The Paris Review's Blog, page 51

The Last Window-Giraffe

Fir0002, Giraffe in Melbourne Zoo, GFDL 1.2, via Wikimedia Commons.

Péter Esterházy once wrote that Péter Zilahy is the white raven of Hungarian literature who can observe the world each time as if for the first time, always fresh and original. While it’s labeled a novel, The Last Window-Giraffe is essentially uncategorizable, a hippogriff of a creation fashioned from fragments of history, autobiography, and wild invention. How such a wealth of elements—from childhood memories to political atrocities to the poignant evocation of the correspondence between sexual awakening and the deaths of dictators—could be gathered and spun into such a coherent narrative is a kind of aesthetic miracle.

Zilahy uses the Hungarian alphabet to present a wonderful mix of historical facts, poetry, and visual images, an approach inspired by the time he spent in Belgrade in 1996, when citizens took to the streets to protest Slobodan Milošević’s electoral fraud. The Last Window-Giraffe evokes many memories of my own past in the former Yugoslavia. There’s a wizardry in Zilahy’s ability to shrink an entire historical epoch to human scale while at the same time elevating ordinary experience to mythic significance. This is intellectual alchemy of the highest order, executed with wit and compassion. Zilahy can murder a sacred cow and canonize an unknown victim of totalitarianism in a single sentence.

H is for:
három puszi = three kisses
háború = war
harag = anger
halál = death
hatalom = power
híradó = news bulletin
hazudnak = they’re lying

U is for:
ur = space
ur = blank
ur = nothingness

You cannot speak your mind under a dictatorship. So serious matters—matters of life and death, imprisonment and freedom—are addressed in jokes. And the biggest joke of all is that the dictators never understand this code of humor. But Zilahy does, so freely does he laugh and laugh at himself.

It is laughter at work, finding joy in the act of protesting, recognizing it as both political and performative, that makes this book read as timeless. There is much to learn here—yes, in terms of past, present, and future, but, more important, in terms of something far more essential that translates into any and all languages because it is at the heart of being human and something we all experience: living with the loss of innocence.

 

Marina Abramović is a Serbian artist. Known as the grandmother of performance art, she pioneered a new notion of identity by bringing the participation of observers into her work. In 2007, she founded the Marina Abramović Institute, a nonprofit foundation for performance art.

“Strawberries in Pimm’s”: Fourth Round at Wimbledon

Photograph by Krithika Varagur.

Hangovers announced themselves on the wan faces on the District line to SW19 on the first Sunday of Wimbledon. Maybe I was projecting. It was a shame, people noted in low tones, that all the British players were now out. A pair of men splitting a salmon-colored broadsheet wondered which BBC presenter was at the center of a recent grooming scandal. “Last night was a proper, proper … if you saw the amount of tequila we were putting away,” said one handsome man, sitting between two heavily made-up girls. All of us filed out, in no particular rush, at Southfields. I went into Costa for an iced Americano before my friend arrived. 

“Careful, dear,” tutted an elderly woman, gesturing to my wide-open tote, the only bag I had in London. “I have no spatial awareness at all,” I admitted, surveying some almonds, a packable quilted jacket, and a copy of Persuasion, all ripe for the picking. “It’s not a rough crowd, of course,” she said, adjusting a georgette shawl, that was the same pearl color as her fluffy hair. “These days, you just never know …” She trailed off. We’d realized, I think simultaneously, that we were in our first queue of the day at Wimbledon, which isn’t just the world’s oldest tennis tournament but a pageant of exuberant restraint, where orderly lines and enclosures have the quality of rites. 

Louis arrived, wearing a gray wool suit, and we submitted ourselves to the flow of the crowd. A specter was haunting the weekend outfits—the specter of the Italian player Jannik Sinner’s huge Gucci duffel bag. Logomania was back, all around us: Goyard and Chanel bags, giant plastic Prada sunglasses, even several pairs of those Obama-era Tory Burch medallion flats. I complimented the sturdy unmarked sweater of a teacher from Somerset, who had, in recent years, become both a Wimbledon regular and a self-published author of over two dozen books on the pedagogy of drama. “I was actually going to wear my jumper printed with strawberries,” she said, “but we had a mishap with the dog this morning.”

At the corporate suite that housed our tickets, I asked a three-time seasonal employee if he’d ever encountered misbehavior at Wimbledon. Not really, he said. Had anyone ever, like, passed out? No. Had he ever heard an ambulance called? He jogged his memory for a moment, but also no. “I think,” he conjectured, “that people just sip on their drinks all day, but it’s a long day, so they end up absolutely fine.”  

There was time to kill before the first match, which is why I found myself at the IBM Experience booth, contemplating its invitation to “raise the game with AI.” “Do you want to try it?” a ponytailed employee asked me. “Sure,” I said. She told me I could press a numbered button to replay clips from last year’s matches and commentate on a headset, just like they do on TV. 

“Why?” I asked her. She smiled brightly. 

“Who’s going to hear this?” I asked.

“It goes … into the system,” she said. 

I asked her how AI improves tennis commentary.

“It helps us pick out the best parts of a match,” she said. “Really, it’s all on the website. Wimbledon dot com.”  

I selected a clip from last year’s Kyrgios-Djokovic matchup. “Well,” I ventured, toward the end of my allotted thirty seconds, “it’s anyone’s game.” I later learned that I had done my part for their large language model. 

The first Centre Court matchup that day was between the Russian Andrey Rublev (the world number seven) and the Kazakh Alexander Bublik (number twenty-six). “… like the most famous painter in Russia,” explained a man walking behind us, presumably about the Tarkovsky biopic indelibly evoked, in some quarters, by Rublev’s name. “Medieval Russia.” Our seats were halfway up the stands, facing the umpire. The court is smaller than you’d think; you can see puffs of white dust come loose when a ball hits a line with force. We watched the game mostly in pin-drop silence, but after exceptional shots or rallies, the crowd indulged in light cheering for “Sasha” and/or Andrey. (Wimbledon spectators’ sympathies lie less with underdogs than with whoever’s up at any given moment.) Last year, Russian and Belarussian players were banned from Wimbledon, but this year, only Russian and Belarussian flags and paraphernalia were. 

They were still neck and neck when my phone vibrated with the alarm I’d set for afternoon tea. Back at the corporate suite, people were crowded around the television playing the Ashes, the Test cricket series between England and Australia. (The first-ever Wimbledon, in 1877, had a two-day break to avoid clashing with the Eton-Harrow cricket match.) England was poised to turn the tide by winning game three of five; they were two wickets away, then one, and it was over: “That’ll do it,” “Oh thank God,” “That’s a relief.”  

“I wish we could have been there,” said a dark-haired woman near me. “I mean, of course, this is great too,” she said, noting our current setting. What would she have done if she’d been invited to attend the Ashes and Wimbledon on the exact same day, I asked her. “Oh gosh, well, there’s just something about Headingley,” she said, of the Leeds suburb where that day’s match took place. I later learned that she was a professional cricket player with a Wikipedia page. “Do you think that Test cricket is on its last legs?” I asked Louis, recalling a long disquisition on the subject by my dad. “No chance,” said a short, besuited man with a Pimm’s Cup in each hand. “We don’t give up our traditions that easily, here in England.” 

Two scones later, we were back in our seats to watch Rublev win in the fifth set. “They’re saying it’s one of the best-ever shots at Wimbledon,” said the man in the tall, well-dressed millennial couple next to me. He immediately pulled up a video replaying the penultimate point, which Rublev was describing, in a postgame interview happening below us, as “the most lucky shot ever.” 

I set off to explore the grounds, which were part white-collar office park and part imperial palace gardens. The yellow-tile leaderboards showed that the Canadian player and occasional white rapper Denis Shapovalov had just been knocked out in a major upset. On court eight, two teen girls were duking it out during the hottest part of the day. A local tennis coach, leaning over a purple garbage can, explained that they mow the ryegrass courts to precisely eight millimeters every morning. But their famous “bounce,” he said, was critically endangered. “Used to be you’d see a lot of serve and volley, serve and volley,” when the balls would come fast and low. That “classic Wimbledon” gameplay has been displaced by longer rallies of the modern game. He had helped train some of the ball kids, whom I watched at close range, mesmerized by their identical striped polos, their whole heads turning left and right with each hit, and how they fed fresh balls, elbows unbent and arms extended at forty-five degrees. Like much else here, I felt that the Victorians would have loved these seen and unheard children.   

Though the clouds had burned off and we were all crisping under direct sunlight, Wimbledon’s promise of perfect order seemed to hold: babies weren’t crying, couples weren’t fighting. I never saw anyone reach for sunscreen. I did find myself thinking more and more about one of my favorite videos, a Monty Python sketch where Wimbledon contestants are trounced by an anthropomorphic blancmange. I might, I realized, want another snack.

