The Paris Review's Blog, page 42

Kurt Vonnegut’s House Is Not Haunted

Kurt Vonnegut’s house. Photograph by Sophie Kemp.

In my earliest childhood memories—the big blur we will call the gear shift between the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—Schenectady, the city I was born in, is a distant star. Fuzzy, soft, a blurred edge that feels so far away in the way that childhood always feels so far away. Schenectady, the city I was born in, is a small upstate city between the rivers Mohawk and Hudson. Home of the perfect 12345 zip code. The location of the General Electric Power headquarters. Girls wearing low-rise jeans to rent VHS tapes at the Hollywood Video on Balltown Road. Street names: Brandywine, McClellan, Union, Glenwood Boulevard, Nott, Van Vranken. A white clapboard church hovering atop a hill on a rural route—I used to take modern dance classes there. An ice-skating rink next to an Air Force base where the pilots flew to Antarctica, always flying so low when they went over my house. NXIVM ladies planning their volleyball trips to Lake George. My parents knew the exact address of where the Unabomber’s mother and brother lived, in a historic district called the Stockade. And as for me, I do not remember when I first registered that Kurt Vonnegut lived in Alplaus, a small hamlet in Schenectady County, named after the Dutch expression aal plaats, which means “a place of eels.” (There were no eels that I am aware of.) I think it was in high school. I think my hair was cut short. I think it was when I was a virgin. I think it was when I got a job as a bookseller at the Open Door on Jay. I think I was probably sixteen.

I already loved Kurt when I found out that for a few years after World War II he lived an eight-minute drive from the house I grew up in. As a teenager in Schenectady, I read not all but most of his books. It was because of my father, who also loved Kurt. He gave me a copy of Slaughterhouse-Five, and it was the first time that I fell in love with a novel, because it was brutal and hilarious and weird and terrifyingly sad. Slaughterhouse-Five is set in Dresden and Luxembourg and Outer Space and also Ilium, New York. Ilium, it is argued by most Vonnegut readers and scholars, is probably Schenectady. It appears in several of his other books. Player Piano, Cat’s Cradle, and a few different short stories. Here is how Ilium is referenced, in one passage of the Slaughterhouse-Five: “Billy owned a lovely Georgian home in Ilium. He was rich as Croesus, something he had never expected to be … In addition he owned a fifth of the new Holiday Inn out on Route 54 and half of three Tastee Freeze stands.”

Billy Pilgrim is the protagonist of Slaughterhouse-Five and a guy who will live in a human zoo later in the novel. Unlike Billy Pilgrim, Kurt Vonnegut did not own a lovely Georgian home. He was there, in Schenectady, because he got a job at General Electric’s corporate campus, working in the publicity department. Working at GE got him into writing science fiction. “There was no avoiding [writing science fiction],” he said in an interview, “since the General Electric Company was science fiction.” During his time at GE, he wrote Player Piano, his first novel. His thing is that he wanted to just do that full time. Write books. But he wasn’t ready to do that full time yet, thus the job. So Vonnegut moved into the house, not far from the GE campus, in Alplaus, a middle-class hamlet on the Alplaus Creek and Mohawk River. 

In August, I decided to drive to the house for the first time. I did this with my father, because he was the one who gave me Slaughterhouse-Five, and also because he’s now semi-retired and agreed in advance that it would be “funny,” and “cool,” to accompany his twenty-seven-year-old daughter on a “reporting trip” four miles down the road from his house. “Did you know he lived in Schenectady before you moved here?” I asked my father. “No, I don’t think so,” he responded. Out the window: my former elementary school and preschool, the Chinese Fellowship Bible Church, anonymous corporate campuses, new housing developments that when I was a kid were huge, empty fields.

Vonnegut’s house, which I found by googling “Vonnegut’s house Schenectady NY,” is set directly overlooking Alplaus Creek, on a quiet side street. It is kind of in the woods. Lots of big trees on the street. The houses are old but not old. None of them are big. A few of them have big campers and ATVs out front, and the occasional snow mobile. Old cowboy boots used as planters and wind chimes. Vonnegut’s house is red, slightly set back from the road. It has seen better days, but it is kind of charmingly shabby, overgrown with plants spilling out of the gutters. No plaque. It is not marked in any way. There is a camper parked in front, empty water coolers lying on the front porch, and an early aughts VW bug in the driveway. It remains a private residence. When my father and I showed up, we basically hid behind the camper for a few minutes. He narrated the scene out loud. “Alplaus, New York,” he said, “where the state bird is the mosquito!” I sat there in silence on account of being shy. 

Thus: I failed to stop my father from talking to the pink-haired teenage boy who saw us basically hiding behind his parents’ RV.

Thus: “Do you know that Kurt Vonnegut used to live in this house?” my father said to the teenage boy with pink hair.

“Uh, yeah,” he said.

“Do you have people stop by your house all the time asking about Kurt Vonnegut?” my father continued.

“Sometimes,” the teenage boy responded.

The boy’s father came outside, probably because he saw him chatting with a strange middle-aged man and his sullen adult daughter. The boy’s father was a man named David Lovelady, from Liverpool, England. He was very friendly. Excited to talk to us about Kurt Vonnegut’s house, shepherding us onto his front lawn and introducing us to his three chickens. David did not know he had purchased Kurt Vonnegut’s house until he and his wife had basically closed on it. He had found out that Kurt Vonnegut lived in Alplaus, and when he googled it, he was delighted to discover that not only had Vonnegut lived in Alplaus, but he had lived in the very house that David and his wife had just bought!

His wife, Gail, came out; so did the rest of their kids. They asked if we wanted to see inside. The thing about the house, they told us, is that it was not haunted, because ghosts are not real, but also a copy of Player Piano, sitting face out on a bookshelf, kept falling on the head of one of their kids and as a result the family had this inside joke about it being Kurt’s ghost. Obviously, I wanted to see the haunted bookshelf so they showed me the haunted bookshelf. It looked pretty normal. Also facing out was a stuffed animal gnome holding a coffee cup that said “Best Mom,” and a book about raising chickens. I cannot stress enough that the house of Kurt Vonnegut is now just a completely normal house where people live and is full of completely normal things that appear in completely normal houses. Which to me makes a lot of sense. Vonnegut in my opinion is a charming and scrappy weirdo. He is not the kind of person you think of as living on some kind of grand estate. 

Photograph by Sophie Kemp.

David asked my father and me how we even knew the house was here. I told him I probably learned about it at the bookstore I worked at in high school, people would occasionally come in and ask about it. How in the early 2010s you still had a handful of people who did not know about the magic of Google Maps and therefore you had to physically give them directions. I tried to remember what this was like. To have once been a girl, age sixteen, telling people to “turn right onto Freeman’s Bridge.” To drive past the abandoned Alco factory that is now a casino where I was once forced to see a U2 cover band. The ice cream place, Jumpin’ Jacks, where they show fireworks on the Fourth. The banquet hall, the Glen Sanders, where we had my senior prom.

My father and I decided we had stayed long enough at the house. Our hosts were headed off on a trip to the coast. They (the Lovelady clan) suggested we go down the street to an old general store where Vonnegut had rented some office space, so we did that and took some more pictures. This part was not interesting. It involved my father and me doing some reconnaissance for about five minutes and then deciding we were done. Additionally, I was criticized for not taking iPhone photography in landscape mode. So we drove home, back to the house where I grew up. I logged on to the internet and I did some research about when Vonnegut left Schenectady. The answer was basically: as soon as he could. He moved to Cape Cod in 1951 to write full time, decamping to the village of Barnstable to a similarly unassuming but lovely small house.

He was not a very ostentatious guy. Of all of the places he lived, the most regal was a brownstone in Turtle Bay, a slim white home down the street from where E. B. White also once lived. Apparently he (Vonnegut) once almost burned down the house because he was obsessed with smoking inside. This to me is almost a comforting thought—Vonnegut carelessly lighting cigarettes inside of his abode. This makes sense to me, that he lived a little messily and not for show, because he is the kind of person who wrote beautifully and hilariously about being a person. He wrote science fiction novels that were not corny or ridiculous or dorky. Just in a way that feels extremely human, which, if you are writing all the time about outer space, is a triumph. 

 

Sophie Frances Kemp is a writer in Brooklyn, originally from Schenectady, New York. She has published nonfiction in GQ, Vogue, and The Nation, and fiction in The Baffler and Forever. She has a forthcoming novel called Paradise Logic.

On Bei Dao’s Visual Art

Ink dot painting by Bei Dao, from the series “The Moment.” Photograph courtesy of Bei Dao.

Our new Fall issue includes an excerpt from Bei Dao’s book-length poem Sidetracks, translated from the Chinese by Jeffrey Yang. In Sidetracks, Bei Dao reflects on his turn to making ink-dot paintings like the one here.

In April 2012, while with his family on a beach in Hong Kong, Bei Dao suffered a stroke that severely affected his language abilities. After a month of trying to learn how to read all over again, he was assessed by a speech-language pathologist to be at only 30 percent equivalency. Daily conversation was difficult; the words he depended on for his life and art would possibly never return. It was an unprecedented crisis that he later compared in an essay to being “like an animal trapped in a cage.” (I’m reminded of these lines Bei Dao’s friend Tomas Tranströmer wrote after a paralyzing stroke, translated from the Swedish by Robin Fulton: “I am carried in my shadow / like a violin / in its black case.”) While recovering in the hospital, Bei Dao started to doodle and brush calligraphy, and when he returned home, he started to paint, channeling the lyric impulse from the void of words into physical images. Thirty years had passed since he’d last painted a picture.

