The Paris Review's Blog, page 27

The Nine Ways: On the Enneagram

Light through stained glass. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CCO 2.0.

When I was a boy, the most obvious thing, in almost any situation, seemed to be something that wasn’t named. This unspoken thing usually had to do with desires or strong emotions that appeared to run under people’s words. In a stained glass window, the least striking element is often the very scene being depicted. People could have that quality when I was little, resembling stencils marbled with glowing hues. Where did their hidden longings end? Where did mine begin?

As I got older, I often lived like a cashier behind Plexiglas. I came to study people from a certain remove. That I had barely made my own wishes known, even to myself, became clear a few years before I turned forty, when, for the first time, I fell in love.

On an early date, the woman I fell for and I were joking about past lives. We sat at the counter of a breakfast place in Dallas, eating pancakes. She said she thought your previous life must relate to something you did a lot as a kid, because you were that much closer to the other side. I said I was probably a neurasthenic in a sanatorium in Europe writing thin volumes of philosophy. She said, “I think you were a dancer!” In fact, I love to dance, and as a child, danced all the time.

Around the time this relationship suddenly ended, my friend Sam told me about the theory of personality that is attached to the enneagram. If I had been introduced to this system seven or eight years earlier, I would have assumed it was stupid. Or if I hadn’t been so torn up and turned around, I might not have been desperate enough to take the enneagram seriously. What I found, however, was a deep and dynamic model, and one that spoke intimately to my intuition about what lurked beneath the surface.

In the months and years that followed, I would go on to consider every person I knew in the light of this system. I read extensively about the enneagram. I talked to friends about the model and then with friends of friends. I began to get referrals. Now I have a small practice where I do private enneagram-based coaching.

The word enneagram describes a figure that has existed since the time of Ancient Greece. It looks like this. There is some disagreement about who first appended a theory of personality to this shape. The Christian mystics known as the Desert Fathers, who lived in the Middle East in the third century, wrote about concepts very similar to those that animate the system now associated with the enneagram.

The first person to articulate a formal theory was the philosopher Oscar Ichazo, who presented the psychological model now called the enneagram in a series of talks given at the Institute of Applied Psychology in Santiago, Chile, and elsewhere in South America, in the sixties. In attendance was the psychiatrist Claudio Naranjo, who would later give his own interpretation of the subject at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. From there, the enneagram was disseminated far and wide and appears today in a variety of forms, some more rigorous than others.

Ichazo’s core theory is that people, on the deepest level, wish to avoid a very bad feeling, an experience so awful it is what we imagine death is like. There are nine ways this terror can be imagined reaching us, and nine correspondent ways it can be avoided. The nine techniques of avoiding this universal fear are figured as points on the enneagram and exist in a complex and dynamic interplay with one another. In any individual personality, one of the nine is predominant.

The nine ways are often referred to using a kind of shorthand: 1 is the Reformer; 2, the Helper; 3, the Achiever; 4, the Individualist; 5, the Investigator; 6, the Loyalist; 7, the Enthusiast; 8, the Challenger; and 9, the Peacemaker.

It can be hard to pinpoint the right metaphor for the role these numbers are thought to play in a person’s psyche. The nine can be conceived of as parts, dimensions, or styles. I sometimes picture each number as being a corner in a very large room. Imagine the plane of this room’s floor is uneven, and the walls, as a result, are of irregular shapes and sizes. We may find something close to a natural comfort in one corner or in some nook nearby. The light from a window might amiably rhyme with that of a spot across the room. Some parts of the room might have high ceilings with bare white walls. Others, though narrow, might overlook a courtyard. If this place is big enough, its far corners might seem beyond reach or even nonexistent. We might hesitate to emerge from our favorite hideaways.

I offer this extended image to illustrate that while, as a numerical typology, the enneagram may seem like a tacky attempt to reduce human complexity, it is intended to do the opposite. By describing the contours of the corner we have mistaken for the full extent of who we are, the system invites us to enlarge our sense of self and to seek out renewed—really, restored—relationships with the world, other people, and our own life. In my case, that has meant seeking a better balance between the apparent philosopher and the hidden dancer. To return to the image of stained glass, working with the enneagram often means finding new stencils, in the mosaic of our lives, for the colors that already stream inside us.

I am moved by this model because it takes seriously how scary the process of being alive can be, and how possible.

 

Jacob Rubin, the author of the novel The Poser, is an associate professor at SMU. Piggy Bank, his first book of poetry, was recently published by Gold Wake Press. More information about his work with the enneagram can be found here.

Rorschach

Rorschach plate that originally appeared in Psychodiagnostik by Hermann Rorschach (1921). Public domain.

Two monkeys with wings defecate suspending a ballerina whose skull is split. Her tutu reveals thighs from the fifties, toned. Their hands are on her poor wounded head; she has no feet. One of the monkeys, the one on the left, has a badly defined jawline. The woman has a perforated abdomen.

Two cartoon Polish men high-five. Their legs and their heads are red, to accentuate the fact that their heads are like socks. Their eyes are like their mouths, almost smiling at their mischief. They betray a body pact.

Two bald women with upturned noses, alien eyes, and prominent oval breasts. The separation between torso and hip through a knee and high heels propping up either two gardeners watering or two amphibians. On either side, fetuses in placenta or ghosts with their fingers to their lips, and with ribbons, evidently red, around their necks.

Rorschach plate that originally appeared in Psychodiagnostik by Hermann Rorschach (1921). Public domain.

Nothing. Or a monster with a half-hidden face, one eye visible, and something that splits its head. (Maybe a vagina.) You can see whiskers and cockroach pincers, Turkish shoes with stiletto heels and something unrecognizable between its legs. Or it’s a blurry monster that pulls them apart, and underneath, another monster or two that supports the first.

A butterfly walks with its feet warped, like it’s melting, dragging its wings. It has huge antennae and its back is to me; it sways to the right. Its expression is either looking off into the distance or perfect disappointment.

An extraterrestrial insect, thin, with four arms and two other small ones, its lower half unrecognizable. This part could also be two submarines with whiskered fish faces. It has a translucent shawl around its shoulders and its expression is of perversity or rage or desire or desire to kill.

Three open legs and a clitoris with a padlock. Could also be the profiles of two limp women with hands behind their backs.

Two possums climb a hill. At the base of it: two unhappy pigs and a playful devil or a very slim alien in an elegant shirt and suit jacket. A green bat with something else’s face, long, and above that a huge frog or anteater that consumes them all, with the help of the possums. This could also mean the frog ascends to heaven.

A swarm of hired pigs. Two Afrofuturistic hit women with tall hair wraps and two futuristic Ku Klux Klan members crossing swords.

From top to bottom: two emaciated men in hats dance, ludic, trophonic. Two insects fan them while riding on two other insects. Two marsupial mermaids drink a slurpee, intertwined, or play bagpipes while giving birth to fetuses in light or fish in amber. There’s a yellow-ocher ornamental set or something that doesn’t fully materialize; it has a torn root. Between them, something connects the mermaids’ nervous systems.

Rorschach plate that originally appeared in Psychodiagnostik by Hermann Rorschach (1921). Public domain.

 

Diana Garza Islas is a Mexican poet. A selection from her poem “Section of Adoring Nocturnes” appeared in the Summer issue of The Paris Review. Her Black Box Named Like to Me, in which this poem will appear, will be published by Ugly Duckling Presse in fall 2024. This poem was translated by Cal Paule. Paule is a translator, poet, and gender studies teacher.

The Host

I took the day off work to cook. Dad wore my apron and made the charoset and complained about how long it took to cut that many apples. Mom told me the soup tasted like nothing and made me go to Key Food to buy Better Than Bouillon. They were visiting New York to see my new apartment for the first time. Mom had always been in charge of preparing this meal when I was growing up, but for the first time, the tables were turned: I was hosting and we were eating at my house. She was older and more disabled now, which meant she could no longer use her hands to chop carrots and celery and fresh dill. So instead, she sat on a cane chair at the kitchen table she had just bought me from West Elm, tossing directions my way like a ringmaster.

Everyone said Passover would be weird this year. How could it not be? Tens of thousands of people were being systematically starved in Gaza at the hands of Israel. Our government was helping, weaponizing American Jews in its effort. It felt wrong to celebrate by eating ourselves silly.

I kept thinking about that one line—“Next year in Jerusalem.” It’s a line Jews have been reciting for thousands of years, way before the Nakba and the establishment of the state of Israel. But when I was growing up, I associated it with the directive that camp counselors and youth group educators had given me: to connect myself with Israel; to visit the country, “the homeland”; and to move there, should I be so inclined. This was a suggestion I now felt affirmatively opposed to, and resented having ever been taught. I didn’t want to think about propaganda at the dinner table. Whoever read this line aloud, I felt, would be encouraging the rest of us to contribute to a tragedy of displacement and violence.

By sundown, I was drinking my second cup of wine and Dad was studying THE NEW AMERICAN HAGGADAH so he could lead the seder in an abbreviated way for my friends, most of whom had gone to Catholic high schools and Jesuit colleges. Waiting around hungrily and impatiently until they arrived, Luke punctuated the silence by telling my parents the story about the time he enunciated the ch in l’chaim in front of an entire courtroom.

“Be there in 5-10,” Tim texted the group chat. “Princess Jake demanded an uber.” Tim had sourced a 6.6-pound cut of brisket from his workplace, a meat distributor specializing in biodiversity and humanely raised animals. Jake had cooked it with carrots and spices, using the skills he had been honing at his workplace: a restaurant in Greenpoint where the prix fixe menu started at $195 without the wine pairing. Zach came with the shmura matzah—“artisanal,” he called it. Eleni came with the wine. Tim arrived wearing a vest right out of Fiddler on the Roof. We call it his Jewish outfit. We all sat down at my new, big, rectangular table, me at the head and my parents at the other end. The dining area had two big windows, and the light was nice and yellow as the sun started to set. This was the first time my parents would meet these friends, some of my closest, and I was eager for everyone to drink their wine and settle in, for any awkwardness to melt away.

“ ‘Haggadah means “the telling,” ’ ” Dad began, reading from THE NEW AMERICAN HAGGADAH. I had asked Mom to bring the books from home, the ones stained with Manischewitz, that were blue, covered in paper jackets, and produced by the Maxwell House coffee company. But she couldn’t find enough for the nine of us, so instead she’d ordered copies of THE NEW AMERICAN HAGGADAH from Amazon. This edition was supposed to be “conventional.”

Lauren rolled in late with the latkes. Dad had been reminding me that latkes were not a Passover food but a Hanukkah one. I’d asked her to make them anyway, because everyone loves fried potatoes, and Lauren was an expert, having hosted a latke party every year she’d lived in New York. “What’s the difference between crème fraîche and sour cream?” Mom asked, plopping a spoonful of the former onto her steaming potato pancake.

“One is French,” Tim said.

“ ‘The Seder is a joyful blend of influences which have contributed toward inspiring our people, though scattered through the world, with a genuine feeling of kinship. Year after year, the Seder has thrilled us with an appreciation of the glories of our past, helped us to endure the severest persecutions, and created within us an enthusiasm for the high ideals of freedom,’ ” Dad read from THE NEW AMERICAN HAGGADAH. We took turns reading, as if we were in a classroom. The bottle of red followed.

“ ‘Maror, a bitter herb such as the horseradish root, reminds us of the bitterness of slavery in Egypt,’ ” Lauren read.

Jake went next. “ ‘Z’roa, a roasted lamb shank, reminds us that during the tenth plague the Jews smeared lamb’s blood on their doorposts.’ ” Ours was a chicken bone, cleaned and blanched.

“‘Beitsa, a roasted egg. In ancient days … our ancestors would bring an offering to the Temple,’” Luke read. Ours was raw, not hard-boiled.

“ ‘Charoset, a mixture of nuts, apples, sugar, and wine, reminds us of the mortar used in the great structures built by the Jewish slaves for the Pharaoh in Egypt.’ ” That one was me.

“ ‘Karpas,’ ” Tim read, in an outside voice, “ ‘a green vegetable such as parsley, reminds us that Pesach occurs during the spring.’ ”

“ ‘Hazeret, romaine lettuce, is on the Seder plate because it tastes sweet at first but then turns bitter,’ ” read Eleni.

“ ‘Some families have adopted the custom of placing an orange on the Seder plate,’ ” Mom began. “ ‘This originated from an incident that occurred when women were just beginning to become rabbis.’ ” I cut her off. We didn’t have an orange.

“What’s the orange?” Tim asked.

“It’s for women’s liberation,” I summarized.

“And we don’t have it?” he exclaimed. His teeth were purple from the wine.

I didn’t put an orange on the plate, because when I was growing up, we didn’t put an orange on the plate, and besides, my plate didn’t have a spot for an orange.

The last bottle of wine we opened was a dessert wine from 2016, which someone had brought to our apartment the weekend before, for a housewarming party. Tim made us swish our glasses with a little water to make sure we tasted the pours in all their purity. He planned to leave New York soon for Berkeley, where he would work on a wine harvest with a guy who wore a trucker hat. “This wine is made of dried grapes,” he said, “something you might drink at a christening ceremony.” It goes down thick like cough syrup, and tastes sweet like honey. It reminds me of that one time I tried mead.

