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“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. 

RIP Billymark’s

Photograph by Nikita Biswal.

Billymark’s West was a normal bar. That was its greatest virtue, probably. It had a pool table, a jukebox, booths, a beer-and-shot special. It was a little dingy and dark. There was a TV and, somewhat oddly, a lot of Beatles-themed memorabilia. The prices were not so bad, by New York standards, though drinks weren’t as cheap as they could have been, either. There was graffiti in the bathroom. It was in some ways the Platonic ideal of a bar, such that it might seem familiar to you even if you’d never been. It had its own story, of course: it opened in 1956 and was taken over in 1999 by two brothers, Billy and Mark, one of whom was usually at the bar. They were the kind of guys you would describe as “characters” in part because they were playing a well-worn role. Billy—whom I saw more often—would call me “honey” and then charge me a price for my Miller High Life that seemed, each time, to be made up on the spot. Sometimes he was gruff, but mostly he was jovial, and it appeared as though he knew everyone in the bar, in a vague sort of way. The patrons of Billymark’s filtered in from the odd mix of places nearby: Rangers games at Madison Square Garden, galleries in West Chelsea, trains at Penn Station, and the offices of The Paris Review a few blocks away. I liked going to Billymark’s for a drink after work, though I didn’t go all that often. Still, it was always a place to go, a place in the neighborhood that stood out mostly for how normal it was. When I found out the bar had closed a few weeks ago, I was bereft.

I understand that there are many people who are not always asking themselves, How can I get it back? But I am. Sometimes in fact this question feels like the animating force behind my emotional life—where did it go and how can I retrieve it? No one knows what it is, least of all me. Not long ago I was taking a train north toward Poughkeepsie and I was overcome with the memory of a previous train ride, on a Friday in July several years ago, toward a house in the woods where we stood one night on the porch and watched heat lightning and fireflies rise off the grass in the steam of a recent rain. Other more and less important things happened that weekend, but that is the image that came to me as I stared out the train window, along with the feeling that I could never get it back, any of it. I am speaking of what is generally called nostalgia, though I think the word is overused such that it conjures the gentle, moony feeling you might get listening to a second-rate James Taylor song. No, the feeling I am trying to describe is totalizing, characterized by sharp, surprising loss wrapped up with something like pleasure. That day on the train, I was so overwhelmed that I had to lie down.

Bars are good places to go if you want to chase feelings like this. Or bad places, depending on your perspective. But it’s true that people who frequent bars—who really frequent them—are often the kinds of people who are looking for something lost, and perhaps getting lost in that looking. This is related to the consumption of alcohol, which can feel at times like a shortcut to bygone days. It also has to do with the spaces themselves, which are designed to be familiar and to mimic, perhaps, other bars where we’ve been before while retaining their own particular magic. That’s what a good bar is like, anyway. There are fewer and fewer good bars, for all the obvious reasons, and Billymark’s was one of the last in the stretch of blocks around our office. I can’t really explain why, but it was an especially good one.

Billymark’s was the kind of bar that allowed you to feel like maybe you could get it back. It made me think I could get Beacon Hill Pub back—the first bar where I ever drank as a teenager, a place where in the eighties my father used to eat the hot dogs they would boil at closing time, or so he said, and where I once whiled away a Saint Patrick’s Day staring into the shockingly blue eyes of a stranger, wondering what would become of my life. That bar is closed. Billymark’s made me feel like I could get back the Chieftain, an old newspaper bar downtown in San Francisco which isn’t even gone but is gone from my life, or really I am gone from its. Other bars like these, where I have wasted my wastrel youth, all seemed contained, somehow, in Billymark’s. They seem contained, too, in the loss of it. Probably I should have expected this, from all those stories I used to hear about bygone days, but it’s been a surprise all the same: as I get older, there are more and more places I’ll never go again. 

One time I went to Billymark’s to meet my friend Nick. I was going somewhere later, but I was also sad about something. He works in the neighborhood too. We decided to have a quick one. We had a Miller High Life and a shot, and then a second Miller High Life and a shot, and we talked for what felt like a long time. Then I walked out toward the subway smiling, into the damp of a February that like every February seemed like it would never end. Nick and I have gotten a lot of quick ones at a lot of bars, but they seem contained in that evening, the image I have of parting ways outside of Billymark’s into a new glow we had constructed through the sometimes-dark magic of that bar. I can’t remember what we said to each other now, nor can I now return to the booths where we said it, and so I find myself wondering once again: How can I get it back?

 

Sophie Haigney is the web editor of The Paris Review.

Announcing Our Summer Issue

As we were putting together this Summer issue of the Review, an editor in London sent me Saskia Vogel’s new translation of a 1989 book by Peter Cornell, a Swedish historian and art critic. The Ways of Paradise is presented as notes to a scholarly manuscript; the author, Cornell tells us in an introduction, was “a familiar figure at the National Library of Sweden,” where for more than three decades he was “occupied with an uncommonly comprehensive project, a work that—as he once disclosed in confidence—would reveal a chain of connections until then overlooked.” After his death, the manuscript was never found. “Which is to say,” Cornell writes, “all that remains of his great work is its critical apparatus.”

The footnotes that comprise The Ways of Paradise orbit certain preoccupations: the center of the world, labyrinths, flânerie, rock formations, Freudian repression, passwords, folds of fabric, aimlessness. As I followed the trails left behind by the mysterious man Cornell calls the author, I felt an emerging sense of relation between only tangentially related things. (I also felt a relief that the categories of “Fiction” and “Nonfiction” had already been banished from the Review’s table of contents in favor of the more-encompassing “Prose.”)

Taking note of connections, intended or not, is one of the pleasures of deep, patient reading—which is to say, one of the pleasures of reading for pleasure. And so I am always delighted when, despite our best efforts to avoid organizing an issue of the Review around a given idea or theme, a reader will point out that the most recent one was clearly all about this subject or was wrestling with that idea.

Which makes the kind of letter I am now writing—to announce our new Summer issue, out this week—a conundrum. I could flag its seasonal topicality (“That summer we had decided we were past caring,” Anne Serre writes in the issue’s first story. “It was just too tiring, rushing back and forth between mental institutions”). Or I could, like a savvy host at a drinks party, point out possible conversation starters: works in translation, maybe. Or romance novels (“I am a sucker for women carrying each other around,” Renee Gladman writes in “My Lesbian Novel”). Or the visionary (“It could be a dog crossing the street one morning with a string of wieners, which is something I’ve always wanted to see,” Mary Robison tells Rebecca Bengal in her Art of Fiction interview. “That’s my golden dream”).

But most of the time when we read, we are enjoying something we can’t necessarily name in advance. In Dreaming by the Book (1999), Elaine Scarry argues that when writers describe something, what they’re really doing is instructing the reader in how to make mental images—ones that appear “not just like a lazy daydream,” Scarry explains to Margaret Ross in her Art of Nonfiction interview, “but as an incredibly complex landscape of interactions.” There is no replacement for this powerful exercise, she says: “If you really want to take down someone’s, or a whole population’s, ability to think, you must do it by shutting down their practice of the fictional as well as their practice of the factual.”

Consider this issue of the Review, then, a chain of connections whose links are you, their reader. Soldiers, reportedly killed in combat, disembarking from a train in the eerie light of dawn, in a story by the late Argentine author Rodolfo Enrique Fogwill, translated by Will Vanderhyden. Odysseus sitting on the rocks by the edge of the sea, grieving his homecoming, in Daniel Mendelsohn’s new translation of The Odyssey. Scarry recalling how, as a child on summer vacation, each day she would await her grandfather’s return from the anthracite mines where he worked. “I would trace his path in the dirt over and over,” she says. “I’d think, Now he’s coming out of the mines, now he’s approaching me, when I look up he’s going to be there. No, he’s not there. He’s coming out of the mines, he’s approaching me. No, he’s not there.”

 

Emily Stokes is the editor of  The Paris Review.

Rented Horrors

Illustration by Na Kim.

I was a fairly unsupervised child, living like a rat on the crumbs of adult culture, its cinema in particular. 1976’s Taxi Driver I saw for the first time at eight—rented and shown to me by a housemate of my mother’s—and what I remember most is the gamine Jodie Foster at a diner’s laminate tabletop: her cheer, and her will, her fistfuls of prostitution money. The relieving and misguided lesson I absorbed, likely because I felt particularly attuned and exposed to adult violence, was that childhood could be short-circuited. Soon after, thanks to a few errant adults in my life, I was renting the most obscene things I could find, studying the horror aisle of the Silver Screen Video in Petaluma as though it were the Library of Alexandria: containing and promising and threatening all. Unusual to my experience of these films was that their one-dimensional and sex-warped predators did not seem so different from the world reflected in my actual life.

A few years before, the month I turned five, my neighborhood had been infested by the FBI, who were searching for traces of the just-kidnapped twelve-year-old Polly Klaas. She was abducted in October of 1993 from a sleepover at her house, which was around my literal corner. What Polly became, in the child’s simplistic understanding, was the greatest celebrity: her face on every magazine and national news segment, the vigil always lit for her in town looking like an ancient shrine to the cruelest gods. It took almost two months to find her body. When the guilty man was finally tried, he famously declared in court that Polly had pleaded: Just don’t do me like my dad. Her ruined father lunged for him.

In the years I consumed most of the horror canon, I saw Sissy Spacek in her red shower, Tatum O’Neal with her hips electrocuted by sin up toward God, Jamie Lee Curtis in breast-bouncing flight. I watched the Pet Sematary trilogy, though the supernatural was never of much appeal—I was a girl, and I was curious about girls being killed. One could say that this curiosity was only an expression of internalized misogyny, and one might be very right, but this theory would exclude the great protection afforded me by the chance to experience this kind of hatred against women with no disguises, in private, with the ability to rewind and replay.

Decades later, I’d read the white feminists who castigated the slasher canon, Solnit and her derivatives who called for its expulsion, asking why it was that depictions of violent misogyny, the fetishization of the missing woman and the female carcass, had not been dismissed from the cultural record. By then it was too late to revise my response to genre’s blunt messaging, which had been a comfort when I was a girl, requiring even for the child little decoding. That bluntness was welcome among the subtleties of other monoculture staples: how a likeable male character on The Larry Sanders Show might meet jokey opprobrium for being “pussy-whipped,” or how, as in the dispiriting pablum of You’ve Got Mail (1997), a charming woman could find real love so long as she sacrifice her financial and spiritual purposes. The horror movie was also the beginning of my indoctrination into image culture, the fascination with the unidirectional, the film still or painting that could change me—and that I could never change. It did not occur to me until recently that this submissive solace came at certain personal costs. Back then these movies felt like an empowerment, because what I hoped to comprehend, in order to master, was the machinery of fear.

Something horror movies have always understood is how fear is a granular phenomenon, one whose most powerful vehicle is not the antagonist, but the onus he creates in the consciousness of the pursued: the woman whose survival depends on her never becoming paralyzed with terror, but also never relinquishing it entirely. After Polly’s kidnapping, after Polly’s murder, none of the children in our neighborhood could be seen outside locked houses. All the jewels of small-town Americana that had brought the families there became doubled with evil—the lacy eaves of the Queen Anne Victorians rendered gothic, the branches of huge oaks splitting the sidewalk at forty-five-degree angles violent. I’d always eaten the wild berries that grew through so many fences, dripping coastal dew on foggy mornings, but I remember, after that girl’s death, some neighbor slapping my hand away, certain that glistening black cluster was poisonous. For years after, school meant frequent assemblies. Fluorescent take-home packets, exhorting that we memorize certain phone numbers and signals of danger, were countless, and in a prefiguring of the brave or heedless woman I’d become, I left them crippled in the juice-damp bottoms of my backpack. Each child’s life, the language seemed to suggest, was now the child’s responsibility: there were numinous lurking forces that would always want to end it.

