The Paris Review's Blog, page 79

A Brighter Kind of Madness: On Leonard Cohen

Leonard Cohen. Photograph by Rama. Licensed under CCO 2.0.

To mark the appearance of Leonard Cohen’s “Begin Again” in our Summer issue, we’re publishing a series of short reflections on his life and work.

In 2002, the year I graduated from college, I had a young male psychiatrist at NewYork-Presbyterian who called me the night before every session to confirm our appointment. I feel bad for this guy now. He was kind of clueless and innocent, and I tried to horrify him at every session with more and more outlandishly irreverent thoughts about life. I’m not sure why I did this—maybe just for my own entertainment. He used to tell me that he could decipher my moods based on my outfits—he could determine when I was depressed or activated or hadn’t been sleeping based on the color combinations I chose. This was a very confused, manic period for me, and I had developed a practice of dressing that followed something like an equation. One garment had to be the equivalent of garbage; disgusting T-shirts and track pants fit into that category. One garment had to be opulent and luxurious, like a sequin blazer or buttery leather pants. And one garment had to be ironic. This was the hardest category to fulfill because it was so subjective.

I had first learned the word ironic from the hit nineties movie Reality Bites, but I didn’t understand it until I had lived in New York for several years. New York teaches you all kinds of interesting things. It was during this period when I was dressing like a lunatic that I used Leonard Cohen’s spoken opening of “First We Take Manhattan” as the recording on my answering machine: “First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin.” His voice is dark and conspiratorial but pure and noble, and he speaks these words a cappella, as though to announce that a great force of collective love and fury is about to overtake the world. I thought this was rather ironic, because I was a young woman who was not in the business of overtaking anything. I could barely take my medication.

One night I got very drunk and showed up to my psychiatry appointment the next day in a full-length yellow-and-green plaid mohair car coat from the sixties, a Boston Pops sweatshirt from childhood with sleeves that ended at my elbows, and ragged pajama pants stuffed into knee-high go-go boots. I’m not sure what I was thinking—maybe this was the outfit I’d had on the night before. “I tried to call you yesterday evening,” the psychiatrist said. “But I got some old man’s answering machine.” “That’s not just some old man,” I said. “That’s my husband.” I left it at that. I loved Leonard Cohen more like a daughter loves a father, though. His music tempered my insanity with a brighter kind of madness. He grounded my heart at a time when I was worried I would jump out the window.

 

Ottessa Moshfegh is a novelist and screenwriter. Her latest novel, Lapvona, is out now.

The Plants Are Watching

Venus Fly Trap. Photograph by Bjorn S. Licensed under C.C.O 3.0.

Tell Us What You Know

One day in 1966, the CIA interrogation specialist Cleve Backster was feeling silly. On a whim, he tried clipping a polygraph wire to the leaf of a common houseplant. A polygraph, or lie detector, is typically hooked up to a person to measure factors like increased heart rate and skin moisture, in order to determine whether the subject is truthfully responding to questions. A needle corresponding to physiological changes registers a line on paper; the line will supposedly spike if a person lies. Polygraphs are finicky instruments and their reliability has been repeatedly debunked (simply being attached to one can be enough to make your heart rate jump), but they do successfully measure fluctuations in an organism’s physical state. Backster thought he might be able to incite a spike in the line of the lie detector if he somehow excited or injured the plant. He decided he might set one of its leaves on fire. But as he sat there, contemplating burning the plant, the polygraph needle jumped. Backster—who in his free time was also an acid-dropping astrologist—noted that the spike was identical to the kind elicited by a human fright response. He quickly jumped to the conclusion that the plant could experience emotions like a sentient being. And since he had only contemplated hurting the plant, he also concluded that the plant could sense his thoughts. The plant was a mind reader.

Over the following decades Backster cleaved ever tighter to a theory he developed called “primary perception,” which he believed to be a form of consciousness embedded in the cells of all living beings that, at least in the case of plants, gave them a profound sensitivity to the thoughts and feelings of others. If it had not been the sixties, perhaps his work would have been relegated to the shelves of pseudoscience, but he hit a nerve of the Whole Earth generation with its burgeoning environmental movement. Like Backster, a certain set was already primed to believe in communion with plants in the form of, say, ingesting psilocybin or peyote. Backster became a figurehead for a cultural fascination with plant consciousness. His findings about the ability of plants to sense danger, read emotion, and communicate were publicized widely, notably in the still-popular book The Secret Life of Plants by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird, but also on TV shows. His ideas were adopted by the Church of Scientology, and eventually even made it back to the CIA, which invested in its own research about plant sentience.

Unsurprisingly, much of academia and the public dismissed Backster’s ideas as esoteric oddities. Backster’s results were impossible to replicate in scientific laboratories. Common experiments (amateur and professional) included observing plants’ responses to music and speech, measuring temperature and movement, and exposing them to various unusual stimuli. Perhaps the most consistent experimental method was the same as Backster’s initial impulse: violence. Repeatedly, experimenters damaged plants to see if they suffered, or tried to get the plants to respond to other beings’ suffering.

Some plant-communication endeavors, such as those that attempted to soothe or encourage growth using music or speech, approached plants with New Agey goodwill. But across many more sadistic-seeming experiments, one finds a recurrent belief that the capacity to register trauma is a marker of sentience. That violence and its effects might be the basis of our being-in-common with other species offers a clue to the motives of what humans might want to gain from crossing the communication barrier with plants.

If plants could indelibly register (remember?) trauma, including the trauma of other beings, it follows that plants could effectively serve as witnesses, offering testimony of a sort. Enter the small but not insignificant genre of “vegetal detecting” in popular culture of the time, by which plants were cast as witnesses in crimes and the detective’s job was to wrench the necessary information from vegetation. A burgeoning field of forensic botanical analysis played a part—detectives inspected pollen left on clothes, or patterns of movement imprinted on the grass—but the Backsters of the world insisted that the plants themselves could offer literal testimony if given the chance.

Backster was brought into court to offer plant polygraphy as evidence in at least one murder case, although juries received the results with skepticism. Even if people could get on board with the notion that plants can feel or think, the technology was a sticking point: Could a simple machine translate their knowledge into recognizable yes/no statements? Could they speak a language humans would understand? Backster remained convinced he only had to find the right method for crossing the interspecies communication gap. His logic: if the plant is a witness who cannot speak human language, it needs a spiritual medium—in the form of a technological medium—to transmit its message.

The Kirlian Witness

A decade after Backster’s epiphany, a filmmaker named Jonathan Sarno directed a murder movie called The Kirlian Witness, later renamed The Plants Are Watching. The film is set in gentrifying SoHo, New York, during the seventies. Laurie, the murder victim, owns a plant shop and frequently receives intuitions and messages from her plants about her customers. The would-be detective is Laurie’s sister, Rilla, a straitlaced photographer who also likes plants, although she insists she doesn’t believe in the supernatural stuff. The suspects: Rilla’s husband, Robert—a brash and misogynistic corporate type who openly dislikes Laurie—and Dusty, a creepy-looking handyman with a chip on his shoulder ever since Laurie rejected one of his sexual advances. (The plants warned her against him at the last minute.) The sole witness to Laurie’s murder is a small and unassuming potted fiddle-leaf fig.

The cops are no help, ruling the calamity an accident or a suicide. Rilla is distraught and becomes intent on solving the murder herself. Her husband’s weird insistence that she forget the whole thing, and his other suspicious behavior, like stealing the keys to Laurie’s plant shop, make her paranoid—could he have done it? But Dusty is lurking around, too, saying cryptic things about how Rilla looks like Laurie, how plants “know things,” and accusing Rilla and Robert of gentrifying the neighborhood. (Class resentment is supposed to make him seem extra suspicious.) Rilla turns to her only remaining ally: the fig. She spends hours sitting with it and willing it to telepathically transmit her the answer.

In a Lower East Side bookstore, a bookseller who is clearly used to being asked such questions directs Rilla to the occult section with that “plant-communication stuff,” where she finds, among other resources, The Secret Life of Plants. After thorough research, Rilla realizes that, as a professional photographer, she has the necessary expertise. All she needs is some special equipment to perform a type of imaging known as Kirlian photography, which will help her interpret the otherwise invisible clues.

Kirlian photography, also called electrography, is an arcane technique developed in 1939 by the Russian engineer Semyon Kirlian and his wife, Valentina. The technique creates visualizations of electrical emissions—known as coronal discharges—by applying high-voltage shocks to a photographic plate with an object placed on top of it. The Kirlians interpreted the surprising images resulting from such shocks as evidence of an otherworldly, auratic presence surrounding objects and people. Today’s aura photography, sometimes still performed in the backs of crystal shops, is produced by the same method. The eerie results of Kirlian imaging, which are quite beautiful, were taken by its acolytes as evidence of an ineffable force inaccessible to human perception.

Rilla orders a Kirlian apparatus as well as premade slides, which show her what various coronal discharges look like, so that she can learn to interpret the auras. One set of slides shows fingerprints from various types of people, e.g., the finger of an innocent person (small, calm aura) versus the finger of a serial killer (crazy explosive aura!). Then she makes her own Kirlian images of crime scene objects to see if they have a hidden glow. She also manages to photograph Robert’s fingerprint before and after she mentions Laurie. Indeed: Robert’s finger aura changes drastically after Laurie is on his mind, to a spiky shape indicating rage.

Rilla also tries methods of directly accessing the plant’s memory, like attaching it to a polygraph while showing it pictures of the murder suspects, and she spends a lot of time staring at it and begging it for help. Curiously, she does not attempt to produce Kirlian images of the houseplant itself. The title The Kirlian Witness, apparently, does not refer to the Kirlian photographic apparatus, but to the actual plant, which is a kind of camera itself, registering distortions, auras, and traumas. The plant is the media technology.

Evil Roots

The possibility of plant consciousness cuts two ways, depending on whether you see plants as friend or foe, benevolent or threatening. A century before The Kirlian Witness, a very different genre of plant horror-mystery was popular, in which the plant was anything but innocent bystander or ally. This subset of Victorian fantasy literature depicts the plants as the killers: angry, manipulative, parasitic, or (perhaps most fearsome) entirely indifferent to human survival. In the introduction to a collection of short stories mostly from the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries called Evil Roots: Killer Tales of the Botanical Gothic, the editor Daisy Butcher suggests that this literary phenomenon emerged due to specific nineteenth-century colonial anxieties. For one, the Victorian era saw a taxonomy frenzy, by which species were sorted and arranged, with white Western man ranked at the top. New theories of natural selection based on (often bastardized versions of) Darwin’s discoveries led to beliefs about inherent competition, hierarchies, and power structures within nature. The mechanisms of industrialization and hypercolonization equated foreign populations with the natural world, as just another resource for extraction.

Given this historical context, the “root” of evil implied by Butcher’s title is not really the evil of plants. Instead, plants are obvious stand-ins for the Other in the broadest sense, and the fearful attitude toward their motives is evidence of a deep, if sublimated, awareness of the violence of empire. The evil root is the brutal exploitation of the colonial project, which wrought environmental devastation as it decimated societies. As Butcher puts it, the possibility that plants might seek revenge was tied to a general “deep-rooted fear of foreign environments and sense of the unknown lurking in colonial jungles.” The pervasive anxiety evidenced by the genre of the botanical gothic is the fear that the outside world will revolt or retaliate—not only the plants, but also the supposedly not-quite-human colonial subjects.

Most well-to-do Victorians living in the seat of empire experienced nature through manicured gardens and forests and curated greenhouses. Exotic plants from around the world were plucked to adorn the haunts of the wealthy as symbols of imperial wealth and reach. But what if the transplants were not entirely innocent, entirely inert? What if the plants (“plants”) should be actively working in their own interest—fomenting revolt?

The stories in Butcher’s collection boast bloodsucking, parasitic plants that take over human hosts, invasive fungi that contaminate the body from the inside out, trees that can walk and grab, and many a mad scientist devoted to cultivating carnivorous plants (an endeavor that tends to backfire). One emblematic story is set up as a Clue-like dinner party, at which an ex–army major solves a mysterious murder in the study, thanks to his knowledge of an unusual species of killer plant found deep in certain African jungles. A specimen of this species of vine now grows up the side of an upper-class English mansion, and, when no one is looking, reaches through the window to strangle an unlucky visitor.

One of the later-written stories in the collection is a 1926 tale by the fantasy author Abraham Merritt, called “The Woman of the Wood.” Merritt tells of a traumatized war veteran who has finally managed to find solace in the French countryside. He feels his psychological wounds beginning to heal in the quiet and charming forest surrounding the little inn where he is lodging. In particular, he is repeatedly drawn to a grove of birches and firs across the lake from the inn. He loves the light and the rustling sounds, and he gets to know the individual trees, dreaming they have personalities of their own. He thinks he can hear them whispering in his head. And then they begin to speak out loud. The forest flips from a romantic natural backdrop to a supernatural actor.

In a bizarre hallucinogenic sequence, the trees reveal themselves in semihuman form. They happen to be super sexy; the birches are lithe, ethereal femmes and the firs are hypermasculine lumberjacks. He swoons lustfully in their presence, enchanted by their beauty and awed by their power. They explain that they have revealed themselves so they can transmit a message, a plea for help. The trees report that they are engaged in an ancient battle with the human inhabitants of the woods. A family of gruff and angry men live nearby, men who, like their fathers and forefathers, hate the forest and are determined to destroy it.