In yet another line, this one for strawberries and cream, a man from Bristol wearing performance sunglasses told me it had been just about twenty-four hours since he and his friends had set up tents in yesterday’s ticket queue. “Hardly roughing it,” he said, given the Deliveroo coverage, and even, if you were into that sort of thing, day passes to a gym near the campsite. (He wasn’t.) “There’s strawberries and cream, and then there are strawberries in Pimm’s,” a girl was explaining to her sister, by the row of cashiers. I thought about T. S. Eliot’s vaguely right-wing list of characteristic elements of English culture: “Derby Day, Henley Regatta, Cowes, the twelfth of August, a cup final, the dog races, the pin table, the dart board, Wensleydale cheese, boiled cabbage cut into sections, beetroot in vinegar, nineteenth-century Gothic churches and the music of Elgar.”

I stopped by the gift shop, where almost everyone looked like a potential employee, due to all the lanyards and commemorative gear. “Yellow! Yellow?” pleaded one mother, clutching an oversize novelty tennis ball—albeit a hot pink one—to a reedy blond man, until he admitted, finally, “I don’t work here.” I suspected there would be even better AC at the free tennis museum downstairs, where most of the other refugees were the parents of small children. At a “reaction station,” a father coached his two young daughters, in tulle dresses, toward excellence in a game that resembled whac-a-mole: 

“Zoe! Mia. Mia! Come on. Zoe!” 

She missed.

“No it’s fine. It’s fine.”  

I sought out a to-go drink, a gin and tonic in a reusable plastic cup that said “I live at Wimbledon.” “Some people come here and don’t even watch the tennis,” said the bartender, a cherubic art student from the north of England. “They just sit here and make deals all day. But that’s more of a weekday crowd.”  

We watched Iga Świątek play Belinda Bencic on Henman Hill, which had become very pleasant in the pink and orange part of the day. There were hours of tennis left, but the families clustered on blankets (and in one instance on a prayer rug) were already discussing routes home in minute detail. British people, noted Louis, are terrified of getting stuck somewhere. As for dinner, there were three options at the closest food court: BRITISH, GRILL, and WORLD. I chose WORLD.

“When did I last drink water?” a girl with bleached-blond hair asked her friends, around the tables where we all ate nondescript wraps standing up. “I think on the tube this morning. But then I had two espressos. Do you think that cancels it out?”

We took our seats one last time for the headliner, reigning world champion Novak Djokovic. The retractable roof, which was the futuristic white of a Calatrava bridge, shuttered over us. We also had some new rowmates, who were engaged in a conversation so animated that it visibly stressed out my British friend.  

“But you are so American,” said a vivacious blond woman in her thirties, to the shy young man next to her. “No one could be more American than you.” He squirmed. “I learned English fourteen years ago, by watching old Hollywood movies,” she told him, in an implacable accent, as the first set progressed. The young professional nodded. “I used to live in Battersea, but I got a divorce. Now I live in Surrey. Do you know Surrey?” He did not. “But you must be a big deal,” she pressed, unleashing a dazzling smile on the timid young man. “Just a family friend who had tickets …” he offered, staring at the floor. “You are so cute,” she told him. “So charming, so bubbly.” 

Hubert Hurkacz was making Djokovic fight for every point, and the first two sets both ended in tiebreaks. It was spectacular tennis, and then we had to go home. There’s an eleven o’clock curfew at Wimbledon, out of courtesy for neighbors, and it was already 10:35, though the match would keep going in our absence. (I watched Djokovic win the next afternoon, on my laptop.) We were shepherded into the mild night. The chatter converged on two topics: do you play tennis and we must play tennis. A group of four friends were resolving to change their lives. “I bet you’re really good.” “I’m dreadful.” “He’s dreadful.” “But I’ll start a group chat.” “It’s a shame not to. The weather’s been so good.” “We’ve got to play.” “We’ll play.” 

 

Krithika Varagur is the author of The Call: Inside the Global Saudi Religious Project and an editor of The Drift.

My Lumbago Isn’t Acting Up: On Disney World

Turkey leg and sea king.

On the first day, God said, “Let the atmospheric water vapors condense and become rain,” and so there was a downpour, and it was inconvenient. But we had ponchos. It was November at Disney World, and ponchos were like noses or smartphones in that every visitor had one, of course they did, it wasn’t even a question.

Soon the rain turned horizontal and worked itself inside the ponchos, and now the condensation cycle in the sky was being restaged on an individual level. You’d think this situation—thousands of humans being dumpling-steamed in plastic and packed into a slow boat or a shuttle simulator—would create a terrible odor, but Disney World was one step ahead: employees (“cast members”) stationed at the threshold of each attraction kindly asked guests to remove their ponchos before entering, and all obeyed, crumpling wet balls into pockets and backpacks … and we saw that it was good.

I’d intended to keep a detailed diary at Disney World but totally failed. My notebook has only two notes, both scribbled at Living with the Land, the EPCOT ride where you hop into a boat and glide past an idyllic farmhouse and through a series of greenhouses to learn about crop rotation and pesticide reduction. “In our search for more efficient ways to grow food, we often fail to realize the impact of our methods,” a narrator explained, channeling Wendell Berry. When we passed a thicket of tomatoes, the narrator revealed that one of EPCOT’s tomato plants had yielded “thirty-two thousand fruits.” A gasp went through the crowd. 

As it turned out, Living with the Land features the greatest fantasy in all of Disney World: no dirt. So the first note in my notebook was:

“What vacuum cleaner used by maintenance employees @ Land?”

… for which I neither got nor sought an answer. The second note was:

“Bougainvillea flower edible?”

This was prompted by a sign in one of the greenhouses claiming that it was. Bougainvillea doesn’t look edible. It is too torridly colorful, like one of those frogs whose neon exterior betokens a venomous interior. Later I looked it up and the sign was semicorrect. It is the bract of the bougainvillea that is edible, not the flower, but the bract is what most people think of when they think “bougainvillea flower.” You can deep-fry it in the manner of a zucchini blossom.

I was at Disney World to spend time with fifteen family members who had traveled from the Florida Keys, Maryland, and various parts of Virginia. It was my first time on a Disney property and I’d spent the plane trip reading a folder of articles on Disney. First Baudrillard, to kick off my transition into a figurante interactif. (I skirted Louis Marin’s “Dégénérescence utopique: Disneyland” because it is about Disneyland, not World. And because it is in French.) Then the classic Greil Marcus piece from 1998 about how all mainstream Disney World discourse converges into “a search for a way to say ‘The horror, the horror,’ without sounding too corny”—which was true up until Greil Marcus published the piece. In its wake there emerged an antiphonal category of writing that you could characterize as the “Actually, Disney World is kinda cool!” piece. The best of these include John Jeremiah Sullivan’s 2011 yarn in which the author becomes porous to the park’s majesty through strategically administered doses of weed, and Ron Suskind’s 2014 account of the park (and of Disneyana at large) as a conduit for communication with his autistic son. 

There’s also a great deal of academic literature on Disney World. This is true even if you’re someone, like me, who feels that there is a great deal of academic literature on almost everything. Type “Disney World” into JSTOR and you will unearth many pages about how the theme park is not a Rabelaisian carnival (glad that’s been cleared up), or about how it is a monument to death, or about how it is somehow in dialogue with synthetic Cubism or Mecca or Hegel’s end of history. Plus much discussion of simulacra and fascism, naturally.

Random act of Ayn Rand.

What was the point in adding to this surplus? No point. Except, after I’d settled in to our time-share and signed up for the Disney Experience app and started visiting the parks, several puzzles for which there had been no solutions in Greil Marcus or in “Walt Disney World: Bounded Ritual Space and the Playful Pilgrimage Center” et cetera did present themselves. 

The puzzles were four in number.

***

Puzzle number one: Walls without a face.

None of the bathrooms (that I saw) at Disney World had mirrors mounted above the sinks. The inevitability of a mirror above a bathroom sink isn’t something you register until you look up and find one missing. Which is exactly what Disney visitors did, by the way, as we washed our hands: looked up, became confused, and then stared at the wall where our faces should have been.

There were mirrors in the bathrooms, but only beside the exits. Clearly this was one of the park’s ingenious interventions. Anyone who might have lingered with their reflection, thereby blocking sink traffic, was forced to move along toward the door. So the location of the mirrors was not a puzzle; the puzzle was this: why had Disney—which is packed with (and even defined by) instances of invisibly elegant people-engineering—fumbled this one by rendering it so noticeable? 

Puzzle number two: Lack of sex. 

Even though it is a childhood-themed destination, Disney World is also a place where adults wear costumes, drink a ton of alcohol, and walk around in steamy weather—but unlike other locations where these factors obtain, Disney World is utterly sexless. It’s possible I missed the presence of sex, but I looked really hard.