In 1995, a town over from where we lived, the first Scream movie was shooting—they had approached the high school there, but a rabid city council meeting that cited the Klaas case obstructed the possibility; the production found a nearby community center to pass as a school instead. Once it was in theaters, the adolescent older brothers and sisters of my friends seemed proud to point out the locations—in particular the stately houses, dressed by the scale of velvety hills and long, curving driveways—where Drew Barrymore and Neve Campbell had tried not to die. Our town was diseased with film shoots before and during my childhood: American Graffiti (1973), When Peggy Sue Got Married (1986), the remake of Lolita (1997), Pleasantville (1998),  Basic Instinct (1993), not to mention a cameo in Reagan’s “It’s morning again in America” 1984 campaign agitprop; if you crossed the town line you could soon reach the church from The Birds (1963) and the beach from The Goonies (1985).

But our inclusion in the slasher renaissance of the nineties—portions of I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) shot nearby soon after Scream—fed a unique carbonation of local spirit, maybe because of another precept of the genre: that the greatest evil comes for the greatest safety, or purity, traits long conflated in Hollywood with affluence and white beauty. When Polly died, much was made of how close-knit and idyllic the town had seemed before, of how newly these Caucasian mothers feared for their children. This seems to me now a cryptic confirmation of another great evil: the assertion that these lives were worth more than those already endangered by more systemic threats. Polly’s murder became a flashpoint in the legislation of California’s three-strikes law, for which her father platformed, and which incarcerated even categorically nonviolent multiple offenders, the majority of them people of color, for life.

Perhaps the area’s  self-mythologized virtue was why parochial beauty seemed the right setting for Scream’s dead teenager in a miniskirt, electrocuted and hanged through a pet flap in the raised garage door. The girl’s mistake, in that scene, is to mock her killer, who has confronted her with a knife, for playing his role. “Please don’t kill me,” she sneers, “I wanna be in the sequel.” A then-novel feature of Scream was its cringey meta-awareness of the genre, delivered by an incel-ish teenage video-store-clerk character who reverentially expounds upon horror’s narrative strictures—for instance that anyone who has sex, or uses the phrase “I’ll be right back,” is sure to be slaughtered. That teenage girl’s death by electrocution and asphyxiation is the first in the film that is not a stabbing, suggesting mightier retribution to those who mock the archetype. In other words, she dies for not believing movies are real.

***

It was around the time Scream was shooting that my mother—an unusually tall, beautiful, and errant woman who still dressed in the dramatic capes and trench coats she had worn on the dark boulevards of cities where she’d lived before—was the prey. She was unlike many of the mothers I knew: single, poor, a smoker, a renter, free if not lascivious with nudity, a Wiccan, then a Buddhist. It began with a few occurrences I later heard her narrate to the police: one night, she had thought she’d closed the front door, but the front door had been open, beyond it my rope swing arcing through a windless night. On a phone bill she discovered many calls to paid phone sex lines, backdated to weeks before the event in question, which was this: around 3 A.M. one night, she woke up to discover her blankets had been removed. At the foot of the bed a man sat crouched, stroking her feet. As the story went, she chased him shouting out of the house through the back door, and he was a spectacular runner, leaping corner bushes, sending the wooden bench of the swing to flight again.

As later became true of my life, my mother had many friends, but no family. She had a surfeit of love but a scarcity of protection, which mirrored what she offered me. In sum, I was often alone. I can see my childhood much more than I can feel it—in fact, when urged to by professionals, I struggle to feel it at all—so the banalities of how I spent my time, and the specifics of the culture I sought out, are of talismanic interest to me. I know I walked much more than was popular for children to do, that there were often community Bettys and Rachels leaning out car windows at intersections, offering and then insisting on rides I always declined. Though among classmates I was affable and socially invested, I was fond of certain back passages: the narrow cobblestone alleys downtown, or the canopies of bramble that could be found at the borders of my elementary school, reached at recess by a bend in the chain-link fence. I liked to see without being seen. Perhaps I was imitating the safety and authority granted the observer or the stalker, but because in my hiding I never wished to hurt anyone—let alone be anyone—it feels more precise to say that I wanted to be a camera: to become its cool black glass, maybe something even further ungendered and bodiless. Ratified by privacy, I felt like the sight line itself, narrowing and focusing as the narrative demanded.

My fixation on a particular film, When A Stranger Calls Back (1993), was occasioned by the fact that I had a VHS copy—taped from TV and given to me by teenage neighbors—but its camp dealings with stalking and home invasion held lasting and relevant appeal. What I remember most is an audacious scene in which the protagonist, believing all her doors and windows have been secured, all closets verified empty, takes a moment to recalibrate in her spartan loft. As she passes out of frame, the camera settles on the exposed brick wall and reveals the architecture is breathing: the stalker has disguised himself, in elaborate ocher-and-charcoal makeup, to blend in with the bricks and divots. The eyes in the wall open and scan left and right, with joy and interest, seeing everything they need to without moving at all, as it goes tackily mythologized that the great director does. Fixed in his chair when the shot is finally right, all arrangements he takes in are his, all starts and struggles and ends, all limits. If I had likely focused on this film because of the man who had targeted my mother, later it came to echo an event in my own life: when I was a freshman in college, placed in a cinder block dorm of breezeways and little security, I woke a little before dawn to a figure in shadow at the foot of my bed. Nothing moved but his hand.

The strange thing about the memory is how little I recall, what I did or said to make the man flee. I know only that my roommate, whom he passed on his way out, screamed and ran to my side of the room. I don’t remember any real trauma afterward, any real trouble sleeping, and this must be because it did not seem remarkable—given the absolute resemblance to what had happened to my mother, and given the filmic images I had put in my mind, so much worse than this pathetic masturbating stranger. I learned later, from campus security, that the girl who’d slept on my mattress the year before had once woken to a man of the same description. He had stalked her all year, they said, and the tone with which they delivered this information suggested it should be cause for relief, or akin to it. But the air of the fact was also the faint breeze of dismissal. “You would never be kidnapped,” I remember the exquisite bully of my Girl Scout troop saying, on a camping trip in the Polly years, to a gangly, weak-chinned child among us. She well grasped the insult and wept, cloistered and gasping for an hour in her sleeping bag.

Why wasn’t my door locked? Perhaps few bothered in that sunny suburban dorm, perhaps it had been my roommate’s oversight, but I wouldn’t bet on either—namely because I had modeled myself after my mother, who, after all that had happened in the neighborhood, was foolish or fearless, had always left a window cracked for the cat. I remember her insistence on this detail, but I don’t know if she saw it as absolution or apology, to herself or to me. Sometimes grief imitates the dead it misses, but I think I’d shown myself stubborn long before she died, recalcitrant against precautions I wouldn’t have to take if my body were otherwise. Even after I was without the mother who would ask after my location, and likely in perverse service of that mourning, I went on walking through urban parks at night when it was the straightest path home, accepting the drink or the drug in good faith. I spent seasons alone, usually quite happily, in extraordinarily isolated places—where I did not know a person, where I did not hear my name.

There was another story about my mother and male predation, which is also another story about a brick wall. In the desolate Bronx of the seventies, she had slammed the skull of a man who tried to mug her against the nearby building once, ending the interaction. It is less relevant because of the act, and more because it was her still-awestruck male friend who delivered the information. She hid her eyes with a hand and giggled, hesitant to accept this as an achievement. I wish I’d understood the wisdom she subtly modeled then, which contravened the lessons of the horror genre. Any defense against violence was mostly an accident of norepinephrine and circumstance, saying little about the woman you were at all other moments, and had decided,  through your life’s obligations to yourself and other people, to be. Your identity was staked to so much not relative to male predation, the bashful, witty kiss she gave me said, even men in general.

But at eighteen, woken by that man and unafraid, I only saw myself as lucky, if luck can be tenebrous—to have spent my childhood numbed by the real hatred in all that fake blood, which scanned more as a total transformation of the body rather than a consequence of any distinct, mortal wound.

***

Strangely, all that blood comes from a black-and-white imprimatur. In the trope of the stabbing hand that Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) invented and all the slashers later adapted, the camera remains on Perkins’s flexed wrist, where it pumps with the mechanized regularity of an oil rig. In 1960 this was a concession to ratings: they could not show the slain Janet Leigh or much of her struggle, save that brief snatch into her eye. But in the desensitized decades that followed—the genre birthing itself in full color, those makeup artists surely keeping this in mind—the formula usually concluded to picture its victim only once all hope was lost, an often naked body slathered in pools of primary red. Consider the sound that accompanies Perkins’s grip, the top of the violins that composer Bernard Hermann keeps muted until the murder, in a score he symbolically called “monochromatic.” When Americans jokily mock this gesture, they tend to sync their shrieking with the mimed stabbing, suggesting that the sound represents the glint and motion of the knife. But I’ve always heard it as a thrum, like a biblical horde of mosquitoes, coming not for a trickle of blood but for some endless offering of it: more a spectacle of color than the female death it depicts. “Not blood,” Godard famously spat, when asked about the excess of it in 1965’s Pierrot le Fou. “Red.”

As a child horror fanatic, did I ever consider I might have felt drawn to all that female blood because other depictions of it were lacking? The last few years have seen a spike in menstruation imagery—usually sexualized, fetishistic, and foreboding—but it was not until my early thirties that I read any fiction not deploying it as a furtive upset or a burden, or in the context of  heterosexual pregnancy. The phenomenon seems hardly to have changed in meaning, even for the Girlboss-y, Future-Is-Female, post-Wing cis millennials, from a symbol of shame, or at best inconvenience, to anything like power, or fertility. I’ve heard female friends say you ought to fear the men who beg to fuck you as much the repulsed who refuse to. If I don’t know what to believe on that count, I do feel certain about the horror genre’s relation to blood. It is no coincidence that the cinematic slaying of choice, even in a country with a gun problem, has always been a stabbing—phallocentric and protracted, leaving its victim a certain amount of time alone to die: alone with the body that has, apparently just by living, provoked its own gushing end.

***

The horror movie was the gateway to cinephilia for many—proliferating faster than any other genre in the history of Hollywood, targeting the same adolescent market who were the invention and target of twentieth-century advertising, raising two if not three generations on the sport of classifying similar entries against each other. I mostly stopped watching anything capital-H horror by my early twenties, though I kept up with what it influenced, and my feeling for the genre was replaced by a religious feeling for cinema itself, in a theater whenever possible, a ritual I still most love to experience alone. Because of how the horror movie trades on captivity and voyeurism, it is easy to argue for the genre as not only the entry to cinema, but a broader metaphor for the cinephile as a type.

Cinephilia as a condition was most classically deconstructed in the theorist Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” but if I read it now the argument neatly doubles as a reading of horror movies, as well as of their male fanatics, and where these films leave the women who also watch them. Describing the hedonism of the person in the dark theater, hermetically sealed from the morals of the world outside, Mulvey suggests this experience is both of “looking in on a private world”—like the horror film’s stalker or murderer does—and “blatantly one of repression…of [the viewer’s] exhibitionism and projection of the repressed desire onto the performer.” The person in the audience, Mulvey says, undergoes a graded process of identification with the image before him, just as the Lacanian child comes to recognize his reflection in the mirror. If I read this as applied to the horror villain, the boiling point of that repression is the moment of transgression: the projections acted upon, the phone line cut, the knife unleashed. The murderer, watching his prey, is a stand-in for the moviegoer watching the villain; it’s a perfect circle, one that leaves real women out. That the history of cinema is overwhelmingly male is no secret, but that its pleasures are particularly suited to the female captor in the audience—and that these pleasures deepen and complicate when the film depicts violent misogyny—may be less discussed. If you return to Mulvey’s original thought about projection but keep the horror movie in mind, something else becomes quite obvious: the moment that the male audience finally identifies with the image of the villain is also the point at which the real woman in the dark is finally, if temporarily, inviolate. She is alone with an entrapment that she has—unlike many other confinements in her life—chosen, and paid for.

