gender and sexuality. As Ann Powers writes in the introduction to Good Booty, “Popular music’s very form, its ebb and flow of excitement so closely resembling the libido, drew people to it as a way to speak what, according to propriety, couldn’t be spoken.” Music offers a more detailed, nuanced form of expression than even spoken language, and far more nuanced than the sex and gender binaries imposed from on high. And yet the powers that be do not always recognize music as subversion. Music is a space where singers can say what they mean without saying it, where melody and rhythm offer plausible deniability for even the most plainly sung truths. “BD women, you sure can’t understand / They got a head like a sweet angel and they walk just like a natural man,” Lucille Bogan sang on her 1935 recording of “BD Woman’s Blues” (referring to “bull dyke women”). She openly celebrated her butch and transmasculine siblings decades before the fight for LGBTQ rights had entered the mainstream.

Listening to music is inherently a sensual exchange. Music enters the ear, causes pleasure, and inspires identification in the listener, who is not merely a passive participant in the encounter. The listener joins the singer in the song’s ambiguous and ephemeral space, and is changed by the act of attentive, emotional listening. “The listener’s inner body is illuminated, opened up: a singer doesn’t expose her own throat, she exposes the listener’s interior,” wrote Koestenbaum. “Her voice enters me, makes me a ‘me,’ an interior, by virtue of the fact that I have been entered. The singer, through osmosis, passes through the self’s porous membrane, and discredits the fiction that bodies are separate, boundaried packages.”

Anyone who has loved music has felt what Koestenbaum describes. The singer’s voice enters the listener and becomes the listener’s voice. The fan hears a beloved song and believes she is singing the words of the song, that they were written for her to sing. The division between artist and fan dissolves in the moment of impassioned listening, and with it goes the division between genders. In music, people are not separate; they cannot be divided up into two discrete categories.

At the 2018 Pop Conference at Seattle’s Museum of Pop, the scholar E. Glasberg, while moderating a keynote panel called “The Butch Throat,” wondered what the contemporary analog to the castrato voice might be. Whose voice soars above society’s gendered poles? In my new book Glitter Up the Dark, I wanted to explore some answers to this complex question, to shed some light on why music has become a unique cultural incubator for the expression of gender transgressions. It is not intended as a comprehensive catalog of androgyny in music; if it were, it would be much longer. Instead, it is meant as an investigation of the different strategies musicians have used to break out of the limited range of motion and expression mandated by gender essentialism. There are cis men and women who have used music as a temporary escape from their otherwise stable and socially ordained gender identity. There are trans men and women musicians who transitioned while in the process of making a pivotal work, perhaps seeing an opening in the music they were making at the time. And there are artists who defy labeling, who revel in music’s ambiguity as it reflects their own. I don’t mean to equivocate among these identities—nonbinary trans people face different challenges and follow different trajectories than do trans women and men—but to illuminate their common strategies as they pertain to music’s unique potential for defection from the status quo.

Over the past half century, music has accelerated the discussions of trans identity and gender fluidity that now command so much attention on a national scale. The second decade of the twenty-first century has seen growing mainstream support for trans people, though this wave of affirmation has also prompted considerable backlash, in turn. In 2014, Time magazine announced the “transgender tipping point” in popular culture via a cover story on actress Laverne Cox. The article called attention to the fact that trans people exist, have existed for a long time, and are not going away, even as its enthusiasm for a bold new world may have been preemptive: the forty-fifth American presidential administration is currently working overtime to delete trans people from reality and make our lives as difficult as possible. But trans people, as history shows, are not so easy to erase.

In Colorado, where I live, it’s now possible to get a driver’s license with the gender marked “X” instead of “M” or “F.” The AP Stylebook includes an entry on the singular “they” and advises calling trans people by their true names, not their dead ones. In interviews, mainstream pop stars such as Miley Cyrus and Sam Smith openly speak about their in-between gender identities, a feeling of neitherness that can be readily heard in the way they sing—in the creases of Cyrus’s husky alto, in the way Smith’s gossamer tenor lifts away from the diaphragm. In 2017, the pop songwriter Teddy Geiger, who has penned hits such as “Stitches” for Canadian singer Shawn Mendes, came out as a trans woman to the open excitement and joy of her famous collaborators. And in 2018, a giant projection of the late star Prince sang the lines, “I’m not a woman / I’m not a man / I am something that you’ll never understand” during the halftime show of the fifty-second Super Bowl, echoing his real-life performance at the same show in 2007. Gender transgression crept its way into even that most ostentatious display of normative American manhood.

Something has changed in America. Among more and more people, gender is understood not as an inevitable, unchanging characteristic acquired at birth, but as a language, a technology, a system of communication with a full range of expression. Trans and gender nonconforming people have always survived with or without the acknowledgment of the dominant culture, and the dangers posed by the straight world persist, but at the very least it has become easier for us to find each other, to call out into the dark and hear a chorus of voices calling back in return.