Another observation, perhaps related, was an extraordinary scene that unfolded at one of the French eateries at EPCOT. There, I watched an adult purchase a Grand Marnier Orange Slush, take a sip, frown, and return the drink with a complaint that it was too strong, asking for a redo with a “regular amount of vodka” in it. Has any boozer in history requested a weaker drink? As the former New Jersey senator Robert G. Torricelli said under completely different circumstances: “If you live long enough, you’ll experience everything.”

Puzzle number three: Decency under duress.

Near Soarin’ Around the World, a hang-gliding flight simulator, I stood beside a young mother with two children attached to her body and a third screaming at thrash-metal volume while careening up and down a crowded staircase, knocking into dozens of visitors at full speed. Not only did the casualties abide the shrieking boy with smiles but so did his mother, who plodded after him in unruffled serenity. If you mapped her face on to one of those Paul Ekman affect charts, you’d see an expression of contentment at worst. 

In the grab-and-go cafeteria I watched a Disney employee spill a full carton of milk on a grandmother’s pants by accident—and the grandmother laughed! Every time a downpour lashed the park, people hustled into their ponchos with enthusiasm. (Not resentment. Enthusiasm.) Nobody was bummed out by the long lines. The opposite was true, actually; the length of a line seemed to correlate positively with the exuberance of its constituents. “Look at this insanely long line that we are all in! It is so relentlessly long, and yet we are in it!”

Everywhere at Disney World there existed a strong sense of rising to the occasion. The grandmother in her milk-drenched slacks, the mother pursuing her demon spawn, the hour-long lines for ten-minute rides. Rising to an occasion is something we associate with scenarios of adversity, like a post-hurricane cleanup, not scenarios in which we have paid hundreds of dollars to have our pants ruined. And yet.

 

(Diana Vreeland voice:) Why don’t you … BUILD A MURAL OUT OF CARPET?

Puzzle number four: My lumbago isn’t acting up.

Walt Disney’s Carousel of Progress is often described as a revolutionary theatrical experience, which is true: the theater rotates! The show’s premise mimics the Buster Keaton movie Three Ages, in which Keaton plays a man enduring the tragicomedy of courtship across prehistory, Rome, and the twenties. The point of the film is that heterosexual courtship remains consistent over time. The point of the Disney show is that American families remain consistent(ly wholesome) over time. It is not as funny as Three Ages.

During the show’s first act, an animatronic man delivers the line “My lumbago isn’t acting up.” Isn’t acting up. The inclusion of the word isn’t is, I think, the punctum of the attraction, maybe of the whole park. It is a line that makes perfect sense in the context of the script, but if someone offered you or me a billion dollars to work that sentence into a theme park (or a novel or a poem), and to do so artfully and legitimately, I doubt either of us would succeed in cashing the check.

Israel is closed.

***

As many have observed, the allure of Disney World is that everyone gets to be a child again. This applies to obvious treats, like ice cream and cartoon characters, but also to elements of childhood we remember less fondly. For example, being confused. (See above.) Or being supervised. At Disney World, someone is always supervising you. You are instructed on how and when to stand in line at the happiest ATM on Earth; how and when to board an attraction, how and when to disembark. If you wander into a restaurant where you lack a reservation, you will be cheerfully asked to leave. It’s unsettling to discover how peaceful you feel in an atmosphere of rigid top-down control; how much easier it is to outsource your will to an authority rather than struggle toward self-command. “But only for a few days,” you reassure yourself. “After a few days, it would definitely start to bother me.”

The Orlando airport is Disneyfied too, but in a partial way that Walt would have hated. A retro-looking shuttle zips passengers from the gates to the arrival and departure zones, and although this could be read as an intentional “moment”—a way for visitors to relive the famous monorails of Walt Disney World—it is merely an answer to the conundrum of how to process forty million passengers per year through an airport that can’t handle the volume. The original airfield sprang up in the forties and now possesses the floppy proportions of a suit that has been repeatedly let out to accommodate a fleshier body. Points of architectural pride, like plant-filled atria and sculptural ceilings, are rudely abutted by ad hoc corridors and overflow spaces.

At Orlando’s MCO, as at every airport, people subdue the territory to their needs. If a teenager requires an outlet to charge an iPhone and the only outlet resides in a dusty nook, she will drag a restaurant chair thirty feet from its assigned spot and set up camp near the plug. Stranded travelers sleep on the floors of empty gates, surrounded by backpacks and sweatshirts and food wrappers. It’s the kind of reckless conquest that would never occur at Disney World—that nobody would even try.

 

Molly Young is a book critic at the New York Times.

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Something Good

Still from Something Good, 1898. Courtesy of the Hugh M. Hefner Moving Image Archive at the USC School of Cinematic Arts.

1.

It’s the silent abandon with which they kiss, as if they are aware of someone striding toward them, this someone’s finger wagging, telling them, “No, no, not here, stop that now, or I’ll be forced to separate you, you profligate negroes.” But before this imagined censor can reach them, they pull each other close and kiss again, their mouths disappearing into each other, their mouths taking the shape of their longing. They touch each other as if they have just been released from something, as if their license to touch is short, stolen, or forged. In Something Good, which features the first known on-screen kiss by a Black couple, filmed in 1898, it appears as if the two actors, a peach pit–toned Black man wearing a bow tie and jacket and a peach skin–toned Black woman wearing a ruffled collared dress belted at the waist, are touching each other after a long period of denial, as if they have forgotten what the other’s mouth and hands and neck feel like and are now voraciously reacquainting themselves with each other. The pit of the peach swaddled by its flesh, becoming whole there on the limb of the day. Voraciously seeking itself, making itself happen—be. No, not quite voraciously, but without caution or care for who’s watching, though they are both aware, and we, too, are aware that someone is watching their performance.

They do whatever they like, their arms swinging back and forth between forays of kissing, as if they were going to a carnival down by the railroad tracks or have suddenly come out of a clearing, the man having drunk water from a stream, the sky all in it, and when he looked up, there she was, this peach-skinned woman. The man’s mouth moves as if he were remembering the taste of water, and the woman moves about him as water and as what he could not predict, which is the sky, and the shore that makes the water possible. In less than twenty seconds, they move together as earth moves with water, unpredictably, their kissing meeting and coming apart without a preordained or announced rhythm. Earth and water. Peach swelling into its flesh and pit on the limb of the day.

2.

This was love unjailed, loose like corn silk, loose and free and scattered. This kiss, this something good could not be accounted for, measured, borrowed against, traded for, sold short, chained, marched from port to pesthouse, coffled, rented out, quartered, sliced, enclosed, leveraged, loaned out, compounded, bought, reduced, spoiled, shuttered, stunted, remanded to the margins, exploited, extracted from, “mortgaged, won, stolen, or seized,” mined, or dynamited into oblivion. This kiss, this something good, could not be killed, punished, burned, Jim Crowed, couped, circumvented, forced to sit in the balcony, hung from a telephone pole, hung from a bridge because it whistled at a White woman, hung from a tree in the middle of a town square for demanding wages earned for working in some White man’s field. This kiss was without tradition, and therefore inaugurates tradition. Pleasure that was once remanded to the dark of cabins and cornfields, to forest floors and swamps, is now lit in the center of a movie camera’s frame. Ecstasy without interruption or intervention. Freedom without the harness of propriety. Pleasure not yet yoked to spectacle.

Somehow, this kiss escaped the eye-bucking and over-exaggeration of minstrelsy, escaped the potential for it to become yet another manifestation of the White imagination circumscribing and speculating about Black life, escaped the pessimism and destruction of race in America at the precipice of the twentieth century. This kiss was love in the Nadir, in the Dark Ages of Black Freedom. The year of Something Good, the year of this kiss, 1898, was also the year of the Wilmington massacre. In North Carolina’s largest city at the time, a city where Black people made up the majority of the population, a mob of about two thousand White supremacists not only burned their way through the Black part of town, destroying the offices of a Black-owned newspaper and killing more than three hundred people, but also overthrew the local Fusionist biracial government, deposing both White and Black elected officials in the only successful coup in the history of the United States. This mob installed public officials who would inaugurate the brutal regime of exclusion that we would come to know as Jim Crow. The phenomena of White mobs burning and lynching their way through Black enclaves occurred all over the South during the Black Nadir. In the middle of such horrors, in a movie studio in Chicago, two Black actors, Saint Suttle and Gertie Brown, kissed, and it was recorded on celluloid.

Their silent kissing offers a symbolic counterbalance to the loud terror of the mob. And not just to the mobs of post-Reconstruction America but also to the paterollers and slave masters and senators who upheld slavery from the country’s founding. Suttle and Brown kiss in the middle of ongoing catastrophe, in the middle of our American eyes. They embrace a transparency that’s disarming in its vibrancy and clarity. It feels—no, it is revolutionary in its unabashed intimacy, an intimacy to be worn and borne publicly, an intimacy that seems to burst forth from its hiding place. During slavery, intimacy was fraught because slavery erected not only a barrier between the self and another but also within oneself. What is intimacy when it and the feelings that come from it can be claimed by another; when another, someone who calls himself master, can claim the body that feeling runs through?