My head was buzzing. I hadn’t had any water, though I had had several glasses of wine, as THE NEW AMERICAN HAGGADAH had commanded me to do. I examined my glass, the streaks of pink wine struggling to climb down its mouth, viscous from 2016 raisins. I was about to start clearing the plates when I realized that in doing the Reader’s Digest–style Haggadah, we’d skipped “Next year in Jerusalem.” I wondered if Dad had done this intentionally, but I wasn’t inclined to give him that much credit. I surmised it was probably an accident, an oversight caused by hunger and eagerness to get to the end. I didn’t bring it up. Perhaps the better way to think of it was as a coincidence, I told myself: a collision between my anticipation and Dad’s blunder, resulting in an outcome fortuitous for my psychological well-being. And this was the way it should be. After all, I was the host.

 

Alana Pockros is an editor at The Nation and the Cleveland Review of Books. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, The Baffler, and elsewhere.

Three Letters from Rilke

Paula Modersohn-Becker, Still Life with Fried Eggs in a Pan, c. 1905. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Rainer Maria Rilke and the Expressionist painter Paula Modersohn-Becker met in the summer of 1900 in the German artists’ colony of Worpswede, which lies to the north of Bremen in a flat, windswept landscape of peat bogs, heather, and silver birch trees. Born just a year apart in the mid-1870s, Modersohn-Becker and Rilke were trailblazers in art and poetry at the dawn of the twentieth century. Their correspondence bears witness to their lively, ongoing dialogue and underlying creative affinities. Modersohn-Becker’s haunting portrait of Rilke, and Rilke’s meditative poem “Requiem for a Friend,” written in the aftermath of Modersohn-Becker’s untimely death, commemorate the importance each held in the other’s life.

Below are three letters from Rilke to Modersohn-Becker, written late in the year 1900.

—Jill Lloyd

 

Schmargendorf, Misdroyer Strasse 1
25 October 1900

My apartment has just now been completed. I don’t know which object did it; suddenly everything quietened down and it immediately became inhabited and familiar, as if no longer new—and yet … I would very much like to tell you how everything is, and where and why things are the way they are. Well, there is a small, unremarkable entryway, and a kitchen that will become interesting due only to my daily attempts at cooking (I have to prepare everything myself!); from the entryway you step through a small door and under a dark red curtain of heavy, woven linen (sold at Bernheimer’s in Munich as toile japonaise) into my very large study. There is a huge three-part window partially wedged into a bay as wide as the room itself. To the right of the bay, a glass door leads to a small balcony, while on the left the bay is joined by a blank wall to the wall of the study. Underneath the window there is a broad bench covered with a blue-and-red blanket from Abruzzo(!), and two steps in front of this bench, in the center of the room, is the main desk. There is a second, quite long desk set up as a working table for evening tasks—independent of the window, at an angle in front of the stove, and diagonally blocking the corner. To the left of the large window there hangs a narrow rug with a colorful border that keeps that corner dark, and in front of it stands the yellow samovar on a Russian base, surrounded by some Russian things, images, and holy icons. A very broad chair covered by a good, antique Turkish rug connects (to the left of the wall) to the cupboard for the samovar so that it’s easy to put down one’s glass of tea there. The Turkish blanket is stretched up the wall to the so-called ‘Rubens’—the Adoration of the Magi (oil painting—old, 2 meters long, 47 centimeters high)—and provides the backdrop for the best heirloom: a family crest in a precious silver frame. Then there is a small green table where I have to eat what I cook—and a small sideboard. Since I had to make do with a lot of existing things, including the gentle and not at all obtrusive wallpaper (dull yellow with blurred, quietly swaying carnations in pale red), I created particular backgrounds on which the pictures are hung and to which they are all connected in some way or other: for example the Turkish blanket underneath the crest and, on the opposite wall (which is dominated by an eight-unit bookshelf with an attached narrow bench), a precious green-and-gold cloth on top of which I have placed pictures of ancestors and forefathers… But what is the point of telling you all this? I realize that it will not amount to much more than what can be gleaned from a school essay or from old-fashioned travel accounts, or at best I will reach the level of stage directions for a theater … but I did not want to give you those, Miss Becker, but rather (I realize it late enough!) something of the play that is performed in this room, among these things, with them, for them … action, action! For heaven’s sake no description! And the play? … perhaps it hasn’t started yet?

Oh, my dear friend,—now the stage is truly set and, since it has been built of more than cardboard, it will probably last for a while … there are chrysanthemums; at the moment I don’t know where they are, but it calms me to know that they are here. It is evening. Silence. It seems almost impossible that you will not simply appear in my room at this moment—since everything has been set up and the pictures are hung on walls that, seen from the out-side, have now become the walls of my little home. I am waiting: waiting for you and for Clara Westhoff and Vogeler and for Sunday and for the song … and nothing is going to come. I know that nothing is going to come, and yet I wait. I am almost afraid to wish for others to come—there are the Russians with whom I am supposed to be working, and very seldom anyone else. But one morning I will truly wish for it and start working. Today, however, on this first evening in the finished rooms, I may just permit myself to sit—to be filled with longing and nothing else. My thoughts roam among your houses. My heart is suspended somewhere in the wind and rings out. My hands rest open and empty, like half shells from which the pearl has been removed. But do not mistake this for unhappiness, but rather for a kind of celebration that is gently ushering in my winter. I am grateful when I think of all that.

Yours, Rainer Maria Rilke

Today I am sending you a copy of the Revue de Paris with the play Mirage by George [sic] Rodenbach;—do you remember? And my kind regards! Also for your sister Milly and your little sister.

***

Schmargendorf
October 28, 1900

You have a knack for making letters as beautiful as evening hours. I read your letter frequently, and you should read and treasure what I wrote in response when you receive it, in the evening.

Strophes

I am with you, you Sunday evening ones.
My life is radiantly glowing and bright.
I am conversing, but compared to other times
all words have fled my lips and mind,
so that my silence rises up and blooms.

For these are songs: a beautiful silence of many,
that rises up from one person in rays.
The violin player is always alone,—
And, among the others, the slim player
is the most silent one, the one who does not speak.

I am with you, you gentle and attentive ones.
You are the columns of my solitude.
I am with you: do not give me a name,
so that I can be with you even from afar …
Just as great, sprawling gardens
sometimes bear words of foreign woods
on their quiet, darkening paths …

You are quite close to how I feel. I am
not mistaken. This hour now resembles
the hours with the white background.
Around me, the silence resounds with many sounds.
Music! Music! Orderer of sounds,
take what is scattered here at dusk,
lure pearls, rolled away, back onto strands …

Each thing locks in a prisoner.
Go, music, to each thing and lead
out of every thing’s doorway
the longtime fearful figures.
In pairs that hold each other’s hands
they follow you and go along the measures
with which we count the hours deep,—
they go, regally, their heads in wreaths,
from our rooms which had forgotten us.

I am with you, who listen to the sound,
that always hums and for which we sometimes exist;
we lost our fear that it will fade away.
Music is creation. Soul of song,
many things you turn into a structure,
by entering into those many things.
With you all women are one woman;
you link those—who are girls like silver rings
into cool chains that tie together spring.
To boys you give a sense that they could find a
spot toward which the world extends,
and old people already blinded by the day
live on only because they lean on you.
And men have longed for you.

I am with you. Among brothers, among trees,
one is as calm as when amongst you all.
I glean from dreams this sense of feeling soothed:
this being-without-fear of missing something
and this pleasure taken in what one knows.
Simple existence, offered to the heavens,
like ponds that stay forever open,
telling more beautifully of the wind’s experience,
and holding days and evening breeze,
safe above the abyss that is eternal.

I am with you. Am thankful to you both
who are like sisters of my soul;
for my soul wears a girl’s dress
and its hair is silken to the touch.
I rarely glimpse its cool hands;
for behind walls it lives quite far away,
as if in a tower not yet sprung free
by me, and hardly aware that I will arrive.

But I pass through the winds of earth
toward the rising wall,
behind which, in uncomprehended grief,
resides my soul … You know it better;
you’ve seen it, more familiar than myself.
You are the sisters of my bride.
……………
Be good to it.
Be kind to it, the blond sister here.
Speak to it with the rising moon.
Tell her of yourselves. Tell her about me.

I am waiting for a very beautiful hour, and the most beautiful, most open, and most receptive that arrives I will carry to Maid. For you must measure my capacity to give against what I have received. I am an echo. And you were a great sound whose concluding syllables I repeat from afar. Give my regards to Clara Westhoff with this Sunday letter.

Yours, Rainer Maria Rilke

***

Schmargendorf
November 5, 1900

How gloriously my place is turning out for me. Imagine, dear Paula Becker: I had on my desk a copper pitcher with slowly wilting dahlias the color of old ivory, just so that all that was needed to add to them to create a miracle were these fantastic and wonderful cabbage leaves. The miracle occurred and worked its magic.—On the bench attached to the bookshelf there was a tall, narrow vase with a few branches of rose hip arranged with heavy clusters of red rowan berries, and the fir branches were ringed by great yellow and golden chestnut leaves that are like the spread-out hands of autumn wanting to grasp the sun’s rays. But now that the sun’s rays no longer plod along but have grown wings, no chestnut leaf is going to catch a ray. Everything around me (I mean to say by means of this list) was prepared to receive the autumn with which you surprised and delighted me. There was already a spot ready, arranged by destiny, for each piece of your abundant autumn. Including the chain of chestnuts. Only in my house it does not hang on the wall; I sometimes take it out and pass it through my fingers like a rosary (you know about these Catholic prayer beads?). For each bead of such rosaries, one has to recite a particular prayer: I emulate this devout rule by thinking with each chestnut of something lovely that refers to you and Clara Westhoff. Which led me to discover that there are not enough chestnuts.

The first days of November are always Catholic days for me. The second day of November is All Souls’ Day, which up to my sixteenth or seventeenth birthday I had always, no matter where I was living at the time, spent in churchyards—often visiting unknown graves as well as graves of relatives and ancestors, and gravesites that I could not make sense of and that I had to think about during the lengthening winter nights. That was probably when the thought first occurred to me that every hour that we live is the hour of death for someone, and that there may even be more hours of dying than hours of the living. Death has a clock’s face with countless numbers … Now it has been years since I stopped visiting graves on All Souls’ Day. Now I only make a trip to visit Heinrich von Kleist out in Wannsee at this time of year. He died out there in late November; during a season when many shots resound in the empty forest, two heavy shots from his gun also rang out. They barely differed from the other shots, though they were perhaps a bit more forceful, shorter, more breathless … But in the heavy air all sounds become similar and grow dull amidst the many soft leaves floating down everywhere.

But I realize that this is no letter for you, and actually not one for me either. I long for you, dear friend. Farewell.

Yours, Rainer Maria Rilke

Soon I’ll copy for you the song “You pale child, each evening … ,” and then I will send it to you. It does not even exist if it’s not in your possession—especially that one, which first came into being with you, so to speak. During one of these evening hours. Please send my regards to Clara Westhoff and your sisters Milly and Herma. And do not be upset about this letter. Different types of letter will come again!

 

The Modersohn-Becker/Rilke Correspondence , translated by Ulrich Baer and with an introduction by Jill Lloyd, is forthcoming from ERIS Press this month.

 

Ulrich Baer is the author of of What Snowflakes Get Right: Free Speech, Truth and Equality in the University; Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma; and The Dark Interval: Rilke’s Letters for the Grieving Heart. He teaches at New York University.

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) was an Austrian writer best known for his poetry collections The Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus, and a novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge.

Jill Lloyd is an art historian and curator. She has coedited numerous exhibition catalogues and is the author of German Expressionism, Primitivism and Modernity and The Undiscovered Expressionist: A Life of Marie-Louise Von Motesiczky.

“Perfection You Cannot Have”: On Agnes Martin and Grief

Agnes Martin, Night Sea, 1963. The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Copyright the Estate of Agnes Martin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph by Katherine Du Tiel.

Sitting in the octangular room at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, surrounded by seven of Agnes Martin’s grid and row works, I settled first on Night Sea (1963), a turquoise blue painting laced with shimmering lines—a near-faultless impression of an ocean, as if illuminated for an instant by the moon or a lighthouse. Drift of Summer (1965), with its off-white grid, appears like a notebook crying out for ideas. Even the bright and broadly lined work Untitled #9 (1995), which Martin completed in her eighties, looked to me from afar impeccable, its colorful sections seeming to have been generated by a machine or a god. Here the spiritual resurfaced. In Martin’s grids and rows, the possibility not only of excellence—the apparent perfection of her lines—but of a grander, near-divine plan.

A decade ago, my mother died of metastatic melanoma, an illness that lasted about four years. It dragged our family across the country for radiation trials; it made the question “Where are you staying?” frequently answerable with either “Hospital room cot” or “Bed in hotel.” In the wake of her death, I sought out Martin’s grids. I saw them at SFMOMA but also at Dia Beacon, the Whitney, MoMA, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Tate Modern, and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, where Rose (1966) remains my favorite work of hers. The painting’s title at first seems a bizarre one: no flower is figuratively depicted. But in the painting’s cream-colored acrylic, as the lightness of its lines disappear in parts, a natural order underlies its beauty (a rose being, perhaps, beauty’s essence).

Combining linear rigidity and spatial abstraction, in Martin’s works I saw an idea of the world that is guided by plans and sure outcomes—a world made whole again. Martin’s own life was imperfect and traumatic (though she’d likely bristle at the word): she said she was raped as a girl on four occasions, dissociating each time; she lived a seemingly lonely existence, chafing against middle-class sensibilities. I figured she desired, like me, exactness and rightness, apparent salves for the broken. I supposed this aspiration was a core reason for her grids and lines. In fact, she suggested something of the opposite: to view the world as though it were perfect but to understand that it is not—and to see that perfection need not be pursued. “Perfection is not necessary. Perfection you cannot have,” she once said. “If you do what you want to do and what you can do and if you can then recognize it you will be contented.”

