The Paris Review's Blog, page 43

Summer

Tove Jansson, Sommarön (Summer Island), n.d., pencil and gouache on paper, 24 x 15 cm. Photograph by Hannu Aaltonen.

Each summer, when they couldn’t stand the city anymore, when the heat was unbearable, and they had a brief reprieve, they drove for three days to the middle of the country to stay at a log cabin on a lake that her grandfather had built now a century ago and where she had spent summers during her childhood. Her father, her children’s grandfather, and his sister, her aunt, would drive up the eight hours from Chicago and spend a week with them so that they could be around her two small children.

The previous summer, in the week before her father and her aunt arrived, she was able to relax into the lassitude that overtook her from being there, and possibly as the result of the long series of days in the car, with two children to monitor and soothe and attempt to entertain. That summer, after having just finished a period of work, she spent most of the time on the bed in the newer room that the four of them stayed in. She would sit, on the old gray-green sheets, the dog curled up next to her, watching the two children and their father through the window, making notes in her notebook. She sat there amidst the green light of the lake and the surrounding green and sketched out the familiar geometry of the trees surrounding the lake, the fallen trunk the ducks often slept on. She attempted to sketch in pen the white pine tree directly outside her window, the surging upwards of the boughs, like a series of prickly mustaches.

The mother showed the drawings to her oldest in the morning, who became jealous of her notebooks scattered across the bed and demanded her own small notebook, which they later purchased in town, one for both of the small children. She wondered, then and now, if they would remember the sound of their mother’s pen, her illegible scratching that probably looked to them like the branches on a tree.

On their daily morning walk, they picked raspberries by the road, the littlest in wet overalls. Never in these woods growing up had she seen raspberries. She wondered whether it had something to do with the heat and heavy rains of the past years.

In the late afternoon, the sun was bright and hot. She sits with her notebooks and her copy of Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book on the front porch. There were windows on all sides of the cabin. Through the window, she can see the girls and their father at the blue rope swing and hammock in the nested area of the woods near the water, where her oldest has made a fort of long branches. She hears the children lightly fighting, the father’s warning tones. She thinks about the grandmother in The Summer Book, charged with the granddaughter while the father is absent, alone with his work or grieving, or both. The mother is gone, but we don’t know anything about her. The father is allowed to not be present, to also be a ghost.

She wonders whether she is the older woman companion, or the absent father, in this narrative. The children are less on top of her here, they are more free. She couldn’t hear them now. Where were they? Suddenly, they emerge from the woods.

The lake is dark and moves silkily as the afternoon turns into evening. She charts the different patterns. At night the waterlilies recede. She just sits at the window and watches the lake and the trees. In the morning, the lake can be incredibly still, like a mirror. The lake looks dark green, reflecting the trees. Her oldest comes in and shows her a drawing of a bird in her new notebook, without the usual smiling face. She had paged through The Summer Book and seen the illustrations of creatures—mouthless yet expressive. The eldest and her father read the book together during the toddler’s naps.

That morning they had seen a blue heron near the red canoe. It looked like a naked alien, or a dinosaur. It surprised her to see it up close. It took a large shit and flapped slowly away by the time the girls could get to the bedroom window. She ran out with her daughters to look at its excrement, like speckled white paint across the grass. Will you write that in your notebook? her oldest asked her. The other day, she told her mother to write the textures of the lake. Like the brown muck, she said.

How silent everything was—it seems to just be them, like they were the last people on earth. Sunday and no weekenders, save the drunken boaters Friday night trying to see the supermoon. Almost no one on the sparkling lake. The retired town doctor and ER nurse that live across the way come near on kayaks. Sometimes they wave. The curiosity of the boaters that come nearby, like the dreaded pontoon boats. You can hear the voices before you see the people appear, coming closer sometimes to see who is there. She knew they were supposed to wave. They hated these boats, hated the interruptions.

Everything mostly silent except the birdsong The oldest sits at the rocking chair and deliberates on a large and speckled feather from a walk, poring over one of her grandfather’s bird books. Owl or woodpecker, she decides. They counted fourteen ducks on the lake that summer, learning how to fly. The mother sat on the bed looking out at the lake through the window and made spiral drawings of the ripples of the lake. How it can move rapidly.

On their last day by themselves, before their grandfather and great aunt arrive, they sunbathe nude on the dock, her and the two children, the pale moons of their little butts. She knows that all of this solitude will be gone in a few hours. Her peace punctured. The stomping around. The shuffling of slippers. The sighs. Having to remark on everything. But the children are so happy with them, pleased to have family.

There was so much of her oldest, who was then almost six, that reminded her of the child in The Summer Book—her curiosity and independence, but also how she clung to the two elders on the front porch, wanting them to play with her, wanting to chat at them. The aunt, who was actually her great-aunt, had brought a ball of yarn and needles to teach her how to knit, as she had done when she herself was a child. She wasn’t sure exactly what her oldest and her grandfather did or talked about during the hours of nap—she was relieved to have family watch her children.

Tove Jansson, Ensittaren (Recluse), 1935, pastel on paper, 66.5 x 49 cm.

They made sure the grandfather went for a walk down the road every day, sometimes holding the hands of one of his grandchildren, naming the wildflowers on the side of the road.

On the walk, they stopped to check out droppings and animal tracks. The large black mound with fur, acorns and berries in it was most likely Bear. They had witnessed while driving in one day from town two alien creatures running down the road, which they were convinced were wild turkeys. She drew the bird tracks later in her notebook. With the grandfather, they stopped at a burrow on the road and stared at the strange hole, trying to imagine the mysterious creature inside. A badger, the grandfather decides authoritatively. So many creatures that summer. The fox in the middle of the road they saw while driving. The mouse in a cup in the sink. The red ants in sand hills on the road and around the trash can.

On their walk, the grandfather looks with pleasure at the baby pines going up by the road. Red pines and jack pines, he pronounces out loud. He’s allowed a large part of the forest to be cut down by a logging company, which has also carted away the dead trees at no fee. Her father looks at trees the size of small humans and feels optimistic, but it is a source of tension with his youngest daughter, the now middle-aged mother, that continues into the next summer.

The aunt never goes on the walks. She sits there with her large glass of milky coffee and straw and her knitting or her stories on her device. At a certain time she switches to decaf. She has always been an old woman, even when her nieces and nephew were very young, and she was only in her late twenties and thirties, and lived forever in that house in the other city with her other brother and her mother. Now, she takes her mother’s place, and sits at the sliding loveseat that used to be a swing, and watches. The women up at the cabin are supposed to be the ones watching through the windows, while the men and children have adventures in the immediate vicinity. When the lock breaks, the men focus on fixing the doorknob, and the mother is called into being a panopticon for the children. The plant position, to plant yourself in front of children. Like the woman is a tree. Although she was the one to also chase after them.

The next summer, they spent the first week with the grandfather and aunt, which took away the ease she usually felt upon reentering the lake and the woods, their little island. They were already on the rhythm of the others, and the silence was marred by constant voices. For most of the summer her father and aunt would be up there alone, sitting on the newly built front porch—newly built meaning much more than a decade ago—looking at the lake, remarking upon the birds that arrived at the bird feeders, such as the hummingbirds who came to drink the sugar water in the jewel-red feeders. They must name the blue jays, the grackles and the hummingbirds. Oh, look, a goldfinch. Two hummingbirds. They must be hungry.

They didn’t cringe at the increasingly occasional pontoon boats, instead waving at them. They didn’t mind intruders, which they saw as company. Very slow season on the lake, the aunt said.

At the beginning of the week a man came blazing up their road in a vehicle, from one of the more brutish clans that had hunting camps closest nearby, and offered to widen the road, which her father agreed to. As soon as she saw the older, athletic man out there talking to her father, she froze in the doorway and backed away. She was hoping to go out to check up on the children with their father at their swing. The grandfather was uncomfortable seeing the fort that the almost seven-year-old had built over consecutive summers, which he hadn’t noticed. He was worried it was a fire hazard. That was his new obsession—the dead wood, which is why he let the trees get cut down, why he let this man leave a mess of branches widening the road so that, he said, the firetrucks could get in if they needed to. There had been serious fires in this forest in the past, but the recent vigilance seemed to be a response to that summer’s fires in Canada, but not, for her father, mixed with anxiety about warming, which he professed to not believe in, or want to think about. She found herself wondering again whether her father was a good steward of the land.

They settled into a pattern of making meals for the older relatives, of encouraging the grandfather on a late afternoon walk, the children often whining that they wanted to play instead. The sight of their neon t-shirts against the sand road. Wearing the toddler on the mother’s back until she complained and wanted to run after her sister. There weren’t any berries at all on the side of the road this year, at least not yet.

There was an identical feeling to last summer. A palimpsest feeling, especially in the notebooks, the repetitions of the two summers. Only subtle changes. And that everyone was a year older.

She wonders often whether writing in the third person makes the “I” a fiction. Does it make her less real, she wonders?

Because they were up this summer earlier than usual, they kept picking ticks off themselves, which were crawling all over them, including the toddler’s tender arm.

The grandfather wanted them to take him on the boat to see the outlet which bisected his property. He had been fragile since falling the previous winter, outside of a restaurant, and didn’t want to get into the boat without help, which he did, slowly, hanging on to the dock and grunting. The little girls sat in the middle in life jackets. He wanted to see if the pines that were planted were still growing. They were not. Why did you let them cut the healthy ones down? the daughter said again, causing, as usual, prickliness. Well, the loggers weren’t going to just take the dead ones, he said. The water levels are high again, that was good, he said.

When the grandfather and great aunt left, one week later, the children were sad, but the mother was finally able to relax, to look onto the lake, still as glass, with the upside-down reflections of the empty cabins. Then the lake begins to ripple, the double world vanishes. The mother watched the oldest make crayon drawings, her back facing the lake. A house with a triangle roof, just like she was seeing now. Then a large tree. The self is wearing a triangle skirt. The self is as big as the tree. The summery light on the lake. Sweating. Saturated blue and green. Swaying of grasses, ripple of water.

One cooler morning she watches from the window the children with their father on the dock. Pleasure at the red overturned canoe, the red hummingbird feeder, even the red stripes of the flag her father buys every year to hang out there. The water bugs make ripples. The children are trying to catch fish with nets. The littlest captures a small fish. Her net gets caught on the splintered dock. The mother calls out, worried the little one is going to trip. It was like this for her mother, and her grandmother—the women sitting there watching. Her holler matching her grandmother’s. Eventually the toddler falls in the shallow end and emerges weeping, her yellow cotton sweater dripping. The mother runs to help as they pull off soaking wet pants, sweater, shoes, lay them out to dry.

It was perfect weather, after the storms when her father and aunt were here. Not hot. Cold at night, cool in morning. Earlier in the morning she watched two girls make their “pasta soup” in a metal bowl—ferns, weeds, pinecones, dirt, crumbled pieces of bark.

They can walk farther now that the grandfather is not with them. They take a morning walk to the other side of the lake, wearing long sleeves and pants to avoid insect bites, the mother wearing the toddler on her back, the oldest child managing the dog leash, moving to the side of a road when a truck or aging sports car came roaring around. They admired the elaborate signage of the houses more crowded together on the other side of the lake, the solar panels, the modern-looking cabins with Swedish and Finnish flags. Their family, even though they owned most of the lake for a century, did not get nice things. Her father and aunt used the same chipped ceramics that their mother had gotten free in a spaghetti catalogue. When they brought new beds, which they finally did after about forty years, they got the cheapest quilts.

Talking to each other, the parents remarked on this, on the specific sounds of the rustling birch trees, that there are so many less crickets on the sandy road.