In Something Good, it’s as if Suttle and Brown refuse the barriers and walls of slavery, refuse the surveillance and apartheid of post-Reconstruction America, as if they were the grandchildren reared on their parents’ and grandparents’ stories of having to eke out moments of pleasure during the spectacle and banality of slavery, stories of sprigs of lavender and mint placed in a doorway or in a handle of an iron to sweeten the sweat and labor of cleaning and cooking and tending and mending in a White woman’s kitchen, stories of going to bodies of water to hush the sound of study and meeting a lover one was forbidden to meet; it’s as if Suttle and Brown mixed in these stories with their own desire and kissed and kissed and kissed. Loose, free, and scattered.

3.

Why is their kissing so loud? I hear it, hear them, despite the kiss occurring in the black-­and-white silence of the film. Maybe this inexplicable and unlocated loudness is the “something” of the title. “Something” about a kiss. “Something” about the way it opens a man’s face into a bright noise. After each kiss, Suttle pulls back from Brown and his face bursts into an explosion of satisfaction and ecstasy. You can almost hear him say, “Ahhh, now that’s it—that’s it.” His face in its ecstatic glee, the sound of it, reminds me of the dark brown faces and voices of older men whom I have loved in my life—sometimes very difficult men who died very difficult deaths and lived difficult lives before those difficult deaths. One, for instance, was dragged down a road when his pant leg was caught in the door of a car, his body eventually thrown across a field, his body coming to rest only when a fence post impaled his head. The scar of it, the post’s impaling, he carried with him in and out of the barbershop he worked in, carried it with him when leaning back against one of the walls in the barbershop, a curtain of smoke falling about him as he puffed and grinned into a Newport. He carried the scar with him to his death, which occurred less than ten years after the incident. The scar, his cratered and forever-dented head, all because a woman saw her husband coming down the road and sped off before this man could exit the car properly. Despite these difficulties, I have glimpsed moments of this sort of ecstasy, the sort of satisfaction that creases Suttle’s face, this “something good” in the faces of these difficult men, these men thrown down by both life and unwise decisions, thrown down upon the road and dragged to their deaths. I have heard this joy, this bright noise in their faces despite their difficult lives, sometimes because someone or something beautiful crossed their paths or because a trumpet’s plaintive wail made its way out of a radio speaker and touched something deep down in them, and you hear them shout, “You ought to be more careful.”

“You ought to be more careful,” my grandfather would shout and shake his head when I made him laugh, delighting him while standing on the shore of some creek or river in the early morning, a fishing pole in my hand, the leaves overhead scattering their shadows on the surface of the water. My grandfather, too, was a difficult man who died a difficult death—a heart attack while in the hospital being treated for emphysema. The man gasping for breath, his heart, unable to take the stress of his laboring, gave out. The beginning of his life—orphaned, having to steal in order to feed himself—as difficult as his end. Yet the man loved to cut up and laugh, his thin brown face often becoming nothing but a large grin and cheeks.

In the bursts of joy that flood Suttle’s face, I hear a shout, I hear my grandfather’s “You ought to be more careful,” an announcement of a surplus of satisfaction—a “something good” that cannot be controlled, cannot be measured. It is an outburst that lacks self­-consciousness. Not one stitch of embarrassment wrinkles Suttle’s brow or scatters across his face. There’s no worry of what we, the viewers, might think. There’s only the woman in front of him. Although he is an actor and therefore laboring, there’s nothing in his face that suggests fatigue or exhaustion, the laboriousness of work. Nothing feels contrived or says “I can’t wait until this is over.” There, in Suttle’s face, is a territory of possibility. His face conveys the joy of asking to be in joy and enjoyed. Could you imagine—being directed to be in a state of pleasure not for others but for oneself? It appears as if Suttle directs himself toward pleasure, finds something beyond the direction to kiss, finds something good.

4.

Gertie Brown finds something so good that she can do nothing but shake her head at it, shake her head at the man on the other side of her who dips his head down and kisses her. In the writing, I typed “sips” instead of “dips.” Maybe that’s what Brown is shaking her head at—that she becomes what is on the other side of his thirst. And that he is on the other side of her—her thirst, her pleasure, her playing with pleasure in front of this new technology called a movie camera. I want to stay with her shaking her head for a moment. Maybe her bashfully shaking her head “no, no” is again another manifestation of a surplus of satisfaction and of the irony of being all in it, being in the middle of something that overwhelms you with its goodness. So overwhelmed, in fact, that she must turn her head away from his, as if in removing him from her sight she staunches the feelings that convulse and breach the banks inside her.

Turning her head away from Suttle, Brown reminds me of my grandmother refusing to look at my grandfather at his funeral. Yes, this the orphaned grandfather of the difficult life, the grandfather who left my grandmother in her late thirties for another woman, who was just two towns, a cornfield, and cow pasture over. My grandmother turned her head like Brown when she walked up to the casket to look at my grandfather one last time before the eulogy. I remember it well. Someone prodded her to go look at my grandfather because she had refused to do so throughout the service. Not even during the viewing of the body before the service did she cast her gaze toward my grandfather laying in a tan suit in the casket, a tan suit with a chocolate stain on the lapel. My grandmother sat, turned away from him in the small, warm chapel of the funeral parlor, the polished wood panels gleaming on that overcast afternoon. My grandmother kept her body tilted on the seat as if she were trying to overhear something my grandfather might say but without looking at him, her ear cast over her shoulder. It appeared as if she expected to hear an apology or acknowledgment of the life they had shared since she was a teen. Finally, when none came, because the dead cannot offer in death what they would not offer in life, someone cajoled her, nudging her, then pulling her gently up by the elbow, escorting her to the edge of the casket to witness what death and the mortician had done to my grandfather. It might have been my mother, her daughter, who escorted her to the edge of the casket and prodded her to look, to look down at her former husband. In fact, I think it was my mother who took my grandmother by the elbow and stood with her until she could no longer look at him.

My mother was also my first example of loving, abiding, and being with difficulty, which I have yet to master. How could she love this man who left her mother in a house with one apple tree in the backyard, a falling-down shed, and bats in the basement? Perhaps my mother’s love for her father was because, despite the breakup between him and her mother, he never stopped loving and caring for her and her mother. When a bat that had taken up residence in a dark corner of the basement decided to fly about the house, sending us all to hide in the television room, it was my grandfather who came over with a net, trapped the bat, and brought his size-seven brogans down on its head (his words, not mine). And it was my grandfather, with his eighth-grade understanding of mathematics, who came over and built a new shed from scratch, albeit with his own sense of measurements, which meant that he had to rehang the door several times because he didn’t build the shed according to the specifications that came with it. It was also my grandfather who would sometimes watch me and my sister when my mother or grandmother had to work overtime.

But this is about my grandmother, her walking up to the casket, peering over the side of it, and when she was sure it was my grandfather, she turned from him, shaking her head as if to say, “Yes, that’s him, and he’s dead.” It was the same sort of headshake that Gertie Brown offers us and Saint Suttle—surplus, being in the middle of something and being in disbelief, which is a form of belief. My grandmother’s headshake of “yes” also bore a bit of “no,” as in “No, I can’t believe it ended this way.” I can’t be sure, but I believe I heard her say as much—that she couldn’t imagine my grandfather dying like he had—fearful, choking, then a heart attack. Sometimes, I see my grandmother standing on the plush burgundy carpet in the funeral parlor, looking down at my grandfather. I hold her where she had refused to stay, her head shaking at this love that was now dead in a casket wearing her grandson’s suit that no longer fit him, a stain on the lapel.

5.

We are suspicious of beauty because of its shifting, opaque, and often diffuse definition. Depending upon who holds or manipulates beauty, utters something about it, there tends to be in that utterance, in that holding or manipulating, power—a wresting and hoarding of it. Beauty becomes the weather—the sun and the rain—by which all the people beneath it must ask or pray for mercy, for grace, for a kind visitation, for it not to bruise their heads with too much heat or flood their fields or houses with too much water. To be found outside beauty or without beauty is often to be found sitting in the seat of the scornful—unlucky, condemned, graceless, and unfavored. Beauty becomes tied to success, goodness, truth, divinity, and moral rectitude. A bean to be counted, to be measured and weighed against, beauty is a chit and so can become a weapon, a means of exploitation, a fungible commodity, a gimmick. And, in the transaction, those who possess and manipulate beauty hold and wield a power they should have never been given or taken. We are right to be suspicious of beauty. So when I say Something Good is beautiful, I am aware that I am wading into this fraught territory of exclusion, power, and marginalization. But dammit, their kissing, their frolicking in and with each other inside the frame of that film is beautiful because it lacks what exclusion, power, and marginalization do not—domination. When Suttle pulls Brown toward him or Brown turns her face away from Suttle, nothing about their pulling or tugging on each other is about a struggle for power. They revel in the pulling, in the tugging—being drawn to each other. They hold hands and swing their arms back and forth as if they are cradling and nurturing beauty between them—the beauty born there in the moment of them coming together.

