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Seven Adverbs That God Loveth

British Museum, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

I think I am temperamentally a mystic. I feel very drawn to this form of experience and this mode of conceptualizing and, in particular, the deepening and layering of concepts with experience and experience with concepts that can be seen in mystical traditions. Skepticism is not an instinctual or default response for me. If someone tells me something, I am inclined to believe it, no matter how strange it sounds. Maybe I’m just gullible, particularly when it comes to profound experiences that I have never really had, or never had in the way that I would really like. Maybe I’m just a bad philosopher. The thought has certainly crossed my mind.

For example, I believe that Julian of Norwich had Showings, or revelations of Christ; that George Fox, the founder of the Quakers, was carried up to heaven; that William Blake was visited by Angels in his dark little dwelling off the Strand in London; that Wordsworth had a total sensuous apprehension of the divine in nature during his ascent of Mount Snowdon; and that Philip K. Dick had an intellectual intuition of the divine in February 1974. This list could be continued. In fact, it could be nicely endless.

I don’t doubt these things, at least not at first, and I sometimes wonder whether I (as someone who teaches philosophy as a day job) should always be cultivating skepticism or praising the power of critical thinking. There is a defensive myopia to the obsession with critique, a refusal to see what you can’t make sense of, blocking the view of any strange new phenomenon with a misty drizzle of passive aggressive questions. At this point in history, it is at least arguable that understanding is as important as critique, and patient, kind-hearted, sympathetic observation more helpful than endless personal opinions, as we live in a world entirely saturated by suspicion and fueled by vicious judgments of each other. I’m not arguing for dogmatism, but I sometimes wonder whether philosophy’s obsession with critique risks becoming a form of obsessional self-protection against strange and novel forms of experience. My wish is to give leeway for strange new intensities of experience with which we can push back against the pressure of reality. All the way to ecstasy.

I am powerfully drawn to the way mystics experience what they experience, and then think, speak, and write about that experience. But it can be quite hard to describe, particularly to skeptical eyes who might see mystics as simply crazy, which in a way they are. Mad with God (whichever God that might be). So, I’ve decided to frame my approach to mysticism around seven adverbs that might get us closer to seeing the phenomenon. For—as the old Puritan saying goes—God loveth adverbs.

Mystics can be said to think and to work in the following seven adverbial ways:

1. Obliquely
2. Autobiographically
3. Vernacularly
4. Performatively
5. Practically
6. Erotically, and
7. Ascetically

Adverb one, obliquely: that is to say, enigmatically, negatively, through unsaying, oxymorons, antitheses, paradoxes, exaggerations, and subtractions. The writer of The Mystical Theology, who is known to us as Dionysius, who was possibly Syriac and not Greek, is the progenitor of apophatic or negative theology. He writes excessively of “super-essential darkness” or “darkness beyond radiance” to describe God. The anonymous, but Dionysius-inspired and Dionysius-translating, late-fourteenth century author of The Cloud of Unknowing, writes, “Of God himself, can no man think.” The Cloud author’s English translation of The Mystical Theology is simply and beautifully called Hid Divinitie. If God is hidden, then God must be approached obliquely, negatively. God transcends all affirmation.

It is the indirection of much mystical writing that interests me. Maybe indirection is the best direction to take in writing. What we can see in so many mystical texts, to borrow from my friend Eugene Thacker, is a logic and a poetics. This is a logic of saying and not saying, a non-negative negation, or a series of what we might call ascending negations, which is a way of approaching or adumbrating what Saint John Chrysostom calls “the incomprehensibility of God,” or the cloud of unknowing that separates us from the divine.

Mystical logic with respect to God is not a series of descending affirmations, from some postulation of God or substance down through some purported chain of being, from angels to humans, animals, and stones. It is rather a series of ascending negations, moving up from here below obliquely and superlatively, putting a cloud of forgetting between us and all creatures and peering up through a cloud of unknowing.

This logic of negation is also a poetics which places emphasis on a series of figures, like darkness, the desert, cloud, mist, sea, shadow, abyss, radiance, and the whole palette of colors that can be seen in my favored mystic, Julian of Norwich. Here, the intellectual insight into God is conceived on analogy with empirical sight. It is a multiplying of vision, from the perceptual to the conceptual. There are, for example, many climatological motifs in the poetics of mysticism, even a conceptual environmentalism. But this environmentalism is not literal or empirical but figurative and conceptual, where metaphors endlessly enrich and enliven experience.

***

Adverb two, autobiographically: the birth of autobiography, especially female autobiography, occurs with mystical writing. The “I” in Julian is the first “I” of an Englishwoman. The second is Margery Kempe, a generation later than Julian (they met in 1413; Margery wanted the counsel of Dame Julian, as she called her). The earliest stories of women’s lives we possess are in many cases the lives of the mystics: sometimes these were written directly by the mystic, as with Julian, Marguerite Porete, or Teresa of Avila, sometimes they were recorded by Brother Scribe, as with Angela of Foligno, Christina of Markyate, Christine the Astonishing, and many others.

Importantly, if there is an emergence of the autobiographical “I” in mystical writing, then it has the structure of “I is an other,” as Rimbaud said. The I finds its voice and itself through its relation to the otherness of God. Maybe this is why autobiographies without God are often so dull (one thinks of the contemporary tyranny of memoir) unless they stage autobiography as the self ’s conflictual, dialectical relation to itself, the division within the self that still inhabits the form of the religious narrative.

I am thinking here of Rousseau’s Confessions or, even more acutely, of his second of three autobiographies, Rousseau, Judge of Jean-Jacques, which takes the form of Rousseau interrogating himself. Or think of Nietzsche’s stunning self-presentation in his 1886 Prefaces and Ecce Homo, where Nietzsche is always doubled, at war with himself. Autobiographies without an “I is an other” structure are doomed to dullness, unless extraordinary things have happened to you.

***

Adverb three, vernacularly: that is, in the local spoken language. Julian describes herself as “unlettered,” which probably meant that she didn’t know Latin and wasn’t literatus. But other mystics, like Angela of Foligno from the thirteenth century, were probably entirely illiterate and relied on Brother Scribe, a devoted monk. Julian’s book is the first book in English by an English woman, but the same is true of Hadewijch of Antwerp in Middle Dutch, Porete in Old French, Mechthild of Magdeburg in Middle Low German, and Eckhart’s sermons in Middle High German. Medieval mysticism, especially in northern Europe, is the emergence of the vernacular as a religious language.

Of course, the use of the vernacular is an implicit challenge to the authority of the Catholic Church and its use of Latin. One can see this in England with John Wycliffe and the Lollards and the rise of what is called Lollardy, and their insistence on the use of the translated Bible from the late fourteenth century onwards, which is linked to popular insurgency against the powers of Church, King, and State—the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. (Incidentally, one of the prime causes of the Revolt was a pandemic, namely the Black Death.)

Mysticism is often linked to what emerges in the Reformation in the early sixteenth Century with Luther, who also translates the Bible into German. Luther is antimystical, committed to the “alien” nature of grace, and opposed the so-called enthusiasts of the Reformation, like Thomas Muentzer and the Anabaptists, who stressed the immanence of God in every person. Although this is a much more complex issue than I am allowing here, which requires considerable historical nuance, the Reformation opens a different space for mysticism. The turn to the vernacular permits a democratization of religious institutions and a progressive laicization, an undermining of clerical power which can be traced with a particularly wild intensity in America (in groups like the Quakers, the Shakers, the Baptists, and the Mormons, and even all the way to Scientology).

***

Adverb four, performatively: We can approach this issue by following Michel de Certeau, who was an interesting fellow, both a Jesuit priest and a psychoanalyst. For de Certeau, mysticism is not a domain of knowledge or a series of texts whose truth is evidenced with reference to some exterior reality, like the substantiality of God. Nor is mysticism simply authorized through an appeal to visionary experience.

On the contrary, mysticism is a style, a set of practices, a way of speaking and acting that are self-authorizing. Mysticism is performative. It is a certain form of writing and speaking which does not just record experience, but which produces experience, new forms of experience that might not have been previously lived. Mystical writing is a heterology, where the presence of the speaker as subject is an effect of utterance made possible through the other speaking through the subject, where that other is usually God. “I is an other” is the basic mode of production for mystical texts. Mysticism is a heterology where God and the I become one, enter into a zone of indistinction. This lack of distinction between the I and God, which is premised on the annihilation of the Soul, is the strangely passive activity of decreation.

***

Adverb five, practically: The point about the performative dimension of mysticism can be put differently, and this is at the core of the work of the fascinating theologian, Amy Hollywood. She understands mysticism as it develops within monasticism, particularly from the Rule of Saint Benedict, from the sixth century. Mysticism develops in relation to rigorous religious practices, specifically the practices of reading (of scripture), preaching and participation in liturgy, especially the recitation of the Psalms. Importantly, these practices of reading, meditation, prayer, composition, and contemplation are both spiritual and physical practices. As Hollywood writes, “the Benedictine’s life is one in which the monk or nun strives to make every action a ritual action.” Mysticism has to be understood in relation to the cultivation of such practices. Perhaps such practices are the best that we can hope to attain when the world has fallen to pieces. I will return to the question of ritual and devotional practice.

Another, very simple, way of putting this point is that mysticism is not some noetic or intellectual activity, or some state of belief or nonbelief, or even some theoretical apprehension of the divine. Rather, mysticism is a practical matter, a matter of organizing one’s life around a set of practices which are ritually organized. It is about living according to a rule, however that might be understood.

This is the meaning of asceticism. Askesis is sometimes translated into Latin as studium, which is both spiritual and bodily. This is what it means to study, to be a student. Here is a speculative thought: we can also link the theme of practice to the origins of monasticism in Saint Antony and the Desert Fathers. One of the widely read books in the history of Christendom, much more widely read than Plato or Aristotle, was Athanasius’s Life of Antony. Despite five extended periods of exile, Athanasius was Bishop of Alexandria for forty-five years and was responsible for establishing the canon and order of twenty-seven books that make up the New Testament and which has been used ever since. The Life of Antony was a deliberate rewriting of Plato’s Apology, where Socrates becomes Antony, the philosopher becomes the monk, the pagan becomes the Christian. It was a huge hit.

Antony engages in a withdrawal or retreat from the city. Here, the city is Alexandria, which was the Manhattan of the ancient world—a commercial island city off the coast of a vast continent, set up by foreign, colonial powers, with a voracious appetite for everything. Antony goes first into the necropolis or city cemetery and from there into the desert, which is seen as a temple without walls. This is anachoreisis, a retreat into solitude, where the monk is the monos, the solitary. The idea here is that one can find God in the desert by withdrawing into a cave or into a cell. A cave is a cell. The desert is a kind of mystical laboratory where one can find God, a figure which is retained in changed form in the idea of the hermitage and the anchorhold. The point is that withdrawal is a practice.

In the Desert Fathers, the fruit of withdrawal can be hesychia, quiet, stillness, silence. It is the cultivation of apatheia, passionlessness or equanimity. The aim here is achieve a disinterestedness in existence, to become corpse-like, dead to the world. And in this retreat, the monk must constantly struggle with acedia, the noonday demon, or listlessness and sloth. Such is what we call depression, which Julian beautifully calls in Middle English hevynes, the heaviness with which the self is attached to itself, riveted to itself.

It is only by spending time with the noonday demon, the heaviness of depression, that God can be felt, heard, and communicated with. The downward plunge into dereliction and despair is what permits the “straining forward,” or ekeptasis, into God. It is only through listlessness that one might both listen to and lust for God.

***

Adverb six, erotically. I’d like to spend a little more time and space on this adverb, as it is so important for understanding mysticism.

For mystics, everything turns on the love of God. The divine is not some entity—some desiccated abstraction—that invites belief or disbelief, assent or dissent. No, God is to be erotically enjoyed. It is fascinating how much mystics place an emphasis upon the enjoyment of God, a listening which is a lusting. This can be felt more closely in the French term jouissance, which is an enjoyment which delights and pleases but also carries clear sexual connotations.

Marie of the Incarnation (1599–1672), a French missionary in Quebec, wrote, “God alone was my only enjoyment.” God is a source of spiritual pleasure, but also physical delight. This is why Christ is so important and the doctrine of the Incarnation is so vital. Christ is a sensuous being with a sensuous mother and a super-sensuous father. Our lived communion with Christ occurs through the Eucharist, where his flesh is eaten, and his blood imbibed.

The element of liturgical devotion that dominates all others for medieval mystics, particularly female mystics, is the Eucharist. The relation to God, the communion with God, takes place through the mouth. God is orality and enters one’s mouth with a kiss. The famous French mystic, Madame Guyon (1648–1717), writes, “We must remember that God is all mouth.” These words are taken from a commentary Guyon wrote, allegedly in a day and a half, on the Song of Songs. The most important text for Jewish and Christian mysticism, which also turns up in Sufism, is the Song of Songs.

This is not the place to do justice to the intense eroticism of the Song of Songs, this ancient, near-Eastern, nuptial drama, originally composed in Aramaic. The love described in the Song by a young woman—the Shulamite—and a young man is clearly sexual. But it is not sexually explicit. Instead, the Song uses a powerful language of agrarian simile. Her belly is like a stack of wheat, her hair is like a flock of goats streaming down Mount Gilead, her breasts are like two fawns or clusters of grapes. His abdomen is like a block of ivory, his lips are like roses, and so on.

Within Judaism, the Song as interpreted allegorically, not as the love between a girl and a boy but as Israel’s love for God and God’s love for his chosen people. Within Christianity, the Song of Songs is the mystical book par excellence, where the Church—the universal Catholic Church—takes the place of Israel and the two lovers are transformed into God in the person of Christ and the soul expressed through the community of the Church. The Song becomes an ode of love between Christ and the soul. Christian mysticism can be understood as a millennia-long meditation on the meaning of such love.

Already in the third century, Origen interprets the Song allegorically as an epithalamion between a bridegroom, understood as the logos or Christ as the Word of God, and the bride, understood as the soul. He insists on the distinction between eros and agape, or love and charity, where eroticism becomes chaste, and fleshly lust becomes refined love. But, in the medieval Christian tradition, everything passes through Bernard of Clairvaux, who wrote eighty-six sermons on the Song of Songs between 1135 and 1153, reaching only verse four of chapter three of the Song.