When they return, the oldest begs for the mother to go swimming with her, but the youngest needs to be put down to nap. The mother watches the oldest sitting on the splintered, now sunken dock, the bench covered in lichen and bird shit. Her feet in the water, the spirals the water makes. She is waiting with the net, watching for the fish. It surprises the mother, how imaginative and solitary her oldest has become, their secret world here.

In the afternoon, after the toddler’s nap, they finally took out the canoe as a family. The oldest complaining she was not allowed to row, but the mother wanted to, like she had as a child. The children sat in the middle of the boat, in their life jackets, exclaiming over spiders and large ants on the floor. They traced the edges of the property, towards where she had remembered there was a beaver dam when she was a child. Apparently, there was a new dam, in the outlet, which they rowed towards to try to see. Another source of tension between the mother and her father, the grandfather. The father was letting one of the neighbors, who all hunted, try to shoot the beavers. The two adults remarked that in the past the outlet used to be dry, all muck. Now there were so many lily pads. And the ducks sheltered there. It comes as a shock, like a pain, seeing again the thinning trees. What must the other inhabitants of the lake think, she now wondered, to have their view so altered?

When they got back, almost as if to shake herself of this melancholy, she stripped down out of her overalls to her underwear, delighting and surprising the children milling about the shallow side of the water. Later, all three of them naked, as there was no one around, she watched the children climb the overturned boats on the shore, playing pirates. It was like they were the only people in the world. A joy watching them be free, like a relief.

Tove Jansson, Rökande Flicka (Smoking Girl), 1940, oil on canvas, 41 x 33.5 cm.

 

From the exhibition catalogue for Houses of Tove Jansson, on view at Espace Mont-Louis in Paris through October 29, 2023. 

Kate Zambreno is the author most recently of The Light Room (Riverhead, 2023) and Tone, a collaborative study with Sofia Samatar, published next month from Columbia University Press.

The Future of Ghosts

Image of a ghost, produced by double exposure, 1899. Courtesy of the National Archives and Wikimedia Commons.

There’s a theory I like that suggests why the nineteenth century is so rich in ghost stories and hauntings. Carbon monoxide poisoning from gas lamps.

Street lighting and indoor lighting burned coal gas, which is sooty and noxious. It gives off methane and carbon monoxide. Outdoors, the flickering flames of the gas lamps pumped carbon monoxide into the air—air that was often trapped low down in the narrow streets and cramped courtyards of industrial cities and towns. Indoors, windows closed against the chilly weather prevented fresh oxygen from reaching those sitting up late by lamplight.

Low-level carbon monoxide poisoning produces symptoms of choking, dizziness, paranoia, including feelings of dread, and hallucinations. Where better to hallucinate than in the already dark and shadowy streets of Victorian London? Or in the muffled and stifling interiors of New England?

Ghosts abounded—but were they real?

Real is a tricky word. It is no longer a three-dimensional word grounded in fact. Was it ever? We are living in a material world, but that is not our only reality. We daydream, we imagine. Everything that ever was began as an idea in someone’s mind. The nonmaterial world is prodigious and profound.

You don’t have to be religious, or artistic, or creative, or a scientist, to understand that the world and what it contains is more than a 3D experience. To understand that truth, all we have to do is log on. Increasingly, our days are spent staring at screens, communicating with people we shall never meet. Young people who have grown up online consider that arena to be more significant to them than life in the “real” world. In China, there is a growing group who call themselves two-dimensionals, because work life, social life, love life, shopping, information, happen at a remove from physical interaction with others. This will become more apparent and more bizarre when metaverses offer an alternative reality.

Let me ask you this. If you enjoyed a friendship with someone you have never met, would you know if they were dead? What if communication continued seamlessly? What if you went on meeting in the metaverse, just as always?

Already, there are apps that can re-create your dead loved one sufficiently to be able to send you texts and emails, even voice calls. And if you both entered the metaverse in your avatar form, there is no reason why the “dead” avatar couldn’t continue. Truly, technology is going to affect our relationship with death. In theory, no one needs to die. In theory, anyone can be resurrected. We can be our own haunting.

Humans are terrified of death. Will technological developments allow us to avoid its psychological consequences? Or will it give us a new way to go mad? By which I mean to detach from the world of the senses into the metaverse?

And does it matter? If Homo sapiens is in a transition period, as I believe we are, then biology isn’t going to be the next big deal. We are already doing everything we can to escape our biological existence—most people barely make use of the bodies they have, and many would be glad to be freed from bodies that are sites of disappointment and disgust.

Perhaps we are moving steadily toward the nonmaterial life and world that religious folks have told us is the ultimate truth. This time around, we won’t have to die to get there—we join the metaverse.

There are plenty of horror stories about evil spirits impersonating the newly dead. I wonder if spirits of all kinds will infiltrate the metaverse? I am being playful here, but how would we know if a being in the metaverse had a biological self or not?Why wouldn’t ghosts hack the metaverse? Surely it will feel like a more user-friendly, at-home space to them. The metaverse exists, but at the same time, it occupies no physical space. Ghosts exist (maybe), but they have no physical being. Tangible reality is getting old-fashioned.

Once the hard boundary between the “real” world and other worlds comes down—and that’s what the metaverse intends—being alive matters less. Once the physical body becomes optional, where does that leave ghosts?

A ghost is the spirit of a dead person. An avatar is a digital twin of a living person. Neither is “real.” A haunted metaverse. Why not?

In a sense, the Plato sense, materialism is about the hard copy. It is impressive. But it is still a copy.

In other words, we are living in Toytown, and we mistake the substance for the shadow. The substance isn’t what we can touch and feel—and we know we are not actually touching or feeling anything; that’s an illusion. Substance may not be material at all.

Shakespeare put it this way, in sonnet 53: “What is your substance, whereof are you made / That millions of strange shadows on you tend?”

I don’t want to get into Shakespeare’s Neoplatonism here—which is what those lines swirl around—but I do want to get into the fact that computing power and AI have left multimillions of us wondering what is real, in the old-fashioned sense of the word. This will only get faster and stranger as we enter the metaverse; a virtual world with digital twins in our world—or the other way ’round, if you prefer.

“What is your substance, whereof are you made?” This could be addressed to a human. Or a transhuman. Or a post-human. Or an avatar. Or a ghost.

 

This essay is an adapted excerpt from Night Side of the River: Ghost Stories, out from Grove Press tomorrow.

Born in Manchester, England, Jeanette Winterson is the author of more than twenty books, including Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, 12 Bytes, and The Passion. She has won many prizes including the Whitbread Award for Best First Novel, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the E. M. Forster Award, and the Stonewall Award.

Remembering Louise Glück, 1943–2023

Louise Glück’s studio in Vermont. Photograph by Louise Glück. Courtesy of Richard Deming.

Requiem for Louise

We were supposed to meet Louise Glück in New York, at the end of September, to see Verdi’s Requiem at the Met. My husband and I wanted to see Tannhäuser. Louise wanted to see the Requiem, and she was insistent. We decided to hear both, and I was tasked with procuring the tickets.

Louise clearly did not have faith in my ability to achieve this, and I received a number of anxious emails in the lead-up to the day on which individual tickets became available for sale. Would the seats be any good? What would they cost? And, once I had finally purchased the tickets: Now, where are we going to eat?

All summer long we exchanged emails in anticipation. Listening and listening to recordings, comparing our favorites. Louise told us about attending productions as a young girl, becoming enchanted with the music, the drama, and the atmosphere of opera. “I’ll restrain myself from singing along,” she said.

As the day of the concert approached, Louise reached out to say she was feeling sick and might not be able to go. Then it was official; she had to cancel her trip. Massive deprivation, she called it.

My husband and I went; a lovely friend filled in last-minute. The chandeliers sparkled. The audience coughed. In the darkness of Lincoln Center, the music shook us with its beauty and drama. It’s a huge choral work—too large for a liturgical setting and often undertaken by opera companies—with passages of real terror (and the biggest bass drums you’ve ever seen) and passages of quiet, despairing supplication.

Exaudi orationem meam:
ad te omnis caro veniet.

Hear my prayer:
all earthly flesh will come to you.

As I listened to the chorus, and watched the translated titles before me, the poetry of the piece struck me. Even though I’d read those lines over and over, this music made the poetry sensuous, felt.

Louise waited until after the weekend to tell us that she had been diagnosed with cancer the day before we had intended to see the Requiem. “I hadn’t wanted to tell you immediately and spoil the concert,” she told us.

It was the last we heard from her. I can’t stop thinking now about how much I wish she had been able to hear the Verdi. I can’t stop thinking about the terrible irony of having to miss a requiem in order to die.

Also, how like the text of the Requiem Mass her own poetry could be—lines of crystalline beauty, simple in utterance but heavy and resonant with moral authority and mortal truth. True lyrics, what Helen Vendler has called that “genre for literary aria,” with the full range of human interiority: entreaty, wrath, confession, and prayer.

Little soul, little perpetually undressed one,
do now as I bid you, climb
the shelf-like branches of the spruce tree;
wait at the top, attentive, like
a sentry or look-out.

Like Verdi’s Requiem, her poems are somehow both enormous and intimate. Not stuck there on the page, but always a voice, ethereal and alluring, that rises like music up from it.

                                    Let’s play choosing music. Favorite form.

Opera.

                                    Favorite work.

Figaro. No. Figaro and Tannhauser. Now it’s your turn:
sing one for me.

—Richie Hofmann

 

“And the Sun Says Yes …”

1. Louise was a connoisseur of the specific. I don’t think I ever had a dinner with her at which she didn’t ask for a different wine after sampling a glass. She didn’t like Orson Welles’s movies because she didn’t like the way he furrowed his brow. Her favorite gift that she received from me and my wife was either an elegant pair of scissors or four teak sticks for stirring salt in a cellar. Had I ever called her a connoisseur of the specific in her presence, she would have pointed out that it wasn’t wrong, but was far too general.

2. In September of 2002, Yale’s Beinecke Library and Whitney Humanities Center put together a festival for all the living recipients of the Bollingen Prize at a packed church on the New Haven Green. So many people attended that a live feed was projected in the church next door, and that was standing room only as well. The first reader was John Ashbery, whom I had not seen give a reading before, and he had been the brightest star in poetry’s firmament for almost my entire life. He read well—I forget what—and when he finished, for some reason, instead of returning to his seat on the stage established at the front of the church he drifted down to the pews and plopped himself next to Penelope, Robert Creeley’s wife. The next to read was Creeley himself, who was in part the reason why I had become a poet—he had been my teacher and was in fact why I’d dragged my beloved to live in the snowy, snowy environs of Buffalo for three years. Bob read beautifully, with a stolid, craggy elegance.  He too drifted down to the pews, afterward. The stage seemed noticeably emptier. It was Louise’s turn. At that point, I wasn’t that familiar with her work. Back then, I was perhaps too ensconced in a polemical need to be edgy and avant-garde. I had heard she was okay as a reader, though not great. Someone told me she had pioneered the Iowa “uptalk” reading style that dominated poetry in the nineties. On the other hand, my beloved—one of the organizers of the festival—had risked driving from Buffalo to Rochester one night a few years before, in the middle of a blizzard, to hear Louise read. They’d closed the thruway before they even hit the Buffalo city limits, however, forcing them to turnaround. Nancy barely made it back.

Louise stepped to the podium. I picked up a program and began to leaf through it distractedly. Then she began to read “October”: “Is it winter again, is it cold again.” From that first line, she leveled the room in a way I have never seen a poet do before or since. The poem was—and remains—a revelation. Not Romantic, not stormy or angsty or moralizing—it was resolved, insistent, fierce but focused. Her voice enacted what language could do for us, what it could do with us.