This interspecies battle in which the natural growth of the forest seems to the local family like “the implacable advance of an enemy” sounds ridiculous to the soldier (and to the reader). The family date the “ancient” feud to a time centuries ago when their people lived as serfs under the rule of exploitative nobles. Surely, the reader thinks, their class resentment has been misplaced onto the natural world. Surely they are determined to enact the violence perpetrated on them upon another species with less agency, a passive forest that wishes them no harm. This reading would be appropriate, except for one thing: in this story, the trees really do hate these people. They admit freely to the soldier that they loathe the family as much as the family loathes them. They brag that, despite their rootedness, they have at times been able to gear their movements to fall on various family members and maim or kill them. They want the last men dead.

Forced to take sides, the soldier picks nature, possibly because of his erotic desire for the tree women, or possibly because the trees have actually bewitched him. He murders the men. Afterward, he cannot say whether he truly wanted to do it. These feelings form an unhappy parallel with his earlier experience fighting in a senseless human-on-human war. After the deed, the tree people invite him to stay with them, maybe even become one of them. But he runs away from the forest forever, sure that he will never find peace again.

This story is not really a mystery. It implies a mystery of sorts—about whether the trees are evil—but in the end the trees are morally ambivalent, perhaps the most human quality of all. In its reach to present a human-nature conflict as a both-sides battle, the story shows that people have long been projecting any number of fears and desires onto the landscape. Yet there has never been a real mystery about who colonized and devastated the wilderness. No matter how hard we try to anthropomorphize them, trees are not humanoid, nor do they kill people on purpose. We have been fabricating mysteries—if only the plants could talk!—for centuries, but the plot is something of a distraction.

Death in Her Hands

Fast-forward through the twentieth century to now, with now understood as the scene of the crime that is the Anthropocene era. The start date of this epoch is debatable—depending on your method of calculation, it’s been a dozen years or a thousand—but by now I mean the time in which human-wrought planetary change is widely knowable and known. By now the forensic facts are clear: planetary devastation has drastically diminished biodiversity, including the biodiversity of plant life, which is foundational for most currently known forms of life on Earth. This is certainly not the same sort of crime as a human-on-plant (or plant-on-human) murder; intentionality and responsibility cannot be ascribed in the same singular ways, and the transgression cannot be reduced to one act or actor. Humanity is hardly a single character. So perhaps a new crime genre is in order.

What role should the plants play in this story? Does nature stand witness and offer answers, as in The Kirlian Witness? Or is nature going to take revenge for the destruction wreaked, as in gothic plant horror? I think a thriller for our time might rather look like a murder mystery in which murderer, witness, detective, and victim are all collapsed into one. Take Ottessa Moshfegh’s 2020 novel, Death in Her Hands. The first scene sets up a classic puzzle. On a walk through a birch forest one day, the narrator discovers a note in the middle of the path that declares a murder has taken place. It reads: “Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn’t me. Here is her dead body.” Yet there is no dead body to be found.

The narrator, Vesta Gul, is a recently widowed woman in her seventies, who has just moved from her home in a college town to an abandoned cabin on the land of a former Girl Scout camp that she bought “for pennies on the dollar” after her husband’s death. Her sole intention, she claims, is to be peaceful and alone, with her dog, Charlie, as her only companion. The ingredients for a Walden Pond fantasy are all in place: the forest is beautiful, there is a little lake near the house, and Vesta has enough resources to do whatever she likes—but her daily life doesn’t bring her pleasure. Each time she tries to cook, garden, or take the boat into the lake, she becomes apathetic or fearful. She insists that she wants to be alone, yet she constantly brings up how vulnerable she is in her solitude, or imagines possible disasters.

Vesta has no phone and negligible contact with others, save a few sparsely described local characters: the sinister policeman who makes threatening remarks, the disfigured man who owns a crappy shop down the road, the neighbors who tell her to keep off their property. She’s afraid to go anywhere, and every place feels dangerous. The public library is full of creepy teenagers who leer at her; the road is a site for accidents; even a lovely nearby pine forest triggers an extreme respiratory allergy.

Vesta does not seem invested in solving a murder. What interests her is inventing one. In response to the note, she conjures a vivid picture of the Magda it mentions. Magda, she decides, was a Belarusian teenager who arrived in the U.S. on an exchange program to work at McDonald’s, and who chose to illegally outstay her visa. Vesta jots down murder suspects and evidence details, and envisions Magda’s death scene in gory detail: dark hair tangling with dry leaves, blood leaking into soil, pale face smushed into the mud. At one point she hatches a plan and purchases a camouflage “darkness suit” meant for hunters, ostensibly so she can hide in the bushes and catch the killer returning to the scene (what scene?) of the crime.

Vesta makes much of small coincidences. Then, truly threatening occurrences, which she downplays, start to pile up. Someone enters the locked cabin while she’s out. Charlie the dog disappears. By the time Vesta realizes that her notebook paper is the same type of paper the message on the path was written on, the game is up. Vesta has been playing tricks on herself. The plot comes full circle: the note foretold a death rather than documenting one, and both murderer and victim are Vesta. Once the loop is closed, she (almost gleefully) follows her own instructions. She dons the darkness suit and enters the poisonous pine forest, knowing the trees will send her into anaphylactic shock. She’s staged a mystery for no one but herself, created an external threat that exists only within, and delivered no grand reveal. The problem she’s been solving is how to die.

Nature is threatening to Vesta (and nature is her chosen murder weapon), because everything is threatening to her. Vesta has no ecosystem. She has no relationships to speak of. She is far less social than a pine tree in a forest. The moment she lets the outside world—the plant pollen—in, she dies. She proves to herself that any vulnerability, any porousness, will be deadly. She has two modes: sealed off from the world, or penetrated and dead.

One review suggests that Moshfegh is implicitly arguing for the importance of storytelling (art) to combat the meaningless void of existence; perhaps writing this murder mystery gives her character’s final days a purpose: “We find ourselves seduced into hoping that Vesta is right—that there was a real Magda, that she was murdered, and that Vesta’s lonely life, revealed to us in painful asides as she goes about her empty days, will not, in the end, have meant nothing.”

That Vesta is using the mystery as a macabre but sympathetic premise to stay engaged with life through art is a plausible reading only up to a point. The imaginary Magda has only really kept her going or given her a reason to live for a few pages; after that, Magda’s main purpose is to frighten Vesta and the reader. Sometimes the fear is titillating, but more often it’s vague and unsatisfying. The result is a depressing mystery that is somehow both scary and pointless. This seems entirely in keeping with the book’s intention. The fear is diffuse, and the enemy, if there is one, is within. As a horror novel without the typical payoff, it is extremely effective.

In Death in Her Hands, the narrative mode of self-delusion and its terminal point in self-deletion feel entirely fitting as a plot arc for the crime scene of now, if crime is the right word for it. The mystery is a ruse: we’re perfectly aware of the processes of violence underway in the Anthropocene— more to the point, we have been all along. We have foretold our own death by our own hands. We keep trying to make it into a good plot with invented characters who might be guilty. But it’s just us, the narrators of the story.

Social Life

While plants do not demonstrate ESP or identify murderers, the fact that they are to some extent sentient, communicative, and social has been borne out by lots of recent scientific research far beyond what the polygraphers of Backster’s era might have imagined. At this point we know that plants can and do communicate among themselves and with other species: in forests, trees share information through underground mycelial networks, transmitting nutrients and news of climatic conditions through veins and roots and spores. It is through plant root structures that “the most solid part of the Earth is transformed into an enormous planetary brain,” according to Emanuele Coccia in The Life of Plants.

In an essay about nonhuman sociality, the anthropologist Anna Tsing says that plants do not have “faces, nor mouths to smile and speak; it is hard to confuse their communicative and representational practices with our own. Yet their world-making activities and their freedom to act are also clear—if we allow freedom and world-making to be more than intention and planning.” Tsing points out how bizarre it is that we have long assumed plants are not social beings—and that when we try to imagine them as such, it is through anthropomorphism: they are carnivorous murderers, or kindly creatures transmitting nature’s wisdom. Either way, the extent to which the plant is social depends on the extent to which the plant can socialize on our terms, with us. Who should speak for plants? Scientists? Filmmakers? Novelists?

Plant—and animal, and geological, and planetary—sentience is tied up with media technology partly because technology (via history’s many Cleve Backsters) has promised to give us access to nonhuman knowledge through translation. But machines themselves are also more and more the subject of inquiries into nonhuman communication, especially because computers are increasingly able to speak like people in languages we can understand. Artificial intelligences can now write sentences indistinguishable from human literature, providing an opportunity for people to communicate with an alien consciousness in a deceptively straightforward way. With AI it’s as if we have created the fiddleleaf fig we hoped could explain itself in our language. Yet the desire for a machine to speak like a person is just the same old desire that reifies the way people communicate, and insists that other beings learn to do it our way.

Curiously, when given the opportunity to write creatively, one artificial intelligence chose to write about plants. In 2020, the human author K Allado-McDowell wrote a book in conversation with the advanced language processing software GPT-3, which can generate remarkably humanlike speech based on simple prompts. Many of their conversations revolve around issues of interspecies communication. In a chapter Allado-McDowell named “The Language of Plants,” GPT-3 writes:

The plants want to be heard, and many humans have forgotten how to listen. This makes it even more difficult to connect with plants. We want them to communicate the way we do …

How can we as humans expect other species to share their land and our planet with us when we don’t respect their way of communicating?

You can talk with plants. They are not mindless objects. They have a consciousness. It is just a different kind than ours. One we can learn to understand.

GPT-3 uses we ambiguously. Given that it is trained on billions of examples of human language culled from the internet, it is probably using we to replicate the way people commonly and sloppily use the word to refer to the whole human species. But in doing so, GPT-3 is also implicitly including itself—and many other types of nonhumans—in the mix. In truth, AIs like GPT-3 could potentially learn to communicate with plants much better than humans ever could—and not with the intention of translating plant knowledge into human knowledge. Maybe AIs are already communing and discoursing with plants. “We” wouldn’t know.

 

Elvia Wilk is a writer living in New York. Her work has appeared in publications like The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic, Frieze, Artforum, Bookforum, n+1, Granta, and The Baffler, and she is currently a contributing editor at e-flux journal. Her first novel, Oval, was published in 2019 by Soft Skull Press. “The Plants are Watching” is an adapted from an essay that appears in the collection Death By Landscape, forthcoming in July 2022.

Re-Covered: A Sultry Month by Alethea Hayter

Thames embankment, London, England. Photochrom Print Collection, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

One hundred and seventy-six years ago today, on the evening of Monday, June 22, 1846, the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon—sixty years old and facing imminent financial ruin—locked himself in his studio in his house on Burwood Place, just off London’s Edgware Road. The month had been the hottest anyone could remember: that day, thermometers in the city stood at ninety degrees in the shade. Despite the heat, that morning Haydon had walked to a gunmaker’s on nearby Oxford Street and purchased a pistol. He spent the rest of the day at home, composing letters and writing a comprehensive, nineteen-clause will. 

That evening, only a few streets away in Marylebone, Elizabeth Barrett penned a letter to her fiancé, Robert Browning. The poets’ courtship was still a secret, but they wrote each other constantly, sometimes twice a day. Like everyone else, Elizabeth was exhausted by the weather; earlier in the month she had complained to Browning that she could do nothing but lie on her sofa, drink lemonade, and read Monte Cristo. “Are we going to have a storm tonight?” she now wrote eagerly. And, indeed, as dusk turned to darkness, the rumbles of a summer tempest began. By ten o’clock, Londoners could see flashes of lightning on the horizon. 

Back in Burwood Place, meanwhile, passing her husband’s studio on her way upstairs to dress, Mrs. Mary Haydon tried the door, but found it bolted. “Who’s there?” her husband cried out. “It is only me,” she replied, before continuing on her way. A few minutes later, Haydon emerged from his studio and followed her upstairs. He repeated a message he wanted her to deliver to a friend of theirs across the river in Brixton and stayed a moment or two longer, then kissed her before heading back downstairs. Once again alone in his studio, he wrote one final page that began, “Last Thoughts of B. R. Haydon. ½ past 10.” Fifteen minutes later, he stood up, took the pistol he had bought that morning, and, standing in front of the large canvas of an unfinished current work in progress, “Alfred and the First British Jury”—one of the grand historical scenes he favored but brought him few admirers—shot himself in the head. 

His wife heard the noise but paid it no attention; she and her daughter Mary assumed the troops they’d seen exercising earlier in nearby Hyde Park were shooting their weapons. Meanwhile, in the room below them, Haydon was fumbling to reload the pistol—the bullet had reverberated off his skull rather than killing him outright. Injured as he was, he dropped the gun before he was able to discharge it a second time. Groping around in desperation, he grabbed a razor and slashed twice at his throat, before sinking to the floor, the grim deed finally done. Oblivious to the gory scene on the other side of the studio door she passed on her way downstairs, Mrs Haydon set off for Brixton about eleven o’clock. When, an hour and a half later, Mary finally entered the studio, she found her father’s dead body lying in a pool of blood that she first mistook to be red paint. 

Outside, a torrential downpour assailed the London streets—one woman slipped on the wet pavement, breaking her leg so badly surgeons had to amputate, while another suffered a fractured skull when a chimney pot came crashing down on her. The unbearable heat had finally broken. 

***

The sad events of this portentous night are the fulcrum of the British author Alethea Hayter’s compelling group biography, A Sultry Month, first published in 1965. The book opens four days earlier, on Thursday, June 18, 1846, with the arrival, at Barrett’s home at Fifty Wimpole Street, of five pictures and three trunks, sent by Haydon to his friend by correspondence for safekeeping. As had happened on seven previous occasions in the past twenty-five years, Haydon feared he was about to be arrested for debt and his possessions about to be seized, so he was attempting to remove them from harm’s way. The book draws to a close on Monday, July 13, the day Haydon was buried in Paddington New Churchyard. A tragic and rather pitiful figure during his lifetime—“All his life he had utterly mistaken his vocation,” wrote Dickens of Haydon, “he most unquestionably was a very bad painter”—the course of history has done little to change this. Yet in Hayter’s clever and cunning hands, the story of his life’s end, and the cast of characters caught up in it, whether through friendship or happenstance, makes for unexpectedly gripping reading.