There is also something else there, something I can’t name, but I know it’s participating in me calling them, calling this film, beautiful. Something ineffable and simultaneously delightful. It’s actually more than delight, more than pleasure, more than justice and permission. Maybe it’s freedom. It’s as if in this cinematic moment between Brown and Suttle we’ve been released from something, as if we’ve closed our eyes and now can see what we could not see before, feel what we could not feel before. Maybe it’s beauty. Maybe that’s what beauty truly is—sensing something that is beyond sight but that requires both a corroboration and subversion of what we think we know of seeing, feeling. Maybe it’s moving beyond or below noise. Maybe that something is silence—and that silence makes a thing—makes a life—beautiful. Beauty not in noise but in what is without. Beauty as that which takes away, and in the taking-away makes life more abundant. Maybe it’s that—sound without sound. Eyes closed and seeing. Maybe what Brown and Suttle offer for twenty seconds is paradise but without borders, dread, exclusions, a nemesis, or a need to keep out the other. Paradise without a gimmick or an angel at its gates with a flaming sword. Maybe they offer us an invitation to our own beauty, an invitation to feel without the previous harnesses and gates thrown up in front of us. And it is all done silently. Silently. Not because their love is without sound but because the absence of sound offers us more possibility, makes manifest what we couldn’t feel before.

 

From Dark Days: Fugitive Essays, forthcoming from Graywolf Press this August.

Roger Reeves is the author of two collections of poetry, King Me and Best Barbarian, which won the Griffin International Poetry Prize and the Kingsley Tufts Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Reeves teaches at the University of Texas at Austin.

Fireworks: On Kenneth Anger and The Legend of Zelda

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.

One of the most provocative sequences of Kenneth Anger’s career appears in an early short film (and my favorite), Fireworks (1947): a sailor opens his fly to reveal a Roman candle spitting sparks at the camera until it explodes, drenching the frame with spurts of white light. This image would later establish Anger as a seminal figure in the history of queer film, but it also resulted in an obscenity trial—gay sexuality was criminalized, and the Hays Code had a vice grip on Hollywood. A countercultural icon and lifelong Angeleno, Anger died in May at age ninety-six. The body of work he left behind stands beside that of American avant-garde filmmakers like Maya Deren, Sara Kathryn Arledge, Stan Brakhage, and Jonas Mekas: experimental shorts, made predominantly between the forties and seventies, that combine surrealism and scenes of stylized violence with a heavy dose of occult symbolism.

Fireworks, which Anger made at twenty in his parents’ Beverly Hills house while they were out of town, is a gorgeous fourteen-minute film with no dialogue, set to orchestral music. The nameless protagonist, played by Anger himself, leaves his bed, wanders through a homoerotic dreamworld in search of a light, and meets a group of beautiful sailors. They flex their cartoonishly massive biceps for him and light his cigarette with a flaming palm frond but then turn hostile, chasing the dreamer down to deliver a beating. There’s a flurry of white-clothed limbs as they tear his clothes off, whip him with chains, pour milk over his lips and eyes, and gouge open his chest with a shattered beer bottle to expose the face of a compass buried among his internal organs. The dreamer’s expression passes from ecstasy to agony and back again. A few hallucinatory moments later, the fireworks go off.

At the heart of Anger’s work is a question about the erotics of masculinity. The biker film Scorpio Rising (1963), for example, is an ambiguous exploration of fascist aesthetics: high-gloss rider jackets, Nazi iconography, an obsession with the perfected physical form—and the attendant unspoken racial implications. Like the sadomasochistic brutalization of the dreamer in Fireworks, the scenes in which the biker gang lovingly assemble their looks for the night—peaked caps, imperial eagle insignia, and leather—are suffused with desire. It’s one of the hardest watches of his oeuvre for me, but is emblematic of Anger’s work: shorts that span a vast imaginative territory, a sort of psychosexual underworld, where repressed fantasies of the American unconscious can take shape and move around unfettered. He takes dreams seriously as a subject worthy of art and utilizes them to develop scenes that operate on multiple registers. Though it might have been part of a strategy to avoid censorship, the Roman candle in Fireworks reads to me like an homage to the props enjoyed by a certain kind of transmasculinity. Like a strap-on or a souped-up packer, the prosthetic phallus allows the wearer to bathe in the pageantry of a particular type of queer masculinity, whose aggressive quality in this scene is undercut by a sense of comedy, magic, and mischief. Here, and elsewhere, Anger is able to observe the inner workings of desire—its pursuit, suspension, satisfaction, and fluctuation.

—Jay Graham, reader

I’ve often been asked whether or not video games can be considered art. One stock reply I have is that the immersive experience of the video game can allow one to encounter simulacra of more conventional aesthetic experiences or practices. The behemoth new Nintendo offering The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is a playground for such encounters. The player is encouraged to use a near-infinite number of means (building vehicles, “shield-surfing,” being catapulted by a slab of marble) to achieve a near-infinite number of random ends (flying over enemies, sledding down a snowy mountain, or using the aforementioned slab catapult to shoot a ball into a hole on the face of a spherical sky-island one hundred yards away), not because they are required to beat the game, but simply because you can and you find yourself wanting to. The game requires a kind of virtual athleticism: my favorite action involves soaring through the skies on a Zonai Wing, a flying device shaped like a bird that disappears after you’ve used it for a minute. When that happens, if you time it right, you can spawn another one, fall onto it, and keep on flying.

Tears of the Kingdom’s art direction elegantly sidesteps the “real-life graphics” arms race that most major releases engage in and opts for a decidedly impressionistic aesthetic. The game designer Shigeru Miyamoto, the director of 2012’s Skyward Sword, whose art style was refined in Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, has cited Paul Cézanne as a major influence, describing the graphics in his work as “moving paintings.” 

Within this aesthetic frame, however, the action is less modernist impressionism and more a postmodern Fluxus, where actions are equally deconstructive and constructive, and activities that have conventional artistic correlates are designed to be toyed with, experimented on, and used for brazen (or impish) ends. The player can practice sculpture and engineering (building machines with “Zonai devices”), photography (an optional part of the game involves taking pictures of every item and creature with a smartphone-like device), and dance (combat mechanics that pay homage to the “bullet-time” sequences of The Matrix). There’s even virtual land art: one strip of terrain at the border of the map is literally Spiral Jetty by Robert Smithson, and scattered across the map are thirteen “geoglyphs” that can be fully appreciated only when skydiving. The plot is a bricolage of key stories and myths from at least five different religions; the music is minimalist in the Sakamoto mold. Tears of the Kingdom isn’t an escape from reality but an advertisement for reality—including the aesthetic practices that already make our own. 

—William Lennon

Dear Jean Pierre

All images © the Estate of David Wojnarowicz. Courtesy of Primary Information, the Estate of David Wojnarowicz, and P·P·O·W, New York.

The following letters were sent by David Wojnarowicz to his Parisian lover Jean Pierre Delage in 1979, as part of a three-year transatlantic correspondence that ended in 1982. In them, the artist details his day-to-day life with the type of unbridled earnestness that comes with that age, providing a picture of a young man just beginning to find his voice in the world and of the love he has found in it. Although the two exchanged letters in equal measure, Delage’s have largely been lost, leaving us only with a glimpse into the internal world of Wojnarowicz during what turned out to be his formative years. 

Capturing a foundational moment for Wojnarowicz’s artistic and literary practice, the letters not only reveal his captivating personality but also index the development of the visual language that would go on to define him as one of the preeminent artists of his generation. Included with his writings are postcards, drawings, Xeroxes, photographs, collages, flyers, and other ephemera that showcase some of Wojnarowicz’s iconic images and work, as well as document the New York that formed the backdrop to his practice.

—James Hoff, editor

New York City
June 14, 1979

Dear Jean Pierre,

I was very happy to receive your letter last night. I was also nervous. I wondered if you were receiving my cards. Your letter was beautiful, don’t worry about your English—I understand the whole letter, it made me feel sad a bit when I read it. Yesterday I got the photos returned from the shop. As I looked through them, I felt very strange, the same “foggy atmosphere.” It’s difficult to look at the photos and think about Paris and especially you. I sent a few of them to you. When I have time to work in the darkroom and develop photographs, I will make some large ones to send to you. Or maybe I will give them to you when you arrive in August. 