3. My favorite photo of Louise is one of those “live photos” that captures motion just before and just after the picture is taken. We are crossing the historic Annisquam Bridge in Gloucester, Massachusetts, that spans four hundred feet across Lobster Cove. It is nearly dusk, and the late-August light drifts into shadows among the sailboats and pylons.

Nancy, walking a few feet behind us, must have called out. I step out of frame. Turning toward the camera, Louise’s face, for a moment, becomes wide, surprise-filled smile. She then glances off-screen and the sly skepticism creeps in at the corners of her eyes. She asks, “Now what are we doing?”

4. Now, memory: she steps forward again, onto that wooden bridge. I hear her voice—softer, then softer. She is saying something to Nancy, something about rain or light or wine. Soon, too soon, she’s on the far shore. We’re here. Now what are we doing?

—Richard Deming

Hello. It’s Louise.

“Hello.” Pause. “It’s Louise.”

Her phone-machine messages, back when people had phone machines, began that way, with an enjambment. Her name came as a comic redundancy after the surprisingly deep and gravelly greeting, which of course was unmistakable.

Part of what was funny was the slight suggestion of apology in her admission that it was she calling—again, as it were. She knew—and knew her listener knew—that what was coming would involve a demand of some kind, flimsily disguised as a preference or proposal. She didn’t call just to find out how you were.

She did, however, want very much to talk to you, to see you. In fact, it was so important that the day, the hour, and the place of your dinner had to be established weeks and sometimes months in advance.

Before she signed off, there would be a few more pauses and pivots, a few more line breaks.

***

Louise’s need to control her calendar was expressive of her acute awareness of passing time and her will to fight it.

Time was the engine of her extraordinary will, her drive to say something permanent in poetry, to win all those prizes. Behind her resolve was a certain terror. She knew that choices matter in life and on the page because we have only so many of them. She saw us all as moral creatures obliged to make the best of our days, however best might be defined. Most of us fail at what we do with our time. She was determined to be different and so she was.

Age, the seasons, families, memory, death—maybe time is what her poetry is all about? The slow, daily emergency of the clock.

***

While time is a central theme of Louise’s poetry, timing is basic to the form of it. Timing is a matter of syntax: how sense unfolds in language. Syntax is everything in Louise’s poetry, where there is a good deal of complex sound-patterning, but no rhyme or meter and little of what might conventionally count as lyric song. She was allergic to these commonplace features of traditional verse, which stunk of inauthenticity, mere performance. (That attitude puts a sort of time stamp on her work, locating her beginnings in the late sixties.)

Her own technique heavily relies on enjambment and the grouping of lines in stanzas. These provide a visual structure for the drama involved in speaking.

Not stage directions exactly, but a way of measuring language through which we hear her weighing what she is saying while she’s saying it. Testing its truth, her reader judging with her. Thought opens in the beat between one line and another. The white space of the page is part of the poem. Part of the sound of it.

***

Only two American-born poets have won the Nobel Prize for Literature, Louise and T. S. Eliot. Eliot, who wrote lyric poems as dramatic monologues, fruitfully complicating the relationship between poet and poetic speaker, seems to me the crucial model for Louise’s poetry.

In an essay on Eliot written many years ago, Louise declared, “I read to feel addressed.” It follows that she wrote to address a reader. Psychoanalysis was one of the deep sources of her creativity. I don’t mean psychoanalytic theory or motifs, although there is plenty about parents and children and their tribulations in her poetry. I mean psychoanalysis as a speech situation in which one person addresses another with truth at stake, and in which words, our untrustworthy words, are the only way to get at it.

“My preference, from the beginning, has been the poetry that requests or craves a listener,” Louise writes in an essay about her literary education. “Let us go then, you and I”: Louise makes the same invitation to the reader, but she is hungrier, more ready to admit her hunger, to place her demand, than Eliot. She says craves.

***

For a while, Louise pretended not to read on a screen or do email, at least officially. Eventually she made friends with her iPad, and she became a rapid responder. I can’t replay those phone-machine messages from long ago, but I can reread her emails and texts. She tended to sign off “XL.” Extra-large? Of course not. Don’t be silly. Excel, she was saying. That was what she was driven to do. It is also the challenge she left to the rest of us. How like Louise to turn her embrace into an imperative.

—Langdon Hammer

 

Richie Hofmann is the author of two books of poems, A Hundred Lovers and Second Empire. 

Richard Deming is the author of five books, including This Exquisite Loneliness, Day for Night and Art of the Ordinary. He teaches at Yale University, where he is the director of creative writing.

Langdon Hammer is the Niel Gray Jr. Professor of English at Yale and the author of James Merrill: Life and Art.

Real Play

Autumn, Sims 2. Courtesy of Lucie-Bluebird Lexington. Licensed under CC BY 2.0.

I played The Sims a lot as a preteen. It was the only computer game I ever liked that didn’t involve horses, and it lived at my dad’s house, where screen time was not limited. My friend Diana had it, too, and she and I played together sometimes, in the small office connected to her parents’ bedroom. Diana liked the design element of the game, and would use cheat codes to make her Sims very rich, then build them big houses. She chose balconies with glass railings, and reupholstered her Sims’ furniture. 

That part was not interesting to me. My Sims were not allowed to use cheat codes. Instead, they had to succeed within the terms of my own life, or what I imagined it would be as an adult: they had to get jobs, learn skills, and build relationships. They spent time learning to cook, mostly by reading the cookbooks on their bookshelves. They paid bills that arrived in the mailbox, and redid their kitchen floors only if they made the money on their own. Everyone got a smoke detector, and I worked hard to help them keep their Need meters—Hunger, Bladder, Social, Fun, Energy, Hygiene, Comfort, Environment—in the green. If not given instructions, Sims will do their best to handle these needs themselves, electing to use the bathroom or play on the computer. But I liked to do it for them, sending them to the fridge if they were hungry, to bed if they were tired, and to another Sim if they were lonely.

At my dad’s, I started with the first edition, The Sims, which came out in 2000. That one had only four angles available, each ninety degrees apart, in which I could look down and out (and through the walls) of my Sims’ square houses, at three possible levels of zoom. The game was very gridded: furniture could only sit within blueprinted squares, never diagonally. Cockroaches, when they came, crawled in circles within one square only. The cheapest flooring option was black-and-white linoleum tile, which I sometimes used for my entire house, and on which the cockroaches would spread, in a grid, if I didn’t kill them. 

The Sims 2 came out in September 2004, when I had just started fifth grade. I think I got it right away—I remember I was excited—though I’m surprised, now, that I had access so early to a game that I mostly remember in terms of where I could make my Sims WooHoo, their term for sex: bed, hot tub, shower. They were very demure, and would go under the sheets, or underwater, or behind the door, and then become pixelated. Still, though: there was a lot of WooHoo, and eventually a lot of Try for Baby, which would, in The Sims 2, sometimes lead to infants, then toddlers. The toddlers grew into children, whom my adult Sims could Help with Homework. Eventually these children became teenagers, and got boyfriends, girlfriends, pimples, and the desire to run away. 

Sims, like people, live in networks of relationships. For the Sims, these were scored on a range of -100 to 100, based on formal ties (Family Member, for example) and past interactions. Certain interactions became possible if a relationship was particularly negative—Fight, Declare Enemy–but I didn’t want my Sims to have enemies. I wanted them to have Friends, then Crushes. I wanted them to Fall in Love–symbolized by red hearts, which would spin around their heads–and I wanted them to Get Married, succeed in their careers, make babies, and become good artists. I liked to have them Practice Painting, and then, when they were good enough, just Paint. I liked to see what they made, and sometimes I put their art on their walls, to improve their sense of Environment.

I would note that I was playing this game for six or seven hours at a time on a big black laptop of my dad’s, at his kitchen table, on otherwise undefined Saturdays and Sundays. Without imposing any intention on my younger self, I can say, factually, that I was engineering for my Sims what I considered to be normal family lives. I wanted them to live near beautiful trees, and to have gardens. I wanted them to be good artists, and I wanted them to not die until I said so. Because of this, I obsessively saved my gameplay, even though it took a minute every time. The unexpected could always happen. My Sims could get eaten by magic plants, which looked like cows. Aliens could abduct my Sims and return them pregnant. Sometimes Death, a sort of nonplayable character, would show up at my door and come in to eat a sandwich, if he didn’t have other plans for me or a member of my family. There were professional dilemmas, which sometimes seemed rigged against good outcomes. If anything went wrong, or did not support the healthy and expected development of my Sims’ growing families, I wanted to be able to exit the game and return to the last save. The gameplay didn’t have a sense of fate: lightning almost never struck twice, and with my consistent effort, my Sims could usually live the lives I wanted for them. 

I don’t seem to share this gameplay experience with most former Sims players I know. Usually, when The Sims comes up, people talk about the ways they would kill theirs. The classic was to put them in the pool, then delete the ladder, and watch their Energy deplete as they swam in circles and waved at us, through the screen, asking for help. I did not do this. 

Instead, I planted aspens, Japanese maples, and willows on my Sims’ properties, which I think of, often, when I see them real life. Socially, I still think in terms of clickability: who feels clickable to me, and what will become possible once I’ve decided to click. Sims can only initiate certain interactions (Make Out, WooHoo, Fight, Confess to Cheating) if they already have a certain degree of connection and history with another Sim, as designated by the points system, and occasionally by descriptors such as Acquaintance, Just Met, Best Friend Forever, or Going Steady. The interacted-with will respond positively or negatively to another Sim’s social advances based on their prior conception of that Sim, or the strength of their relationship. At my recent birthday party, everyone felt extremely clickable: I saw people I wanted to interact with, and the interactive possibilities, once clicked, tended to fan out into the positive. I was confident that whatever interaction I chose would likely go well and that I would leave with a very full social meter, as well as a positive memory.

Memories were a new feature for The Sims 2, and they existed in unweighted timelines. Burned Toast could be beside Fell In Love, or Got Fired, or Burglar! While these were important for my Sims’ personal histories, I, too, was obsessed with documenting my Sims’ lives. There was a Camera feature, available to the player, which would allow me to capture moments that felt, to me, important. Typically these were first kisses–which I would frame near the willows, getting multiple shots of the same moment from different angles—and weddings, and playing with babies. I especially liked when they fed wedding cake to each other. It didn’t matter that I could repeat any moment, or that the gestures were always the same: documenting these moments felt urgent. These photos were stored in an album only I could see, and which I never looked at. No one looked at it: my Sims didn’t even know it was there. They didn’t get cameras, or if they did, I don’t know what they did with their photos. I don’t know why I did this—social media wasn’t a thing yet, and I didn’t like photography in real life. Now I’d like to see those albums, if only as an archive of what I thought, at twelve, would eventually be worth remembering. The photos probably do live on a disc in a box somewhere in my dad’s house, so I guess it’s possible I could find them, which I might try to do.

If that disc is there, the Sims I made and knew so well are there, too, unchanged since we last interacted. I gave them up around seventh grade, without any ceremony. One day I told my dad that I felt I had to stop playing: that eventually my Sims’ lives would start to substitute for my own. Thirteen going on fourteen, I could see that I was approaching the point in life where things were supposed to happen to me. If I continued to play at being other people, I might not figure out how to do anything myself. To WooHoo, for example: I might never actually WooHoo if I spent so much time taking dirty pictures of fake people WooHooing, especially since they went under the covers, and I couldn’t see anything at all. 

I told myself, though, that if I ever became seriously injured, ill, or confined to bed for an extended period of time, I could download The Sims again. I figured there would be nothing better to do, or that I would at least have earned it—via my discomfort, or enduring whatever had happened. Fourteen years later, when I was twenty-seven, I was suddenly facing two months of lying down. I downloaded The Sims when I got home from the hospital. 