Bernard’s sermons are beautiful, subtle, densely layered palimpsests of quotation and allusion, where he allegorizes each sensuous detail in the Song—references to fragrance, ointment, myrrh, and aloes—as expressions of the soul’s itinerary toward a loving union with Christ. But matters become even more compelling when the affective force of Bernard’s sermons on the Song authorizes and licenses an entire tradition of medieval mystical interpretation which is intensely felt and deeply personal.

In Hadewijch’s Book of Visions (ca. 1250), the union with Christ is described in physical terms: “Then he came to me himself and took me completely in his arms and pressed me to him … Then I was externally completely satisfied to the utmost satiation. At that time I also had, for a short while, the strength to bear it. But all too soon I lost sight of that beautiful man.” One can find echoes of this intensely erotic relation to Christ in a significant number of fascinating female mystics, obviously Julian but also Angela of Foligno and Teresa of Avila (1515–1582), down through Madame Guyon and Marie of the Incarnation in the seventeenth century.

But it would be a mistake to think of the eroticism of this tradition of affective piety as restricted to women. Building from the Song of Songs, the fourteenth-century English mystic Richard Rolle (circa 1300–1349) describes the fire of love, the incendium amoris, in terms of heat, sweetness, and song. The effect of song, sound, and music, especially the Song of Songs, induces a sweetness of love that is felt through physical heat and compared to jewels and gems like topaz. In “The Spiritual Canticle” of John of the Cross (1542–1591), the spiritual marriage of Christ and the soul is compared with the kiss that opens the Song, “There I, being alone, ‘kiss you,’ who are alone.” Once again, God is all mouth and when his love flows into us, it is sweeter than wine. In this connection, we could also think of Saint Francis, with his open, porous, stigmatized body receiving the love of God. Or, indeed, Henry Suso’s identification of both himself and Christ as female.

The obvious eroticism of the Song of Songs develops into a complex tradition of affective piety where the path of the spirit opens through the body and where Christ is a transfigured mystical body: a material body, a spiritual body, and a political body through the community of the church. Many mystics have a fiercely erotic connection with God through the person of Christ. Think perhaps of the many medieval images of the lactating Christ who feeds us from his breast or with the blood of his side wound, what Amy Hollywood calls “that glorious slit.”

To put it mildly, the gender of Christ is fluid, at once masculine and feminine, neither and both, a most queer God. One of great virtues of the mystical tradition is that it allows, and indeed encourages, a more complex topology of sex and gender, of new behaviors and rich potentialities.

***

Adverb seven, the final adverb, ascetically. To my mind, mysticism is ascetic not despite its eroticism, but because of it. And this is a line of thinking that is perhaps puzzling for us: there is not a contradiction between eros and askesis, between love or lust and denial or discipline. Rather, there is a relation of complementarity where spiritual discipline permits the possible transfiguration of love. And it is love’s transfiguration which is of ultimate importance.

This is the reason why I am sympathetic to the allegorical reading of the Song of Songs that begins with Origen and continues through into Saint Bernard and the medieval female mystics. What is going on in the Song is not some banal literalism which sees it in terms of sex, but a transformation of the carnal, another thinking of the erotic, a distillation, what psychoanalysts would call sublimation. What is glimpsed here is some other lineament of desire, that would allow for other possibilities of enjoyment, even and especially the enjoyment of God.

I am curious about the meaningfulness of asceticism today. The forms of ascetic practice in which people engage are legion: hot yoga, ceaseless meditation, extreme fasting, various forms of detox, excessive exercise, and compulsive forms of routine-following, which was particularly acute during the COVID-19 pandemic. Or asceticism becomes pathologized, as with anorexia, bulimia, and other behavioral “disorders.”

We are still strongly drawn by the desire for asceticism, it seems to me. We are fascinated by the extremity of mystical practice—think of the wildly self-destructive antics of female medieval mystics like Christine the Astonishing described earlier, the self-mortification of monks, stylites, anchorites, and the bands of itinerant flagellants in the early Middle Ages. But we find such behavior and its metaphysical demands too rigorous and weighty for our softer secular souls. For us, the purgation of sin has become a juice detox, and flagellation has become our relation to a bad selfie posted on social media.

We are also, I think, deeply puzzled by the way in which mystical practice conceives of the relation between the spirit and the flesh, mind, and body. We have all apparently become holists or monists, where we are all body and body is all that there is. We are endlessly encouraged to listen to our body, let the body do the talking and keep the score. This would be nice if it were true. But it isn’t. We are not identical to our bodies, but rather our experience of our selves is eccentric, divided from itself. Body holism is a new ideological discourse, which is refuted every time we get sick or sit in the dentist’s chair, or—even better (or, actually, worse)—are plagued by hypochondriac symptoms, conversion disorders of the type that have become remarkably widespread: a pandemic of genuinely felt illusion.

Mysticism is an attempt to describe another relation to the body, centered around some distinction between spirit and flesh, pneuma and sarkos. Mysticism is about the spiritualization of the flesh and the fleshly, incarnate nature of the spirit—to understand this requires a certain asceticism. We do not coincide with ourselves. Only psychopaths coincide with themselves.

With these seven adverbs, we can begin to approach the strange and compelling phenomenon that is mysticism, although we have barely even scratched the surface. At its core is love. What mysticism offers is an elevation and transfiguration of love. Its meaning is love. At the very end of her Showings, Julian of Norwich famously writes,

And from the time that it was revealed, I desired many times to know in what was our Lord’s meaning. And fifteen years after and more, I was answered in spiritual understanding, and it was said: What, do you wish to know your Lord’s meaning in this thing? Know it well, love was his meaning. Who reveals it to you? Love. What did he reveal to you? Love. Why does he reveal it to you? For love. Remain in this, and you will know more of the same. But you will never know different, without end.

 

From Mysticism, to be published by New York Review Books in September. 

Simon Critchley has written over twenty books, including works of philosophy and books on Greek tragedy, dead philosophers, David Bowie, football, suicide, and many other subjects. He is the Hans Jonas Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York and a Director of the Onassis Foundation.

Seven Adverbs that God Loveth

From Prabuddha Dasgupta, a portfolio in The Paris Review issue no. 200 (Spring 2012).

 

I think I am temperamentally a mystic. I feel very drawn to this form of experience and this mode of conceptualizing and, in particular, the deepening and layering of concepts with experience and experience with concepts that can be seen in mystical traditions. Skepticism is not an instinctual or default response for me. If someone tells me something, I am inclined to believe it, no matter how strange it sounds. Maybe I’m just gullible, particularly when it comes to profound experiences that I have never really had, or never had in the way that I would really like. Maybe I’m just a bad philosopher. The thought has certainly crossed my mind.

For example, I believe that Julian of Norwich had Showings, or revelations of Christ; that George Fox, the founder of the Quakers, was carried up to heaven; that William Blake was visited by Angels in his dark little dwelling off the Strand in London; that Wordsworth had a total sensuous apprehension of the divine in nature during his ascent of Mount Snowden; and that Philip K. Dick had an intellectual intuition of the divine in February 1974. This list could be continued. In fact, it could be nicely endless.

I don’t doubt these things, at least not at first, and I sometimes wonder whether I (as someone who teaches philosophy as a day job) should always be cultivating skepticism or praising the power of critical thinking. There is a defensive myopia to the obsession with critique, a refusal to see what you can’t make sense of, blocking the view of any strange new phenomenon with a misty drizzle of passive aggressive questions. At this point in history, it is at least arguable that understanding is as important as critique, and patient, kind-hearted, sympathetic observation more helpful than endless personal opinions, as we live in a world entirely saturated by suspicion and fueled by vicious judgments of each other. I’m not arguing for dogmatism, but I sometimes wonder whether philosophy’s obsession with critique risks becoming a form of obsessional self-protection against strange and novel forms of experience. My wish is to give leeway for strange new intensities of experience with which we can push back against the pressure of reality. All the way to ecstasy.

I am powerfully drawn to the way mystics experience what they experience, and then think, speak, and write about that experience. But it can be quite hard to describe, particularly to skeptical eyes who might see mystics as simply crazy, which in a way they are. Mad with God (whichever God that might be). So, I’ve decided to frame my approach to mysticism around seven adverbs that might get us closer to seeing the phenomenon. For—as the old Puritan saying goes—God loveth adverbs.

Mystics can be said to think and to work in the following seven adverbial ways:

1. Obliquely
2. Autobiographically
3. Vernacularly
4. Performatively
5. Practically
6. Erotically, and
7. Ascetically

Adverb one, obliquely: that is to say, enigmatically, negatively, through unsaying, oxymorons, antitheses, paradoxes, exaggerations, and subtractions. The writer of The Mystical Theology, who is known to us as Dionysius, who was possibly Syriac and not Greek, is the progenitor of apophatic or negative theology. He writes excessively of “super-essential darkness” or “darkness beyond radiance” to describe God. The anonymous, but Dionysius-inspired and Dionysius-translating, late-fourteenth century author of The Cloud of Unknowing, writes, “Of God himself, can no man think.” The Cloud author’s English translation of The Mystical Theology is simply and beautifully called Hid Divinitie. If God is hidden, then God must be approached obliquely, negatively. God transcends all affirmation.

It is the indirection of much mystical writing that interests me. Maybe indirection is the best direction to take in writing. What we can see in so many mystical texts, to borrow from my friend Eugene Thacker, is a logic and a poetics. This is a logic of saying and not saying, a non-negative negation, or a series of what we might call ascending negations, which is a way of approaching or adumbrating what Saint John Chrysostom calls “the incomprehensibility of God,” or the cloud of unknowing that separates us from the divine.

Mystical logic with respect to God is not a series of descending affirmations, from some postulation of God or substance down through some purported chain of being, from angels to humans, animals, and stones. It is rather a series of ascending negations, moving up from here below obliquely and superlatively, putting a cloud of forgetting between us and all creatures and peering up through a cloud of unknowing.

This logic of negation is also a poetics which places emphasis on a series of figures, like darkness, the desert, cloud, mist, sea, shadow, abyss, radiance, and the whole palette of colors that can be seen in my favored mystic, Julian of Norwich. Here, the intellectual insight into God is conceived on analogy with empirical sight. It is a multiplying of vision, from the perceptual to the conceptual. There are, for example, many climatological motifs in the poetics of mysticism, even a conceptual environmentalism. But this environmentalism is not literal or empirical but figurative and conceptual, where metaphors endlessly enrich and enliven experience.

Adverb two, autobiographically: the birth of autobiography, especially female autobiography, occurs with mystical writing. The “I” in Julian is the first “I” of an Englishwoman. The second is Margery Kempe, a generation later than Julian (they met in 1413; Margery wanted the counsel of Dame Julian, as she called her). The earliest stories of women’s lives we possess are in many cases the lives of the mystics: sometimes these were written directly by the mystic, as with Julian, Marguerite Porete, or Teresa of Avila, sometimes they were recorded by Brother Scribe, as with Angela of Foligno, Christina of Markyate, Christine the Astonishing, and many others.

Importantly, if there is an emergence of the autobiographical “I” in mystical writing, then it has the structure of “I is an other,” as Rimbaud said. The I finds its voice and itself through its relation to the otherness of God. Maybe this is why autobiographies without God are often so dull (one thinks of the contemporary tyranny of memoir) unless they stage autobiography as the self ’s conflictual, dialectical relation to itself, the division within the self that still inhabits the form of the religious narrative.

I am thinking here of Rousseau’s Confessions or, even more acutely, of his second of three autobiographies, Rousseau, Judge of Jean-Jacques, which takes the form of Rousseau interrogating himself. Or think of Nietzsche’s stunning self-presentation in his 1886 Prefaces and Ecce Homo, where Nietzsche is always doubled, at war with himself. Autobiographies without an “I is an other” structure are doomed to dullness, unless extraordinary things have happened to you.

Adverb three, Vernacularly: that is, in the local spoken language. Julian describes herself as “unlettered,” which probably meant that she didn’t know Latin and wasn’t literatus. But other mystics, like Angela of Foligno from the thirteenth century, were probably entirely illiterate and relied on Brother Scribe, a devoted monk. Julian’s book is the first book in English by an English woman, but the same is true of Hadewijch of Antwerp in Middle Dutch, Porete in Old French, Mechthild of Magdeburg in Middle Low German, and Eckhart’s sermons in Middle High German. Medieval mysticism, especially in northern Europe, is the emergence of the vernacular as a religious language.

Of course, the use of the vernacular is an implicit challenge to the authority of the Catholic Church and its use of Latin. One can see this in England with John Wycliffe and the Lollards and the rise of what is called Lollardy, and their insistence on the use of the translated Bible from the late fourteenth century onwards, which is linked to popular insurgency against the powers of Church, King, and State—the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. (Incidentally, one of the prime causes of the Revolt was a pandemic, namely the Black Death.)

Mysticism is often linked to what emerges in the Reformation in the early sixteenth Century with Luther, who also translates the Bible into German. Luther is antimystical, committed to the “alien” nature of grace, and opposed the so-called enthusiasts of the Reformation, like Thomas Muentzer and the Anabaptists, who stressed the immanence of God in every person. Although this is a much more complex issue than I am allowing here, which requires considerable historical nuance, the Reformation opens a different space for mysticism. The turn to the vernacular permits a democratization of religious institutions and a progressive laicization, an undermining of clerical power which can be traced with a particularly wild intensity in America (in groups like the Quakers, the Shakers, the Baptists, and the Mormons, and even all the way to Scientology).

 

Adverb four, performatively: We can approach this issue by following Michel de Certeau, who was an interesting fellow, both a Jesuit priest and a psychoanalyst. For de Certeau, mysticism is not a domain of knowledge or a series of texts whose truth is evidenced with reference to some exterior reality, like the substantiality of God. Nor is mysticism simply authorized through an appeal to visionary experience.

On the contrary, mysticism is a style, a set of practices, a way of speaking and acting that are self-authorizing. Mysticism is performative. It is a certain form of writing and speaking which does not just record experience, but which produces experience, new forms of experience that might not have been previously lived. Mystical writing is a heterology, where the presence of the speaker as subject is an effect of utterance made possible through the other speaking through the subject, where that other is usually God. “I is an other” is the basic mode of production for mystical texts. Mysticism is a heterology where God and the I become one, enter into a zone of indistinction. This lack of distinction between the I and God, which is premised on the annihilation of the Soul, is the strangely passive activity of decreation.