The first week after I arrived here in New York, it was very difficult not to be able to touch you, to see you and talk. I have no desire to live with anyone but you. I don’t like much of the people here in the strong ways that I feel for you. Americans, or New Yorkers, have more freedom in a certain sense, but they seem to be afraid to explore their feelings. Every one of my friends has been good with me, they try to make me feel comfortable with living in New York. But I feel very strange and I miss you. I am glad you are coming to New York in August. Do not be afraid of New York. When I returned after nine months in France, New York shocked me. But now I see it differently. There is much energy. Many things happen on the streets. Everyone rushing around and much much noise and talk. It can be very exciting, and sometimes it can be very strange. But do not worry, when you arrive I will show you many things and also help you to find your way around the city. I have hope that you will be excited by the experience. It is very different from Europe, but it can be very interesting as an experience. 

I think I will be working very soon. I am waiting for a job working with a photographer—they should call me today and let me know. I feel confident about having an apartment (flat) by August. I will share a flat with Brian. (Brian says: “Hello,” he hopes you are well.) 

I will go to the embassy soon. I have been busy looking for work. I think you are correct. Maybe I should try to live as a student in Paris. We have some time to work on this before the end of August. I wait and wish I could see you tomorrow. Again, I hope you are well, I love you and hope everything is going well. Take good care of yourself. Have a good night. I hope June and July pass quickly. I’ll be very happy to see you. Be well.

—love David

New York City
July 2, 1979

Dear Jean Pierre, Hello! I received your letter and the postcard of the Eiffel Tower—the postcard is similar to a photograph on an American/English edition of On The Road by Jack Kerouac— the letter was also very beautiful … it’s good to hear from you so much, so many times … I am glad to hear you are reading the biography of Jack Kerouac, it’s interesting to read that man’s life—more interesting are his books, one book that is better than Celest Clouchards [sic] is a book called: SUR LA ROUTE …

[…] Tonight after work I walked along the river again, I watched the sun fall through the skies over the cliffs of New Jersey in a huge red ball, the color of roses in Normandy in the autumn, the skies were filled with large clouds like strange airplanes drifting against the sides of tall buildings, I walked out onto a long pier where large ships years ago would dock and unload cargo in the day and the night … the water was a dark blue and rolling under the wind that blew in from the west, it was a beautiful sunset and I felt very strange in a good way, I thought of this past year and of you, I also think to when you arrive and I will have a chance to bring you around the city and show you all these things, the river, the village and the music clubs where many new wave bands play, musicians like DEVO and TALKING HEADS and BLONDIE—it will be very exciting and also very powerful, I don’t think you will have experiences like this anywhere else except maybe England … so much energy and good music and wild living goes on here, so don’t worry about being afraid of New York, it is quite safe to walk around and I think after a few days you will feel comfortable enough here, well, we will see, also this woman I know said to me that you and I can come up to her house near Woodstock, New York, and stay for a weekend, it is so pretty up there with long long rolling hills, forests and streams and rivers and good air … oh Jean Pierre, I think to you and can not wait long to hold you and talk with you and look you in the eyes and make love and be with you sleeping and after work, you must know what I mean …

take care of yourself, be good and I love you

—love David

>

New York City
October 4/5, 1979

Dear Jean Pierre, 

I walked around the Chinatown today and took a few photographs in this tiny Chinese coffee shop. Beautiful place, I saw two tiny photos of saints in an envelope taped to the wall behind the coffee machines, so I photographed it. Now I’m waiting in the West Village for Brian to come down—we have not spent much time together in the last month so tonight we will go to the cinema. I wandered around the river for the afternoon—it felt very peaceful with the sound of wind and water, also there were interesting things to photograph. I took many photos of graffiti that strangers made on the walls—drawings of hermaphrodites, etc. It should be interesting to see what they look like when I develop them. My friend is going to give me equipment for photos when we move into the new place. The weather is warm today, beautiful day. I hope you are okay. Take care of yourself.

—love David

 

From Dear Jean Pierre , out from Primary Information this August. 

David Wojnarowicz (1954–1992) was born in Red Bank, New Jersey. Wojnarowicz channeled a vast accumulation of raw images, sounds, memories, and lived experiences into a powerful voice that was an undeniable presence in the New York City art scene of the seventies, eighties, and early nineties. His use of blunt semiotics and graphic illustrations exposed what he felt the mainstream repressed: poverty, abuse of power, blind nationalism, greed, homophobia, and the devastation of the AIDS epidemic. Wojnarowicz died of AIDS-related complications at the age of thirty-seven.

You can read Hannah Gold’s essay on Wojnarowicz’s letters to Jean Pierre on the Daily here. 

On Mexican Baroque

Carlos Adampol Galindo, Arena México por Carlos Adampol, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Each time I return to Mexico I find myself marveling at how many elements of daily life there could, in some way, be described as Baroque: our sunsets, our cuisine, our pollution, our corruption. Century after century, the country has exhibited a great tendency towards exuberance, and a natural bent for the strange and the marvelous. There’s a constant play between veiling and unveiling (even in our newscasts, one senses indirect meaning in everything), as well as a fluidity of form, in which excess triumphs, every time, over restraint.

Three hundred years of colonial rule produced an intense syncretism of indigenous and European cultures, a bold new aesthetic accompanied by many new paradoxes, and these can be glimpsed today in both lighter and darker manifestations, some playful and others barbaric.

Mexican Baroque emerged from the conquest of the New World, from the long, fraught process of negotiation and subjugation that began to unfold once the Spaniards established their rule in 1521. The European monarchs wanted as much gold as their conquistadores could plunder, while their missionaries sought to convert the pagan savages to Catholicism. The Aztecs of course had their own gods, a monumental pantheon that included the fierce and formidable Quetzalcoatl and Huitzilopochtli, yet these ancient powers proved no match for colonial rapacity.

There was one pivotal overlap between the two religions, however, a fortuitous convergence which helped ease the transition from the Aztec cosmology to the Catholic faith. And this was the “theater of death” present in both religions. Accustomed to their own culture of human sacrifice, the Indians identified with the Crucifixion and with other violent chapters in the new theology, and were thus gradually lured by its passions and taste for the macabre. In artistic portrayals of certain scenes from the New Testament, the blood and the drama were laid on thick.

The Churrigueresque style brought over from Spain, a highly florid and heavily laden version of Rococo, found its most triumphant expression, one could argue, in Mexico. The church architects were Spanish, yet the artisans and laborers were Indigenous and mestizo, and they asserted their autonomy from the metropolis by adding local materials such as tezontle, a porous red volcanic stone, and local motifs, with quetzals and hummingbirds and faces with native features finding their way into the chiseled landscapes. In all their magnificence, the gilt altars and church facades also betrayed a horror of silence and empty space, every inch of wood, stucco, and stone teeming with detail, as if replicating the delirious splendor of the natural world beyond.

Despite the number of masterly creations that resulted, Mexican Baroque mostly emerged from a clash of cultures, from antagonism rather than harmony, and this is largely what grants it its dynamic force. Its art rejected straight lines and predictable paths, reveling in a liberated geometry that mirrored the new unstable and multicaste society that had risen from the embers. The monolithic sculptures of the Aztecs and earlier pre-Hispanic civilizations—signs of a certain stability—were replaced by a more fluid and volatile art, one which favored movement over form, agility over monumentality.

Like most art of the Baroque, it too thrived off a play of contrasts and opposites, and this was most poignantly articulated in the historical counterpoint between the Aztec emperor Moctezuma and the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés, the dialectic between victor and vanquished spilling over into one between old gods and new, the awe of the conquistadores upon discovering this marvel of a land versus the increasing disenchantment of its natives, their gods toppled, their beliefs exploited. To a large extent, the soul of modern Mexico was born from this collision.

***

One arena in present-day Mexico in which a conflict of archetypes can be witnessed literally is in the spectacle of lucha libre, or freestyle wrestling, another European import to which was added local color and verve. Different theories exist regarding its origins: some say an early variant was brought over in 1863 during the French intervention, or in 1910 by a Spanish boxing promoter; a more accepted notion is that the sport came to Mexico in the early twenties courtesy of two dueling Italian theatre troupes.

Everything about the performance favors emotion over form. The movements are exaggerated, as are the wrestlers themselves, massive hulks of men in tights who wear capes like those of superheroes and shiny carnivalesque masks that hide their faces. There’s a certain splendor to them, but once the match begins, that splendor is undercut by an atmosphere of buffoonery. At rest, the wrestlers appear regal and imposing. In motion, the elegance is quickly undermined by their comical leaps and bounds. It is as if they start off by embodying the first period of Baroque in Mexico, in the late seventeenth century, characterized by solemn church facades, rich and refined, and then they go on to embody its second period, from the mid-eighteenth century, which was more opulent and chaotic, an architecture of Solomonic columns that twist, spiral, and writhe.