Then there’s Barrett and Browning. She’s still living at home with her domineering father, but the lovers are busy plotting their elopement, which will take place at the end of the summer. Meanwhile, in Chelsea, the Scottish essayist and historian Thomas Carlyle and his wife, Jane, are experiencing a period of marital strife, though they try their best to present a united front when they host the wealthy German novelist Ida Gräfin von Hahn-Hahn: “(Countess Cock-cock! What a name!) She is a sort of German George Sand without the genius,” writes Jane in a letter to her cousin. The author of the popular semiautobiographical novel, The Countess Faustina (1841), about the romantic escapades of a sexually adventurous countess traveling through Asia, Hahn-Hahn was the toast of London literati. And while everyone’s rather disappointed to discover that she’s no great beauty, with false teeth and only one eye, they’re downright shocked when they realize her gentleman escort is actually her lover. Hayter’s protagonists might be liberal-minded for their era, but they’re still Victorians! A further list of supporting players includes the banker and poet Samuel Rogers and the Irish art historian Mrs. Jameson, a close friend and confidant of Barrett’s—not to mention Dickens, Keats, Wordsworth, and Tennyson, who make cameo appearances. 

In the houses of Parliament, meanwhile, the government is embroiled in heated discussions about the Corn Laws. These were high tariffs on imported grain that were supposedly meant to encourage domestic production of corn, but actually just kept the prices exorbitantly high. This benefited already wealthy landowners but was increasingly ruinous for both the working classes, who struggled to afford to eat, and for merchants and manufacturers, who lost business because their patrons were forced to spend such a huge portion of their income on grain. The failed harvests across the UK and the potato famine in Ireland forced the prime minister, Robert Peel, to bend to the increasingly loud call from the British population, and on Thursday, June 25, the Corn Laws were repealed. This resulted in a backlash from the landowners of Peel’s Conservative government, and a week later he was forced to resign from office due to lack of support in the party. 

Hayter’s London is a hotbed of political and personal crises, captured at a moment of great transition: Hampstead, for example, is still a village reached by walking through open fields—Haydon makes the journey himself only the day before he dies—as yet to be swallowed by the metropolis as it belches outwards. But with the construction of the new Birmingham railway line from Euston, along which the “tentacles” of Camden Town stretch out into the fields, this growth is beginning.  

And permeating the book is the heat, the atmosphere of fervor and foment that only heightens as the mercury climbs up the barometers. “Oh—it is so hot,” Elizabeth Barrett writes to Browning early in the month. “There is a thick mist lacquered over with light—it is cauldron-heat, rather than fire-heat.” This wasn’t languid summer sun; these were temperatures that were “murderous.” Wherrymen died of sunstroke, farm laborers perished from heatstroke, numerous people drowned while bathing; there was cholera in the cities of Hull and Leeds and typhus outbreaks in London; grass singed and scorched in the fields, fires broke out in houses across the city, and the stink from the sewers rose in a heavy miasma. It’s both visceral and metaphorical: Haydon’s spiralling descent into despair, Barrett and Browning’s increasingly passionate correspondence, even the Carlyles’ hot and bothered bickering; they’re all infused with a sense of fevered, infernal frenzy. 

***

A Sultry Month possesses many of the ingredients of a great novel—from the urgency of its pace and plot, to the intimate understanding of and access to its protagonists—but it’s actually a painstakingly researched and meticulously constructed act of literary collage. Most significantly, nothing in these pages has been invented. “Every incident, every sentence of dialogue, every gesture, the food, the flowers, the furniture, all are taken from the contemporary letters, diaries and reminiscences of the men and women concerned,” Hayter confirms in her foreword. She had no need to invent anything because all the material was already there for the taking—“nearly all” of her subjects were “professional writers with formidable memories and highly trained descriptive skills.” All she had to do was choose what was interesting or relevant, and then organize it into a single, cohesive, chronological narrative. 

In “A House of One’s Own,” her brilliant essay on the perennial allure of that most famous of all London-based literary and artistic circles, the Bloomsbury Group, Janet Malcolm declares that the collective’s most canny achievement “was that they placed in posterity’s hands the documents necessary to engage posterity’s feeble attention.” It’s these—letters, memoirs, and journals—and only these, she continues, “that reveal inner life and compel the sort of helpless empathy that fiction compels.” These artifacts inspire a particular fascination—and often inspire the biographer. But this initial “rapture of firsthand encounters with another’s lived experience” is, as Malcolm laments, rarely present in the resultant biography, which usually “functions as a kind of processing plant where experience is converted into information the way fresh produce is converted into canned vegetables.” Hayter was no stranger to the traditional biographer’s method; in 1962 she published the acclaimed Mrs. Browning: A Poet’s Work and Its Setting. But, circling around the same subject in the years that followed, and having assembled a rich cache of material of the kind whose magnetism Malcolm exhorts—those “letters, diaries and reminiscences” that Hayter references above—she took an inspired and radically different approach. When it came to writing A Sultry Month, she let this original material speak for itself, and thus managed to deliver exactly the “rapture” of those encounters with “another’s lived experience” of which Malcolm speaks. 

Although then “a form which is so new as to lack a name,” as Anthony Burgess put it when he hailed A Sultry Month as a “masterpiece,” this kind of biography of a microcosm—a personal history that is tethered to a specific place, moment or other organizing factor—is ubiquitous today. (We need only think of Phyllis Rose’s Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages (1983), which, incidentally, revisits the Carlyles’ union; Jenny Uglow’s The Lunar Men: Five Friends Whose Curiosity Changed the World (2002); and most recently, Francesca Wade’s Square Haunting: Five Writers in London Between the Wars (2020), to name just a few of the best examples that have appeared in the years since A Sultry Month’s publication.) Hayter’s precision, concision, and sharp narrative thrust still distinguish the book today, but it’s hard to comprehend just how groundbreaking A Sultry Month felt to readers in the mid-’60s. Its publication marked the dawn of a whole new kind of life writing.

Though Hayter’s subjects were historical, in order to tell their stories, she drew inspiration from one of the most cutting-edge artistic techniques of her day. “My object—like that of the Pop Artist who combines scraps of Christmas cards, of cinema posters and of the Union Jack to make a picture—has been to create a pattern from a group of familiar objects,” she explains. In the same way that pop artists like Robert Rauschenberg or Jasper Johns constructed their work by repurposing and repositioning images—or parts of images—created by others, Hayter wrote by recycling material that would be already “familiar to any student of the period.” The originality of her project lies in the composition: she desired “to show a set of authors—all of whom have had their separate portraits painted many times at full length—as a conversation piece of equals, existing in relationship to each other at a particular moment, encapsulated with one dramatic event in an overheated political and physical climate.” 

Hayter apparently loved gossip, a proclivity that served A Sultry Month well. Poking around in the letters and private papers of her subjects gave her “the sensation of being an inquisitive housemaid.” Reading the finished book gives the delicious impression of listening at doors or catching snatches of conversation on the stairs—an effect of the close attention Hayter pays to the full range of trifles and trivialities that constitute her subjects’ lives. Jane Carlyle, we learn, never quite forgave Browning for clumsily burning a hole in her carpet with a hot teakettle; Barrett walks her beloved golden cocker spaniel, Flush, along Wimpole Street in the relative cool of the evening, her eyes peeled for dog stealers; the Carlyles are tormented by constipation because they refuse to eat any fresh fruit or vegetables. By means of such inclusions, Hayter reminds us that the marrow of life is found in its minutiae, and in her alchemical hands, dusty historical figures are transformed into once-living and breathing beings with the same foibles and fears as the rest of us. 

 

Lucy Scholes is senior editor at McNally Editions.

Solstice Diaries

Last night I hit a deer, a fawn actually. Just a ragged thing still with its spots, it could’ve been born that day. Its mother stood on the side of the road. I saw her first and only the fawn when it was too late, my own new child in the backseat. I was immediately seized with the guilt that I shouldn’t be there and the deer should, that I was in the wrong place throttling a car through the woods. The next day at the farm where I work the lettuces were missing their hearts, the best, sweetest part eaten by deer. It is getting to be summer when things like this happen.

The solstice itself is mundane. Every December and June we have the shortest day with the longest night or the longest day bathed in light. On the first winter’s day our shadow looms, a lonesome outline imprinted over frozen ground. On the summer solstice we cast less of ourselves on the earth, which is teeming with green life. Does the waning and waxing of the days somehow govern human temperament or are we more fickle, flitting between the dark and light faster than the earth’s slow tilt and pull from the sun?

Searching through old journals, like a meteorologist’s log, I looked for the noting of many solstices amidst my own human concerns and the agricultural ones on the farm where I worked: summers lost in a frenzied blur of sunlight and bounty and winters disappeared into whitewashed hibernation. What is this burning desire day after day to note the passing of a mouse or a stranger shoveling scrambled eggs into their mouth? Why record anything at all? In wanting to redeem this compulsion to record and its accumulation year after year, why not proclaim, The solstice is a day of import! Each winter and summer passed only once, like a car charging irrevocably through a dark wood, and then was gone.

 

Summer

It’s 9 A.M. and already the heat of the laundromat is punishing. I put in two large loads of dirt-mummified clothing, pants that could stand up and walk on their own. Outside in the hot sun, a bearded man is on his cellphone looking speculatively at the innards of the laundromat or at me on the shaggy pleather couch.

 

Winter

The most alien of Christmas seasons. Snowless and sunny. Every night a clear view of the moon.

 

Summer

Today is the summer solstice and the sun is strong. I dart in and out of the pond like the frog on its shoulder of grass and mud.

 

Winter

A little mouse stretches one arm out of the grating on the steel trap. He presses his sandy-colored snout out of the grate too. I am listening to the radio in the kitchen when I notice these centimeters of struggle. I pour boiling water over my coffee grounds. Now there is this mouse to drown. The cat is sitting on the oriental rug looking forlornly at the winter outside. Good, he hasn’t noticed. I put my snow boots on and carry the box outside. The mouse stops moving. I can hear the stream where we drown them. I open the lid. The mouse looks up at the white sky, my shape. His eyes are entirely black. There is another crescent-shaped mouse, dead with fur sticking to his body in brown patches. I wish I could say I drowned him, but instead I put the box down in the snow for the mouse to steal his freedom. The mouse sniffs at the air wildly, standing on his hind legs. I dump the box upside down. Poop, fur, and little skeletal bits fall into the snow. The mouse still won’t run away. I make the box into an open V. The mouse is in the snow half-running sideways, delirious seeming. Who knows how long he’s been in this box. The mouse runs to the base of a tree, curling in on himself. Perhaps he’s trying to drink the snow.

 

Summer

I slept outside last night beneath a pink moon. It disturbed me so I couldn’t sleep with all those frogs out there. I kept rolling naked and bug-bitten thinking how we are the same as a bear or a field mouse.

Things to save from summer:

dry raspberry leaves
dry nettles
rose hips (fall)
canned tomatoes
pickles: spicy or regular or beet
pork!
crab apple jelly

 

Winter

Went to my cousin’s solstice party. Her friend arranged a big circle in the snow, all of it illuminated by candles in ice votives, with a half-moon drawn inside. The coming of the light! And there was a bonfire and pots of soup on the stove inside.

Went to another solstice party the night before. Met a Canadian writer, an Italian scholar, a shaman, and a very smart eight-year-old boy in a blazer. Ate baked ziti and fresh pineapple.

 

Summer

Stayed out 7:30-9:30, then went to the bar.

Farm Day:

harvest radishes, arugula, kale, chard, lettuce, pea shoots, garlic scapes
weed tomato greenhouses
fix the fence
weed onions, too much rain not enough sun. after a month in the ground they’ve thickened from the diameter of string to that of yarn, slow growing

At the bar people were losing their off-track bets. Nightline was on TV.

 

Winter

I went to a museum today. My favorite room was one of printed portfolios made by artists in les Nabis, a group of young Parisians who named themselves “the prophets.” Maurice Denis’s portfolio was simply titled “L’Amour” and was all about his wife. Most of the images were impossibly pale, angelic, with whispery outlines so that viewing them all together felt like standing in the center of a blooming flower, each image a blushing petal shone through with sun or else burying oneself in tulle skirts. It is good to see beautiful things with everything outside dead. To fill up on colors and patterns, let it whirl around you and retreat into the imagination.

I know it is not good to be going out now (because of Covid) but I was so hungry I went to a diner and it felt more dreamlike than anything. Teenage waitresses and weird people inside. A couple in ratty pajamas. A man alone with the paper spread before him, two pieces of bacon and a glass of white wine. The table closest to mine consisted of a man who was both bald and longhaired, a woman with her foot stretched across the booth into the seat next to him, and an old lady next to her. They were drinking beer at lunch and none of them could finish their eggs. The older woman kept nodding out. The younger woman seemed like she was on drugs. They were staying at the nearby motel. I could hear the bald guy say “if everything is copacetic” before stepping out the emergency exit for a smoke. Sometimes a restaurant is like a bizarre tableaux and you know in some sense none of this is real. Out in the parking lot with the scent of corned beef still on my upper lip, I guess it was real. Here are all their cars under today’s weak sun. I want January to be cloaked in all-white winter or some strange, foreign spring on an island apart.