 

Adverb five, practically: The point about the performative dimension of mysticism can be put differently, and this is at the core of the work of the fascinating theologian, Amy Hollywood. She understands mysticism as it develops within monasticism, particularly from the Rule of Saint Benedict, from the sixth century. Mysticism develops in relation to rigorous religious practices, specifically the practices of reading (of scripture), preaching and participation in liturgy, especially the recitation of the Psalms. Importantly, these practices of reading, meditation, prayer, composition, and contemplation are both spiritual and physical practices. As Hollywood writes, “the Benedictine’s life is one in which the monk or nun strives to make every action a ritual action.” Mysticism has to be understood in relation to the cultivation of such practices. Perhaps such practices are the best that we can hope to attain when the world has fallen to pieces. I will return to the question of ritual and devotional practice.

Another, very simple, way of putting this point is that mysticism is not some noetic or intellectual activity, or some state of belief or nonbelief, or even some theoretical apprehension of the divine. Rather, mysticism is a practical matter, a matter of organizing one’s life around a set of practices which are ritually organized. It is about living according to a rule, however that might be understood.

This is the meaning of asceticism. Askesis is sometimes translated into Latin as studium, which is both spiritual and bodily. This is what it means to study, to be a student. Here is a speculative thought: we can also link the theme of practice to the origins of monasticism in Saint Antony and the Desert Fathers. One of the widely read books in the history of Christendom, much more widely read than Plato or Aristotle, was Athanasius’s Life of Antony. Despite five extended periods of exile, Athanasius was Bishop of Alexandria for forty-five years and was responsible for establishing the canon and order of twenty-seven books that make up the New Testament and which has been used ever since. The Life of Antony was a deliberate rewriting of Plato’s Apology, where Socrates becomes Antony, the philosopher becomes the monk, the pagan becomes the Christian. It was a huge hit.

Antony engages in a withdrawal or retreat from the city. Here, the city is Alexandria, which was the Manhattan of the ancient world—a commercial island city off the coast of a vast continent, set up by foreign, colonial powers, with a voracious appetite for everything. Antony goes first into the necropolis or city cemetery and from there into the desert, which is seen as a temple without walls. This is anachoreisis, a retreat into solitude, where the monk is the monos, the solitary. The idea here is that one can find God in the desert by withdrawing into a cave or into a cell. A cave is a cell. The desert is a kind of mystical laboratory where one can find God, a figure which is retained in changed form in the idea of the hermitage and the anchorhold. The point is that withdrawal is a practice.

In the Desert Fathers, the fruit of withdrawal can be hesychia, quiet, stillness, silence. It is the cultivation of apatheia, passionlessness or equanimity. The aim here is achieve a disinterestedness in existence, to become corpse-like, dead to the world. And in this retreat, the monk must constantly struggle with acedia, the noonday demon, or listlessness and sloth. Such is what we call depression, which Julian beautifully calls in Middle English hevynes, the heaviness with which the self is attached to itself, riveted to itself.

It is only by spending time with the noonday demon, the heaviness of depression, that God can be felt, heard, and communicated with. The downward plunge into dereliction and despair is what permits the “straining forward,” or ekeptasis into God. It is only through listlessness that one might both listen to and lust for God.

 

Adverb six, erotically. I’d like to spend a little more time and space on this adverb, as it is so important for understanding mysticism.

For mystics, everything turns on the love of God. The divine is not some entity—some desiccated abstraction—that invites belief or disbelief, assent or dissent. No, God is to be erotically enjoyed. It is fascinating how much mystics place an emphasis upon the enjoyment of God, a listening which is a lusting. This can be felt more closely in the French term jouissance, which is an enjoyment which delights and pleases but also carries clear sexual connotations.

Marie of the Incarnation (1599–1672), a French missionary in Quebec, wrote, “God alone was my only enjoyment.” God is a source of spiritual pleasure, but also physical delight. This is why Christ is so important and the doctrine of the Incarnation is so vital. Christ is a sensuous being with a sensuous mother and a super-sensuous father. Our lived communion with Christ occurs through the Eucharist, where his flesh is eaten, and his blood imbibed.

The element of liturgical devotion that dominates all others for medieval mystics, particularly female mystics, is the Eucharist. The relation to God, the communion with God, takes place through the mouth. God is orality and enters one’s mouth with a kiss. The famous French mystic, Madame Guyon (1648–1717), writes, “We must remember that God is all mouth.” These words are taken from a commentary Guyon wrote, allegedly in a day and a half, on the Song of Songs. The most important text for Jewish and Christian mysticism, which also turns up in Sufism, is the Song of Songs.

This is not the place to do justice to the intense eroticism of the Song of Songs, this ancient, near-Eastern, nuptial drama, originally composed in Aramaic. The love described in the Song by a young woman—the Shulamite—and a young man is clearly sexual. But it is not sexually explicit. Instead, the Song uses a powerful language of agrarian simile. Her belly is like a stack of wheat, her hair is like a flock of goats streaming down Mount Gilead, her breasts are like two fawns or clusters of grapes. His abdomen is like a block of ivory, his lips are like roses, and so on.

Within Judaism, the Song as interpreted allegorically, not as the love between a girl and a boy but as Israel’s love for God and God’s love for his chosen people. Within Christianity, the Song of Songs is the mystical book par excellence, where the Church—the universal Catholic Church—takes the place of Israel and the two lovers are transformed into God in the person of Christ and the soul expressed through the community of the Church. The Song becomes an ode of love between Christ and the soul. Christian mysticism can be understood as a millennia-long meditation on the meaning of such love.

Already in the third century, Origen interprets the Song allegorically as an epithalamion between a bridegroom, understood as the logos or Christ as the Word of God, and the bride, understood as the soul. He insists on the distinction between eros and agape, or love and charity, where eroticism becomes chaste, and fleshly lust becomes refined love. But, in the medieval Christian tradition, everything passes through Bernard of Clairvaux, who wrote eighty-six sermons on the Song of Songs between 1135 and 1153, reaching only verse four of chapter three of the Song.

Bernard’s sermons are beautiful, subtle, densely layered palimpsests of quotation and allusion, where he allegorizes each sensuous detail in the Song—references to fragrance, ointment, myrrh, and aloes—as expressions of the soul’s itinerary toward a loving union with Christ. But matters become even more compelling when the affective force of Bernard’s sermons on the Song authorizes and licenses an entire tradition of medieval mystical interpretation which is intensely felt and deeply personal.

In Hadewijch’s Book of Visions (ca. 1250), the union with Christ is described in physical terms: “Then he came to me himself and took me completely in his arms and pressed me to him … Then I was externally completely satisfied to the utmost satiation. At that time I also had, for a short while, the strength to bear it. But all too soon I lost sight of that beautiful man.” One can find echoes of this intensely erotic relation to Christ in a significant number of fascinating female mystics, obviously Julian but also Angela of Foligno and Teresa of Avila (1515–1582), down through Madame Guyon and Marie of the Incarnation in the seventeenth century.

But it would be a mistake to think of the eroticism of this tradition of affective piety as restricted to women. Building from the Song of Songs, the fourteenth-century English mystic Richard Rolle (circa 1300–1349) describes the fire of love, the incendium amoris, in terms of heat, sweetness, and song. The effect of song, sound, and music, especially the Song of Songs, induces a sweetness of love that is felt through physical heat and compared to jewels and gems like topaz. In “The Spiritual Canticle” of John of the Cross (1542–1591), the spiritual marriage of Christ and the soul is compared with the kiss that opens the Song, “There I, being alone, ‘kiss you,’ who are alone.” Once again, God is all mouth and when his love flows into us, it is sweeter than wine. In this connection, we could also think of Saint Francis, with his open, porous, stigmatized body receiving the love of God. Or, indeed, Henry Suso’s identification of both himself and Christ as female.

The obvious eroticism of the Song of Songs develops into a complex tradition of affective piety where the path of the spirit opens through the body and where Christ is a transfigured mystical body: a material body, a spiritual body, and a political body through the community of the church. Many mystics have a fiercely erotic connection with God through the person of Christ. Think perhaps of the many medieval images of the lactating Christ who feeds us from his breast or with the blood of his side wound, what Amy Hollywood calls “that glorious slit.”

To put it mildly, the gender of Christ is fluid, at once masculine and feminine, neither and both, a most queer God. One of great virtues of the mystical tradition is that it allows, and indeed encourages, a more complex topology of sex and gender, of new behaviors and rich potentialities.

 

Adverb seven, the final adverb, ascetically. To my mind, mysticism is ascetic not despite its eroticism, but because of it. And this is a line of thinking that is perhaps puzzling for us: there is not a contradiction between eros and askesis, between love or lust and denial or discipline. Rather, there is a relation of complementarity where spiritual discipline permits the possible transfiguration of love. And it is love’s transfiguration which is of ultimate importance.

This is the reason why I am sympathetic to the allegorical reading of the Song of Songs that begins with Origen and continues through into Saint Bernard and the medieval female mystics. What is going on in the Song is not some banal literalism which sees it in terms of sex, but a transformation of the carnal, another thinking of the erotic, a distillation, what psychoanalysts would call sublimation. What is glimpsed here is some other lineament of desire, that would allow for other possibilities of enjoyment, even and especially the enjoyment of God.

I am curious about the meaningfulness of asceticism today. The forms of ascetic practice in which people engage are legion: hot yoga, ceaseless meditation, extreme fasting, various forms of detox, excessive exercise, and compulsive forms of routine-following, which was particularly acute during the COVID-19 pandemic. Or asceticism becomes pathologized, as with anorexia, bulimia, and other behavioral “disorders.”

We are still strongly drawn by the desire for asceticism, it seems to me. We are fascinated by the extremity of mystical practice—think of the wildly self-destructive antics of female medieval mystics like Christine the Astonishing described earlier, the self-mortification of monks, stylites, anchorites, and the bands of itinerant flagellants in the early Middle Ages. But we find such behavior and its metaphysical demands too rigorous and weighty for our softer secular souls. For us, the purgation of sin has become a juice detox, and flagellation has become our relation to a bad selfie posted on social media.

We are also, I think, deeply puzzled by the way in which mystical practice conceives of the relation between the spirit and the flesh, mind, and body. We have all apparently become holists or monists, where we are all body and body is all that there is. We are endlessly encouraged to listen to our body, let the body do the talking and keep the score. This would be nice if it were true. But it isn’t. We are not identical to our bodies, but rather our experience of our selves is eccentric, divided from itself. Body holism is a new ideological discourse, which is refuted every time we get sick or sit in the dentist’s chair, or—even better (or, actually, worse)—are plagued by hypochondriac symptoms, conversion disorders of the type that have become remarkably widespread: a pandemic of genuinely felt illusion.

Mysticism is an attempt to describe another relation to the body, centered around some distinction between spirit and flesh, pneuma and sarkos. Mysticism is about the spiritualization of the flesh and the fleshly, incarnate nature of the spirit—to understand this requires a certain asceticism. We do not coincide with ourselves. Only psychopaths coincide with themselves.

With these seven adverbs, we can begin to approach the strange and compelling phenomenon that is mysticism, although we have barely even scratched the surface. At its core is love. What mysticism offers is an elevation and transfiguration of love. Its meaning is love. At the very end of her Showings, Julian of Norwich famously writes,

And from the time that it was revealed, I desired many times to know in what was our Lord’s meaning. And fifteen years after and more, I was answered in spiritual understanding, and it was said: What, do you wish to know your Lord’s meaning in this thing? Know it well, love was his meaning. Who reveals it to you? Love. What did he reveal to you? Love. Why does he reveal it to you? For love. Remain in this, and you will know more of the same. But you will never know different, without end.

 

From Mysticism, to be published by New York Review Books in September. 

Simon Critchley has written over twenty books, including works of philosophy and books on Greek tragedy, dead philosophers, David Bowie, football, suicide, and many other subjects. He is the Hans Jonas Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York and a Director of the Onassis Foundation.

The Private Life: On James Baldwin

JAMES BALDWIN IN HYDE PARK, LONDON. PHOTOGRAPH BY ALLAN WARREN. Via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

 

In his review of James Baldwin’s third novel, Another Country, Lionel Trilling asked: “How, in the extravagant publicness in which Mr. Baldwin lives, is he to find the inwardness which we take to be the condition of truth in the writer?”

But Baldwin’s sense of inwardness had been nourished as much as it had been damaged by the excitement and danger that came from what was public and urgent. Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni’s Room dramatized the conflict between a longing for a private life, even a spiritual life, and the ways in which history and politics intrude most insidiously into the very rooms we try hardest to shut them out of.

Baldwin had, early in his career, elements of what T. S. Eliot attributed to Henry James, “a mind so fine that it could not be penetrated by an idea.” The rest of the time, however, he did not have this luxury, as public events pressed in on his imagination.

Baldwin’s imagination remained passionately connected to the destiny of his country. He lacked the guile and watchfulness that might have tempted him to keep clear of what was happening in America; the ruthlessness he had displayed in going to live in Paris and publishing Giovanni’s Room was no use to him later as the battle for civil rights grew more fraught. It was inevitable that someone with Baldwin’s curiosity and moral seriousness would want to become involved, and inevitable that someone with his sensitivity and temperament would find what was happening all-absorbing.

Baldwin’s influence arose from his books and his speeches, and from the tone he developed in essays and television appearances, a tone that took its bearings from his own experience in the pulpit. Instead of demanding reform or legislation, Baldwin grew more interested in the soul’s dark, intimate spaces and the importance of the personal and the private.

In 1959, in reply to a question about whether the fifties as a decade “makes special demands on you as a writer,” Baldwin adopted his best style, lofty and idealistic and candid, while remaining sharp, direct, and challenging: “But finally for me the difficulty is to remain in touch with the private life. The private life, his own and that of others, is the writer’s subject—his key and ours to his achievement.”

Baldwin was interested in the hidden and dramatic areas in his own being, and was prepared as a writer to explore difficult truths about his own private life. In his fiction, he had to battle for the right of his protagonists to choose or influence their destinies. He knew about guilt and rage and bitter privacies in a way that few of his white novelist contemporaries did. And this was not simply because he was Black and homosexual; the difference arose from the very nature of his talent, from the texture of his sensibility. “All art,” he wrote, “is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up.”