By then, we were onto The Sims 4. I started my Sim off the same way as always: she looked like me, and though there were new personality factors to manipulate (rather than ten-point ranges, such as Grouchy to Nice, I now had to choose descriptors), I tried to make her someone I wanted to be. I think I made her Creative, and a Genius, and potentially Good, though I might have chosen Bookworm instead. When she got to her new square house, I made her Read cookbooks, then Find a Job on the computer. She paid her bills, sometimes after she left them on the floor. She did not have a roommate, and she wasn’t trying to have kids, at least not immediately. When she had the time, she Practiced Painting until she was good enough to just Paint. If she had the energy, she Practiced Writing, and eventually, she began to Write Book. Her aspirations were not so explicitly career-based as they had been when I was younger, which I guess is nice, though she did struggle, having moved to a new place, to make friends. 

It turned out, for me, that The Sims was a terrible game if I had to Go To Work, Pay Bills, Cook Dinner, and Clean Counter in real life. My Sim was always getting hungry, burning toast, and stomping her feet. Often it took so much time to Go To Work, Sleep, and Eat from the plate she left on the counter that she’d start to smell bad, and would take a shower without me telling her to. None of these things boosted her Fun need meter, and the things I did in my free time, ostensibly for fun—Practice Writing, and Paint—weren’t fun to her, at all. Her Fun meter was always in the red, and she’d give up on her writing and painting before I told her to. I ended up buying her a nice bookshelf—for +5 Fun points, out of a possible ten—but she didn’t think reading was fun, either. She left her books on the floor and started waving at me with a thought bubble over head, inside of which there was a television. 

I didn’t want to buy her a television, because I didn’t have a television. I told her to Go to a bar in town, but she didn’t have Fun there, either. She did invite a non-playable character home, but when they got there, she didn’t seem very interested in him, and instead played on her computer. The NPC didn’t seem to mind. He spent the hours until dawn picking up her books from the floor and putting them in her nice bookshelf. Then he went home. 

I didn’t take any pictures of my new Sim’s life. It seemed both boring and exhausting, the way she tried to take care of herself while also maintaining a social life, not to mention a creative practice. None of her art was very good, and I didn’t get to read her writing, which she didn’t like to work on. She was always so tired. I guess I could say it was an affirming experience; I was already living the life I would want to design; there wasn’t anything I really felt I needed to explore virtually, or at least nothing that was available via this Sim, who really complained a lot. I ended up returning the game within forty-eight hours, which meant I got a refund. After that, I used my computer to watch a lot of television, and read a cookbook Diana had mailed me, to be nice, since I was injured. She’s an interior designer now.

 

Devon Brody is a writer living in Nashville.

I’m High on World of Warcraft

The city of Thunder Bluff in World of Warcraft. Screenshot from the game.

It was about four in the morning when the warrior decided to leave our group. He’d started weeping, apparently, into his mic. I didn’t have a headset, but the other members of the group did, and they detailed the player’s breakdown in the chat. He couldn’t take the pressure, they said. He was sorry. He’d let us down. He was tired. He was blubbering now. He left the group and opened a portal to Stormwind, his home city. The rest of us waited a few minutes, trying to think of a way to replace the most important member of the group before giving up, surrendering the hours we’d spent working our way through Uldaman, a subterranean dungeon filled with cursed Dwarves. I stood up and took two steps away from the computer to lie down in bed and stare red-eyed at my character on the screen, which was now lit by the late-summer sun breaking through the bedsheets nailed vaguely across my windows.

I think about World of Warcraft nearly every day, but considering the millions of people who play the game, I’m not alone. Launched in 2004, WoW is the most successful MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) ever. At the height of its popularity, in 2010, the game had more than twelve million active subscribers and continues to be the most played MMORPG today, almost two decades after its release. The game is so well populated that whole books have been written on the game’s sociological aspects and in-game economy. The objective of the game, if you could say there is a single objective, is to increase your character’s level. You do this by completing quests, raiding dungeons, and fighting in player-versus-player (PvP) combat, as well as engaging in the literally hundreds of other tasks and story lines the game contains, all of it taking place within the vast world of Azeroth, with each player’s character being a combination of a race (orc, troll, night elf, et cetera) and a class (shaman, mage, warrior, et cetera).

I got the game for my thirteenth birthday, in March of 2005, and somehow managed to play only occasionally until that summer, when I became hopelessly addicted, often playing for upward of fourteen hours a day. The addiction lasted through the summer, during which I rarely bathed, ate, left the house, or did anything but play WoW. By fall my room was littered with rotting food and unwashed clothes, and bedsheets covered my windows. I didn’t consider myself to be addicted, but dedicated. I cherished the fact that I was capable of spending my time doing just one thing. My favorite moment of the day was when I wandered through the silent house at dawn after a fourteen-hour session, impressed by the feeling of remembering what it felt like to walk. I’ve rarely been happier than I was during that time.

Most of my time in Warcraft wasn’t even spent questing, but simply “exploring” the game—walking my character across Azeroth’s forty distinct in-game zones while listening to music or imagining my own story lines. I spent whole days walking through the World with an almost obsessive fascination and appreciation for the game’s atmosphere: its infinite pixelated horizon, its endlessly looping orchestral music. Often I would just stand still and rotate the in-game camera, admiring the infamously simple graphics—which were mostly swaths of a single texture with plants or rocks drawn on them—or jump my character around to admire the way their armor moved. Once the game map had been completely explored, there were various tactics that players could use to get to unfinished or hidden areas, some of which were accessible only by a technique called “wall jumping,” wherein a player would jump directly at a wall for hours until they found an invisible hole that allowed them into the unpolished world beyond, making exploring in the game a literally endless endeavor.

Sometimes I took a rare break from the game to watch videos of other people playing. There were thousands of videos with millions of views, many of them produced by Chinese players; the most popular being of rogues engaging in PvP combat, displaying their ability to kill others with a single strike. The best videos didn’t show just PvP footage, but created entire story lines around their characters through graphic cutaways and text overlays (often in Chinese) that created a narrative of their character simply being a good person in a bad world, or being a hopeless romantic, et cetera, all of it tied together with a soundtrack of My Chemical Romance and Evanescence songs, and interspliced with footage of them effortlessly and viciously killing other players.

My computer became a kind of cathedral that I built and rebuilt over the years, constantly replacing the graphics card, memory, and CPU in order to see the game more clearly, to enter into the world as much as possible. I adjusted the user interface (the buttons and elements on the screen that control the character’s actions) almost daily, tinkering with it in an attempt to put as small a barrier between myself and the world on the screen.

But it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t enough to simply play the game or to optimize my computer. So during the summer of 2007, while I was deep into the game’s first expansion pack, The Burning Crusade, I started playing the game on drugs.

Up till that point I’d occasionally played after smoking weed and had tried to play on shrooms, before realizing that the high was too intense to play the game properly. But that summer, inspired by reading Erowid.com’s Experience Vaults forums, on which people recount their own drug usage in great detail, I started experimenting with taking minor amounts of the cold medicine Robitussin, which in larger doses apparently produces the strongest psychedelic experience one can have, due to the high levels of dextromethorphan it contains. On Erowid, people documented drinking so much Robitussin (“Robotripping,” as they called it) that they literally tripped themselves into other universes and were able to transcribe full conversations that they’d had with aliens. I never went that far, instead limiting myself to about five times the suggested dose, or about ten tablespoons, which I swallowed in between taking bites of a banana to try to stave off the revolting Robitussin taste. With my sensory sensitivity at a peak, I would wrap myself in a blanket and sit down in front of the computer in the evening, then play until dawn, when the luster of the drugs wore off with the rising run.

Robitussin was like a new computer, a graphics card in itself. On a mild dose it feels as though you’re always about to become high, as though you’re permanently “coming up.” But you never do, and instead remain in a constant state of mild highness that consists mostly of a euphoric body high coupled with vision that is both blurred and slightly enhanced, as though you’re looking at the world through tears. The new outer-space-jungle areas of the expansion pack were slurred, and swam lucidly on the screen. The acts of killing, interacting with another player, or even just walking through the atmosphere seemed like miracles. I played on drugs intermittently that whole summer, then stopped before the beginning of the school year. The only other time I played on any sort of drug was during the winter of 2008, while playing the Return of the Lich King expansion pack, when I sniffed raw peppermint leaves in order to keep myself awake longer, a method, I’d read, that Beethoven and Voltaire used.

After that winter, my playtime staggered, and by the end of 2009 I’d stopped playing completely. I tried to play again in 2014, but couldn’t justify spending my time questing in a game, as opposed to working in an increasingly gamified reality. When I think back on the game, I think of the World—of the rocky red terrain of Durotar, the rocky beige terrain of The Barrens, or the green jungle terrain (with trees) of Stranglethorn Vale—and the game’s humor. There’s just no real-life corollary to spending half your day trying to converse with a player in China, from whom you’ve just purchased in-game gold with real money; raiding a dungeon with forty other mentally ill people; or having a three-hour argument with a literal child on the in-game chat, all while sitting at your desk. Sometimes I’ll try watching a gameplay video, but I won’t be able to stand it for more than a couple of minutes, as I’ll find the changes made to the game —the endless amount of new areas, classes, and races, and the game’s vast oversimplification—genuinely depressing.

 

Patrick McGraw is the editor of   Heavy Traffic .

Against Remembrance: On Louise Glück

LOUISE GLUCK SMILES AS SHE READS HER WORK TO AN AUDIENCE IN THE HOME OF NORMAN MAILER, NEW YORK, NEW YORK, MAY 24, 1968. PHOTOGRAPH BY FRED W. MCDARRAH/MUUS COLLECTION, VIA GETTY IMAGES.)

Before I can think how to begin, she rebukes me: “Concerning death, one might observe / that those with authority to speak remain silent …” (“Bats,” A Village Life). 

Flip the pages, to “Lament,” in Ararat, and once more, a reproof:

Suddenly, after you die, those friends
who never agreed about anything
agree about your character.
They’re like a houseful of singers rehearsing
the same score:
you were just, you were kind, you lived a fortunate life.
No harmony. No counterpoint. Except
they’re not performers;
real tears are shed.

 Luckily, you’re dead; otherwise
you’d be overcome with revulsion.

Those two lines—a joke that hinges on being dead—make me smile. A reflex, as I am also crying. And I think, as I often have, that Louise Glück wasn’t given enough credit for being a funny poet. She is more commonly characterized as an investigator of death. Some find her poetry too skewed toward the grave; I wonder if we are too afraid of the fact that breath is the only thing keeping us out of it. To speak of her as if her death is the culmination of the work, though, is to ignore her attention to death’s vast and fecund opposite, rife with pleasure, with suffering, dominated by silence though it produces much speech in defiance: living, in the present continuous. To live is the verb it’s easy to forget you always embody. I stand. I walk around my bedroom. I worry the cuff of my gray wool sweater. I touch the petal of an Easter lily that opened just this morning. I remember that Louise prized completeness and detail when it came to natural things, so I walk back to my desk. On my laptop, I search the Latin name, Lilium longiflorum. I smile again: my futile attempt to draw closer to her becomes a joke that hinges on death. 

Back to the book. My past self has drawn a line in blue ink beside this stanza: “Death cannot harm me / more than you have harmed me, / my beloved life” (“October,” Averno). Is there anything else to say? 

***

My first conversation with Louise was a total failure. We both thought so. 

You have to understand that I was in some essential way a feral creature, with that skittish hideaway instinct that comes from practicing survival. Though technically “homeschooled,” I was basically an autodidact: I’d spent years reading my way through the library. Since early childhood, my father had terrified and beaten me. When, a little older, I started to resist his control, he also deprived me of language, keeping me in my room for days without books. He read my journals and punished me for my thoughts. At nine, I’d started thinning myself compulsively. Then not just eating but talking became so difficult that I often could not answer direct questions. By twelve, I rarely spoke. My adolescence was silence, secret-keeping, desperate longing for a different future without the ability to imagine any future but death, which I expected would come to me young. You can see why I loved Louise’s poetry. 