This spring I flew to Chicago to see three drawings of hers at the Art Institute. Some were not on view so I made my way to a back room, where a staff member had placed them in front of a bookshelf. Looking at them—Untitled (1961), Untitled (1964), and Untitled #8 (1990)—I got closer than I’d been before to any of her artworks.

Untitled (1964) was something of a mess. The work’s woven tracing paper is so thin that, as I got nearer to it, it looked increasingly ready to collapse beneath the weight of Martin’s pen and pencil and watercolors. The grid’s lines, bathed in a pink-red watercolor, appeared to be drawn and redrawn, the paint escaping from its confines. Untitled #8 (1990), however, is a pen-and-pencil-drawn piece with seemingly clean lines. On the internet, the drawing’s lines looked to me idyllically straight, Martin’s framing penwork weighted the same throughout, with a pencil-drawn grid appearing almost mathematically infallible. Indeed, this is how I’d considered Rose and so many of her other works: forms of excellence, a rightness I too could achieve.

But here, up close, in this silent back room, I saw that Martin had let her pen linger in a corner, pooling a light collection of ink. On the upper part of the grid, her pencil had skipped over a small bit of paper, creating a blank space. The drawing had looked mechanical from afar. Closely viewed, it was flawed and human.

 

Cody Delistraty is a journalist and writer. He is the author of The Grief Cure: Looking for the End of Loss.

37-08 Utopia Parkway: Joseph Cornell’s House

Screenshot from Google Street View. Captured in April 2023.

I said, What does it feel like in there? What do you mean, she said. I said, For example, is it light or is it dark? She said, It’s light by the windows. And then she said, It’s airy if the windows are open. Is that all?

She said it was a bad time. She would rather I not come inside the house. Boxes were everywhere. Everything was in the boxes. She said that her brother had died on New Year’s Day. More boxes. And that it was fine. She said she really didn’t have anything to offer me. She said she knew nothing about the previous resident Joseph Cornell, other than that he’d existed—and that a different man had lived in the house in between them. That it had been remodeled in the nineties. She had moved there for the street’s flatness—she appreciated flatness in a street. Utopia Parkway.

The artist Joseph Cornell lived a lot of his life at her home at 37-08 Utopia Parkway. Age twenty-six onward. The house is still small and gray. Gambrel roof. Clerestory windows. Sash windows. Tin door. Shingles and clapboard. Familiar, symmetrical face. Like the current resident, Cornell had a brother who died first, who lived there with him, in addition to his mother. Cornell, too, had had boxes everywhere.

I had knocked on a door to no answer and then left a note between the wipers and the windshield of a silver car in the driveway, overlaid on the glass above the inspection/registration and a sticker of Padre Pio—the friar, priest, stigmatist, and mystic. Just after I drove off, it snowed, then it rained, and I assumed the message had run off its page.

I got a call a few days later, around 10 p.m., from a no-caller-ID number. A voice said, Did you leave a thing on my thing? I knew it was her because she spoke like my mother’s family who’d once inhabited that same corridor of Queens.

I told her I was interested in the house itself. I asked if she would mind sending me photographs of the walls; or of the stairs to the basement, where Cornell had collected and organized materials (the clippings, the curios, the dolls); or of the view from the garden, where he took his visitors. Anything, really. She said, Sure. She never did.

***

The house is a Dutch colonial (revival)—fittingly, in Flushing, a part of Queens named after Vlissingen, a city in the southwestern Netherlands, a former island. It is believed that the word Vlissingen is in one way or another related to the word fles, which means “bottle,” fittingly, a recurring object in Cornell’s assemblages. Behind the house, there’s still a one-car garage, where Cornell often sat in a chair on wheels with the door rolled up, an object himself in a shadow box like one of his own—his open-faced homes for flecks of life, little chambers where sense and nonsense make temporary truce.

After I left the note on the windshield, I drove in a confused half snow to New Lake Pavilion for Cantonese dim sum. Waiting for the food, I swiped past little images of Cornell’s shadow boxes on my phone and I thought of the word cathect. I had just learned it the night before, from a poet who’d told an anecdote about her mother, who, while she was in medical school and raising two young children at once, would arrange flowers on Saturdays to calm herself down, to not think—it was a repetition that indexed feeling. She talked about cathecting flowers.

Cathect comes from cathexis: “an investment of energy”—libidinal, of course—“in a person, object, idea or activity.” It’s a word that was created by an analyst who was trying to translate Freud’s gestural use of a common German word: Besetzung—a word with a mutable definition: “(1) the occupation or invasion of a country; (2) the occupation of a building without permission (a squat); (3) casting in a play or a film role.”

I thought of the little eddies of Cornell’s infatuation concretized, translated into the arrangements of ephemera: the keys, the die, the maps, the seashells, the clocks, the birds, the book pages, the dime-store toys. The boxes seem to conjure the sequels to the lives of familiar objects. I swiped through more frames of the boxes as I waited for my check—and I thought, There goes Joseph, cathecting again …

I felt then that somehow each box I swept past was a room in the home on Utopia Parkway. That each box he made was an addition to the house. Expanding each day, a perpetual renovation. That he was his own architect, contractor, decorator, and dweller. Cornell lived with his mother in the house on Utopia Parkway; in his last phone call to his sister on the day he died, he said that he wished he “had not been so reserved.” Part of him wished he had left the house.

***

The current woman of the house didn’t send any photographs. I had no way of calling her back—she’d dialed with a vertical service code. I looked for any photographs of the house’s interior but instead came upon a series of comments spanning four years, left almost fifteen years ago, on a blog post that featured nothing but an image of the home’s facade. The softness of the blue light and the wholeness of the tree behind the house and the certain weather of its green suggested it was taken from a moving car, windows down, by someone passing the home at the end of a near-perfect end-of-summer day, the green so full you know it can’t hold on much longer.

First, a woman had commented on the image, saying she had lived next door to Mr. Cornell as a child, that he had given one of his pieces to her parents as a gift, and that after he died her parents had sold it to John Lennon and Yoko Ono for a thousand dollars. She said that at the time, this had been a lot of money to her parents, who had immigrated to the United States from postwar Germany. That she had just visited the Phoenix Art Museum and saw one of his pieces. “It brought back so many fond memories,” she said.

Then, five months later, in the fall, another woman added that she’d never known Joseph Cornell, but that her family had, and that her mother had often cooked for him and did light housecleaning. Her sisters Fran and Jeanette also did little things around the house for him, and her now-brother-in-law used to make the box frames for his art pieces. She was sorry she’d never met him. “His art was simple in material, but beautiful and complex in meaning,” she said.

In the spring, eight months later, a man added that he grew up about one block down the street. His brother used to help Cornell with yard work, and he was very lucky to have gotten a private showing of his art when he was around twelve, although not as lucky as the first commenter. He said Cornell was something of an éminence grise in the neighborhood. A very good man, but a recluse. No one had had any idea how important he would become.

Six months later, a new woman said to the first commenter that she thought she was her childhood friend who had lived next door. Was your father Gary and your brother Eric? Do you remember me? she asked.

Four years later, almost to the day, in the middle of spring, the first woman had replied. You are correct, she said to the third woman. My father, Gerhard, Gary for short; my mother, Ida; my brother, Eric; and I lived at 37-06 Utopia Parkway. She was trying desperately to put a face to her name. Did she live to the left of them in the beige house? She said that we live in a small world.

An hour later, she asked the third commenter, the man, if he had lived on Crocheron Avenue and Utopia Parkway with his mother and brother in the white apartments. He never responded.

***

After a few months of no word from the current woman in the house, I decided to go by the house again. I was driving from the airport. I looked for the white apartments at the intersection of Crocheron and Utopia, which must be a new color now. I also looked for the quince tree in the yard—there’s a story about Yayoi Kusama and Cornell embracing beneath a quince tree in the little yard behind 37-08 Utopia Parkway. Kusama says that as they kissed, Cornell’s mother threw a bucket of cold water over them, ordering them to stop. That she told him not to touch women. That they were a disease. Kusama said that it was an ideal relationship for her, that he was the romance of her life. That she disliked sex and that he was impotent. That they suited each other well. That he wrote to her many times and called her many times each day. That people would think her telephone was broken, and that she would say, No, no, it’s only Joseph Cornell calling me so often—but given the tree’s barrenness (it was late winter), I was unable to identify whether it was the quince tree at all.

I knocked. After a handful of seconds, a very small woman in a very long robe opened the wood door, and then the second tin door very slowly. She was wearing very furry slippers, red—and behind her there were no lights on at all. I told her who I was. The sun had barely set but she had the look of an animal just after waking. She said, Oh yeah. She spoke very slowly and quietly and her voice had no ring inside it—her words were almost toneless. She said that she’d send pictures to my email address. I handed her a box of sfogliatella, the pastry that looks like a lobster tail, filled with almond paste and candied peel of citron.

Driving down Utopia Parkway, I found myself guilty of cathecting. I found myself casting this woman with the toneless voice, in red slippers and a robe, in the role of Cornell’s mother, maybe, or of Cornell himself. I thought about the house with the woman inside and then about the invasion of a country, or squatting in a building without permission.

The interaction reminded me, later, of something I had not thought about for a long time. When I was seven, we moved into an apartment where the previous tenant had been an only child like me, exactly my age, and who, like Cornell’s brother, had had cerebral palsy. He was blind. There was braille on most of the door frames. At night, when I would get up to pee before bed, I would walk to the bathroom through the dark apartment with my eyes shut, and pass my right hand over the door frames and pretend that I was the boy who’d lived there before.

A few days after, the woman on Utopia Parkway sends me these four photographs and says that she hopes these will suffice, that she is sorry but the house is in disarray, that she is just trying to clean up, to just make repairs, to just get over death.

 

 

 

Eliza Barry Callahan is a writer and filmmaker from New York, NY. Her first novel, The Hearing Test, was published by Catapult. She teaches at Columbia University and is a New York Foundation of the Arts Fellow. 

On Wonder

Claude Mellan (French, Abbeville 1598–1688 Paris), The Moon in Its First Quarter, 1635. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. From the Elisha Whittelsey Collection, courtesy of the the Elisha Whittelsey Fund.

I. The World Worlds

It’s probably not the most promising beginning to this talk for me to observe that my subject, like silence, has a way of disappearing the moment you speak of it. Love, anger, regret, even boredom—wonder’s antipodes—may entrench themselves in us more deeply over time, but wonder, I’d venture, is always already a fugitive affair. Maybe it’s a matter of developmental psychology; in the middle of life, I find myself becoming a nostalgist of childhood wonder. (These days I feel it mostly in my dreams.) Or maybe it’s civilization itself that’s outgrown its wonder years. We start out with the marvels of the ancient world—the Great Pyramid of Giza, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Colossus of Rhodes—only to arrive, in our disenchanted era, at Wonder Bread. Any way you slice it, wonder is ever vanishing. Still, I suspect the occasional sighting of this endangered affect has something to do with why someone like me continues to write poems in the twilight of the Anthropocene. Of course, William Wordsworth said all this more eloquently and in pentameter verse, too. Maybe poetry is a faint trace of wonder in linguistic form. By following that trace for the next hour or so, I hope we’ll come a bit closer to wonder itself.

Let’s begin with an early wonder of the Western literary tradition. In Book 18 of the Iliad, the god Hephaestus forges a shield for Achilles, who’s lost his armor in the bloody fog of war. But as Hephaestus works the shield’s surface, this peculiar blacksmith—being a god, after all—simply can’t resist creating a world, too:

There he made the earth and there the sky and the sea

and the inexhaustible blazing sun and the moon rounding full

and there the constellations, all that crown the heavens

A little creation myth blossoms amid the slaughter, as Hephaestus hammers not only Earth but—within the brief passage of three dactylic hexameters—the totality of the known cosmos onto the shield as well. And he’s only just getting warmed up, really. Over the next 150 lines of the poem, Hephaestus emblazons the shield’s surface with a compact survey of ancient civilization, including the arts of war, law, agriculture, animal husbandry, astronomy, music, dance, and so on. A sensualist at heart, he sets this panorama buzzing all over with Epicurean minutiae: we see “bunches of lustrous grapes in gold, ripening deep purple”; we hear a boy plucking his lyre, “so clear it could break the heart with longing”; we even taste the savor of “a cup of honeyed, mellow wine.” Not bad for a piece of antiquated military equipment. Faced with such artistry, I can’t help thinking of the shield’s disabled maker as a kind of poet, like the blind Homer himself. Sure enough, Hephaestus incorporates a miniature epic into the shield’s pageantry, too, with its own besieged city, fraught war councils, interfering gods, and loved ones watching anxiously from the ramparts as a tiny surrogate Hector is hauled “through the slaughter by the heels.” No wonder Homer describes the shield as “a world of gorgeous immortal work.” It contains an entire Iliad and more within its gilt compass.

Beguiled by Homer’s art, some readers have even tried to reverse engineer real shields from this literary blueprint over the millennia. Probably the most spectacular example of all time was fabricated for display at George IV’s coronation banquet by the sculptor, draftsman, and Homer enthusiast John Flaxman in 1821. It’s a marvel of nineteenth-century British punctiliousness in low relief.

The Shield of Achilles designed by John Flaxman and cast by Rundell & Bridge.