Bei Dao’s first paintings in this period were composed of repeating lines that formed an abstract landscape resembling surging hills or waves. Feeling he lacked the necessary skill and technique to manipulate the plastic line, he abandoned it and turned to one of the most fundamental elements of Chinese painting: the ink dot. A longtime photographer, he compares the ink dot to the pixel of a photograph. In his book-length poem Sidetracks, which will be published in English by New Directions in 2024, he describes the creative process of ink-dot painting like this:

nebular ink dots on rice paper—in accord with the cosmos painting pictures makes me euphoric ink dots cluster disperse depending on the flow of random scattering forest beyond the borders of language good fortune depends on disaster / disaster conceals good fortune I am aimless freedom listening closely to the whispers of snowflakes guarding the vortex of day and night at the center of the mysterious river

Four years after his stroke, Bei Dao’s Chinese language abilities had improved dramatically, and a new medical assessment showed a recovery of over 80 percent. He continued his painting practice, though, and started to write poetry again. In 2018, a year before he turned seventy, Bei Dao had his first-ever painting exhibition at the Galerie Paris Horizon, located just north of the Centre Pompidou. In the essay he wrote for the exhibition, he contrasts the oil-based pointillism of an artist like Seurat with the watery ink dots of the East, where the tones and textures of the so-called five shades of ink in traditional Chinese painting must be naturally integrated with the brush and the rice paper to form a single whole. And as the water evaporates, the ink colors change, creating unexpected effects. He has experimented with using the cold colors of Japanese green ink alongside the warm colors of brown ink, while using sumi ink to deepen the tones and textures through a rhythmic layering. Around the time he began his new painting practice, he made a pilgrimage from Hong Kong to many cities across the mainland to learn about traditional Chinese medicine. He has received treatment from eight different traditional Chinese medical doctors who are well trained in the dialectical principles of yin and yang and the five elements as originally presented in the Yellow Emperor’s Inner Canon, which was compiled over two thousand years ago.

The artist Xu Bing—he and his wife, the poet Zhai Yongming, were the first collectors of Bei Dao’s paintings—wrote an essay for Bei Dao’s Paris exhibition in which he links his work with that of the Chinese maximalist artists: a loose grouping used in the early aughts to classify work that resonates with Western minimalism but that is also, as the art historian Gao Minglu has described it, closely tied to “the spiritual experience of the artist in the process of creation as a self-contemplation outside and beyond the artwork itself.” Xu Bing suggests that a maximalist style of compressed intensity and repetition are generally found in three kinds of artists: the formally untrained, such as the Aboriginal artists of Papunya in Australia; the physically or mentally ill, such as Yayoi Kusama; and contemporary artists who “dress up like a god and play a ghost.” The painting by Bei Dao shown here is from an ongoing series titled Cǐ​kè (The moment), which Xu Bing writes is a reflection of “a mixture of these three categories.”

 

Jeffrey Yang is the author of the poetry collections Line and Light; Hey, Marfa; Vanishing-Line; and An Aquarium.

Mercedes-Benz CLK 320

Photograph courtesy of Colin Ainsworth.

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

 

My parents both worked, and they both made good money, and I needed a car. It all felt very incidental. They had this image in their heads of an ideal weekend—the two of them driving around the Texas Hill Country with a large, iced drink in the cup holder. They’re sitting in the front seats, vintage-by-way-of-long-term-ownership Ray-Bans strapped on tight, and the top is, of course, down. After some searching, they found a fairly cheap used Mercedes-Benz CLK 320—convertible, two doors, soft top, black paint, black interior. They said I could drive it when they didn’t want to, which turned out to be basically every day.

I often forget that this can sound pretty cool. Not only the notion of having a car at sixteen, being able to get around or away if I needed or wanted to, but also that the car was a murdered-out drop top. It is cool to have wheels, especially in Texas. We lived in a suburb outside the Austin city limits, but my parents both grew up in small towns, one in South Texas and the other in the Panhandle. Getting a car, for them, had been the first notion of a kind of promise to leave those small towns. Leaving was, of course, the coolest thing a teenager could do—that great cliché articulated to me when my dad played me Bruce Springsteen songs. My parents saw this car and saw themselves having left, and they saw me in it, years later, as a kind of Ferris Bueller—loud, omniscient, and abjectly capable.

I was very grateful to have a car, but I was not Ferris Bueller. I was not the Fonz. I was not “cool,” per se, though not exactly uncool, either. I never figured out how to explain this properly to my parents—that there was a certain kind of guy who drove this car and that that guy wasn’t me. It would be breaking some news to them. What do you mean our son isn’t the chillest guy at the Episcopal school?

The car was also a clunker. Sensitive, temperamental, like the dog down the block. The black-on-black in a summer drought, a dozen consecutive days of temperatures over 100 degrees, was unbearable. There was no way to air it out: the soft top trapped the heat, but when the top came down, the sun came in. I’d blast the AC for an hour straight and pray that it would still run the next day. A foreign car, too, requires expensive, high-octane gas. This was not ideal.

I have only one photo of myself and this car—a film photo of me and my friend picking up another friend in a nice part of West Austin. There’s a big beautiful white house in the background, the black car in the foreground, top down, and me and my friend in the front seats on a sunny day. I see the photo, with its Tumblr-era look, as a kind of coda to my parents’ vision of that car. It seems to capture a different day, an adjacent reality, one where I hop into the driver’s seat without opening the door, and where I feel less out of place under the vast Texas sun.

 

Colin Ainsworth is a writer who lives in Brooklyn.

Teetering Canaries

Illustration by Na Kim.

Translated by Imogen Taylor

One stifling hot night in early August, I dreamed, as I always do when I have a fever, the old, familiar dream: the earth opens up before my feet, a gaping pit appears, and into this pit I fall, then clamber straight back out, as eager as a cartoon character, only to fall into the next pit that suddenly yawns before me. An endless obstacle course engineered by some higher power, an experiment going nowhere, the opposite of a story. This dream has followed me since childhood and is probably as old as the realization that I will, one day, end up in a pit forever. As a piece of drama, it is extremely simple, and yet it’s an effective dream and no more unoriginal than that of my friend Sibylle, who told me over breakfast a few days later that she has regular nightmares of being swept away by a vast, tsunami-like wave.

I was reminded that of all the arts I would like to master, lucid dreaming is at the top of the list: you sleep and dream, fully aware that you are asleep and dreaming, but the real skill lies in being able to intervene in the events of your dream and steer the plot in your favor. As a lucid dreamer, I could, with no trouble at all, see to it that the steam train hurtling toward me was brought to a halt by, say, a lady-chimp passenger with the presence of mind to interrupt her grooming and pull the emergency brake. I could arrange for my missing child, lost in the fairground throng, to reappear, bright and chirpy, on the broad shoulders of a gently smiling nurse. I could even have a burned jungle returned in dizzying time-lapse to its former chlorophyll-drenched glory and commandeered by a raucous and triumphant menagerie. I could rewrite my nightmares with every narrative device available to me, draining them of the horror that resonates deep into waking life. All the signs, all experience, all probability notwithstanding, I could make everything end happily. I could transform leaden impotence into mercurial superpower with daring and ingenuity, unafraid of even the most implausible twist.

Midpoints, Sibylle explained to me—she was plotting out a streaming series and had papered one side of the hall in her apartment with Post-its—midpoints are what screenwriters call those decisive events that change the course of a film’s action and send it heading toward a new destination on the plot horizon. Tipping points, I knew from the science pages of the newspapers, are those critical moments when climate and ecological systems shift from one state to another—decisive but elusive events that have such a huge impact on the environment that conditions are thrown off-balance. Ecosystems, for example, are so severely weakened, or populations of individual species so seriously depleted that they no longer recover but collapse, tip over, leaving behind them what, in the drastic vocabulary of Sibylle’s screenwriting theory, is known as the point of no return. A simple enough phrase, but what it means to reach that point where there is no going back defies not only imagination but terminology and narrative patterns.

The question of when exactly tipping points are reached is, despite decades of feverish research, difficult to predict. There is a wealth of data on the subject—figures that chart the various factors with relative precision, from the number of carbon dioxide particles in the Earth’s atmosphere to the rising sea level to the maximum temperatures measured since records began and the projected number of plant and animal species lost daily to extinction. Plotted onto a graph in an impressively simple-looking grid of coordinates and neatly divided into units, this data can be extrapolated, and correlations established, but the result is only a series of formidable curves which, bar a few fluctuations, move with an apparent sense of purpose from the bottom left to the top right-hand corner—from the one known, unchangeable past to several unknown futures.

These prophecies are at once concrete and abstract; the scenarios they spell out made about as much sense to me as the mosaic of scrawled Post-its on Sibylle’s wall. I walked up and down the hall, deciphering the occasional note, especially the bright signal-yellow ones that Sibylle had used to flag the midpoints. But the overall plot eluded me. I was sweating, though the hall was the coldest place in the apartment and it wasn’t yet noon. Perhaps my temperature was up again, I thought, and I asked Sibylle for a rapid test, but like all the others I’d taken, it turned out negative.

That morning, a voice on the radio had announced that it was the driest summer on record. The newspapers, meanwhile—this was national news, not local—were reporting a mysterious fish kill of scandalous proportions in the Oder River. In the first articles on the topic, an angler referred to the event as “a tragedy,” the environmental minister called it “a disaster,” and a scientist described it as “a massacre.” A stretch of more than five hundred kilometers of a river that was both boundary and connection between two European countries was as good as dead; its ecosystem had tipped over.

I didn’t know whether Sibylle had read Aristotle’s Poetics as a student, but his idea that a poet should write not about what has happened but about what might happen still applied. To what extent, however, poetry could be used to describe a present of overlapping emergencies and tipping points was more than doubtful.

Sibylle’s original plan had been to set her series in the near future, and she had taken several stabs at establishing the difference between our present and the time of the show’s action. But since coming across a quotation by the author Kim Stanley Robinson describing science fiction as “the realism of our time,” Sibylle had declared the problem obsolete. The future was unequally distributed; evidently the past was, too. Only recently, the demise of the fossil age had seemed imminent—an arduous but inevitable process; now, all over Europe, mothballed coal power plants were being prepared for reactivation. No climate curve could compete with the material immediacy, the archaic weight of war. When the bombs fell, everything went through the floor.

At home, I looked up the passage in the Poetics to see what Aristotle had to say about turning points. “Peripeteia,” he writes in Chapter Eleven, is a reversal from one state of affairs to its opposite, “from ignorance to knowledge, and thus to either friendship or enmity, depending on whether the characters are destined for good or ill fortune.” I caught myself wondering what we were destined for. Not the bombastic apocalypse of the book of Revelation, that was for sure—but evangelical hopes of deliverance were equally out of the question, with their guilt-steeped, redemption-starved slogans clamoring for nothing less than the “salvation of the world.” Aristotle had it good, I thought; he had the whole soap opera of Greek myth at his disposal. “Every tragedy,” I read, a little further on, “is made up of complication and dénouement. The complication consists of the prehistory and part of the action; the dénouement comprises the rest.”