When she called me, I was eighteen, and had just been admitted to Yale, where she taught from 2004 until her death. I was at a gas station in Lancaster, Ohio, as far from poetry as anywhere could be. An unknown number, Cambridge area code. The admissions office, she said, had sent her the poems I’d submitted with my application and asked her to talk to me. Neither of us, fortunately, ever remembered exactly what was said, but my terror of talking, and talking to her, specifically, made me even less articulate than usual, and she, awkward in the face of awkwardness, faltered. “I thought you hated me,” she told me later. When I applied to her workshop at the beginning of my first semester of freshman year, I hoped she wouldn’t remember me. She did. I became her student.

She fascinated me. Her ability to extemporize in whole paragraphs. Her delphic certainty, a stated preference for the definite article, alongside an almost religious commitment to doubt, her sentences chained together by small temperings: “a kind of,” “as if,” “it may be that,” “I think,” “I believe.” And then—bang—a proclamation I’ll remember till I, too, no longer have memory. During office hours, I peeked at the labels of her clothes, which fell in luxurious folds of silk and wool and cotton and leather, black or gray or a dark green, and memorized the names of designers I looked up later. And I studied her mobile face while she read a poem: in those shifting expressions, a theater of perception and judgment before the lifted hand brought down the pen. 

Sometimes, when she looked at me with a cool speculation or, other times, with a softness I named to myself as pity but did not resent because it seemed the gentle hand one experienced sufferer offers another, I felt as if I were watching her describe something to herself, the something being me, and sometimes she did describe me to myself, her clarity having some of the heartlessness of a real oracle: “You love your mother and hate your father, and you hate that your mother still loves your father.” The intensity of my desire to be seen matched the intensity of her seeing. She recognized my docility as a facade (obedience, never a quality she respected), and stoked the fire that burned it up. At least on the page, speech, choked by my father and then by myself, surged forth at her invitation—no, her urging—to speak. 

“You have the makings of a real poet,” she told me that semester. Excited, as if she had made a rare discovery. I couldn’t meet her gaze; the idea overwhelmed me. But it took root in my mind and, shyly, slowly flowered into a dream and then a pursuit. She often thought in oppositions: “real” pointed to its negative, “false,” which was a betrayal of the art. (In the same way, she often described a poem or a line as “alive,” and though I do not remember her ever saying something was “dead,” I heard the unspoken problem.) “‘Poet,’” she wrote in an essay about her own education, “must be used cautiously; it names an aspiration, not an occupation. In other words: not a noun for a passport.” In her encouragement there was a warning, and a goad: You must do the making, Elisa, and the making goes on till you end. 

She rejected many of my lines (“inert,” “hopelessly conventional”) but she never rejected my thoughts, no matter how cruel or deviant or strange. Often she anticipated the logic or the emotion, as if it were natural, at least comprehensible. In front of her, to her, for the first time in my life I could say anything.

***

The first time I read Louise’s poetry, I was twelve and sitting on a concrete berm at a gas station in northern Ohio. Nearby, my mother was making clouds of steam by pouring cup after plastic cup of water into the van’s radiator. My brothers and sisters played tag in a triangle of scrawny grass. Although my family didn’t often buy books (expensive), for some reason we’d recently visited a bookstore, where I chose The First Four Books of Poems (four-for-one appealed to my sense of value). I’d read poetry before, but it was this particular encounter with poetry, at dusk in high summer surrounded by the smell of gasoline, that remade me. Louise thought it funny—it is funny—that both of my introductions to her happened at Midwestern gas stations. 

Her books, now piled beside me, encompass something like six decades of moods and situations. As a poet, she is both fixed and fluid. Change, I believe, was one of her deepest interests and drives. “As soon as I can place myself and describe myself—I want immediately to do the opposite thing,” she told an interviewer. Each book responds to some aspect of the previous. The distinctiveness of her lines—the powerful clarity of her thoughts—obscures, I think, that she is a master of personae, and it’s possible, at least from Ararat onward, to understand the books as both lyric and dramatic. The poems are made so subtly it’s easy to miss that subtlety, like grandeur, is one of her modes. The lines people often quote, such as the closing couplet of “Nostos”—“We look at the world once, in childhood. / The rest is memory.”—resound because of their daring assurance. But that conclusion requires the preemptive undermining of the previous lines: “Fields. Smell of the tall grass, new cut. / As one expects of a lyric poet.” (Again, she never gets enough credit for being funny.) 

An abiding preoccupation, which compels the changes from poem to poem, voice to voice, book to book, is an anxiety about creation. Sometimes it emerges as an anxiety regarding form: finding a sufficient one, dealing with the consequences of fixing anything in words, which necessarily holds it still. Sometimes it is the fear, lurking or stated, that there will never be another poem.  (“I’m talking too much,” she said to me recently. “But you’re our great poet of silence,” I teased her.) The greatest anxiety, however, concerns whether the thing created—the poem—will do justice to creation itself. 

When I learned she had died, I was sitting on my bed, a red notebook in my lap. In that dazed rebellion that’s grief’s first incarnation, I wrote, You wrote my life, and then I corrected, You wrote all over my life, and then I corrected that correction: You wrote all through my life, and now I correct with a line I know I’ll correct again till I’m dead, too: You wrote me into my life. 

“Sentimental,” I can hear her saying, with a grimace.

***

In the years since I met Louise as a person, not only as a poet, I’ve felt as if we were bound by an affinity that did not always emerge from the best parts of either of our souls. That we both casually use the word soul is one piece of that affinity. But there was also a sharpness, a darkness, an ironic eye turned on the self and the world—these tied us together as much as the appreciation of absurdity, the frustration with language, the fear of silence, the devotion to art, the passion for sensory experience and for passion itself, in its manifold forms. Manifold, a word that I associate with her, because its most perfect use may be in the first poem by her that I read, “The Drowned Children”—who are forever lifted in the pond’s “manifold dark arms.” 

Louise had so many friends, so many students, and I suspect that many feel an analogous sense of affinity. Her perceptiveness made her, I think, unusually capable of forming intense connections. It could also (here, Louise, I offer a counterpoint, a harmony) make her unkindness especially devastating. 

When I look back, I trace what feels like her love for me. She read. She listened. She critiqued. She encouraged. She nagged. Her faith in me exceeded my faith in myself. She supported me during a psychiatric hospitalization, and after my brother’s death. In turn I tried to love her, to understand her, to live, and to write.  

After I heard she was sick, and before I heard she died, I copied down a passage from Camera Lucida, in which Roland Barthes rebels against the application of any category to his specific grief over the absence of his specific maman: “what I have lost is not a Figure (the Mother), but a being; and not a being, but a quality (a soul): not the indispensable, but the irreplaceable.” My first, flailing, childish thought when she told me that she was ill: I can’t do this without you. I still am not sure what I meant by this (poetry? life?) but I know what I meant by you. You, Louise, who would hate this whole thing. 

I last saw her—how can “last” really mean “last”?—at the end of August, when I spent a few days visiting her in Vermont. For much of that time we talked as I drove her through a landscape of a solid green fortified by the wild rains that had flooded Montpelier, and spoiled her garden. In a labyrinthine antique store, we sat for a couple hours in a matched pair of damasked armchairs, discussing the history of our relationships with beauty (in people, in objects, in the world). In Plainfield, I inched the car forward slowly enough for her to point out every place of past significance, and outside the house where she wrote The Wild Iris, we talked about our terror of how love works on the lover, how pathetic it makes you. When I began the long drive back to New York, we were in the middle of many conversations, which we said we’d pick up soon, next time we saw each other, and the next time, when we would finish our conversations, then I would buy her dinner, for a change, a really excellent dinner, appropriate to her gourmand taste. As I write this, the intervening time disappears. We are sitting across from each other at a dining table. Sunset behind her, which means night is already behind me. The silence that follows a bout of laughter has settled on us. The wine she chose is almost gone. She asks, “Do you think anyone would expect us to laugh as much as we do?” And because I am again answering, I know that she was right, in “Lament,” to conclude that “this, this, is the meaning of / ‘a fortunate life’: it means / to exist in the present.”

 

Elisa Gonzalez is a poet, fiction writer, and essayist. Her debut collection of poetry is Grand Tour. 

What Lies Beyond the Red Earth?

Carle Hessay, Image of the Hollow World, 1974. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

A few years ago, I read a lecture by Chinua Achebe given in 1975, later published as an essay entitled “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.” While I greatly respect Achebe’s novels, his essays have often left me wanting. His voice reminded me of my grandfather’s, the intonations of a proud Nigerian man, rightly aggrieved at the dysfunctional state of his country, his continent, and its indefatigable life in the face of rampant, extractive exploitation by imperial powers. I feel that Achebe’s frustration can leave blind spots in his arguments, and the lecture in question—an outright denouncement of Conrad’s famed novel and its canonized status as “permanent literature”—was, I thought, an example of this. Achebe considered Conrad’s novel explicitly racist in its themes, in its depictions of the “natives,” and in the gaze of Marlow, Conrad’s primary protagonist, who Achebe believed wasn’t much removed from Conrad’s disposition.

Achebe questions the meaning of writing to our society, or the meaning of any art for that matter, when it can be so explicitly racist and go mostly unremarked upon by fans and critics alike, regardless of how beautiful the turns of phrase or evocative the depictions of the lush, sweltering alien landscape. I have a complex relationship with Conrad’s novel and agree with some of what Achebe put forth, but his argument felt incomplete. Achebe’s disgust is understandable, but I think one can see Conrad was also getting at a lack of vocabulary for this rich, intricate world, of atmospheres and new sensory and metaphysical experiences, at times in his prose defaulting to beautifully phrased but reductive tropes, which are still embedded in the unconscious of Western society today. As Achebe railed at Conrad’s reduction of complex cultures, knowledge systems, and languages, down to a dark, flat backdrop for Marlow’s descent into the pit of despair, and lamented Conrad’s objectification of West African bodies, I became hooked on an important and maybe even existential question—who was Achebe’s lamentation aimed at? Who was the primary audience for his words, written in English? And was there a moral authority to hear his appeal, and if so, what then?

I envision this moral authority: a shining round table, a collective ethereal body. I can picture where this body receives education, and what information and legacy bestow upon this body to uphold such cosmic authority. I peer at this body’s ancestral responsibility and how intricately woven its cultural history is with morality, technology, and progress—through religion, reason, language, war, and subsequent laws. I wonder, wouldn’t this same moral authority Achebe speaks to be the same that has canonized Conrad’s novel, lauding it as one Western literature’s great works?

Roughly around the time of Conrad’s birth, Anglican and Baptist missionaries from Britain began spreading the Christian word across Nigeria alongside armed colonial powers, and systemically implemented a proposed order and moral structure, offering bondage under the benevolent cloak of Christianity. They found innovative ways to suppress and diminish ancient local knowledge systems whilst leveraging the locals’  deeply inherent spiritual devotion. Tribal factions with differing religious and philosophical dispositions were difficult to control without the concerted imposition of particular moral principles through Christianity. Coordinating labor and governing over resource-rich lands was made easier by exploiting the tenets of local knowledge and sowing discord between tribes. Christianity has been significant to psychological governance, by imposing a moral condition and constraining culture, dissenting thought, or ways of seeing and being alien to the new “explorers” of this productive continent of vast cultural and environmental diversity.

Christianity existed in Africa before the arrival of missionaries. However, their spectral presence served a particular economic purpose, the legacy of which I witness today on the continent and across its diaspora. We can see this coercion and its resulting conservative legacy of docile communities as part of a colonial extraction strategy.