When I was much younger, before seeing movies with men became a staple of my social life, my inclination after leaving a theater was to stay quiet, extend the hush of that entrapment. But by my mid-twenties I had populated my life with a number of film directors and editors and critics, men of a familiar pathology whom possibly I objectified: all of them I relied on to think rather than feel, to contextualize and classify a single film as a phenotype within an archetype. I was at first an amateur in this indexing, my encyclopedia less reliably recalled, and then I began to study: staples and arcana, four-hour screenings alone, Jarman and Akerman and the nurse exploitation boom of the seventies. The bickering geriatrics at Film Forum, the damp and bald eccentrics at Anthology. I’d never be a golden-key cinephile—I had another purpose, which was to write my own fiction—but I was hardly ever more joyful than the moment a screening started. It felt like love, or was better than love, how now I’d been found, and now I might change, without the burden of having to speak, or even to stand. The periods in my life when I saw the most movies were usually characterized by some furtive emotional dimension I did not feel equal to observing. There were friends I wouldn’t see because of what personal question they might ask, but I would always see a movie.

Seeing movies, in the way I saw them and with whom, also meant a certain degree of being seen. When sometimes one of these men, or their friends, remarked that I looked like Léa Seydoux or Michelle Pfeiffer or Glenda Jackson or Mariel Hemingway—a kaleidoscope of features different enough that I had to wonder if my beauty was even real, if my face was even fixed, or if either were mine—I tried not to think whether that was chief reason for the friendship, not the intellect I’d cultivated. A strange thing about female beauty is how, even if it changes and can act on your life—and I do feel ignoble to say that I have allowed it to hugely or ruinously act upon mine—you are never meant to admit to it. Perhaps, in the half life of the movies we’d just watched, it was easy for these directors to imagine: my crying at their cue, or awaiting permission to move my arms and legs from some splayed false death. The broken ankle of my feminism had always been an ease with female tokenism, and my appearance’s part in that tokenism I both begrudged and vainly, hideously, misogynistically accepted. Of course I glorified filmic beauty, of course I was flattered. And this was despite and because of the fact that in the horror movies I had chosen to parent me, this was the quality that typically invited targeted slaughter—the ultimate act of attention—and before that, status as a protagonist, at least as a main character. So many movie stars—texted a cinematographer I was once decided I was in love with, happy taking direction because of how instantly he declared he was in love with me—make me think of you. Soon after, about my upcoming period, from a set in another country: I can’t imagine the blood you must pour. I can remember rereading that text, in thin disgust or morbid fascination, and I can believe now, even if he might dismiss the thought, that the statements were not unrelated.

I came, in time, to feel afraid of him, that man, or of the illogical fact that I’d mistaken my long and real admiration for his work—his grotesque and claustrophobic and recognizably unamerican relationship with the faces he framed insanely, cropping them as if with butcher scissors—for something bidirectional, some respect we exercised for each other. He was an exception to a pattern of platonic relationships with male cinephiles I mostly kept that way, in part because I did not hope to taint those conversations after leaving the theater, as impersonal as they were impassioned. Some lasted years, became ultimately supportive, though when I squint it can seem peculiar: that our opinions were how we discovered each other, subtly and obliquely and much less than vulnerably. Those exchanges were always triangulated by the culture we’d swallowed in the dark, together or separately, recently or formatively,  that triangulation multiplied by the cinephilic law that any single film be defined by its declension in film history. No matter how minor or campy or slapdash the screening, you could count on a discourse that attempted to tie it to the astonishing mass of the cinematic record. That bulk was the point, and it was also the fun.

***

Cinephilia claims a total scholarship of this bulk as its foundation, but like any claim of this nature, the realization of that goal is impossible. The more any scholarship of narrative art codifies its subjects, delineating traditions and schools so as to identify the deviations that birth others, it omits anomalies that feel insufficiently combustive with whichever zeitgeist. The bulk is the fun, but the game is how one sorts the bulk. The theorist Raymond Williams suggests that this kind of sorting of art is dependent on aversion or adherence to the dominant social character’s “structure of feeling”—an era’s popular methods of argument, the fictional images and narrative patterns that subtextually represent these conflicts, rather than the content of the arguments themselves. It’s a snaking piece of theory, one that can be applied only once an era has passed: measured by the contrasts of which works of narrative, supposedly most representative of how actual life felt, rose in the culture to meet, and shape, similar others. When I consider which renderings the female experience I did not consume earlier in my life, when they might have made a different person, the implications are much less academic than personal—astonishing as some serious illness that is long past, but not without consequence.

Agnes Varda’s Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962), for example, glorified a structure of feeling that let it ascend immediately to the feminist canon. I remember how it alienated me, when I saw it in my early twenties, that it didn’t make me feel as much as I was supposed to. The images of its protagonist—dreading the results of a biopsy, she enjoys a manic, episodic day around Paris, repeatedly shedding her fanciful clothes and changing theatrically in public into others—were felt, however subconsciously, to be in conversation with burgeoning second-wave feminism, its preoccupations with transforming external womanhood: bra-burning, armpit hair tufting in clouds, the condemnation of heels and the like. It could be called a picaresque, save the fact the harm inflicted by its protagonist is largely upon herself, which is to say, it is not exactly empowering. Notably, there is very little in the dialogue of Cléo that you could call overtly feminist, or even political, and her transformations are in no sense away from traditional femininity; in fact, they are toward it, into frillier hats and dresses. That the movie failed to move me must be because the threat of tragedy hinged on illness—physical turmoil, not mental autonomy. The landscape of the mind was mostly, or only, the place where the woman went to think about her body.

By the height of the second-wave movement, Claudia Weill’s arguably more feminist Girlfriends (1978)—which suffered funding issues and stop-and-start production over three years—met critical acclaim but swiftly fell into obscurity, likely because it had little to suggest or depict in the way of female presentation, or metamorphosis through it. It follows the steep estrangement of two previously inseparable women who move into separate, bittersweet fast lanes of career and family, each complexly conflicted about what she’s sacrificed. In contrast to Cléo, Girlfriends proffered no easily reproducible image of “feminism” that might have fit beside its Boomer activist counterpart of an easily reproducible slogan, the structure of feeling then hugely dominant. It is a melancholy film, but also coruscatingly funny, a quality which distinguished it from a then-voguish life-and-deathness about the female condition. It was only a woman in that type of emergency, I thought when I saw Girlfriends, much later than it would have been seminal, that I had been guided to study, and to become. That Cléo’s bodily emergency rose to canon, and Girlfriends’s furtive emergency of identity fell, was surely clinched by the fact that male-coded systems—medicine, law enforcement, heterosexual love—could help the first type of crisis, but had very little to do with the second.

While Girlfriends has gained a cult appreciation and many revivals (in no small part due to Kubrick’s fondness for it), it spawned few or no descendants in the late twentieth century. Claudia Weill went on to direct one feature that was panned, a number of TV movies, and later one episode of Dunham’s Girls; the film’s writer, Vicki Polon, is working through her seventies as an HR facilitator for dentists. Despite some critical praise at the time, the movie was a kind of sterile orphan in American cinema, not only furthering no lineage but seeming to come from none. In addition to exemplifying the popular structure of feeling, Cléo could be interpreted (as was the New Wave genre it belonged to) as a rebellious daughter of noir—the same fecund silences, the same stepping between clarifying light and emulsifying shadow, which further helped to situate it in canon. Because historiography is fond of cause and corollary, the more visible scholarship on “feminist cinema” in the two decades following Cléo readily included responses to it—Bergman’s Persona (1967), Fassbinder’s Veronika Voss (1983)—both of which deal with female psychology only as imperiled by corporeal trouble. If I picture the totality of cinema, a century and change as a family tree, it’s easy to see where one of these films sits: in conversation forever with other entries in a populated cluster. The other is a single point in the margins, only connected to others by the faintest line, even if increasingly linked to cousins as history maternally revises itself.

After the rise in streaming, cinematic history is rarely imagined or portrayed as tangible, but last summer I had the visceral experience of seeing it as a physicality. I went to visit a director friend in the bowels of a building where he was sorting through some fifty thousand VHS tapes, once the stock of a famed video rental shop in New York where he had worked in college. It took five escalators to reach the basement, and I remember saying, when I arrived, “This is the closest I’ve ever been to the center of the earth.” All the other people organizing the tapes alongside him were men, some of them middle-aged directors, some of them cherubic acolytes who aspired to become that, all of them plastic-gloved and quite happy to be there, matching tapes to cases, determining a system as they went. He was more relaxed than I’d ever seen him, absent the brilliant, birdlike agita that always seemed to be what moved him on brisk walks. Adjacent to the room of tilting stacks was a lightless shipping container, where I was briefly taken, stretching some fifty feet back and housing the merchandise not yet considered. I sat on the bare concrete floor of that basement in a dress, taken by their peace and industry but also increasingly confounded by the prospect of taxonomy: how it’s a peculiar task, when you think of it, taking the faithful custodian away from life at the same moment he attempts to describe it. “Do you dream of this?” I asked one of them, a little revolted at the prospect. “Every night,” he answered.

When I finally ascended into the weather outside, I wondered whether I’d just seen the most demonstrative possible literalizing of the cinephile. Perfectly cast as the sophisticated and adult apotheoses of the video-store-clerk caricature that Scream had depicted, they were comforted by patterns and titles and graphics almost interchangeable. I was walking under tall buildings then, thinking of different taxonomists I had loved and had always left, feeling as much in the cool shadow of that male procession as that of all the Financial District stone. The bird-watcher who had memorized a thousand names and went to far continents to learn others; the architect who would crouch to details as minute as a seam in a sidewalk to tell me what their classification meant, stunning me with how far the information reached—how the implications seemed to touch everything, but not everyone, around us.

I’d always found these qualities endearing until they were exasperating, when I might murkily consider how rarely taxonomy is blameless, how often it has been the tool of systematic oppression. You could argue that there are two families of bigotry, one fathered by simple ignorance and homophilia—I hate this group because they are unlike me, and so a threat—and another by a weaponized knowledge. I often recall the breathless section in Said’s Orientalism in which he describes the exhaustively researched books that the French and the English, arriving in Egypt and in India, presented to the leaders of the people they would colonize. With indexical concision, the gilded pages enumerated every observable aspect of the country they’d come to subjugate: the trees and the scriptures, the endemic diseases and the holidays, the funerary rites, the popular names for infants. We know this place better than it knows itself, they said, which was also a way of dehumanizing each person within it, each feeling anomaly whose life inevitably included behaviors and passions outside those pages’ classification. How often have I overheard some couple arguing, or been the target of similar vitriol, in which the accusation “This is just like you” arrives leveled as the greatest insult?

Certainly I had been guilty of worshipping those collectors I’d loved, but I still felt pride in how differently I went through the world, more clinched by sensations and hunches, a private investigator in my own life. I kept faith I’d be guided by an image that appeared and annotated the meaning of all that preceded, as Bresson dictated in his diaries that any frame he included must. Despite my boredoms with certain precautions, rarely had I missed the image portending violence—but when I wasn’t watching my own experience carefully enough, it was a dumbfounding cruelty to see the act-change in retrospect. I am thinking, for one, of a night in 2019 on which I was assaulted, in Rome, by a man who happened to be—or unsurprisingly was—a scholar of cinema.