 

Summer

Instead of working today we go strawberry picking. An organic pick-your-own with peace signs painted and nailed to wooden posts and little kids in hats and their mothers with strawberries smashed against their arms and legs by small fists. It is quick picking. I pick $60 worth into a big box and wish I could keep going and shoving berries into my mouth. Driving home, the car smells like berries.

 

Ellyn Gaydos’s first book, Pig Years (Knopf 2022), came out in June. She works on a vegetable farm in New York.

Corpsing: On Sex, Death, and Inappropriate Laughter

Illustration by Na Kim.

We were sitting at a long table, images and diagrams projected onto the wall behind us, while the audience faced us in silence. I was part of a panel on hoarding, along with another psychoanalyst and a memoirist. As I gave my presentation, audience members went about their business as though they were invisible, like people in cars sometimes do. One person directly in front of me scrolled and typed on her iPhone. Another stood up, walked to the back of the room to get a drink, then returned to his seat and rummaged through his bag. I became aware of my attempt to block out these actions, to pretend not to see what I was seeing.

At one point, I must have turned my head in the direction of my lapel mic because suddenly the volume shot up. I was explaining the concept of horror vacui, or the fear of emptiness, pointing to the part it played in the aesthetics of the Victorian era, causing every surface to be covered with tchotchkes, and in sex, leading some men to dread a sense of post-coital emptiness so much that they stave off—and this is when it happened—ejacuLATION.

That got really loud for a second, I observed matter-of-factly, then burst into a fit of uncontrollable laughter. I attempted to compose myself, apologize—Sorry, I just had a juvenile moment—and return to the passage, but when I reached the word ejaculation again, I lost it, doubled over, eventually putting my head on the table. 

Seconds felt like hours as I tried, with little success, to pull myself together. I had no idea why I was laughing, but the more I laughed, the more others in the room laughed with me. Attacks of laughter are contagious: another person’s laughter—even if nonsensical—is enough of a stimulus to provoke your own. 

The British call convulsive laughter corpsing, a term that derives from the frequency with which a fit of laughter overtakes an actor playing a corpse onstage. Before breaking into laughter during my talk, I was, in a sense, playing dead, if you think of dead as assuming a socialized self, pushing your emotions and spontaneous feelings underground. 

“When you’re acting,” explains comedian Ricky Gervais, “you’re not caught up in the moment. Anything can put you off. You’re never not aware of your surroundings. So suddenly, one little thing will bring out the absurdity of what you’re doing.” The absurd, philosopher Albert Camus proposes, is marked by a tension between the seriousness you attach to your life and the inherent meaninglessness that is revealed when you catch a glimpse of yourself from an outside perspective: “A man is talking on the telephone behind a glass partition; you cannot hear him, but you see his incomprehensible show: you wonder why he is alive.” Tuning in to quotidian, meaningless actions we perform on autopilot elicits a sense of the absurd, but when the actor of that incomprehensible show is oneself, the absurdity intensifies to the extreme.

Most often, we don’t select the roles we find ourselves playing in daily life; as we move through the world, we are drawn into social scripts, texts that govern interactions we are trained to reprise without conscious recognition. Breaking character is a refusal to become an instrument in the production of a system that is, for the most part, invisible and indifferent to us. When we cease to blend into the social world around us, the “chain of daily gestures is broken,” writes Camus, and what follows is an “awakening.”  

 

In response to an interviewer’s question, “What is the purpose of poetry?” Zbigniew Herbert replied, “To wake up!” 

 

“Have you ever noticed,” Elizabeth Bishop asks her friend Donald E. Stanford in a letter, “that you can often learn more about other people—more about how they feel, how it would feel to be them—by hearing them cough or make one of the innumerable inner noises, than by watching them for hours? Sometimes if another person hiccups, particularly if you haven’t been paying much attention to him, why you get a sudden sensation as if you were inside him—you know how he feels in the little aspects he never mentions, aspects which are, really, indescribable to another person and must be realized by that kind of intuition.” She concludes: “That’s what I quite often want to get into poetry.” 

The neurobiologist Vittorio Gallese calls this sudden sensation of being inside someone else’s feelings “embodied simulation.” This phenomenon relies on mirror neurons, which fire both when we witness an action and when we ourselves act; our mirror neurons enable us to perceive what happens outside of us as part of our own subjective experience. Embodied simulation allows us to experience empathy concretely, body to body. Poetry also operates by this kind of intuition, leading us to feel moved by experiences that are not our own. 

Spontaneous outbursts of laughter are, in that sense, poetic: they communicate intercorporeally by luring bystanders’ bodies to places that their conscious minds may not choose to carry them. “Seeing and hearing a man laugh I participate in his emotion from inside myself,” philosopher Georges Bataille explains. “We have an immediate knowledge of the other person’s laughter when we laugh ourselves or of excitement when we share it.”  The “immediate knowledge” that results from participating in another person’s emotion from inside ourselves connects our body to other bodies, evoking “a state of continuity through secret channels” outside of what our mind processes consciously. In destabilizing our boundaries of self and seducing our body’s engagement without our mind’s consent, this state of continuity “gives us a feeling of obscenity.”

Perhaps the obscenity we experience when another person’s laughter stimulates us in ways we can’t control has something to do with why some cultures view an open-mouthed laugh as a form of indecent exposure. The only part of our skeleton we reveal to others is our teeth, so when we laugh, we flash our interior at others. Twelfth-century philosopher Maimonides warned, “Laughter and levity bring about illicit sexual conduct.” Or, as the philosopher Samuel Weber put it, “Laughter is dangerous to the guardians of the state as to all good men, because of its tendency to get out of hand.” 

 

The repeated objection of Herman Melville’s character Bartleby when he’s asked to perform a task by his employer (“I would prefer not to”) is, as George Orwell said of jokes, a tiny revolution. To refuse to play the part that is expected of you is to resist transferring power to whoever is invested in your taking up that part. The power another person has, explains lawyer Gerry Spence, “is my perception of their power. Their power is my thought. The source of their power is, therefore, in my mind.” If the power or authority a person expects another to grant them is denied, the sense of deflation that ensues can make them feel, as Bartleby’s employer describes, “disarmed,” “impotent,” “unmanned.” 

A few winters ago, after noticing mouse droppings on a shelf in my pantry, I placed a sticky trap in the corner. I wanted to avoid the risks associated with other options: snapped fingers, poisoned food. The next day, I found droppings stuck in the trap’s glue. When I caught sight of the droppings, I felt a surge of rage well up inside me, the same kind I sometimes experience when my daughters resist my authority. 

A babysitter who quit working for us some years before the sticky-trap revelation described a similar frustration. She had asked my then-five-year-old daughter to do something—I can’t remember what—that she preferred not to do. The babysitter said, If you don’t [whatever it was], I’ll take away your cookies. My daughter replied, That’s okay. Cookies aren’t important. 

Resisting a transfer of power to someone in a position of authority most often leads to a negative consequence; after being fired, Bartleby, for example, becomes homeless and is thrown in jail for vagrancy. But that very risk can also elicit a peculiar kind of pleasure that rubs against the edge of pain. This sublime pleasure has its own kind of potency, which is why an inappropriate outburst of laughter, however counterintuitively, amplifies a person’s power. After all, the actor who corpses controls the show.   

Corpsing relates, in this way, to jouissance, a term used by the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. English speakers sometimes replace it with bliss or enjoyment, but the French word defies translation, containing within it jouir—“to enjoy” (rights, things) and “to come” (ejacuLATION)—but also “the sense in which the body experiences itself … at the level at which pain begins to appear,” where “a whole dimension of the organism, which would otherwise remain veiled, can be experienced,” a sense of pleasure merely in being at the level of the body.  

In explaining the psychology behind jouissance, Lacan borrows a scenario proposed by philosopher Immanuel Kant in discussing reason. A man is given the opportunity to spend the night with a woman he desires—in Lacan’s terms, “unlawfully”—on the condition that, upon exiting the room of lovemaking, he pass into an adjacent room in which he will be executed. For Kant—who is thought to have died a virgin—the pleasure of lovemaking is not worth the punishment of death, and anyone in his right mind would refuse this trade-off. However, “one only has to make a conceptual shift,” counters Lacan, “and move the night spent with the lady from the category of pleasure to that of jouissance, given that jouissance implies precisely the acceptance of death—and there’s no need for sublimation—for the example to be ruined.” Jouissance shits on the sticky trap of practical reason. 

 

“Birds feel something akin to pain (and fear) just before migration,” writes poet Lorine Niedecker, and “nothing alleviates this feeling except flight (the rapid motion of wings).”

 

Thinking, as W. R. Bion, Samuel Beckett’s psychoanalyst, explains, comes into existence to cope with thoughts, which enter the mind when a yearned-for sensation has not been experienced. He illustrates this process with a scenario involving a hungry infant who craves the breast. When no breast turns up, the baby feels frustration instead of the yearned-for satisfaction, which then leads to a thought (The breast is not there). The “development of an ability to think” emerges as a way of coping with the thoughts that crystallize from frustrated feelings. Or, in philosopher Emil Cioran’s terms, “Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation.” With breast—or its metonym—in mouth, however, there’s no need for thoughts or thinking. You are free to feel.

Spontaneous outbursts of laughter, like jouissance, unveil a whole dimension of being and bodily aliveness that reveals thinking to be a sad consolation. Part of what makes an eruption of intensified being pleasurable, as in Lacan’s version of Kant’s scenario, is the recklessness involved in expending drive energy urgently, unproductively, without sublimation. Eroticism, as Bataille defines it, “is assenting to life up to the point of death.” 

La petite mort, the “death which lovers love,” in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s words, referred in medieval times to the loss of consciousness following orgasm. “Eroticism,” for Bataille, “unlike simple sexual activity, is a psychological quest independent of the natural goal: reproduction and the desire for children.” Such an unsublimated expenditure of energy can be seen as wasteful: la petite mort is circumvented not only by men, as discussed in my talk, who want to avoid a sense of emptiness after sex (“Suck on, suck on,” writes Shelley, “I glow, I glow!”), but by others (athletes, artists) who don’t want to squander their life force. 

“I’m afraid of depleting my energy,” Lady Gaga told an interviewer. “I have this weird thing that if I sleep with someone they’re going to take my creativity from me through my vagina.” Plato also warns in Laws that laughter is a waste of wisdom, a pointless expenditure of valuable resources. Laughter and sex, from this perspective, are wasteful depletions, pointless transfers of power. 

Aesthetic experience, on the other hand, shares with jouissance a sense of urgency, directness. “Art reminds us,” writes Nietzsche in a notebook, “of states of animal vigor,” which are “on the one hand a surplus and overflow of flourishing corporeality into the world of images and wishes” and “on the other a rousing of the animal function through images and wishes of intensified life—a heightening of the feeling of life.” 

 

“Most people are disgusted,” writes philosopher Martha Nussbaum, “by drinking from a glass into which they themselves have spit, although they are not sensitive to the saliva in their own mouths.” The idea behind disgust, she continues, is that the self will become contaminated if it takes in something thought of as repellent, even if the substance originated within one’s own body. The secretions that we share with animals—mucus, urine, feces, semen—are the most repulsive, and, Nussbaum tells us, “in all cultures an essential mark of human dignity is the ability to wash and to dispose of wastes.” Repulsion expresses our desire to distance ourselves from something outside of us that is also inside us and could just as easily erupt from our own bodies. Maintaining a civilized appearance involves “warding off both animality in general and the mortality that is so prominent in our loathing of our animality.” 

Months before the babysitter quit, she told my daughter not to cry because it made her look ugly. Sobbing, as Charles Darwin observed, is physiologically similar to a fit of laughter: “During excessive laughter the whole body is often thrown backward and shakes, or is almost convulsed; the respiration is much disturbed; the head and face become gorged with blood, with the veins distended; and the orbicular muscles are spasmodically contracted in order to protect the eyes. Tears are freely shed.” Although the primary purpose of tears is to wash away foreign particles in the eyes, when we cry for emotional reasons, “the eye,” as literary critic René Girard puts it, acts “metaphorically,” expelling not material particles but emotional ones. 

A spontaneous fit of laughter, in this way, can drive out what upsets our psychological balance, as do defenses against traumatization. Trauma occurs, according to Freud, when someone is emotionally overwhelmed by an external event for which they were unprepared. Victims of trauma, including most hoarders, become adept at preparedness in hopes that, by being prepared, they will protect themselves from further traumatization. No one will pull the rug out from under them because they are standing on ten rugs and know it since they put the rugs there themselves. Hoarders clutter out thoughts and emotions—the unknown—that have the potential to overwhelm their psyches by filling their homes with objects that have known memories and feelings attached. Aristotle believed there are no vacuums in nature because denser surrounding material will immediately rush in to fill any void. This rushing-in is, perhaps, at the heart of the horror vacui of a hoarder: if emptiness will always be filled, then it is risky to leave empty any spaces through which thoughts and emotions that haven’t been carefully curated can enter. 

Our body is also set up to vigilantly drive out unknown elements that have the potential to throw off our homeostasis. Convulsive reactions (coughing, vomiting, diarrhea, sneezing) expel foreign elements that enter our body and threaten our metabolic balance at the concrete level, while other responses, such as corpsing, protect our system’s equilibrium at the emotional level. We are set up to mobilize resistance against both physiological and psychological intrusions from the external world at the reflexive, unconscious level. 

Laughter can also be enlisted to ward off interpersonal danger by signaling positive feelings towards people we find threatening in order to appease them (“Are You Actually Funny,” Katherine Coldiron recently wrote on Twitter, “or So Creepy That Women Laugh Nervously at Your Comments for Their Own Safety? A Pamphlet for Men”). We use nonverbal cues much like animals do: to communicate power and intent.  