Baldwin understood the singular importance of the novel, because he saw the dilemma his country faced as essentially an interior one, as his fellow citizens suffered from a poison that began in the individual spirit and then made its way into politics. And his political writing remains as intense and vivid as his fiction, because he believed that social reform could not occur through legislation alone but required a reimagining of the private realm. Thus, for Baldwin, an examination of the individual soul as dramatized in fiction had immense power.

***

Baldwin’s reputation as a novelist and essayist rests mainly on the work he did in the decade before 1963, a decade in which he was passionately industrious. The year 1963 seems to have been a watershed for him. He wrote hardly any fiction in that year. It was a time in which “the condition of truth” could not be achieved by solitude or by silence or by slow work on a novel.

Baldwin began the year by going on a lecture tour for the Congress of Racial Equality, known as CORE. In the first few days of January, he met James Meredith, the first Black student to enroll at the University of Mississippi despite being denied admission by the state’s governor. Meredith noted how quiet Baldwin was, but he was also amused by Baldwin’s version of the dance known as the twist.

Also in January of 1963, Baldwin met Medgar Evers. They began to travel together in Mississippi, investigating the murder of a Black man and visiting the sort of churches that Baldwin’s stepfather, the model for the Gabriel of Go Tell It on the Mountain, would have preached in.

When Baldwin returned to New York, where he lived in a two-room walkup on West Eighteenth Street, he became involved, with Lorraine Hansberry and others, in various protests. He also had a busy social life. His biographer David Leeming writes: “He still had the ‘poor boy’s’ fascination with the rich and famous … and they were just as fascinated by him. He found it difficult to refuse their frequent invitations. In short, the work was not getting done.”

In the spring of 1963, to find peace, Baldwin traveled to Turkey, which had become one of his havens.

In May 1963, back in the U.S., Baldwin spoke in nine cities on the West Coast over ten days, earning around five hundred dollars a speech, all of which went to CORE. In that month, his face appeared on the cover of the mainstream magazine Time. Three days later, when a friend gave a party for him at a restaurant in Haight-Ashbury, “literally hundreds of people struggled at the windows … to get a glimpse of him,” Leeming reports.

Two days later, Baldwin was in Connecticut, and then, on two hours’ sleep, he went to New York for a meeting with Attorney General Robert Kennedy. On May 12, Baldwin had wired Kennedy, blaming the federal government for failing to protect nonviolent protestors who had been beaten by police in Birmingham, Alabama. Now, on May 24, Baldwin and other activists, including Hansberry, Lena Horne, and Harry Belafonte, met Robert Kennedy at his home. The meeting went nowhere. Its main result was to increase the FBI’s interest in Baldwin.

In this same year—1963—as Baldwin made speeches, attended meetings, and stayed up late, he had many plans for work, including a book on the FBI. James Campbell writes in his biography: “Baldwin never produced his threatened work on the FBI, but he had, as usual, a multitude of other plans in mind, including the slave novel—now retitled ‘Tomorrow Brought Us Rain’—a screen treatment of Another Country, a musical version of Othello, a play called ‘The 121st Day of Sodom,’ which [Ingmar] Bergman intended to produce in Stockholm, and a text for a book of photographs by … Richard Avedon.”

Baldwin worked on the Avedon text after the assassination of Medgar Evers on June 12, 1963. It has all the hallmarks of his best writing: the high tone taken from the Bible, from the sermon, from Henry James, and from a set of beliefs that belonged fundamentally to Baldwin himself and gave him his signature voice: “For nothing is fixed, forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have.”

In August, Baldwin flew some members of his family to Puerto Rico to celebrate his birthday. Then he went to Paris, where he led five hundred people in a protest to the U.S. embassy, returning to the U.S. in time for the March on Washington at the end of the month. In September he went to Selma to work on voter registration. The following month he went to Canada. In December, he traveled to Africa to celebrate the independence of Kenya.

When Baldwin was asked how and where he had written his play Blues for Mr. Charlie, he replied: “On pads in planes, trains, gas stations—all sorts of places. With a pen or a pencil. … This is a hand-written play.” It was the only writing he completed in 1963.

***

Part of James Baldwin’s fame arose from his skill as a television performer. On camera, he used clear, well-made sentences. At times, he spoke like a trained orator, channeling his views into sharp wit, fresh insight, irony, with impressive verbal command. What he displayed was an intelligence that could quickly become grounded and combative and political once the television lights were on.

In some early appearances such as one on The Dick Cavett Show with the Yale philosopher Paul Weiss, Baldwin’s arguments were too complex for the short time he had been allotted. Because his delivery was slightly halting—he was articulate in bursts—he was too easy to interrupt, and he was always at his best when he could speak without interruption. It was as though he was sometimes too thoughtful for television.

This, of course, also gave him an edge. It meant that he was not mimicking politicians or TV regulars. He sought to challenge, and to set about thinking aloud. There were moments when he loved a simple question so that the answer could be ruminative and complicated. He used a context such as a talk show to state the most difficult truths in a style that belonged to the sermon or the seminar more naturally than the television studio.

He knew how to slow down, so that the camera lingered on his face as he prepared himself to say something difficult. He had a way, when he was about to offer an opinion that might seem extreme or unpalatable to his host or his audience, to hesitate, to let the camera see him thinking, and then to return to fluency.

At times, Baldwin’s manner in television interviews and in public debates could be scathing and indignant. But he could also be calm and self-possessed. In a 1963 debate in Florida, for example, even though his fellow panelists were hostile, Baldwin remained polite. He was ready to talk about the private life, the creation of the self, in a way that no one could argue with, since he himself had set the tone and the terms. He was also ready to make clear that the lives of white people, too, had been maimed by segregation. But what was most notable is how he moved his face towards the light, how he spoke with authority, and how at home he seemed to be in a television studio.

There were times when Baldwin appeared like a method actor playing out the part of thoughtfulness, working out as the camera rolled how a man considering things carefully might appear.

While he could be provocative, he was also measured. He exuded a sort of melancholy wisdom. At times, he managed to sound optimistic, especially in a panel discussion in August 1963, at the time of the March on Washington, when he was in the company of Harry Belafonte, Marlon Brando, Sidney Poitier, and Charlton Heston.

When Lionel Trilling wrote of the “extravagant publicness in which Mr. Baldwin lives” and wondered how Baldwin might find “the inwardness which we take to be the condition of truth in the writer,” Trilling was still in a world where it was presumed that writers should be quiet and stay home. And Trilling was not alone in believing that Baldwin was destroying his talent by going on television, writing articles, giving speeches, and being distracted by whatever was happening on the street.

But Baldwin belongs to a group of writers, born in the twenties and early thirties, who wrote both fiction and essays with a similar zeal and ambition; they did not see nonfiction as a lesser form or reporting as a lesser task. It was not easy to make a judgment on whether they were mainly novelists or, more likely, essayists who happened to write fiction. Also, it was often hard to make a judgment on what constituted their best work.

For example: Norman Mailer’s The Armies of the Night and his Miami and the Siege of Chicago, both works of imaginative and original political reporting, may equal his best novel, The Executioner’s Song. So, too, V. S. Naipaul’s long essay on the dictatorship in Argentina, “The Return of Eva Perón,” and his autobiographical essay Finding the Center may match in power his novels A House for Mr. Biswas and The Enigma of Arrival. Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album may be better than her novels A Book of Common Prayer and Democracy.

These writers—Baldwin, Mailer, Naipaul, Didion—traveled, took an interest in life, and accepted commissions from editors. And all four understood that if writing is a display of personality, then their literary personality was, no matter what form they used, lavish enough to blur the distinction between reportage and high literary fiction.

But there were also times when all four of them took on too much; their interest in a subject was sometimes not equaled by their account of it. Baldwin’s book on the child murders that occurred between 1979 and 1981 in Atlanta, The Evidence of Things Not Seen, is slack and rambling; Mailer’s Advertisements for Myself and Marilyn: A Biography are not quite readable now, their egotism bloated and out of control; Naipaul’s travel books often present someone too mean and irascible, more interested in showing off his own crankiness than in exploring the world outside. And Joan Didion’s book Salvador might have been helped by more research.

What is fascinating about Baldwin’s occasional journalism and speechmaking is how uneven it is, and how rapidly this can give way to insights and sharp analysis and then a glorious, sweeping, seemingly effortless final set of statements and assertions.

While he worked fast on these stray pieces for magazines, Baldwin refused to settle for a simplified version of his own oppression. Instead, he combined irony and urgency in the same thought, seeking a manner that took its bearings from somewhere high above us, perhaps even from his own unique access to the word of the Lord.

“In a very real sense,” he wrote, “the Negro problem has become anachronistic; we ourselves are the only problem, it is our hearts only that we must search.”

In “As Much Truth as One Can Bear,” a New York Times Book Review article from January 14, 1962, when others might have been concerned about the police or about housing, Baldwin wrote about private loneliness as though it were the most pressing problem facing Americans: “The loneliness of those cities described in [the work of John] Dos Passos is greater now than it has ever been before; and these cities are more dangerous now than they were before, and their citizens are yet more unloved … The trouble is deeper than we wished to think: the trouble is in us.”

Sometimes, in his journalism and in his speeches, Baldwin was amusing himself. He took words such as equality or identity and concepts such as whiteness and examined them with a mixture of mischief and a sort of Swiftian contempt.

For example, in an address to Harlem teachers in October 1963, he sought to explode the myth of the original, heroic, white settlers in America: “What happened was that some people left Europe because they couldn’t stay there any longer and had to go some place else to make it. That’s all. They were hungry, they were poor, they were convicts. Those who were making it in England, for example, did not get on the Mayflower.”

In an essay called “The White Problem,” published in 1964, Baldwin wrote scornfully about the vast difference between the white and black American celebrities. He wrote, “Doris Day and Gary Cooper: two of the most grotesque appeals to innocence the world has ever seen. And the other, subterranean, indispensable, and denied, can be summed up, let us say, in the tone and in the face of Ray Charles. And there never has been in this country any genuine confrontation between these two levels of experience.”

He sought to elevate what was complex, multifarious, intricate. In 1966, he wrote: “Much of the American confusion, if not most of it, is a direct result of the American effort to avoid dealing with the Negro as a man.”

Since he had it in for easy and fixed categories, he was bound eventually to become eloquent about how his society dealt with the idea of men and masculinity.

In the early sixties, Baldwin spoke in an interview with Mademoiselle magazine about sexuality in his customarily challenging tone: “American males are the only people I’ve ever encountered in the world who are willing to go on the needle before they go to bed with each other.”

While early in his career Baldwin did not speak directly about his own sexuality, others were ready to offer hints and innuendos. A 1963 Time magazine profile, for example, described Baldwin as a “nervous, slight, almost fragile figure, filled with frets and fears. He is effeminate in manner, drinks considerably, smokes cigarettes in chains.”

When Lionel Trilling worried about Baldwin’s “extravagant publicness,” the implications of the word extravagant would not have been lost on many readers. And when Norman Mailer wrote of Baldwin that “even the best of his paragraphs are sprayed with perfume,” he would not have been easily misunderstood. Also, the extensive FBI file on James Baldwin includes the sentence: “It has been heard that Baldwin may be a homosexual and he appeared as if he may be one.”

Baldwin, in his own writings, was often careful. He liked complex connections, strange distinctions, ambiguous implications. Thus, even in a time when gay identity was becoming easier to denote or define, Baldwin resisted the very concept of gay and straight, even male and female, insisting in an essay in 1985 that “Each of us, helplessly and forever, contains the other—male in female, female in male, white in black and black in white. We are part of each other. Many of my countrymen appear to find this fact exceedingly inconvenient and even unfair, and so, very often, do I. But none of us can do anything about it.”

Religious elements in the civil rights movement were suspicious of both Baldwin and Bayard Rustin, a prominent organizer and activist who was close to Martin Luther King Jr. While King was not personally bothered by Rustin’s homosexuality, some of his colleagues were. One of them suggested that Baldwin and Bayard “were better qualified to lead a homosexual movement than a civil rights movement.” Baldwin’s homosexuality may have been one of the reasons why he was not invited to speak at the March on Washington in 1963.

But these were minor irritations compared to what happened when Baldwin’s fellow activists began to absorb fully the implications not only of Giovanni’s Room but also of Another Country. This third novel, published in 1962, became a bestseller. Its Black hero, Rufus, in the words of the Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver, was depicted as, “a pathetic wretch who indulged in the white man’s pastime of committing suicide, who let a white bisexual homosexual [sic] fuck him in the ass, and who took a Southern Jezebel for his woman.”

Cleaver, in his book Soul on Ice, published in 1968, wrote, “It seems that many Negro homosexuals … are outraged and frustrated because in their sickness they are unable to have a baby by a white man. … Homosexuality is a sickness, just as are baby-rape or wanting to become the head of General Motors.” Later, in an interview with The Paris Review in 1984, Baldwin said “My real difficulty with Cleaver, sadly, was visited on me by the kids who were following him, while he was calling me a faggot and the rest of it.”

It would have been easy then for Baldwin to have gone into exile, disillusioned and sad, to have written his memoirs and become nostalgic about the glory days of the civil rights movement. Indeed, he was planning to write a book about the murdered leaders Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King.

But this is not what happened. As the sixties went on, Baldwin became energized and excited by the Black Panthers, whose leaders he first met in San Francisco late in 1967. The three leaders—Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, and (despite their antipathies) Eldridge Cleaver—were, David Leeming writes, “as far as Baldwin was concerned, the future of the civil rights movement. … Baldwin admired the radicals; he saw them as part of the larger ‘project’ of which the old civil rights movement had been only a stage.” Baldwin wrote a preface to one of Seale’s books and supported Newton when, soon after their first meeting, he was arrested and imprisoned.

He also became more militant in his television interviews. For example, in an interview with Dick Cavett aired on June 16, 1969, he said: “If we were white, if we were Irish, if we were Jewish, if we were Poles, if we had in fact, in your mind, a frame of reference, our heroes would be your heroes too. Martin would be a hero for you and not be a threat, Malcolm X might still be alive. Everyone is very proud of brave little Israel, a state against which I have nothing—I don’t want to be misinterpreted, I am not an anti-Semite. But, you know, when the Israelis pick up guns, or the Poles or the Irish or any white man in the world says, ‘Give me liberty or give me death,’ the entire white world applauds. When a black man says exactly the same thing, word for word, he is judged a criminal and treated like one and everything possible is done to make an example of [him] so there won’t be any more like him.”