In a song called “Don’t Let Them In,” the queer performer Perfume Genius sings against a delicate trill of piano, “In an alternate ribbon of time / My dances were sacred / My lisp was evidence / I spoke for both spirits.” His voice carries the same ambiguity I hear throughout pop music’s history: a sense of belonging to neither gender, floating beyond the impetus to box oneself in. This alternate ribbon of time is not a parallel universe. It winds through recent and ancient history, as musician after musician has opened space to dance outside the roles they were prescribed at birth. Listen and you’ll hear it: a catch of breath, a euphoric wail, a skidding away from one way of being to another and back again.

Do not believe those bootlickers of the patriarchy who flailingly insist upon the androgyne’s novelty, and don’t listen to anyone who construes trans people as fictions. Trans people are as ancient as music. We have always been here, singing from the shadows, glittering up the dark.

 

Sasha Geffen is a writer based in Colorado. Their work focuses on the intersections between pop culture and gender and has appeared in Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, Artforum, The Nation, and The New Inquiry, among others.

Excerpted from Glitter Up the Dark: How Pop Music Broke the Binary , by Sasha Geffen, © 2020, published with permission from the University of Texas Press.

Poets on Couches: Mary Szybist Reads Amy Woolard

In this series of videograms, poets read and discuss the poems getting them through these strange times—broadcasting straight from their couches to yours. These readings bring intimacy into our spaces of isolation, both through the affinity of poetry and through the warmth of being able to speak to each other across the distances.

“If By You You Mean We”

by Amy Woolard

Issue no. 230 (Fall 2019)

The apples are early this year, & the grass is late. The taxi is

Early & the past is late. The fist is late. The tooth—like the news

Of the tooth—broke both early & late. I’m telling you: this all

Really happened. I had a love I ripped through like it was bread.

I had bread & cheese, apples & sugar on my every plate.

A sugar rose on my every cake. A love like a water

Ring soaked into the grain of my kitchen table. Sugar, I don’t need it

Refinished. The way it happened, I was my own witness. When we was

Together / everything was so grand. I love you like the fifty-two bones of the feet,

The fifty-four of the hands, the hell & the fast foam from a high-water wave

Smoothing itself toward me like a flu passed through a kiss. I couldn’t

Keep anything down. So happened it was my bread & butter for years

To turn the tables of this town. I didn’t know a morning

That wasn’t the end of my night. I came in through your basement

Bedroom window. I brought a love like two forkless fists stuffed

With lemon cake. A love like the house spider that crawls in

& then out of your open mouth during sleep, leaving only your waking

Tongue & its hustled memory of caught snowflakes from an early flurry.

 

Mary Szybist is the author of Incarnadine, winner of the 2013 National Book Award for Poetry.

How to Survive the End of the World: An Interview with Mark O’Connell

In Mark O’Connell’s eerily prescient new book Notes From an Apocalypse, he spells out a question that now feels inescapable: “How are we supposed to live, given the distinct possibility that our species, our civilization, might already be doomed?” In trying to answer, he traveled to places where the looming apocalypse could be glimpsed, talking to those who believed, or wanted to believe, that the collapse of civilization was already underway: preppers, survivalists, people hell-bent on the colonization of Mars.

For his subjects, the question of how to survive the apocalypse is a practical one, and they respond to it with answers like “be obscenely rich,” “dig a big hole in the ground and just stay in it,” or “gaily wash your hands of society, which you were not all that keen on to begin with.” For O’Connell, and for most of us, the question is more complicated—not just how to survive, but how to live—and the conclusions he reaches are what give the book its hope.

Mark and I became friends through Twitter, a fact which has done great damage to my belief that real friendships cannot be forged on the computer. I messaged him more or less out of the blue to ask for his advice on a writing-related problem that I believed to be an intractable disaster, and he pointed out the solution that had been in front of me the whole time. This is typical. As a friend, Mark is generous, with an apparently boundless enthusiasm for connecting people whom he (always correctly) believes will get on with one another.

His first book, To Be a Machine, was awarded the 2019 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the 2018 Wellcome Book Prize, and was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction. He is a contributor to The New York Times Magazine, Slate, The Dublin Review, and the Guardian. This interview was conducted over email during the first week of April, while I was in Cape Town and Mark was in Dublin.

INTERVIEWER

The book starts with an epigraph from Annie Dillard, “These times of ours are ordinary times, a slice of life like any other. Who can bear to hear this, or who will consider it?” What is it about those lines that appealed to you?

O’CONNELL

When I was putting that quote in as the book’s epigraph, I distinctly remember thinking that I was not myself entirely sure why I had chosen it, but that surely I would never be asked to account for it, because no one ever pays much attention to these things. And now here I am, having to do just that for The Paris Review—yet more evidence for my conviction that I can never be permitted to get away with anything. So thanks, Rosa, for that. It’s from For the Time Being, a book I love maybe more than any other book by a living writer. One of the things she does in the book, and in those lines in particular, is sort of deflate the apocalyptic sensibility, the notion that we are living in extraordinary times. The epigraph gestures toward what I was trying to do in my book, which was to do justice to the extreme apocalyptic urgency of our current time while also bearing in mind the fact that, in terms of the broader picture of human life on earth, this is also just business as usual.