The wrestlers’ masks often evoke their powers and persona: El Santo, Blue Demon, Fray Tormenta, Huracán Ramírez, Rey Mysterio. They are costumed heroes and villains engaged in a jocular battle between good and evil. The Baroque fondness for extremes is felt in every match, which is fought between a técnico—one who follows the rules and plays cleanly and gracefully—and a rudo: one who transgresses, breaking codes with relish. In this play of adversaries, there is no guarantee that good will win. In fact, the rudos are often expected to triumph, hinting at a cultural acceptance that righteousness, in Mexico at least, isn’t necessarily rewarded.

In a sense, the showdown between Moctezuma and Cortés could similarly be envisioned as a battle between a técnico and a rudo; the Aztec emperor, honest and honorable and deferential to his guests, played by the rules, while the conquistador lied and cheated and, thanks in part to his deviousness, succeeded in bringing down an entire civilization.

***

The wild gestures that fuel the lucha libre spectacle elicit a frantic emotional intensity. Audiences work themselves into a lather, subjecting the wrestlers to a loud repertoire of insults, mostly bawdy and vulgar, as if they were taking sides in some kind of moral contest rather than a sporting tournament.

In Baroque art movement tends to be centrifugal, a restlessness away from the center, as opposed to the classical impulse of restraint. Although the wrestlers lunge at one another, they are constantly being cast outward, either by their opponent’s thrust or by the elastic ring, their main instrument for propulsion. Performers often take flying leaps outside the ring and land in the audience. Similar to what Caravaggio did in his paintings, these “suicides,” as the moves are called, break down the boundary, and remove the safety barrier, between viewer and spectacle; one can smell the sweat, feel the flesh, hear the grunts, almost grasp the energy, of the wrestler as he comes crashing into us.

Even the geometry of the ring is defied, its quadrangle stretched and deformed again and again. The rapid shifting of planes—between floor and air, the ring and beyond—is forged by grand aerial maneuvers and gestures of torsion and contortion. Every effort is answered with a countereffort, every movement turned into its opposite, a great elasticity between up and down as each man tries to bring his opponent to the ground. In this endless curling and coiling, transcendence is, at least corporeally, denied. Something deeply Dionysian haunts the spectacle, chaotic and unpolished. And yet it is often marked by pathos—sometimes in the mere sight of a massive lump of a man unable to haul himself up or even more so when a wrestler is defeated and his mask removed. The moment his identity is revealed, his strength and his aura dissolve.

 ***

A more recent and dismaying phenomenon of Baroque excess and hyperbole, wherein the human body again becomes the site of transformation and yet the spectacle of bloodshed is real, not staged, is within the violence wrought by the warring drug cartels.

Since 2006, Mexico has been in the grip of a disastrous war on drugs, initiated by our then president Felipe Calderón. Over sixty thousand individuals have lost their lives as the cartels battle among themselves for territory while a weakened military and often corrupt police force try desperately to control them. Nearly every day the news offers reports of beheadings and dismemberment, of a violence and brutality so extreme that even the depiction of severed body parts in Goya’s Disasters of War seems restrained. It goes without saying that narco-violence is not an art, yet the graphic mise-en-scènes could similarly be read as allegories of great sociopolitical disintegration, and the headless bodies as metaphors for a country without any real leadership.

Mexicans are accustomed to severed body parts; they have been an element in our landscape since pre-Hispanic times. Skulls, in particular, feature prominently in every one of our civilizations, the hollow eye sockets and bared teeth a presence from ancient eras through to the modern. Yet they have become so detached from their cadavers that they seem to exist entirely on their own, devoid of humanity. And it is one thing to see images in stone at the Museum of Anthropology and quite another to witness heads with their hair and flesh still on them, faces one could have glimpsed on the metro yesterday. The ancient skulls formed part of a metaphysics, whereas the decapitated heads of today signal chaos and collapse.

In Uruapán, a city in my father’s northwestern state of Michoacán, masked men once stormed into a discotheque called Sol y Sombra (Sun and Shadow) and tossed five severed heads onto the dance floor. This incident, which took place over ten years ago, was one of the first outings of La Familia, a drug cartel composed of right-wing vigilantes who quickly established their bloody reign over the region. The photographic image of these decapitated heads, each with its trail of blood where it has rolled out from the black plastic bag, is hard to erase from memory. Their eyes are closed, their faces a shiny olive color; the gangrene of death has yet to set in. In their midst is a large scroll emblazoned with a warning for rival cartels, a handwritten message that ends with the words “Divine Justice.”

Other cartels, like Los Zetas, the Gulf Cartel, and the Sinaloa Cartel, are similarly fond of leaving behind gruesome memento mori. Bodies, often headless, are dangled from bridges or left in segments by the side of the road. Here Baroque is taken to an extreme, deformed into excess and true monstrosity. The tremendous striving for effect, a desire to make the most startling impact on the senses, has mutated into an unabashed theatricality of the utmost violence.

There are, these days, few signs of redemption. In a regrettable twist of the Baroque, its original vitality has been contorted, redirected towards death rather than life. One finds similar aesthetic criteria, a similar dynamism and instinct for theatricality, yet the early religious impulses have morphed into their opposite. And for some the only religion left, it seems, is death itself.

Perhaps the most literal manifestation of contemporary Baroque—a true syncretism of Spanish Catholicism and pre-Hispanic beliefs—is to be found in the cult of Santa Muerte, or Holy Death, the patron saint of the Mexican underworld, who is a sanctified personification of death herself. Though her cult incorporates dozens of Catholic rituals, she remains vehemently unrecognized by the church.

The millions who worship La Santa Muerte tend to belong to the more marginal or endangered strata of society: criminals, transvestites, drug dealers, prostitutes, taxi drivers, police officers. They are individuals who live by violence or are threatened by it, those who exist in a perpetual twilight and, professionally, mostly by night. And they come to her for protection.

I first encountered La Santa Muerte at her main altar in Tepito, Mexico City’s shadowy sanctum of drugs and contraband. There she stood behind a glass pane, a tall skeleton in a long black wig, a jeweled crown, a sparkling gold dress, and a diaphanous cape. She was heavily adorned, an embodiment of Baroque’s dual pull towards death and sensuality, and I couldn’t help feeling like I was seeing a pre-Hispanic skull in Spanish robes. In one hand she held a globe of the world, in the other the scales of justice. Spread out at her feet was a semicircle of figurines, smaller versions of herself, and a flickering landscape of ephemeral offerings: candles, apples, flowers, incense, beer, bottles of tequila, lit cigarettes. I watched as the devotees queued up to press their hands against the pane and murmur their prayers, then quietly deposit a gift.

 ***

When the Spaniards arrived in Mexico, Moctezuma, believing they were gods, had his emissaries bring Cortés tortillas smeared with human blood as an offering. The emperor himself was a sybaritic gourmet, presented with around three hundred dishes a day made from ingredients brought in from all over the country. Human sacrifice also formed part of the cuisine, and his priests would cook up the remains of sacrificial victims in squash flower soup. The most Baroque dish to emerge from the Conquest is mole poblano, a thick sauce like dark blood concocted from chocolate, almonds, spices, and three types of chili, originally put together by nuns in a convent in Puebla. In Mexico there’s a saying that the spicier a food—and the more it makes you cry—the tastier it is. True culinary enjoyment should be accompanied by a bit of agony, and so it is that to this day mole remains our most beloved dish, a reminder of the turbulent forces from which modern Mexico was born.

 

This piece is adapted from Dialogue with a Somnambulist, out from Catapult this August. 

Chloe Aridjis is a Mexican American writer who grew up in the Netherlands and Mexico. Her debut novel, Book of Clouds, has been published in eight languages and won the Prix du Premier Roman Étranger in France. In 2014, Aridjis was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. 

The Hole

Photograph by Nicolaia Rips.

When he walked into my bedroom for the first time, he pointed at the top right corner of the room. “What is that?”

The answer was a hole. Directly above my closet and several inches below the start of my ceiling is an obvious nook—a deep-set crawl space suspended inside my wall. If that weren’t fun enough—“fun” said through gritted teeth, like how the realtor said “Now, this is fun” when he showed me the nook—there’s another feature: a bolted door within the nook. A dusty, intrusive, and creaky wooden door that points up to the sky. Between the bolts that secure the door is a sliver of light, slim enough that you can’t see what’s on the other side.

My building is an old Boerum Hill brownstone with a criminal exterior renovation. Inside my bedroom, though, the floors slant and the ceiling droops. It’s a beautiful princess bedroom, if the princess never got saved and lived forever unmedicated in her virginal bedroom. It’s a room of illusions, and the nook is its most illusive element. The nook is the last thing I see every night before I go to sleep. Goodnight Moon, good night dollhouse room, good night nook.

He was the first person I dated after a catastrophic college relationship. He was sweet. He reminded me of a portrait of a medieval saint or a beautiful lesbian. He asked questions.

“What are your dreams for the future?” Don’t know. “What did you want to be when you were small?” Taller. “Where does the door in the nook go?” Not sure. “Have you ever opened it?” Never. “Never?” Never ever. From my bed he would stare at it, and the more I tried to ignore it, the more he pushed. “What if there’s something amazing up there?” And what if there isn’t. Here we are in my bed, I thought, no point in fantasy.