The first quality of his I noticed, at an outdoor table where we had exactly two glasses of wine, was how he had the tendency of the academic or the polyglot to speak in elaborate, fully formed certainties only after he’d privately paused to determine them, looking elsewhere as he did. We’d met in a neighborhood I’d approved of because it was not near my hotel but also not near where he lived. It was good, he said, for walking. As a woman you develop certain superstitions against potential evils, and “the midpoint” has often been one of mine, a neutral territory as a safety: you have to pay, or think, to leave it. After the drinks we passed up and down hills, stopping at the low nasoni where I admired how athletically he hinged to drink over the mossy basins at his feet. We were discussing how, in Rome, many of the grand old cinemas are extinct: they were converted, around the turn of this century, into cavernous, lucrative bingo halls that prey on the elderly and the demented. Some time later, in a sloping plaza where we listened to a tilting cathedral’s mass, our subject became the scale of Pasolini’s movies—the way the low architecture of the Pigneto allowed that director to describe the misery of poverty, but also the expansive fantasies held by forgotten people, implicitly suggested in the selfsame visual gulps. At a certain point, I noticed he had not touched or in any way flirted with me. He was aware I was on tour to promote a translation of my recent novel, but when he perfunctorily asked after the facts of my day, and discovered I had been at certain TV and radio stations, he seemed confused, then silenced. Let back into his quiet as we continued to walk, he took turns that I automatically followed. Finally, on a loud side street where several bars spilled over from upstairs balconies, he stopped and pointed up to another, this one silent—the darkened doors shuttered, the neoclassical stone terrace giving off its cold patience.

“This is it,” he said. This is what, I asked. He thought he had mentioned, he said, how his family was remodeling a place just here. He had briefly referred to an apartment, but never where it was, nor that we had always been walking toward it. In a peculiar sequence of behavior, he unlocked the door, and then asked whether I wanted to see it. He was already entering the lobby, he was already ascending, and I was so taken aback that I followed. Upstairs there were centuried exposed beams, large sheets of plastic matted with particulate dust, and I watched him carefully opened the balcony doors before what happened did. At first it was fine, and then it was not; I said something, on the floor of the empty room, and then, instructed not to speak or move, I stopped saying it. I listened, instead, to the drunk young laughter of the people across the way. The bruises I examined later, with a clinical chill reminiscent of his, trying to classify which motions of his, or mine in reaction, had caused them.

The moment on the street had been the image that warped the others: he had wanted to walk so as not to look at me; the location had never been neutral; he had been gelid physically because he wanted control. He had never been confused about my work, but why I, who did not even live in that country, had certain honors for which he must have worked harder. Something I did not reflect upon until months later was the warm laugh he gave, once the assault had concluded, when I used the word brutal, and how he put a hand to my shoulder and called me a taxi—what this told me was how clearly he believed the event to have been consensual. While this is often the calculated lie told later by those guilty of sexual assault, more unusual was why he was capable of actually believing that, totally and immediately. It was not arbitrary that he’d spent his life articulating studious, autonomous power over images, ordering them to fit an argument. He was not like the lobby pugilist or the critic beleaguered by deadlines, not even much like the working director who might thrill at the practicalities of craft. Only four and a half years later, recalling the way he thought and spoke in private, richly cited paragraphs, how his very proprioception was synonymous with layers of film stills captured on the same Roman streets he’d grown up walking, can I recognize it: how he must have reached as close as anyone sane gets to feeling that they are changing the meaning of the movie by virtue of their watching it. I still don’t know if this makes him superior to me—who always submitted to the image, who could never quite change it—or if it makes him corrupted, or if it leaves him forsaken.

The taxonomist or the expert, the scholar or colonizer, is largely immune to threat or revelation. His knowledge situates any entity against its likenesses. But any matrix of fear—as well as any matrix of love—is always balanced on an emphatic novelty, however sometimes fanciful. “A crime like no other,” “A romance like no other.” These are ham-fisted movie loglines, and also similar to the hyperbolic phrases with which people narrate their lives in order to survive them. How banal or terrifying is it, that the saddest and happiest people run to the same sentiment: “I’ve never felt this way before”? If I’d isolated certain behaviors of that man and then grouped them, if I’d focused more on which type he represented instead of asking sincerely about who he was, maybe I would have solved it: been like the audience member in a movie who calls out advice and warnings, whom I’ve always despised as a fool, having taught myself to see any character as a fabricated surface, any image as intentional, coming toward me but not for me. To recognize isomorphisms—a “bad” man to a type of them, a film to its contemporaries—is a way of possessing the original object of comparison. But to be the possessor is also never to be the possessed, blessed occasionally with divinity. I never catalogue anything in my dreams, but once I swam off a porch, from some baroque and floating mansion, into an unending plane of water that appeared, with its lucid mirroring, to photograph the sky. It was a world without people, I understood—with fear, and with succor. My body was incomparable against it, and its perfect instrument.

***

Recently, I rewatched When a Stranger Calls Back, surprised to discover everything I hadn’t remembered, its innovative tensions with the genre’s formula. I had forgotten entirely that the antagonist, who hides in the wall, is revealed to be a ventriloquist—literalizing the pursued woman’s rapidly moving fear, rather than tying it to the person who provokes it, the movie’s ingenious coup de grace is to make the enemy bodiless, shape-shifting which corner it threatens from. The unusual fact of two female protagonists, one younger and one older—which is even more unheard of, a target over forty—had also slipped from memory. The maternal of the pair is played by an empowered and shoulder-padded Carol Kane, a survivor of assault who has assumed the protection of the younger woman. It is Kane the man in the wall is after, apparently enraged by this female solidarity; this bond itself is a phenomenon rarely seen in the horror genre, despite some characters’ first-act promises. Earlier in the film, teaching a self-defense course in a flickering community center, her waist-length hair echoing her gestures and emphasizing her actions like a chorus, the loving-if-hardened character contends: “You cannot say ‘I don’t believe in violence’ unless you also say ‘I don’t believe in living.’ ”

I must “believe” in violence—epistemic, visual, actual—and certainly in how each of these types of violence make the others possible, and likely, in perpetual recursion. What I do not appear to have believed in was living. What I mean is I did not pay that much attention to what was not the art I was consuming or making, that the most fulfillment and meaning came from decades in the psychic cave of the movies, the silence of galleries, the fourteen years of writing fiction that fed and housed me. Because I was practiced, even remunerated for disassociating from my own body and life, what that man did to me in Rome—and other similar violations, of which there are many, beginning with my father’s in childhood—feel far from the worst of what misogyny has given me.

That idea, my insistence that it’s the transgressions on my thinking I resent much more: perhaps that is the worst of it. The worst is that I can believe this and call it a native thought, not one informed by everything I watched that threw the woman’s body away, which must have urged me to make my mind the precious thing instead. As if I don’t remember sitting through a certain Altman film, at twenty-two or three, one of the last in an oeuvre I wanted to complete. As if this doesn’t mean watching a minor character, after he speechifies on his doeish girlfriend’s great sweetness and purity, gauge open her eye and face with a Coke bottle. As though the gore does not spill down her empire-waisted peach dress as her face in profile screams and gurgles, a carnage exacted for the benefit of a group of male characters seated in the foreground, and the fictional witnesses are not a sadistic mirror of the audience of men around me, and the moment in the fourth row does not slip almost psychedelic, becoming some exigent and ongoing forever in my mind. How quickly it changes, how feverish I feel, how enthralled everyone seems with some agreed-upon reality that makes no sense, the rules of which I need to learn, or have forgotten. What happens to the rest of my life if I get up to leave, instead of not moving at all, subservient to that terrifying covalent static in the theater, which I tell myself later is a laudatory response to high culture? What if I concentrate on the fact that this is not even a major plot point, that woman’s wet and bronchial scream, the distension of her eye socket?

When I began to write this, I believed the horror movie was the start of how I oriented my time, the primacy of the images that were not my life. Now I know it began with the photos of Polly, inescapable in 1993. If we memorized them closely enough, the adult wisdom went, she might be saved: she might live to become other images. But I think many of us children, the girls in particular, had another motivation, creeping and bodily. The reason is as sad and as unforgivable as what happened to Polly—whose exceptional beauty I was determined not to mention; whose great love was remembered to be theater, where she was magnetic with a slapstick charisma a little like Gilda Radner’s; who would now, improbably, be forty-three. Children retold the night again and again: how Richard Allen Davis held the knife to her throat at the sleepover, how afterward her friends lay there counting as he’d directed, their wrists bound by cut Nintendo cords. The Ford Pinto he drove, the gray hair he slicked back. So long as we went on interpreting these images, alongside the photos of Polly the family had released, they did not refer to us. Weren’t we like the woman in the theater who senses the male audience projecting onto what is projected, their throats catching and calves tensing as they list forward, becoming a part of the changing light?

I never cried when Polly was found, but I can heave and retch about it now, how we must have felt—however impermanently and guiltily, however aware of the sacrifice the dead girl had made for us, however ignorant of the ways our lives as women would later seem to contract—thrillingly, blackly, resolutely safe.

 

A fiction writer, critic, activist and essayist, Kathleen Alcott is the author of three novels and a short story collection, Emergency (W.W. Norton). Their work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories of 2019, The Best American Essays of 2024, Harper’s, The Guardian, Tin House, The Baffler, Zoetrope, The New York Times Book Review, Elle, and elsewhere. A recipient of a 2023 O. Henry Prize, Alcott also been nominated for the Joyce Carol Oates Literary Prize, the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature, The Sunday Times Short Story Award, and the Chautauqua Prize. They have taught at Columbia University and Bennington College; organized with Writers Against the War on Gaza and for healthcare justice; lived in France, Maine, Vermont, Austria, Arkansas, and California and recently returned to New York City. 

The Measure of Intensities: On Luc Tuymans

Luc Tuymans, Polarisation—Based on a data visualization by Mauro Martino (2021).

Graphing is the practice of visualizing the abstract—the use of the coordinate plane not to map a territory or to demarcate a two-dimensional surface but to track a measurable quantity across space and time, quantities such as position, velocity, temperature, and brightness. Its invention can be traced to Nicole Oresme, bishop of Lisieux, courtier to Charles V, and scholastic philosopher-­polymath who held forth at the College of Navarre of the newly founded University of Paris. His Tractatus de configurationibus qualitatum et motuum (Treatise on the Configurations of Qualities and Motions) from 1353 lays out early versions of what we now call functions and the x and y axes, which he referred to as “longitude” (the axis of the independent variable) and “latitude” (the perpendicular axis for plotting the values of the dependent variable). What made these pictures not merely illustrational but statistical “graphs” was Oresme’s radical insistence on presenting the variables in accurate ratio, with some accord of scale between the unit of measurement and the object or subject or process being measured. His key principle, at least when it comes to the visual, is: “The measure of intensities can be fittingly imagined as the measure of lines.”

Not content to have merely created graphing, Oresme also speculated about creating graphs of graphs, so­-called complementary graphing that goes beyond the charting of an individual phenomenon into the charting of the relationships between sets or groups of multiple phenomena, an innovation that took the statistical combination of algebra and geometry just up to the border of what would become modern calculus.

It’s striking to note what phenomena—and what relationships—Oresme thought worthy of graphing. His examples include motion and heat and cold, but also varying definitions and degrees of the qualitative, including grief or sorrow, in effect prophesying the future of infographics, which don’t purport to measure just production, consumption, price fluctuations, or the orbits of stars, but also the ebb and flow of human opinion.

This is a profoundly contemporary desire, to metricize and parameterize our own thoughts and emotions, and to create dynamic models from those standards to show—to make seeable—our social and political life.

***

In 2015, a team of six American academics published “The Rise of Partisanship and Super­-Cooperators in the U.S. House of Representatives” in the journal PLOS ONE. The paper made its rounds on the eve of an especially fraught U.S. presidential election season—at a time of so-­called fake news and faker outrage, when, as the paper’s abstract deadpanned, “It is widely reported that partisanship in the United States Congress is at an historic high.”