***

Two weeks before he died, the poet W. B. Yeats wrote a poem called “Cuchulain Comforted,” which began with a series of statements free of metaphor. The poem was written in terza rima, a form that was new for Yeats. Unusually, this poem did not need many drafts. It seems to have come to him easily, as if naturally. In earlier Yeats poems and plays, Cuchulain, a figure from Irish mythology, had appeared as the implacable, solitary, and violent hero, prepared for solo combat, free of fear. Now he has “six mortal wounds” and is attended by figures, Shrouds, who encourage him to join them in the act of sewing rather than fighting. They let him know that they themselves are not among the heroic dead but are “Convicted cowards all by kindred slain // Or driven from home and left to die in fear.”

Thus, at the very end of his life, Yeats created an image that seemed the very opposite of what had often given vigor to his own imagination. His heroic figure has now been gentled; his fierce and solitary warrior has joined others in the act of sewing; instead of the company of brave men, Cuchulain seems content to rest finally among cowards.

This poem is not a culminating statement for Yeats, but a contradictory one; it is not a crowning version of a familiar poetic form, but an experiment in a form—terza rima—associated most with Dante. Instead of attempting to sum up, it is as though Yeats wished to release fresh energy by repudiating, by beginning again, by offering his hero a set of images alien to him, which served all the more to make the hero more unsettled, more ambiguous.

How fascinating to see a writer abandon bold self-assertion and, however briefly, find a tone that is compassionate and genial and tender.

There was, however, no such moment in Baldwin. From the beginning, he displayed his own vulnerability, his own softness, sometimes as a weapon but mostly as a way of transforming an argument so that it was not a contest to be won but rather a question to be reframed—to be moved from the narrow confines of the public realm back towards the unsettled (and unbounded) space of the self, the questing, uneasy spirit.

 

Adapted from On James Baldwin by Colm Tóibín, now available from Brandeis University Press.

 

Colm Tóibín’s most recent book is The Magician. He was interviewed by Belinda McKeon in issue no. 242 of The Paris Review.

I Got Snipped: Notes after a Vasectomy

From Five Paintings, a portfolio by Olivier Mosset that appeared in The Paris Review issue no. 44 (Fall 1968).

Popop, who came home to raise me after his release from Holmesburg Prison in ’88, would have never let a white man in a white coat lay a hand on the D, let alone the vas deferens, had he the context to differentiate between the two. He never mentioned any experiments either. If he had, he wouldn’t have seen the wanton use of his body as some epic reveal of treachery but another quotidian instance he might describe by way of an exasperated sigh, shrug, or “Duh, dickhead” hurled at some scholar with the “real” details, or social reformer come to reimagine us in their image, to correct our supposedly devious sexual habits before it was too late, which often meant well before our twelfth birthdays. Given the early onset encroachments of power, that old black adage on suspicion and physicians was never an abstraction at home.

I got snipped anyway.

And I was late, by any reasonable measure, thirty-two with too many kids climbing up my leg, three boys and one girl whose temperaments have long since broken and rebuilt me in their images, the first of whom arrived too soon after his mother stopped taking birth control and forgot to tell me. And I’ve never met people more averse to independent play. Shouts of “Daddy!” and “Dada!” puncture my every attempt to think, coming on as tickles or itty-bitty terrors between each typed word, and so I write this from two worlds at once, where promises of the near future—the local pool or doggie park, Rita’s Water Ice, the school track, the bike trail, or playing Diablo and Super Smash Bros.—defang the demands on my attention for ten or so minutes at a time. The interstices allow collective laughter over new word enunciations—a six-year-old’s “feastidious,” or a question of the utmost importance: Who taught the twins to say “Fresh to def?” My daughter, twelve, takes credit, and my oldest son, two years her senior, is above it all until we remind him how the ticklish remain so, even chin hair deep into puberty. It’s there, between the laughter and all my pleading—“Stop, no, don’t” and “Put that dog down!” and “Stop chokin each other!”—that I give myself over to thought, which is writing, and in this case or every case, correlated with what the children mean to me, and what I might mean to them, and what it meant to ensure that I might conceive children nevermore.

The doctor was quite brown, if that counts for anything in this context, and not one of those people whose entire personality is dedicated to the hatred of children, who seem to be multiplying on every blunt “side” of the political spectrum. Gentler than most lovers, he cupped my testicles and said that everything would be all right. And in this man’s supple embrace I drifted off into a blissful nondream of future agency.

My homie Drake—no, not the former child actor with the slimthick sandworm sex tape, but a real person—had already sworn by it as a matter of ideal if not yet action, watching and waiting for some of us to go first before sliding into the VA hospital with his trademark gusto. In his episode of Hot & Single last year, it was the second bullet point on a little red billboard advocating his potential fuckability:

Fashion photographerHas a vasectomyThinks liking art is a personality

This was much like when we all joined the army in our teens, unable to afford rent, or love—despite whatever J.Lo might have said in 2001—and made another friend go first. It was Bruce that time, exchanging three or so horrible jobs for one in which you might support the empire less obliquely or lose your life, but be fully clothed and have a place to live, groceries for your mom and them, who damn sure weren’t gonna be fed otherwise. None of us had any children yet, though we certainly longed for a kind of family we almost didn’t have.

Drake and I were deployed to Baghdad together and, let him tell it, he always knew better than you that he didn’t want no kids. The threat of possibility cast a limit on pleasure itself. Way back when, a broader contingent of us stacked contraceptives like Jenga pieces, unable to decouple desire from fear. It was always about whose lover had an IUD or who was on the Pill, driving to Rite Aid at 2 A.M. for condoms and VCF or calling your homeboy to call your other homegirl to call yalls coworker who always had a Mason jar full of Plan B underneath their too-low-to-the-ground mattress. But here’s the thing: despite all the contrivances and risk, the discourse around responsibility and desire, the distance we were trying to gain on our forebears in one way or another, getting a vasectomy never really appeared to us as a serious option. It ranked far below the risk of pulling out—especially when your lover, let alone SZA, might beg you not to.

And so there we were, most of us without health insurance, hardly ever visiting a doctor for any reason, unless it was to get tested for STIs or the irrefutable breakage of bones or the murkier disintegration of our psyches, all of which happened more often than anyone admitted. But I think the deeper tragedy was that most of us feared a forthcoming decrease in our selectability above all else; we wanted, as my friend Aisha might say, to get chosen. We’d yet to truly accept the fact that our virility was a mode of appeal, especially to straight women of a certain age; we dreaded a trip to the discard pile via the “Want children” field on Hinge. This was a comically Darwinian program we were subject and subjecting ourselves to, with the help of this century’s quite ordinary loneliness. Before and after my decision to get a vasectomy in 2021, I had friends, usually older women, sit me down in earnest, my eyes bleary from late nights and stress with the children I already have and ask, “Are you sure?” or “What if you fall in love with someone who really wants kids?”

My other homie Clarence, who joined the army after he’d seen us do it, sprinted to the nearest urologist in exhaustion right after his daughter was born, despite our jubilation that little Maddie had squeezed through at the eleventh hour before that permanent shutdown. Though “shutdown” is a misnomer: everybody knows you still cum, and, anecdotally, it appears to be more pleasurable, having separated the wheat from the chaff altogether. The day after his procedure Clarence whispered me upstairs giddy with conspiracy, before turning the light on and unsheathing his two tall, dark, and handsome testicles. They were swollen and gleaming a little, but smooth, with just the smallest spatter of blood beneath a wad of gauze. He declined my offer to change his dressings, but the dick was still intact, dapper and healthy as always; it was hard to imagine better results. I think my own decision was made then, at the top of Clarence’s stairs, the light refracting off his nuts like some otherwise unfathomable North Star to sexual freedom.

Being close to other black men who’d done it made the difference. From junior high to circumscribed fatherhood, in shop class and out waiting tables, on the court and in and out of court, we’d always talked openly about manhood and fatherhood and race without having to entertain the boring mandate that some woman be the antagonist; we could touch and say we loved each other, and chastise one another for our dishonest interactions with lovers; but we could also wail on the regular about our lack of say after an accidental pregnancy, or sob our sorry asses home from being made a boy at family court over the years. We didn’t play zero-sum games or belittle one another for public sentiment, all of which fostered a rare honesty I found nowhere else, especially after I finally entered college and obtained the knowledge and health insurance that might have better supported the thing we call choice.

After the procedure, I did and didn’t wonder why more men who enjoy sex with women but don’t want children refuse any concrete gesture upon the scrotum. It was Damon who summed up the shared trepidation of niggas the world over: “I just ain’t tryna take no chances down there,” he said, which is hard to label unreasonable, with history in mind. This is after our grandmothers and mothers, their friends and sisters, and daughters and friends had been made mules of the world, toward the inception and maintenance of—despite enduring exclusion from—this thing we call modern medicine. It is after the heyday of U.S. eugenics programs, which sterilized mostly black and Latino and poor folks. And it is after the natal alienation, systematic rape, and forced reproduction of an entire genre of reinvented people was used to construct both this country and an altogether profitable new trajectory for “deviance.”

So far be it for me to tell any black person that they should cast aside doubts about elective procedures. And, but, against that notion, the default position which offloads the kingship of contraception to your mom or girlfriend hasn’t quite worked out either. Reportage from lovers and friends is variously bad on birth control: the pain of switching out IUDs and the dislodgings; the disproportionate rate of ovarian cysts on hormones; the irregular bleeding, weight gain, libido and lovers lost, and God forbid going back to the hospital for tubal ligation. Standing over me as I write this, and trying (sort of) to keep our twins from jumping on me, Jess tells me for the first time that she got her tubes tied in that two-for-one C-section deal after her new baby with the new dude. And while my friend Kaina asked them to “just take the whole apparatus out” (the doc refused), my sister, who refuses birth control of any kind—because of how it ravaged her body—considers such an operation a fate too close to death; only a few years have passed since my aunt Suzie had her sixth kid and never left the hospital.

It’s maybe a little obvious that the risk of vasectomies is not comparable to pregnancy, or the labors that women endure staving it off. And whatever we might think about the specific pathological imprint of black men and boys—which in the public imagination is essentially limited to our genitals and “leadership potential” (whatever the fuck that’s supposed to mean)—one would be hard-pressed to call us the prime architects of dubious family planning in this country. The hegemonic sense that we are all lazy superpredators packing the “last taboo” in our gray sweatpants, that perhaps we are also too well loved, or loathed as transparent subjects, or that goofy aphorisms like “black-on-black crime” represent true phenomena, really gets in the way of saying, feeling, thinking, or doing much of what makes being alive worthwhile, which certainly includes fucking , or else the thrill of responding to the desires of others with your own in equal measure, if, when, and however two or more grown and consenting and hopefully nasty-ass people feel like it. But this is all one small part of the larger problem we have where sex meets anything. Among the many issues that stem from our relation to, yet inability to wholly inhabit white patriarchal norms, we’re only now beginning to think of black men as potential parents. I’ve never been treated worse than when I begged the courts for joint custody.

Perhaps this is worth saying too: vasectomies won’t prevent STIs or normalize talking about them openly, but neither does all that pulling out; they won’t fix your relationship, but neither will that new baby; and they’re not some heroic sacrifice or inoculation against the post-Roe apocalypse. And facts: I think getting cut even this late in life has been just one node toward accessing greater pleasure, uncoupled from the anxieties of accidental genomic narcissism. The space made real by eliminating this fear has only clarified my desires in sex and life, including the energies dedicated to loved ones already living, like my friends and their kids, my kids and their friends: little Eva and Imani down the street; my own mother, whom I now care for; Jess’s new cute little angry baby by her new man; my sister’s high-needs son and little Lala, the smoothest baby to ever waddle across the earth; Tasia’s Lily, and elf-eared Leon; Luke and Bruce’s half-dozen progeny, who don’t come around enough; my brother’s Aubree and brand new baby Glory; and of course sweet Maddie, who says “Uncle Joe” like I owe her money and dubbed one of our backyard ducks Mr. Quackers before he was eaten by the Fantastic Mr. Fox.

As a child in what I’ll call a hostile home and world system, to be polite, my fantasy life had been populated by a socialist collective of animals more tender than Orwell’s piggies, so I was unhappy, to say the least, that Mr. Fox decimated half our flock. No surprise then that after the primary sadness of my  grandfather’s death last year, I not only went back to collecting and battling Pokémon on Nintendo Switch—and no, I’m not interested in letting the kids win—I also opened the backyard up to baby ducks and chickens, and two friendly, if loud, geese. I had the kids tend the yard with me and collect eggs, let them package the product into cartons to share with our friends and neighbors. As told by my partner, Panini, I have externalized a biological drive for life in such a way as to make it more respectable, albeit no less crazy or exhausting.

What I really want, perhaps, is a more collectively responsible way through our predicament and desires, some manner of speaking and doing honestly that feels good in relation to ourselves and the women in our lives, that is neither hypersaturated by fear and white supremacy, nor curtailed by the shallow dishonesties of public sentiment.

But who am I anyway, strolling through Target at eight this morning in a BABY DADDY T-shirt Jess got me two Father’s Days back, buying a thirty-six-pack of SKYN Elite condoms—could be large or regular, mind your business—and sexting back one of your friends about what she likes and where. Four kids too late, I’d like to say that getting a vasectomy was the best sexual decision I’ve ever made, and that you can love someone, many people, in fact, and not want any more of them at all.

Back when I got home from the hospital with this swollen lump between my legs, they were all waiting for me, though, those people who live in my house, having run the sitter ragged, reminding me that I’d promised to teach them how to skateboard. And so there I was, kick-pushing like Lupe out back as the little gremlins cheered me on, all of us cheesing for not-so-different reasons.

 

Joseph Earl Thomas is the author of the memoir Sink and the novel God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer.

At the Great Florida Bigfoot Conference

Skunk ape in costume against Miami skyline. Photograph by Josh Aronson.

The evening before the fourth annual Great Florida Bigfoot Conference in the north-central horse town of Ocala, I was in a buffet line at the VIP dinner, listening to a man describe his first encounter. “I was on an airboat near Turner River Road in the Glades and I saw it there,” he said. “At first, I confused it with a gator because it was hunched over, but then it stood up. It was probably eight feet tall. I could smell it too. I froze. It was like something had taken control over my body.” His story contained a common trope of Bigfoot encounters: awe and fear in the face of a higher power.

I sat down at a conference room round table and gnawed on an undercooked chicken quarter, looking around at my fellow VIPs, or as the conference’s master of ceremonies, Ryan “RPG” Golembeske, called us, the Bigfoot Mafia. Most of the other attendees were of retirement age. Their hats, tattoos, and car bumpers in the parking lot indicated that many were former military, police, and/or proud gun owners. Many were Trump supporters—beseeching fellow motorists to, as one bumper sticker read, MAKE THE FOREST GREAT AGAIN, a catchphrase which had been written out over an image of a Bigfoot on a turquoise background in the pines, rocking a pompadour. The sticker was a small oval on the larger spare wheel cover of a mid-aughts Chinook Concourse RV. Above it and below it, in Inspirational Quote Font, was the phrase “Once upon a time … is Now!” The couple who owned the RV cemented their identities with a big homemade TRUCKERS FOR TRUMP window decal next to a large handicap sticker. As a thirty-six-year-old progressive, I was an outlier in this crowd. But, like many, I was a believer.

It bears repeating: I believe in the existence of the Bigfoot, Sasquatch, Yeti, Wild Man, or, as it is called in South Florida, the Skunk Ape. There have been too many credible accounts and oral histories passed down over thousands of years to discount its/their existence. During my time working as a teacher on the Miccosukee Indian Reservation, I heard from students and elders very detailed and grave encounters with a large humanlike primate in the swamp. In the course of publishing Islandia Journal, a periodical of hidden local folklore and history, I also meet swamp enthusiasts—historians, hunters, hydrologists, et cetera—who describe encounters clearly. Though I’ve never had an encounter myself, I believe these stories intuitively, told by those who have nothing to gain from their telling. Unfortunately, no biological evidence supports the idea that Bigfoot exists. Attendees of the conference wax rhapsodically about what the future holds thanks to eDNA. The discovery of primate DNA in the water or dirt near an encounter location would rekindle the possibility of a biological Bigfoot, but for now, we’re waiting.

This absence of harder proof meant that the conference was, predictably, rife with speculation. At the VIP dinner, I sat next to Monica, one of my few fellow thirtysomethings in attendance.  She was sunburnt and wore small round gold-rimmed glasses. She’d moved to Jacksonville from West Virginia with her partner, Joey, who told me later that she was just there to support Monica’s varying interests. While looking down and shuffling BBQ beans and mac and cheese around her styrofoam plate, Monica asked if I’d heard about the latest paranormal goings-on at Skinwalker Ranch in the Utah desert. Talking about large objects under mesas and anomalies in the sky, she gestured wildly. This struck me as off-base: we were at a Bigfoot conference, not storming Area 51. “It’s all connected,” she said, before explaining that Bigfoot tracks disappearing into dry creek beds weren’t the product of hoaxes but rather because Bigfoot travels using interdimensional portals. I expressed some doubt. “You can either close your mind,” she told me, “or open it to the very real possibility of infinite dimensions.”

After the VIP dinner, I drove down Ocala’s State Road 200—an asphalt expanse of strip malls—to Gator’s Dockside Restaurant. The person behind the popular Instagram account called @florida_bigfoot_hq was hosting a pre-conference get-together. The account is run by Brooke Moreland, a self-described “researcher of the strange and unusual,” who posts a combination of bikini, tattoo, fitness, and gun content on her personal Instagram. I saw her the next day at the conference wearing a BIGFOOT SPECIAL FORCES tank top. Against a setting sun, the tank’s Bigfoot walked holding an assault rifle. “He always sees you,” the shirt read, “But you will never see him.”

At the happy hour, I sat down next to Thomas and Todd, who’d driven down from Mississippi. In his free time, Todd designs Bigfoot-themed coasters. He doesn’t have an Etsy shop and wasn’t a vendor for the conference. “I just make ‘em for myself and for friends,” he told me. “Take one.” He handed me a coaster which read “Florida Skunk Ape: The Original Florida Man.” The coaster, disintegrating beneath the ring where his beer had been, was red, green, yellow, and black—the same colors you might find on a head shop ashtray. Thomas told me he was an HVAC repairman and heavy metal guitarist with a long ponytail who filled his time driving between jobs listening to Bigfoot podcasts. His dad got him into it. “It’s intergenerational for me,” he said.

The etymology of the name “Bigfoot” can be traced to Bluff Creek in California. In 1958, a bulldozer operator working for a logging outfit spotted sixteen-inch footprints next to his vehicle. His crew also reported encounters with a harmless area creature. Bigfoot hysteria entered the American psyche more broadly in the seventies after the release of the famous 1967 Patterson-Gimlin film, which purported to capture Bigfoot walking across Bluff Creek, California, in 16mm glory. Roger Patterson rented out movie theaters and screened the documentary which included the footage, and eventually sold rights to the BBC for use in one of their own TV docudramas. All of a sudden, people were heading into the woods in search of the creature. In 2019, the FBI released a trove of documents related to inquiries by Peter Byrne, the director of Oregon’s Bigfoot Information Center from all the way back in 1976. He’d been requesting an investigation into area sightings and a specific hair sample. Fifty years later, he finally got a reply in the files: the hair was from a deer. Many Floridians saw the possible existence of Bigfoot as a disruption to regularly scheduled hunting and real estate development. They wanted nothing to do with their resident Skunk Ape and took to the woods in angry mobs, except instead of pitchforks and torches, they brought rifles. They found clues, including a series of seventeen-inch footprints, but they were breadcrumbs that led nowhere. In 1977, hoping to quell the hysteria behind these hunts, Florida state representative Paul Nuckolls sponsored a bill to protect Skunk Apes from being hunted. The proposed law made it a misdemeanor to “take, possess, harm, or molest the Skunk Ape.” Ultimately, it did not make it through the legislature.

According to the Bigfoot Field Research Organization, which maintains the most extensive database of reported Bigfoot encounters around the world, Washington state has the most listed encounters and California has the second. These are not surprises. The Paterson-Gimlin film assured Bigfoot’s association with the woods and mountains of the Pacific Northwest. Florida comes in at number three. This surprises many. Florida has long marketed itself as a destination for beachgoing and fishing—a place where you can take a break from the coast and go see an alligator by the side of a road. The pine woods of Ocala’s National Forest and the mammal-rich cypress hammocks of the southern part of the state don’t make it onto postcards as often.

I asked my new friends at the @florida_bigfoot_hq event about this: Why is Florida a hotbed of Bigfoot encounters? “Plain and simple,” Todd replied, “You’ve got year-round freshwater and food.” He was referring to Florida’s weather, its springs, and a constantly replenishing store of wild turkeys, hogs, and other huntable animals. It was a sober, reasonable answer, and probably the best one I got the whole weekend, assuming you believe that Bigfoot is a biological being that requires food.

Skunk ape in costume. Photograph by Josh Aronson.

The next morning I drove to Rainbow Springs to take a dip in the seventy-two-degree water and mull over my own question. While driving, I’d passed the Villages, a retirement community with the power to influence presidential elections. I drove past swaths of clear-cut forest. I drove past roadside attractions like the Don Garlits Museum of Drag Racing, the Zipline Adventure Park, and Gatorland. Florida’s retirement communities and roadside attractions invite transplants to escape the malaise of a perceived American decline; they also often function as hotbeds of eccentricity, conspiracy theories, and right-wing politics. In 2021, at the first annual Great Florida Bigfoot Conference I’d attended, peak pandemic, it was paranoia which held my nose captive. Mask mandates were flouted in the merch aisles. Vendors sold SQUATCH LIVES MATTER stickers. One media company called the Soul Trap played a loop of a video about the Mark of the Beast.

In his recently published book The Secret History of Bigfoot, John O’Connor asked the scientist and writer Robert Michael Pyle if he thought Bigfooting and Trumpism were related. “Yes,” Pyle replied. “There’s a lot in common. As with the January 6th people, Bigfooters are all white guys. And they love their gear and their big trucks and their big guns and all of their infrared things. It’s not exactly the same crowd as January 6th, but it’s some of the same people.”

But the tone was different at the 2024 Great Florida Bigfoot Conference, which took place on June 8. Only one vendor called What the Sas? even really went there. When I asked them how sales were going for their gray tee with an illustration of a Bigfoot holding a LET’S GO BRANDON poster and storming the Capitol, the salesman shrugged and said, “Not as good as last year.”

According to the host, Gather Up Events, there were more than two thousand people at Ocala’s World Equestrian Center for the 2024 conference. The event was held in a giant, white warehouse with fifty-foot ceilings. Lines were twenty-deep at concession stands along one side of the room, where giant pretzels shaped like big feet were sold. Jovial attendees dipped their toes in cups of mustard. The center part of the hall was split in half. On one side were all the vendors, including a company called Area 52 Media Group, which offered a full suite of video editing and posting services for Bigfooters on expedition. Other tables sold night scopes, custom hunting knives, lawn signs, and advertised their YouTube channels and podcasts. A fifty-foot-wide screen hung above the stage on the other side of the room where lectures and panel discussions took place. The sides of the room were split by a wall of step-and-repeat head-in-hole boards, a space where, for a few minutes, you could become Bigfoot.

Many of the attendees were in the crowd to see a keynote address by Ranae Holland, the self-proclaimed “Skeptical Scientist” of the Bigfooting world. Holland does not believe in a biological Bigfoot. She was a star of Animal Planet’s Finding Bigfoot, a show which ran for a hundred episodes between 2011 and 2018. The show was a low budget, high-ad-dollar documentary-style and personality-driven program. The names of her costars still echo as refrains through the communities, like a Mount Rushmore of a Bigfooters. Spend time at a conference and you’ll hear them: Bobo Fay, Cliff Barackman, Matt Moneymaker, Ranae Holland. The cast never found a Bigfoot, but they had real, mysterious encounters and gave airtime to thousands of witnesses and local Bigfooting organizations. The show helped establish an industry which is thriving today.

Despite some scoffs from the crowd, Holland used her time on the Florida stage to champion LGBTQ rights in the Bigfooting world, espouse the virtues of indigenous land stewardship, and also revile her trolls, the so-called “Ranaesayers” of a very online community. Holland does not believe in a biological Bigfoot but rather an exquisite corpse of a celestial Bigfoot aggregated from various indigenous oral histories throughout the Pacific Northwest. The word Sasquatch, after all, is thought to derive from the Salish word Sasq’ets, which translates to “hairy man.”

When it came time for the Q&A, I stood up and asked Holland my enduring question: “Why Florida?” At first, she equivocated, but eventually came to a philosophical answer of sorts. “Florida,” she said. “It seems people in Florida are more open to sharing their experiences than in other places, for some reason.”

The reason intersects in some ways with conspiracy, certainly, and the state government’s movement toward freedom-cloaked fascism. But to funnel all Florida Bigfooters into an Erlenmeyer flask of religious fanaticism and conspiracy theory doesn’t do the subject justice. Bigfooters abound on all sides of the political spectrum, and our ranks include Peter Matthiessen, a left-wing political activist, environmental champion, and founding editor of The Paris Review. Matthiessen’s nephew Jeff Wheelwright has written extensively about his uncle’s passion. During his time in Nepal, researching a book that would become The Snow Leopard, Matthiessen claimed to spot “a dark shape” jump behind a boulder near a creek in a canyon. Bigfoot!

On my way out of the conference, I ran into the master of ceremonies and asked him how he felt. “It’s just so nice,” he said, “for people to have an event like this where they can talk about their experiences without feeling judged.”

During her keynote address, Holland talked about one of the most positive impacts of all this Bigfooting: that more people are getting outside and into the woods. Beyond that, maybe, people are looking to experience an awestruck, body-freezing encounter out in whatever wilderness is accessible. When I first got my driver’s license, I’d use the freedom to light out of Miami and speed on the Tamiami Trail into the Everglades. My friends and I would park at trailheads and hike in the ever-unfolding swamp, wondering if we might see something different this time. On one such trip, we pulled onto a dirt road near the Big Cypress to shoot scenes for a short film about a mythical golden alligator of the Everglades. We stopped the car, rolled down the windows, and took in the sound of the wind in the trees. We both heard the crackle of branches and agreed there was a shadowy shape along the road’s tree line. We ran out after it but found nothing in its wake but more trees, and solitude.

Rather than a fear of their fellow man, it might be that Florida Bigfooters are instead fearful of a world where the possibility of a Bigfoot doesn’t exist, that we live in a world which has been so overdeveloped that the numinous is relegated to plays of light and shadows. O’Connor writes in his Secret History about the 2009 Texas Bigfoot Conference, where Peter Matthiessen was convinced to give a keynote address. Talking to a local reporter about his interest in the subject, he waxed about the human need for story and myth. He ended his remarks by saying, “You know, stranger things have happened than Bigfoot.”

 

Jason Katz is the founding editor of Islandia Journal, a Miami-based periodical of subtropical myth, folklore, ecology, and cryptozoology. 

On Getting Dressed

William Merritt Chase, Young Woman Before a Mirror. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

When I get dressed, I become a philosopher-king—not in the sense of presiding over utopia, but in the sense of trying to marry politics and intellect in the perfect imitation of God. Political considerations might include: destination, company, self-image, self-regard, in-group and out-group arrangements. The intellectual ones might involve: the weather, the way I am always too cold no matter the weather, the subway, the blisters on my feet, the laundry. When I get dressed, I have never once considered whether to add a belt. Belts have never struck me as a thing to “add”; pants either need a belt or they don’t. But some girls like to “add” one, and that’s fine too. I do consider the area where a belt might go—that stretch of midsection where the top of my pants meets the bottom of my shirt. It means a lot (to me), where exactly on my body that convergence takes place. If it’s lower, say a few inches below my belly button, I might get slouchier when I stand around, might remember being a kid in the early aughts, and I might in general feel more weighed down by the pull of gravity. If it’s higher up on my torso, I sit up straighter in my chair, I prefer a more substantial shoe, I feel more compact, more professional, more like my mother.

When I get dressed, I think about the last time I washed my hair and whether I’m going to wear my glasses or not. I am too much of a germophobe to wear shoes in the house, so I have no choice but to imagine the theoretical addition of a shoe, which I’ll put on last, when everything else is already a foregone conclusion. Lately, I can’t stop buying socks; it’s a compulsion. Wearing socks with no holes, that haven’t yet become limp from untold numbers of wash-and-dry cycles, has recently become crucial to my feeling of being able to face the world. On the other hand, I wear the same bra every single day, and it is such an essentially bland item of clothing that it feels like putting on my own skin. Nights are a different story: it’s important to invite spontaneity into your evening in whatever way you can.

When I get dressed I am confronted with the protean ecosystem of everything I have, everything I want, and why I have things that I’m not sure I want. Some things that I almost never buy, no matter their purported “quality,” are: dresses or skirts with slits, matching sets, sweaters with puffy shoulders, V-neck cardigans, Birkenstocks, tops where the pattern is only printed only on the front and not the back, jeans that are ripped at the knees, and anything described as a “tunic.” I’m not saying that you shouldn’t buy these things, I’m just telling you that I don’t want to. One thing I do want is to compose an ode to the tank top. The tank top is the shortest route to luxury—one of the only designer items affordable to those of us on a budget. A beautiful sweater or a handbag from wherever is out of the question, but you might, if it’s your birthday or you take an extra freelance gig, treat yourself to the flimsiest, paper-thinnest $200 tank top, knowing that the construction and the material is worth a fraction of that and feeling unreservedly that every dollar of difference is a delicious indecency. There’s nothing noble about being frivolous. But it can be wonderful to choose to be part of something bigger than you, which has a history and an artistry and—in the best case scenario—a point of view. It can even be worth an inordinate amount of your hard-won money. Anyways, when I get dressed, I reign over my little shelf of needlessly fancy tank tops and I feel alive.

There are some eternal quandaries. If I have to wear a sweater, a button-down shirt becomes untenable. (I don’t ever pop the collar neatly above my sweater, though I have nothing against prep, per se). If I have to wear tights, the prospect of choosing a skirt and a top and a sweater and socks and shoes becomes monstrous to me. If I choose to inflict tights upon myself, I will end up in a longer skirt so that I can avoid at least fifty percent of the lines that all those layers will generate on my body. I want to wear a pointed-toe kitten heel, but it feels impossible to do. If I have to wear a hat for warmth, I usually don’t.

When it’s time to take myself and my outfit into the world, I observe the doctrines of wilderness backpackers: I carry everything I could possibly need but no more than twenty percent of my body weight, as a general rule of thumb. This means I need a bag. When I see a woman without a bag or an extra layer somewhere on her person, I ask myself where on earth she could possibly be going. I think that she must live close by, and I wonder what her apartment looks like. When I see a man without a bag or an extra layer or anything else in his hands, his appearance of being untethered to a place or a purpose adds to his general unpredictability, and I cross the street.

I’ve noticed that most of my bags are green or blue. I’ve noticed that the most tempting thing to buy secondhand or vintage is a light jacket. They are often leather or suede or some other material that stands the test of time, and they’re less commitment than a coat, and they’re cheaper and more inoculated against trends. Most styles of light jackets from every recent era can be worn in the year 2024 without anyone batting an eye.

I’ve noticed that when I get dressed, I have to scrunch down my shoulders and shift my weight back on my feet so that my whole frame can fit in my mirror for the purpose of scrutiny. I don’t think I ever stand like this in my normal life, and I wonder if that makes any difference. It’s possible I only believe I like this dress because I only ever see it at this exact, awkwardly recessed angle. My nightmare is to appear like I’m wearing a costume of any kind. A friend once told me that blondes shouldn’t wear red, sending me into a monthslong deliberation. I think, now, that I can pull off an orange-y shade.

When I get dressed, I avoid at all costs thinking about how I might be doing something called “gender presentation.” As you can tell, this is all complicated enough as it is, and I am already running late.

I don’t have a closet in my little room. Instead, my clothes are all hanging, folded, or stuffed above and below me and on all sides. They are an immersive phenomenological experience, creeping out of every attempt at containment, constant, physical objects that I have to contend with as soon as I open my eyes in the morning. And in this way, it’s impossible for me to see my clothes as first and foremost a collection of textual emblems that others can read to decipher my social class, my taste, my upbringing, etc. If you interpret them in that way, once I am dressed, that’s your business. But the only time they feel full of symbolism and yet-unmade-meaning to me is when they’re shrouded in that floaty plastic, fresh from the dry cleaner. Otherwise, they are extremely literal. At the end of the day, they are in a heap on my floor and they have a mysterious stain on them, and there’s nothing metaphorical about that.

The reality is that there is a right answer when it comes to the question of what I should wear. I don’t mean that anyone else would notice if I got it wrong. But if I’ve just left the house and I’m waiting for the uptown train and I remember that I bought a long-sleeve dress two months ago that can only be worn with tall boots, and soon the season for long sleeves and tall boots will be over, and I have no plans in the foreseeable future to wear this dress, and the occasion for the dress was in fact tonight but it’s still dangling from a hanger in an overlooked corner of my bedroom, it will break my heart. Usually I can avoid this problem by making a dinner reservation, which offers another opportunity to get it right. However, if the long-sleeve dress is white (it is), and therefore wearing it to dinner means that I would fly too close to the sun, then I will wear it to a museum instead.

 

Isabel Cristo is a writer and researcher. She was born and raised in Brooklyn. 

You Are a Muppet

Photograph courtesy of the author.

Sesame Street premiered in 1969, the same year that my eldest sister, Kate, was born. The genre of children’s television was in its infancy; Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood had premiered just the previous year, joining Captain Kangaroo and Howdy Doody on the limited roster of shows meant for the very young, and the idea of using gimmicks from commercial TV—a variety of segments, a sense of humor—to support children’s development (not just to keep them quiet or sell them toys) was revolutionary. In 1969, the Sesame Street universe was inhabited by Big Bird, Oscar the Grouch, Cookie Monster, and Bert and Ernie—all Muppets—plus the humans Gordon and Susan, who were married to each other; Mr. Hooper, who ran the corner grocery; Bob—apparently, according to Wikipedia, a music teacher; and a rotating cast of kids, who seemed to have happily wandered in from the real world.

By the time I was born, in 1984, Sesame had grown. There were more Muppets, including the Count, Snuffy, Elmo, and my personal favorite, Grover, and more humans, including Luis, Maria, Linda, and Gina. There was merch: I took some early steps in Bert and Ernie slippers. And there were studies bearing out what the show’s creators had always claimed: watching Sesame Street could help little kids learn to read and count, improving their chances of success in school and potentially their entire lives. I watched Sesame Street every morning in my Bert and Ernie slippers and my jammies, sitting as still as I could in the rocking chair, hoping against hope that the cat would join me.

My mom had watched Sesame Street with both of my older sisters, and she liked watching it with me, too, which was no accident. The creators knew the value of co-viewing for children’s development, and they wrote the show to entertain parents as well as kids, with on-the-nose parodies of contemporary prime-time TV (among the most memorable, Miami Mice and Monsterpiece Theater), celebrity appearances (Judy Collins sang the alphabet with Snuffy; Jesse Jackson recited poetry on a stoop), and recurring sketches (who could forget Grover as the incompetent restaurant waiter?). Obviously, the Muppets, with their strangely expressive mouths and sophisticated sense of irony, were preferable to any cartoon, and particularly to the Disney-princess franchise—in which any human mom can recognize certain heteronormative toxins, of which my mom, child of one bad marriage, party to another, then finally and perhaps hesitantly in the one that would last, was perhaps even more acutely aware. She dressed all her daughters in overalls. One year she sewed me a cape like the one Grover wore to play Super Grover.

My first salaried job, in 2008, was at an uptight nonprofit run by an oil family in Washington, D.C. I disliked the job, which required me to wear nylons and organize policy “convenings,” the point of which I could not see, and I hated D.C., where irony seemed to have been smothered by earnest, middlebrow ambition. I wanted to move to New York, and I often took the bus up for the weekend. Coming back one Sunday, in the middle of Union Station, I saw an exhibition about Sesame Workshop: it, too, was a nonprofit, which I now considered my area of expertise; surely it wouldn’t require nylons; and it occurred to me that I should try to get a job there. After a couple of tries, I did. It was 2010, and I was twenty-six years old.

As an employee, my relationship with the Muppets became complicated. My job was to convince funders of the Muppets’ impeccable, unparalleled value for children’s cognitive, social-emotional, and even physical development; their unique ability to entertain while educating; the trust they commanded from parents. I believed in most of that, based on my own experiences with Grover and the gang, and I appreciated present-day Sesame Street’s increased emphasis on certain curricular themes in response to children’s changing needs. For example, in response to the childhood obesity epidemic, healthy eating had become a focus. This was not as radical a change as some reactionaries seemed to think at the time; Cookie Monster rapped about healthy foods, with backup vocals from Muppet fruits and vegetables, as early as 1988. More concerning to me was a certain new character who had been added to the cast I remembered.

In the early nineties, the producers had decided to introduce female Muppets to help balance the cast of mostly males; hence Rosita in 1991 and Zoe in 1993. Both of these characters had matted monster fur (turquoise and orange, respectively) and followed clothing-optional personal style guidelines, like the rest of the Muppets. But in the early aughts, they decided they needed a lead female character, and that this character should wear a dress. According to the creative director at the time in a New York Times interview, the show had been missing a certain dress-wearing aspect of being a girl. According to me, they must have thought a girly girl could help them compete with the kinds of characters that had kids’ and adults’ attention in those days. At any rate: enter Abby Cadabby, a literal fairy princess, humanoid-leaning and distinctly less hirsute than Rosita and Zoe—clipped pink fleece on her body and long hair with bangs on her head—who unfailingly appears in a dress, pigtails, and, I’d argue, mascara. At twenty-six, I still loved Oscar, Cookie Monster, and Grover. I felt neutral toward Big Bird, Elmo, Rosita, and Zoe. And I hated and disdained Abby Cadabby.

Why? I’d always liked dresses as much as jeans. Would I not have related to Abby, back then, as a kid? Maybe. But I hadn’t had the opportunity. Watching an all-male monster cast—wry, goofy guys who never seem to think about gender at all—I saw no difference between them and me. If I’d seen a pink, nonmonster princess next to them, I think I would have realized that my guys were guys and that I was supposed to be more like her; she was my assigned teammate, and our role was not to be goofy but to be pink. I was grateful to have identified instead with Grover, who, while male on paper, expresses no particular gender and is rarely referred to by pronouns. The cape—one-size, all-gender—suggests only valiance and flair.

Like most reactionary anger, mine contained a hypocrisy. When I argued, in my head or to coworkers, that all the “classic” Muppets—a slippery term that obviously changes with each passing decade—were effectively nonbinary, I did not think about Bert and Ernie, who were humanoid and masculine in a way that the others were not. Their tufty hair, their sweaters, their voices, and their dynamic as a gay couple—perceptible on some level, I think, even to young children—gave them a much more specifically gendered energy than Grover and the gang. Yet now that I think carefully about what makes them different, it isn’t their gender but their age. Most Muppets have an age—Big Bird is five, Grover is four, Elmo is three—but Bert and Ernie mysteriously don’t. Presenting as somewhere between thirty and seventy, they are certainly adults, because they live together on their own, in the garden-level apartment of Gordon and Susan’s building. With the exception of Oscar, other Muppets aren’t typically shown keeping house. They exist on the street or on the liminal space of the green screen. Bert and Ernie are adults, and they are human, and I suppose I accepted that these two conditions made gender unavoidable.

It’s funny how children’s media riles us. We all think we own it, that our own particular memory is the authentic one, and that any change is ruinous. A few years ago The New Yorker ran a piece by Jill Lepore bemoaning the twin plagues of commercial competitiveness and “ed-school fads”—which, she seemed to think, had ruined Sesame Street—and pronouncing the spirit of the early seasons dead. (Lepore made a curious exception for the international coproductions, of which she seems unlikely to have seen many.) The piece did not quote any current Sesame Workshop staffers, and it seemed to have gone un-fact-checked, an unusual editorial oversight that might indicate the contagious appeal of this kind of nostalgic rage. I was a few years out from Sesame then, and despite my own issues with the show, I was annoyed with Lepore and The New Yorker on behalf of my former colleagues. I knew how much research went into every decision. I’d spent five years telling funders about that research and getting money to do more of it. Wanting Sesame Street to stay the same is about as reasonable as wanting your childhood home to stay as you left it even after a new family moves in. Yet, to this day, I consider Abby Cadabby a betrayal of the show’s core values.

Sometimes, back at Sesame Workshop, when I started up my rant about the unfairness of Abby being human while the guys got to be monsters, someone would mention Rosita or Zoe. Sure, Rosita and Zoe were legitimate monsters, I’d say, but the gender-monster balance remained unfair because they were only minor characters. While that’s a disservice to Rosita (who appears in many segments, often singing and playing her guitar), I do think Zoe has been a bit in the wings, and the reason could be her shifty relationship to girliness. Apparently, when Zoe first joined the cast she wore only “light jewelry”—a clothing-optional look that makes perfect sense for a three-year-old, which she is. But in 2002 she began wearing a pink tutu every time she appeared. Ostensibly this was because she was, or became, obsessed with ballet like many girls her age, but also the aughts were an era of “postfeminism,” that dangerous idea that stereotypes are ancient history and thus ripe for revival. In retrospect, the monster in the tutu merely heralded the pink fairy. By the time I started working at Sesame, Abby had more airtime, more lines, and more merch than Zoe ever had.

Still, Zoe’s continued presence in the cast, as well as her current costume situation, calms me. Since 2018 she wears the tutu only sometimes, when she feels like it, often appearing in her natural state. She also, I read, drives a soapbox car around the neighborhood, accompanied by both a doll and a pet rock. This Zoe feels closest to the kid I was, a product of my own imagination as well as outside influences, a small person to whom the gender binary is interesting but not yet particularly relevant. A girl but not definitively so.

I called my mom to fact-check a few things and told her about what I was writing. She got it. At that age, she said, you are a Muppet.

 

Jane Breakell is The Paris Review’s development director.

Making of a Poem: Patty Nash on “Metropolitan”

Anton Mauve, The Return to the Fold (1978). Public Domain.

For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets to dissect the poems they’ve published in our pages. Patty Nash’s poem “Metropolitan” appears in the new Summer issue of the Review, no. 248.

Do you have photos of different drafts of this poem?

I do not write in “drafts.” I just continue to write or tinker on the same poem until I can’t anymore. This means that it is hard to see earlier iterations of the poem—the earliest one I have access to is one that I sent to my friends, so it was somewhat presentable already. There are small line differences, however, and sometimes major ones. For example, I changed the gender of the protagonist in this section—here is a screenshot of an earlier version:

I also slimmed down the ending, thank goodness. Earlier version here as well:

How did this poem start for you? Was it with an image, an idea, a phrase, or something else?

At the time, I was writing many ninety-five-item list poems, informed by the myth of the ninety-five theses. An aggrieved monk, Martin Luther, nails his complaints to a church door—then, as the story goes, all hell breaks loose. (Of course, it was a lot more complicated than that.) I was interested in this auratic, definitely apocryphal idea of an earth-shattering text or event. In this case, the “event” represented by the theses was the Reformation. While “reform” sometimes implies social progress, this certainly was not the case for the Reformation, which I understand more as a rearrangement of control, a reorganization of power relations. I used the form of these theses as a mantle for my writing, sheltering the affects of my daily life under this formal mantle of historical grandiosity. It’s sort of silly. But just like everyone else on the planet, I am involved in historical events at all moments.

This particular poem happened after visiting New York City with my boyfriend, Johannes—that’s where the title “Metropolitan” comes from. We were amazed at the extent to which our experience of New York aligned perfectly with our expectations of the city, which had been cultivated through decades of movies, books, and television. If this mythologized idea of visiting a famous museum was a cultural product, we were its consumers. On the other hand, we were its producers, too. The poem’s first line is a quote from my friend Emma, who asked Johannes if he read literature after we were done with the Met. I thought this was a truly amazing question—what is “literature,” anyways?—and let the poem develop from there.

How did writing the first draft feel to you? Did it come easily, or was it difficult to write?

When I was writing this poem, I was having so much fun that I thought it couldn’t possibly be a “real” or “serious” poem. Unlike the other list poems I was writing, this one includes a lot of overheard moments—people at a party, a doctor checking my lungs, people in line at the museum, my friends, me in moments of thoughtlessness, me in the third person, my family members in central Oregon. In a sense, this poem takes on fleeting observation, and listening, as its subject, and I wanted to do so in a way that didn’t feel random. It was important that I still retain the emotional core, the serious interest in smallness.

How did you come up with the title for this poem?

This was difficult. I felt hesitant about situating the poem so explicitly in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, or the Metropolitan Opera, because it felt so hammy. My friend Elijah has said that he categorically hates all poems with New York neighborhood names in them, and I feared that this might go down that route, trying to evoke this mystified, urbane coolness with references. On the other hand, cheesy as it sounds, I was really into New York. This poem was “Untitled” for a while but I then settled on “Metropolitan,” which is what my heart was telling me to do. “Metropolitan” doesn’t just imply New York, but also the concentration of a city, its postured centrality.

Were you thinking of any other poems or works of art while you wrote it?

Certainly! It takes place in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, after all. One of my favorite paintings I saw there, pointed out to me by my boyfriend Johannes, was The Return to the Fold by Anton Mauve, which depicts a flock of sheep retreating from the viewer. Apparently, Mauve’s specialty was painting flocks of sheep, and paintings in which the sheep were facing the viewer were more expensive. I liked this idea that the central action, the core unit, was receding from view. I often feel that way when writing, as though I am trying to catch up with the flock.

I was also finishing up Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace while writing this, a book I just loved and totally inhabited. You read that book and feel somewhat sad about everything that came after that—Tolstoy seems to have been convinced that the Napoleonic Wars represented the end of history. From my perspective, he was writing at the beginning of it. I also had been to my first opera, Der Rosenkavalier, at the Met, and that experience launched an all-out opera obsession that persists until now—opera itself is a form of both historical repetition and ephemerality, one that also can hold great ambivalence to its own tradition. The repetitions of history are directly mirrored in the form of this poem, and are a pretty big preoccupation of mine overall.

 

Patty Nash’s first book of poems, Walden Pond, will be published by Thirdhand Books in August.

Making of a Poem: Patty Nash on ”Metropolitan“

Anton Mauve, The Return to the Fold (1978). Public Domain.

For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets to dissect the poems they’ve published in our pages. Patty Nash’s poem “Metropolitan” appears in the new Summer issue of the Review, no. 248.

Do you have photos of different drafts of this poem?

I do not write in “drafts.” I just continue to write or tinker on the same poem until I can’t anymore. This means that it is hard to see earlier iterations of the poem—the earliest one I have access to is one that I sent to my friends, so it was somewhat presentable already. There are small line differences, however, and sometimes major ones. For example, I changed the gender of the protagonist in this section—here is a screenshot of an earlier version:

I also slimmed down the ending, thank goodness. Earlier version here as well:

How did this poem start for you? Was it with an image, an idea, a phrase, or something else?

At the time, I was writing many ninety-five-item list poems, informed by the myth of the ninety-five theses. An aggrieved monk, Martin Luther, nails his complaints to a church door—then, as the story goes, all hell breaks loose. (Of course, it was a lot more complicated than that.) I was interested in this auratic, definitely apocryphal idea of an earth-shattering text or event. In this case, the “event” represented by the theses was the Reformation. While “reform” sometimes implies social progress, this certainly was not the case for the Reformation, which I understand more as a rearrangement of control, a reorganization of power relations. I used the form of these theses as a mantle for my writing, sheltering the affects of my daily life under this formal mantle of historical grandiosity. It’s sort of silly. But just like everyone else on the planet, I am involved in historical events at all moments.

This particular poem happened after visiting New York City with my boyfriend, Johannes—that’s where the title “Metropolitan” comes from. We were amazed at the extent to which our experience of New York aligned perfectly with our expectations of the city, which had been cultivated through decades of movies, books, and television. If this mythologized idea of visiting a famous museum was a cultural product, we were its consumers. On the other hand, we were its producers, too. The poem’s first line is a quote from my friend Emma, who asked Johannes if he read literature after we were done with the Met. I thought this was a truly amazing question—what is “literature,” anyways?—and let the poem develop from there.

How did writing the first draft feel to you? Did it come easily, or was it difficult to write?

When I was writing this poem, I was having so much fun that I thought it couldn’t possibly be a “real” or “serious” poem. Unlike the other list poems I was writing, this one includes a lot of overheard moments—people at a party, a doctor checking my lungs, people in line at the museum, my friends, me in moments of thoughtlessness, me in the third person, my family members in central Oregon. In a sense, this poem takes on fleeting observation, and listening, as its subject, and I wanted to do so in a way that didn’t feel random. It was important that I still retain the emotional core, the serious interest in smallness.

How did you come up with the title for this poem?

This was difficult. I felt hesitant about situating the poem so explicitly in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, or the Metropolitan Opera, because it felt so hammy. My friend Elijah has said that he categorically hates all poems with New York neighborhood names in them, and I feared that this might go down that route, trying to evoke this mystified, urbane coolness with references. On the other hand, cheesy as it sounds, I was really into New York. This poem was “Untitled” for a while but I then settled on “Metropolitan,” which is what my heart was telling me to do. “Metropolitan” doesn’t just imply New York, but also the concentration of a city, its postured centrality.

Were you thinking of any other poems or works of art while you wrote it?

Certainly! It takes place in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, after all. One of my favorite paintings I saw there, pointed out to me by my boyfriend Johannes, was The Return to the Fold by Anton Mauve, which depicts a flock of sheep retreating from the viewer. Apparently, Mauve’s specialty was painting flocks of sheep, and paintings in which the sheep were facing the viewer were more expensive. I liked this idea that the central action, the core unit, was receding from view. I often feel that way when writing, as though I am trying to catch up with the flock.

I was also finishing up Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace while writing this, a book I just loved and totally inhabited. You read that book and feel somewhat sad about everything that came after that—Tolstoy seems to have been convinced that the Napoleonic Wars represented the end of history. From my perspective, he was writing at the beginning of it. I also had been to my first opera, Der Rosenkavalier, at the Met, and that experience launched an all-out opera obsession that persists until now—opera itself is a form of both historical repetition and ephemerality, one that also can hold great ambivalence to its own tradition. The repetitions of history are directly mirrored in the form of this poem, and are a pretty big preoccupation of mine overall.

 

Patty Nash’s first book of poems, Walden Pond, will be published by Thirdhand Books in August.

Toyota FJ Cruiser

The author’s brother and the Toyota FJ Cruiser, on Route 23. Photograph by Thom Sliwowski.

“I want to wrap / my face tight with a silk scarf and spiral    down /    a Cinque Terre highway in an Alfa Romeo,” writes Olivia Sokolowski in her poem “Lover of Cars,” which appeared in the Fall 2023 issue of the Review. And who doesn’t, when you put it like that? In celebration of Sokolowski’s poem, we commissioned writers to reflect briefly on cars they’ve loved, struggled with, coveted, and crushed on.

 

This car was an unwieldy inheritance. It wasn’t needed, wasn’t wanted, and wasn’t even paid off. The FJ Cruiser had been the prized possession and long-standing project of my uncle Andrzej: an elevator repairman who lived in Passaic, New Jersey, until he died suddenly of an air embolism. It was a freak accident: a minuscule air bubble traveled from his IV to his lungs while he was lying in the hospital with a stomach ulcer. This uncommonly gentle man died a uniquely terrifying death: gasping for air that filled his lungs but couldn’t reach his bloodstream. A nurse found him crumpled on the bathroom floor, purple in the face, eyes wide open.

This car had been his desideratum incarnate. Before he even purchased it, he got a scale model the size of a kitten, with functional doors, windows, headlights. Boyishly he showed it to us, his teenage nephews, when he came over to our house. Once he bought the car he drove it mostly shirtless, wearing sunglasses, drinking Red Bull. He affixed the metal company sticker of his employer—Standard Elevator—to a spot on the central console. Long after he died, the pleasant, neutral scent of his body odor remained in the car, despite my brother’s attempts to dispel it with various kinds of air fresheners. I always thought this smell matched the car’s aesthetic: a campy machismo, cartoonishly buff, dense without being hefty or overbearing. This was a car that knew what a silly shape it cut on the highway—and liked it. Driving it, you would wave to other drivers of other FJ Cruisers, some of whom would even wave back.

In truth, the Toyota FJ Cruiser is an astonishing vehicle: it drives like a tank. It can surmount boulders and ford rivers, at least theoretically. It seats four. The rear doors are suicide doors with handles hidden on the inside jambs, allowing the whole vehicle to unfold like a beetle opening all its wings. This one was silver, but the roof was white, and this really looked quite slick. A little hatch, which we discovered only after many years, opened the trunk window. But when reversing, you couldn’t see much of anything. Visibility is poor from the driver’s seat of any FJ, but drive it enough and you get a feel for its broad, solid shape. Because its windshield is so narrow and so wide, it has three windshield wipers, and many times have I observed them, mesmerized, as they did their synchronized dance. The gear differential rumbles in your hand when you shift to four-wheel drive, which the manual recommends doing for at least one day per month. Together with my brother we learned these and other facts about the car, which sat in my parents’ driveway in New Jersey for three years until my brother took it with him to college in Massachusetts.

Shortly after his death, the task of cleaning out my uncle’s apartment fell to me, my brother, and my mother. He had been her brother. Packing up the belongings of this forty-something-year-old eccentric bachelor, which included a massive sombrero, camouflage pants, torn jean shorts, and various trinkets which we placed gingerly into boxes we would never open again, I realized how death redoubles and multiplies in every object a person owned, the significance of which turns enigmatic. His miniature FJ Cruiser was placed in a box along with everything else and entombed in my parents’ basement. I have not been able to locate this scale model again, though not for lack of trying.

But I did manage to borrow the full-size FJ Cruiser from my brother, six years later, when I moved to California for grad school, taking it along with two friends across the country. In Nebraska we drove along an astonishingly straight highway, in FJ cruise control at ninety miles an hour, gusts of wind tearing every other cigarette from our hands and out the windows. We blasted Guided By Voices and screamed jokes at each other. This boxy car was completely un-aerodynamic: wind buffeted your face, messing up your hair, and the hefty engine walloped you with its revving. It was in-your-face in every way. In Nevada, driving north from Las Vegas, we decided to camp in the desert. Cognizant of the vehicle’s capabilities, we simply pulled off the highway and drove for ten minutes over rocky terrain. We parked, set up our tent in the headlights’ beam, and, turning them off, looked at the fullest night sky we had ever seen. We smoked a doobie. Suddenly my friend Santiago pointed to a strange blade of light appearing over a ridge. Had we inadvertently driven onto a missile range? Were we about to fucking die, right now? Too late to scramble, we panicked, pacing around the car idiotically. When we looked at the ridge again we saw that this blade of light was no armament: it was the moon. The eyelash of a very thin, crescent moon was rising over the horizon. A few weeks after I arrived in Berkeley, my brother and father and sister flew out and drove the car back to New Jersey, then my brother took it back with him to college.

In the end he held onto the car for ten years. He would drive it from Massachusetts to New Jersey once a month to visit our parents, and eventually he paid it off. Toyota stopped selling FJ Cruisers in 2014, and shortly thereafter they became a collector’s item. Famously, cars depreciate in value the moment you drive them off the lot, but this one actually became more valuable over time. A curio from another era, our uncle’s ideal automobile became the apple of the local mechanic’s eye. He’d seen the vehicle across oil changes, tire rotations, and transmission issues. From his auto body shop in Pequannock, New Jersey, he called my brother to make offers, and then increasingly desperate entreaties, all of which my brother declined. Instead he traded in the FJ Cruiser to Toyota itself, and against its value, which was assessed as far lower than what I saw as the car’s true worth, he bought himself a slate-gray RAV4. The financing scheme seemed fair to him, my brother said, and, besides, his new car wouldn’t stand out as much.

 

Thom Sliwowski is a writer living in Berlin. His essays have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Sidecar, and the Public Domain Review.