He believed doors were made to be opened. I believed, firmly, that some doors should not be. Locked basement doors, closed bedroom doors, the door to a safe, the attic door in a horror flick, a patio door on a burning summer day when the AC is on, the seventh door in Bluebeard’s Castle. He argued for letting in the elements; I, for the threat of a draft. I could unleash a spirit or an alien or a doll left up there imbued with the spirit of a child born during the Depression or of some creep who studied acting at an Ivy League. A ghost is like a pet or a child, and I’m not responsible enough to handle a poltergeist.

Unfortunately, my refusal to deal with the door rendered the whole nook a lost space. There, above my head, was a nook the size of a rich child’s tree house, and I was neglecting it. It was large enough that I imagined I could stand in it fairly comfortably. Being raised in Manhattan, I started to obsess about the nook. I could rent it out as a fourth bedroom. I could use it as off-season storage for several lumpy hand-knit sweaters I felt too guilty to get rid of. I could build a library in it for books I’d stolen and borrowed. In fact, he was upset that I’d never read any of the books he’d lent me. He noticed I was using his favorite book as a coffee coaster.

Our relationship, like most organically sweet things, rotted. When he dumped me, he said there was a disconnect. He said maybe we’d find our way back to each other, and I said we would not. A classic door-half-open divide: he tried to keep it open, but I bolted it shut.

A few days after we broke up, I propped a chair against the wall and scrambled upward. Halfway into the nook, my arm strength dissolved. I dangled, my tush protruding from the wall, wiggling stupidly. I considered shouting for my roommate. Then, I considered her laughing at me. Maybe, I thought, I should just allow myself to be stuck. It’s fine to be stuck. I continued up. There I crouched, panting, in the crawl space, jamming at that ungiving door. With a crack it broke.

From the waist up I stuck out through the ceiling. I could see over Brooklyn. Brooklyn could see over me—a ghoulish, dust-covered, and bizarrely grinning woman escaping from an attic. I wedged myself up further. Suddenly, I was on the tilted roof. The door was open and there was nothing to be scared of. When one door closes, God opens a trapdoor.

 

Nicolaia Rips is the author of the memoir Trying to Float: Coming of Age in the Chelsea Hotel.

Pasolini on Caravaggio’s Artificial Light

Caravaggio, Self-portrait as the Sick Bacchus. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Pasolini’s pen was preternatural in its output. Collected by the publishing house Mondadori in their prestigious Meridiani series, his complete works in the original Italian (excluding private documents such as diaries, and his immense, largely unpublished, epistolary exchanges in various languages) fill ten densely printed volumes. The twenty thousand or so pages of this gargantuan oeuvre suggest that, in the course of his short adult life, Pasolini must have written thousands of words every day, without fail. 

Allusions to painting—and to the visual arts more broadly—appear across the full range of Pasolini’s writings, from journalistic essays to poetry and work for theater and film. The intended destination of the textual fragment below, which remained unpublished during Pasolini’s lifetime, remains uncertain. We know, however, that it was most likely penned in 1974. The “characterological” novelty of Caravaggio’s subjects, to which Pasolini alludes in passing, underscores some of the parallels between the two artists’ bodies of work: an eye for the unlikely sacredness of the coarse and squalid; a penchant for boorishness to the point of blasphemy; an attraction to louts and scoundrels of a certain type—the “rough trade,” of homosexual parlance.It is striking, for instance, that some of the nonprofessional actors that Pasolini found in the outskirts of Rome and placed in front of his camera bear an uncanny resemblance to the “new kinds of people” that Caravaggio “placed in front of his studio’s easel,” to quote from the essay presented here. Take Ettore Garofolo, who for a moment in Mamma Roma looks like a tableau vivant of Caravaggio’s Bacchus as a young waiter. Even the illness that ultimately kills that subproletarian character—so often read as a metaphor of the effects of late capitalism on Italy’s post-Fascist society—is born out of an art historical intuition that is articulated in this fragment on Caravaggio’s use of light. 

But it was equally an exquisite formal sense—a search after “new forms of realism”—that drew Pasolini to Caravaggio’s work, particularly the peculiar accord struck in his paintings between naturalism and stylization. Pasolini professed to “hate naturalism” and, with some exceptions, avoided the effects of Tenebrism in his cinema. It is, instead, the very artificiality of Caravaggio’s light—a light that belongs “to painting, not to reality”—which earns his admiration.

The Roberto Longhi mentioned below is Pasolini’s former teacher, an art historian at the forefront of Caravaggio studies. It was Longhi who resurrected the painter from a certain obscurity in the twenties, arguing for the consequence of his work to a wider European tradition from Rembrandt and Ribera to Courbet and Manet.

—Alessandro Giammei and Ara H. Merjian

 

Anything I could ever know about Caravaggio derives from what Roberto Longhi had to say about him. Yes, Caravaggio was a great inventor, and thus a great realist. But what did Caravaggio invent? In answering this rhetorical question, I cannot help but stick to Longhi’s example. First, Caravaggio invented a new world that, to invoke the language of cinematography, one might call profilmic. By this I mean everything that appears in front of the camera. Caravaggio invented an entire world to place in front of his studio’s easel: new kinds of people (in both a social and characterological sense), new kinds of objects, and new kinds of landscapes. Second: Caravaggio invented a new kind of light. He replaced the universal, platonic light of the Renaissance with a quotidian and dramatic one. Caravaggio invented both this new kind of light and new kinds of people and things because he had seen them in reality. He realized that there were individuals around him who had never appeared in the great altarpieces and frescoes, individuals who had been marginalized by the cultural ideology of the previous two centuries. And there were hours of the day—transient, yet unequivocal in their lighting—which had never been reproduced, and which were pushed so far from habit and use that they had become scandalous, and therefore repressed. So repressed, in fact, that painters (and people in general) probably didn’t see them at all until Caravaggio.

The third thing that Caravaggio invented is a membrane that separates both him (the author) and us (the audience) from his characters, still lifes, and landscapes. This membrane, too, is made of light, but of an artificial light proper solely to painting, not to reality—a membrane that transposes the things that Caravaggio painted into a separate universe. In a certain sense, that universe is dead, at least compared to the life and realism with which the things were perceived and painted in the first place, a process brilliantly accounted for by Longhi’s hypothesis that Caravaggio painted while looking at his figures reflected in a mirror. Such were the figures that he had chosen according to a certain realism: neglected errand boys at the greengrocer’s, common women entirely overlooked, et cetera. Though immersed in that realistic light, the light of a specific hour with all its sun and all its shadow, everything in the mirror appears suspended, as if by an excess of truth, of the empirical. Everything appears dead.

I may love, in a critical sense, Caravaggio’s realistic choice to trace the paintable world through characters and objects. Even more critically, I may love the invention of a new light that gives room to immobile events. Yet a great deal of historicism is necessary to grasp Caravaggio’s realism in all its majesty. As I am not an art critic, and see things from a false and flattened historical perspective, Caravaggio’s realism seems rather normal to me, superseded as it was throughout the centuries by other, newer forms of realism. As far as light is concerned, I may appreciate Caravaggio’s invention in its stupendous drama. Yet because of my own aesthetic penchants—determined by who knows what stirrings in my subconscious—I don’t like inventions of light. I much prefer the invention of forms. A new way to perceive light excites me far less than a new way to perceive, say, the knee of a Madonna under her mantle, or the close-up perspective of some saint. I love the invention and the abolition of geometries, compositions, chiaroscuro. In front of Caravaggio’s illuminated chaos, I remain admiring but also, if one sought my strictly personal opinion here, a tad detached. What excites me is his third invention: the luminous membrane that renders his figures separate, artificial, as though reflected in a cosmic mirror. Here, the realist and abject traits of faces appear smoothed into a mortuary characterology; and thus light, though dripping with the precise time of day from which it was plucked, becomes fixed in a prodigiously crystallized machine. The young Bacchus is ill, but so is his fruit. And not only the young Bacchus; all of Caravaggio’s characters are ill. Though they should be vital and healthy as a matter of consequence, their skin is steeped in the dusky pallor of death.

Translated from the Italian by Alessandro Giammei and Ara H. Merjian. 

From Heretical Aesthetics: Pasolini on Painting, to be published by Verso Books in August.

Alessandro Giammei is an assistant professor of Italian studies at Yale University. Il Rinascimento è uno zombie will be published by Einaudi in 2024.  

Ara H. Merjian is a professor of Italian studies at New York University. He is the author of Against the Avant-Garde: Pier Paolo Pasolini, Contemporary Art, and Neocapitalism. Fragments of Totality: Futurism, Fascism, and the Sculptural Avant-Garde will be published by Yale University Press in 2024.