As Donald Trump might say: “People are talking … I’m hearing things …”

The paper endeavored to test this “widely reported” hypothesis and understand its bases. In doing so, it took as a given that in the U.S. Congress in general, and in the House of Representatives in particular, “individuals are persuaded to follow party lines while having the opportunity and incentives to collaborate with members of the opposite party.” In the hopes of “measur[ing] the extent to which legislators tend to form ideological relationships with members of the opposite party,” the paper proceeded to quantify this level of cooperation, or lack of cooperation, between House Democrats and House Republicans between 1949, under the Truman administration, and 2012, under Obama.

I’ll continue to quote:

Each member of the U.S. House of Representatives from 1949–2012 is drawn as a single node. Republican (R) representatives are in red and Democrat (D) representatives are in blue, party affiliation changes are not reflected. Edges are drawn between members who agree above the Congress’ threshold value of votes. The threshold value is the number of agreements where any pair exhibiting this number of agreements is equally likely to [be] comprised of two members of the same party (e.g. D­D or R­R), or a cross­party pair  (e.g. D­R). Each node is sized relative to its total number of connections; edges are thicker if the pair agrees on more votes … We define a network of over 5 million pairs of representatives, and compare the mutual agreement rates on legislative decisions between two distinct types of pairs: those from the same party and those formed of members from different parties. We find that despite short-­term fluctuations, partisanship or non­cooperation in the U.S. Congress has been increasing exponentially for over 60 years with no sign of abating or reversing.

The findings of this study were visualized—they were turned into graphs—by a data scientist named Mauro Martino of IBM Watson, whose red-and-blue (or red­, white, ­and ­blue) work formed the source for Luc Tuymans’s Polarisation—Based on a data visualization by Mauro Martino, a massive painting from 2021.

 

Division of Democrat and Republican Party Members Over Time,
visualization by Mauro Martino, from “The Rise of Partisanship and
Super-Cooperators in the U.S. House of Representatives” (2015).

***

Another experiment: try to forget everything you’ve just read about the origins of this painting (or paintings, plural, as Tuymans has sometimes said) and just look. Polarisation comprises four panels dotted with red and blue pools surrounded—or shrouded—by all the purple-­gray shades that red and blue can argue over. Each panel has a date: 1951, 1967, 1989, 2011, and the alignment of the dates on the canvases shows that the paintings are hung at a ninety­-degree tilt, the horizontal becoming the vertical, landscape turned to portrait.

Even without any image or inkling of the source material, it should still be clear that these canvases are, or depict, graphs, though at a scale that far exceeds that of the survey­-and­-poll­-results scatter diagrams that fill the media. Tuymans’s renderings are monumental, epic rectangular suspensions of whiteness populated at their centers with red and blue nodes whose atomic or molecular attractions and repulsions have aggregated them into clusters. That these clusters come to reflect one another vertically suggests, to me at least, the rounded volumes of the human form: top half the head, bottom half the torso; the crude circles of the body politic being stretched and compressed, enlarged and shrunken, and then, ultimately, dissevered. Follow the panels chronologically and watch how their centrifugal coagulations draw apart; watch how they diffuse and disintegrate, as their cloudy density gives way and what was once connected becomes tenuous, attenuated, partisan. A rift is being created, an unbridgeable divide, until even the foggy gray contrails that’d crossed the aisle break off and dissipate and fade into the background whiteness, performing this work’s most subtle “illustration”: the gradual elimination of gray (cross-­party collaboration, compromise, ambivalence, ambiguity) through the failure of our extremities to communicate.

The year 1951, perhaps only because it’s 1951, looks to me like outer space, the next frontier, a cosmos stretching out unbounded. By 1967, that cosmos has been strained through generational change, with the counterculture trying to drag the old into the new while refusing to accept or even acknowledge the persistence of tradition, which willful ignorance is already inculcating a counter­reaction of resentment. In 1989, the gap widens unto rupture and inequality reigns, leaving the range between red and blue a lonely barren, a middle-­class no­-man’s-­land, bereft. By 2011, the withdrawal is complete, the disengagement total; the positions have retrenched into polarized identities—parties turned tribes—and terminally hardened.

***

Though Tuymans has not explained—perhaps not even to himself—why he chose to paint those four years specifically, he has mentioned the significance of the year in which he chose to paint them: 2021, in the wake of another contentious (and falsely contested) U.S. presidential election, which marked the world’s slow emergence from the plague and lockdown that most of us prefer not to discuss or even remember. It’s impossible—it’s impossible for me—to look at this work and the date of its making and not think of COVID­-19: the rallies railing against the closing of schools and places of business and worship; the right­-wing protests over government overreach; the left­-wing protests over the overreach—the lethal violence—of police; the masking that worked, or that  didn’t work, depending on the news source; the curve that wouldn’t be flattened; the daily graph­-delivered updates on infection and mortality rates cross-­referenced according to age, gender, race, income bracket, and all manner of compounding intersectionalities; and last but not least, the famous computer mockups of the novel coronavirus’ virion itself, that motley lottery ball bouncing around, seeking attachments with its fuzzy coronae.

Polarisation was first exhibited in Oresme’s city, Paris, and it is Paris that gave me the sense of its painterly pedigree. Pointillism, like its related color discipline of divisionism, is a period style that I wouldn’t have otherwise associated with Tuymans’s often bleached­-out or grayscale work, but one day while wandering around the Musée d’Orsay I was reminded that Georges Seurat originally called his technique “chromoluminarism”—an unwieldy term employed to indicate the primary importance not of the dots themselves but of the light let in between them, the nullities or voids that bring the luminosity and encourage the eye to assimilate the dots into masses, movements, greater constituencies. Tuymans’s Polarisation takes this technique to the nth degree, by presenting a literal congress of dots that make no figure, atop a screen of light that has been wrenched apart into the gaping, ragged chasm of a schism.

 

Joshua Cohen was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family.

The People Who Fight at Dinner Parties

Oskar Schlemmer, Dinner Party, 1935. Public domain.

I think most people like to walk away from a dinner party saying, “What a lovely evening.” I do. But I don’t feel compelled to do that. I know it’s not always possible. Also, I prefer people who don’t necessarily regard the warm glow of candlelight or the sound of a thirty-seven-dollar bottle of listán negro being poured into a glass as an automatic call for politeness, regardless of what is being said, or happening in the world. It’s commendable to walk into a dinner party assuming you’ll have a nice time but wise to prepare yourself for the wrong-thinking of your fellow guests.

There are people who never become openly enraged at dinner parties but I am probably not interested in knowing them. I love telling people stories about me getting upset at dinner parties. Here is one: I was at a small dinner party recently where my companions started talking about what they perceived as the huge problem of anti-Semitism on college campuses. While I do not doubt anti-Semitism exists on college campuses, I would not classify resisting and protesting Israel’s seventy-five-year occupation of Palestine, near twenty-year blockade of Gaza, and killing of tens of thousands of people as anti-Semitism. 

All I could manage in this situation was a dismissive snort. I was asked to explain my snort, but I knew that if I did I would be beaten to death with facts from one newspaper, which I also read and with whose arguments I have become numbly familiar, so I just snorted again, left the table, and went to bed. Now, the hosts of this dinner party were my own parents. I got lucky in this instance. Most dinner-party invitations do not include a bed and an en suite bathroom. Whatever you are willing to say you must also be willing to stew in.

I have a friend who is a film critic who was at a dinner party several years ago when another guest proclaimed, “If Walt Whitman were alive today, he would definitely be writing for television.” No one has ever said to me that if so-and-so dead writer were alive today they would definitely be writing for television. But my friend, because of his job, has similar observations made to him “about every eighteen months.” So he was prepared with a response: “That’s a ridiculous thing to say. You don’t know what you’re talking about. What makes you think that Walt Whitman would ever write for television?”   

The person had no answer. 

I asked him if this was awkward and he said, “Yeah, it was awkward. But I mean, there’s nothing we know about Walt Whitman that would lead us to believe he would write for television if he were alive today. This type of comment began with Shakespeare, which I don’t really buy, but at least makes some sense because he’s a playwright, but then it’s spread to just any great author of the past. The only purpose of a remark like this is to elevate the medium of television writing.” 

Another friend of mine, who is not a mother, tagged along to a dinner party with a close friend of hers who is. Motherhood was in fact what bound all the women at this gathering; it was explicitly a mothers’ group. Perhaps my friend, destined from birth to a life of making sharp observations about children and mothers, should not have been there in the first place. But she had only a short visit with her friend, and she went, promising to be cheerful.

It came to pass that one of the mothers present began to make observations about her children’s birth order and artistic and intellectual talent relative to each other, observations she had gotten from Instagram and had presented to her own children, and now to the dinner party, as science. My friend is not a scientist, but she did attend high school. And though she is not a mother, she had been a child, and a sibling, who was while growing up forced to hear her own parents speak openly about which sibling was better at what. Her adrenaline kicked in, she could no longer protect herself from unsolicited input on what she was good or not good at and what her brother was good and not good at, but she felt she had to protect this total stranger’s children.

Now I, also not a mother, and someone who considers the act of throwing down at a dinner party a virtuous one, would be goddamned before I told a mother surrounded by other mothers anything about mothering unless I felt that a child was at risk. These kids seemed mostly at risk of having a mother who took advice from Instagram. I didn’t envy them, but they didn’t seem to be in immediate danger.

My friend was not similarly deterred. She led with her firm belief that what the woman was saying was not true and more importantly, should not be shared with her children. This did not go well. The woman told my friend that she had learned to trust her intuition, that being a mother had taught her that. My friend said that albeit not from being a mother she had learned not only to follow her intuition but also to believe in reality and not to work out your own anxieties on children. 

There is nothing anyone remembers from this event other than my friend shouting down this woman. When I asked her what drove her, she said, “I had ambivalent feelings about speaking up. On the one hand, I felt it was the right thing to do. On the other hand, I felt ashamed. What if I was being cruel? What if I was only being self-righteous? As long as I kept going, that shame was kept at bay. But mostly I can’t stand people who talk about Instagram at parties.”

As I was writing this piece, dinner parties were in the news and going viral. In early April, the student Malak Afaneh stood up, microphone in hand, at a celebratory dinner for Berkeley Law students, and made a speech about the genocide in Palestine. The host, the Berkeley law professor Catherine Fisk, tried to wrestle the microphone out of her hands. Afaneh and some fellow protesters left under threat of trespassing charges. A few weeks later, the author Qian Julie Wang wrote a Twitter thread, retweeted over two thousand times, about her husband hosting Passover for his largely Zionist family, and how he marked the occasion by reading from a Haggadah statements like “Ethnic cleansing is being performed in our name” and “Israel has held the keys to Gaza’s water supply since 1967.” He added “unprepared remarks about today’s discovery of 300 bodies in mass graves,” and kept reading even as some guests walked out. I am pleased to see the dinner party as an occasion to intensify dissent rather than merely react to it.

As of now, the world still generally favors those who stay silent, who shut up and eat. Pass me the listán negro, let me drink to a better world, one where the righteous fight at dinner parties and everywhere else, with ever-increasing imagination and force.

 Sarah Miller is a writer who lives in California. She writes a Substack.

Those That Are Fools: At Clownchella

Photograph by Sarah Shtern.

“Well, God give them wisdom that have it; and those that are fools, let them use their talents.”

—Feste the Clown, Twelfth Night, William Shakespeare

Walking up to the Elysian Theater, a small club off the 5 at the foot of Elysian Heights in Los Angeles, I thought I was hallucinating when I saw a dozen goats under the bright white light of the marquee, and for every goat a clown. Everyone was fawning over the short-haired creatures. Some had two little bald spots on their heads instead of horns, which, I later learned, is where the hot irons get applied for disbudding.

The Elysian was hosting Clownchella, an event happening the week before Coachella. Maybe it goes without saying: these events bear virtually no relation to each other. Coachella is a sprawling music and art festival of spoon-fed nostalgia, snakeskin pants, and sensorially shattering spectacle held on the grounds of a polo club, brought to you by sponsors like American Express, Coca-Cola, BMW, et cetera, and which costs (at least) $510 plus accommodations. Clownchella was a one-night clown festival with five acts that cost sixteen bucks.

At Clownchella, I expected circus-variety clowns, red noses and big shoes. I had figured that the history of clowning had reached its terminus; from ancient Greek mimes to commedia dell’arte, Charlie Chaplin to Bozo to Krusty (my personal favorite). The clowns most relevant to our times seem to be the old-fashioned scary ones, the Jokers and the Pennywises. But I’d heard that Los Angeles has a diverse and burgeoning clown scene that’s innovating the form. Independent teachers are developing their own clown pedagogy, nurturing a new generation of performers and borrowing from European clowns, who, apparently, are way ahead of the curve. This summer, Hannah Levin, the host of Clownchella, and some other LA clowns are traveling to Étampes, France, to study with the French clown and pedagogue Philippe Gaulier, who for the past fifty years has taught clowning using methods like mask play, Greek tragedy, and the study of Chekhov, all with the goal of finding the clown within. The clowns here take silliness very seriously. Standing outside the Elysian, I watched as the goats jumped around and let out cute little bleats.

A woman with magenta-colored hair, Scout, who runs Party Goats LA, told me they were rescues, mostly Oberhaslis, a breed of dairy goat developed in Switzerland, except for the one Nigerian dwarf goat in attendance. Scout and her crew bring the goats to children’s parties and senior homes, do goat hikes, and are planning to start providing brush clearance services for wildfire prevention. “Goats and people have had a relationship for over ten thousand years,” she said. “They were the second animal domesticated after dogs. And no matter what culture your ancestors are from or where you come from—” In the middle of her sentence I glanced up and saw a tallish man with a bald crown and short white hair on the sides. He wore a custom letterman jacket with the words clown boss on the back in big red fuzzy letters. I’d heard about Clown Boss, a.k.a. Chad Damiani. I’d heard that this was a clown you didn’t want to cross. Indeed, despite the tightly packed crowd, a perimeter of personal space was allotted to him, as for a capo at a wedding, or funeral.

All the animals filed into the theater’s foyer. Near the front desk, I introduced myself to Sethward, who is known for absurdist performances in homemade animal costumes and several appearances on America’s Got Talent. He had a giant mustache and a somewhat odd manner of speaking. I saw the performers cramming through the door leading to the green room and decided to sneak in. I’d expected to see people putting on big red wigs and blowing balloon animals and straightening their dunce caps, but instead it was mostly full of goats. All the performers were dressed in normal clothes. What kind of clown show was this gonna be? I cradled a baby goat in my arms, gave it a kiss, and went back to the theater’s foyer.

Photograph by Sarah Shtern.

I saw Clown Boss standing near the concession stand and walked over. He had a neat white beard and somewhat muscular build, and watched me as I approached. I was struck by his eyes, nearly jet black, a mix of sadness and kindness swimming in them. I scanned his torso for a squirting flower or spinning bow tie. He was pleasant and friendly. I asked him what a clown is. “A clown presents some sort of game, or method of play, that the audience can participate in,” he said. “And normally, it’s really dumb. Because that just adds to the pleasure.”

Damiani used to be a pro-wrestling announcer, then a successful six-figure-earning screenwriter. After his partner died from pancreatic cancer, he asked himself what he was doing with his life. Damiani started to clown about thirteen years ago and has become a sort of clown guru, hosting numerous intensives and workshops every week. He has a podcast about clown. (The clowns I spoke with used the word clown in this way, as an abstract noun, a state of being, rather than a common noun or verb.)

Inside the theater, I sat in the second row. In the marketing for Clownchella the crowd was encouraged to dress like they were going to Coachella. One woman donned a low-cut silvery dress and sparkly head jewelry, another was dressed in all leopard print, and there were two high-glam punks, but these may have just been their Thursday fits. The hosts were Hannah Levin, a clown and licensed social care worker who curated Clownchella, and Deshawn Ball, a former Marine who, with Jamonte Williams, runs a group called Clowns of Color, whose routines have included Oompa Loompas demanding reparations and French chefs wearing jockstraps. Levin and Ball were dressed like farmers in overalls. As they did their opening bit—dispersing “golden tickets” for goat yoga—bubbles magically appeared and floated through the crowd. Then the goats were brought out to Beyoncé’s “Texas Hold ’Em” and there was much dancing and hooting.

The closest thing to circus clowns came during the opening act. The Egg Heads wore giant papier-mâché eggshells on their heads, red ruff collars, red circles painted on their cheeks, and red painted noses. The two of them fell over each other and committed minor humiliations. Yellow yolk dripped down their chins as they gave dejected downward smiles. The next act was a contrast: Best Actress, a three-clown troupe who were dressed like normal. These scaramouches posed as festival concierges and took the crowd’s drink orders. Pretending to hear “breast milk,” one of the clowns took out her left breast and started pumping.

This reminded me of something else that Damiani said: “We don’t have permission to be dumb in our lives. We’re told that if we’re dumb we’ll lose our jobs, or that we’re bad parents, or bad partners. Here, we can let go and do something foolish.” The clown John Bradford appeared at the top of the slope leading down into the theater. He had long blond hair covered by a red skull cap, a houndstooth cardigan, and very tight khakis. He wore two skis, and with agonizing effort he slid down the incline, nothing to lubricate his descent, ski poles impotently tapping the floor. After being assisted onto the stage he grunted as he cross-countried the two yards to the stage’s center. His back to the audience, silent, he turned his face around coyly, showing off his perky ass. This went on for some number of minutes. And then it kept going, the laughs gradually diminishing as the gag went on until the awkward lack of laughter caused laughter anew.

The psychology of clowning is complicated. Or is it totally simple? Rachel Troy, who works as a therapist, was originally doing more Groundlings-type sketch characters. She got into clowning about two years ago, after taking the Idiot Workshop, a class started by John Gilkey in 2012 that had also inspired Damiani to pursue it more seriously. “Clown seems to be about paradoxes,” Troy said, “and about flipping things on their head completely. Making you think differently. In a lot of the work that I see [in Los Angeles], there is an intensity.”

For her set at Clownchella, Troy held a comically oversize wire hanger around her head, the prop a stand-in for her character. Wire Hanger spoke in a childlike quiver, described her withered self-confidence and shriveled drive. “I never let myself dream,” she said, pathetically. Wire Hanger couldn’t hold anything up, couldn’t bear the weight of even the slightest gown. “Just came out of the closet,” she said to pained chuckles. This bouffon performance was cringey, pitiful, and mocking of power. “I couldn’t get straight enough,” Wire Hanger said. “Rachel flagged down a cop and, well, he got the job done. I’ll tell ya, nothing shakes your confidence than knowing you’re more useless than a cop!” In the end, Wire Hanger triumphed, transformed into Joan Crawford from Mommie Dearest (who hates wire hangers) and put on a heavy luxurious fur coat.

Photograph by Sarah Shtern.

Finally the theater dimmed and two blazing beams of light shot into the room from the entrance. Clown Boss appeared in a red turtleneck, a motley muumuu, and red sunglasses. He was leading the troupe FLWLS (Flawless), so trailing behind him were four performers, Deidre Lee, Nalini Sharma, Caroline Cummings, and Emily Shankman. “What you’re going to see tonight,” he said, using two flashlights as spotlights on the performers, “are these four clowns taking on the ultimate challenge—they are going to do a better show… than goats can.” The performers were dressed like goat-mime hybrids, black pants and white tops, fake horns, a conceptual smudge of white face paint. Damiani coached the performers—a sort of Max Bialystock from The Producers—critiquing their movements and sometimes singing small praises. “Show me courage!—that’s good Diedre!” The goat-mimes pined for his approval and also mischievously disobeyed. At one point he encouraged the performers by saying “The press is here tonight!” (me) and I felt the thrill of recognition, or a thinly veiled threat. Damiani told the sound tech to play Tchaikovsky’s “Waltz of the Flowers” but Johann Strauss II’s “The Blue Danube” got played by mistake. The performers crawled and bucked, chewed one another’s hair, recited Hamlet’s “To be, or not to be” speech, and climbed the crowd like they were cliffsides.

The show seemed over. But then, with an awful shriek, a large and terrifying creature tumbled out from a small door under the stage’s staircase. Sethward wore a monstrous goat costume. On welded stilts he stood about eight feet tall. He let out piercing baas and begged the audience for help as he rose up on his grotesque armature, spittle on his fake goatee, then fell backward on his ass over and over, abjectly. He stood over two people in the first row and leaned toward me. Sethward’s performance was a punishing slapstick, a tremendous feat of self-inflicted violence that rendered brutally clear the sometimes-thin line between humor and horror. (One influential clown and teacher in Los Angeles is Red Bastard, whose creepy bouffon act includes an all-red costume and white face paint. He likes to get audience members to disclose their secrets, and also call their mothers to apologize.)

Photograph by Sarah Shtern.

The night ended with a final session of goat yoga; there’d been three or maybe four sessions throughout. The whole audience got on the stage, as did all the clowns. The “yoga instructor” carnival-barked her orders—Downward dog! Child’s pose!—as the goats jumped on people’s backs and ran around, chewed on people’s hair and pissed on the stage as crew members chased them to sop it up with blue towels. Watching the scene from my seat, I saw that some audience members’ faces were caked in their own clown paint.

The yoga element seemed oddly fitting. Clowning is not therapy, but talking with all these Los Angeles clowns, there’s a clear connection to wellness, to self-actualization through supportive, loving community. Deshawn Bell told me, “Through clown, I learned how to break that mold that I created for myself, or that society had created for me.”

Before the show, I’d been reading about the heyoka, a sacred clown in Sioux society, a fool figure who begs for food during times of plenty, laughs during tragedy, becomes an agent of chaos when peace prevails. Sure, laughing helps the pain, but I did find myself craving a little more from Clownchella. Maybe I wanted something closer to the sacred clown, or to glimpse a more radical clown underground, a place where the jester’s privilege is invoked to eviscerate those who value power over beauty, money over truth, property over life.

Or was I just not letting myself be dumb enough?

“Goats can make you laugh, but can they make you cry?” Clown Boss joked during FLWLS’s set at Clownchella. “Can they make you think? Can they make you care?”

   

Rob Goyanes is a writer and editor from Miami, Florida. He lives in Los Angeles.

Pokémon Is All About Reading

Image by Sara Goetter.

The game is played with great feeling. Pikachu, perhaps the most successful soft power symbol of the twenty-first century’s new media enterprise, looms gigantic over Nintendo as a concept and cuteness as aesthetic dominance, despite staying mostly benchside on the battlefield. Though, for some of us, these pocket monsters are just ciphers for the competitive video game circuit: 4D chess pieces; some amalgamation of straights, flushes, or full houses; the kings, queens, and rooks of RNG; what Dungeons & Dragons would be with rounded edges and big-lipped fish splish-splashing their way toward evolution. Next to my black-and-white Nintendo Switch sits the corduroy Bulbasaur my son got me for Father’s Day. I’m playing around with weather, one of four core environmental hazards in the extended Pokémon video universe: Rain, Sun, Snow, and Sand. Enjoying the filth I am, of a team whose prospects are slim but whose aesthetics please me, listenin to Beans and Freeway on my headphones. And even though what we do is wrong I play Tyranitar to start, a darkly rock type dinosaur with SAND STREAM, brewing up a storm when she enters the battlefield. Despite a soft-chinned weakness to FIGHTING types, Tyranitar is a respectable individual; she earned a slot on my team of six through grit and survivability, clapping back after absorbing heavy damage historically, just without the heroism of hindsight.

Pokémon is all about reading. Hard and soft. Soft, like how I can assume the way my opponent’s Iron Hands, a FIGHTING type, is trained based on trends in the meta game, whereby Pikalytics.com discloses player data amalgamated from prior battles. Most people plug this Pokémon into a hard-hitting tank slot: high HIT POINTS and ATTACK, made to live through anything and crush enemy morale thereafter; it’s what they’re good at, these hands. And as they say in The Players Club, you gotta use what you got to get what you want. And everybody wanna be the very best, of course, like no one ever was: picture Ash Ketchum listenin to Drake, confused, yet falling so deeply in love. But I respect my opponent’s awareness here. I change Tyranitar’s type to FLYING. Typical move, and my opponent could read me reading them and react to this and I could read their reaction and so forth in an endless chain of telekinetic tug-of-war. But he does not. Tyranitar resists the punch, and together, with the help of this ghost dog, Greavard, who burns Iron Hands—now at less than half-full health from Tyranitar’s foot in that ass—we carve a path toward victory.

A whole decade before Trey Songz couldn’t help but wait, I was beyond impatience rushing into the local EB Games store and slamming down my grass-cutting money for Pokémon Red. Its world has shaped my psyche for as long as I can remember, from soft-boy-kid card collector into dedicated owner of translucent purple Game Boys past. Afterward, I fucked around with the idea of getting into the official competitive scene, observing the e-sport from afar. But until this year and the death of the man who raised me, I’d never tried. There are lots of obvious reasons for this, like class background, money, and time, and the peculiarities of social existence, the navigation of white nerd spaces that have always made me queasy; sure, I’d swing by Benny’s Card Shop on Torresdale Ave. for cards, or hit a Yu-Gi-Oh! tournament here and there, but I was still more at home on the basketball courts in Mayfair, where rushing over to get winners would inspire fear from random white women in the suburb, diving into the tall grass to escape my representation. But I can’t play ball like I used to. Now I deliver the order in Super Smash Bros., Street Fighter, Little Big Planet, or Pokémon. Pokémon chief among them. This global trans-media product whose system of play elevates and then magnifies the stylistics of the chess or checkers or Speed I played with my aunt, the Texas Hold’em I played as a kid on Popop’s computer, the Dungeons & Dragons–style dice-roll mechanics grafted into my beloved Icewind Dale role-playing games. Teaching my children mathematics by the game’s pleasurable proxy, I watched their jaws drop at an equation for calculating battle damage in one turn of Pokémon:

On some level this is basic algebra, stretched out for the convoluted chorus of choice that such games demand: the multiplicity of variables that make generalizations both iffy and necessary, as in life. With more than a thousand Pokémon, some of whom have dozens of usable moves or abilities combined, complex type matchups, and SPEED interactions—not to mention the impact of item choices and player particularities—every best-of-three competitive Pokémon match is a master class in complexity. With at least thirty larger tournaments a season, and several hundred players in the video game division alone, not counting all the special events and local setups, the online tournaments and unofficial skirmish matches, the game’s growth, especially in the past few years, tells the story: throngs of people lined up outside convention centers and local stores all across the world, sold-out regional and international competitions from London to Chile, Indiana to Portland, up to sixty-five thousand dollars in prizes, and the chance to compete for the world title, which, held last year in Yokohama, Japan, ran out of spectator passes near instantaneously.

And while I’m never stepping on a court serious with AI or LeBron or Steph—shit, I couldn’t even check Damon Young last year at his local gym—anyone can play against some of the best in the Pokémon game by virtue of its general openness, whereby openness, of course, involves money. Getting out to a Pokémon tournament ain’t like buying Beyoncé or Taylor Swift tickets, but it’s also not getting penny candies from the corner store. Registration might run you around seventy dollars, but that’s the small of it; the real shit is paying for the hotel and travel. Many players move in groups, sharing the cost, at the very least, of housing. Having taken years off from gaming for real for real—between children and changing careers and being deployed to Baghdad and writing the book and all the college-degree collecting and grade-school trips and deaths in the family and living, and living and COVID and calls from school and calls from court and calls from hospitals and calls from the shelter—I have never been part of such a group.

The Pokémon VGC regionals in Charlotte, North Carolina, are notorious for attracting some of the best players and biggest crowds, so when you walk into the Charlotte Convention Center there’s a shoulder-to-shoulder clash of subcultural sycophants and lookie-loos and handshakes and hugs and awkward mustiness and ashy lips and great hair and gold frames and ill-fitting blouses and incredible cosplay fits and unexpected intimacy and accidental resistance to normativity collapsing space in the otherwise stale corporate enclosure, often stifled by a well-meaning yet reactionary adherence to the law as concept. The crowd is mostly male, though one might be surprised, or not, in comparison to other gaming events at this scale, by how many women and trans people attend, through force of will, putting in work over the pre-ascriptions of boys’ club etiquette, just like one might be surprised, or not, at the casual anti-black structure of feeling also common everywhere else in the world. I lose my second game and shake my opponent’s hand afterward, saying “Good game” all the while, the stock phrase of match completion which, when I have any energy, I try to avoid by actually speaking to people. We’ll become friends a few tournaments down the road, but in the moment, I’m deliberating on the optimization of both myself and my Pokémon team—do I get rid of Tyranitar and Greavard for creatures with more bite? Is it more important to win or to grasp the momentary pleasure of a great turn or two?—collapsing the self-reflective improvement ethos of who I am and what I do.

And that’s when I hear it. A group of black men behind me:

“Nigga,” one of them says. “If I win a regional imma flip a table out this motherfucker.”

I’m laughing off instinct, off familiarity, already. These are my people, I think. The niggas. Here I am, comically attentive to one of my favorite words in the English language, to its proper use and rigorous subversion of feeling in the fuckment we call the English language, making me feel, just that fast, closer to some kind of home. Hard to go without a joyous nigga, the word as filler, as family, as functional connector of species, the great tendon of my own speech.

“So proud of you, nigga!” another nigga says.

They’re all hugging in a magic circle, making jokes. The one we’re proud of is Silver, undefeated the whole first day of regionals, 9–0. My satisfaction is magnified by his appearance: weight-lifting-type dude covered in tattoos, the jeans and a hoodie, gold chain and backward cap and swagger-like-us mode of moving that makes me think, especially in this setting, Do I know this nigga from somewhere? I find out only later that he was also in the military, had joined up after a time for the resources otherwise denied, always denied, and the loved ones who need just as much. After getting knocked out with a pretty average record at 5–4, I watch the rest of Silver’s games and exchange info, dap him and the rest of his crew by way of introduction, letting them know I’m writing a book about playing competitive Pokémon. Quiet as it’s kept, there’s a lot to say, just not here, and not always now.

Things happen, and niggas don’t do as well as we’d hoped, neither Silver nor Aarush or Jorge or Damon, and the only shame would be stopping there, I suppose—we’ll come back next year. The potential to play gets me giddy at times, like the boy I was never supposed to be; we were never supposed to be. It encourages one to wonder what’s possible in this smaller social world, the structures of almost-togetherness heaped upon with strangers, how I’m besieged by the naive sincerity I had discarded for survival until now, and how this is also a dimension of being a black man in public. I return to Omari Akil’s provocation about Pokémon GO: the death sentence, they called it, if you’re a black man, lambasting the augmented reality approach to catching Pokémon in the streets as a safety hazard in a racist society—though one could always already guess, given history or intuition, where the best Pokémon or important locales would be, where risk would be assumed and by whom. It’s hard for me to shake the state of any game from what happened today or yesterday, what will happen next year or what went down in the eighteen- or nineteen-sixties. So why then, I ask myself, does this thing here feel so much like life?

 

Joseph Earl Thomas is a writer and gamer in Philadelphia. He is the author of the memoir Sink and the novel God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer.

Interrupted, Again

William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Work Interrupted (1891).

I’m fascinated by interruptions. Things are running along one way, one sort of conversation is ongoing, reality is like this not that and then suddenly—everything changes. There’s a further question of when interruptions are admissible, even welcome, and when they are forbidden. My story in the latest Spring issue of The Paris Review is about a dinner party that gets interrupted. The interruption is bad news for the host (an imaginary Icelandic philosopher called Alda Jónsdóttir) and bad news for the person who does the interrupting (another imaginary philosopher called Ole Lauge). But it’s even worse news for a beautiful poached salmon, minding its own business at the center of the table.

One of the most famous interruptions in literary history is the strange case of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Person from Porlock. The story goes that in the summer of 1797 Coleridge was at home in the village of Nether Stowey, Somerset. The cries of birds echoed across the gentle Quantock hills—warblers and whinchats, stonechats, pipits and nightjars. Coleridge was asleep and dreaming vividly (opium may have been taken). Upon emerging from his stupor, he realized that he had dreamed a vast, wondrous poem—“Kubla Khan.” He dashed off to find a pen, ink, and paper, and began scribbling everything down: the famous opening “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure-dome decree” followed by another fifty-odd lines of sparkling verse. But then: a knock on the door, an interruption! A “Person from Porlock” had arrived on business, and distracted Coleridge for a long, tedious interval. When our poet finally returned to his desk, the vision had faded. Coleridge published “Kubla Khan” as a “fragment” and blamed the Person from Porlock for depriving posterity of the complete work.

Since then, the Person from Porlock has become a symbol of unwanted interruptions, poetic genius demolished by tawdry reality, the dangers of answering the front door, and so on. Nonetheless, a few people have questioned Coleridge’s story. In a short poem, “The Person from Porlock,” Robert Graves suggests that if anything we could do with an army of such persons hammering on doors and interrupting solipsistic writers, as a form of quality control. The poet Stevie Smith also presents her views on Porlockgate in “Thoughts about the Person from Porlock.” For a start, asks Smith, why did Coleridge rush to answer the door? Why didn’t he just hide like any self-respecting misanthropic author? Smith concludes that Coleridge was already stuck, “weeping and wailing” over his poem, “hungry to be interrupted.” The advent of the Porlock Person was, in fact, a huge relief.

Douglas Adams’s 1987 novel Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency imagines a parallel world in which Coleridge finished “Kubla Khan,” without any interruptions. In Adams’s witty counterfactual, the finished version of “Kubla Khan” is imbued with some weird power to destroy humanity. A time-traveling detective, Dirk Gently, is dispatched to eighteenth-century Somerset to play the Person from Porlock (who, in this reality, doesn’t exist) and ensure that Coleridge never finishes his poem. One trouble with interruptions, Adams suggests, is that, on a cosmic level, we have no way of knowing if they’re good or bad. By the logic of the butterfly effect, for example, had Roland Barthes been interrupted at any point on the twenty-fifth of February, 1980, he probably wouldn’t have been hit by a laundry van on his way home. The tedious interruption we resent at the time may spare us a far greater sorrow, including—in Adams’s novel—the actual apocalypse.

There’s also a lovely collection of essays called The Book of Interruptions, edited by David Hillman and Adam Phillips. Subjects include Freud, Derrida, Wittgenstein, Proust, death (the greatest interruption), Yeats’s A Vision, and—naturally—the poor Person from Porlock. In an essay called “Xanadu and Porlock: Thoughts on Composition and Interruption,” Hugh Haughton points out that the last two lines of “Kubla Khan” (in its fragmentary form) are terrific: “For he on honey-dew hath fed / And drunk the milk of Paradise.” This begs the question of whether the Porlock Person did Coleridge a massive favor, by ensuring that he stopped there. The Book of Interruptions was published in 2007, and was billed as a response to our Age of Interruptions—as “modern technology is changing our forms of attention, everyday life is subject to more disruption than ever before.” This was before smartphones became ubiquitous, so matters have since escalated. If anything, we now live in an Age of Interrupted Interruptions.

Someone told me the other day that they’d read about new research that proves it takes us twenty-five minutes, on average, to focus again after an interruption. I went away to look this up. I got interrupted six times while I was reading the article, which meant—on the basis of the study—that it would take me two and a half hours to recover from the interruptions. After I’d finished looking at the article I went out, so I wasn’t quite sure how that would work. Was I just going to be in a really diffuse, bemused state for the next two and a half hours? Would that be appreciably different from my usual really diffuse, bemused state? I was pondering that question, but then I got interrupted again. By applying this method for the rest of the day, I clocked up a cumulative tally of seven hundred and twenty-five minutes of necessary recovery time for all the interruptions. This worked out as more than twelve hours. I had no idea how I would fit that in alongside all the interruptions that would certainly follow.

Still, there are (some) reasons to be cheerful. In No One is Talking About This, Patricia Lockwood catalogues our quotidian cyberinterruptions and turns them into “an avalanche of details” that retain their poetry: “pictures of breakfasts in Patagonia, a girl applying her foundation with a hard-boiled egg, a shiba inu in Japan leaping from paw to paw to greet its owner, ghostly pale women posting pictures of their bruises—the world pressing closer and closer.” From this teeming array of interruptions Lockwood weaves a “spiderweb of human connection grown so thick it was almost a shimmering and solid silk.”

And who’s to say that Coleridge didn’t interrupt the Person from Porlock, rather than the other way round? Perhaps our Person from Porlock was at home on that summer’s day in 1797. They’d just woken from a vivid dream, which had conveyed a fully formed and revolutionary new theory of reality. They dashed off to find a pen, ink, and paper, and began scribbling everything down: but then, they were interrupted! Their boss turned up in a fury, saying that some dodgy poet had failed to pay his bills, again. The Person of Porlock was sent off to Nether Stowey—a long ride over strenuous hills. They arrived at the poet’s house, and knocked on the door. A wild-eyed man answered, looking as if he’d just gotten out of bed. He took an absolute age to produce the money, and meanwhile kept banging on about some place called Xanadu. Finally, the debt was paid, and the person from Porlock hurried home.

By then, alas, they had forgotten their extraordinary theory of reality—all because of an unfortunate interruption by the Person from Nether Stowey.

 

Joanna Kavenna’s novels include A Field Guide to Reality, Inglorious, and Zed. You can read her story in issue no. 247, “The Beautiful Salmon,” online here. 

Chasing It Down the Elevator Shaft to the Subconscious: Or, Getting Hypnotized

Flashes of light pulsing through the nebula surrounding the protostellar object LRLL 54361. Image from NASA‘s Hubble Space Telescope, public domain.

A little more than two years ago, an image appeared in my thoughts, which I took to be a memory. It first struck me randomly, while making lunch at home, but immediately the image felt familiar and well-worn, though I couldn’t concretely remember thinking about it in the past. It was a short clip of myself in bed, at my family’s home in Maine, when I was about seven or eight, peering out the window in the middle of the night and seeing an ambient white light coming from an uncertain origin above, flooding down like a curtain onto the field.

The image was almost certainly a false memory—perhaps derived from a dream—or some kind of psychological projection. But I’d been wrong in this assumption before: I once began to suspect that a story I’d told for decades, about being a baby model for a diaper company, was an odd fantasy that I’d inserted into my biography, but when I asked my mother, she confirmed that it was true. If only as an anomalous psychological object, one of uncertain provenance and meaning, the memory-image seemed worthy of investigation. But how do you investigate the origin of an image in your mind’s eye? It occurred to me that perhaps I’d found a reason to finally call on the services of my friend Louise Mittelman, a hypnotherapist. Hypnotism may have the mustiness of nineteenth-century spiritualism hanging over it, as well as associations both sinister (like the CIA’s MKUltra mind-control program) and cartoonish (think Rocky and Bullwinkle, spiraling eyeballs), but this all felt appropriate to the irreality of my investigation (and, for that matter, the irreality of our postpandemic moment). I texted her to make an appointment.

Louise belongs to a collective of practitioners, including psychotherapists, yogis, and herbalists, who work out of Get Right Wellness in Ridgewood, New York, an unassuming storefront just a few blocks from my home, marked only by a sign with two delicately drawn hands releasing a radiating sun, the letters GRW stamped in its center. When I arrived, I rang a buzzer labeled “Clarity,” and a minute later, Louise appeared. She made us each a cup of tea and walked me to her office, settling into a large orange chair beside a table on which sat a notebook and a small gold bell. I sat down across from her.

Hypnotism works, or doesn’t, to the extent that a patient is open to suggestion, and everyone has a different degree of “suggestibility.” “It’s a boon for hypnotists to be suggestible themselves,” Louise explained. “The way that I visualize hypnosis, it’s sort of like an elevator shaft into your subconscious.” Most of Louise’s hypnotherapy clients come to break a habit—often to quit smoking, which is a classic use of hypnotherapy and has a high success rate. She also helps people work through relationship issues, prepare for public speaking or exams, and wants to learn more about treating trauma. Some people come with more esoteric requests, though, particularly for past life regression therapy, which involves retrieving memories from previous incarnations of oneself—though, of course, the interpretation of these “memories” is highly contested. Louise told me about one of her own experiences, while she was getting certified at the Divine Feminine School of Hypnosis, of “dropping in” on what seemed like a past life. “I was in the twenties and I was this female jewelry maker, and I was wearing pants—what came through really clearly was the pants.” At lunch after the session, one of her classmates mentioned that she was working on a project Louise hadn’t been aware of, a movie about a female artist who’d popularized women’s pants. Like my own memory-image, the origin of Louise’s hypnotic vision was mysterious. I felt I was probably in the right place.

 “So, what’s the story of this memory? What was going on when it came up for you?” she asked. I told Louise that the memory-image of the light on the field had surfaced for me a couple of years earlier, amid the congressional hubbub over UFOs and after a friend became obsessed with them, all of which caused me to reflect more deeply on a different, entirely certain memory. In 2018, at the same house in Maine, my brother and I saw something weird: a single, unblinking white light arcing over the sky, like a satellite but too near, which then made a ninety-degree turn, as if instantaneously shifting from the x-axis to the y-axis, glowed red, and shot out of the atmosphere. Who knows what it was? As I reflected on this strange sighting, this image of a light over the field wheedled its way into or up from my mind.

Louise didn’t bat an eye. “You have this thing in you that you want to get out more clearly,” she said. “What’s the texture of the obfuscation?” Well, it’s either repression or not a real memory, I thought, but the question was actually about why I was suspicious of the memory-image at all. Sputtering for a minute, I said, “The same reason I’m wary about a lot of weird stuff—you want to appear employable.” But, she pressed, how did this memory fit into the larger dynamics of my life? Shit, I thought, is this whole thing somehow an unconscious response to my slow exit from academia? Or my father’s death, which occurred a year or so before I started contemplating the image? Is this all about releasing myself from certain standards and expectations? “I think what I’m really interested in,” I managed, “is trying to rebuild where I think the wall belongs between the acceptable and the unacceptable.”

As Louise instructed, I uncrossed my legs, put my feet firmly on the ground, sat back on the couch, and fixed my eyes on a point on the ceiling, feeling a twinge of apprehension. “Allow your eyes to rest on that place as you simultaneously focus on the sound of my voice,” she said. For a minute she described how it would feel to relax my eyes, and then she told me to close my eyes and snapped her fingers as she said it. She said waves of relaxation were streaming down my jaw, shoulders, clavicle, my arms and legs. “Noticing now that your arms feel heavy,” she said, “like marble.” I felt my arms go slightly dead with the word “marble.” It wasn’t that I couldn’t move them, I’m certain I could have, but it felt like I would have had to go back into them, as though I were a half step removed from my body.

Louise instructed me to go to my “anchor place,” a home base of calm and security that we’d chosen beforehand. I’d picked Jackson, Wyoming, where I once spent a summer hiking in the backcountry. I explored it in my mind’s eye and settled down on a fallen tree in a forest clearing. Louise then counted down from three, snapping her fingers with each number, encouraging me to visualize and inhabit this clearing below the Grand Teton. By the end, I could feel the temperature, hear the sounds of birds around me, and see the view in every direction. I’d had to consciously construct the scene, but after the snapping, a surprisingly vivid and comprehensive awareness of that world remained stably in place. It was as though I was looking in on a dream I could wake from at will, which Louise and my subconscious were constructing together.

Next, Louise told me to bring the memory-image of the light on the field into the forest clearing with me. As we counted down from ten, she said, the image would become clearer and clearer. She rang her gold bell. “Ten,” she said. “The image is getting clearer and clearer.” Ring. “Nine—clearer and clearer.” But I couldn’t incorporate the image into the scene. I felt analytic gears shifting, a soldier of rationalism appear at the crest of a hill, and I began consciously trying to force a representation. By the time she said “One,” the image appeared as a large, black-and-white photograph stapled to a tree. It was not alive like everything else in the scene, and I couldn’t animate it. I felt for a moment like the spell had been broken.

Louise asked me instead to imagine the thing blocking me from interacting with the image. Immediately a stone wall appeared in the middle of my clearing, like the ones scattered throughout the forests of New England, where I grew up. “What feelings are attached to this wall?” she asked. “A desire to climb over it, but also a feeling of safety from it,” I said. What does the wall protect you from? Fear? Confusion? “Fear of confusion,” I said. She told me then to locate where the fear of confusion lived in my body, and to my surprise, I instantly knew where it was and what it looked like—a slightly deflated blue-gray ball between my heart and stomach. It did seem like the endless second-guessing and searching of my consciousness had been dampened. The images came easily now, without intention, and I accepted them almost without question. How hypnotized was I? She told me that the semideflated ball would now appear in my right hand as a different object, and immediately I pictured a long, carved wooden candlestick, which I knew was somehow related to my paternal grandmother. When she told me to find in my left hand a symbol of my curiosity about the memory-image, a star appeared before my mind’s eye. I understood these to be Platonic images: the artificial light of the candle and the true light of the star were analogous to the fire and the sun in the allegory of the cave, which I have taught ten thousand times. Except—I realized after the fact—the star I’d seen had not been a ball of plasma, a star in the sky, but instead a Christmas ornament.

Louise had me mash my hands together and the star broke the candlestick in half, the triumph of curiosity over fear. We returned to my clearing in the woods. The stone wall had deteriorated. She suggested I apply the star energy to the wall, and it began crackling like Pop Rocks in your mouth. When it had disappeared entirely, the photograph on the tree shrank. Shrink it down even further, Louise instructed, let the image fly away. I imagined it zooming away from my sanctum, over the horizon, and I felt a sense of relief. “It doesn’t belong,” I said.

The sun was now setting in my scene. “Letting your intuition speak to you and give you a message about this memory, how do you want to relate to this memory?” I was disappointed, but not surprised, by the message that came to me: “Chase it.” It seemed like the only answer possible, and I later wondered if Louise had somehow suggested it to me. She counted us out of the hypnosis, this time up from one, again using the bell. At “Ten,” it was over. I noticed no transition as the trance ended.

I never expected to discover whether the image is a memory of something real or not—I don’t think I’ll ever know. But since visiting Louise, I’ve developed a healthier attitude toward the unknown. What the hypnotic session clarified is that the meaning of the image, whatever its provenance, lies in an anxiety about abandoning established beliefs. The memory-image appeared as an invocation to tear down and rebuild the walls of my understanding, the distinctions and categories through which “reality” is worked out in the first place. The death of a parent, the derailment of a career, the apparent collapse of a society—in the midst of these world-breaking experiences, it’s another “I,” one that is not governed by our conscious mind, that is called on to reorder reality. The light on the field emerged as a symbol of this irreal process of reordering, under the influence of which one might also be better able to confront the meaning of a UFO making a right-angle turn, and recognize other signs that things are not what they appear. Such aberrations, like Gramscian monsters, are figures in the struggle to birth a new world. Even if it doesn’t make sense, or feels like a futile adventure, it must be worth chasing them.

 

Jeremy Butman is a writer and academic who has been published in The Believer, Los Angeles Review of Books, the New York Times, and elsewhere. He is currently working on a book about anomalous experiences for Strange Attractor Press.