Here we find bunches of lustrous grapes in gold, a boy with his lyre, and that cup of honeyed wine—all meticulously accounted for. And yet I can’t help feeling this luminous artifact offers, at best, only a low-resolution copy of the Homeric original. Let’s zoom in for a moment on those golden hounds at their masters’ feet to have a closer look.

I’m not sure why Homer enumerates the figures in this little tableau with such exactitude amid all the shield’s armies, crowds, and processions—“and the golden drovers kept the herd in line, / four in all, with nine dogs at their heels”—but it offers us a perfect opportunity to check Flaxman’s work for quality control. Four drovers? Check. Now let’s count the dogs. (You might think I’m being persnickety here, and with good reason, but bear with me just a little longer.) So where is that ninth hound? Marianne Moore once famously claimed that “omissions are not accidents.” It’s hard to say whether Flaxman’s missing hound is an omission or an accident, but it makes me wonder.

Listen carefully, and you’ll hear the poor beast—“barking, cringing away”—somewhere in the vaporous limbo between fiction and reality. “Paws flickering,” it’s a creaturely cipher for what’s lost when we translate the virtual into the real. The former U.S. Army cryptographer and Homer enthusiast Cy Twombly illustrates this loss in oil, crayon, and graphite in his postmodern Shield of Achilles a century and a half later.

Shield of Achilles by Cy Twombly, courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art: Gift (by exchange) of Samuel S. White 3rd and Vera White, 1989, 1989–90–1. Courtesy of the Cy Twombly Foundation.

You won’t find our missing hound here, either—and that’s the whole point of Twombly’s abstraction. All those kinetic scribbles convey Homer’s energeia, or literary energy, but they also make an absolute hash of the shield’s pictorial imagery. Not even a cryptographer can code so much world into so small a space. Whether you reconstruct it like Flaxman or deconstruct it like Twombly, the shield of Achilles will forever remain an impossible object. It belongs to that wondrous category of things that are larger inside than outside, like a poem, or a person, or a world. “The world is not the mere collection of the countable or uncountable, familiar and unfamiliar things that are at hand,” writes Martin Heidegger in The Origin of the Work of Art, “but neither is it a merely imagined framework added by our representation to the sum of such given things. The world worlds.” Homer’s shield isn’t a picture of all the countable or uncountable things—star systems, ripening grape clusters, flickering hounds—that populate the world. As Flaxman and Twombly discovered, it can’t even be pictured at all. But it worlds.

“Glorious armor shall be his, armor / that any man in the world of men will marvel at / through all the years to come,” Hephaestus predicts as he hammers the glowing cosmos on his forge. If you were to survey the readers’ responses to this literary marvel over the millennia—from the anonymous commentators of antiquity to moderns like Alexander Pope and G. E. Lessing to undergraduate term papers in Humanities 101—you’d end up with something like a brief history of wonder in Western civilization. Describing the plowmen at work on the shield’s figured surface, Homer himself is the first among mortals to express wonder at its construction:

And the earth churned black behind them, like earth churning,

solid gold as it was—that was the wonder of Hephaestus’ work.

I can’t imagine a more gorgeous description of humanity’s passage through the dark field of world: “the earth churned black behind them, like earth churning.” But why doesn’t Homer say the shield’s golden surface churned like earth churning? This Möbius strip of a simile is a marvel in its own right. Spellbound by Hephaestus’s artistry, we forget the shield’s a shield in the first place—so we feel we’re watching soil behave “like” itself. It’s a kind of reverse alchemy, where gold becomes dirt, vehicle becomes tenor, and shield becomes world. Sometimes it seems there’s no escaping wonder before such worlding work. Of the golden women depicted in the shield’s wedding procession, Homer writes, “Each stood moved with wonder.” I’m not sure whether we should envy or pity these embossed figures, forever frozen in transport at the wonder they inhabit.

But there’s a serious glitch in the god’s plans for this “world of gorgeous immortal work.” Though Hephaestus prophesies that “any man in the world of men will marvel” at his craft, none of the many men in the Iliad—Trojan or Greek—ever marvel at the shield’s construction. Achilles’s fellow soldiers won’t even look at the god’s radiant work: “none dared / to look straight at the glare, each fighter shrank away.” Only a blind genius could invent such tragic optics. Homer embeds a gilded cosmos in the midst of the epic for his readers to marvel at through the ages, but the Iliad’s inhabitants remain forever blind to this wonder hidden in plain view. Beholding his gift from the gods, even Achilles—the only mortal who scrutinizes the shield’s figured surface—fails to wonder at the sight:

                       The more he gazed, the deeper his anger went,

his eyes flashing under his eyelids, fierce as fire—

exulting, holding the god’s shining gifts in his hands.

Rage (mēnis) is the first word of the Iliad, and we usually associate it with blindness rather than perception: “I was blinded, lost in my inhuman rage,” says Agamemnon during one of his many changes of heart in the poem. But Homer envisions something like a phenomenology of rage in this scene: “The more he gazed, the deeper his anger went.” For Achilles, anger is more than affect—it’s an adjunct of perception itself. Only once he’s “thrilled his heart with looking hard / at the armor’s well-wrought beauty” does he break off his furious gaze. Instead of blinding him, rage furnishes this exceptional character with a singular perspective on things.

Why does Achilles alone rage at this “world of gorgeous immortal work”? It may have something to do with his sense of vocation. In Book 9 of the Iliad, we find him in his tent, “plucking strong and clear on the fine lyre” he won in battle long ago, “singing the famous deeds of fighting heroes.” I can’t help feeling this armchair bard would have made a passable poet in a different world. (Isn’t every poet a sulky egotist with a hyperactive death drive, after all?) But Achilles is born to fight, not to sing. Anything that comes between him and his bloody vocation—including the “beautifully carved” lyre, “its silver bridge set firm”—must be cast aside for him to follow this calling. Not even life itself matters more to him than this grim occupation. “Hard on the heels of Hector’s death your death / must come at once,” his mother warns him, but Achilles only retorts, “Then let me die at once.” What’s the point of living if you can no longer kill? Achilles doesn’t work to live, he lives to work—Homer uses the word ergon, which means something like “labor,” to describe the hero’s exertions on the battlefield—and his business is death.

Wonder, for the Greeks, led to a very different sort of vocation. We see this illustrated in a scene from Plato’s Theaetetus, where Socrates plays his customary role of career counselor to a youth he’s interrogated to the point of utter perplexity:

Theaetetus: By the gods, Socrates, I am lost in wonder when I think of all these things, and sometimes when I regard them it really makes my head swim.

Socrates: It seems that Theodorus was not far from the truth when he guessed what kind of person you are. For this is an experience which is characteristic of a philosopher, this wondering [thaumazein]: this is where philosophy begins and nowhere else.

Funny how Theaetetus must first become “lost in wonder” in order to find himself. He learns “what kind of person” he is—a philosopher—from his brush with thaumazein. This beats any aptitude test I took in high school. For Plato, wonder “is where philosophy begins and nowhere else.” No wonder, no philosophers. Even Aristotle, who built a whole philosophical system from his lover’s quarrel with Plato, agrees on this point. “It is through wonder that men now begin and originally began to philosophize,” he observes in the Metaphysics, “wondering in the first place at obvious perplexities, and then by gradual progression raising questions about the greater matters too, e.g. about the changes of the moon and of the sun, about the stars and about the origin of the universe.” If this sounds familiar, it’s because we’ve come full circle, to the origin of the cosmos—the earth, the stars, “the inexhaustible blazing sun and the moon rounding full”—that Hephaestus hammered onto the shield’s bright circumference in the first place. But we’ve yet to consider those “greater matters” that form the astronomical rungs on the ladder of Aristotle’s ascent into thaumazein—the moon, the sun, the stars, and the origin of the universe. Let’s take the next step in wonder’s philosophical progression and look to the moon.

II. Worlds Beyond

Sooner or later, the moon pops up on pretty much every poet’s literary horizon. Whether you’re a Japanese courtesan, a Yoruban folk singer, or a Conceptualist cosmonaut, it’s as close as the art comes to a timeless universal motif. But how many poets ever make the moon feel new in their art? Nearly 350 years ago, John Milton managed to work a nifty little lunar renovation into the epic paraphernalia of Paradise Lost, as the irrepressible Satan—after nine days and nights in free fall from the battlefield of heaven—takes up arms once again:

                                          His ponderous shield,

Ethereal temper, massy, large and round,

Behind him cast. The broad circumference

Hung on his shoulders like the moon whose orb

Through optic glass the Tuscan artist views

At evening from the top of Fesolè,

Or in Valdarno to descry new lands,

Rivers or mountains in her spotty globe.

Even the most pious poet can’t resist a bit of literary vandalism now and then. Emblazoning the full moon on Satan’s shield, Milton blots out the classical world of Achilles’s shield—just as Paradise Lost will, he hopes, eclipse the Iliad in the annals of literary history someday. “Massy” yet also “ethereal [in] temper,” Satan’s shield is another kind of impossible object, or hyperobject. It belongs to that wondrous category of things that hold dual citizenship in the realms of the material and the ideal, like a poem, or an angel, or the venerable moon itself. Since antiquity, astronomers had speculated about the moon’s ontology—was it composed of ethereal vapors, or massy like the earth?—until Milton’s “Tuscan artist” put these theories to the proof with the aid of his “optic glass.” Oddly, we don’t really see much of the moon on Satan’s shield. Superimposed on its “spotty globe,” we find a portrait of Galileo Galilei—the man in Milton’s moon—who, more than any poet or rebel angel, revolutionized our view of the heavens above.

Milton visited Galileo—by then old, blind, and under house arrest—in Florence during the summer of 1638. (DreamWorks has been sitting on my script of this story for ages.) In his book The Starry Messenger, Galileo had published the first topographical drawings of the moon’s surface to appear in the West nearly three decades earlier.

Galileo’s moon sketch. Courtesy of Linda Hall Library of Science, Engineering & Technology.

Peering through his telescope, the Florentine astronomer marveled at a cratered and mountainous terrain that defied expectation:

The surface of the Moon is not even, smooth and perfectly spherical, as the majority of philosophers have conjectured that it and the other celestial bodies are but, on the contrary, rough and uneven, and covered with cavities and protuberances just like the face of the Earth, which is rendered diverse by lofty mountains and deep valleys.

Galileo discovered that the moon, too, was a world, “just like” ours. Look closely at that progression of topological nouns ending Milton’s lines, and you’ll see how the moon came of age as a world in this period—from a flat “circumference” to a volumetric “orb” to a mapmaker’s “globe.” In Galileo’s wake, the French engraver Claude Mellan’s moon maps would soon highlight the chiaroscuro curvature of the lunar orb.

Three representations of the moon by Claude Mellan, courtesy of The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1960.

By the end of the eighteenth century, the moon had assumed world-like dimensions in the British artist John Russell’s aureate globe.

Moon globe by John Russell.

All this time, Earth was yielding its last blank spots—known as sleeping beauties—to the epistemological imperium of geography. But now another “spotty globe” offered “new lands, / Rivers or mountains” to be mapped—and the moon was only the beginning.

The moon on Satan’s shield heralds a revolution in the history of cosmological wonder. Galileo’s telescope revealed a host of worlds in the heavens above—new moons circling Jupiter, stars never before seen by the human eye—all swiftly incorporated into blind Milton’s literary vision of the cosmos. Paradise Lost stages a universal masque of wonder beneath this canopy of plural worlds. Awestruck, Adam delivers a Hamletic soliloquy on outer space, which makes of “this earth a spot, a grain, / An atom with the firmament compared / And all her numbered stars that seem to roll / Spaces incomprehensible.” Milton himself wonders if God might “ordain / His dark materials to create more worlds” from chaos someday. Satan, too, plays the amateur cosmologist, speculating that “space may produce new worlds” for his legions to invade following their expulsion from the kingdom of heaven. If you find Paradise Lost slow going, try reading it as science fiction. (Spielberg, what are you waiting for?) Nebulous monsters wing their way through star systems. Angels and demons alike imagine humans colonizing other planets. For the first time in English poetry, we view Earth from outer space—“that globe whose hither side / With light from hence though but reflected shines”—half cloaked in brightness, half in shadow. I could go on. But amid all this, the archangel Raphael warns Adam—and, consequently, Star Trek aficionados everywhere—to “dream not of other worlds, what creatures there / Live in what state, condition or degree.” Maybe wonder, like the moon, has a dark side.

Let’s not forget that the most wonderstruck character in Paradise Lost also happens to be the most fiendish by far. Unlike furious Achilles, Satan simply can’t stop mooning over all of creation. From the stairway to heaven, he “looks down with wonder” at Earth below; once he’s touched down on our planet, he gazes upon Eden “with new wonder”; when he first sees Adam and Eve, he’s overcome by “wonder and could love” them, too. Such vulnerability to wonder, on Satan’s part, is frankly endearing. I, for one, can’t help feeling sympathy for the poor devil when we last see him—at the conclusion of his final speech to the rebel angels in hell—still wondering to the bitter end:

                                             He stood expecting

Their universal shout and high applause

To fill his ear when cóntrary he hears

On all sides from innumerable tongues

A dismal universal hiss, the sound

Of public scorn. He wondered but not long

Had leisure, wond’ring at himself now more:

His visage drawn he felt to sharp and spare,

His arms clung to his ribs, his legs entwining

Each other till supplanted down he fell

A monstrous serpent on his belly prone

I’ve felt this way after poetry readings myself sometimes. (Isn’t every poet a narcissistic angel in reptilian form, after all?) Satan’s ultimate object of wonder in Paradise Lost isn’t a newly discovered planet, or humankind, but “himself,” transformed into a serpent. You’d expect Satan to feel horror at this grotesque Ovidian metamorphosis—his cranium warping hideously, his arms fusing into his torso, his legs corkscrewing into a scaly tail—but this antihero’s wondrous journey through the cosmos ends where it began, in a failure to see himself for what he really is. Maybe dreaming too much of worlds beyond reach can make a monster of you.