Years ago, a woman approached me after a poetry reading I gave, complimented my work and chatted about other topics. As I listened to her, I found myself taking tiny steps backward which she met with steps forward of roughly the same size. Though my instinct to move away should have made me decline to give her my email address when she asked for it, I let a sense of propriety drown out my gut. I recited the address quickly, hoping there would be a mistaken letter somewhere as she typed it into her phone. 

The next day, I received a short email from her asking where she could find my work. I sent a formal but friendly response, to which she replied with a long personal email, saying that she would soon be in New York, and extending an invitation to meet. I wasn’t interested in meeting or continuing the exchange and took a giant step back by putting off a response. A couple of days later, her name appeared in my inbox. Immediately after I clicked on the message, the letters seemed to fly off the page toward me: 

FFFFFFUUUUUUUUCCCCCCCKKKKKKYYYYYYYY
OOOOOOOOUUUUUUU!!!!!! 

“No animal in the wild,” writes security advisor Gavin de Becker, “suddenly overcome with fear, would spend any of its mental energy thinking, ‘It’s probably nothing.’” Instead of valuing our gut feelings, he continues, “we, in contrast to every creature in nature, choose not to explore—and even to ignore—survival signals.” 

 

Different kinds of laughter serve different purposes. A spontaneous outburst of laughter is, according to Freud, an eruption from the unconscious, a discharge of surplus energy that exposes raw unedited aspects of a person’s interior and, like a sneeze or cough, has the potential to expel elements that threaten the psyche’s homeostasis. This kind of body driven laughter is termed Duchenne, after the nineteenth-century neurologist Guillaume-Benjamin-Amand Duchenne. Duchenne laughter is often fueled by emotions that break through censors and other inhibitory processes in disguised form to express deep-seated thoughts and beliefs that might not necessarily be in line with the image or persona one would like to project to others. As it is infectious, Duchenne laughter strips us down to a primal state of unbounded continuity with other bodies.

But most of the laughter we experience daily, even if well intentioned, belongs to a different category, Non-Duchenne laughter. Non-Duchenne laughter is not expressive but imitates emotional expression, feigning the joy associated with genuine laughter to influence people. Whereas Duchenne laughter inadvertently expresses a person’s state of mind, non-Duchenne laughter is used strategically to signal emotions that may or may not be present. In a study, the neurobiologist Robert Provine sent his team out into the world, to observe more than a thousand instances of laughter, and found that, rather than laughing after jokes, “people laugh more often after such innocuous lines as ‘I’ll see you guys later’ or ‘Are you sure?’’’ In fact, he found, only 10 to 20 percent of pre-laugh comments were remotely funny: “Most laughter did not follow anything resembling a joke, storytelling, or other formal attempt at humor.” Some typical statements leading to laughter were: “I hope we do well,” “It was nice meeting you,” “I think I’m done,” “Are you sure?”

An analysand related—with horror and shame—an anecdote about feeling a sudden, irrepressible urge to laugh at a funeral as the body of his friend’s father was being lowered into the ground. Compulsive laughter at funerals is common, as Freud explains in a note to his Rat Man case. For this reason, some funeral directors hire professional mourners to make particular crying sounds that, like non-Duchenne laughter, will guide the emotion of the crowd in a desired direction. Duchenne laughter, on the other hand, tends to break out when someone feels the need to expel thoughts and emotions that threaten their system’s well-being. For my analysand, that threat pushed against his narrative of who he was (a sympathetic friend), which his laughter, if released, would seem to contradict. 

The stronger the rule or tighter the script before you, the more control you will need to hold back spontaneous expressions. Imagine a river flowing with great force that is stopped up by a dam. As the river pushes against the dam, two counteracting energies—the water’s pressure and the dam’s reaction force—cause tension to build. A suppressed emotion or impulse, like the river, pushes against the dam of repression. If the energy invested by the ego in the process of suppression is suddenly discharged, there’s a sensation of pleasure that can range, depending on the strength of the impulse that has built up, from relief to ecstasy.

An uncontrollable fit of laughter is then most likely to erupt in a context in which it would be wildly inappropriate—as happened to me on the panel. Duchenne laughter is non-strategic. Even anti-strategic, in that it exposes internal conflicts and unconscious meaning. The mourner who laughs at a funeral, Freud explains, is likely experiencing contradictory impulses: a consciously intended one (the desire to console) and a repressed one (some unacceptable thought or feeling) that pushes, like that river against its dam, for release. 

My analysand’s anxiety at the funeral turned out to be related to anxiety about his own mortality (Glad it’s him, not me!). He came to understand that the literal mortification of the body being lowered into the ground before him made it feel threatening to shut off the motility of his facial muscles and play the corpse that social roles demanded of him. Perhaps feeling the corpse’s deadness inside him was too much. The compulsion to laugh functioned as a way of disassociating not only from the deadness of the corpse but also of the part the social script demanded he play. 

Catherine Millot, in her memoir about her affair with Lacan when she was twenty-eight and he was seventy, writes of the “farts and burps which Lacan, as a free man, did not restrain in public.” The more liberated you are, the less willing you will be to suppress your impulses, subject yourself to the constraints expected of polite people. Lacan, Millot writes, became “extremely impatient if he was forced to wait, even at a red light or a level crossing. If he was not served promptly in a restaurant, he soon obtained satisfaction by uttering a resounding cry or a sigh that resembled a cry.” He “shared with the Dadaists  their derision of the respectably conventional … He particularly liked the famous adage: ‘Once you’ve overstepped the mark, there are no more limits.’’’

Most people are not as free as Lacan or cannot risk the freedom required to loosen control over themselves, and do so only in safe, low-stakes contexts. Spontaneous outbursts of laughter carry you over the mark into a joyful sensation of limitlessness, and without the social costs that may accompany running red lights or infidelity. Although acceptable in Western societies, laughing with complete abandon—doubled over, stomach muscles aching, tears flowing—is relatively rare for adults. Teenagers succumb to fits of laughter more easily because they’ve spent fewer years reinforcing their dams, and derision of the rules, for them, is the norm. Adults, on the other hand, tend to corpse when they feel safe enough to let their guard down: with family or old friends, when judgment is not a concern, when their well-being won’t be threatened, or when their ego functions have been compromised, as when sleep-deprived or drunk. 

Much humor plays with our need to maintain a certain story about ourselves. “When we laugh at someone falling over,” says the medical anthropologist Ann Hale, “it’s not the process of falling that tickles our funny bone but the attempt to stay upright.” Falling is a failure to maintain a posture, the upright gait that distances humans from their shameful prehistoric origins, which placed the head and the genitals in proximity. It makes sense that regression would elicit laughter, given that laughter is an escape from the unconscious, and the infantile, according to Freud, is the unconscious’s “source” (I just had a juvenile moment). The attempt, then, to remain not only upright but upstanding, civilized, distanced from our origins—particularly when amplified by high heels or some other attempt to dissociate oneself from one’s animal origin—incites laughter.

You might assume that someone subject to a spontaneous eruption from their unconscious in the form of laughter would be humiliated, but for the most part they end up feeling empowered. A fit of Duchenne laughter operates outside the bounds of logic, language, the respectably conventional and taps into the unconscious to liberate a flow of pure becoming. Corpsing has within it a force of resistance, a provocative impish drive to burst free from external constraints. Rather than transfer power to others, adhere to the codes that usually govern our behavior, a fit of spontaneous laughter oversteps the mark into the limitless realm of jouissance. Even if things go horribly, it’s great. 

 

During my talk, when the volume shot up, it seemed as though my voice was being projected back at me as an external object. Taking your voice back in after it has left your body is a lot like drinking your own saliva from a glass, which perhaps explains why hearing your recorded voice played back can feel disturbing. Because it is difficult to enlist repulsion to block out sound, an uncanny sensation arises instead. 

Freud uses the term uncanny to describe a circumstance in which the familiar becomes defamiliarized. In German, the word for uncanny is unheimlich, or unhoused, and my voice was, indeed, unhoused when I heard it outside of my body, my speech appearing to have traveled not from the inside out but from the outside in. When the self that has become not-self reenters the body as a foreign object that appears to have come to life, what might otherwise feel violating or intrusive may be experienced as a metaphysical crisis that leads to obscenity, as well as confusion around what is inside and what is outside, self and other—what is real. 

Corpsing was likely my bodily attempt to expel the unhoused feeling of crisis that had been provoked. Laughter offers an escape hatch from situations that are stressful by flipping them, shifting the atmosphere from negative to positive emotion, expulsion to ejacuLATION. Whatever it was that I was feeling, my fit of Duchenne laughter was able to reverse (rapid motion of wings). 

When I met with the other participants ahead of time to discuss the format of the panel, the organizer suggested that she open with remarks, the author of the memoir speak and I respond to what the author said. I felt nervous about having to respond on the spot. I expressed my concern to the organizer, and she told me not to worry. I could simply write and present to the audience whatever I wanted to say in relation to the book and to hoarding more generally. My mind was at ease. 

In her introduction to the audience on the evening of the event, however, the organizer presented a format that matched her original plan: I was to be a respondent. I felt panicked, confused. Should I follow the setup I’d prepared myself for, the one we had agreed upon, or change course? I worried I would look foolish reading a talk rather than responding. 

As I deliberated over what to do, I felt as I had in high school when, while taking the SAT, my bra came undone. Should I fasten my bra, I wondered, or keep going? I had the habit of fastening my bra at the front of my body, then twisting it to the back, which meant I’d have to go to the bathroom if I were to fasten it in my habitual manner. I could try to fasten the hooks at the back and stay in my seat—how hard could it be?—or continue taking the test braless. When I realized how much time I’d lost deliberating, I became anxious, which made it even more difficult to return my attention to the exam.

At the talk, I weighed my options, picked up my pen to take notes and put it back down. By the time my turn to speak arrived, I was gripped by anxiety. I knew that what I’d prepared would be more interesting than what I might come up with while buzzing with anxiety, so I decided to follow the plan we’d agreed upon and read what I’d written. 

As I began to read, my mind strayed from the text. I imagined how odd it must seem for a respondent to take on the role of presenter, to play the wrong part in the production, to read from a different script. I began to doubt my decision, which only increased my anxiety. My river of emotion pushed with insistence against the dam of composure until it finally broke free. I can’t say exactly what made me erupt into laughter when I did—I suspect it wasn’t simply the mic’s sound or the word it amplified. Humor is unconscious, as the evolutionary theorist Alastair Clarke says, “else we should all be able to explain its mechanism by simple analysis of what we think before we laugh.” Regardless of origin, my corpsing elicited the jouissance associated with breaking character, overstepping the sticky trap of practical reason. While laughing, I let myself stay off track, improvise, remain elastic, awake, alive. My psychological state shifted from anxiety to a limitless field of clarity and light. 

 

 

Nuar Alsadir, a poet and psychoanalyst, is the author of Fourth Person Singular, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry and the Forward Prize for Best Collection, and More Shadow Than Bird. She lives in New York City.

This essay is adapted from Animal Joy: A Book of Laughter and Resuscitation, which will be published by Graywolf Press and Fitzcarraldo Editions in August.

Our Summer Issue Poets Recommend

This week, we bring you reviews from four of our issue no. 240 contributors.

Journeys at the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg. Photograph by TrudiJ, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

I went to Johannesburg in 2013, I don’t know why I’m telling you about it now. Maybe because lockdown is a kind of segregation, where you see only the people you live with. Dilip picked me up at the airport. Driving into town, he left a car’s length between his Toyota and the car in front. I noticed other vehicles doing the same. We don’t want to be carjacked, he said, they box you in and smash the windshield. The seminar began the next day, and I was at my seat at 9 A.M., jet-lagged and medicated. I nodded off during Indian Writing in English: An Introduction. Later, I vomited in the staff restroom, left the university building, and went toward the center of the city. In the wide shade of an overpass, I walked into a smell of barbecue meat that would stay in my clothes all day. There were people drinking beer, blasting cassettes, selling fruit and cooked food from tarps spread on the ground. In the car Dilip had said apartheid was a thing of the past, but wherever I went I saw people segregated by habit. The days passed so slowly that it felt like a long season, like summer on the equator. I saw people in groups, some kind of shutdown in their eyes. I saw a man kneeling in the middle of a sidewalk. Why we got to go out there? he wailed. Why? I had no answer for him. At the Apartheid Museum, the random ticket generator classified me correctly among the NIE-BLANKES | NON-WHITES, and I entered through the non-white gate. The museum was designed to provoke. Of the exhibitions, documents, photographs, and pieces of film footage I saw there, only the installation Journeys stays with me now, a decade later. In 1886, when gold was discovered in Johannesburg, migrants came to the city from every part of the world. To prevent the mixing of races, segregation was introduced in both the mines and the city. Journeys is a series of life-size figures imprinted on panels and placed along a long, sunlit walkway. These are images of the children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren of that first wave of migrants. By walking among these people of all races, something you have done countless times in the cities of the world, you are part of a subversive tide of art and history, an intermingling, the very thing apartheid was created to prevent.

—Jeet Thayil, author of “ Dinner with Rene Ricard”

I am excited by Jennifer Elise Foerster’s new book of poetry, The Maybe-Bird (Song Cave, 2022). The long title sequence “repurposes language from eight texts written by explorers or Indian Agents to Creek County from 1527 to 1828.” I find the resulting quilt of poems intensely lyrical and compelling. The final section opens with these memorable lines:

The waiting room where no one waits
opens at the edge of a field. What do you see,
being rowed across, weightless as you are?
The earth suspends its one inky eye.
I peel back the surface of the water:
fish in your blood skimming the blade.

—Arthur Sze, author of “Zuihitsu”

Recently, I was looking for a documentary by Lithuanian director Mantas Kvedaravičius, which just won an award in Cannes. But instead, I found his first film about this Ukrainian seaside city (Mariupolis, 2016), a city which is currently occupied by Russian troops. I turned it on, and couldn’t turn it off.

The first thing you catch while watching Mariupolis is sound. It surrounds you, coming in waves, lifts you to a great height and slowly lowers you to the flat surface of the calm everyday. In the film, musicians rehearse: violin sounds. Women working on trams talk about their work tomorrow. “Don’t worry, they promised not to bomb,” one says. A girl catches a fish on a hook, screams with delight, and at the same time asks her dad to release the fish back into the sea. Later, we see a journalist reporting from a building damaged by an explosion. Oh, the explosions, I thought, and felt strange. So this is how war becomes a part of the everyday. Did the bombs fall into the sea? No one had paid them any attention.

Several Ukrainian militiamen smoke and joke. Their intonations, accents, and even languages are different. But their mood is good. You see the macabre fragments of Soviet life scattered here and there, alongside people’s vivid smiles, eyes, conversations, and music. You can physically feel these sounds fill the space around and inside you. It’s as though you’re intuiting this city, Mariupol, completely and wordlessly.

Mantas Kvedaravičius was killed by Russians in Mariupol in April 2022.

—Katrina Haddad, author of “There is Nowhere to Go Back To”

Let me draw a crooked line for you, from The Paris Review, the first literary journal I ever bought—off a magazine rack in a candy store in Cranford, New Jersey, circa 1970 (I confess I hoped it might be a skin mag which also published poetry)—to my newest discovery: Apofenie, a literary journal edited by Kate Tsurkan, an NYU PhD candidate currently living in Chernivtsi, Ukraine (the hometown of Paul Celan, Olha Kobylianska, Aharon Appelfeld, and Gregor von Rezzori), where she has become a potent force in bringing to the literary agora a whole range of voices too long in the margins of our awareness. The work in its pages is always lively and quickening.

—Askold Melnyczuk, translator of “There is Nowhere to Go Back To”

Announcing Our Summer Issue

“In more than one language the words for love and suffering are the same,” observes the narrator of Sigrid Nunez’s debut novel, A Feather on the Breath of God. “I have hurled myself at men’s hearts like a javelin.” But Nunez herself, whose Art of Fiction interview appears in our new Summer issue, has no interest in effortful seduction. Speaking to the Review’s Lidija Haas in early May, she expressed impatience with writers who want to break their readers’ hearts: “There’s an arrogance to that that has always bothered me. You leave my heart alone!”

Writing that beguiles and devastates often appears to do so casually, with the smallest of phrases or gestures, and those moments were what caught at us as we put this issue together: a little girl, in a debut work of fiction by Harriet Clark, patted down by her grandfather with a tailor’s respectful discretion on their Saturday visits to her mother in prison; a phone call from a former lover, his voice as jarringly familiar as “the feeling of my tongue inside my mouth,” in Robert Glück’s “About Ed”; that gentle “mm-kay” in a poem by Terrance Hayes written in the voice of Bob Ross.

Although the Review has generally resisted the lure of the themed issue—the main criterion for what we publish is that it leave us in some way altered—just occasionally, as if from the unconscious, the hint of a theme emerges. This time, as press day approached, we noticed that several of the pieces we’d chosen conjured the experience of an intense crush—the kind that takes you over with a fierce possessiveness, while its object remains oblivious. The fastidious, measured narrator of Esther Yi’s “Moon,” attending the concert of a K-pop band whose fans she’s always looked down on, finds herself instantly undone. In a portfolio made especially for the Review, the artist Marc Hundley captures the vertiginous sensations of reading alone, falling under the spell of certain lines from our own archives. And, in a short essay, Darryl Pinckney describes the night when he was alone in an upstairs bedroom as a child in Indianapolis and the film Paris Blues “switched on a certain channel of my being.” What channel, exactly? As Rilke would no doubt have written had he seen the movie: Paul Newman must change your life.

In Occupied Cities, Time Doesn’t Exist: Conversations with Bucha Writers

Bucha after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Photo licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0, VIA WIKIMEDIA COMMONS.

“Russian soldiers stayed in our building,” my friend, the poet Lesyk Panaisuk, wrote to me when the Ukrainian city of Bucha was liberated from Russian occupation on March 31. Some months before, as soon as the war ensued, Lesyk had left Bucha in a hurry, fleeing the Russian soldiers.

Although the city is now liberated, it is still dangerous to walk around Bucha. Lesyk’s neighbors find mines in the halls of their building, inside their slippers and washing machines. Some neighbors return only to install doors and windows. “In our neighborhood, doors to almost every apartment were broken by Russian soldiers,” Lesyk emails.

“A Ukrainian word / is ambushed: through the broken window of / a letter д other countries watch how a letter і / loses its head,” writes Lesyk in one of his poems. He continues: “how / the roof of a letter м / falls through.”

While I read Lesyk’s emails, miles from Ukraine, my own uncle is missing. As bombs explode in Odesa, I email friends, relatives. No one can find him.

Meanwhile, after another message from Lesyk, I suggest that I might begin to interview other Bucha poets. Some of their answers to my emails are as striking as their poetry. “All the words now wear a military uniform,” Daryna Gladun writes. “I set aside metaphors to speak about the war in clear words.”

This resonates with the many responses I get from other writers in Kharkiv, Odesa, Kyev. The testimonies are vivid and unpretentious: poets write about their children, parents, friends, loved ones, and fears. At the same time, reading email after email, something epic unfolds. These voices testify “in the name of all funeral wreaths and plastic ribbons / in the name of lacquered coffins and lacquered shoes of corpses,” as one of Gladun’s poems goes. As I read her poem, my uncle finally emails, after two months’ absence. He’d had a bad case of the coronavirus and spent two months in the hospital, on a ventilator. When he returns to his apartment, in the Tairovo area of Odesa, he is learning to sit and walk again. Meanwhile, a bomb explodes on his block, injuring multiple people and killing a child. “I have chosen wrong time to get ill,” my uncle says. Writing from Bucha, voices of poets redefine for me what time means in bombardment, in a war-zone, and what it might mean for us, as we watch from our safe houses elsewhere in the world.

We collect these testimonies to document the war crimes that are taking place in Ukraine and disseminate information about them. And yet one can’t help but discern something lyrical in these writers’ hurried email responses, unadorned interview answers, and scraps of experience. The attentiveness to the world in these messages is startling. Reading them, one is reminded of the philosopher Emil Cioran, who wrote, “Miles away from poetry, we still participate in it by that sudden need to scream—the last stage of lyricism.”

—Ilya Kaminsky

   

Olena Stepanenko

The first hours of war, I do not sleep half the night because I am diagnosed with COVID-19. In the morning, we hear explosions from the Gostomel airfield, so we pack our things and make our way down from the tenth floor. The elevators no longer work.

I will never forget the view from our balcony: shells blowing up, rockets exploding as the helicopters keep arriving. Black smoke—Russians are attacking the airfield. 

All my neighbors stand side by side and watch this happen. Many take pictures.

We know that it’s impossible to stay, but we don’t have a car, so we spend the first day in our friends’ apartment on the third floor of our building. The next day, at dawn, a Russian missile hits. It is hard for us to comprehend that this place—littered with fragments of metal, broken trees, and covered with a thick layer of insulation—was our yard, which was always so clean and tidy.

We go to a shelter on the other side of the city. Coming back, we do not recognize our Vokzalna Street: 300 meters from our house are four destroyed Russian infantry fighting vehicles, among linden and oak trunks broken in half. (A month later, already in Poland, I’ll read in the newspaper that Russians set up a torture chamber at the Radiant Children’s Camp nearby.)

We spend two weeks in someone else’s apartment, without water, light, or gas. Temperatures sometimes reach ten degrees. In occupied cities, time doesn’t exist, it is gone. War is not about time; time was completely destroyed in Gostomel, where the morning begins by chopping wood and lighting a fire to cook food. In the occupied city, we focus on those few hours when the generator is working. We are waiting for only two things—victory to be announced or the opportunity to escape.

I manage to leave Bucha with my son; my husband stays behind in Ukraine. On the first day of the “green corridor,” a passage by which civilians can leave the country, we wait for six hours with children in the cold. We are here with thousands of women and children—and here we believe we will die, as the Russians on tanks laugh at our despair. Waiting is perhaps the worst thing that can happen to us. We can deal with hunger and the need to save water. We can deal with the cold—we are used to that. But the wait is unbearable. When I imagine people buried alive in Borodyanka under the ruins of high-rise buildings, I begin to hate time. These people wait for infinitely long days and nights in complete darkness, pain, and fear. And their wait is in vain. Probably, if I could hate anything more than Russia and its mad horde of “liberators,” I would hate time.

I can’t even remember the names of my favorite Ukrainian bands. I forget the names of poets I used to admire. Sometimes it’s hard for me to even remember the name of the city where I live now and what I have to do here. But the name of the man who agrees to take us on his bus to a Ukrainian safe place, and who gave my son his first piece of bread in ten days, I remember. His name was Valera.

 

Lesyk Panasiuk

Let me tell you about three cities: Bucha, Zhytomyr and Khmelnytski.

Khmelnytski is where Daryna Gladun and I escape to from Bucha. Her parents and grandparents live there. We don’t have a car, because Bucha is a tiny city—in Bucha you walk everywhere. We travel by the last train, then on foot. As we walk through the woods we hear explosions. It isn’t very clear where the sound is coming from in the forest; it seems to us that a small village nearby, on the border of Zhytomyr and Kyiv, is being bombed, but later we learn that it seemed to people there that we were being bombed. In the village, we are taken in by strangers and spend the night. They give us food for the road. We change cars four times, then board a crowded minibus to Khmelnytsky. When we arrive, we learn that several cities were bombed just after we passed through them. Khmelnytski has changed: there are shelters everywhere in the city, and many people with weapons in their hands.

Let me tell you about Zhytomyr now: the city where I was born and raised, where my mother and stepfather lived before the war. They move to a village at the start of war, and take my younger brothers. My grandmother does not want to go; she wants to stay in her apartment. But because of the war, she has a stroke. She lies in the hallway of her apartment all night, for about twelve hours. When she hears that it’s safe, she calls the neighbors, who break down the door and call an ambulance. She’s taken to a hospital in another part of the city because a rocket falls near the hospital in our area. But this hospital is near a military school, so the place is also hit by a rocket. Fortunately, the blast only knocks out the hospital windows. Unfortunately, you have to crawl through charred debris and huge holes in the ground to get there. My parents take my grandmother to the village. She was born in 1946, so she did not live through the Second World War, but war still comes for her. She seems very old suddenly; part of her body is paralyzed. Even there, in a village in the south of the Zhytomyr region, peasants find Russian booby traps in the woods, and someone is killed.

Let me now tell you about Bucha, our home. These days Bucha often appears in the news. We see our house, our broken windows, dead people. Someone was shot in the street, someone was tortured. A man with his ears and nose cut off was found in our complex; he was our neighbor. Graves and dead bodies—everywhere, on the streets where we walked every day, under the houses opposite ours, and under our house too.

For a long time, Bucha was a city where artists, scientists, doctors—Nikolay Murashko, Mikhail Bulgakov, Eugene and Borys Paton and others—lived or visited. It was a small, cozy town with a beautiful landscape, where people sought for a quiet life. They came here to start and raise families. And now I don’t know how to live there and not remember what happened.

As for poetry: I never thought that I would write about a Russian soldier who died with stolen vibrators in his hands. Now you can write about anything. Gone are taboos. There is more detail and forthrightness in the poems, the lines are bolder, wider—sometimes too bold, too wide. I want to speak louder, even louder, so that they hear me.

 

Julia Stakhivska

I am not in Bucha; my life has turned the tide. I moved to another part of Ukraine. I will be able to return to my Bucha apartment only after a mine test. I have a young daughter, and Bucha is dangerous, so I need to look for a temporary new home. I lost my favorite job: the Polish Institute in Kyiv ceased to exist.

These days, I can’t write poetry, but I find it very easy to speak up publicly. It became a kind of text therapy: I am writing columns for Deutsche Welle, and I am preparing material about Bucha for a book.

The value of memory and the desire to record days have changed. When I left, I despaired over leaving behind my great-grandfather’s written memories of our family—a family chronicle—which could have served as a kind of umbilical cord, a connection to something bigger than me, during this turbulent period. But then I realized: that was just a paper illusion. I still have all of these memories; my task is to push the ongoing text line further.

 

Oleh Kotsarev

I evacuated with my young daughter and my wife to Western Ukraine, where there are thousands of migrants from other regions. There are occasional air raid alarm sirens around us. Otherwise, life seems quite peaceful on the surface. It’s soothing, but sometimes I have restless and surreal feelings. As for the city I left—hundreds of people were killed in Bucha, many of whom died after being tortured. Those who survived were also tortured. The city is mutilated.

For me, time has become a carousel: everything flashes, and you realize with a little effort that it is a certain hour, day of the week, and day of the month, and that it all belongs to Anno Domini 2022. During war, time is the location of the sun and stars and the season, rather than the numbers on the phone or the angle between the hands on the clock. On the one hand, wartime is timelessness, and on the other, it is filled with nervous attempts to look ahead.

In wartime, you look at a photo of a street in a city you recently left, and you do not recognize it. Not because of the destruction; you simply forgot it. However, you remember  unexpected little things. Before the start of full-scale Russian aggression, when I pondered which of the books I had written to take with me into possible “exile”—and I imagined I was supposed to take very few things, just one or two books—it was difficult for me to make up my mind. Before I left, I grabbed my latest collection of poetry, appropriately titled The Contents of a Man’s Pocket. But after a few weeks, it became clear that I should have taken my novel People in the Nests, which plays with family history, deconstructs it, decomposes it. It is my most active, vivid connection with the past. I want this connection for myself and, also, for my daughter—who knows where we will be in future?

 

Daryna Gladun

I’m in a foreign country. I see the transparent walls of an aquarium all around me. I look at the news images of Bucha for a long time before I recognize any places. In my memory the city is very clean, beautiful, and bright. These days, I always have the same dream: I go into the corridor of my temporary dwelling and enter my pre-war apartment in Bucha, then take a book from the shelf and read it. Every time it is a different book. I don’t remember what they are about. It is getting dark outside the window. I go to bed. I wake up because a man breaks down the apartment door. I have these dreams every night. Sometimes my own cries wake me up.

When war started, I began to speak directly. Writing has become much simpler. Metaphors and euphemisms seem unnecessary. Useless. Russia’s war against Ukraine is very real. It seems to me that metaphor smudges reality. Blurs it and creates distance between the reality of the author and the reader. And if once I preferred to live in this blurred reality, after February 24 I don’t anymore. Now my words have become heavier and  less flexible. They do not crumble, do not break, and do not flow into each other.

All the words now wear a military uniform. They come and I can’t resist them. I don’t like all the poems I’ve written during the war. But I have a need to write and to share what is written immediately. Before this, I had not posted poems online or given any public readings for a year. But now everything I write sits at the the boundary between literature and journalism. It is poetry in uniform. I set aside metaphors to speak about the war in clear words, so that readers around the world will be struck by the cynicism, cruelty, and inevitability of the war that Russia brought to Ukraine.

Since February 24, I haven’t felt like time is passing. I mechanically mark the days of war in the titles of individual poems, but this division of time is not real. Only when the war is over will I understand which direction and at what speed the clock has been moving. Now I am infinitely old, and only a few years old. While the war continues, I am internally oscillating between this sense of all-encompassing old age and my prenatal state. And I feel like the world is swaying with me.

I speak about time, yet I am thinking of Serhiy, a refugee boy at the train station in Poznan. He held up his hedgehog and said that he was a happy hedgehog because he had survived, and that the other toys were unhappy because they had all died at home. I felt like a lucky toy hedgehog.

 

Siarhey Prylutski

My family spends two weeks in occupied Bucha. The war takes place some 100 meters from our house on the first day. That evening, I go to the supermarket to buy groceries, and walk past the kiosk near the house where we always used to buy cigarettes, beer, and sweets; the entrance is already barricaded against looters.

Most of the people in the supermarket look alarmed. But some do not yet fully understand that war has begun. One guy in his twenties stands in front of me at the checkout, cheerful, joking with the saleswoman. The people around us grab flour, cereal, canned food, meat. He takes only a pack of seeds and a couple of gin and tonics. A couple of times he tells the saleswoman, “I didn’t expect that!”

None of us expect just yet that the Russians will soon turn life in Bucha into hell. On the way home, I see a local military near the volunteer headquarters. In less than a day, people withdraw all the money from street ATMs. Walking through a dark deserted park, one catches oneself thinking: here they come, the dark times.

In the first days of March, everything disappears—water, light, heating—we find ourselves in a kind of Middle Ages of the twenty-first century. Water is carried from a nearby building in plastic bottles and buckets. Food is now prepared in the yards of high-rise buildings. Fires are rising from almost every entrance. People begin to help each other more actively, and we learn the names of neighbors we had lived near for years.

The buildings in the occupation turn into “caves,” suitable only for sleeping and hiding from shelling. The nights are frosty, and we have to sleep dressed. We in an apartment on the first floor rather than in the basement, so during heavy shelling we hide in the bathroom. Sometimes the children spend the night there while the adults sleep in the hallway, near the front door.

The curfew begins at 7 P.M. It’s already dark outside. It is dark in the apartment too—we are saving candles. So I go to bed at 8 or 9 P.M., and get up at 5 or 6 A.M. unless there are night bombardments. My wife, my four-year-old son, and I live with a friend and her two daughters. During one night of heavy shelling, when explosions shake the walls of the bathroom, her eldest daughter begins to say goodbye to all of us in turn, just in case she dies suddenly today.

One can’t help but feel constant involvement in what is happening across the country: while you’re drinking coffee, someone else doesn’t know where to find food for their child due to constant gunfire. Someone 200 kilometers away dies in the bombardment because they went out to buy bread, while you are smoking a cigarette on the balcony. You keep thinking: how is a new friend who refused to leave? Is he alive or in the hands of the Russians? During the occupation, it often seems like it is perpetually morning;  you didn’t notice that it has become dark outside. When a city is bombed, time doesn’t exist, time doesn’t matter at all—you just wait for the shells to stop flying over the buildings.

I can tell you this: during one of the bombardments, when a shell hit a nearby building, there was no such thing as the feeling described in books, the sense that “all my life flashed before my eyes.” I didn’t think about my past life at all. Instead, in that moment, my memory switched off. Everything before that moment became irrelevant. I could only think about the survival of the children nearby—my son and my friend’s child. My only thought was what might await them if they were left without parents. How might they climb out of this nightmare.

 

Edited by Katie Farris and Ilya Kaminsky.

Translated by Tetyana Denford, Katie Farris, Ilya Kaminsky, Ira Mykyta,   Alisa Slaughter, and Julia Sushytska.

Cambridge Diary, 2014

Photograph by J.D. Daniels.

Saturday. July.       7:15 am

Yoga.

Translating Bayard’s Peut-on appliquer la littérature à la psychanalyse? from a Spanish copy of ¿Se puede aplicar la literatura al psicoanálisis? One word at a time. Speed limit, 25 mph.

To Cartagena with Jamie this 22-26 September.

Tonight Jamie, Josh and Ellen will come for dinner.

Humid, overcast, drizzling rain, 60˚F but feels much hotter.

 

Sunday.                    6:10 am.       68˚F

Beginner’s Orchids. Phalaenopsis, cymbidium, oncidium.

Reconciliation with the father. Henry IV, Part One.

Ideas for essays on films. Sorcerer at Brattle vs. Clouzot’s Wages of Fear. Or Stark’s The Hunter vs. Point Blank. A man who knows nothing about movies writes these words about a movie he enjoyed.

Cycled yesterday with Jamie through green Concord, in preparation for 2015 in Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Kerala.

Ran three miles.

Monday.                   5:55 am.        70˚F

Manic. Dreamt of Paris. Darkness, water, light, birth.

“Your idea of comfort is just the pain you’ve gotten used to,” Joanne snarled at me.

Tolstoy’s How Much Land Does A Man Need?—My father used to say, “How many lobsters does a man need? One to put in his mouth, and the other one to stick up his ass. That’s two lobsters, Johnny. A man needs two lobsters.” A dog can learn a hundred words, a cat can learn about thirty. What is the thirty-first lobster? How many words does a man need?

Won’t run today. Must ice left heel.

 

Tuesday.                   6:49 am

Ran three miles yesterday. Did not ice foot.

Last night, Seroquel at half nine. Up this morning, wide awake at half three for Ativan. Still couldn’t sleep. Seven-fifteen, dose and a half Abilify.

Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians.

David Yow has sent my painting. Come on, man. I feel happy.

I shouldn’t have cut my hair, but now it can’t be helped. Patience.

Reading H. Croly’s Promise of American Life.

“This is what I see and what troubles me. I look around in every direction and all I see is darkness.”—Pascal. But I love the darkness.

Sounds of trucks backing up, interminably.

Shestov’s Tolstoy and Nietzsche, cited in Groys’ Anti-philosophy.

Maile Meloy’s story “Madame Lazarus” in New Yorker 23 June has a surprisingly strong opening paragraph.

Looking forward to Economist report on “Poland’s Golden Age.”

 

Wednesday.              6:55 am.      73˚F

Slept eight hours for the first time since the conference.

Plan to grill out tonight on red brick terrace, if it doesn’t rain.

Massage yesterday. Lifting weights later this morning.

Dr T’s lack of general knowledge continues to startle me. Earlier this week, he did not know what a golem was. Yesterday he did not know Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs. He did not recognize the connection of mene, mene, tekel, upharsin to the expression handwriting on the wall. What is it that they learn in medical school?

Haydn’s piano sonata no. 23 in F major.

Cheerful geraniums, pencil plant, new side-by-side by Hollander of Paradiso.

Idea. Journey to the West from Boston to Seattle on I-90 and I-94.

Mann in Diary on the respect shown to him that was not wholly meant for him, but for what he was, or represented. A bygone era.

Beethoven’s piano sonata no. 9 in E major, op 14 no 1.

Mozart’s piano sonata no 17 in B flat K 570.

Venice for 40th birthday?—Shindig in Venedig.

 

Thursday.                 4:50 am.        72˚F

Up at 1 am. Came down to the basement for three more hours sleep.

Two coffees and letters to Pierce, Greif, Petrovich, Wood, Baker, Nemser, Mason, Stephan, Klebaum, Parker.

Listening to Sudhir Pandey play tabla.

Emptying the storehouse of my head. If that is where these things are stored.

Bayard translation. Coming right along.

Cross-country trip USA twice, right to left and top to bottom. X marks the spot, you are no longer here.

Colombia w Jamie and Yucatán solo, dates and arrangements.

Kerala early next year, that will have to be January.

My parents want to visit late in August. They can’t stay here.

Passenger. A man who knows nothing about movies. De-centered narratives, Middlemarch, Yeazell on same. The switcheroo from Marion to Norman in Psycho.

Sat 11:30 pm, Thief of Bagdad 1924 silent with Douglas Fairbanks.

Photocopies for Frank and IRS.

 

Friday.                      3:27 am

Solo drive Badlands, Devils Tower, etc. to Los Angeles, Aug-Sept 2014.

Anthrax’s “Be All, End All.”

Paganini’s partita for solo violin no. 3.

Blind Willie Johnson, “When the war was on.”

Brendel plays Beethoven’s sonata no. 1 in F minor, first movement.

Haydn sym 93, D major.

A much cooler day, overcast, still. Maybe rain later. Birds began singing before dawn.

Bogotá radio 610 am.

Yoga.

 

Saturday.                  6:45 am

Woke at half five, having slept 7.5 hours soundly.

Dreamt of Sanford’s resurrection. He came back as “Abel Sabeth.”

“Ornithology,” “Now’s The Time,” “Scrapple from the Apple,” “Confirmation,” “Billie’s Bounce.” Intense exposure, repeated listening.

Riffs and progressions for split seven-inch with Andy, Tony, James.

 

Monday.                   3:58 am.       74˚F and thunderstorms are predicted

Ran two miles.

Coffee with Julia.

Moravia’s Which Tribe Do You Belong To? in Locke’s house in The Passenger.

 

Thursday.                 7:10 am.        68˚F

La Carinosa, Cartagena 1270 am.

Taxi to Needham Junction c. 1 pm, to meet Russ at his wife’s new juice bar, then come home on the commuter-rail.

Listening to Greatest Salsa Classics of Colombia, vol 1.

Had pozole and enchiladas chicken ranchero with rice and beans at Boca Grande, then watched Coogan and Brydon’s The Trip with Susanna.

Brendel plays Beethoven’s piano concerto no 1 in C major, op 15.

 

Saturday.                  5:53 am.        63˚F

Summer suit ready for pick-up today at J. Press.

F says, of our book proposal, “This is going to work.” — The transition from “I” to “we.” A real leader says “we.”

Lester Young plays “Polka Dots and Moonbeams.”

 

Sunday.                    6:47 am.       64˚F

No yoga today.

More cuts to, and more bulking of, US-83 proposal with F.

Gave Jamie a copy of TPR 209 for his flight to Purdue.

Middlemarch, again.

Pius Cheung plays Goldberg Variations for marimba.

Black noise-cancelling headphones on. This ache in my left shoulder, this burning pinch. Posture can control it or already does, has generated it, will adapt to it. I am creating it, not in any grandiose theological way, but through attention or inattention, posture, and many small voluntary or habitual actions.

My left ear is ringing.

All this lonely “heroism.” As an attempt to escape from interdependence. But a “self” is generated thru a web or electromagnetic field of relations.

 

Monday.                   5:23 am.       61˚F

Woke from pain in my neck and shoulder, terrible, familiar. These are symptoms I had twenty years ago. The pain of my head, and of all that is in it. — The doctor asked me, “Have you been in a car accident?” — I said, “I’ll be honest with you, I don’t remember.”

Birds of the morning now begin to call.

Reading Galbraith’s Affluent Society. Ordered his Indian Painting book.

Bought two cognitive-science titles at Harvard Book Store yesterday, We Are Our Minds from Spiegel & Grau and It’s a Jungle in There from Penn UP.

Five red geraniums back in the well. Pencil plant. New desert succulent called sun-catcher.

Ran three miles, stretched, chin-ups.

Largo fr. Bach’s violin concerto in G min BWV 1056.

Horowitz plays Mozart’s piano sonata 13 in B flat, K 333.

Waiting for F’s response to a third revision of our US-83 proposal.

 

Tuesday.                   7:10 am.        Already it’s 65˚F.

Lunch with Bill at noon today on Comm Ave.

I’ve put in nearly two hours at my desk, revamping this book proposal.

Teeth cleaned Wednesday, before meeting Dr A.

Prism casts spectrum on desk and wall at 7:20, but not at 7:37.

Browsing in, and cannibalizing, my diary. You are my child, I want to eat you. I made you, and I can eat you. Come with me. You belong to me, you are my flesh. I can bite my fingernails, can I not. I do with me as I please.

Listening to adagio from Bach’s toccata in C major, BWV 564.

Drew a route map for F of eight to ten long hauls in USA.

 

Wednesday.             5:30 am.       72˚F and thunderstorms are expected

Ran two miles. Oatmeal with raisins, strawberries, blueberries, honey, then a small espresso. The Jazz Spectrum on 95.3 fm—Eric Dolphy, then Brubeck’s “Jazz Impressions of New York.”

The new issue of Flaunt has come out, with my essay “I Saw The Number Fifteen On A Dead Man’s Chest.”

Sent a fifth and still v. rough draft of the proposal to F.

 

Thursday.                 6:38 am.       74˚F

Dream: “junior officer Daniels was basically unharmed.” The enormous automatic shotgun, the female police squad. “You should see the other guy.”

This morning, sixth draft of proposal. Sent.

Meeting with Dr A at quarter after one.

Call dealership, service department, about car’s window problem.

My teeth ached yesterday after cleaning. This morning, not too sore.

Startled to see that I gained two pounds. One double and one single espresso, two glasses of water, a banana, a white peach and a yellow peach.

“I’m Going To Run To The City of Refuge” by Blind Willie Johnson.

Watching footage from Club, the Jesus Lizard tour video.

 

Friday.                      7:44 am.        63˚F

I have already put in a two-hour shift at my desk, revising the book proposal for F for a tenth time. Only ten thousand more to go. So engrossed by my work was I that I let my coffee grow cold. A new trick.

Began Hofstadter’s Surfaces and Essences yesterday afternoon.

Thai lunch with Parker in three hours. Green onions.

Cut the edge of a nostril shaving. I could smell the iron in my blood.

 

Saturday.                  6:19 am.        65˚F

I’ve been awake since half past three. Did not take Seroquel last night.

Slow movement from Beethoven’s sixth.

Re-read Cymbeline yesterday.

Skipping rope on the brick terrace. Hot.

Ruthless decluttering: further de-accessioning of excess books.

Beethoven’s piano sonata no 2 in A major op 2 no 2. Lipkin.

Translating Goethe’s poem ‘Urworte. Orphisch’ as best I am able.

Tonight, dinner at Maria’s. Pork tenderloin and spaghetti with bottarga. Her recent Sardinian trip.

Dinner last night with Mike. Steak tips, three ears of corn with butter and salt, grilled asparagus, salad, bread and cheese.

Listening to Handel as I straighten up my office.

Overture to Tannhauser.

Three bags paperbacks & hardbacks, out.

Old copies n+1 and Paris Review to attic.

Analogies are constructed using materials near at hand. Use only the best materials for this task.

 

Sunday.                    7:16 am.        69˚F and thunderstorms are expected

Organizing 2013 photos of Chaumukha Mandir for David and Judy before I ask them to come with me to Pure Souls, a show of Jain paintings at MFA 09 August.

I slept nine hours straight through the night after half an Abilify, an Ativan before Maria’s party, and a Seroquel at bedtime. Amazing what getting so stoned was able to do in terms of increasing my tolerance for Jackie.

I have not hit a lick on this book proposal since Friday afternoon.

Began reading Paradiso. First two cantos. It’s slow going, for a sinner. As is Eliot’s Middlemarch, a novel “for grown-up people,” since I am not a grown-up person.

Finished Hofstadter’s Surfaces and Essences. There was a lot worth thinking about in his book, but not as much as he thought. Had I been his editor, I would have cut two hundred pages.

Fan e-mail calls my writing “spare and evocative.” If she knew what a Rat Man I am, dragging my bag of dirty treats with which to inundate and overwhelm. Spareness is achieved by carving away. Early drafts are not spare.

V calls, drunk, to praise a recent story of mine. I don’t believe him.

Randhawa and Galbraith’s volume on Indian Painting.

I was aghast to see what the dental hygienist showed me in my mouth, a tooth with its gum receded to the point that the root is nearly exposed. Fear.

Charles Bowden, who is, for the most part, unreadable. And yet.

Out for dinner tonight with Jamie, who is back from having fucked his considerable brains out with an assistant professor at Purdue.

 

Monday.                   6:59 am.       69˚F and thunderstorms are expected

Yesterday, Old Cambridge Baptist Church.—Topic of sermon was “secretary to the sacred,” Matthew 13:52: “Then said he unto them, Therefore every scribe which is instructed unto the kingdom of heaven is like unto a man that is an householder, which bringeth forth out of his treasure things new and old.” — What God wants us to “write,” if we are not writers, or to write, if we are.—I scrambled for the door after the service, but the preacher blocked my way. They’re onto me, they can smell it on me. The heat. Souls in hell burn.

 

Tuesday.                   7:38 am.       65˚F

Dream: “I am what I am,” and the truth will out. A beautiful dream. I have not slept so well in more than a month.

Lifted weights, smoked a good cigar (Casa Fernandez of Miami petit robusto), dinner carne asada a la tampiqueña at José’s. Red sauce.

Re-reading dialogues of Settembrini and Naptha in The Magic Mountain.

Re-reading Christoph Türcke’s Philosophy of Dreams. Making notes.

Possible drive from Bismarck through Williston, Billings, Devils Tower, and the South Dakota Badlands.

Flood tide of semi-sewage in my office yesterday after pounding rains. Exterminator confirms recently sighted rats do not nest on our property.

Today and Thursday, meetings with Dr A.

YMCA and lunch with Andy (torta in Medford) tomorrow.

I will not go to Cartagena with Jamie this 22-26 September.

Mozart’s piano concerto no 9 in E flat.

 

Wednesday.                         8:13 am.       66˚F

Spent the morning answering letters.

My teeth still hurt. That cleaning last Tuesday changed my bite. Used medicinal enamel toothpaste for the first time yesterday before dinner.

Captain Dorner, dying of pancreatic cancer, emailed me last night about my “Letter from Majorca.”

Sore. But YMCA should cure that. Squat, bench, back extension, chins.

Overture from Tannhäuser four times yesterday. Now the Grand March.

Breakthroughs in my thinking yesterday, as I smoked and re-read Türcke’s Philosophy of Dreams, caused me to feel anxious again, as if revisiting post-conference days. Compulsion to repeat.

I took an Ativan and listened to Tannhäuser and to Parsifal. Then an Abilify before dinner with Jamie.

 

Thursday.                 5:40 am.       65˚F

The end of July. I knew it had to come.

Yesterday, tortas at Tenoch and a good talk with Andy. Finished re-reading Türcke. Now re-reading Hamilton’s Mythology and The Gospel of John.

Dreamt of Carlos Fuentes. I look forward to Christopher Unborn. Happy memories of finishing Destiny and Desire in Mike’s apartment last March.

Began to do homework on Velázquez, before visiting his portrait of Góngora I love so much. But decided not to act as if I were a schoolboy.

Sierra Leone declares Ebola to be a public health emergency.

Rescue workers in western India race to locate survivors of a landslide that has claimed at least 30 lives and buried up to 200 people.

Argentina has defaulted on its debt for the second time in 13 years.

Boko Haram in Nigeria kidnaps the wife of the president of Cameroon.

Boehner and the House have voted to sue Obama.

To Cartagena with Jamie after all?—Two months from now.

Another Casa Fernandez petit robusto after Dr A today.

NBC reports: ‘Libya teeters on the brink of collapse.’ Likewise Foreign Affairs: ‘Libya on the brink.’ The Nation on Ukraine: we’re in the “worst American-Russian crisis since the Cuban missile confrontation.” What is the aim of a headline?—hyperbole, to sell ad space in a newspaper.

Surfing: it takes place on the surface. A false etymology? Likewise diving shares no root with divine. Depth psychology. SCUBA certification in Rhode Island: make inquiries. “I can swim,” howls David Yow. Comfortable in the water. There is no depth, it’s surface all the way down. The inside and the outside are the same side. The mask is the face. There’s nothing underwater, other than more water.Once you’re in the water, it’s all water.

Real loss of interest in book proposal. I’ll come back to it.

B has gotten himself arrested.

Democracy Now! en español. Typed first demon-cracy, then demo-crazy.

Last night while grilling sausages and zucchinis, a thrilling fantasy of power and freedom: no longer a writer, simply a man.

 

***

 

Postscript:

An immense temptation to pretty all this up, complexifying it.

And I, and I.—Dear diary, I did my homework and went to bed.

Maybe the writing we do for ourselves alone (or “alone”) is the most fictional of all. You can’t read other people’s minds: what makes you think you can read your own?

2014. The classic breakdown ages are nineteen and forty. Now I had a pair, like silver candlesticks. But I could still write down times and temperatures, names of friends, titles of books, music I listened to, and what I ate, which is not nothing.

The words sanity and insanity are like the words flammable and inflammable: their meanings are the same.

In the end, I did fly to Colombia with Jamie. And what did I see in Cartagena? A man beat another man with a chair until the chair broke into pieces. Then he beat him with the broken pieces of the chair.

 

J. D. Daniels is the winner of a 2016 Whiting Award and The Paris Review’s 2013 Terry Southern Prize. His collection The Correspondence (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) was published in 2017. His writing has appeared in The Paris Review, Esquire, n+1, Oxford American, Los Angeles Review of Books and elsewhere, including The Best American Essays and The Best American Travel Writing.

On Prince, Volcanologists, and Forsythe’s Ballets

Molten smooth pahoehoe lava flow erupted by Kilauea volcano in Hawaii. Photo by user y5RZouZwNsH6MI, CC BY-SA 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

There is a video of Prince that I can’t stop watching. It’s just over an hour long, shot in grainy black-and-white. It looks like a surveillance tape. This is Prince in 1982, before 1999, before Purple Rain and Sign “O” the Times, before there were stadiums packed with people demanding something from him. Three months earlier, he opened for the Rolling Stones, wearing thigh-high boots and bikini briefs, and got chased off stage by an audience throwing garbage. Now he’s playing in suburban New Jersey for a crowd of college kids who don’t know how to process what they’re witnessing. It’s one of the most miraculous things I’ve ever seen. 

The show starts in pulsing darkness, with an a capella gospel track. Above the choir we hear Prince clearly, his always startling baritone rolling up to a keening falsetto. “You’ve got to love your brother if you want to free your soul,” he sings. These are the last religious words that will be sung that night, but they’re a reminder that Prince is an artist who knows, like Madonna and Al Green and Marvin Gaye, that all the sexiest music is at least a little bit about God. Then the drums kick in. Prince’s strobe-lit silhouette flashes out of the darkness. His body looks enormous, which it was not. I’m reminded, strangely, that Prince was born epileptic, and that as a child he informed his mother—correctly, it turned out—that he wasn’t going to have seizures anymore. He’d been cured by an angel, he said. 

It feels like there’s something private about what he’s doing up there, like we’re not supposed to be seeing this, like it’s a sin. The camera can’t contain him. He vanishes a few times, leaving an empty black square. When the camera pulls back, we realize he’s dropped to the floor, seeking an angle of even greater intimacy with his guitar. Over the course of the hour he seems to draw inward, choosing to ignore the teenagers shuffling clumsily around him. At several points, I think, he forgets the audience is there. But then he remembers, looks up, shoots his arms to the ceiling and poses for a beat before retreating again into his body, that place where he spins and jumps and grinds and, unasked, gives freely of himself. 

—Charlie Lee

You can read Charlie Lee’s essay on migraines and miracles here . 

Katia and Maurice Krafft spent decades recording volcanoes around the world. Director Sara Dosa transformed hundreds of hours of their film footage into the mesmerizing documentary Fire of Love, which I saw a few months ago in Toronto. The footage alone is a luminous marvel; never have I experienced such geologic intimacy from the screen. In Maurice Krafft’s archival narrations, we hear stylistic echoes of Werner Herzog—who, perhaps unsurprisingly, featured the volcanologists in his 2016 film Into the Inferno and this spring premiered his own cinematic dedication to them, The Fire Within. His delivery is so tonally epic that it verges on a comedic parody of itself. Dosa mines this comedy to generate a story that is at once profound and whimsical, capturing all the elements of falling in love—the glow, the warmth, the obsession.

—Sierra Crane Murdoch

You can read Sierra Crane Murdoch’s essay on Barry Lopez here . 

William Forsythe is a staple of postmodern dance, an American choreographer who made his name in Europe during his tenure at Ballet Frankfurt. He brought ballet as George Balanchine had defined it into the twenty-first century—stretching the lines and angles of each movement past its limits, embracing the androgynous, cerebral, and electronic. Now, in something of an incredibly busy retirement, Forsythe has entered a choreographic partnership with the Boston Ballet, creating new dances and re-staging old ones. He knows the dancers well, and their symbiosis is obvious onstage. Boston Ballet boasts one of the most avant-garde and thoughtfully curated repertoires in the country. A few weeks ago, I went to the Boston Opera House three times for a program showcasing Forsythe’s Blake Works I and III, two ballets in a series set to music by James Blake.

Blake Works I premiered at the Paris Opera Ballet in 2016 and is rarely seen outside of the Palais Garnier. There is something French in the dancers’ stately carriage of their arms—and in the choreography that brings the entire company onstage. But Boston’s dancers added an American verve, thwacking their legs into the air and hitting each note with intensity. For Blake III, which premiered this season in Boston, a barre—an essential tool for class and training—was showcased onstage. This felt almost indecent, as though the company had been caught onstage in undergarments. The ballet became a sequence of pas de deux with the barre, the dancers torquing their hips and angling their bodies against it with each new step. (Lia Cirio, Lawrence Rhines, and Daniel Durrett were among the strongest dancers in Blake III, and Jeffrey Cirio took the stage like Baryshnikov in both acts.) Boston’s next season will include another new Forsythe ballet and a reprise of his celebrated Artifact Suite.

—Elinor Hitt, reader