I was aware that the history of life on Earth was no stage play and the emergence of humans an astounding but fleeting protein-based event; I knew that, like other strange and wonderful beings, we would one day vanish. But I couldn’t help myself; I saw the scenes play out in my mind again: the planet burning, then seething and steaming, then squelching; water withdrawing and continental plates shifting; forests growing rampant, oceans filling with life, animals coming on land to explore—until, an eternity and a few glacial seconds later, a stooped, hirsute, armed creature emerged, with whom I had learned to identify. The rest was settlement and deforestation, mining, urbanization and satellite junk. I was stuck. If that was the prehistory, and human life was not to end in tragedy, we needed a dénouement—a solution, a turning point. But what form should it take? My brain, which had been just large enough to fit through the birth canal, seemed to have reached its limits. All it came up with was the worst kind of ecokitsch, calendar quotes such as “We have only borrowed the Earth …” and “Only when the last tree …”—words of wisdom that I had once written on my exercise books in glitter pen and whose half life was shorter than that of a plastic bag rotting in a bush. The more dramatic announcement—another tipping-point warning—that it was already “five to midnight” seemed, ironically, to be one of the oldest catchphrases around and had completely outlived itself. But there was that other common idiom, particularly popular in the English-speaking world, of “the canary in the coal mine”—a cryptic, equivocal expression that evoked a little yellow bird in the hidden bowels of the Earth. A fowl of the air in the underworld, relegated to lightless depths where it sings its song, perched in a small cage, because that’s all it can do and because, torn from its context, it does what birds so often do in human stories: it produces a surplus of beauty, grace, and meaning. But how, I wondered, had the bird found its way into the mine—into that figure of speech, that metaphor, that image of disorientation, of misery, mercy, danger, the Anthropocene?

While searching for the origin of the expression, I came across a character—and characters, as I knew from Sibylle, were always good. People were still more interested in people than anything else—this was, of course, a not insignificant part of the problem. My character was the Scottish physiologist John Scott Haldane, whose first biographical turning point might, in the script of a biopic, be the scene in which fourteen-year-old John sees his elder brother George turn copper-colored and struggle to breathe for days on end until he is carried off by diphtheria. The physiological miracle of human breathing would hold a lifelong fascination for Haldane and inspire him to a number of inventions, from the haemoglobinometer to a prototype space suit, but also to some rather abstruse experiments that might make for some good scenes in a biopic: his field trips to collect samples of contaminated air in the Dundee slums and London sewers, for instance, or his studies of altitude sickness at Pikes Peak, Colorado and decompression sickness in the deep sea lochs of Scotland—not to mention the test involving goats in a decompression chamber, at the end of which the poor creatures teetered out of the porthole-like opening, staggering on their feet.

But the scene that leads to the little bird comes earlier, in the 1890s, when Haldane, a man in his midthirties, is investigating mining accidents in British collieries. The coal from those pits was used to power the puffing machines of the motherland of industrialization—machines whose wondrous, many-cogged mechanisms not only unleashed enormous quantities of energy and produced a highly ramified industrial system, but also sent vast amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and masses of workers into misery.

Haldane appears in this fog-shrouded scene wearing overalls and a miner’s helmet and carrying a cage full of mice and a leather case marked in signal red with the forbidding words London Fever Hospital. He is already a renowned respiratory expert and has been called to the scene of the accident in the Rhondda Valley in South Wales, if not to save the lives of the casualties then at least to prevent further accidents.

It goes without saying that conditions in coal mines were, then as now, unhealthy and often even life-threatening—and explosions, triggered by coal dust or gases, were all too common. In the biopic, we see Haldane in the pit, taking blood not only from the dead miners but also from the pit ponies that have perished underground with them. We also see—it’s a color film, of course—that he is troubled by the carmine hue of the blood; we see his gaze fall on the Davy lamps that are still burning next to the corpses. Then come a few scenes of rising action, but eventually—after a change of scene to his laboratory in Oxford—Haldane is able to prove that the majority of victims did not die, as supposed, in underground explosions or from a lack of oxygen, but were poisoned with carbon monoxide, that colorless, tasteless, odorless gas that inhibits oxygen intake even when inhaled in only the most minute quantities and kills large land mammals such as horses or humans within a couple of hours.

Haldane’s life was one big self-experiment; one of his biographers even described him as a kind of “canary in the coal mine” himself, so strong was his habit of self-experimentation. In a later scene, we might see him studying the effects of carbon monoxide on his own organism and comparing the results with the effects of the same substance on a mouse. While he observes only a slight drowsiness in himself, the mouse is already curled up unconscious in a corner of its cage, the pale fur of its belly exposed. Haldane grabs the little body, opens the window and almost immediately—it is literally a matter of seconds—the mouse, who remains unnamed in the script, recovers consciousness.

Switch scenes again and Haldane is recommending to the miners that they use mice as “sentinel animals”—but as the rodents are rife in the pits, and always after the men’s victuals, they are clearly not trustworthy enough for the job. In fact, it won’t be long before mice are cast as canaries in the drama of human medical history and used as model organisms in genetic research, but that would be another film altogether, a documentary that would open in a park in Novosibirsk with a tracking shot onto a bronze statue of a bespectacled mouse about the size of a baby, dressed in a lab coat and wielding a pair of needles with which it appears to be knitting a DNA helix.

But to return to our hero. Haldane eventually strikes on another, smaller species of warm-blooded creatures that are similarly practical, almost as easy to acquire and keep, but most importantly, have an impressive track record as pets. Canaries are also such efficient breathers that they absorb oxygen even when they exhale; this makes them extremely sensitive to toxic gases—sensitive enough to lose consciousness some twenty minutes earlier than humans. Twenty minutes is a long time, long enough to leave the mine and return to the surface, to fill one’s lungs with fresh oxygen and escape asphyxiation. What’s more, the symptoms of poisoning are immediately apparent: an unconscious canary will stop singing and fall in a swoon from its perch—an unmistakable warning sign. And aren’t those bright yellow feathers a sign in themselves, crying out to be interpreted?

Some sources claimed that the first canaries to be sent down into the mines were deviant specimens that had been withdrawn from sale and were going for a bargain: male birds with less attractive plumage and poor singing skills. But the contemporary literature that I managed to find on the subject—titles such as Katechismus der Kanarienzucht (The canary breeder’s catechism, 1901) or Der Kanarienvogel: als Hausfreund der deutschen Familie (The canary: a friend of the German family, 1908)—never tired of complaining that “the English fancy” for breeding canaries for their color and form alone, “with no heed to the birds’ singing power,” had brought forth “monstrosities” such as the long-necked, humpbacked Scotch Fancy, the London Lizard with its scalelike markings, and the Yorkshire Spangle, a straw-yellow bird with a brown-green cap and eye rings that was “particularly popular among the lower classes of the population”—“the strongest” but also, as the author remarks, not without a touch of chauvinism, the “most phlegmatic breed of English canary.”

There is one scene without which no Haldane biopic would be complete. It is set underground and shows a group of miners—some still boys, some aged before their time—having whistling competitions with the birds in their little cages. Since canaries are good mimics, this scene should perhaps be imagined as a kind of concert—a high-pitched, cross-species, underground concert, the voices echoing and answering one another, spurring each other on. I liked the idea that the men kept an eye on the birds, concerned about their well-being—not least because their own depended on it. I also liked the thought that they, in turn, would save the lives of their lifesavers in an emergency.

It touched me to read that the miners mourned their canaries when they were replaced in the eighties by more sensitive but soulless detectors known as electronic noses; the underground symbiosis between them had transformed the birds from avian early warning mechanisms into something more like companions. The empty cages ended up in museums and became anecdotal material for a chapter in industrial history, along with Haldane’s “canary resuscitator,” now on display at the Science and Industry Museum in Manchester, a contraption designed for the immediate resuscitation of unconscious birds—a cast-iron box with glass sides, its porthole-like opening firmly bolted with a swivel pin. Atop this box, screwed fast in the grip of a pipe clamp, is a shiny black cartridge that strangely resembles an atomic bomb. A nickel-plated copper pipe connects it to the inside. Behind the glass sits a small bird, yellow with green patches, its pale pink beak raised, its tiny black eyes gleaming as they reflect a distant source of light. The bird is dead as a doornail, its stuffed body attached to a perch with invisible wire. Its life—so much is clear—could not be saved by the resuscitator.

As so often, the obsolete and discarded are to be found hibernating in the parallel universe of language. In metaphor, the pit canaries live on, haunting the news like miniature Cassandras—practical, feathered oracles that fall mute in the face of disaster and drop dramatically from their perches at that precarious point where life tips over into death. These figurative canaries turn out to be every bit as adaptable as their real-life models. In recent articles, the phrase “canary in the coal mine” has been used, variously, to refer to a species of water flea called Daphnia that is sensitive to chemical substances, the drought-ravaged wine industry of Australia, a foundering baseball star, methane-spewing craters in Serbia, the canceled Batgirl movie, and thousands of dead manatees starving off the coast of Florida.

But the metaphor is not always uncontroversial. In 2021, the Fijian prime minister, Frank Bainimarama, stated with some force that the Pacific Island nations, already long affected by global warming, were tired of playing the part of the plucky little sentinel bird. “We refuse to be the proverbial canaries in the world’s coal mine, as we are so often called,” he said, adding, “We want more for ourselves than to be helpless songbirds whose demise serves as a warning to others.”Their lives, after all, were not figurative; they were actual and actually under threat—and they wanted, understandably, to be saved for their own sake, and not because the nations responsible for their plight saw their predicament as an anticipation of their own precarious future.