Worlds swim through Paradise Lost like bubbles in a glass of champagne, but Milton cautions us not to lose sight of ourselves in this teeming universe. Who’s more blind to our world than the astronomer squinting into his telescope’s eyepiece? “They can foresee a future eclipse of the sun,” writes Augustine in his Confessions, “but [they] do not perceive their own eclipse in the present.” I suspect Milton had this sort of inner eclipse in mind when he described Satan’s dusky radiance following the archangel’s fall from heaven:

His form had not yet lost

All her original brightness nor appeared

Less than archangel ruined and th’ excess

Of glory obscured, as when the sun, new ris’n,

Looks through the horizontal misty air

Shorn of his beams or from behind the moon

In dim eclipse disastrous twilight sheds

On half the nations and with fear of change

Perplexes monarchs. Darkened so, yet shone

Above them all th’ archangel

Milton’s selenographic shield may advertise Galileo’s discoveries, but its spotty globe also reminds us that Lucifer—the erstwhile “bringer of light”—is, in truth, eclipse personified: “Darkened so, yet shone / Above them all th’ archangel.” Nothing discloses the dark side of wonder like an eclipse. I once saw one, through a piece of welder’s glass, in a derelict park on the other side of the world. Even the crows seemed perplexed by its disastrous twilight. There was an uncanny chill, as if a refrigerator door had swung open inside me. But the wonder of it all wasn’t that the sun had been blotted out overhead. What stopped my breath was the slow silhouette of another world gliding into view.

III. Worlds Within

Three centuries after Paradise Lost first lit up the Western literary firmament, an American poet, cookbook author, and marijuana enthusiast named Ronald Johnson purchased an 1892 edition of Milton’s poem in a Seattle bookshop—and promptly began to black out most of the text from its pages.

Image courtesy of the Ronald Johnson Collection, Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas. Used with permission of the Literary Estate of Ronald Johnson.

Why would anyone so meticulously deface an already outdated copy of the venerable Puritan epic? “I got about halfway through it, kind of as a joke,” Johnson later explained in an interview, like a sheepish delinquent caught spray-painting a cathedral. “But I decided you don’t tamper with Milton to be funny. You have to be serious.” What began as a little joke at Milton’s expense developed into a postmodernist masterpiece of literary eclipse in its own right. Blot out the first and last two letters of paradise, and you have radi. Lose the first and last letters of lost, and you have os. Even the title of the poem Johnson fashioned from this procedure—Radi Os—is ordained solely from Milton’s dark materials.

Before publishing this literary curio, Johnson scrupulously whitewashed the epic he’d defaced, yielding a photographic negative of his poetic eclipse:

Image courtesy of the Ronald Johnson Collection, Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas. Used with permission of the Literary Estate of Ronald Johnson.

Nobody wrote Radi Os. The poem was wondrously erased into existence. Its author’s words are nowhere to be found in this work, and yet—like Milton’s Creator—he’s everywhere.

“There is another world,” the French poet Paul Éluard once said, “but it is inside this one.” I think Johnson would gently amend this to say there are other worlds, but they are inside this one. Turning the astronomical theater of Paradise Lost inside out, Johnson investigates the plurality of worlds within: “worlds, / That both in him and all things, / drive / deepest.” A little textual puzzle from ARK, the cosmological epic Johnson labored over for twenty years, illustrates the wondrous multiplication of inner worlds throughout this poet’s work:

earthearthearth

earthearthearth

earthearthearth

The literary critic Stephanie Burt has deciphered the secret messages embedded in this triple-decker concrete poem. Earth, earth, earth. Ear, the art hearth. Hear the art, hear the art. Sampling a jeremiad from the King James Bible—“O earth, earth, earth, hear the word of the Lord”—Johnson composes a manifold matrix of worlds (and hearts). It’s one thing to register the verse in universe and another entirely to construct a poetics of the multiverse. The erasurist’s decision not to delete the s that pluralizes his book’s title makes worlds of this difference. Radi Os isn’t a radio; it’s an orchestra of radios. Well, that’s not quite right. See that caesura fracturing the poem’s title? An imaginary number of broken “radi os” hums and buzzes inside this literary hyperobject. One radio may tune into a single frequency at a time, but a chorus of broken radios can broadcast everything from an infernal racket to the music of the spheres all at once. “You don’t tamper with Milton to be funny,” our holy fool may attest, but for all its radical theology, Radi Os is, in the end, a divine musical comedy.

Listen carefully, and you’ll hear a marvelously cracked piece of postmodern music playing behind the curtain of Johnson’s literary erasure. At a party with his students one night—so the story goes—the poet first heard a recording of Baroque Variations, by the composer Lukas Foss. At one point in the work, a xylophone spells out Johann Sebastian Bach in Morse code. Elsewhere, a highly trained musician smashes a bottle with a hammer. Johnson’s various enthusiasms must have lined up nicely that evening, because he embarked upon the “solitary quest in the cloud chamber” that would become Radi Os the very next day. In the dedicatory note to his book, Johnson quotes Foss’s liner notes for Variation I—on a larghetto by Handel—as a sort of key to his own work:

Groups of instruments play the Larghetto but keep submerging into inaudibility (rather than pausing). Handel’s notes are always present but often inaudible. The inaudible moments leave holes in Handel’s music (I composed the holes). The perforated Handel is played by different groups of the orchestra in three different keys at one point, in four different speeds at another.

Handel’s larghetto, from the Concerto Grosso, op. 6, no. 12, may very well be the most beautiful melody the composer ever wrote. It’s easy enough to find online, if you’d like to hear the “always present but often inaudible” original music behind Foss’s détourned Variation I sometime. Then listen to the Foss, and you’ll experience the otherworldly beauty of Handel under eclipse. It’s hard not to hear broken radios searching for a classical music broadcast in this perforated larghetto’s eerie harmonics and bursts of sonority. If you find Radi Os slow going, try reading it as the libretto for a post-structuralist space opera—lyrics erased by Johnson, score perforated by Foss.

The wonder of variations—in music, in poetry, in evolutionary biology, and elsewhere—is how one variation begets another, though you never know what you’ll beget. Perforating Paradise Lost, Johnson produced a literary variation on Foss’s musical variation on a Baroque artist who composed dozens of variations of his own—including Hephaestus’s favorite, “The Harmonious Blacksmith.” To see how Radi Os makes possible even further variations on itself, let’s look at the original passage in the 1892 edition of Paradise Lost on the page where Satan’s shield first appears.

Image courtesy of the Ronald Johnson Collection, Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas. Used with permission of the Literary Estate of Ronald Johnson.

What if somebody other than Johnson—say, a young woman in rural New England on a snowy night long ago—were to compose her own holes in this dark material?

                                                                     time

Can

 

             thunder

 

Here

Here                                              in my

 

 

 

        unhappy mansion

 

 

              but

                             that voice

 

Of

 

                                                                       fire

 

                    scarce     ceased

                                  the

Ethereal

 

                                                         artist

 

                                          in her        globe

 

Of

                                  marle                            steps

On                               and

            on

It’s hardly “Because I could not stop for Death,” but you get the idea. There are innumerable poems encrypted in the “harmonious numbers” of Paradise Lost. I even hear echoes of the sadly underrated poet, Star Trek aficionado, and Ronald Johnson enthusiast Srikanth Reddy in this literary cloud chamber.

The mind is

                      a

          matter

 

 

                                                                my

 

                                                                     friends

                                                         of

 

 

 

 

                                        voice

                                              the                 edge

Of                       it

 

         moving

 

                                           like

                           glass

 

      in

Rivers

 

                                                         but

 

                burning

I could do this forever, and that’s exactly the point. You could, too. I suspect that’s why Johnson breaks off his own work at Book 4 of Paradise Lost, leaving nearly seven thousand lines of pristine Miltonic pentameters for others to cross out someday. “Radi Os kind of wrote itself,” said the author of this unfinished erasure. “I think it ended when it needed to end, and I didn’t need to add the rest.” An open-ended variation on Milton’s song, Radi Os invites us to “add the rest.” And why stop at Paradise Lost, for that matter? Compose your own holes in any book—Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the Constitution of the United States of America, The Unsignificant—and you’ll unearth a manifold matrix of worlds within.

A literary multiverse, Radi Os is riddled with cosmological wormholes, theological rabbit holes, and typographical holes. From the “O        tree,” a slant rhyme for poetry that opens the work, to the “O for / The Apocalypse” that trumpets the poem’s closing revelations, Johnson makes us see the hole in whole and hear the hole in holy. There’s a hole in wonder, too, though I’d never tumbled through it until I came across the following page in Radi Os:

Image courtesy of the Ronald Johnson Collection, Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas. Used with permission of the Literary Estate of Ronald Johnson.

The first time I read this passage, I had no idea what lay behind it. But that floating little phrase—“the O / Of / wonder”—kept looping around in my head, so I dug up an old copy of Paradise Lost to read the Miltonic original and was wonderstruck. Almost three thousand years ago, a blind Greek poet pictured the world on an ancient shield. Two and a half millennia later, the moon spied through an optic glass eclipsed Homer’s world in a theological poem of Reformation England. In my own lifetime—I was four, astronauts had set foot on the moon’s surface only a few years earlier—a little-known American poet erased Milton’s spotty globe all the way down to a wondrous O. World, moon, O. The word for when things line up in this way is syzygy. The microscopic linkage of chromosomes necessary for reproduction in our species is one example. An eclipse—when three celestial bodies line up in astronomical space—is another. The word syzygy is itself a syzygy, which almost makes me believe in intelligent design as far as language is concerned. Read aloud its sequence of three identical vowels lined up in a row—y, y, y—and you’ll hear humankind grappling with the mystery of causation. Let’s not overlook that linked chain of o’s in “the O / Of / wonder,” either. It’s a syzygy, too. Why, why, why? Oh, oh, oh. We all live that song.

So many images flicker through this O in Radi Os—a full moon, a ghostly shield, a hole in a page from a timeworn edition of Paradise Lost—but I always return to a mouth open in wonder. When we see golden acrobats turning handsprings on an ancient shield, or when the mountains of the moon first swim into focus through a telescope’s eyepiece, we say “O,” hardly aware that our lips are assuming the shape of the signifier itself. The “O” of wonder, Johnson shows us, is the o in wonder. I can’t think of any other word where our writing system and the morphology of human speech enter into such wondrous alignment. But the mouth forms an O in arousal, and in hunger, and in death’s terminal rictus, too: “Thy mouth was open,” George Herbert says to Death personified, “but thou couldst not sing.” There’s no such thing as pure or simple wonder. When thaumazein forces our lips into an O, all those ancient drives—from Eros to Thanatos—move through us as well. The art of poetry traditionally originates in this inexhaustible, sonorous “O.” O muse, O Lord, O my love, O late capitalism, O etcetera—the O that Johnson plucks out of wonder invokes endless poetic variation. With all due respect to Plato and Aristotle, philosophy isn’t the only vocation that springs from thaumazein. If you look closely at the O of wonder, you’ll see a poem beginning there, too.

 

Srikanth Reddy is the poetry editor of The Paris Review. This lecture will appear in The Unsignificant: Three Talks on Poetry and Pictures, forthcoming from Wave Books in September.

Swallowing: I Was Mike Mew’s Patient

Francisco de Goya, “Out Hunting for Teeth,” 1799. Public domain. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

I named her Holy Jemima when I was nine, or thereabouts. I liked the way the words sounded and it was meant cruelly. Holy Jemima was two years older than me, and her family—her mother, father, two sisters, and brother, making six—were in a cult.

I did not know they were in a cult. I just thought they were crazy Christians. The turbo type. I was forced, occasionally, to interact with Holy Jemima, because her little sister, Jessica, was friends with mine.

The whole family had this shark-eyed stare. Holy Jemima would fix me with it and tell me that Harry Potter was evil, that they did not celebrate Halloween in their house because of Satan, and that the school church was getting it all badly wrong.

“You’ve got to come over,” she told me once, “and watch these videos. You have no idea about the world. The school is not telling you about the real miracles that are happening. There is a preacher in Africa, a Black guy, and he is curing people. His name is TB Joshua.”

“You watch videos of church?”

“He has cured AIDS. On video. Exorcisms too. Have you ever seen a demon leave someone’s body? They go like this.” She rolled her eyes back in her head and waved her arms about as if having a seizure and started going aghnaghnahgnghgnghgnhgnhgn.

A thing about growing up: you do not know what is strange until after. This was suburban England and the Holy Jemima’s hobby seemed about the same, to me, as my parents’ doctor friends’ African masks mounted on the walls above their CD towers of world music. Six streets down from them was Bellybutton Man, whose hobby was watching us leave school whilst silently smiling and lifting his blue T-shirt to finger his navel. And Bellybutton Man seemed about the same as Andy, eight minutes across town, who ran a pub and was a chess savant, who showed you newspapers and explained where the grandmasters were making mistakes. And Andy seemed about the same as Jake, whose hobby was that his parents let him drink as much Sunny Delight as he wanted. When you’re a kid it’s all just flora and fauna. You learn prejudices slow, like which plants are poison.