Many early contributions to foundational mathematics originated in Asia and Africa, and roughly a century before these missionary expeditions, the origins of European statistical mathematics and probabilistic methodologies were forming. These methods are now pivotal to computational methods like machine learning , vital to the pursuit of AI. Bayes’ Theorem, for example, a formula founded by the reverend and early statistician Thomas Bayes, is a significant driver of machine learning and originates in what appears to be shaky, metaphysical, and even monotheistic beginnings, as Justin Joque explains in his book Revolutionary Mathematics: Artificial Intelligence, Statistics and the Logic of Capitalism.

Bayes’ Theorem is a mathematical formula for determining conditional probability: the likelihood of an outcome occurring based on a previous outcome having occurred in similar circumstances. One might establish a belief, and later update said belief with newly acquired information supporting one’s argument or intention. Bayesian influence is significant to quantum mechanics (which is key to AI research and development) and its attempts to understand the physics of nature and the uncertainty of the universe.

As Joque says, the metaphysical origins of Western statistics have been well-documented by mathematicians and historians alike, many of whom have strongly resisted the Bayesian method, particularly in the twentieth century. Still, intriguingly, this method has recently resurged and is now very popular in algorithmic computing, developing “truths” (the outcome of this subjective method), principally for capital from numerous subjective origins (including social origins) that, over time, we have established for primarily economic purposes. This subjective Bayesian method—beginning with a guess or an assumption and adding data to solidify one’s guess or assumption—inevitably puts us in a slippery metaphysical dimension, not too dissimilar to where we might have been in years gone by, particularly in Europe, where society leaned on monotheistic reasoning to make sense of the world. Therefore, one might speculate that the logical endpoint of computation based on this statistical model, implemented by engineers and venture capitalists educated under a singular ontological framework, might aim at a convergent “truth,” whatever that may be, if we understand the (even unconscious) influence of monotheism on these protagonists implementing their dominant beliefs and morality, through the accumulation of vast amounts of information, with origins already hazy.

So then, a moral authority? If we use—and I consider this pronoun necessary here, for several reasons, as our involvement purports to be passive, but is not—algorithmic models to determine who has access to a loan or whether someone is guilty of a crime or not (to be then placed in for-profit prison systems), does morality, or a moral authority, as we understand it, ultimately serve only the acquisition, maintenance, and accumulation of capital? If so, then to who is the moral vanguard Achebe appeals to?

Achebe’s appeal, deep into the latter half of the twentieth century, is to an English-speaking, educated authority, of a dominant economic and educational system, with culture prominently in its service. Hundreds of years of Christian influence and legacy intersect with the Enlightenment’s emphasis on reason and individualism, which allies with violent methods of implementing extraction in distant lands in ways increasingly invisible to us as technology surges, all which combine to form today’s Western world, where race, class, and gender make for active feedback loops to further accumulate capital by manipulating datasets, which entrench and dictate our respective fates within this socially constructed economic system.

The same system of imbalances and inbuilt gaslighting narratives provide much of the patronage of art and culture. Patronage that attempts to uphold a moral center, guiding us to how we might exist alongside each other. “Culture” defines society’s artistic and intellectual refinements. We needn’t disregard the etymological origins of the word in this instance: of cultivating and tilling earth until it is fruitful and beneficial enough to sustain life. Or the biological meaning: an environment suitable for the growth of bacteria to spread indiscriminately. Culture maintains primacy for this economic system, affirming a dominant language and knowledge and suppressing other influences and dissent. Culture’s power and intentions are even crystalline in how few works of literature from across the world are translated into English until they’re deemed worthy of translation by an authority, the same authority, ultimately, that canonizes Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. I remain, for example, astounded by how many contemporary novels from the United States I read with a complete lack of a “nonwhite” person written into their pages as if none exist. An observation I make with some understanding of the history of segregation, yet, even so, when I imagine the scale of such autonomous formulations within society, it is enough to take one’s breath.

Transhumanism, a new ideological formation that appears to be just a loose cluster of ideas, aims at an optimized human condition, which transhumanists might argue can only occur in a state beyond the fallibility of the corpus, where we find empowerment in new deified technologies, which construct a mirror of increasing sophistication. As Narcissus gazes down at his rippling reflection, it begs the question of who stands visible in the mirror. Transhumanism, the technological ascension of the human condition, an ideological aspiration, appears incapable of imagining ascendancy without the ballast of wealth enabling further advancement, inevitably in the hands of a few then tasked with designing the human through a lens that cannot be anything but eugenic by its very foundations. Peer from their vantage point to a tier just below, where our modern saints, namely celebrities, serve as prototypes through feedback loops of continuous visibility and modification, guiding the surface-level aesthetic ideal of the human.

The fervor for AI’s ascension to a plane beyond us is a quasi-spiritual desire, echoing the past’s metaphysical anxieties and our need to see something, possibly something monotheistic, beyond ourselves. It seems now, through probabilistic methods, the hallowed saint forms in our image as we shape greater systems of knowledge to further a delusion, synthesizing the spectacle of an impressionistic, all-seeing and all-doing deity and, yes, a moral authority to whom we’ll perform worship through mimetic ritual. This supposed moral authority remains a primary weapon for today’s technological and economic shackling of and extraction from the human condition. Social media companies, for example, from the same moral lineage discussed here, provide us with ways to see more of the world than ever before but attempt to control what aspects of humanity we should see, how we see them, and to which we should aspire. Utilizing long-established economic imbalances, these companies maintain what we might call cognitive call centers, across Africa and Asia, paying employees a pittance to screen harmful content before it reaches us, the comparably wealthy consumers, and making it clear, if ever we choose to avert our gaze from the gleaming totem, whose welfare is regarded as valuable and profitable. It has been widely reported that social media has worsened our collective mental and emotional welfare as a society, so the comparably wealthy consumers, also find themselves an extractive resource. Then there is our evolving echo, language learning models, and the moral limitations they apply to what we may ask of them. We remain docile to technology, and lack the vocabulary to really speak about it, as Heidegger once noted, therefore we do not or cannot resist.

So I wonder what these universal claims to a moral authority are. How do we determine objective truths about humanity that we lean on to maintain and evolve society—truths that glean and reconstitute subjectivity, that increasingly inform and guide our day-to-day—when these truths are developed, in part, through aggregating and reconstituting data, deploying subjective methodologies, which neglect the thought, methods, and experiences of large swathes of the human and nonhuman world, whilst simultaneously finding those realms materially valuable.

I am not saying anything new, but the conditions of diaspora, existing in the vestibule as it were, offer unique perspective and experience, enabling one to see what remains outside “progress,” leaving one room to ruminate on what idealized progress can only mean. Look at the uncanny horror of a slick image export from a language learning model, and see our collective pursuit of an ideal self-representation. This representation of the human, with lines and scars smoothened, feelings transcended, through our loop of dreams and desires, told and untold, live and evolve in billions of datasets, some of which (like porn) tell more truth about what we covet (or think we covet).

The vast processing power and conducting qualities of rare metals required for increasingly energy-intensive computers, from GPUs for gaming and 3D rendering, to the violently wasteful, yet invisible, energy-sapping crypto-mining, ignorantly shilled by celebrities, become a painful metaphor for our wasteful annihilation of the planet. These resources include human data and labor, and despite many obstacles, the African continent gains increasing attention from swarming venture capitalists for its young, growing middle-class, tech-literate population and technological innovations.

Diverse languages, as with diverse tribes, existed beyond and across the dividing lines of nationhood engraved throughout the continent by colonialism, but language control has since been one of the most effective ways to control land for access to resources. One can hear lamentations at the reluctance of African teachers to teach in native languages and who even reprimand students for speaking them. When we comprehend what else language suppresses, such as cultures, knowledge systems, and distinct moral principles, which may differ from the standard fed to us, we might think differently about the accelerated consolidation of languages, meanings, and intentions, output by our digital deities, a homogenization echoed by reduced agricultural biodiversity.

As Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o says, to be divorced from one’s mother tongue is a form of slavery, and language is more than a simple ordering and patterning of words or signs, but it runs deeper, through the body, through the soil and a continuous lineage of ancestry in dialogue with the earth. Many former colonized countries grapple with the in-between—the metaphysical struggle between imposed and inherent cultures and the disingenuous contradictions of a top-down moral design. How do we consider how “native” English speakers of formerly colonized countries use the language differently from what we might consider the standard?

So we reach the bubbling core of my book Red Earth and the interdisciplinary art project it is central to, which is no lament—quite the contrary, it is a meditation from a particular vantage point, even if I am partly divorced from my mother tongue. I am a fluent “Listener,” but I cannot confidently be a “Caller”—which, for me, is a strange vestibuled condition, an incomplete relationship to a native cosmology, swirling only at its fringes, one’s body feeling and intuiting, but rarely articulating this innate knowledge, even though I hear it, and feel it, like the red earth between my toes, and in how the sounds of palm leaves rustlings say so much more. I ask what this kind of in-between means for a world of precise statistical perspectives and binary ordering. I can see and feel what posthumanity has existed in this culture and what lies beyond the soul-sapping postcolonial discourses, where many wail and others nod along as if listening, but not really. What lies beyond? With my feet firmly planted on the ground, I try to touch this possibility, however faintly.

I grab this vestibule, an open secret, as a unique place of my own. Born to Nigerian parents and raised in the United Kingdom, I submit to the perpetual translation of my identity—a constant feedback loop, charging back and forth from one cosmos to the other. Growing up, this became a distinct private space removed from many other people in my immediate environment. Rather like the way I have existed between cultures, languages, and knowledge systems, I have wondered if there is any possibility of creating a dialogue between probabilistic computation based on the origins mentioned earlier and the metaphysical foundations of alternative origins, such as Yoruba culture. Or is the idea entirely paradoxical and pointless? The diasporic existence, a meshing of worlds across time and space, traversing coordinates, existing in motion, non-place, and uncertainty (a realm also concerning quantum mechanics), is an interesting point at which to consider where and how knowledge systems and language might meet, or to consider at least any impressionistic or metaphysical entanglement with these knowledge systems—mathematics in dialogue with ritual and tradition.

Famed Nobel laureate playwright and novelist Wole Soyinka addresses such parallels in his book Myth, Literature and the African World, when he posits the many similarities one could draw between Yoruba deities and the “universal relevance” of Greek gods significant to the origins of Western thought. One of the temporal concepts Soyinka addresses is the nonlinear conception of time beyond the human, a key concept in Yoruba thought and philosophy and a key driver to my Red Earth project. Soyinka suggests Yoruba is comparable with Greek mythology, or Judeo-Christian theology, in richness and depth, and how, for Yoruba, the degree of acceptance of something like nonchronological time is implicit, innate, and given reverence and understanding. Within such thought, one can also find moral dispositions, actions, and practice differing from those in the Judeo-Christian or Greek mythological definition of the term, where, for instance, the Greek gods, as Soyinka explains, are beholden to little or no consequence for their depravity. The only time they may bear consequence is when they infringe upon another deity, unlike the Yoruba deities, who commit transgressions, but must somehow acknowledge their actions. Soyinka suggests the existence of an alternative morality to the European, which may, to a large extent, be unconscious in Yoruba society. Yet, when I consider my diasporic vestibule, I consider these unconscious realms and how these subtleties, which are part of me, and others in our behavior and language, disappear in universalizing computational concepts.