Dillard, for me, is an ideal writer, in that she inhabits the world in an ecstatic way while refusing to avert her eyes from its darkness. She is also incredibly funny, without ever stooping to being humorous.

INTERVIEWER

What’s the difference, for you, between a writer who is incredibly funny and a writer who is being humorous? It feels like an important distinction because I think for some people, there’s a suspicion of levity when the subject is inarguably serious, unless the funniness comes delivered to the reader in a package with a label that says “Let Us Pause for Some Light Relief Before We Head Wearily Back To The Salt Mines.” Was that something that you thought about when you were writing the book? Which is, I should say, incredibly funny.

O’CONNELL

Maybe this is a very idiosyncratic and unsustainable distinction, but I can think of nothing less funny than humor as a mode of writing. It’s like stand-up comedy or something. Almost impossible to be authentically funny within the brutal constraints and expectations of that formal context. It’s very gratifying to me when people find my writing funny, but it’s also always very unpredictable. Often the things that people find funny in my writing are things that I have written in a spirit of more or less deadly seriousness. And I’m fine with that—actually, I love it. Because for me, funniness is often an epiphenomenon of absolute seriousness. As a nonfiction writer, you constantly come across situations that are inherently funny, and being funny is just a matter of diligently describing reality. You literally just jot down in your notebook the amazingly strange things that people are constantly saying, and the amazingly strange things that are constantly happening around you, and you write about it as accurately as you can, and often that just winds up being funny. I think the reason I don’t like a lot of so-called humorous writing is that it sort of misses the point of how funny things are, and drowns that reality out with a load of jokes. I also think that writers who are not funny are, in some basic and irreducible sense, unserious.

INTERVIEWER

Throughout the book, you meet a lot of apocalyptically minded people—preppers, bunker salesmen, tech billionaires who want to colonize Mars, tech billionaires who are buying up tracts of New Zealand. As you point out, the idea of civilization’s collapse is nearly as old as civilization itself. But you also make the case that there are particularly lurid strains of doomsday scenarios active today, exemplified by the visions of people like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. Can you talk a bit about that?

O’CONNELL

The book is an attempt to reckon with what it’s like to live in a time of rampant apocalyptic anxiety and fervor. In one sense, it’s as much about my own anxieties. The external spectacle of people preparing for the end of the world provided me with a way of working out the complexities of my own apocalyptic anxiety. Figures like Thiel and Musk, for example, function a bit like characters for me, and occupy a symbolic position. They allow me to work out my themes, to say things I want to say about capitalism and the damage it’s doing to the world. In this sense, I suspect I approach writing in a way that is more common to fiction writers than nonfiction writers, with the difference being that I don’t make things up. Or maybe I’m just being obtuse, and basically all nonfiction writers go about things in this way. I wouldn’t put that past me, to be clear.

INTERVIEWER

Was there a particular moment that made you realize you were going to write this book?

O’CONNELL

Yes. It was reading about doomsday preppers, and luxury survival bunkers, and realizing that I’d found, in the idea of people preparing for the end of the world, something that could give shape to my formless obsessions and anxieties. It helped that these things offered a really interesting prospect for reporting, for going out and finding weird and surprising and vivid things to write about.

INTERVIEWER

What’s it like discussing your book now, at a moment where the end of the world is the dominant topic of conversation? I saw a review that describes you as proceeding “like Noah sensing rain in the air.”

O’CONNELL

While I’m of course happy to be compared to Noah, I’m really more like some guy in Noah’s village who saw what Noah was up to, and went and got himself a book deal to write some scrolls about the whole scene. But it is very strange for the book to be coming out right now. It’s as though the entire world has been narrowed down to a single narrative strand, and it just happens to have the same theme as my book. Obviously every writer wants their book to be timely, but I would happily settle for a lesser level of timeliness—where, say, bookshops were still open, and also millions of people were not likely to die.

There is certainly a high level of dramatic irony at play here. I got a delivery of some copies of my book from my publisher a couple of weeks ago, and the delivery guy was wearing a face mask, and I had to use plastic gloves to open the box containing my book about the end times. It’s all a bit on the nose. But actually, I’ve realized that’s one of the subcutaneous themes of my work, how reality so often presents itself as overcooked fiction. And yes, the parts of the book about doomsday preppers, luxury bunker builders and so on—it’s hard not to read those bits differently now, I suppose. There’s a sense in which they were right about some things, just as anyone who perpetually predicts catastrophe will be right eventually. But also civilization is not collapsing. I’m sitting in a park near my house, writing this as my daughter sleeps in her buggy beside me. People have not reverted to savagery, and I see no signs that they will. At least not where I am. But maybe these are the reflections of Noah’s neighbor, clutching his scrolls to his chest as the water rises to waist level.

INTERVIEWER

There’s so much good noticing in the book—it’s rife with the strange things that people do and say. Do you recognize these moments for what they are as they appear, or do you figure it out later?

O’CONNELL

I am actually astoundingly unobservant almost all of the time. My wife is constantly remarking on my capacity to not notice things. I’m trying to think of examples of my poor powers of observation, but I also have an astoundingly poor memory, so nothing comes to mind. But every school report I had as a kid was basically, “Smart and fairly conscientious, but also weirdly absent-minded for a nine year old,” or whatever, and that assessment has mostly held good throughout my life and career. But I think the good noticing you’re talking about has to do with an ability to give in to distraction, to submit to whatever irrelevant thing happens to be claiming my attention at a given time. When I’m reporting, I tend to get into a particular mental state that I think of as “moronic receptivity.” It’s like my thinking mind is turned way down, and I’m just taking in a lot of information from my immediate environment, and noting as much of it down as I can.

I’m very unskilled as a reporter, in the sense of knowing what I want to find out in a given situation, and asking the right questions to get to it. I have no capacity for directing conversations. Reviewers often frame me as this Louis Theroux–style character who slyly gives people enough rope to hang themselves, but I’m actually just trying to keep up most of the time. But what I am good at is noticing things that have symbolic resonance, or peculiar ways people have of expressing themselves, or surreal things that are happening on the margins of a scene. And there’s this quite spooky thing that almost always happens when I’m reporting, which is that those things seem to happen at a much higher rate than in ordinary life. I do notice those things in the moment, yes, and I mostly immediately know when they’ll be useful to me in the writing.

INTERVIEWER

I was trying to describe Notes from an Apocalypse to a friend the other day, and one of the things that I came up with was that it was a “very Irish book. Very.” Do you agree with that?

O’CONNELL

I have to ask, what do you think is so Irish about it?

INTERVIEWER

Off the top of my head, the ability to find the raw facts of reality funny and to make them into a story. The sort of recurring fixation on roaming—Irish people, in my experience, love to make an absolute meal out of how they got from one place to another. The natural antipathy for/suspicion of authority. The fact that you are obviously getting a great kick out of making yourself laugh, not in a self-indulgent way at all, just when I think of Irish people, I think of them walking around smiling quietly to themselves at their own jokes. The general smoldering sense of historical injustice, and then the easy acceptance of, and natural empathy with, outright eccentrics. Does any of that gross national stereotyping feel right to you, in terms of what you write about and how you write about it?

O’CONNELL

I’m not sure these count as gross stereotypes, actually, and they would be pretty flattering ones if they did. But this is such an interesting question to me because since my first book came out I’ve been aware that people—myself included—sort of have trouble putting me in the category of “Irish writer.” This is especially the case in Ireland. I think there are obvious reasons for this. One is that, even though I’ve lived here all my life, neither of my books have had much in particular to do with Ireland. And although Ireland has this famously rich literary history, nonfiction has historically never had much of a part in that. Journalism is not really seen as a literary form here at all, in the way that it is in the U.S. I have never seen To Be a Machine in an Irish Writing section of a bookshop here. But I do think there might be something irreducibly Irish about my writing. To Be a Machine was animated by this sense of the absurdity of absolute commitment to logic. If there’s a central idea in the book, it’s that extreme rationalism is indistinguishable from outright madness. And I realized at a certain point that that was a really Irish notion. Flann O’Brien is full of it, and so is Swift, and so is Beckett. This is not to say that my writing is influenced by those people in any way I can identify, but they are absolutely in my bloodstream, and in the bloodstream of the culture that I exist in.

INTERVIEWER

Who are you influenced or informed by? Who do you read when you get stuck?

O’CONNELL

Well, I spent four years in my late twenties and early thirties writing a Ph.D. thesis on the fiction of John Banville. All day, every day, just reading Banville, writing about Banville, so that whole passages of his work are burned into my retinas like an image left too long on a screen. So it seems inconceivable that the rhythms and cadences of his prose would not have gone to work on me in some deep and permanent way. DeLillo is quite an overt influence, I would say. You probably wouldn’t have to look too hard at either of my books to see where he’s left his mark on me. Maybe the most overwhelming presence, actually, is Borges—not as an influence over my writing as such, but more as a methodology of interpreting reality. If it’s possible to be a Borgesian in the same sort of way as people are Marxists, that is what I am. When I feel stuck, the person I read more than anyone else is Janet Malcolm. She’s a very clarifying presence for me, as a nonfiction writer. I read Malcolm, and I think, okay, now that’s how it’s done.

INTERVIEWER

Throughout the book, you are pretty unsparing with yourself as you try and answer unanswerable questions, or solve insoluble moral problems. I did notice though that there is one question that you simply abandon, whether there was “some inherent connection between the wearing of Oakley-brand shades and the holding of extreme reactionary views—opposition to the role of the state in the structuring of society, the belief that personal liberty meant freedom from taxation, the conviction that white heterosexual males were in fact the last victims of societally sanctioned discrimination”? You have had months now, surely, to think about this question. Are you any closer to an answer?

O’CONNELL

I didn’t simply abandon it. I probably thought longer and harder about it than anything else in the book. I just couldn’t come up with a theory that I found satisfactory. After the book went into production, the rapper Vince Staples, who I revere, randomly tweeted that “backwards Oakley’s is the white power durag.” I think that’s pretty inarguable, and is in the same general ballpark as the point I’m making—although obviously he goes even deeper, into talking about a style of wearing them—but he never got into the question of why, either. Yaniv Soha, my U.S. book editor, had an interesting theory about how sunglasses are, more than any other article of clothing, an expression of one’s sense of transgressive cool. It’s impossible to put on shades without feeling self-consciously cooler. Mirrored Oakley’s were at their most popular in the hawkish Reagan/Bush years, and so, as he put it to me, for anyone who came of age during the late eighties and early nineties, “sees that time as a kind of cultural apex, still listens to butt rock and its adjacents, yearns to return to that muscle-flexing, militaristic register, there is no better way to express that than to wrap the middle of your face in reflective plastic.” I think Yaniv is definitely onto something there. But also I think it’s just good to have a little open-ended question in the book, a little discursive invitation for the reader.

INTERVIEWER

Some of the loveliest moments in the book come when you write about your family, and about the experience of parenthood as a “radically increased stake in the future.” In that sense, it’s an incredibly hopeful book—the conclusion that there’s no real or pragmatic alternative to hope. Given that you would not, I don’t think, necessarily describe yourself as an out-and-out optimist, did reaching that conclusion surprise you?

O’CONNELL

I am definitely not an out-and-out optimist, or really much of an optimist at all. But what I found in the course of writing the book was that I was not quite as committed a pessimist as I’d assumed myself to be. The book had started to become a kind of inner argument between despair and hope. I definitely went through a trajectory when I was writing the book. I started writing it in a long interlude of real hopelessness about the future, and by the time I was finishing it, I felt quite differently. A lot of this had to do with things that were happening in my own life. My wife and I had a second child, a daughter, and that was just an amazing time, full of a sense of expanded possibilities, the mood of which had to bleed into the book. But yes, the book is hopeful in the sense that its conclusion is that hopelessness is not really an option. I started to recognize pessimism as a luxury, an intellectual self-indulgence, I had allowed myself when I was younger and had less of a stake in the world. But at the same time, the hope that is present in the book is extremely fragile. It ends with me reading to my wife, while she is breastfeeding our daughter, a news story about how the massive plunge in insect numbers is threatening ecosystem collapse. While I’m doing this, our daughter blows a raspberry at me, which is obviously a moment of levity, but the context is as dark as it was at the beginning. I think what’s different at the end is that—and there is no way of saying this without sounding corny—I’m just more capable of giving my full attention to my daughter blowing a raspberry at me, without letting the thought of the future, which is always going to be unknowable, overpower the present moment.

 

Rosa Lyster is a writer living in Cape Town.

What’s Inside That Giant Cross?

Cellular cross in Tampa, Florida. Photo: Steven E. Jones.

The apotheosis of the combination of religious iconography with cellular technology may be the cell tower disguised as a cross. There’s a striking example near my university in Tampa, Florida, on the grounds of the New Life Tabernacle Church. The cross stands out at the edge of church property near the northbound lanes of Interstate 75. At about a hundred fifty feet, it’s much taller than the palm trees along the road, and it glows bright white against the blue sky.

From the highway, the cross looks bright white and thin, almost delicate. Up close at the cell site, which is located between a grassy soccer field and a retaining pond, the steel poles look grayish and a little weathered. The tubular upright is enormous, bolted together in three large segments and slightly faceted. I know that the top is packed with antennae, amplifiers, relays, and cables. Standing close to the tower and looking up, I can see large ventilation holes in the upper segment and a small lightning rod sticking out from the very top, too fine to be visible from the highway. (Tampa is supposedly the lightning capital of North America.)

The day I stopped I got lucky: a technician opened the gate and let me walk inside the security fence to look around at the ground space, a rare privilege, where I saw a freshly poured concrete slab for a second carrier, T-Mobile, soon to be colocated there. (The current lease is with Verizon.) This will require an additional set of equipment, including a new tier of antennae inside the cross, and new cables to join the existing red, green, and blue bunches that now emerge from a low porthole and run across the ice bridge (as they call it) to the switching box. That day, the new backhaul cable was already buried in a trench with fresh dirt on top, headed underground toward the nearest network switching station. A metal cabinet contained a rack of eight batteries, and a propane tank was hooked up to the existing generator.

For an evangelical Christian church like this one, a prominent cross is already an act of communication, a kind of spiritual semaphore. The pastor told me the congregation fully supported the construction of the cross for this reason, but some local residents outside the church telephoned to complain that the money for construction should have gone to feed the hungry instead. From the pastor’s point of view, Verizon’s approaching the church was providential. He quoted a Bible verse—“The children of the world are often wiser than the children of light” (Luke 16:8)—to say that the church has to market itself in order to reach the community. And of course, as he might have added (but did not), the lease provided welcome income.

 

Steven E. Jones is the DeBartolo Chair in Liberal Arts and a professor of English and digital humanities at the University of South Florida. He is the author or editor of eleven books, including The Emergence of the Digital Humanities (2014).

This essay is excerpted from Cell Tower , part of Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series.

Quarantine Reads: The Book of Disquiet

In this series, writers present the books they’re finally making time for. 

Maybe it is true that books find you when you need them: The Book of Disquiet sat on my shelf for at least a year before I took it down, sometime in February. The hardcover is fat and dense, and the text is, like a drug, rather mood-altering, so I was still working my way through it as things began to change, and am still working through it now, in a world that has come to feel entirely different.

The Book of Disquiet, by the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa, is properly speaking perhaps not a book at all, and I imagine Pessoa would not necessarily be pleased to have his name so prominently affixed to it. Under the orthonym “Fernando Pessoa” he did write an introduction, but he credited the texts themselves to two different authors, his semi-heteronyms “Vicente Guedes” (who “endured his empty life with masterly indifference”) and “Bernardo Soares,” an assistant bookkeeper. The book is made up of fragments of varying length, something like disconnected diary entries. They have been ordered in different ways since they were first collected in 1982, nearly fifty years after Pessoa’s death; in 2017, the Half-Pint Press in London did an edition “typeset by hand and printed by hand on a selection of various ephemera, and housed unbound in a hand-printed box.”

Maybe Pessoa had a plan in mind for his fragments, maybe there was a structure that we just can’t divine—the version I have, Margaret Jull Costa’s 2017 translation of Jerónimo Pizarro’s 2013 edition, is, I think, the first in English to present them as close to chronologically as scholars can figure out—but if any hypothetical order exists I’d rather not know: these are scattered times. Things one didn’t even know one held to or depended on are gone. Rhythm, habit, the rituals that mark and shape the day, something as mindless as the commute that shifts you from one gear to another, none of that registers anymore. There is a frozen-in-place quality to things, an eternal present-ness.

Which is a way of saying that it’s been hard these days for me to find meaning; we are storytelling creatures, but I seem to have lost the plot. I can’t register a story, keep up with a narrative, make sense of any frame. In The Book of Disquiet, though, there seems thus far to be no plot to lose. There are characters and events, but I can find no thread to follow, no causes and effects. Every fragment feels self-contained, its connections to those on either side tenuous at best. As far as I can tell, there is really nothing to be gained from reading the book front to back: you could approach this as bibliomancy, opening at random to find something that speaks to you (no. 27: “To organize our life so that it is a mystery to others, so that those who know us best only unknow us from closer to”). Jull Costa notes that its “incompleteness is enticing, encouraging the reader to make his or her own book out of these fragments.” For me it has been less a building and more a ritual: prayer beads, mantras, a worry stone.

Even more disorienting than the loss of rhythm has been what feels like an extreme shift in perspective. There is a crisis outside, people are terrified, people are fighting for their lives, other people are risking their lives to help them. I am, so far, one of the luckiest, and am counting blessings every morning and crossing my fingers every night—and yet there remain the little things. It feels churlish in these times to be bothered by slow internet, frustrated by a bad hair day, annoyed with a friend over something trivial when I can’t remember the last time I saw him. My heart stops every time I open the news, and somehow I am chewing the same cud I always did.

Not as a distraction but as a counterargument, Pessoa’s book has been, for a couple moments each evening, a helpful companion. To begin with, there is very little of the outside world at all: even when Bernardo Soares is describing how “the dark sky to the south of the Tejo was a sinister black,” the focus of the passage is still Bernardo Soares; the view is always inward. It’s not the melancholy, really, that I’m finding comfort in: it’s the insistence on a self, on the self. Call it what you will, solipsism or self-centeredness, but at the best of times and at the worst of times one is still oneself. And in isolation, one is oneself more than ever. I can’t outrun that, outthink that—and I also can’t be anyone else. So perhaps it is okay, for a little bit of time at night, to think not about what’s happening outside but about something else: “I had a certain talent for friendship, but I never had any friends, either because they never appeared, or because the friendship I had imagined was a mistake made by my dreams. I always lived an isolated life, which became more and more isolated the more I came to know myself.”

Maybe what I’m having trouble with is perspective, balancing a world that has become unrecognizable and unknowable with a me that is yet to adapt. It helps that The Book of Disquiet is also in part a book about how one inhabits one’s city (in this case, Lisbon); yesterday I stumbled upon fragment no. 309, one of Bernardo Soares’s, in which he “daydreams” the journey from the capital to Cascais and back. He is looking forward to watching the landscape and the water, but “on the way there,” he writes, “I lost myself in abstract thoughts, watching, without actually seeing, the waterscapes I was so looking forward to, and on the way back I lost myself in the analysis of those feelings. I would be unable to describe the smallest detail of the trip, the least fragment of what I saw.” New York is still outside my window, I know, but it is transformed (a tent hospital in Central Park, empty subways) and out of reach. Soares’s loss—because it is in some ways a loss—felt like a message. I tried to re-create in my head my favorite walk in the city, in Fort Tryon Park, through the Heather Garden to sit on the Linden Terrace and look across the water at the Palisades. I couldn’t properly recall the small details that mattered—the pattern of the flower beds in the Heather Garden, the weathering of the steps that lead up to the terrace, on which particular bench I last sat. I don’t know when I might next take that walk, but I’d like to believe that when I do, I’ll look more carefully.

 

Eddie Grace lives in New York.

Tsai Ming-liang’s Shadow City

In Tash Aw’s column Freeze Frame, he explores how his favorite masterpieces of Asian cinema have influenced him.

Still from Tsai Ming-liang’s I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone.

For most of the second half of I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone, Tsai Ming-liang’s 2006 masterpiece of unfulfilled desire, the characters struggle to breathe through makeshift face masks, fashioned from materials as desperate as plastic bags or metal jelly molds. Their daily lives are being slowly constricted, suffocated by something in the air, which we presume to be Kuala Lumpur’s famous near-annual smog, except no one really knows for sure—the news on the radio provides conflicting information—so the smoke that descends upon the city takes on a more sinister aura. The air itself has become dangerous to breathe. No one knows when this oppressive anxiety will end.

As I write, Kuala Lumpur is in virus-induced lockdown. Looking out from my apartment I can see only the odd car on what is usually a busy highway, and the neighborhood is almost eerily calm. The city’s streets are emptier and more silent than in the film, but the sense of stasis and uncertainty is the same. Both in the film and now, the anxiety is caused by something that threatens our health, but it is also tied to a deeper malaise: a fear that our societies are fragile and ill adapted to the swirling changes of modern life.

The people who inhabit the Kuala Lumpur of I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone are drawn from some of the most vulnerable and ignored—yet omnipresent—sections of society. The story is built around a chance meeting of two migrant workers, Rawang, a construction laborer from Bangladesh, and an unnamed man—possibly from Myanmar or China, though we never find out since he doesn’t say a word throughout the entire film—who drifts through the streets and is badly beaten up one night by a gang of local thugs. Rawang and his group of fellow Bangladeshi workers come across the Homeless Man—as he is called in the credits—close to death in the street. They have found a soiled mattress dumped in a heap of rubbish nearby, and are struggling to haul it back to their cramped quarters, where it will be at least better than the thin pieces of cloth they usually sleep on. At first they decide to leave Homeless Man where he is—he is none of their business, and in their world, we understand that physical violence is so commonplace it barely deserves a second glance—but Rawang persuades them to go back for the unconscious stranger, whom they place on the mattress and carry back to their boardinghouse.

In the first days after their meeting, the injured man is so badly hurt that Rawang must help him with even the most basic of functions: feeding him, holding him upright as he urinates, washing him, dressing and undressing him. Many days and nights pass like this, and as Rawang nurses the man back to health, he finds that he enjoys the physical bond created by their enforced closeness. In their rudimentary lodgings, particularly when they are both sleeping on the mattress—which Rawang has lovingly scrubbed clean, fumigated, and aired in the sun—the two men enjoy an intimacy so intense that it drowns out the noise around them—the incessant rowdy chatter of the other men, the ever-present TV at night, the traffic. They never exchange any words, but we have no doubt that Rawang cares deeply for his new companion. He loves him.

Meanwhile, very close to where Rawang lives in the heart of downtown Kuala Lumpur, a young man lies in bed, permanently paralyzed. We don’t know what illness he suffers from, but he is incapable of any movement, though from time to time, he is able to blink and his eyes tear up, perhaps from memories of times past, or from the frustration of being excluded from life. He is cared for by his mother and the family maid, who lives in a makeshift room built into the ceiling space above the man’s bed. On the ground floor of the building is an old coffee shop run by the two women, neither of whom wants to be there. They are both dreaming of gentler existences in more beautiful times and places, but they are trapped in this decaying corner of the city.

Favored by migrant workers and anyone in search of somewhere to eat and drink cheaply late at night, the kopitiam is a remnant of old Kuala Lumpur, a once-thriving business now barely profitable. But this one is right in the middle of town, where real estate is expensive. Soon, it will be sold, and the handsome, dilapidated space and its eclectic, democratic clientele will be forced move on, replaced by hipsters and luxe backpacker hostels. For both the people who frequent the coffee shop and those who live in the rooms above it, the building is a refuge for misfits and outsiders, those injured by the sharp edges of a rapidly modernizing society with little time for kindness.

Shot fifteen years ago, the film feels at once utterly contemporary and anchored in a distant past, as if Tsai Ming-liang had anticipated the Kuala Lumpur of 2020 while celebrating the historic richness and squalor of the city’s urban life. Unlike some of Tsai’s other celebrations of queer desire, most notably Goodbye, Dragon Inn, set in a Taipei cinema on the evening before it shuts forever, I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone offers little romanticism and no nostalgia at all. It is chaotic and dirty, with no effort made to prettify the decay of the old shop lots in the city center. And yet, in its stark framing of the dimly lit back lanes, dank alleyways, and porticoed walkways, it provides some of the most ravishing views of downtown Kuala Lumpur ever captured onscreen. Walking through Chinatown late one evening a few weeks ago, just before the city went into lockdown, I was reminded of the film’s enduring beauty and humanity. The only people on foot in the streets were migrant workers, generally Bangladeshi, generally men. They paused to watch Bollywood movies playing on small TV screens in shop windows, or gathered in groups to watch someone perform a magic trick, or maybe gamble—anything that offered them a few moments of laughter and entertainment. Overhead, the tips of the skyscrapers and giant new shopping malls peered over the roofs of the old, low buildings, like symbols, visions for the future we were meant to believe in. The people in the streets around me that night were the ones who built those skyscrapers. What does it mean to construct the future of a country but remain unrecognized, unwanted?

Much of the action in the film takes place close to Pudu Prison, which was demolished several years after the film was shot. Rawang first finds the Homeless Man outside the painted walls of the jail; he spends quiet moments alone in an abandoned construction site nearby, whose haunting beauty is a reminder of the pitfalls of rampant development in contemporary Asia. The ever-present threat of incarceration sits next to a physical reminder of the failure of ambition; those whose lives are the most precarious remind us that our notion of progress is fragile.

As the Homeless Man regains his strength, he begins to roam the streets once more, and soon runs into the maid, embittered by years of service to the paralyzed man and his vain, cruel mother. Tired of caring for someone who seems barely alive to her, she finds solace in the Homeless Man’s company, and after many thwarted attempts, they finally manage to get together in the abandoned construction site. The man has stolen the precious mattress that he has shared with Rawang and carried it all the way to his secret resting spot—a sort of double betrayal of the friend who saved him. But when he and the young woman get together, the smog is at its worst, and they cannot kiss without choking. As soon as their lips touch, they have to pull away and gasp for breath, battling to stay conscious.

Their inability to consummate their desire is a physical one, but it also seems psychological, as if they are held back by fear. What they long for is intimacy and belonging, but in this half-finished shell of a tower block, they are incapable of achieving either. The harshness of their lives has weakened their bodies and they are unable to withstand the choking smog. If they give in to their desire, their lungs will give up. Who will come to their aid then? Their world will swiftly become as lifeless as the devastated building they are in. Like the smoke that hangs in the air, their fear is universal. In this moment, caught somewhere between indecision and exhaustion, we share their anxiety—at how quickly our lives can be upended, at losing the ability to express even our most basic passions to the people closest to us. Perhaps the fear will dissipate when the toxic air has cleared. Or maybe we will never quite forget the knowledge that the edifices of this modern life we have created are fundamentally flawed, and might crumble at any moment.

 

Tash Aw’s most recent novel is We, the Survivors.

Redux: This Caliper Embrace

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.

This week at The Paris Review, we’re having a little birthday party for Eudora Welty, Samuel Beckett, and Seamus Heaney, all born on April 13. Read on for Welty’s Art of Fiction interview, an excerpt from Beckett’s novel Molloy, and Heaney’s poem “Polder.”

If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review and read the entire archive? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. 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.

 

Eudora Welty, The Art of Fiction No. 47

Issue no. 55 (Fall 1972)

At the time of writing, I don’t write for my friends or myself, either; I write for it, for the pleasure of it. I believe if I stopped to wonder what So-and-so would think, or what I’d feel like if this were read by a stranger, I would be paralyzed. I care what my friends think, very deeply—and it’s only after they’ve read the finished thing that I really can rest, deep down. But in the writing, I have to just keep going straight through with only the thing in mind and what it dictates.

 

 

from Molloy

By Samuel Beckett

Issue no. 5 (Spring 1954)

There are people the sea doesn’t suit, they prefer the mountains or the plain. Personally, I feel no worse there than anywhere else. Much of my life has ebbed away before this shivering expanse, to the sound of waves in storm and calm, and the claws of the surf.

 

 

Polder

By Seamus Heaney

Issue no. 75 (Spring 1979)

After the outburst and the terrible squalls

I hooped you with my arms

and remembered that what could be contained

inside this caliper embrace

the Dutch called bosom …

 

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