***

I met Dr. Mike Mew at the house next door to Jake’s. This house had been a house, but now it was a dentist. It was called the Smile Centre. Outside was a laminate board that said so, accompanied by a fading photo of a perfect and disembodied grin.

Mike Mew is the head of the closest thing dentistry has to a cult. This was not true when I was nine but it is now. Mike and his father, John, believe that in humanity there is currently an epidemic of ugliness. They promise that you can build yourself a new and strong and masculine jawline, basically just by swallowing different. They call this mewing. His New York Times profile calls him a “celebrity to [the] incels,” but girls like him too. He has obtained adoration on both 4chan and TikTok. Mewing is a big thing, a real phenomenon.

Mike Mew also has, at time of writing, an ongoing misconduct hearing for, among other things, making a six-year-old boy wear head, neck, and inside-mouth appliances that allegedly led to the child being in so much pain he had “seizure-like episodes.” I was Mike Mew’s patient from ages nine to fifteen, or thereabouts. This all started in 2005.

Over Christmas last year, I showed my new fiancée around where I grew up. All the sights: Bellybutton Man’s spot and Jake’s house too. We then passed the Smile Centre, which has changed its name now.

“Oh my God,” she said, “you saw Mike Mew? Are you serious?”

This was how I learned that he was famous, that he had a Netflix documentary, and that my fiancée had seen him on TikTok and had been secretly mewing the whole time.

***

The waiting room of the Smile Centre subscribed to the most boring magazines in the world. Titles I remember being like “Interior Design for the Middle-Aged Wives of Small Business Owners” and “Regional Tatler.” There were leather sofas which were somehow always hot. There was a fish tank I once saw blue food coloring being added to.

Behind the desk was the person responsible: a sixtysomething white South African woman whose hair oscillated wildly between visits from gray to jet black and back again. She would say “Gibri-il Smitt” meanly, unsmilingly, and then I would go into the examination room, where her son was waiting for me.

The son was called Jeff, pronounced “Jiff.” It was a family business and Jeff was the main onsite dentist. I think I was there for a routine NHS visit when Jeff noticed my teeth were misaligned.

“His teeth are very misaligned,” I remember him telling my mother, who came into the examination room with me. I remember her saying: “Oh, dear.”

There was a second dentist present. This was Mike Mew.

Mike Mew’s practice was in London. Not the suburbs. He was the glamorous dentist. He had descended,

Jeff explained, a guru in the field of “orthotropics” (a word he made up), and I was very lucky that he was visiting.

At the next appointment, in a different room in the dentist house, Jeff filled my mouth with putty while Mike watched. At first, Mike mostly just watched. The bottom half first, then the top half. I had to bite down hard. I remember gagging on it, and the clay taste. It had to stay in my mouth for the longest time.

When Jeff took the top half out, one of my teeth came with it. This was very painful but I didn’t show it because I’m really brave.

Jeff pulled the tooth from the clay and inspected it, then handed it to Mike, who did the same.

“Don’t worry,” Mike said, to my mother, who was worrying. “It’s just a baby tooth. It would have come out in the next year or two anyway.”

“If you’re sure,” my mother said.

“We’ll have to redo the mold,” Mike said, smiling at the tooth, “once he stops bleeding.”

***

After this, Mike took over. Mike Mew made us look at some before-and-afters. He narrated these. He had a big laminated photo album and flipped through it.

“Look at this one. His face is long and thin, like Gabriel’s. His mouth was too small and his teeth were too crowded. Now look. His face is short and square and handsome. Look at the jawline. More handsome, right?”

“Uh,” I said, not wanting to say some gay shit.

“More handsome, right, Mum?” said Jeff.

“More square, definitely,” said my mother.

“That’s right!” said Mike, and he put the book down and smiled with lips closed, because he thought he’d convinced us.

***

Later, in the bathroom, I inspected my teeth in the mirror, and wondered why I was meant to care about which way they pointed.

Then I looked at some family photo albums, at photos I was in. Then I looked at myself in the mirror again to compare my current head with my previous head.

I wondered if the two dentists were right—whether my body was becoming ugly. And if it was, why it would do that to me.

This was something I had not thought about before.

***

Alongside the cast of my ugly teeth, and promises that I’d look that way forever unless action was taken, a bill was presented to my mother. I remember the number two thousand. I remember that we were broke. We couldn’t afford a car sometimes. Researching this, I asked my mother recently how we’d paid for it.

“We didn’t,” she said. “Your grandmother did.”

The clay version of me was used to shape the first appliances. They were made from translucent blue plastic and metal wire. One sat in the roof of my mouth and the other sat underneath my tongue. The metal wire was wrapped around my teeth on either side so that each appliance would stay in place.

Neither of them fit right at first. I lay on the hydraulic chair with my mouth open. Mike placed his hand in my hair and tried to force the upper appliance around my teeth.

When it didn’t go in, he handed it to Jeff, who went at it with pliers. Then Mike tried again.

They kept doing this until it did.

Both appliances had a miniature cog inside, right in the middle. Mike gave me a tiny key and some instructions.

“Give the key a quarter turn every night, before bed. The appliance will get wider, very slowly, with each turn. It will force your teeth apart. It will make your mouth wider. Got it?”

I nodded but didn’t say anything because my mouth was full of plastic and tiny cuts from being poked by the wires. It hurt to move. In my head, I called it the Crank.

My main memory of this period of my life is being unable to eat because my teeth and jaw hurt so much. And the appliance was so disgusting—it felt so embarrassing to remove before a meal—that I made up increasingly bizarre excuses to avoid eating in public. I did not want to look like a nerd.

In 2005 they hadn’t really invented anorexia for boys. So no one minded.

***

I gave up turning the Crank pretty quick. By this point Mike Mew had taken a special interest in me, or acted as though he had. He would say how perfect it was that I was starting puberty. Because my face was still growing—not fixed, like an adult’s—he could mold it to his desired proportions. And so he was coming to town for all of my sessions.

Mike became increasingly confused at the lack of progress. It didn’t seem to occur to him that I might be cheating, that I was a preteen boy, and might, on some fundamental level, not care enough about which direction my teeth went in.

He and Jeff tried removing some of my back teeth to make more room inside me. He operated. I was delighted to be fucking up their system, to be making them do exciting, unnecessary, time-consuming procedures.

It felt like revenge for the Crank.

I had just learned about communism from a cassette of a Clash album. I’m Che Guevara, I thought. I am the Che Guevara of Dental Appliances.

 When the teeth were removed from my head I spat so much blood. My mother made a gasping sound.

“Don’t worry,” Mike said, “the blood mixes with the saliva. It looks more dramatic than it is.”

He turned on the miniature dentist tap and the blood began to wash slowly down the tiny sink.

The spiraling water turned from red to pink, then to nothing. I remember watching it, equal parts benzocaine-curious and horrified.

***

The operation, of course, did not work either. They changed tack, Mike and Jeff. They decided my chin was too far back in my head.

So they gave up on the Crank and recast my teeth and made a single appliance. This new appliance sat at the top of my mouth, its wires wrapping around my remaining back teeth. It had two long teeth of its own, the appliance, almost like fangs, which came down from the roof of my mouth, around my tongue, then curved, so that the pointed end of each was aimed at the inside of my gums.

Mike Mew explained this above my head. He would never raise the chair to speak to me.

“He’s a mouth breather. So he holds his jaw like this.”

He opened his mouth and retracted his chin and made a duhhhhhh sound.

I wanted to explain to Mike Mew that it was hay fever season. But his finger was in my mouth.

“So when he opens his mouth too wide, or doesn’t hold his jaw correctly, the appliance will give him a little prick on his gums.”

***

“Little prick” is an understatement: Mike Mew is a small and bizarre-looking man. He has a perfectly square head which, when Mike was a child, his dentist father molded using prototypical orthotropic methods. He is very short, and very slim, which gives the impression of his skull being about the same width as his waist. He wore, during our sessions, a tight shirt tucked into tight trousers, paired with square-framed glasses. He is bald, but fashionably so, and his manicured remaining hair frames the top of his strange little head very neatly. The impression he leaves is of an almost total cubeness, like a minor antagonist in a PlayStation game. He undoubtedly believes that his own physical format is somehow inherently correct, and in what he is selling: he has made himself into an example of it. “Look at your lips,” he said in one session. “Too big, too droopy, ugly. Now look at mine.” He turned to my mother. “This is how lips are meant to look. Firm and tight. Attractive.”

***

A few years passed. The fangs did work. I watched my face change. My chin went forward by the millimeter. I forced my teeth to stay together as long as I could, even while talking. I held my lips open to breathe when I had to. And each time I went to see Mike Mew and Jeff, they got out a tub of some kind of air-drying molten plastic and made the spikes on the fangs slightly longer, to force my chin farther and farther forward.

At the same time I had become six foot and skinny. I cycled everywhere and was tan all the time from the sun. I could buy cigarettes and lie on the grass and smoke them with my friends and people would sort of slide up and speak, then retreat. And once I worked out what was happening—which took a very long time, because I had never previously been cool, let alone attractive—all I could feel was a great unearnedness, a fraudulence of self, a deeply troubling sense that I was an accomplice in some great dental scam, and that anyone who was nice to me was being fundamentally misled, and that the only recourse I had was to make my personality as abrasive and unpleasant as I knew my body secretly was.

But also, when I stopped thinking about all that—when I could just let good things happen to me—life ruled. It ruled so much lol.

***

Mike Mew was delighted with my new fourteen-year-old face, and I thought that would be the end of it. But he didn’t stop there. Having fixed my jawline, he became concerned about my cheeks.

“His face is still very round,” he said. He put his gloved hand across my mouth and squeezed my cheeks so hard it hurt. “It feels like there’s too much muscle there.”

“He’s a bit mixed-race,” my mother said. She still came to the appointments, mostly. “He is kind of meant to look like that.”

Mike Mew looked at Jeff and said, “We need to give him cheekbones.”

***

The next part I can’t remember so well, partly because what Mike Mew says about mewing now is different from what I remember and partly because I had just discovered smoking weed and most long-term memories I’ve committed since are dreamlike and intangible, and trying to lift them from my brain feels, in a very pleasurable way, like lifting sand from a shimmering ocean I’m standing in.

Aside from their chemical effects, the suburban obtainment of drugs provided perhaps the first hint that my world was not what it seemed, of how it might be recast, of the impending strangeness of adulthood.

When buying drugs, you are asked to wait at street corners whose names you never knew. You see, for the first time, the insides of houses that do not belong to people with children. You learn fresh words, like ten-bag or cro, and find that language is the admission fee to new parts of your universe. You learn that all things have many secret sides to them, which were there all along.

***

Amid all this I remember Mike Mew and Jeff becoming very confused—again—even more so than before, about why there was too much muscle in my face. They theorized I was slacking in my sleep. They tried taping my mouth shut at night. Nothing worked.

There is a certain kind of depression that strikes people who reach the limits of a sales pitch they’ve treated as gospel. Mike Mew became distracted, grayer, more desolate. Less hyperactive and talkative. He trudged in his shoes that I remember as orthopedic. I remember feeling really bad for him.

But eventually, after some months, Mike Mew came into a session elated. He was engaged and curious. He had what seemed to be a new idea. When he was like this, he was charming, in his way. Boyish.

He gave me a tiny plastic dentist cup with water in it. He asked me to swallow while he watched.

He made me repeat this so many times. With my mouth open and his face very close to it. With my mouth closed. Until I could barely swallow any more.

“The problem is,” he said, “that you’re swallowing wrong. You’re swallowing with your tongue in the bottom of your mouth. It’s working the muscles in your cheeks. It’s making them too strong. Your tongue should be at the top, firmly. Watch me.”

Then he made me stand up and go to a mirror with him. And we took turns swallowing until he decided I was swallowing the way he wanted me to. This is the thing—the seed of the technique—that became known as mewing.

The Mews’ literature tells it differently. They say that Mike’s father invented the technique in the seventies. My guess is it’s somewhere in-between: based on the amount of time I spent lying open-mouthed in the hydraulic chair while Mike and Jeff hypothesized and pontificated about my teeth, Mike Mew was doing what is known in medical terms as throwing shit at a wall to see what stuck, and “swallowing different” was, when he was treating me, a semi-forgotten trick that he dusted off. That mewing was simple and cheap enough to preach online, thus catapulting Mew to viral dental superstardom, strikes me as a happy half-accident. Or, less than happy, depending on your view of Mike Mew.

***

Mike Mew cast my mouth in clay once more and made a new appliance that would allegedly force me to mew—to swallow correctly—the whole time. This time its fangs pointed at the insides of my cheeks.

I did not bother wearing it. I did my assigned at-home in-front-of-mirror swallowing practice maybe once if ever. I was fifteen and I did not want to become more of a cube. I was so bored of thinking about my own face. I had visions of being about to kiss girls and pausing to remove the blue plastic from my mouth, strands of my saliva following it like cheese on an advertisement pizza. This would not do.

So I told my mother that I’d had enough. And I never saw Mike Mew again.

***

I’ve not seen a dentist since. I tell myself that I’m English, that my teeth are meant to be terrible. For example, I did not go when, during a particularly dark heroin winter, my mouth began   to fill with blood from an unknown source every couple of days. And I will not go for the tumor-shaped thing currently growing on my lower gums, either.