I want to draw attention to the need for new archives of the future and new ways to think about a computational existence. The Red Earth Project is a speculative exercise about language, translation and data, and whose language, history, authority, and morality are now encoded into our digital realities. I am asking if our current trajectory will only entrench the negation covered here in feedback loops much faster and more granular than we can comprehend, and whether there is any room at all for provenance with this data or is it inherently flawed. Is computation, by its foundational principles, anathema to other metaphysical dimensions than the one from whence it came? Is this simply the underwhelming and even violent trajectory for the autonomy of alternate cultures, moral ideas, and outlooks as their lands of origin shudder and succumb to climate damage? As words drive my creative practice, with this book I eke out a metaphysical realm of my own, from which I can begin a process of experimentation on what equitable exchange between culture and computation could become, an interdisciplinary practice echoing my reality.

 

Michael Salu is a Nigerian British writer, artist, scholar, filmmaker and creative strategist. His book Red Earth, from which this essay is adapted, will be published by Calamari Archive this month.

We’re More Ghosts Than People

Screenshot from Red Dead Redemption 2.

I don’t find myself investing much in the kingdom of heaven. It has always been this way for me, even as a child. I prayed often, sometimes the requisite five times a day in my Muslim household. But I did it out of a sense of duty to my living, not what might exist after my living.

I can’t control my own arrival to whatever the promised land may or may not be, because I don’t have the rubric in front of me. I have sometimes been a good person who does bad things, and sometimes I’ve been a bad person who does good things. The way the afterlife is most often discussed is by way of a scale that sorts into binary categories. I grew up with Muslims who insisted that every bit of food left on their plate after a meal would be weighed against them on the day of judgment. I considered this: arriving in front of the robed choir, a few grains of rice tipping the scale toward an irreconcilable level of bad, banishing me to some fiery underworld.

In early 2019, spinning through Red Dead Redemption for the first time, I became obsessed with the idea of a heaven for someone who wasn’t real. Someone I had come to love, but who only existed in a fictional realm. It was a private thought. Discussing love and sanctification like this seems foolish, probably a byproduct of my many newfound chambers of loneliness. I wanted not only a kinship with this not-real someone, I wanted to save them, and save myself in doing so.

Not only is this foolish, it also tilts toward what some might consider sacrilege. But if you will allow me to soften the message: what I am saying is that I’m not invested in my own entry into heaven, but I find myself required to believe in its existence nonetheless. If enough people you have loved transition to a place beyond the living, you might grow to hope that place is heavenlike. I want everyone I have buried to be in a place of abundance, a place beyond their pain. For me, being consumed by silence—and an obliviousness to whatever has become of you—is one definition of peace. I’m fine with that for myself, but not for my beloveds. Not for you, person I do not know and will likely never meet. I want an abundant dominion for you.

***

The first time Arthur Morgan goes into a coughing fit in the game Red Dead Redemption 2, the TV screen trembles and floods with a sharp red-orange. Your controller matches the screen’s trembling and flashes some color I can’t recall. This happens in what is essentially the game’s final act, before its epilogue. There’s still enough of it to be played through as Arthur. By this point in the game, you’ve grown close to him. Your gang begins to dwindle, beloved comrades are murdered, or they’ve run off in search of more prosperous terrain. You’ve survived with Arthur, who is beholden to his instincts that he can make what he has work for him until something better comes along.

His coughing fit sends him leaning up against a wall in the town of Saint Denis, and then stumbling into a doctor’s office. The verdict is tuberculosis. The doctor grimly wishes Arthur well, in a way that doctors wish people well when they know there isn’t much time left.

***

Red Dead Redemption 2 takes place in 1899, at the turn of a century when law and order is raining down on America, and the days of the outlaw are coming to an end. These are more the game’s words than my own—words that are shown as a preface to the opening. Arthur runs with a gang he’s been with since he was a teenager. Their leader, Dutch, is a dreamer who often waxes rhapsodic about Tahiti or Australia or someplace not in America where the gang could live out their days and flourish without a care in the world. This, of course, requires money. Arthur and the gang go through much of the game in pursuit of the ever-elusive One Last Score. Robbing trains for paltry bits of coin, taking down a stagecoach here or there. But it isn’t ever enough. No matter how much individual wealth Arthur amasses and pours into the gang’s camp fund, it will never be enough for the new world of Dutch’s imagination.

The world of Red Dead Redemption 2 is expansive and immersive. While riding along the landscapes, you might be greeted by a person moaning in pain, pleading for medicine after being bitten by a snake, or a person begging for a ride home. Occasionally, you might be submitted to more nefarious characters: the person faking injured who pulls out a gun to rob you as you get close, or a KKK meeting happening deep in the trees. How each of these encounters is handled impacts Arthur’s honor throughout the game. There is a meter for this. It is quantifiable and certain, calculated and easy to see, like so many of our supposed good or bad deeds in our real lives perhaps should be but aren’t.

In my first playthrough, I decided early on that Arthur was a good person who sometimes had to do bad things to survive, but even before he was stricken with his illness, I was committed to raising his honor as high as I could. I’d sometimes ride around searching for good deeds to take on, anyone calling out for help. I’d kill if I absolutely had to, but I didn’t loot the dead bodies of those I killed, and I never drew my weapon on anyone out of a bloodthirsty recklessness. Only what I needed to do to survive, and nothing more. I figured there was something at the end of all this. Some way that Arthur might be rewarded for his goodness.

I am sorry to tell you now that you can’t save him. You won’t be able to, no matter how hard you throw yourself against the door of the closed doctor’s offices of towns at night while torches flicker above doors and virtual townspeople look at you with concern.

***

All of the video games I grew up loving had a fix for death. Nothing was permanent. At least not for you, the main character of the story. The first time I played Red Dead Redemption 2, I barely remember being affected by the reality of Arthur’s diagnosis. “It’s fine,” I thought to myself. “Something will come along and this will be fixed.” When Arthur’s friend—an Indigenous chief named Rains Fall of the Wapiti tribe—learns of Arthur’s illness and gives him a blend of herbs, you think this might be what heals him. But it’s only temporary. Within a few in-game weeks, Arthur is once again coughing, collapsing on the street of another town.

***

I know it is foolish to talk about grief in this way. To discuss coming to terms with loss through a character I would lose every time I was taken away from the game, to run some errand or to return some email. My first time playing, the world was a different one than it was when I played it a second time, which is of course true of any pursuit taken up twice over the course of linear time. During my first run the world had not yet been shaken by a pandemic. In my experience grief hums at an inconsistent frequency; I know it well enough to know that grief is never entirely done with me. And so—even in a world unaffected by COVID—it didn’t take much for me to mourn Arthur’s slow fading into the inevitable.

I coped in phases: first, I kept up on my path of trying to do as many good deeds as possible, thinking that if I tilted Arthur’s honor meter far enough in a “good” direction, it might save his life. Sure, the internet insisted that this was not possible, but what did they know? I might be on the verge of discovery! Yes, I will give you a ride to a town two towns away from where I need to be! Yes, you can rob me, person who perhaps needs my goods and wealth more than I do! And, Lord knows, more than Dutch does! Everyone can have all of my earthly possessions, my earthly time, whatever else can be spared!

When that didn’t work, I gave in and just accelerated the process of ending the game. I sped through main story missions, with Arthur getting visibly weaker. Bartenders and passersby commented on his sickly visage. Members of his gang expressed sympathy or mockery. He fought to stay alive, and then he didn’t.

When it was all over, I found myself laughing, alone on my couch. Despite myself, I’d once again fallen for the first trick I was ever taught: that on the other end of some vague and broad attempts at goodness, there might be something that saves me, that saves anyone I love.

***

Arthur gets sick in the process of attempting to collect a debt from a man who doesn’t have the money. This happens in the game’s first act. The man is not well, as is made clear by the man’s wife, who runs out of their modest log house after you, as Arthur, have grabbed the man, threatened him, and hit him a few times. During one such time, he coughs into your face. You might think nothing of it at the time, even as Arthur wipes blood from the man’s cough away from his mouth, resigned to the fact that there would be no money to collect. One act later, when it is revealed that the man has died, Arthur goes back to the man’s widow and demands the money the man owed. That’s the way it goes, of course. If the dead don’t pay, the living must.

***

The building where I worked as a debt collector in the 2000s looked like it could have been a portal to anywhere. Like anything could have been inside of it. This is how all the debt-collection buildings looked in Columbus, Ohio. Large, gray, nondescript slabs. Bricks sometimes, if you were lucky. All of them on the outskirts of the city, nudging up against a suburb’s borders but never in the suburb. Places where good people went to do bad work because they had to survive.

I needed a job. I had, by that point, accumulated a small criminal record, with a larger one to come. I had to find a place where I could accumulate some form of legitimacy, and no one else would hire me. Debt collection companies would take anyone. There was a boom in the industry. This was right after the early-2000s recession but before the more robust late-2000s recession. Broadly, this meant that there were more people in dire straits than there had been before. Misery as a gateway to opportunity: you might even call it the American Dream.

The base pay was bad, by design: as long as the base pay was bad, collectors would strive to make commissions on the money they had to collect. In a cavernous room lined with tightly arranged gray cubicles, people put headsets on and dialed numbers for hours at a time. At some of the more upscale collection agencies, there were computers that auto-dialed the numbers for you. My pals who worked at those described a sense of blissful detachment. They were not scrolling through a person’s information for long enough to make a person real. At my agency, we had to dial manually, finding the phone number at the bottom of a long file, outlining a person’s financial delinquency, scrolling past notes left by collectors who called before you got to a person. Notes about a call’s hostility, or a person’s anguish. There is something about the seeking of the number and dialing that made the work more intimate, for better or worse. Unmasking the hostage, so to speak. Occasionally, above the medium decibels of consistent chatter, you would hear someone shout, some display of aggression toward whatever person was on the line with them, threatening them, spitting out the word “debtor” like a curse. When they’d hang up the phone, they’d take pride in the fear the briefly injected into the life of a stranger.

I’d like to say, today, that I was bad at this job because it misaligned my moral compass. It did, of course, but really I was bad at it because I was nonconfrontational. Because I didn’t particularly like talking on the phone. Because when I would hear people—defiantly or weakly—insist to me that they didn’t have anything, I felt like it was my duty to believe them. It was my duty to understand them because I, too, did not have anything. On my breaks, I would look at my prepaid cell phone and see messages from bill collectors, calling me to collect what I did not have, and what I was not making at this job. And still, I called. I called widows, sometimes mere weeks—according to them—after a burial. I called elders who spoke to me sweetly about what they could not do. Some who told me that my voice reminded them of a grandson, or a nephew. I called people who were sick. I called people who spoke to me while machines beeped slowly in the background. Every day, I’d have to find some way to shake the guilt off after I clocked out, until I finally ran out of ways, clocked out, and never came back.

***

I don’t know how to define honest work in a dishonest place. This isn’t a noble thing, but back in those days, I didn’t ever mind stealing if it also meant that I could eat a decent enough meal, or find enough cash for a bus ride somewhere. I have struggled to explain this to anyone who hasn’t made a bed out of the concrete, below the sky in a quiet place. I was bad at stealing, and I was bad at lying, which is why I always got caught. But I didn’t mind it nearly as much as I minded working at the collection agency, or at the door-to-door knife-sales company, or at the front desk of the crooked insurance office that performed shady business I simply cannot discuss here but that anyone who has worked in such a place might understand. Call it selfish, but the thought was always that if I’m going to lie anyway, I don’t wanna do it on someone else’s clock. I don’t wanna do it in a way that detaches a human element from it. I don’t want to dull the sin. Sure, I’ll walk into a grocery store and walk out with some shit I ain’t have the money to pay for and wouldn’t have paid for even if I did have the cash. The entity of the grocery store will be all right, probably, and I get to survive a little bit longer. It always felt different when there was a name, a voice, a person on the other end of a line. A person looking at me through a screen door. Do only what you have to in order to survive, and take nothing more.