The canary metaphor was on the point of becoming an empty cage, a cliché. It seemed to obscure rather than reveal, like the 1934 camouflage publication that I came across in the catalogue of the Berlin State Library. Listed as Der Kanarienvogel: ein praktisches Handbuch über Naturgeschichte, Pflege und Zucht des Kanarienvogels (The canary: a practical guide to the natural history, care and breeding of canaries), this book turned out to contain Molotov’s speech on the second five-year plan at the seventeenth conference of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

Figures of speech are never innocent, and even canaries are less innocent than one might imagine. Buffon, in his Natural History of Birds, may describe “the musician of the chamber” as a “delicate,” “social,” and “gentle” bird—“its caresses are amiable, its little pets are innocent, and its anger neither hurts nor offends”—but his contemporary, Goethe, has Werther almost expire with longing when Lotte’s canary caresses her mouth with its bill and then proceeds to kiss his: “His little beak moved from her mouth to mine, and the delightful sensation seemed like the forerunner of the sweetest bliss.” The meaning of this “sweetest bliss” is hinted at not only in the German verb vögeln (to fuck; literally, “to bird”) but also in Dutch seventeenth-century genre paintings, in which a caged bird is a common and unequivocal symbol of virginity—a state that is, by definition, precarious.

While searching for the origin of this association, I came across an image of ravished innocence in Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, where, aptly enough, it is mining that is depicted as a nonconsensual act, the rape of Mother Earth:

We trace out all the fibres of the earth […] We penetrate her inner parts and seek for riches in the abode of the spirits of the departed […]

[…] we probe her entrails, digging into her veins of gold and silver and mines of copper and lead; we actually drive shafts into the depth to search for gems and certain tiny stones; we drag out her entrails, we seek a jewel merely to be worn upon a finger!

I wasn’t sure whether to feel happy or fatalistic about such serendipity. The story I’d set out to tell seemed to be a very old one.

Perhaps the main tipping points lay so far back in time that, rather than simply damn their consequences—the part that was usually faded out—we should learn to value them. It occurred to me that plenty of ruined landscapes that had been abandoned by humans were now places of refuge for threatened species and would soon be conservation areas. It was getting complicated.

“The extraction of ores and other mineral resources,” I dictated to myself, just to get things straight in my mind, “is inextricably linked not only with almost all human achievements in technology and civilization, but also—more than any other trade or industry—with massive overexploitation, devastating destruction, and a state in which nature and culture are no longer distinguishable and produce such strange amalgams as canary birds.”

The birds I was trying to set free were all flying straight back into their cages. They were no longer natural beings but cultural products of a centuries-old history of domestication, shaped above all by the unimaginative laws of a market—a history that began with the breeding monopoly of Spanish monks in the fifteenth century and was still going strong in the late nineteenth century when the rise of the mail-order industry ended in the deaths of so many birds. This wasn’t the story I wanted to tell: the dull, powerful, ubiquitous interplay of supply and demand, which had given us, on the one hand, the homogeneous cultural landscapes of Central Europe that I liked to escape to in my free time and, on the other hand, these birds—virtuoso warblers with a range of up to nearly three octaves, whose trilling I had listened to for a time on endless YouTube videos and could no longer hear without getting a headache.

For a particularly mellifluous specimen, old canary guides recommend keeping a male bird on his own, though some manuals have condemned this as cruel, pointing out that canaries sing to impress potential mates and rivals and to mark their territory. I was reminded of a theory for why evolution has given us not only an inexhaustible variety of biological answers to the question of what life is but also such peculiar, decadent, and superfluous gifts as beauty, ornament, and culture—the hummingbird’s iridescent feathers, the baboon’s pornographically bare bum, and, of course, the delights of birdsong. The theory had what I considered one of the best names a theory can have. It was called singing for sex, and in its out-and-out obsession with vögeln, it rivaled the writings of Sigmund Freud.

But there was another, more modest—and moving—interpretation, which saw birdsong as something that behavioral biologists refer to as the contact call. Also features of human behavior, contact calls are sounds made to convince those around you—and also, to an extent, yourself—that you still exist. An “I’m here; where are you?” A whistling in the dark—at once self-reassurance and protective magic.

The best canary singers are said to have lived on Fuerteventura, before deforestation and overgrazing transformed the island into a desert. There are still flocks of Atlantic canaries on Madeira, the Azores, and the western Canary Islands; my research told me that, with a population of about 1.5 to 2.5 million pairs, the species was classified as Least Concern on the IUCN Red List. What was concerning, however, was the dwindling populations of a number of other animal and plant species native to the Canaries, such as the dragon tree, the Canary Islands Large White, the Iberian water frog, and a handful of endemic species of giant lizards.

More concerning still was that, although a glut of poisonous golden algae had been identified as the cause of the fish kill, it remained unclear what had triggered it. Not for the first time, factors were too complex to allow the incident to be treated as a straightforward criminal case in which the perpetrators had only to be tracked down, brought to justice and duly punished. An affair that had destroyed the lives of millions of creatures was at risk of petering out in inquiry committees and mutual finger-pointing. Volunteers were called on to gather the hundreds of tons of stinking fish corpses from the riverbanks and dispose of them in dumpsters before they sank to the bottom of the river and further polluted the water by consuming oxygen as they decomposed. I didn’t have the words to comprehend these tons of dead fish—creatures that, more than any others, are proverbially mute, even in life.

Somewhere there was mention of damage limitation, but what I wanted was a face, a character, a hero. Someone who would rescue rather than repair—an expert like Haldane, an eccentric scientist who was on the side of the good guys and would make ground-breaking discoveries with his tests and experiments, preventing not only humans but freshwater fish and mollusks from death by asphyxiation. Hundreds of tons of dead fish—it was apocalyptic. But there was no lake of fire. It had even begun to rain. Life went on.

Before a canary falls from its perch, it begins to teeter. Before a system tips over completely, there are often major fluctuations and complications: populations rise and fall, and inconclusive test results cloud the already murky picture. But by then, as scientific models—and experience—teach us, developments cannot be stopped. The shit hits the fan. The situation spirals out of control, setting off an unpredictable chain of irreversible and, indeed, irreparable events, which for some reason I imagined as a custard-pie showdown in a silent film, in which the pie lands in the face of an innocent bystander, triggering a series of unlikely but inevitable chain reactions before the picture fades on a disconcertingly tranquil-looking scene of devastation.

There was no way back. The canary metaphor was teetering. It might be a compelling image, but it was no use to us, because, like it or not, Earth wasn’t a coal mine that could be evacuated in an emergency, even if tired fantasies of colonizing nearby planets had recently made something of a comeback. It would take more than the behavior of a bird to bring home to us that the carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere during the extraction of coal and other fossil fuels was so drastically altering conditions for life on Earth that the future had become not only an uncertain place but a frightening one.

In Aristotle’s time, the Canary Islands lay beyond the Pillars of Hercules, at the end of the world, and those who didn’t have the time to make the pilgrimage to Delphi, Olympia, or Claros relied on the observation of birds and the interpretation of dreams to provide them with oracles in their day-to-day lives. While dreams in those days were divine prophecies—the medium of choice for communications from higher spheres—in our culture they are at best expressions of the fears and desires buried deep in our psyches. I knew from years of analysis that such fears and desires can be almost impossible to tell apart, so I was unimpressed to hear that dreams about falling into pits have, not very originally, been linked to the discovery of having a vagina rather than a penis.

There can be few concepts that so closely interweave human fears and desires as the Anthropocene. Man-made, like all words, whether grace, or Gaia, or greenhouse gas, the term Anthropocene was coined to give a name to the world-dominating part played by our species in the drama of life on Earth and, at the same time, to sanction the rapacious work of industrial societies as human nature. The dilemma surrounding the concept of the Anthropocene is an old one: there is no such thing as unbiased description. With every word we utter, with every metaphor or idiom we use, we are shaping the world. The trouble is, as experience has taught us, that, despite their far-reaching consequences, life’s tipping points and turning points are often revealed to us only with a certain time lag. Moments that seem innocuous enough as we live through them later realize their fateful and inevitable potential. Historiography, whether concerned with one’s own life or with the use—or abuse—of the Earth, doesn’t identify the linchpins until it’s too late.

When did this desperate state of affairs begin? With the extermination of the saber-toothed tiger in prehistoric times, or with the introduction of the steam engine in the early modern era? With the Mesopotamian accounting system which invented stockpiling and the concept of ownership, or with the Neolithic or Industrial Revolution? With mining, that most unfathomable of arts? Or with one of Fritz Haber’s inventions? But which? The one that led to the production of artificial fertilizer and the feeding of billions, or the one that enabled enemy soldiers to be wiped out with toxic gases in World War I? It was good old Haldane, the secret hero of this essay, who braved the front as a human canary in May 1915 to identify the lethal vapors at the Battle of Ypres as chlorine gas, and immediately invented a makeshift gas mask to protect against them. It all linked up. No creature is imaginable without its environment. Or as Haldane put it, rather more soberingly, in his 1935 study The Philosophy of a Biologist—having progressed with admirable logic from breathing specialist to environmental physiologist:

The fact that the life of an organism extends over its environment implies that the lives of different organisms, although they are distinguishable, enter into each other’s lives. There is no spatial separation between the lives of different organisms, just as there is no spatial separation within the life of any one organism.

When I tried to tell Sibylle about it that evening, she waved me away. “Exactly. It wasn’t a weapon, it was a bag,” she said, somewhat incoherently, “and the whole of early history, with its bragging myths about hunting and killing, was a masculine, heroic, imperial narrative that’s left us screwed.” Some of the Post-its lay scattered on the floor. She had discovered Ursula K. Le Guin and decided to transfer Le Guin’s “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” onto the epic arc of her series plot—a story without heroes, blending character and background; a Where’s Waldo? picture effortlessly spanning multiple universes. I was convinced, but had no idea what it meant for my writing—no idea how to convey such obscure mycelial webs in language, in a script that depends on gaps to create a readable text, in a grammar that, however sophisticated, tends to rigidity. The genre question also reared its head again. I’d never been much of a fan of that bourgeois, individualistic genre that is the novel, but that hadn’t stopped me from devouring its prototype, in which a white man on a desert island reenacts a rather questionable version of the processes of civilization, slavery and all. It came back to me that Robinson Crusoe’s main problem was not hunger but loneliness, which he attempted to ward off by taming a young parrot before turning his didactic attention to a member of his own species.

I tried to envisage a world without birds. I tried to imagine the horror, the total quiet, the end of the world. Could silence be loud? Could it spur humans to action? In Silent Spring, a book by another heroic scientist, the marine biologist Rachel Carson, the silence of birds is an urgent warning sign, a call for retreat, and the book, although it makes no mention of pit canaries, is often credited with kick-starting the environmental movement. First published in 1962, it frames birds’ silence as both reality and metaphor—and the absence of birdsong as the salient feature of a wasted region that has been hit by “a strange blight”:

It was a spring without voices. On the mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens, and scores of other bird voices there was now no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh.

Carson leaves no doubt as to who is responsible: “No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of new life in this stricken world. The people had done it themselves.”

The chapter is called “A Fable for Tomorrow,” and Carson’s narrative trick is to warn of acute disaster by writing as if it has already struck, and then proceeding to interpret the signs. It was, I thought, the reverse of a strident alarm. The silence of the birds made sense as a signal only if someone had previously heard them sing—only if their absence was noticed. For something to be missed, the memory of it had to be alive.

Carson’s study, an appeal written with both literary sensitivity and scientific vision, was certainly heartening proof that by influencing legislation, books could prevent the extinction of species and save the unmetaphorical lives of countless creatures. Laws and regulations are, in the end, also a kind of literature, with interpretations debating their value, application, and validity.

In 1969, seven years after the publication of Silent Spring—and five years after Carson died of breast cancer—a hearing held in Madison, Wisconsin ended with a breakthrough in the ban on DDT, a toxic, carcinogenic and non-biodegradable substance harmful to vertebrates as well as insects. Not only did scientists at the hearing attest to a sharp decline in the robin population following the use of DDT, and to the universal contamination of human mother’s milk with the pesticide; representatives of the US Department of Agriculture admitted in court that—unlike Haldane—they hadn’t tested for toxicity, but simply accepted the information provided by the manufacturers.

That same year, Kurt Vonnegut addressed an audience of physics teachers at the American Physical Society. Vonnegut, who had himself studied chemistry and German—an interesting choice in the late thirties—spoke of his doubts about the usefulness of the arts, “with the possible exception of interior decoration,” and went on to present what he called “the canary in the coal mine theory of the arts”:

This theory says that artists are useful to society because they are so sensitive. They are super-sensitive. They keel over like canaries in poison coal mines long before more robust types realize that there is any danger whatsoever.

The most useful thing I could do before this meeting today is to keel over right now. On the other hand, artists are keeling over by the thousands every day and nobody seems to pay the least attention.

It is unlikely that Vonnegut wore a canary-yellow suit to give this speech; he was probably wearing one of his fawn jackets—another color to be found in the canary breeder’s palette. Nor did he keel over at any point in the course of his address. But he did tell his audience of the urgent and seemingly simple advice that he liked to give young people to warn them out of the deep, dark pit:

When I speak to students, I do moralize. I tell them not to take more than they need, not to be greedy. I tell them not to kill, even in self-defense. I tell them not to pollute water or the atmosphere. I tell them not to raid the public treasury. I tell them not to work for people who pollute water or the atmosphere or who raid the public treasury. I tell them not to commit war crimes or to help others to commit war crimes.

The main character in Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse-Five, also published in 1969, is quite definitely a canary. But rather than keel over, Billy Pilgrim comes “unstuck in time,” because he is too sensitive to cope with the atrocities he witnessed during the bombing of Dresden. In a plot that jumps wildly back and forth, disregarding all chronology, Billy is abducted by extraterrestrials, who here assume the implausible—but no less surprising—role of deus ex machina, that higher power that traditionally intervenes at the last minute to untangle a snarled narrative or avert disaster. Because the horror has already happened.

In a frame story, the narrator, who is evidently closely akin to Vonnegut, writes repeatedly—like me in this essay—of what can be described only as a failure. The failure in his case is his powerlessness to narrate, and thus communicate and share, his experiences of the war—although he does at one point claim that, as “a trafficker in climaxes and thrills and characterization and wonderful dialogue and suspense and confrontations,” he has “outlined the Dresden story many times.” When at last he gives the manuscript to his agent, the agent is disappointed that it’s so short. The narrator defends himself:

It is so short and jumbled and jangled, Sam, because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again. Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is except for the birds.

And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like “Poo-tee-weet?”

I found it heartening that Vonnegut allowed the birds to survive the massacre. My mind still refused to grasp that the story wasn’t about us—that Homo sapiens wasn’t the hero of the drama but only a blurry character blending into the background, doing what birds do when they make contact calls. The canary bird was me, and it was calling to me, reassuring me that I still existed, in a present whose precarity was not only identified as such by science but brought to life by art—a world full of midpoints, X factors, and unsettling beauty; a web of unconditionally interdependent life.

I was exhausted. A lack of knowledge didn’t seem to be the problem. The Club of Rome had just published a new report which, fifty years after its infamous diagnosis on the limits to growth, came to a verdict that left me reeling. “The biggest challenge in the world today,” I read, with faint dread, “is not climate change, biodiversity loss, or even a pandemic. It is our collective inability to distinguish between fact and fiction.”

I shivered.

It had dropped cold overnight. In Sibylle’s hall, logs were stacked in front of a now bare wall. All the Post-its had vanished. Her gas supplier had shut off the gas and she had ordered a wood-burning stove on the internet, which would, with any luck, be delivered before the frost set in. Come winter, we would do what Aristotle had done when he was cold: we would make a fire. And perhaps we would tell ourselves a story that mattered.

 

Postscript

Months later, at the end of a warm winter with little rain and even less snow, the environmental organization Greenpeace published a report identifying three hard coal mines in Upper Silesia as the cause of the Oder fish kill. These mines dump the highly saline water that is a waste product of coal mining into the nearby tributaries of the Oder and the Vistula. Polish law places essentially no limit on the chloride levels of industrial wastewater discharged into rivers. It is safe to assume that the disaster will repeat itself.

 

Judith Schalansky, born in Greifswald in former East Germany in 1980, is an acclaimed writer and book designer, and the publisher of a prestigious natural history imprint in Berlin. Her books, including Atlas of Remote Islands, the novel The Giraffe’s Neck, and the International Booker Prize and National Book Award nominee An Inventory of Losses, have been translated into more than twenty-five languages and have received numerous awards. This essay won the Crespo Foundation’s Wortmeldungen Literaturpreis 2023.

Imogen Taylor is a London-born, Berlin-based literary translator. Her translation of Sasha Marianna Salzmann’s Beside Myself was shortlisted for the 2020 Schlegel-Tieck Prize and the 2021 Helen & Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize. Other work includes How We Desire by Carolin Emcke, Promise Me You’ll Shoot Yourself by Florian Huber, and Two Women and a Poisoning by Alfred Döblin.

The lines of Aristotle’s Poetics in this essay are translated by Imogen Taylor from a German edition: Aristoteles: Poetik, translated and edited by Manfred Fuhrmann, 2010.

Child Reading

Photograph by Timmy Straw.

In childhood, books have a smell. Not an actual smell: I’m not talking about the sweet mustiness of a Knopf hardcover circa 1977, or the creaking sawdust odor of a Bantam paperback. I mean that, in childhood, books have the hunch of a smell: the way, later in life, you might suspect that each thing has a noumenon, a reality independent of our apprehension of it. In childhood, a given book’s particular smell—though it might actually smell, like snow, of absolutely nothing—emits a kind of hovering mysterious message: here is something you can give yourself up to, it seems to say; here is something you can give yourself over to, and at the same time never quite reach. In this sense, in childhood, books are more serious than they’ll ever be again.

In childhood, you find a book in the library, or you’re handed one—in my case, my reading program circa 1990 was shaped by a saturnine and pinchingly generous librarian named Cynthia, who noted our shared inclination toward what I might now call optimistic gloom and gave me, at the age of eight, a children’s series on environmental disasters: Chernobyl, Bhopal, Three Mile Island, Love Canal. It was Cynthia—alarmingly old, nimble, with fraying hair, and whose face seemed to shatter when she smiled (a wonderful moment in itself, though it was scary to see her face reassemble into its usual austerity, like watching the breaking of a water glass in reverse on VHS)—it was Cynthia who gave me Robert Cormier’s 1977 YA novel I Am the Cheese.

The cover of the book was promising, I saw. It showed a boy, such as I both thought and wished I was, maybe twelve years old, with a wistful, reluctant look, big ears, and sharp elbows; he’s in the gray wash of a prison cell with cracked concrete walls, a wood pallet for a bed, a key (weirdly—why the key?) on a peg behind him. And I had a hunch of the book’s smell, certainly: it was something contiguous to the feeling of an fall morning, and to the horizon looking south, out of town; contiguous, too, to the brackish salt sense of future adulthood, of workdays and money fear, of someone, someday, mysteriously wanting to kiss you. In it I sensed some shadow of the future—as adulthood is, for kids, both inevitable and impossible; as childhood can be intuited, when you’re a kid, as the long shadow of your own adult body cast back onto your child present. I Am the Cheese contained a message for me, I felt. I read the whole thing in one go, one morning in the back of our Datsun Maxima, headed to the mountains, probably, the Oregon Cascades, with the ever-present smell of cut grass and gasoline in the car from my father’s landscaping work; I read the whole thing as though goaded to—whipped on like a dog in a pack of dogs behind the musher of the book.

It’s a paranoid book, and desolate—written, I now understand, at the end of the Vietnam War, around Watergate, the grimmer surfaces of world order newly visible in the first hints of Cold War melt-off—and it was hypnotizing. I dread descriptions of plot, blow-by-blow accounts, but suffice it to say here: I Am the Cheese involves a family swept up in the nascent witness protection program via the father, a small-town-journalist-turned-whistleblower to the violent excesses of government corruption. The book unfolds through the consciousness of the family’s only child, a quiet boy named Adam, and it takes place in the fall, in New England (itself a thrill: me, who had never left Oregon except to visit, once, Fresno). And it is threaded through with references, tightening my ignorant heart to anticipation: references to jazz; to Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel; to petty shoplifting; to the perpetual haunting of the father; to shabby motels, diner hamburgers, pay phones; to conspiracies, details, forms of love and betrayal organizing like ice crystals just behind the surface of things.

It turns out, however, that this anticipation of the heart feels quite different in reverse—rereading the book this month, I was unnerved to discover how many fantasies, desires, impulses that I had thought my own were in fact informed by it. I saw that I had, for instance, unconsciously interpreted a number of difficult and very real events in my own family through its fictions; I saw too that several people with whom I’ve fallen in love share a glimmer of psychic resemblance to the girl Adam loves. I was unnerved to discover, in short, that a YA novel could be the source of a greater portion of my instincts and reflexes than seemed at all appropriate; that it could make desirable—so desirable, in fact, as to seem outside of desire—a whole array of emotional tendencies: toward shame, melancholy, irreverence, estrangement. As in: hi-ho, the dairy-o, the cheese stands alone. 

In childhood, you find a book in the library, or you’re handed one; and how you find the book, and when, and precisely where you are when you read it—these things matter enormously. The quality of the light, the mood at home, the facts of material circumstance, so normalized as to be both total and unconscious—in childhood these are as much the experience of the text as is the text in itself. The book and the situation in which you read it form a single weather, and this weather contains you—it enfolds you, as Walter Benjamin writes in the fragment “Child reading,” “as secretly, densely, and unceasingly as snow.” It’s easy to think, then, that there is some aspect of yourself still sitting, mittened and suited up, strangely warm, in that same falling snow; still turning the pages, even now. And to think, too, that this is true no matter how ridiculous, or desolate, or paranoid, or merely competent the book—in the light or dark of your adult present—now appears. Or maybe it’s this: that your hunch of the book’s smell—its noumenon, if I may—is in some strange way bound up in an awareness of your own.

 

Timmy Straw is a poet, musician, and translator. Their poems “Brezhnev” and “Oracle at Dog” appear in the Review‘s Winter 2022 issue, no. 242.

Citroën Cactus

The French Cactus. Photograph by Holly Connolly.

“Okay, fine,” I said, when we saw the price of train tickets from Paris to the wedding we were attending deep in the South of France. “I’ll drive. But we’re getting a Citroën Cactus.” I had not driven in Continental Europe before, and had, by quirk more than anything else, only ever driven a succession of Cactuses; first my mum’s, then a different rental, then, finally, my own.

The Cactus is essentially a four-door, five-seat car, but one of deeply muscular proportions—when I sent a photo of my gray model to a friend who could barely believe that I drive, let alone own, a car, he replied, “It’s, like, a 4×4?” Then there is my favorite feature—unique, as far as I know, to the Cactus—a strip of “Airbumps” lining each side. Said to act as a buffer on collision-prone Parisian streets, they make the car look a little like it’s kitted out in a North Face jacket. Cactuses are not flashy, nor are they known for their reliability. Say the word Citroën to any man who is invested in cars and he will shake his head and start talking about “those French cars and their electrics.” But I have never loved anything because it is functional.

So if I was going to drive for hours on the wrong side of the motorway, I wanted a Cactus. Europcar, however, had other ideas.

“What is this car?” I said, when I saw the word Renault on the rental forms in Europcar’s Charles de Gaulle office. “We selected the Citroën Cactus.”

“Yes,” said the stiff-haired woman behind the counter. “But we have upgraded you. You’ll see: this is a much better car.”

“The key.” She handed me a strange, sleek object that could have come from an Apple Store. There was no metal key attached to it. It was far too light in my hand. “And remember to photograph any scratches that we haven’t marked up.”

Brave face. “It’s the future!” I said, brandishing the keyless key as I returned to Zsófia, who stood with our suitcases outside the office. “We’re looking for row F28.”

“Oh! My mum had this car,” Zsófia said as we arrived at a nondescript white car. “She loved it. It’s a good car.” It looked small—much smaller than the Cactus. Inside, it was worse. We were seated so low down that we’d be looking up at every other car, crammed in tight together; Zsófia’s knee was touching the gear stick.

There was no ignition. Of course there wasn’t, because there was no key. So then what.

There were many buttons. One, apart from the others, read “Engine Start Stop.” Was that it? Start the car by pressing a button? Slowly, very slowly, I pressed it. Nothing. It was like sitting in one of those coin-operated rides for children they have in shopping centers, but you’ve run out of money.

“I’ll call my mum and ask how hers worked,” said Zsófia. The phone started ringing, she was put on speaker—the connection was terrible. “The clutch?” Zsófia was saying. “The button and what with the clutch?” I felt really hot. I started trying to get the windows down. “How the fuck do you even move the mirrors in this thing?”

I know now that all I had to do was hold down the clutch, then press the on button and the car would start. But this felt too illogical to even bother to try: How would it know I was pressing the clutch before it was even turned on?

“No,” I said. “It’s too much. This is all too much. This is not a real car.”

Once, driving back to the airport at the end of a family holiday, my dad pulled over onto the hard shoulder of the Spanish motorway and, screaming all the while, threw a suitcase full of John Grisham novels into a field. I felt like that. “Zsófia,” I said. I was trying not to catch sight of myself in the rearview mirror. “Let’s take the suitcases out of the boot.”

I marched back to the office, straight to the front of the queue—“It’s urgent”—and slammed the fake key down on the counter. “I saw a Cactus in the parking lot,” I said. “Give it to me.” The woman looked up. We had been awake since 4 A.M. I did not look nice. “Of course,” she said. “One moment.” Ten minutes later, driving out of the parking lot high up behind the wheel of my Cactus, I was Thelma and Louise. I was ready. I was home.

Driving, as anyone will tell you, is about muscle memory. It is also about overriding your own fear of the car’s capacity to kill, until being at the wheel becomes something maybe like the thrill of holding a loaded gun. Or it is for me, at least. I was taught to drive twice. First at nineteen, then again at twenty-seven, both times by a sturdy County Tyrone man called Jim. I felt younger the second time. Timid and illegal in the driver’s seat and horribly aware that it was I and only I who was operating thousands of pounds of steel and aluminum—that I was responsible for everything that happened.

When it clicked, and I can’t explain it any better than that—it was a thing that happened overnight—there was nothing like the sheer feeling of control. The meditative gravity. Very few things that I do in my life have any real stakes; driving is one. But for me, for the magic to work, there needs to be a certain symbiosis with your car: you have to trust it. And so I got in my Cactus.

Later, after we had gotten a flat tire and the only mechanic within an hour’s drive still open in rural France at 6 P.M. on a Friday had taken pity on us and offered to change it for free, I texted my brother a photo of the Cactus being repaired. He wrote back: “Do you have some sponsorship deal with citroen cactus haha.”

 

Holly Connolly is a writer based in London and Belfast.

An Illegible Quartet and Choreographic Research

Dietmar Rabich, “Kreta (GR), Rethymno, Fortezza, Theater,” Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

In recent months I have been listening to Benjamin Britten’s String Quartet No. 2 (1945) and trying to describe something, anything, about it. Describe seems too weak a word when there exist long formal analyses of the piece: nevertheless, analysis seems easy, and description much more difficult.

It might be a vocabulary and grammar and syntax issue: I’m not sure we have any of those for music like this. Mervyn Cooke says of the first movement: “The overall effect … is highly unusual.” This is the reassuring resignation of a music writer.

***

Roland Barthes: “Music, by natural bent, is that which at once receives an adjective.”

Yes, the Britten quartet is highly unusual. Its key is C major. The rare moments when we in fact get this chord feel like a brief truce, a favor granted to us to snatch a breath of familiar air. Otherwise it moves relentlessly through accidentals and harmonies. Through time signatures, too: but the beat is constant, almost innocuously present and obvious: you could do a spin class to the propulsive beat of the scherzo. It defies us to find anything else amiss: here is a pulse, what more could you want?

***

The piece is illegible, I think. Britten seems to be reading aloud, quite fluently, from something we did not recognize could be read at all. It is—if not untranslatable—at least untranslated.

***

Leonard Bernstein said of Britten’s music: “There are gears that are grinding and not quite meshing, and they make a great pain.”

(Insert compulsory mention here of Britten’s homosexuality and pacifism, and resulting social alienation. Insert compulsory countermention of his enduring, loving, mutually supportive thirty-nine-year relationship with the tenor Peter Pears.)

***

Britten composed the quartet a few months after visiting Bergen-Belsen and playing with Yehudi Menuhin for liberated prisoners of the Nazi camps. He had spent the first part of World War II in the United States, and upon returning to the UK registered as a conscientious objector. He spoke little about the trip to Germany, but Peter Pears said much later that it colored everything Britten wrote afterwards. When the quartet premiered, the proceeds were donated to a fund for survivors of the 1943 Bengal famine, a humanitarian disaster caused by the criminally exploitative and neglectful British colonial government, with Winston Churchill at its head.

The quartet is also described as robust.

***

Other adjectives employed by music writers for the quartet: austere, uncanny, misty, magnificent, sly, dark, tantalizing, restless. I have to admit it sounds particularly good played on these days of frantic autumn wind.

***

There are dry disgusted bits and straining tender bits. Sometimes the quartet seems to forget about beauty for minutes at a time—gets taken over by defiant cruelty and cheerful dread—and then suddenly remembers it in a shaft of damp sunlight. (In this way it is faintly recognizable as “English.”)

There are bizarre bits and frenetic bits and grinding determined bits. It feels something like trying to outrun a migraine, which I can do sometimes with caffeine and a cold shower and keeping busy but which is always a set of blind tactics against my body’s favorite mystery. Hard to hear the sharp C major chords as anything but the migraine’s triumphant stabs of pain.

***

The quartet was officially composed as a tribute to Henry Purcell: the last movement is a set of variations called a chacony (or chaconne), an old dance form. Variations demand a specific attention, each time: find the theme, then find the variety. After the theme is stated, there are twenty-one variations. Try counting them!

One variation has a cello line like a man turning over in his sleep. Another sounds like a methodical sorting, arraying, and cataloguing of our souls in all their various parts. Another is a jolly death train chugging out of a station.