Once, in a particularly philosophical moment, Mike Mew told me: “Everything is discipline. You can apply what I’m teaching you now to anything you choose.”

I do not hate Mike Mew, because how could I? He was right. I love to grind away at my mouth, which was his work. To yellow it, to watch it chip. To make my body   fat and flabby and then to bring it back to the bone. This, the learned and painful discipline of writing or sculpting a differently mangled self—of becoming compelling in spite of, or even because of, an ugliness—this is what I am grateful for. And the nicer jawline, too. Obviously.

***

Showing my beautiful new high-cheekboned, correctly swallowing fiancée around my hometown after she told me about Mew’s fame, I learned other things too. All the parts of the past that fresh eyes and hindsight had cast strange.

I learned that Andy the Savant’s pub had closed down during COVID. And that Bellybutton Man, who was actually harmless, had died some time ago.

And that the African church of the Holy Jemimas’ had been some kind of cult compound, and that TB Joshua had been faking exorcism seizures and miracles on video to obtain donations from gullible Europeans, and then raping a good deal of them, until the compound   burned down in a potentially godsent fire. And that Fitzcarraldo had put out an acclaimed book by a reformed cultist, which the BBC was turning into a documentary.

And that perhaps my own face had once been strange enough to launch two billion TikTok views, from all the incels and looksmaxxing boys and girls who wanted to stop looking exactly like I had. And I was going to have to process that, somehow.

But what I’m actually saying is: it’s not that deep. It’s all about perspective. How much you see depends on what face you’re looking out of. And how much time you’ve had to look into it.

 

Gabriel Smith is the author of the novel Brat.

On Joanna Russ

THOR, Pink Kiss, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Bury Your Gays: the latest tongue-in-cheek name for authors’ tendency to end queer relationships by killing somebody off, or having someone revert to heterosexuality, or introducing something that abruptly ends a queer storyline. The message: queer love is doomed, fated for tragedy. The trope has existed for decades, and although there are plenty of books and movies and television shows now that aren’t guilty of it, Bury Your Gays is by no means a thing of the past. In 2016, the death of The 100 character Lexa reintroduced Bury Your Gays to a whole new generation and reminded seasoned viewers—who could recall the infamous death of the character Tara Maclay on Buffy the Vampire Slayer—that the trope was alive and well. More recently, Killing Eve’s series finale reminded viewers yet again.  

Joanna Russ (1937–2011), who wrote genre-bending feminist fiction throughout the seventies and whose The Female Man (1975) catapulted her to fame at the height of the women’s movement, agonized over Bury Your Gays. In 1973, Russ was writing On Strike Against God (1980), an explicitly lesbian campus novel about feminist self-discovery and coming out. But her head was, in her words, “full of heterosexual channeling.” She felt constrained—enraged, often—by the limited possibilities for how to write queer life, but she struggled to imagine otherwise. “How can you write about what really hasn’t happened?” Russ appealed to her friend, the poet Marilyn Hacker, as she pondered the relationship between life and literature for people whose identities, desires, and ambitions were erased and denounced by mainstream culture. Everywhere Russ turned, women (and especially queer women) were doomed: “It was always (1) failure (2) the love affair which settles everything,” in life and literature alike. Russ’s was a quest to examine, deconstruct, and reconstruct the elements of storytelling so that readers with deviant lives and desires might find themselves—their dreams and plights, lusts and fears—plausibly and artfully borne out in fiction, and it was a quest she undertook in dialogue with Hacker over the course of many years.

The letters published today on the Paris Review’s website offer a window into Russ and Hacker’s shared, decade-long attempt to wrest language—prose fiction in Russ’s case, poetry in Hacker’s—from the grips of patriarchal convention and to remake it in the service of underwritten lives. This window reveals Russ’s frustration at its most potent: On Strike Against God was her first foray as a seasoned author into a genre—realism, or literary fiction—she had enthusiastically abandoned years before. As an adolescent reader of “Great Literature” in the repressive fifties, Russ had become “convinced that [she] had no real experiences of life.” Great Literature—not to mention her educators, psychologists, and friends’ parents—told her that, despite the evidence of her eyes and ears, her inner life, and the experiences that shaped it, “weren’t real.” And so she turned to science fiction, which concerned itself with the creation and navigation of new worlds, within which gender roles could be either peripheral or malleable or both. She embraced speculative fiction as a “vehicle for social change,” a tool for escaping the “profound mental darkness” that engulfed her youth. On Strike Against God marks Russ’s return to the real world as a subject for fiction, and the real world’s bigotries were there to greet her upon arrival—in life, in fiction, and in her own head. 

Russ’s struggles upon returning to “realistic” fiction were not, of course, simple failures of imagination, just as Bury Your Gays isn’t simply a failure of individual creativity, nor is it (necessarily) evidence of an individual creator’s homophobic intent. “Authors do not make their plots up out of thin air,” Russ explains in “What Can a Heroine Do? or Why Women Can’t Write” (1972). They work with familiar, well-worn attitudes, beliefs, expectations, events, and character types—Russ calls them “plot-patterns”—that are already available to them, modeled for them by extant works of art. Like all “plot-patterns,” Bury Your Gays dramatizes what mainstream culture “would like to be true” and, indeed, what it took pains to enforce as true, especially in the early twentieth century. The Motion Picture Production Code—“the Hays Code”—instated by the Motion Picture Association of America in 1930 and enforced until 1968, threatened all depictions of “perverted” sex acts with censorship—unless, that is, these perverted acts, people, and relationships were shown to suffer consequences. This meant that, to depict gay life and love without fear of censorship, creators had to punish their characters with death, madness, or heterosexuality. The result? Hundreds of works of narrative art—lesbian pulps, gay films—with devastating endings. The message, for decades: homosexuals were bound for lives of loneliness. 

But of course, readers like Russ, coming of age in the fifties, sixties, and beyond, weren’t privy to the material bases of these devastating plots; the reality of the Hays Code lurked behind the scenes, regulating what it was possible to imagine, limiting queer viewers’ hopes and dreams for their lives. There were exceptions, of course. Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt, published in 1952 and adapted into Carol in 2015, was a beacon in the dark. The novel doesn’t end in tragedy, so unusual for its time that it was rumored to be “the first gay book with a happy ending.” In her 1991 afterword to the novel, Highsmith recalls the gay novel conventions of the late forties and early fifties. “The homosexual novel then had to have a tragic ending,” she writes. 

One of the main characters, if not both, … had to see the error of his/her ways, the wretchedness ahead, had to conform in order to—what? Get the book published? … It was as if youth had to be warned against being attracted to the same sex, as youth now is warned against drugs. 

And so readers grew up, became writers, and recycled the trope, entrenching it, increasing its potency, even if they didn’t want to. A teenage Russ in the early fifties didn’t know anything about the Hays Code—she knew only that she couldn’t imagine a future for two women in love. When, in grade school, Russ wrote a story about two lesbians, she followed her imagination—but her imagination couldn’t conjure a happy future for her characters. In fact, it couldn’t conjure any future whatsoever. “I couldn’t imagine anything else for the two of them to do,” she explains, and so she ended the story with suicide. 

A seasoned writer by 1973, Russ had identified the problem—the seeming necessity of “failure”  or the heterosexual “love affair that settles everything”—but she struggled to solve it. Before she settled on On Strike Against God’s final, published ending, which she characterized as “an appeal to the future,” she cycled through frustrating alternatives, drawn ceaselessly back to the old, dire clichés. “The pressure of the endings I didn’t write—the suicide, the reconciliation, the forgetting of feminist issues—kept trying to push me off my seat as I wrote,” she confessed to Hacker. She wouldn’t kill off her lesbian protagonists like she did so many decades before—that much she knew—and she wouldn’t concede to heterosexuality, but what was there to do instead? “We interpret our own experience in terms of [literature’s] myths,” Russ wrote, reflecting on these difficulties. “Make something unspeakable and you make it unthinkable.” 

Straining for alternatives, Russ even tried murder on for size: she’d end On Strike Against God not with suicide but by having her protagonist kill “you,” the novel’s presumed-male reader, the object of Russ and her characters’ ire. Hacker, thankfully, objected to these earlier, unpublished endings. Murder, she pointed out—and killing men, especially—wasn’t an improvement on “failure” or the panacean love affair. In her letter to Russ, Hacker noted that these earlier endings capitulated to the same tropes Russ was trying to avoid. “Why are [the last pages] addressed to men[?]” Hacker asked. “I wanted this one to be for us, women.” “I can see,” she continued, “that the book must end on a note of challenge … but there is still the implication that The Man is still so important that even this book, even in defiance, in hatred, in challenge, is addressed to him, that the person you see reading it is not a woman or a girl thinking here is something at last, but a man being Affronted.” 

On Strike Against God was Russ’s attempt to speak the unspeakable and think the unthinkable, and she couldn’t do it alone. At Hacker’s urging, Russ decided instead on an ending that said, instead, “this is the beginning,” in which she addressed her readers directly, rallied and appealed to them, urged them to read, write, and live into reality that hopeful future that “really [hadn’t] happened” yet—urged them to do, in short, what Hacker and Russ were struggling to do themselves, in conversation with one another. If past and present models weren’t up to snuff—if neither “Great Literature” nor lesbian pulps were adequate for depicting, in fiction, queer life and desire—Russ would enlist her readers in “an appeal to the future,” positioning her novel as a jumping-off point for an as-of-yet unthought and unspoken world of possibility—as, in her words, “a kind of prayer.” Any meaningful, future-oriented appeal for change, in life or in literature, must involve other people, Russ concluded, and she told her readers so.  

 

Alec Pollak is a writer, academic, and organizer. She is the winner of the 2023 Hazel Rowley Prize and the 2018 Ursula Le Guin Feminist Science Fiction Fellowship for her work on a biography of Joanna Russ. Her writing appears in The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Yale Review, and various academic publications. She is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of literatures in English at Cornell University. 

“Intelligent, Attractive, Powerful Lesbians Conquering the World”

A letter from Marilyn Hacker to Joanna Russ.

The following correspondence between Joanna Russ and Marilyn Hacker is drawn from a new edition of Russ’s On Strike Against God (1980), edited by Alec Pollak, to be published by Feminist Press in July. You can read Pollak’s introduction to the work of Joanna Russ on the Daily here.

October 23, 1973

Dear Marilyn,

Your letter is lovely—esp. since now I can write two letters where formerly I would’ve written one: one to you, one to Chip.

Your book business is rather like my teaching, except teaching does leave more time & more ways one can cut corners, and so on. And you are beginning to sound just like Chip about London—I have this feeling that the two of you will turn up in NYC again—or I guess I should say the three of you.

And goodness knows, you BOTH need separate rooms. And the baby ought to have a velvet-lined cell where it can be put when both grown-ups have other things to do. Mind you, a nice cell, and a nest, too, but having seen your flat, I agree that it’s crowded.

God, it seems we all end up in the same place. A very close friend of mine, who used to get upset when I went on & on about MEN is now divorced; another came back from Canada more militant than I’ve ever been, and here you are saying just what we’re all thinking. I can’t read modern novels anymore (unless they’re by women), I can’t bear the conventional Didion sort of stuff, the usual Young Enraged Man simply seems to be writing from the other side of the moon or something. And I am worrying endlessly over the aesthetics of propaganda/polemic/didactic writing, trying to figure out (the worst problem currently) whom one is writing to. I think we both went through the business of I’m Not A Girl I’m A Genius, only they really won’t let one do that; it just won’t work. George Eliot is the most heartbreaking cop-out I’ve been able to find: every book I’ve read (tho’ I haven’t read Romola) breaks about halfway through. Her courage falters, her plot switches in midtrack like a locomotive suddenly on a switchback, and the scheme of the book crumples up. And it’s always where she comes to the conventional limits of femininity. Maggie changes into a different character in midbook in The Mill on the Floss (so does Tom, by the way)—Daniel Deronda is really two books—poor Gwendolen is left hanging in midair in the damnedest way while Daniel takes off for Zionism—and in Middlemarch, Dorothea’s first problem (what to do with herself ) somehow vanishes in the middle of a Love Affair. You can just see the book fall to pieces in each case. Only Adam Bede holds together—and there’s no stand-in for the author there. Brontë, seems to me, simply stuck to her own experience and let it dictate to her: she writes the Great Romance once (Jane Eyre, naturally the book everyone reads), lets her book split in two in Shirley, and breaks into the most bitter, passionate kind of subversion in Villette. Which is why, I am beginning to suspect, George Eliot (with her male worldview) is considered a Great Writer and Brontë isn’t. Or aren’t (both).

I don’t think it’s a matter of space but of fear. There’s Daniel’s mother in Deronda, the Jewish opera singer who hacked her way out of the ghetto and a ghastly father, even gave away her son so (1) she wouldn’t have to bother about him & didn’t want to and (2) so he wouldn’t be raised a Jew: it’s all there, the freedom, the ruthlessness, the price, the transcendent, necessary arrogance—and the author takes it all back by saying she isn’t LOVING. (!) Her life could be written, even in the nineteenth century, but Eliot didn’t. Brontë could have. I think Lucy Snowe is magnificent, tho’ I suspect some of the loose ends in the book might just come from Brontë’s early death. Was it published after her death? …

I’m happy with my teaching now, loathing my colleagues more than I can say (it wasn’t Cornell; it’s just the Type), and have just finished a thirty-eight-thousand-word novella in which my two Lesbian heroines end up practicing shooting a rifle in their backyard. I want to call it “On Strike Against God,” this being what some judge said in the nineteenth cent. to a group of striking women workers: that they were on strike not just against their employers but against God.