***

It has always been easier for me to convince myself that the sins I’ve been immersed in and the average time I might have left to make up for them simply don’t align. I’m a better person now than I have been in the past, though I’ve also dislodged myself from binaries of good and bad. If there is a place of judgment where I must stand and plead my case for a glorious and abundant afterlife, I hope that whoever hears me out is interested in nuances, but who’s to say. I don’t think about it, until I do. Until I get sick and wonder if I am sick with something beyond routine, or until I swerve out of the way of a car on the highway and feel the sweat begin to bead on my forehead. It’s all a question of how close I feel like I am to the end.

I have no interest in playing God, but I do like low-stakes control of an outcome, which is why Arthur’s predicament suited me, in a way. Arthur is portrayed throughout the game as a conflicted but mostly decent man, trying to make sense of a world that doesn’t want him around anymore. In game-controlled missions, he helps people of a lesser station in life than his. He has a code. He maintains a consistent level of curiosity about his surroundings and the people in them. He sees all of the people in the camp as equals, and wants to get to know them. Charles and Lenny and Sadie—all people who have, in some way, been cast off by the harsh realities of the era—find closeness and comfort in Arthur.

A therapist asked me once if I thought of myself as redeemable, and I’m almost certain I laughed it off, or detoured toward another answer that sounded satisfying but actually said nothing. I believe in redemption in the same way that I believe in heaven: I feel required to. Not only because of my personal politics, but also because of my social interests, and my investment in others beyond myself, and also—yes—because I do imagine that somewhere along the uneven path of my life, I’ve tried to be better more often than I have been worse. I suppose I’m cynical about all of it, though. The world, as it stands, is obsessed with punishment, particularly for the most marginalized. Punishment for living in the margins, or an intersection of the margins. I don’t know if my personal beliefs in redemption can undo that massive ghost, hovering over so many of our lives, baked into our impulses, even when we know better. Even when we, ourselves, have been on the losing end of that impulse.

It is easy to attempt to redeem Arthur in a world that isn’t real. To play a mission where Arthur kills, rides away over a trail of dead bodies, and then goes and helps the camp with chores. Picks some flowers along a hillside. Helps a family build a house. In a world where no one is reminding you of the wreckage you’ve taken part in, it’s easy to compartmentalize your damage and chase after that which is strictly beautiful, or cleansing. Climbing your way toward the upper room by any means necessary, on the wings of anyone who will have you.

***

My most recent time playing through Red Dead Redemption, the world—the real one—had already ended, in some way. My pal Franny has a poem about the end of the world where she says that the world has already ended well before we arrived, and will end again many times through our lives, and I think I believe in that, too. That each time there is a massive rupture in some corners of collective living, the world has ended and started over again. Each time I feel pushed beyond a place of past comforts to a point where I realize I can no longer return, a world has ended and started over again. Like most things, it is easier for me to consider the apocalypse as a series of small movements instead of a single event.

This time, the world felt, to me, like it was in a holding pattern after its ending and attempting to begin again. The world was a car, stalling after not running for a long winter. There were those who decided that the pandemic was over and they’d go back outside, only to be rushed back inside by the inevitable spreading of the pandemic. Amid the grief, and amid the rage, there was something fascinating to me about being suspended in the somewhat-stillness of the world I’d built for myself, which felt like as good a time as any to replay Red Dead Redemption 2, and take a less emotionally frantic approach. All I ever want is to know my exits before I enter, and I took some delight in knowing what was coming for Arthur before firing up the game again, almost two years after I’d eagerly taken to it with oblivious wonder for the first time.

This time, I have yet to finish the playthrough. I might not ever finish it in the traditional sense—finishing the story missions to work through the game’s narrative arc. What I do love about the Red Dead Redemption 2 storyline is that it starts out bad, gets worse, but then has a quick uptick of goodness before descending again into bleakness. It’s not just Arthur’s illness. The gang dwindles. Some die, some drink themselves into misery, some simply leave.

I’ve found myself enjoying the game’s small pleasures, looking to slow down the realities that I know are looming around the corner. If large parts of my real, actual life are in somewhat of a holding pattern, I can force Arthur into that with me. I’ve stalled right before the game starts to turn completely downhill. Things are starting to get bad, but not so bad that my already somewhat fragile state might decline with the circumstances within Arthur’s orbit.

It helps, of course, that there is a lot to do in the game that has nothing to do with the main story, and has nothing to do with the good deeds I was obsessed with pushing upon Arthur my first time through. I fill my satchel with berries and plants that I never consume or craft anything with. I walk into the saloons and play card games for hours, winning or losing cents at a time. I drink and stumble around dirt roads with no aim.

And I seek out sunsets. This is my favorite part. The mountains along the virtual world’s western landscape are the best for this. I climb up one, set up camp, and watch as the sun goes down. I allow Arthur to fold into these daily routines, which strip hours away from my own real-life daily routines. And this is, I think, how I will leave it. This is what the game will be for me now. I can untangle myself from the desire to save Arthur if I stop considering the inevitable.

In my own orbits, in the center of trying to wrestle with my own goodness or badness was another option: complete stillness. I was most stagnant in my youth when I was trying to prevent myself from pursuing my lesser angels. My self-control is only a little better now, and so I do welcome the idling world, no matter how it comes and no matter how it might end up going. I find a type of salvation in holding patterns. Not one heaven, but many small, disparate ones. I sit on my couch for an hour without moving, and make a man sit at the edge of a cliff without moving, both of us watching a fake sky drown in color, both of us not yet sure when we’re going to die or how much time we have left. There are probably better ways to attempt the playing of God, but there are certainly far worse.

 

Hanif Abdurraqib is a writer from the east side of Columbus, Ohio.

In Remembrance of Louise Glück

Photograph by Katherine Wolkoff.

Nearly thirty years ago, during my junior year of college, I took a poetry writing class with Louise Glück. I’d never read any of her books, but I was aware of some undergraduate buzz about a visiting poet who’d recently received the Pulitzer Prize for a book of talking flowers. Her last house had burned down; her father had made his money in blades; she would need someone to drive her to Star Market for groceries on weekends. (I volunteered once, waiting nervously in the parking lot until she returned with a cantaloupe and asparagus.) The person I met in the classroom was frighteningly honest about poetry, and about being a poet. She said it was okay not to write—that she herself had gone several years without writing even a single poem—so it would be perfectly fine if we didn’t share any poems of our own with her that term. When we did turn in something for workshop, she mercilessly rooted out “mannerisms” in our poems; I became terrified of this critique, which only made my writing all the more mannered. She would linger over details like “angels in homespun linen” in a poem by Czesław Miłosz; almost three decades later, I still remember her wry grin of envy at that image. More than anything else, Louise loved it when something was surprising and, in retrospect, inevitable, as it is so often in her work, and in our lives—like the ending of her poem “Happiness”:

I open my eyes; you are watching me.
Almost over this room
the sun is gliding.
Look at your face, you say,
holding your own close to me
to make a mirror.
How calm you are. And the burning wheel
passes gently over us.

Glück’s death marks a line break, but not a full stop, to a timeless voice in the art of poetry. It’s a voice that resonates with the wonder and grief of ancients like Sappho and moderns like Dickinson—in other words, like Louise Glück.

 

Srikanth Reddy is the poetry editor of The Paris Review.

Green Ray, Pepsi-Cola, Paramusicology

The Pepsi-Cola Sign in Gantry Plaza State Park. Kidfly182, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The Pepsi-Cola Addict, written in 1981 by the cryptophasic teenager June-Alison Gibbons—who refused most communication with anyone other than her twin sister, Jennifer—is as idiosyncratic as one would expect. Preston Wildey-King—the Pepsi-Cola addict of the book’s title—lives in a tenement with his mother and his sister in Malibu, California. How Preston developed an addiction to Pepsi is unknown. This omission begs interpretation—readers must make their own projections onto Pepsi-Cola. Is it a sweet elixir that dulls the bitter taste of Preston’s fleeting childhood? Or a symbol of American overconsumption and excess? Gibbons doesn’t provide an answer, leaving us with a plot point as perplexing as the addictions we see every day. Sometimes a can of Pepsi is just a can of Pepsi. 

—Troy Schipdam, reader

Éric Rohmer’s 1986 film The Green Ray centers on a difficult person. We know that she’s difficult because, during a conversation midway through, she insists, multiple times, “I haven’t been difficult at all.” Her name is Delphine, and she’s a Parisian secretary who broke up with her fiancé two years earlier. While she craves human connection, she flees, sometimes literally, whenever it seems it might appear. In one of the film’s best scenes, she runs away from people who have the gall to invite her to a nightclub. In another scene, she stops to read a sign on a lamppost that says, “Retrouver le contact avec soi-même et avec les autres. Groupes et séances individuelles.” (“Reconnect with others and yourself. Groups and private sessions.”) She walks on.

When a friend tells her she’s sad, Delphine says, “I’m not sad.” She sublimates her loneliness into an obsession with having a good summer vacation. As the film opens, Delphine learns that her holiday plans have been upended: she’s been ditched by a friend who wants to travel with a new lover instead. “The three of us could go together,” Delphine suggests. She’s rebuffed. We soon see why: even when she’s not a third wheel, she’s hard to be around. A complainer who doesn’t enjoy much of anything, she’s resistant to offers of help and advice. When she learns that her sister and brother-in-law are going camping in Ireland, she asks her young niece, “It’s very rainy. Does that scare you?” At a dinner party, when the host has just served pork chops, she extols the virtues of vegetarianism.

An acquaintance takes pity on Delphine and invites her along on a family vacation to Cherbourg, but that goes badly. She then goes on an increasingly disastrous series of trips and spends much of the film in tears. In North America, the film was first released as Summer, but maybe it’s more appropriate to watch it in fall. The story concludes as Delphine is finally heading home after her miserable peregrinations. As she arrives at the train station, there’s a sense that she’s getting older, that not only summer but also her best years have passed, that maybe the sun will set without her finding love again.

But there’s a chance something different will happen. The green ray of the title—and of an eponymous Jules Verne novel that served as Rohmer’s inspiration—refers to an almost mystically elusive optical phenomenon. Under certain atmospheric conditions, in the last moments before it dips below the horizon, the setting sun can flash green. On one of her trips, Delphine overhears some older people discussing the plot of Verne’s book. Its heroine never sees the green ray, but she “manages to understand her own feelings.” Throughout the film, Delphine claims to know her feelings. She may believe that she’s being vulnerable; she even cries in front of other people. But her self-pity prevents her from accessing true vulnerability. It’s not until the very end of the film that she risks sharing her real feelings with another person.

For years, I also confused self-pity with vulnerability, and I relate to the film. I love it not, though, for its relatability but because I find it so strikingly naturalistic. Rohmer purportedly encouraged his actors—many of whom were friends and even family—to improvise their dialogue. That authenticity, which I strive for in fiction, is what I think gives the film its luminosity. Even the green ray captured in the film’s last shot is genuine; rather than create it in the studio, as producers wanted, Rohmer brought a photographer to the Canary Islands to capture the real thing.

—Alena Graedon, author of “No Changing”

I discovered the American Museum of Paramusicology through attempts to find more information about the American composer and choreographer Julius Eastman, perhaps the most important artist of the late twentieth century in the United States, although people outside the art world don’t know who he is. The site/journal/publishing concern/archive is run by the musicologist and artist Matt Marble and hosts a range of materials—books, recordings, scores, histories—relating to music by composers whose work is inflected by esoteric spiritual or philosophical practice, among them Alice Coltrane, David Lynch, and Constance Demby. The site and its associated podcast, Secret Sound, recently went subscription-only—but I recommend the five dollars per month. Everything there is totally brilliant and humbling.

—Lucy Ives, Robert Glück’s interviewer for The Art of Fiction No. 260