At the end of the final variation it rolls back into C major and declares, I told you I knew the way. All the passengers are green and shivery with motion sickness, but nevertheless, we are home.

—Rosalind Brown, author of “A Narrow Room”

 

Partly legible notes scribbled while engrossed in the dance performance choreographed by Moriah Evans at Performance Space New York in the winter of 2022 are my only documentation of Remains Persist. This was a durational affair lasting four hours in which nine performers, acting as either research subjects or examiners, carried out a series of timed, highly structured tasks. These tasks corresponded to two types of research, which Evans, in the show text, refers to as “remains studies” and “resignation studies.” Both happen through movement in real time: the former consists of “excavating the body” to locate the remains of something lodged within, and the latter results from accepting “something inevitably present but invisibilized in the body.”

Before being assigned a type of study to conduct, each performer was queried by others playing the role of examiners, who asked the “subject” questions centered primarily on their body’s relationship to memory, control, and narrative of the self, among them:

Is the body disciplined?
How did the self educate the body?
Is part of your flesh in someone else’s flesh?
Would you describe the self as chaotic or well-maintained?
Does the body feel happy?
What does the body have to say right now?
What stuff are you always carrying with you?

While answering these questions, the subject performed movements that seemed to radiate from the inner organ or body part being targeted by the study. Throughout the performance, various commands were repeated, with variations, by alternating performers: Initiate speech. Resume your organ work! Dance with and from the remains! After each round of tasks, the performers would swap roles and start over again.

Rapt as I was for the show’s entire duration, I’ve never been more aware of my expendable condition as an audience member. Performers were actually at work, plumbing their physical and psychic interiors, and they seemed concerned with being witnessed by the audience only circumstantially. Poet that I am, I tend to be skeptical of seductively vague catchphrases concerning “writing from the body.” Here, this happened to be exactly what was unfolding before me. The deliriously vivid speech that the performers produced on the spot as part of these studies stunned me. This was unrepeatable language opening up their bodies, transforming them before our eyes, bestowing on them an obdurate, unique, all-too-human dimension. This was ecstatic writing produced by bodies in a trance whose defenses were pulverized, revealing the terrifying truth of an innermost language—proof that the self is as much written and underwritten by the body as the other way around.

Of course, Evans didn’t seek to control the audience’s comings and goings. People could move around, leave the theater and come back later, but in the program notes, she warned: “The longer you stay, the closer you get to theater.” By the end of the show, the performers had become characters in a play with whom I’d experienced a wide range of emotions instead of virtuosic figures whose stamina and mastery over their bodies in motion I couldn’t but admire. (Although there was that, too.) What they offered was catharsis—the spectacle of the body healing itself through the process of ejecting the stories and verbiage bodies tend to hold. Who said this type of verbal outpouring has to remain relegated to drama or poetry?

Dance with and from the remains! It’s all we can ever do if we let the body celebrate the exuberance of its own ability to move itself and others.

As it happens, if you’re on the West Coast, you can catch the show today or tomorrow at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

—Mónica de la Torre, author of “Flip Side”

The Sofa

Berthe Morisot, On the Sofa, ca. 1882. Public domain.

In the months in which death swooped down on my father, circling on some days, and on others, its talons gripping the bars of the hospital bed where he lay dwindling, I found myself caught, as if on a Möbius tarmac strip, driving between Manhattan, where I live, New Haven, where I was teaching, and Long Island, where my father was dying. His death had been precipitated by a fall, but for years he had been kept alive by a series of red blood cell infusions; these had stopped working, and at almost ninety, one by one his faculties, until then intact, had one by one begun to fail. I had loved my father, but our relationship had not been an easy one, and his dying did not mitigate those complications nor make things easier between us. He was not a man who approved of my many casual arrangements and rearrangements or who participated in the give-and-take of ordinary life. He without fail believed he was right, but he also believed in portents and he was afraid of the dark. When I was a child his father died of the same blood disease that would kill him fifty years later, and early on the morning of that first death a flock of mourning doves alighted on the terraced lawn behind our house. Come and see, my father said. I was twelve, in my nightgown. A decade later, after my grandmother died, my father refused for the next ten years to sit in a darkened movie theater.

That fall, the autumn that turned into the winter of my father’s death, was for me more than usually fraught. A love affair had ended, or hadn’t—all that remained to be seen—but it meant that, as we were not speaking, he did not know that my father was dying, and I did not break our silence to tell him. A beloved dog, belonging to my middle daughter, a beautiful white Pyrenees, had developed epilepsy, which had resulted in seizures; during one seizure, the dog had badly broken her leg running into a tree; the decision was to put her down; my daughter, too, had a broken heart. I had an allergic reaction to my COVID booster, which resulted in a virulent raised rash all over my torso. And so on. Every Tuesday I drove eighty miles to New Haven from my house in Harlem, up the Saw Mill past Spuyten Duyvil and over to the Merritt Parkway, where the autumn leaves were so beautiful it was like driving up the bloodstream of a unicorn, and then from New Haven the next day one hundred miles to Long Island, over the Whitestone Bridge. My father had gout; he had pneumonia; he had dementia. He recognized me, or not. Afterward, I drove back over the Triborough to New York. The bridges were sutures over the bays and rivers. At the end of these trips I would park the car or put it in a garage a few blocks away from the house, climb up the stoop, go through the crowded little vestibule where steam hung in the air from the radiator, and then sit, still wearing my coat on the little sofa that was pushed against the wall. Sometimes I sat there for a few minutes, but more usually, I sat there for hours.

The sofa is a family relic. When I was first married, we found, in the attic space of a friend’s old chicken coop, the skeleton of a sofa. We were living in a tiny apartment on West End Avenue; the appeal of the forlorn sofa was that it was small. We brought it back in pieces tied to the roof of the car, and a few weeks later I had it re-covered with seven yards of pale silk twill embroidered with a pattern of pale red stripes and pink and yellow flowers: the choice of a person who has not yet had children or cats. A decade later the sofa moved to a larger apartment overlooking Morningside Park. By then I had acquired three children and a second husband, who conceived a deep dislike of the sofa, which he said was a Victorian copy of an early eighteenth-century design. There was a baby on the way. The brocade flowers unraveled. Laundry piled up on the sofa. When we moved to a drafty house down below the park, the sofa, now shreds, as the children liked to pick at the embroidery, was put between the windows at the end of the dining room until, in a frenzy of domestic renovation, it was shoved against the wall by the front door.

A peculiarity of the house to which we moved is that it is only fifteen feet wide. Sitting on the sofa in my coat, still as a figure hacked from stone, I looked almost directly into a corner formed by the back of another sofa, the curve of the piano, and the dim recess of the fireplace, encased in black slate. A space of no space. Before my father’s fall that summer, I was in Rome, walking almost every afternoon from Monti, near the Colosseum, east through the Porta Pia and then down to the Via delle Quattro Fontane and then to the river. The Italian architect Francesco Borromini, who often built in almost impossible configurations and made the air in those spaces eddy as if awhirl with swallows, was a master of liminal space, of small bivouacs, places to secret the self. Standing across the street and gazing at the church of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, it is difficult to see the entire facade from the street, jammed in the intersection of four streets. The visitor enters through a green door into a tiny elliptical anteroom that shudders open to the small nave; above, an oval full of light, punctuated by embossed diamonds and hexagons, lifts up the space of the church like a kite held aloft by the sky at the end of a string. Often there are students drawing in the pews, their necks craned upward. Sometimes I would sit there, too. My father was not a handy man, but one of the things he did make for me were kites out of newspaper, and I could imagine those kites swooping above the nave as they had swooped and veered over Riverside Park, the newsprint too far away to read. When I first came to Italy, when I was very young, I lived in Perugia, down one of the streets winding from the piazza, and every night we came to sit by the fountain, where at dusk the starlings spiraled above it like a column of ash and then flitted back down to eat the crumbs of bread we left for them.

Each week, I drove in the spiral, north and east and south and west, and returned to sit on the small sofa. As winter drew in, I let myself into the house and sat in the dark. Once in a while the phone rang, and after a time a friend who often called would ask—since I had told him—if I was sitting on the sofa. There is a passage in Thornton Wilder’s play The Skin of Our Teeth in which the prodigal son, Henry Antrobus, returns home after an absence of a thousand years (it is an inventive, excoriating play) and says, “Get it into your head. I don’t belong here. … I have no home,” and his father retorts: “Then why did you come here?” What was I doing, sitting on the sofa?

It is a mystery how things come to belong to us and even more why from certain things it is impossible to part, but I see now, thinking back on that time, that the sofa provided, for me, a kind of liminal space, a place that marked, that autumn, where I was—in between things—between being the daughter of my father who despite our periods of estrangement had towered over my childhood, a man who was soon, so mysteriously, not to be; the sofa, with its plucked-out embroidery, like a bench in a train station waiting room, where I sat, turned to stone, waiting for a silence to reverberate.

 

Cynthia Zarin’s most recent book is Two Cities, a collection of essays on Venice and Rome; a novel, Inverno, and Next Day: New and Selected Poems are forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Knopf Doubleday, respectively. A longtime contributor to The New Yorker, Zarin teaches at Yale University. 

The Art of the Libretto: A Conversation with Thulani Davis

Courtesy of Thulani Davis.

X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X is opening at the Metropolitan Opera on November 3. It originally premiered in 1986 at New York City Opera and is the result of a collaboration between three cousins—Anthony Davis, who wrote the music; Christopher Davis, who wrote the story; and Thulani Davis, who wrote the libretto. I spoke with Thulani Davis on the phone about the niche art of writing a libretto,  how she transformed Malcolm X’s speech into arias, and the many American stories that might be operas.

 

INTERVIEWER

How did you first approach writing the libretto for X, back in 1981?

DAVIS

My cousin Anthony Davis asked me to write one, which he would then set to music for an opera. I had never written a libretto, so my first thought was, Oh my God, that’s a lot of poems. My first problem in 1981 was trying to figure out how much I could do in a day, alongside a full-time job. It was a challenging and deep learning experience. But having done a few of them now, I think it’s a better job for a poet than for a playwright. Poets usually don’t write plays, and playwrights don’t usually write in verse, so writing a libretto is a weird little niche.

I used to read the librettos in the opera house before they had implemented the idea of putting the words on slides or screens above the stage—I was used to trying not to be heard turning pages at the opera. The only librettos I ever read as a result were in English, and they wouldn’t strike you as poetry. They were not felicitous reading. I wanted X to be more graceful. American English is a rhythmic language. Over time it has become more percussive, and more casual, so there are ways to have fun with it while still writing poetry.

INTERVIEWER

How did you think about the use of language in an opera that spans such wide geographic and temporal dimensions?

DAVIS

I really had to refresh and research. I lived through most of the time period that X covers, but the opera starts before I was born. So the first third of the opera is in a language that people were not necessarily using as I was growing up. I talked to a lot of people who knew Malcolm. When I was thinking about writing the character of Malcolm especially, I listened to records of his speeches that were put out at some point after his death. I read books of his speeches. I was a little horrified because he spoke in run-on sentences and you really need shorter lines in a libretto. Nobody’s ever mentioned this to me as a criticism, but I made him a much terser speaker than he really was. I put some periods in there.

INTERVIEWER

Did you always know that opera was the form in which you wanted to approach the life of Malcolm X?

DAVIS

The original thought that I had was musical theater, not opera. There were works being done around that time that were on very serious topics. They didn’t have fun dancing and choruses, but it was all set to music. Opera fit because it really is an epic story. So many American stories are operas, like gangster stories. They’re epic—The Godfather is an epic. You could write three operas with that kind of material, but people in this culture tend to want to see it as a movie. We have operas in the culture that are taking place all the time. We’re living through one right now. Our language is so singable that there are many more operas that should be created in it. 

I should also say I saw West Side Story live when it was first done. That blew my mind about using American English and New York Puerto Rican English. And I thought, Okay, that’s something to do.

INTERVIEWER

 Were there other early experiences of performance that influenced you?

DAVIS

When I was a teenager, the first time I heard Shakespeare performed live, I was just overwhelmed by its musicality. I thought, How do you do that? When I was about thirteen, I joined the Washington Theater Club because I wanted to take acting classes. It was there that I realized I shouldn’t be an actor. But we did go to see Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas. I got my mind blown because, again, it was so musical. 

Now, as a seventy-four-year-old, I understand why somebody like Dylan Thomas would make you want to write very musically. He’s playing with all the tones and vowel sounds of Welsh spoken word, or English as I heard it, and using all these other sounds that were not like the way I talked. So that’s what I became interested in, and didn’t know what to do with when I was a teenager.  

INTERVIEWER

How did you first start collaborating with your cousin Anthony? What were you working on with him before X? 

DAVIS

We did a show called Where the Mississippi Meets the Amazon. After for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf, Joe Papp wanted Ntozake Shange to do something else at the Public. He came to see a show that she and I and Jessica Hagedorn did, a night of just the three of us doing our poetry at a women’s club in New York. Anthony played piano. Gail Merrifield at the Public was really taken with it and said, “You got to bring them to the theater. They can do this on a theater stage.” So he did, and we hired a band. Anthony was the piano player. David Murray played saxophone. Fred Hopkins was on bass. We did more poems for them, and they structured music around it. It involved a lot of improvisation. It was tremendous fun. That’s when Anthony really started to compose for my poems.

The only reason I said yes to working with Anthony on X is that his musical emotional life is really close to my poetry’s emotional life. Most of the time the music really matches whatever mood I wrote the words in or whatever voice I was writing in. There was one point in time when he wrote music from the opposite emotional framework of what I had imagined, and it really upset me. My intention was a painful sense of loss, having to do with a baby. He wrote a lullaby and it was heartbreaking but very sweet. When I first heard it, I thought, Oh, no, no. But in the end it was so much more moving that way, done in the opposite tone of my intention.

When Anthony wants to ask me to change a word at the end of an aria, he’ll suggest words with the same vowel sound. He’s very attuned to what I’m actually doing, especially to my internal rhyming. Those internal rhymes will happen with notes in the middle of two lines. It makes the words more musical for me, even when I read it out loud to myself. I didn’t even realize for a long time that he was doing that.

INTERVIEWER

I’d love to hear about how you wrote the scene in the libretto when Malcolm goes to Mecca, which includes an extremely moving aria. What were you thinking about when you were envisioning the scene?

DAVIS

This was, as far as I’m aware, the first time Islamic prayer has ever been put in an opera. I was originally going to write a scene in which Malcolm was in Mecca, near the Kaaba, the great Black Cube that people circulate around. Someone who ran a playwrights’ workshop that I had belonged to when I was younger called me up. He said, “I hear you’re writing an opera about Malcolm X.” I said, “Yeah, I’m writing a Mecca scene as we speak.” And he said, “Oh my God, you’re not going there, are you?” He said, “You can’t show the Kaaba. You’re not supposed to photograph or replicate it.”

I thanked him. He hung up, and I was scared to death I was going to do something offensive. But it was such a wonderful accident that he called, because I rewrote the scene so that he is waiting outside Mecca in kind of a dormitory where pilgrims would stay. And all of the other people onstage are going through the motions of morning prayer, so I put the actual morning prayer into the libretto. 

Malcolm had belonged to a religion that was imitating Islam, but had made changes to it for the sake of this idea of black dignity. Elijah Muhammad didn’t want anybody kneeling, and he felt like black Christians were doing plenty of kneeling, and he wanted people to stand up and pray. So in my version Malcolm is trying to get down on his knees, which physically isn’t something he was often doing. He’s watching all the other people and imitating their motions. And instead of being triumphal, his aria is, “Will they accept me? Will they let me in?”

INTERVIEWER

How did you revise the libretto for this run?

DAVIS

There’s an aria in there that’s a duet between Malcolm and his wife, Betty Shabazz, which wasn’t in there before. Just before Malcolm goes off to Mecca, she talks about how the henchmen will come for him. It’s really a scary aria. I wrote it thirty-seven years ago. But at the time, Shabazz and her entire family were coming and sitting in the box with Beverly Sills. There were many more people who knew Malcolm who would be in the audience. And I just didn’t think they could take it. So I wrote another aria, note for note the same. About a year ago, Anthony said, “Can we put the original aria back in?” And I said, “Okay. Yes.”

INTERVIEWER

How did it feel to see X performed again, after all this time?

DAVIS

I went to a rehearsal in Detroit, and there were high school students there. There was one group that was sitting right across the aisle from me in the orchestra, and they were kind of rustling around in the beginning. Then the child Malcolm sings his first aria, called “Mom Help Me,” where he’s trying to get his mother to hear his situation. I just burst into tears—a reaction to it I’ve never had before.

Hearing the eleven-year-old child sing it, I experienced what I felt when my mother died when I was six. I had never connected those things in my life. I was sitting there crying, and it was quiet as a chapel while this eleven-year-old was singing this aria angelically. At the end, the high school students were the first people to come out of their seats to give us a standing ovation. It was very moving.

A friend of mine who’s in his sixties, a very worldly person, came to the next performance. At the intermission, I saw him in the hall and he said, “Okay, that aria totally just screwed me up. It just messed me up.” I realized there was something going on for men in the audience as they heard the delicate feelings of a black male child. It goes into this place that we don’t often see in this culture. We don’t see black men expressing vulnerability or the vulnerability they have as children. It’s like a quiet secret place. To me, that’s what opera should be like. A lot of people go to opera in this country to see operas they’ve heard all their lives and to cry in the same places where they usually cry. 

 

Sophie Haigney is the web editor of The Paris Review.

Dirty Brown Subaru Outback

Screenshot from “2011 Subaru Outlack AWD (Walkthrough).”

My mom liked to call the color, half-endearingly, “baby-shit brown.” I’m told Subaru manufactured vehicles in that particular color for only one year, 2011. The biggest Outback model—far from cute. I wouldn’t say that I lived out of it, though that’s not too far off. I was in college at the time, and my living situation consisted of sleeping on a three-season porch in Colorado Springs. I bought the car in Boston, the summer before my junior year, and threw a futon mattress in the back. By the time I got to my porch, I kept as many clothes in my room as I did in the back of the car. Wherever I slept, the temperature was always the same inside as out, and most mornings I was drowning in high-altitude sunshine.

It was a dirty car. If I was with friends and we stepped out of a bar and saw a dumpster in the parking lot, someone would say, “Look, it’s the passenger seat of K’s car.” Lots of laughs. Once, driving from Colorado Springs to Moab, Utah, half the rear bumper released itself from the frame. I could see it waving through the back windshield like a shit-brown flag against the canyons and red dust. I kept promising to plastic-weld the bumper back together, but a Frankenstein-like stitch job with black tape did the job well enough. As they say: duct tape will fix anything but a broken heart. My friends took to calling the car “Dirty Gerty,” with a flair for rhyme. Why Gertrude? Who knows.

The beginning of the end for Gerty came at high speed. It’s not as frightening as that might sound. Visiting home after graduation, near Boston, I was doing eighty on Route 2 when the car stalled. I pulled over to the side of the road and got it started again. On a side street, after I came to a complete stop, the engine stalled again. It was an automatic. By the time I got it to a garage, I was basically keeping a hand, twist-ready, on the key in the ignition. Blown transmission, not worth replacing, considering the condition of the car. After three years, close to a hundred thousand miles, and nights spent in at least half of the lower 48 (MA, VT, ME, NH, RI, NY, PA, MD, VA, OH, IL, IN, IA, ID, MI, MN, MO, KS, NE, CO, UT, AZ, NM, CA, OR, WA) and five Canadian provinces (NB, NS, ON, PE, QC), I donated Gerty to charity.

Because it was a limited model-color run, I don’t see too many Gertys out on the roads. I saw one this morning. In my chest, I felt that familiar flip, my foot pressing the pedal to the floor, climbing something steep, looking over at a friend, Max or Rowan, Fiona or Hollis, with a sea of cans and coffee mugs at their feet.

 

Kelan Nee is a poet and carpenter from Massachusetts. His poems have appeared in Poetry, The Adroit Journal, 32 Poems, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. His debut collection, Felling, is forthcoming from the University of North Texas Press in 2024. He lives in Houston.