I would imagine you’d know by now—has Chip mentioned it to you?—that I’ve just about decided heterosexuality is, for me, the worst mistake I could make with the rest of my life. I was itching to tell you when I saw you in London but was too craven. And—not that I think you will immediately broadcast the news—do not tell anyone. I am not sure yet how I want to become publicly branded or by whom. And certainly if by chance any news of this should seep back to the academic community in which I live, that would most likely be IT.

The labeling still bothers me. I don’t feel like an anything sexually—and am quite capable of watching Christopher Lee on the Late Late Show (when I don’t have class the next day) and mooning about him all night. But I have more and more the feeling that my attraction towards men is compounded of a real witch’s brew of bad things—adoration, self-contempt, nostalgia, negativity—there’s something not-real about it, very imaginative and all that but still all in the head. While what I have felt for women has always been real, concrete, hooked to a concrete situation and person, and quite freeing. And very sexual. I keep trying to tell myself that the sex of the person I’m attracted to doesn’t matter, but that’s nonsense. It matters tremendously. Because all the power di!erentials, all the politics, all the pain & despair and God knows what of the past 34 years (by the age of two I was already being made into a sexist mess), simply can’t be wiped away. Maybe they could if the world around me did not constantly and endlessly reinforce them. (Which is a point I often tried to make to my analyst, without the slightest success.) I suspect you are right, and that we are all involved in very complex gender games, that people become hetero- or homosexual for very different, individual, and complicated reasons, and that men and women do so for extremely different reasons. But somehow all this has to be shoved into two labels. As a character says in that wonderful What the Butler Saw: “There are only two sexes, Preston, only two! This attempt at a merger will end in catastrophe.”

So I have fantasies (when I do) about men, but seldom. And none at all about women (except willful ones). And am not sleeping with anybody. And I keep losing the memory of my one rather pitiful and disastrous Lesbian affair, which was nonetheless magnificent, freeing, sensuous, beautiful, mind-bending, and real. I suppose the problem is that even with a Lesbian mind or soul or personality, I still walk around with a head full of heterosexual channeling. But it doesn’t seem to get below the head.

Of course there seems to be no way of making friends with any of the men here without getting my toes trampled on constantly. I try to turn a lot of it aside, or laugh at it, or ignore it, not wanting to fight a dozen battles a day, so eventually I explode and they are all amazed. I’m told I’m “oversensitive”—a quantified view of existence that has always puzzled me immensely! And alas there are so few people to talk to. And I’m tremendously gregarious at work. That is probably a writer’s problem: one can be either alone-and-working or gregarious, but switching takes time.

That may be why you’ve been so caught up in buying books—get into one head and you can’t get out into another.

My former lover and I are still very good friends, by the way. She has simply run shrieking from any sexual contact with anybody, apparently feeling so overwhelmable by people that she won’t sleep with anyone. And I do think feeling herself to be a (gasp, gulp) Lesbian did freak her out. But my goodness, I don’t feel any different.

Chip’s preface to Hogg impressed me a lot as you know, if you saw my letter to him—because of the connection it suggests—absolutely bedrock connection—between aesthetics and ethics. Aesthetics IS ethics, in another key, one might say. I find myself worrying endlessly over my novel and the new novella that somehow the structure isn’t right, isn’t tidy, isn’t “dramatic” or “good”—because indeed once you get outside the accepted values, everything changes, including one’s ideas of narrative. So the long, long short story (I think it’s really a short story in motion, if not in length) has no proper “ending”—it ends with a leap into the future, so to speak. Either one must leave that up in the air, as it were (Villette!), or end in defeat, which is a beautifully aesthetic ending, but hateful morally. Both the novel and the story end by, in a way, dumping themselves into the reader’s laps. And my OWN aesthetic sense, nurtured by unities and conclusiveness and dramatic resolutions which, in fact, are embodiments of accepted moral ideas, stirs uneasily and says, No, no, no. But (responds the other lobe of the brain) that’s what happened. How can one write about success in a situation in which success and the implications of it are still unrealized and fluid in actuality?

Suppose, for example, in The Left Hand of Darkness, Estraven hadn’t died? What a bloody moral mess Le Guin would have on her (I almost wrote “his”) hands! Here we have an alien hermaphrodite and a male human (who’s not quite real) in bed together. Worse still, living together. Could they live happily ever after? What would the real quality of their feeling for each other be? Could they get along? (Probably not.) Would they end up quarreling? (Their heat periods don’t match, let alone culture shock.) So the great old Western Tragic Love Story is called in to wipe out all the very human, very real questions, and we can luxuriate in passion without having to really explore the relationship. You see what I mean.

It just struck me that my 2 pieces, like Invisible Man, like Rubyfruit Jungle, like even Isabel and Sarah (which is cute but not that good) have no “endings”—the story ends either by saying; Here I Am—i.e. burning into you an image of the protagonist’s predicament (like Ellison and like my novel) OR by saying not “We succeed” but “We are now ready to attempt” or “We begin to attempt.” Which, studied by traditional criticism, is all very unimpressive, and “badly-structured.” Villette, it seems to me, ends with a Here I AM. You either end with “Now we actually begin” (or “It’s up to you, reader”) i.e. the rallying cry to the barricades—or we end with sheer lyricism, the power of one image, like the man in his room lined with electric light bulbs. One is a double-bind; the other is a promise or an appeal. And promises and appeals are certainly suited to propaganda. There have been lots of Unhappy Housewife novels in which (if she doesn’t go mad) the woman abruptly “solves” her predicament by denying it; I have 5 paperback books that do this, inc. Up the Sandbox, which is the worst. Also Diary of a Mad Housewife. They won’t make the leap. Polemics ought to end with a kind of prayer. I found myself writing at the end of my novel “Go, little book” etc. and last line “For on that day, we will be free.” (Schmalz, I tell you!) And in the novella, “I never challenged Daddy—til now.” But these are beginnings, not endings. So the aesthetic of polemic is going to be very very di!erent from the aesthetic of either comedy or tragedy. (Isn’t there something in German romantic writing that has this odd, “unfinished” quality? Because, in fact, it hasn’t yet happened? Shelley’s Prometheus ends with the lyrical faith-leap into The Image.) Oh tragedy is so beautiful. Jeez. Ugh. In my novella I said “You want a reconciliation scene? You write it.”

It really is aesthetically different. I suppose to poets it’s just as hard, but I envy you—you don’t have to produce PLOTS, you bastards.

Here I am, hung up on explaining to my friend here why I loathe and wish to destroy paternal middle-aged white men who tease me by flirting with me.

And a former Cornell colleague saying airily that Gilman et al. are silly people and why get angry at them?

Anyway, just came to me that in the novella, the process is as clear and plain as can be: (1) heroine has happy Lesbian love affair, after lots of initial worrying and reluctance (2) heroine “tries out” her feminism—integral to the affair and in fact what produced it—on 2 sets of friends (3) is repulsed by both (4) is radicalized (5) gets lover back (who has been going through same process) (6) prepares for Ultimate Revolution by learning to shoot rifle. Says her one wish is to “kill someone.” Not in hatred, but to make a change, a difference, a dent in the world. Could it be more dramatically/narratively put? Problem is that the ending is ethically the wrong sign—it shocked me as I wrote it. And what it will do to my colleagues if they ever read it is best left unimagined!

The pressure of the endings I didn’t write—the suicide, the reconciliation, the forgetting of the feminist issues (which I think far outweigh, or rather include, the Lesbian ones) kept trying to push me off my seat as I wrote. I kept saying to myself “That’s banal. That’s propaganda. That’s obvious.” (Oh how subtle failure can be!) But there was simply nothing else to do—anything else would have been false. In a vague way I remembered Frantz Fanon’s bit about having to shoot the oppressor just to make the tremendous discovery that The Man is vulnerable. But it was pure Russ, I assure you.

The aesthetic problem, as I see it, is that the “prepare to succeed” is itself tentative and complex—it’s not like an already settled issue, i.e. the Knights of Malta marching off to the Crusades. The real uncertainty of real issues comes in.

Goddess knows, it’s also the only kind of live literature now. All the old solutions have turned to fuzz & lint, as far as I am concerned. For women it was always (1) failure (2) the love affair which settles everything. Look at George Eliot, WANTONLY drowning Maggie so she can rehabilitate her. Oh, it kills me. This, from a talent as good as (or even better than) Tolstoy! Wuthering Heights gives us both the old tragedy and the new tentative hope-of-success—which is why, of course, all movie adaptations leave out Part II and no critic up until College English 1970 has spent any time at all on Cathy #2 and Hareton Earnshaw, except to say that the novel “declines.”

I am getting so that the very name “tragedy” or phrases like “the beauty of tragedy” make me grind my teeth. What excuses! Ah, one learns from suffering. Go tell it to Ralph Ellison.

And the happy ending of The Exception.

Still, it’s good to be writing now (if not living). All these beautiful pathetic heroines drowning & dying & getting poisoned or going interestingly mad. And all these heroes dying nobly, feh. Feh, feh, feh.

I must stop now—I haven’t yet got my rugs and my downstairs neighbors (who get up at 6 a.m.) come hallooing up the stairs if I type past 11. This spring I shall try to get a house.

Tell Chip that my new novella ends where he thought Female Man should end. (Actually I was getting there at the end of Chaos, when I had someone say “Just life” i.e. not a settlement or solution, just things going along.) Oof! If you have time, tell me what kind of poetry you’ve been thinking of. The whole business of propaganda is utterly fascinating to me.

It is the only live stuff.

Joanna

September 28, 1975

Dear Joanna,

… I had just gotten to the part in the letter where I was going to say, and now, about intelligent attractive powerful Lesbians conquering the world, & talk about On Strike Against God. I picked it up to remind myself of what I was going to say, and read it, again, all the way through, which is why this is Sunday afternoon instead of Sunday morning. What a good book. I’m glad you wrote it. I’m glad somebody wrote it, and especially that it was you. (I’ve never gotten to say that I found The Female Man even better on second and third readings, that all the minor changes were right, that I can’t wait to see it in print.) Not to finish a book with anger or disappointment or disgust. Thank you. I would like to write a letter to Ted Solotaroff at The American Review, sending him a copy, and saying I think this novella is great, and I’m sending it to you in the hope that you will agree & accept the privilege of publishing it. And what a good antidote to the sexist claptrap you usually present as fiction. In fact, if you (Joanna) agree, I will do just that—perhaps a slightly more diplomatically phrased letter, copy to you of course. They would give you (comparatively) lots of money. And lots of people, lots of women would read it, instead of being insulted by Philip Roth or collaborating in the cheerful hopelessness of the Catholic convert woman short-story writer with eight children and a sexy but unsympathetic husband. (but Nature is beautiful, isn’t it?)

May I indulge in a few very small bits of lit-crit? I will.

Until the party scene, I was confused about Jean’s age & status (job). On second reading, I noticed that she is said to be considerably younger than her friends, who are later said to be in their mid-thirties. But on first reading I assumed she & Esther were coevals until the party, when I found out she was 25. Somehow things would have clarified themselves much more quickly (in terms of visualizing the characters &c) if she was said fairly early to be a 25-year-old graduate student (because I kept picturing her to myself as 35, profession to be revealed, simply, I guess because one assumes that people described first as my friend X are the same age as the speaker. The narrator’s past experiences given in the first pages place her in her thirties pretty definitely.

I’m probably not entitled to say this, but Stevie’s reaction, though perfectly believable seemed to me pretty atypical of what the average gay male reaction would be (Relieved? Congratulatory?) Which is not to exonerate gay males of sexism, or to want the episode changed.

Very minor point—when Esther goes back home, & describes having been attracted to a girl she saw walking in front of the library, this girl seems to be wearing the same outfit, or at least the same top, as Leslie was at Ellen & Hugh’s, though it isn’t said to be the same or similar. And it just made me stop a moment. I mean, if it was the same blouse, Esther would have noticed it. And if it wasn’t, its description made it seem so.

And last. The last pages are good, well-written, occasionally brilliant, threatening, strong, &c. But why are they addressed to men? I wanted this one to be for us, women. I can see the problem, that the book must end on a note of challenge, and you’re not looking to go out & shoot women, but there is still the implication that The Man is still so important that even this book, even in defiance, in hatred, in challenge, is addressed to him, that the person you see reading it is not a woman or a girl thinking here is something at last, but a man being Affronted.

Chip & Whi”es came back. Chip out again to see if an ambulance comes for a man who had a heart attack or epileptic fit in the park next door. Whiff is sitting on the floor at my feet, tearing a telephone book in half. Page by page, admittedly, but she’ll work her way up to more impressive feats. Trying to crawl these days, and obsessed by the problem. Betting (straight light brown) hair.

Will close now and post this.

Love, Marilyn

And what you were not saying two summers ago.

Like “The political is the personal!” Propaganda is an appeal to the future.

which is always a double bind, a no-win situation.

 

Joanna Russ (1937–2011) was a Hugo and Nebula Award–winning author of feminist science fiction, fantasy, and literary criticism. She is best known for her novel The Female Man and now for her darkly funny survey of literary sexism, How to Suppress Women’s Writing.

Marilyn Hacker is an award-winning poet, translator, editor, and lesbian activist. She is the author of nineteen volumes of poems, and her honors include the National Book Award, the Lambda Literary Award, the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, the Robert Fagles Translation Prize, and the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry.