The Paris Review's Blog, page 8

Two New Movies

Amalia Ulman’s Magic Farm (2025).

Montreal/Paris/London/New York/Berlin/Chicago/Seoul/Amsterdam/Mexico City/Tokyo/Vancouver/Los Angeles. In the Day-Glo light of the mid-aughts, that slogan of American soft power swung off canvas tote bags everywhere. The message was optimistic: the world has no boundaries—at least, if you’re wearing American Apparel.

Magic Farm, the sophomore work of Argentine director Amalia Ulman, is that millennial dream fruited and fermented. Her characters work at a VICE-style gonzo web show, pal around with Chloë Sevigny, and proudly blaze a trail through the world, totally unaware that the trail they’re proudly blazing has already been paved and advertises Monday–Friday street-side parking.

Ulman’s grifters end up in the Argentine countryside chasing a tip that doesn’t exist. Quickly, they resolve to fabricate one—unconcerned with the ethics behind writing their own reality and indifferent to the townspeople’s actual lives, which, of course, have far more depth: the nearby farmland is routinely crop-dusted with a pesticide that’s resulted in a sickly, cancer-addled population. The Americans despair over crushes, bugbites, jobs, and the imagined pain of creating something revelatory out of nothing. Can magic be manufactured? Or does it, like factory-farmed corn, salmon, or cattle, end up tasteless, even cancerous?

Personal childhood heartthrob Alex Wolff (passing around a business card replete with the American Apparel font) swings between braggadocio and romantic ruin. Immediately, he is entranced by local soubrette Camila del Campo, a stunner who scampers up trees to post thirst traps. Chloë, his more mature love interest, is the hostess of the show. She is paraded around by the traveling circus, desperately unhappy with the cage she built. Meanwhile, Joe Apollonio swoons in the presence of Guillermo Jacubowicz, the good-natured hotel owner, culminating in a sexually tense but doomed laundry-washing. As an actress, Ulman is the most reserved of the bunch, playing a pregnant translator caught between the locals and the Americans.

As a director, Ulman is anything but reserved, excelling at tender moments of personal inadequacy, allowing characters to snip themselves down to the quick. She moves the camera with a sense of boundarylessness: the viewer is placed on the head of the dog, is shot into the air, and takes a ride around on a motorcycle. Unironically, boundarylessness is what killed American Apparel: their CEO, Dov Charney, was eventually ousted for sexual misconduct. The stores in Montreal/Paris/London/New York/Berlin/Chicago/Seoul/etc. closed one at a time, and then suddenly. The world, after all, is not edgeless. Magic Farm’s hapless protagonists may be oblivious to their surroundings, determined to cocoon themselves in the safety of their own problems—but, Ulman ensures, we are not.

—Nicolaia Rips

 

In The ADHD Muses, Bernadette Van-Huy—better known as the eponymous member of the art collective Bernadette Corporation—takes on the “fake theme” of ADHD. As to what makes the theme “fake,” I’m nonplussed. Perhaps it’s just a refusal to commit to an idea. The movie starts with jazz, but it’s all downhill from there.

The test group for this ironically engaged theme—which tracks with the collective’s interest in pouring identities into prefabricated forms and isn’t a terrible premise in the abstract—are two young women whose lack of apparent talent isn’t allowed to get in the way of the filmmaker’s affectionate curiosity about them. One of them, Marika Thunder, is the daughter of painter Rita Ackermann, a longtime associate of the filmmaker’s. A significant portion of the film is shot in what appears to be Ackermann’s studio, where Thunder and Tessa Gourin, an aspiring actress, woodenly recite scenes from Pulp Fiction or a Christopher Walken monologue that, like the title Annie Hall scrawled on an otherwise blank wall, don’t make themselves any more interesting than the average spazzed shoutout. Choppy editing doesn’t make the film kinetic or even lively. The older, figurative painter Eric Fischl gets name-checked—I guess he’s on the attention-deficit spectrum, as they say—and it’s a sign of how dull The ADHD Muses’s proceedings are that I would have welcomed an interview about his dusty work by the time the Mean Girls scene recitations started.

A long shot of Gourin walking along East Eighty-Sixth Street and interior-monologuing about her life so far and an extended studio visit with Thunder both fail to inspire. Gourin: “A really interesting fact about me is I’m always early.” If there was a script for the film, SMALL TALK! would be the header (and footer) on every page.

The outro to the film features an omniscient narrator offering a curious meditation on clock time, implying a thematic connection to the women’s personal orientations, but it’s a little late to be retrospectively tacking on a long view that the director’s subjects themselves lack. If there was a guiding concept behind the film, maybe it should have felt a bit more real to Van-Huy before she pressed RECORD.

—Paige K. Bradley

The Matter of Martin

Martin Amis poses for a photo in his North London home on Oct. 18, 2005. Courtesy of Writer Pictures/Graham Jepson, via AP Images.

“They’re waiting for an autograph from Salman Rushdie,” the man behind me explained. After everything he’s been through. People were gathering behind a barricade at a door of the 92nd Street Y, down the block from the one where I stood waiting for “A Celebration of Martin Amis.” A couple of minutes passed, during which time the man behind me also decided to tell me that he thought the attempt on Donald Trump’s life seemed staged. Then the actual Salman Rushdie arrived at our door, wearing a tan Yankees cap, and walked right in, unbothered by fans. Suspicious of my line mate’s sense of the nature of the assassination attempt and his suggestion that the crowd was there for a novelist, I excused myself and went to investigate. A woman at the barricade said they were there for Murderbot. (This, I gathered from Google later, is an action-comedy TV series.)

A literary writer in 2025 may not pull throngs of fans hanging off a barricade the way an action comedy TV series can. But the crowd passing through the lobby of the 92nd Street Y, there to hear a set of distinguished writers talk about Amis, was indeed soon in the hundreds. Martin Amis, whom Geoff Dyer once called the “Mick Jagger of literature,” was among our last great literary celebrities. Along with his crew of London writer friends—which included Christopher Hitchens, Ian McEwan, and Rushdie—Amis moved like a star, back when writers (I’m told) commanded that kind of public attention.

In the lobby, some attendees self-identified as Amis diehards: Paige McGreevy, who works at the United Nations, remembered being eighteen in Barcelona, staying out until six in the morning, sleeping all day in her blackout-shaded room, and then waking up and inhaling Money in bed. The novelist Julian Tepper recalled with a cringe the time he approached Amis at a PEN gala and did the whole “Mr. Amis, I just wanted to say—” thing. Another Money fan, Emilie Meyer, who said she was a friend of the Amis family’s, marveled at the way its protagonist combines piggishness with a nimble, pixielike wit. Meyer is a bookseller at Aeon Bookstore, and she often recommends Amis’s work to people who come in seeking books for a vacation—that way, she explained, they will always remember it as the trip when they read Amis.

Emilie is twenty-five. Most of the other young people in the crowd were there with groups from M.F.A. programs. Both the New School and NYU, I was told, arranged for tickets. Some of the students hadn’t read much—or any—Amis, but all seemed pleased to be there. Most of the attendees were closer to Amis’s age, and some were from his milieu. Anna Wintour entered; this being the second Monday of May, she was available. She sat down in the auditorium not far from literary agent Andrew Wylie, who represented Amis from the mid-nineties on. (Wintour, who also attended Amis’s London memorial service in 2023, goes way back with Amis; in their London youths, she dated his great friend the Hitch.)

A few rows back from them, I chatted with Hugo Guinness, another pal of Amis’s from those days, who fondly recalled tennis games and “lots of drinking.” Novelists were still cool and glamorous then, he said; playwrights too. He and his wife, the painter Elliott Puckette, had also attended the London memorial. This event, as the speakers soon made clear, was the New York version of that service.

The event was billed as a “celebration,” and I didn’t quite know what that would mean. I was thinking maybe a panel, perhaps some group discussion of his books. Instead a procession of venerated writers stood behind a lectern to deliver what were effectively eulogies; it was a celebration of life, two years after Amis’s death. Isabel Fonseca, Amis’s wife, reflected in gracious opening remarks on Amis’s recurrent interest in the theme of aging. She noted that he was searing on each stage of life, including old age, though he “hardly touched his own.” The speakers shared tender anecdotes about “Martin.” Jeffrey Eugenides, who spoke after Fonseca, noted that Amis was actually a “sweetheart” who’d gone to the trouble of shipping his daughter’s stuffed animal, left behind at Amis’s rental house in Brazil; cigarette ash was stuck to the stamps. (That the speakers noted that Amis could be tender did not surprise me: Anyone who has read Amis’s writing about children, not to mention the boundless sorrow of losing his cousin Lucy Partington, the victim of a brutal murder, suspects this.) Lorrie Moore described how he aged gracefully from an enfant terrible, recalling the handful of times she encountered him. She said, intriguingly, that money in his work functioned as a “La Brea Tar Pit of the soul.”

People shared snippets of conversation and memories, praised his style and personal qualities, and read long passages from Amis’s work. It was during these readings that the biggest laughs came. Amis writing about himself is probably funnier than most people could be about him. (Though it was also very funny when Fonseca said that to crack open a Martin Amis book is to wonder, “When will something truly horrible and humiliating happen to this man, or this woman?”) A. M. Homes read the opening of The Rachel Papers, and Jennifer Egan read from The Information, Amis’s great tale of literary rivalry and flailing. Nathan Heller, was the only speaker who had never met Amis: “I knew him as a writer, which is the way I suspect writers would most like to be known.” He spoke to and for the many of us who also knew Amis only through his work—those of us pulled to the event by the Nabokovian throb of recognition. Of all the speakers, Heller best captured, and reenacted, Amis’s sheer sense of wonder and glee about literature. One pleasure of reading Amis is the electricity of his alertness to the world: Heller described him as writing realism with “the saturation turned up.” Recalling the “ecstatic snicker” that comes from reading both Martin and Kingsley Amis—this “somatic line of literary happiness”—Heller reminded us that reading Amis is fun. Murmurs of how great Heller was circulated in my section.

Overall, the tone of the speeches was reverent—appropriate, probably, to the occasion. Still, Amis was a writer who ventured gleefully beyond the bounds of good taste. Rushdie, who closed out the evening, recounted the cheeky word games they used to play; in one, they replaced the word Love in titles with the words Hysterical Sex, to get to “Hysterical Sex in the Time of Cholera” and things like that. A close friend of Amis’s, he shared his regret, his voice almost breaking, that he never properly got to say goodbye. “So I’ll say it now,” he concluded. “Goodbye, Martin. And I send you a lot of hysterical sex.”

Amis’s work was the focus of the event. But Amis was interested in life—his own, and those of the writers he examined in his parallel career as a critic. As the critic Parul Sehgal (who cohosts a terrific podcast on Amis called The Martin Chronicles) wrote in 2020: “The hallmark of his own literary criticism is his interest in the pressures that life and art exert on each other.” His own life seemed to exert much. He was not a hermit type. He had a rich world—relationships, children, tennis matches, vexed paternal relations, feuds, spats, dental work (sorry!). Amis ran headlong into the mix, as any satirist, arguably any writer, should. He went after Hitchens in print, who went after him in turn. He defended himself vigorously against claims that his major dental surgery was cosmetic, and friends did the same, for example in a ten-page New Yorker spread—covering the oral surgery, a massive book advance, and his falling-out with Julian Barnes and Pat Kavanagh—which appeared in 1995, a few months before I was born. One critic, Rushdie told the magazine, “behaved disgracefully badly in the matter of Martin.” But on Monday, none of this came up. The asterisk that sometimes hovers over conversations among young people today about his work (yes, the portrayals of women aren’t always great, but … and yes, he was sort of controversial, but …) were absent too. That’s okay: it was, after all, a celebration. It was all very pleasant for the man who, in the eighties, became the face of what one critic called the “new unpleasantness.”

Amis’s writing is stylish and screwy and grotesque and vulgar. The jokes come at an unhinged pace. He was an exquisite writer of the male body and the horrors of inhabiting one: “My hair hung on my head as if it were a cut-price toupée,” Charles Highway (Charles Highway!) reflects in Amis’s debut novel The Rachel Papers. That same character savages the “Big Boys” that are his pimples and speaks of “laundering my orifices,” as “they went all to hell if not scrupulously maintained.” A genital region is referred to as a “rig.” The names, across his books, are insane. Amis calls characters things like Spunk, 13, Fart Klaeber, Sod. A female cop (or as she calls herself “a police”) is named Mike Hoolihan. A quartet of violent dogs are Joe, Joel, Jeff, and Jon. That he called a writer-character Martin Amis, or so the story goes, caused his father to throw Money across the room. Famed for his antic satire, he was later unafraid to take on—in his novels, nonfiction, and short stories—genocide and the end of the world, too.

No one is doing it like Amis did. That the contemporary fiction landscape lacks his flavor of frenzied humor, chaotic storylines, maximalist characters, and full-throated play is a loss. But perhaps that’s how it should be, especially for a critic who championed writers whose work could not be mistaken for anyone’s but their own. He was an influence—the 92nd Street Y is planning more events featuring young writers affected by Amis—but he was also singular. Perhaps his legacy, more than inspiring copycats, will be to have opened up a sense of freedom, a sense that, yes, you really can do what you want.

The auditorium in the 92nd Street Y’s Unterberg Poetry and Literature Center has the names of a handful of famous writers and thinkers emblazoned on the walls. I was amused to note that directly to the right of where I sat, the wall read SHAKESPEARE. Amis was fascinated by, and irreverent toward, the Bard of Avon. In The Rachel Papers, young Highway suggests that Shakespeare had it easy because he could just wrap things up with a wedding; far harder to make it through the narrative muck of twentieth-century relationships. And one of the all-time Amis passages, for me, is John Self’s close analysis in Money of a portrait of Shakespeare: “The beaked and bumfluffed upper lip, the oafish swelling of the jawline, the granny’s rockpool eyes. And that rug! Isn’t it a killer?” (A rug, in Amisese, refers to a head of hair.) Shakespeare, to the comfort of our hero, “looked like shit.” Amis, who mocked literary giants, nonetheless betrayed in his journalism, and in the frequent references to great writers in his novels, an awe for the stars that preceded him—though he never stopped denigrating playwrights, whom he suggested, in his memoir Experience, were knighted far too much. “It is very funny that Shakespeare was a playwright,” he wrote. (Amis was himself knighted posthumously in 2023.)

After the speeches, everyone filed back onstage for a charming farewell. No one took a bow. It was not a performance, not really. In the lobby, I chatted with a couple of members of the extended Amis–Fonseca family, one of whom observed that Amis talked like he wrote. The evening, they concluded, had felt authentic.

Amis showed, even early in life, a canny awareness of his own image (one doesn’t become a literary Mick Jagger by accident) and both his capacity and his inability to shape it. In a letter to his father and his then-stepmother Elizabeth Jane Howard, ahead of his Oxford interview, a teenage Amis wonders: “Shall I be refreshingly different, stolidly middle-brow, engagingly naïve, candidly matter-of-fact, contemptuously sophisticated, incorruptibly sincere, sonorously pedantic, curiously fickle, youthfully wide-eyed? Should I bow my head in solemn appreciation of the hallowed atmosphere of learning? Should I play the profound truth-seeker, the seedy anti-hero, the crusty society-observer, the all-discerning beauty-appreciator?” Fair questions, all. But his conclusion, touching and wise, is: “No, I suppose I shall end up … just … being…… myself.” Himself he seemed to stay.

Amis’s friends and readers last week, looking at his life, did not attempt holistic description of who he became. In his criticism, Amis sometimes quoted at length from the writers he reviewed. I am not reviewing Amis, of course. But in the spirit of skimming inspiration from him, I will end with a passage from Experience about the trouble with life and the structure of it all:

The trouble with life (the novelist will feel) is its amorphousness, its ridiculous fluidity. Look at it: thinly plotted, largely themeless, sentimental and ineluctably trite. The dialogue is poor, or at least violently uneven. The twists are either predictable or sensationalist. And it’s always the same beginning; and the same ending.

 

Lora Kelley is a writer who lives in Brooklyn.

A Missive Sent Straight from the Mayhem: On Michelle Tea’s Valencia

Photograph by Juergen Striewski, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Michelle Tea once described Valencia as “a snapshot, more or less, of my twenty-fifth year on earth, written not how it happened but how I felt it happened.” It feels right, then, in a numerological sense, to be addressing Tea’s classic twenty-five years after its turn-of-the-millennium publication. One way to do so would be to hail Valencia as an exuberant, hilarious record of a truly unprecedented and mutinous time in lesbian/queer history—the San Francisco dyke scene of the nineties—and by lauding its spot-on testimony to the fashions (“I had big purple hair, a green studded collar, and roller skates. I looked insane”), the locales (Mission dive bars and apartments, the Bearded Lady, a whorehouse in the woods of Marin), the drugs (booze, crystal meth, mushrooms that taste like “a trunk of moth-eaten clothes,” Valencia Street coffee), the pre-internet technologies (zines, open mics, personal ads in newspapers, pay phones, latex gloves), the gender vibes (all over the place, but generally still using she/her pronouns), and the kinks (“Petra was really into the knife. I got the sense that I could have been any body beneath her, it was the knife that was the star of the show”). Such a read would underscore Valencia’s status as one of the most vivid, thrilling documents of its time, while also ensuring that the explosive and inventive culture it portrays isn’t lost to history, as so much queer history, especially of the lesbian, poor, and debauched variety, can be.

But here I want to talk about other things that reading Valencia now makes me think and feel. Namely, I want to talk about Valencia’s achievement in transmitting the conjoined rush of being young, being high, being in love, and becoming a writer—and how that rush feels when these things are pursued all at once, with great abandon. Writers often convey this rush in retrospect, after the dust of an era has settled, or after they’ve removed themselves from a scene (and/or from the substances fueling it). That’s its own trick—and one that Tea has pulled off elsewhere, such as in her great 2016 novel Black Wave. Valencia is something else, maybe something more improbable. It’s a missive sent straight from the mayhem. I still don’t know how she did it.

So, how did she? I’m willing to bet that this passage from Tea’s 2018 collection Against Memoir describes her process at the time pretty accurately: “I remember being inside a nightclub, sitting up on top of a jukebox, scribbling in my notebook by the light that escaped it. All around me the darkness writhed with throngs of females, their bodies striped and pierced, as shaved and ornamented as any tribe anywhere, clad in animal skins, hurling themselves into one another with love. What feeling it filled me with. An alcoholic, an addict, I know what it is to crave, and the need to take this story into my body was consuming. For years I sat alone at tables, writing the story of everything I had ever known or seen.” It’s a kind of miracle, when everyone’s fucked up and fucking, for there to be someone just as fucked up and fucking, but also scribing it all down, and rendering it into literature. And here we have to thank the Higher Power of our choosing that Tea perched atop that jukebox, sat at that bar table, and scribbled. As Tea puts it in a Valencia-era essay titled “Explain,” in a passage that never ceases to make me want to pump my fist: “Why not me. My poverty and the girls that don’t love me and how drunk I got the other night. How I was a prostitute. It seems to be literature when guys write about it, it’s practically become a genre, men writing about their transcendental trips to the cathouse, their orgasms and revelations. Or men writing about women’s lives in general. Straight people writing about queers and white people writing about every other race on the planet. The writing that I love, it’s the Other telling the part that got left out, the truth. Not only a writer and a historian, but a spy.”

Some spies don’t have to labor too hard to throw others off the trail; being a diminutive female is usually enough to keep people from recognizing the genius at hand. “There’s this awful copy shop near my house,” Tea says in “Explain.” “I go there all the time because I’m too lazy to walk up to Kinko’s. The guys at this place are such jerks. I had a bunch of my books and he said, Are Those Your Books? Yeah. You wrote them? Yeah. He makes this suspicious little scrunched-up face. Are You Sure? he asks. He means it. Looking at my dirty fucked up hair and tattoos scrawled up my arms and whatever else he saw. You Just Don’t Look Like You Would Be A Writer. Yeah well keep an eye out for yourself in my next novel, asshole.” And just like that, there he is—first in her essay, and now here. That’s one thing writing can do—seize the means of production. (Asshole!)

Tea makes it look easy to write from the eye of the storm, but let’s pause for a moment to appreciate the rarity. Surely her hypergraphia—a compulsion to write that she has compared to other addictions—helped; as she describes her disposition in Valencia, “Oh, I should be quiet and full of potential like all those still flowers, but I know I am a weed and I’ve got to blow my seeds around the garden.” Yet there’s inevitably a tension between writing and living hard. Sometimes getting wasted makes writing possible (“I always drank while I wrote, and I loved drinking so much that the drinking kept me in my chair, writing,” Tea has said); at other times, it can threaten the whole project, including the project of staying alive. “I could not imagine what would happen to me if I smoked more pot,” Tea writes in Valencia, before adding, in a classic step toward self-abandonment, “I held it to my lips and drew it in.” Being high on love presents a similar conundrum: after filling pages and pages about different girlfriends in Valencia, Tea tells us: “I cannot write when I have a girlfriend.” The mystery of the balancing act goes on.

Maybe one way to think about it is, this balancing act works until it doesn’t, and Valencia emanates from of a time when it was working. For some, it stops working before age twenty-five, but twenty-five seems to me like a pretty typical high mark, before the shit really starts to hit the fan. Denis Johnson’s collection Jesus’ Son—published a year before Valencia—comes to mind here, in part because both Jesus’ Son and Valencia capture so powerfully what Johnson called, in reference to his collection, “the experience of the youthful soul,” and in part because of something Johnson once said in response to an interviewer who asked him if he felt nostalgic for the wild, druggy, desperate days that Jesus’ Son describes. “Well,” Johnson said, “just for the self-abandonment of it. Just sometimes there’s nothing better than lying down in the dirt, being completely hopeless and helpless, because then of course you have no responsibilities, and that kind of appeals to me. But the problem is you can’t do that for long. There’s always a steam roller headed your way.”

The protagonist of Jesus’ Son collides with that steamroller in the book’s pages; in Valencia, the rumble remains in the offing. You can hear it faintly in passages such as: “And Laurel got a girlfriend in Amsterdam, and George got a boyfriend who wouldn’t top him, and eventually Candice did like me, and eventually Iris no longer did, and my older poetry friends from the bar left behind secret addictions as they moved to far away states to dry out, and Ashley got a boyfriend and disappeared completely, and here I sit with my coffee.” Some folks may have begun to move on or move out, but for now our narrator stays put, coffee and notebook in hand. Valencia is a freeze-frame of that ongoingness.

When I imagine an interviewer asking Tea if she feels, twenty-five years hence, nostalgic for the experience of the youthful soul captured so lavishly by Valencia, I think about something she said in conversation with another great chronicler of queer life, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore. “When I was younger and saw nostalgia in older people,” Tea tells Sycamore, “it really scared me. I never wanted to have that kind of a relationship to my own history. It felt like everyone always thinks that their time was the best time, and it was almost a plan I came up with when I was younger, or a pledge I made to myself, to not get old and boring. Part of that means not being nostalgic.” To honor Tea’s wisdom here, I invite us to read Valencia not as a postcard from a bygone era, but as a shimmering, ever-alive thing, an always-open portal to the kind of youthful soul who vows, as Tea’s narrator does, to “run through the streets in excellent danger.”

Valencia lets us touch this excellent danger whether we have grown away from it, are smack in the middle of it, or never chose to court it. No matter how dangerous or bleak things get, Tea’s narrator remains fundamentally optimistic and questing. Faced with the advent of darkness, she asks, “What would the night give us?” This fundamental buoyancy—which is aided and abetted by Tea’s never-flagging sense of humor—steers us away from moralizing, away from the quicksands of trauma, and toward possibility and gift. “In the mainstream popular consciousness,” Tea tells Sycamore, “certain things are like irredeemably bad. Like getting strung out on drugs is bad, and you’ve lost something if you’ve gotten addicted on drugs. This idea that you’ve lost control, or you’ve lost your mind, or something. Or you’ve lost your virginity, you know how girls always ‘lose’ their virginity. Or if you do sex work, you’ve somehow lost … Any transgression get marked as a sort of loss. And what’s never talked about is what you get from it.” Valencia is all about what you get from it.

 

This essay is adapted from the foreword to the twenty-fifth-anniversary edition of Michelle Tea’s Valencia, which will be published by Seal Press in June.Maggie Nelson is the author of several books of prose and poetry, including Pathemata, or, The Story of My Mouth; Like Love; The Red Parts; Bluets; the National Book Critics Circle Award winner The Argonauts; and On Freedom. She teaches at the University of Southern California and lives in Los Angeles.

Recurring Screens

My iMac G3, running Warp.

The world’s first screen saver was not like a dream at all. It was a blank screen. It was called SCRNSAVE, and when it was released in 1983 it was very exciting to a niche audience. It was like John Cage’s 4’33″ but for computers—a score for meted-out doses of silence. 

Instructions for using the screen saver were first published in the tech magazine Softalk. The headline read: SAVE YOUR MONITOR SCREEN! Across from the article was a full-page photo of firefighters rescuing a computer monitor from a burning building.

Softalk, December 1983.

 

The article explained that there was a new danger facing computers: “burn-in.” Basically, if a screen showed the same thing for too long, the shadow of its image would be tattooed to the pixels. A screen saver stirs the soup of the image to keep it from sticking to the screen. 

The science behind burn-in is grotesque: picture swarms of electrons like locusts flinging themselves at the thin phosphor coating of a screen, chewing holes. A screen saver periodically smokes the locusts out, thereby saving the screen from the disfigurement of monotony.

SCRNSAVE was a big deal engineering-wise, but it never caught on with most computer users, who, reasonably, did not see the value in making their screens shut off every few minutes. Before long, software developers figured out how to convince people to adopt screen savers: aesthetics. The screen savers had to make people want to look back at the screens they had just looked away from.

In 1989, a software company called Berkeley Systems launched a program called After Dark. Instead of just going blank, After Dark screen savers showed animations: flying toasters, or falling rain, or overlapping curved lines in neon gradients. The new screen savers took the world by storm. But in terms of preventing burn-in, flying toasters were no better than a blank screen. Their purpose was pleasure.

 

After Dark 2.0, Berkeley Systems, 1992.

 

I don’t know the exact percentage of my life I have spent watching screen savers, but I’m sure it’s equivalent to the amount of time I’ve spent peeing or stuck in traffic. I’ve probably watched screen savers for the same amount of time I’ve spent dreaming about the car, the airplane, and the hill. The details change, but every night for years I’ve dreamed that I’m in a car, and that I’m on an airplane, and that I’m jumping off the top of a hill.

When I was a kid, my favorite After Dark screen saver was called Warp. In Warp, you’re flying into the center of a tunnel of tiny white stars. Nothing happens except that you keep going forward. Nothing changes, but it always seemed to me like it might. Like if I kept looking I might finally see past the tunnel’s center. I’d watch until an adult snapped their fingers in my face and told me to pay attention.

In my least favorite screen saver, 3D Maze, you’re running through a maze with red brick walls and a white  asbestos-tiled ceiling. The light is cold and fluorescent, like in an office building. Sometimes you go the wrong way and have to briefly run backward. Sometimes the whole maze flips over and you keep running on the asbestos ceiling like nothing happened. The worst part of 3D Maze was that it could appear on any computer screen without warning. Once the screen saver had started, it was hard to look away, even though I knew what would happen. Every night in my sleep I climb the hill, and I jump off the top.

***

There are no screen savers in pleasureis amiracle by Bianca Rae Messinger. But the poems talk about memory as though time itself were a screen saver—a series of recurring dreams that overlap. Messinger writes:

nothing is transposed so she goes back to sleep with no thinking about
fucking but about water or is it the same object anavenue circles it tying
the new ocean and outside there’s a field which is familiar though
destroyed  sometimes she has torun  as the water comes fast and tan, so
she steals a car in the next scene like a  spaceship   so fast 

Many words in pleasureis amiracle are merged. They make me think of parataxis, the pushing together of distinct ideas in writing. Messinger imagines parataxis as a physical form of adhesion. Words can stick together, and so can everything else. A new ocean to a familiar field. An image burned into a screen. 

By the time I started high school in 2008, the screen saver boom had faded. Bored with the limited options on my white plastic MacBook, I downloaded one called Electric Sheep, whose selling point was that it would never show the same thing twice. Every time the screen saver ran, my computer would connect to other computers on the internet, and together they would make new kaleidoscopic patterns in new kaleidoscopic colors. The website explained:  

When these computers “sleep,” the screen saver comes on and the computers communicate with each other by the internet to share the work of creating morphing abstract animations known as “sheep.” The result is a collective “android dream,” an homage to Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

I was excited to be part of an internet of dreaming sheep. But for some reason my computer could never connect. Every day it made the same four patterns in the same four colors. Instead of many sheep remembering many dreams, the screen saver was like one sheep trying to remember one dream and only seeing fragments. A car, an airplane, a hill.

Bianca Rae Messinger believes phone calls are a form of time travel. For Messinger, if it’s morning on one end of the phone, it’s morning on the other. “If you walked to California from New York,” she explained to me once, “it would be morning by the time you arrived, even if it wasn’t when you left.” A voice on a telephone travels close to the speed of light. Ergo, time travel. In pleasureis amiracle, she writes:

wefight in your red car about space,
whether it’s consecutive, you say,   whether it’s observatory
no,  i say no too as i tend toagree
without wantingto, but yet   each
moment feels improvisatory…

Can time be improvised if we are trapped in it? If we are trapped in time, can we teleport to other places? According to some scientists and science fiction writers, the answer is yes—through something called a tesseract. In A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine L’Engle describes the tesseract by way of an ant. I’ll summarize:

If an ant wanted to walk from one side of a length of fabric to the other, it would need to walk across the entire surface. Here’s a diagram that L’Engle included in her book:

 

 

But what if someone folded the fabric in half? The ant would be able to teleport immediately from one end of the fabric to the other. 

 

 

Now imagine the ant has been walking along a box instead of a piece of fabric. To travel instantly to the other side, the ant would need to fold the box in half without breaking it, which would mean invoking the fifth dimension: a tesseract.

Are phone calls tesseracts? What about the internet, or dreams? Messinger writes: 

doing everything   at once doesn’t feel like
an action exactly…this neighborhood
smells like the one I grew up in but
that’s 300 miles away.

pleasureis amiracle asks whether memory is a type of action and whether a repeated action is a form of remembering. The book answers: Memory is an action like the spinning plate of the microwave. It’s morning on both sides of the phone because you remember morning. If you leave a computer awake long enough, it will eventually remember to show a screen saver. Every time it sleeps, the computer dreams its recurring dreams. 

***

My grandmother’s iMac spent most of its time showing Flurry, a dancing rainbow spider that was the first-ever Macintosh screen saver when it debuted in 2002. My grandmother was very tech-averse and preferred to write on a yellow legal pad. Whenever she needed to use the iMac, she’d call me with questions. “Thank goodness you picked up,” she’d say. “An alternate universe has emerged in the corner of my screen. Can you help?” 

I quickly gave up on trying to convince her to use words like “window” or “application” instead of “planet” or “dimension.” Her descriptions felt closer to the real experience of using a computer—like trying to fly a spaceship. She read a lot of sci-fi. I helped her download Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven from iTunes as an audiobook. We listened together as a man altered collective reality with his dreams.

 

My grandmother’s stereoscope.

 

A glass slide of my grandmother being pulled by a horse.

 

One of the few things my grandmother’s family managed to bring from Austria when they fled the Nazis in 1938 was a stereoscope—a three-dimensional image-viewing device. When I was young, my grandmother sometimes let me look through its binocular-like lenses at glass slides of her in Austria: a three-dimensional child in a cart pulled by a three-dimensional horse. 

When my grandmother died, everyone agreed I should be given her computer. Actually, at first everyone agreed that we should throw her computer away, but they said I could have it if I really wanted it. 

My grandmother’s computer looked like all iMacs had looked for a decade—like a piece of sheet metal with an apple stamped on it. I took it home and it runs decently enough. Not quickly, but respectably. Not quite light-speed, but telephone-speed.  

The first iMacs did not look like sheet metal. Instead, they looked like colorful plastic bubbles. I recently bought one on eBay. It’s from 1999 and made of pink translucent plastic—a color Apple called strawberry. My concept was that I’d try and replace my 2021 laptop with the Strawberry. But when the Strawberry arrived, it wouldn’t turn on. When I finally got it to wake up, it could not load most websites.

I took the Strawberry apart thirty-nine times. (I kept count.) I didn’t really know what I was doing. I cut my hands open on the logic board more than once. There’s still dried blood on the hard drive. But despite my best efforts at modernization, the Strawberry has refused to accept any of my updates. It only wants to exist in 1999, to connect to an old internet that hardly exists anymore. These days it mostly runs screen savers. Warp is still my favorite.

 

The Strawberry and my grandmother’s iMac.

 

Toward the end of pleasureis amiracle, Messinger writes, 

being able to ‘live’ in one’s own memories was what caused
the eventual collapse, and it being joyful. a radio on repeat…
she thinks, an easier way to say this is that dreams are now considered life forms.

I used to think I could use old computers to break open time and get everything back; to fold the screen in two and make a tesseract. I wanted to know what would happen at the end of my dream with the car, the airplane, and the hill. I wanted to go inside the stereoscope and see my grandmother in three dimensions in a place that no longer exists. 

But when I finally went back in time, what I found instead were screen savers. Radios on repeat. Places where you could look at time and watch things move around inside it, at the speed of a telephone, just slower than light. 

 

Nora Claire Miller’s debut poetry collection, Groceries, is forthcoming from Fonograf Editions this fall.

A Man Is Like a Tree: On Nicole Wittenberg

Nicole Wittenberg, Woods Walker 7 (2023–2024), oil on canvas, 96 x 72″.

Nicole Wittenberg has painted a variety of subjects over the last fifteen years, but two predominate: lush and lyrical landscapes, often of places where water meets land—generally unpopulated, but with an occasional figure glimpsed among the trees, as if to provide focus and scale—and her less well-known male nudes (along with an occasional pulchritudinous female counterpart), often engaged in sex acts that have seldom been depicted in Western high art. These pictures show sexual beings up close and personal, though maybe up close and impersonal is more to the point. They are exercises in concision and point of view; if you get close enough, anything looks big, and these dicks look monumental, like big trees in a low-rise landscape.

Despite their provocative, even polemical subject matter (why not paint dicks?) Wittenberg’s paintings of blowjobs and the form of self-care commonly known as jerking off are also concerned with style, with the how of painting as inseparable from the what. In paintings like Blow Job and Red Handed, Again, both from 2014, the how relies on a gesture that is high-risk and directionally sound. It is the precise placement along with a certain velocity that allows the gesture to adhere to the form. In terms of accuracy of brush mark, Wittenberg might be the Franz Kline of dick paintings. You have to paint something, and you may as well paint what interests you. Sometimes you might paint what interests others, to see if it also interests you. Are these paintings pornographic? I don’t know, maybe. I don’t really care—perhaps that descriptor is even a compliment. I’m not especially polemical in my approach to art or to life, but suffice it to say that the analytically sexual gaze in painting should be equally and unreservedly available to all. These are paintings that say, Oh, is this image making you uncomfortable? Get over it.

Nicole Wittenberg, Red Handed, Again, 2014, oil on canvas, 36 x 48″.

Wittenberg’s landscape paintings and pastels, on the other hand, belong to a long ancestral line; they derive, meanderingly, from some of the earliest paintings produced in this country, and they constitute a contemporary reframing of a potent and closely held self-image: the sense of wonder engendered by the pristine vastness of the North American landscape. It’s as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote about the early Dutch settlers sailing into New ­Amsterdam, seeing for the first time the “fresh, green breast of the new world.”

Wittenberg posits two basic visions of this Arcadian heritage, the peopled and the unpeopled landscape, and both stem from her time living among the shallows and the depths of coastal Maine, where she has summered the last dozen or so years. One type of picture shows a densely wooded grove bordered by water, seen from the middle distance in the indistinct light of early morning or evening. In these seminocturnes, the landscape is shadowy and mysterious, more or less inaccessible—perhaps the view from a boat of one of the innumerable uninhabited islands that dot the Penobscot Bay, as in Cradle Cove (2022). Or the view from the shore as we contemplate a stand of trees halfway to the horizon in the fading pink light, as in After the Storm (2024). The illumination is dim; the trees are backlit and the colors of the woods and water as well as sky are all dark and close-valued. These pictures are portents of existential unease, of loneliness and something unresolved, and as such are a continuation of a soulful lineage; one feels Marsden Hartley standing behind them, and behind Hartley stands Albert Pinkham Ryder. Wittenberg’s luminous, unpeopled landscapes have a closely held, interior feeling of something that resists us, of an awareness just out of reach.

Nicole Wittenberg. Woods Walker (2021), pastel on paper, 15.5 x 11.5″.

The other type of landscape painting is also of the Maine woods but seen from within a grove of towering white pines. It is perhaps midday, the contrast between light and shadow is high, and a solitary figure wends his way beneath the swooping branches. These are the Woods Walker paintings, of which Wittenberg has painted a number of variations. The addition of the single figure marked a turning point in her art; we are inside the forest now, the figure is our surrogate, and though more of a participant in the passage of minutes and hours and the change in light, we are still vulnerable to the vicissitudes of nature, weather, and memory. The unspoken worry: Will we be able to find our way back? The ebullience one feels in that moment, walking in the brilliant light, arms swinging by one’s sides, may be short-lived.

Wittenberg’s paintings all share a concern for compression and for scale: dicks as big as trees and trees towering over diminutive hikers. Both are a function of point of view, which itself constitutes the painter’s first decisive act. The point of view goes a long way in setting a picture’s narrative capability. We only see what the painter chooses to show us; what is left out is not our concern. We can’t know what happens in the next instant, or after we stop looking. The mystery continues to unfold, with us or without us. This exact quality of light—hold it! In the next instant it changes, forever. The melancholy of painting.

 

David Salle’s essay “A Man Is Like a Tree” will appear in Nicole Wittenberg, the first survey of Wittenberg’s work, which will be published by Phaidon in July. The publication of the book coincides with two solo exhibitions of the artist’s work, at the Ogunquit Museum of American Art and the Center for Maine Contemporary Art.

A Night and a Day and a Night and a Day and a Night and a Day in the Dark

Photographs courtesy of Lisa Carver.

 

Day One

All around me are short, shiny young Romans groping each other. The old ones engage in the more solitary pleasures of hawking loogies and eating out of greasy paper bags. I’m on my way to a dark retreat on a farm so high up in the mountains it requires five modes of transportation to get there—plane, train, metro, bus, taxi—each more confusing than the last. You buy your bus ticket at a particular newsstand nowhere near the bus. The only reason I knew this was because Antonello, the dark-retreat guide, had emailed me travel instructions … paragraphs of them … which I had memorized for dear life. Clutching my ticket, I tried to go through gate ten up the stairs to platform ten, as instructed, but the gate was locked. I tried gate eleven, but there was a sign saying not to cross the platform, which would have been the only way to get to ten. Vomit or diarrhea had been flung over the wall of the stairwell at regular intervals the whole way up. How did anyone have so much stuff in their guts? And why would they keep going up the stairs? I would have laid down and called 911. These Italians are of hearty stock. The smell was amazing. The arrow indicating the way to the metro switched directions so many times it curled and pointed at the sky. I guess you just guess here. Don’t even think about asking for help from the people in little cages like tollbooths scattered about. Signs in front of the booths warn in English: “We’re Not Here to Give Information.”

At last I alighted in Sora, the town closest to the farm, population five thousand, and called the taxi driver, Giulia, but she only giggled and said her boyfriend took her car and she had no idea when he would be back. I walked the streets of Sora and noticed that all the clocks were off, but each told a different wrong time. Actually, now that I think of it: Other towns don’t even have clocks anymore, do they? Everyone’s looking at their phones.

Which is one reason why people go on dark retreats. It’s the only place you can escape your phone, with its light and sounds. When my husband Bruno’s ex-wife Emilie asked why I would torture myself like that, I gave my usual answer: I don’t do anything for why; I do everything for why not. But this is more than a whim. I used to be fine with how I am: never staying in one place or with one person. But lately something feels off, feels in need of fixing, and I don’t know where the problem is. Could be I will find it in the dark. That’s historically what dark retreats are for: to heal body and mind when more conventional methods fail. Often a mirror would be secured over the bed as a passageway for ancestors or spirits to give you whatever advice they’ve been saving up. I’ve had too much hubris to listen to anyone’s wisdom, especially my ancestors’, considering half the ones I know about were rapists or murderers. But if we learn the most from mistakes, it follows that the worse someone lived, the better their advice must be. Hold on, dead Carvers, I’m coming!

I was waiting as instructed at a fountain in the middle of town with a directional arrow pointing inexplicably straight down to the center of the earth when a woman in a bikini hanging out of a banged-up car with no taxi sign hooted at me.

“You must be Giulia,” I said.

“I must,” she answered—not sarcastically, but as a simple imperative—and we were on our bumpy way.

The farm is made up of lush hills that stretch empty all the way to the empty sky. So peaceful. Lethargy rolled through me in waves as Antonello showed me around, two chickens in tow. Antonello could have been thirty or sixty. He was open yet unreadable, joking yet serious, bony and taut yet gentle. He looked like he was born on this farm (he was) and would die here, just like his father and his father before him. I said I was hungry, and he yanked some grapes off a vine on the wall and handed them to me. I’m glad I told him I was a vegetarian! He looked capable of grabbing one of the chickens, wringing its neck, plucking its feathers, throwing it on a fire, and handing that to me as easily as the grapes.

At the end of the line lay my dark room. It’s basically a cave, its stone walls carved into the mountainside and fitted with a bed, a dresser, a card table, a chair, and a doorless bathroom over to the side. No nightstand for the book I need to read in order to sleep or the notebook I need to keep in order to live. For the first time since my father taught me to read and write at two years old, I would be without both. I did bring a tape recorder with black electrical tape over the red “on” light just in case I have some thoughts, but it’s not the same. Writing has been my one constant. I was about to be truly alone. For a night and a day and a night and a day and a night and a day.

Antonello asked what meditation method I’d be using to manage anxiety or fear. I said none. He looked dubious. I said, “We’re just animals. Animals crawl down into pitch-black holes all the time. I think it’s normal.” He said, “So your method is no method.” I got irritated at that, because I will not be using the no-method method! That’s a method! If you plan for something, that’s what you’ll get. I don’t want to manage my fear—I want to meet it. But first, dinner.

We took Antonello’s seventies van down to the regular part of the farm where British, Portuguese, Romanian, Dutch, French, and Italian guests gathered around two long tables pushed together. No one but me came for the dark room. The others are here for relaxation, nature, silent horseback riding … The next time I sit at this table, everyone here now will be gone, and a new pack will have arrived. I don’t join in the conversation.

“Are you ready?” Antonello asks when I put my fork down.

Oh, yes.

 

Day Two
(transcription numbered with each time I turned the recorder on)

1.

I just had my once-daily human visit, as such. Antonello knocked on the door and wordlessly placed some food in the vestibule between the outer and the inner door. He had said my meal would arrive at one o’clock each day, so I figure I’ve been in here fifteen hours with nothing to say worth turning this recorder on for. If I hadn’t just had that fractional interaction with the world to remind me there is a world out there, who knows if anything at all would have occurred to me as worth preserving for later. In here it feels like there is no later.

When I went to sleep last night, it felt normal. You sleep in darkness and silence. But when I opened my eyes in the morning and there was no light and no coffee and no bustle of stepchildren getting ready for school, I was instantly thrust into an altered state. I started hallucinating my surroundings. Furniture, walls. Not seeing it—I was imagining it. And imagining was exactly the same as seeing. It’s making me wonder how much I imagine what I think I’m seeing out there in real life too.

Eating in here is nothing like the eating I’m used to. Sometimes I get the fork to my mouth and there’s nothing on it—it must’ve fallen off. And what even is it? Something that could have been eggs with nuts inside. A spongy breadlike thing—mayhap a giant mushroom? And some really sour lettuce, possibly seaweed. I don’t know this food and I don’t know the man who brought it—not really. You just have to trust. It must’ve been like this in the womb: you didn’t decide anything; stuff just came; you just ate it. I love when things get down to their simplest form. After a few bites, I was full. Everything is slowed down here, functions are going extinct. I pictured my digestion trying to outrun the slowness and then just shrugging and curling up for a nap. This constant game of intake and energy conversion and discharge and beginning again before you’ve even finished one job … why didn’t it ever occur to me I don’t have to keep going and going? I could just … not eat.

I hallucinated stepping out onto the balcony, which doesn’t exist. I looked down the valley, which doesn’t exist. I didn’t exactly feel my body moving, going outside. I was just doing it. It was totally natural. It’s so still here, I guess my brain knew I needed to see and move or I’d go crazy, so it let me see and move in this other way that has always existed, I just never had cause to tap into it before.

I also hallucinated two rectangles of light cast on the wall from two windows instead of shadows. Wait a minute. That’s what windows do. Ha ha ha! But in my brain windows cast shadows, and this was opposite. I thought that for at least thirty seconds. And then just as it had drifted in, it drifted away: the hallucination, then the awareness that it was a hallucination, then the story I built about what it means to hallucinate.

Nothing spectacular has shown itself—nothing like the dragon that visited the Buddhist monk on his dark retreat that he talked about on a YouTube video. It’s all mundane. I shouldn’t say mundane because it’s very beautiful. What I mean is it has become ordinary almost instantly—the ways of the dark.

I tried hallucinating on purpose just to see what I could see. I saw a snowy mountain dotted delicately with evergreens and a cabin. Then I remembered where I’d seen this mountain before: in a large Japanese painting behind the sofa at Mrs. McCooey’s, a woman paralyzed by polio who my mother would take me to visit. I’d stare at that painting and fantasize about being there instead of where I was, with the boring adult conversation, which was always the same. Now I am one of those boring adults talking instead of escaping into a painting.

When I was a kid, I thought art and songs and movies were real. Then I grew up and grew money and influence, and art became symbolic. Everything became symbolic. And complex, and distant. Now, in this room where I can’t see and can’t impress anyone, nothing is symbolic, everything is easy, and I can walk into paintings again.

2.

I feel like it’s bedtime, though it could be anytime. I don’t know how to behave here. There’s no habit, no feedback, no punishment or reward to show me what is expected of me. The same way I can’t inspect the food, can only eat it, I can’t inspect the life I’m leading right now, can only live it. Well, I’m not leading it. I’m lying in it. In the light, you get to choose from a menu at a restaurant, and you choose from the menu of life—what kind of friend will you be that day, what hobbies will you learn that year. There’s only the one thing here. And it’s eternal.

I know this: I’ve spent way too many of my first twenty-four hours being bitter about Bruno, filling this room with lists of all the ways he is chaotic and selfish. He’s not even doing anything to me right now! I give so much energy to fighting with him when we are in the same room, how disappointing that I’m continuing the fight when we aren’t. Obsession is an invasive species of the mind. You can reimagine events so constantly it chokes out all the other little events that are trying to happen. I’m ashamed. I’m having to face that it is me choosing to live my life in struggle. I gotta stop telling myself it will be better “when …” There is no “when.” There only is.

Auuugh, gawd, listen to me holding forth and forth to my audience of none! I can’t stand myself.

3.

It’s hard to tell sleeping from waking in here. But I do recognize what a nightmare is, and I just had one, so I must have been asleep. In it Bruno kept turning the light on and telling me about something happening—animals replicating. I said, “Leave me be. They’re going to replicate whether I’m there to see it or not, and right now I’m on my dark retreat.” But he wouldn’t stop, so finally I went to see these animals replicating. I could hear something moving behind an old built-in bookcase, and I yanked desperately at it to free the creature, and pulled out chunks of what I realized was the original Bruno. The pieces were falling apart in my hands like rotted food, while the replicant Bruno yelled and gesticulated at me. It was so horrible it woke me up. It was horrible because it’s true.

We categorize nightmares as unreal because we, as a species, don’t “believe” in sleep. I mean as a landscape, its own real place. Perhaps I should reverse it, stop paying attention to what people say when I’m awake and instead believe what they say in my sleep.

4.

Harry Styles lyrics running through my mind: Stop your crying, have the time of your life, gotta get away from here, you’re not really good, everything will be all right.

5.

Came here to report that I was walking in the snow in a black snowsuit. I saw an oval space in the snow and curled up in it. I pulled snow over me like a blanket and it kept me warm. I thought, Why didn’t I ever realize we don’t have to be cold?

I don’t know why I keep seeing snow when I know it’s not winter out there. I guess because snow is white, and I’m hungry for the opposite of blackness.

6.

I feel my separateness. I feel like a tiny piece of gravel cutting into the heel of the darkness. The darkness is whole and I am just an aberration. I don’t matter. I have never had that thought before! How terrible it feels! How I wish I could talk to someone or look at homes on Zillow or walk the dog—anything to tell me that it’s the darkness that’s insignificant and fleeting, not me. Oh God, it’s awful in here! I can’t even fantasize about the other activities on the farm that I might do when I get out of here, like paragliding, weather permitting, because it won’t be me out there paragliding. It will be Lisa Light. Lisa In Motion. I don’t know that person. Me Now is stuck in here forever. Without all of Lisa Light’s scurrying about, I have come to the terrible realization that—get ready for it: There is no God. Sigh.

I thought God was everything and so that meant me, too. But now I see there is no “one life” that I’m a part of. I am a minor character in someone else’s plot. Someone else being this darkness, this stillness.

 

 

Day Three

1.

When you chew, you hear yourself. I don’t want to hear myself chewing! And there’s nothing I can do about it! Chomp, chomp-chomp-chomp-chomp-chomp. I ate yesterday’s unknown fruit for breakfast, and oh my goodness! The squishing and the chomping. I could hear the juice squirting! I don’t want to know all the machinations of the human sausage factory. I can’t handle it. This awareness of process. I want to live in a dream, flitting about. Just do your jobs, body, and don’t tell me about it.

2.

I hallucinated a church bell. I think it really did ring a few times—the only sound loud enough to penetrate these castle walls—but then I heard it two hundred and fifty more times. I counted. I started experimenting with trying to stop and start it, and I could. So it probably wasn’t real, but you never know with Italians and how much they love Jesus—two hundred and fifty could be exactly the right amount of times to ring His bell.

3.

Okay, 113 church bell tollings from the opposite direction. Then twenty more from the first direction. It’s getting irritating because I don’t know which world I’m in. I’m also starting to hear something like the ticking of a clock or horse hooves on cobblestones in the distance. You know how when the radio’s set at the lowest volume in your car, you can’t quite hear music but you know it’s there? You can sort of feel it? It drives me crazy. This sound is like that, only I can’t adjust the volume. It could be what John Cage describes as the treble hum of our nervous system above the base thump of pumping blood.

Maybe there’s a whole lot of sounds all the time that we never hear. Maybe I’m hearing a tree growing right outside my window.

4.

You hear about vicious killers in solitary confinement feeling tender toward a rat in their cell, or an insect. There’s a fly or a bee or a mosquito in here with me … Pretty sure it’s a fly, a big horsefly, and I feel tender toward it. It really breaks up the monotony. It’s doing things, moving around, living. I feel united with it against the darkness. We’re two of a kind!

5.

It feels much later than one o’clock. I’m so distressed. Antonello hasn’t come with my food. I don’t care about the food, but I care about the coming to my door.

My insect is gone too. Maybe it died.

6.

I think it’s night, but I can’t sleep because I’m seeing so much light. Bright light above, below, within. Drive-in movie screens with bright white movies playing. Walls of graffiti, all the words white white white. And silver. If I close my eyes, it doesn’t stop it because the light is coming from inside me. You guys, there is all this light inside my brain. I’ve stayed in here too long.

 

Day Four

1.

It’s the fourth day. I think. It feels like the fourth year. My muscles have atrophied. I get dizzy when I stand. It’s weird to walk. The floorboards sort of … float up to meet my feet. I imagine they must actually move an infinitesimal amount each time we walk on them. Everything must, even stone. Every single thing is coated in membrane—that is the nature of things. I simply haven’t been sensitive enough to pick up on the motion of objects till now. But yes, everything is in motion. Each time my foot lands, I can feel the give, and the springing back, of the floorboards. It’s disconcerting. I’ve always thought of myself as walking on a surface, not with it. In fact, the floorboards are walking on me too.

2.

I don’t like to think of other people having been in this room or coming here in the future. We are not welcome, with our disruptive thoughts cutting the one cool Everything into pieces. At first I thought the darkness didn’t care about me, but I was forgetting we care a lot about a splinter stuck in our finger. The darkness might try to tweeze me out! Or drive me mad with terror or boredom so that I self-eject. I have always been good at camouflaging myself, so thus far I have eluded detection. But if someone else came into the room—even if I think about somebody else here—the darkness might sense their presence, even my made-up person’s presence, because they wouldn’t be coated in darkness camo like me. And then, after the darkness was done with my made-up person, it might scan for more intruders and find me! Oh ho, now I’m all spooked out.

3.

I took a shower. It was nice. I took off my clothes and stood under the showerhead (I felt for it to figure out where to stand) and turned on the faucet, and what happens next is totally predictable when you perform those three operations … yet it surprised me as if it just happened on its own, as if I didn’t do anything at all to create that wetness.

Another surprise came when I got out of the shower. Earlier, I’d felt around for the cool basin and left my towel in the sink. I thought I would be able to find it there easily. Turns out that wasn’t the sink. Can you guess what it was?

I was careful putting my clothes on, because it’s dangerous to drop things in the dark. They move. I lost a sock in the night. I took both of them off and dropped them by the bed when I went to not-sleep. This morning only one remained. I was on my hands and knees everywhere feeling for its brother. Somehow it got to the middle of the room!

Trying to find the right place to comb the part in my hair so that it doesn’t dry with my cowlick gone haywire without looking in a mirror was precarious.

Anything done tentatively is exquisite. When forced to move slowly, to grope for one’s bearings, we become fragile, delicate. We come across small beauties that normally we rush past and trample. Feeling uncertain opens the possibility of surprise. Surprise is not enjoyment. It’s awe. Humility. Surprise is being outsmarted by the universe, and we glory in our smallness because it allows us to be teased in a loving way by the ubiquitous.

This feeling was perfectly captured by a travel guide who took a duchess to see the Grand Canyon: “Upon standing on its rim and encountering its vastness for the first time, the duchess flung her arms open and screamed.”

4.

Every time I feel my way along the soft stone wall, a nanoscopic layer falls off. How many feels, over thousands of years, before this stone wears clean away, and I can plunge my hand through the wall into the outside?

5.

The electricity bill for this cottage must be so low. Ah ha ha!

6.

Note to self: Look up the meaning of desultory. I do believe this pillow is “desultory.” It’s a wet noodle pillow.

***

 

 

***

And that was my last transmission from the dark. I tried to gauge when it was 10 P.M., so I would exit at the same hour I entered, but I miscalculated, because when I wobbled out of my room I was hit in the face with some hazy afternoon sunrays. All the better to witness the world with.

 

7.

Oh my God. All that is out here! Fruit trees, a mother cat with kittens, horses whinnying, stone houses with no doors in the doorframes, no windows in the window openings, no floor but dirt. These are probably those crumbling Italian countryside houses you hear about that you can buy for a dollar. Of course now I really want to buy one and stay here forever. Hey, I bet that’s the father cat there. There’s so much dimension out here. I don’t know why I ever went indoors! This world is glorious! I gotta take it while I can have it! Because—you guys—I’ve gotten a glimpse of what’s to come. Death is heavy, man. Literally. It hurt my chest lying on me. And the loss of God got me right in the mouth. I can feel with my tongue a bunch of canker sores inside my lips and one of my cheeks.

 

And that’s where the recording stops, with a small scream from the first human being I came across, an old-fashioned, lots-of-layers dress despite the warmth of the day, woman. I’d forgotten to look at myself before emerging. I must have been a sight. All pale, with my legs moving funny. Puffing my lower face out so the cankers didn’t scrape against my teeth while I muttered into the recorder. I wore sunglasses even though by now it was twilight, and a later (shocking) glance in the mirror revealed that my cowlick pointed straight to the moon.

 

Day Five

I met the guests at dinner, and they were indeed all new people—from Scotland, Spain, Australia, Ireland, Poland, and England. They were curious about what happened in the dark. After hearing what I went through, a couple of them wanted to try it out; the rest said over their dead body. When I got to the part about losing God in there, a vibrant gay handsome Australian actor/content creator named Robbie cried, “I found Him!”

He whipped out his phone and read what he had just written about the year since his mother died and he found out his Argentinian fiancé was using him for a visa, so he ran away to Thailand and did ayahuasca and breath work and something with three initials that unblocked trauma quite traumatically, it seems, as evidenced in the video he showed me of himself in little black underwear shaking like someone being exorcised.

He asked what I do and then he googled my name and was yelling SUCKDOG?!?! The name of my band from a million years ago. Seven faces stopped eating and they, too, demanded an explanation. I said, “It was the eighties.” That seemed to satisfy everyone.

Robbie was vegan and alcohol-free while he lived in Thailand, until he came to Italy and someone offered him a glass from a fifty-thousand-dollar bottle of wine. I asked if it tasted like $50K. He said no, it tasted like $5K: He only had one glass.

It is so good to hear other people’s jokes and not just your own.

Antonello explained how they make cheese on the farm the old-fashioned way. They slaughter a lamb and use its intestines (I think) to make the milk bubble (I think) as it’s churned instead of the chemicals that Americans and now the rest of the world use instead. They make everything on this farm themselves with absolutely nothing from stores. Nothing modern whatsoever. Robbie said he learned from Antonello that agriculture is exactly the same as spirituality.

Robbie and I spilled it all—utterly indiscreet. What a relief it was to make sense to someone! Conversation with him is not the high wire act it is for me in France. Even after three years of living there, Parisians find me inexplicable, and it kind of hurts my feelings. Everything there is undertone and nuance that I just don’t get. I don’t want to get it! It feels like a game with rules written in invisible ink, where someone has to win and someone has to lose. I don’t want to do either! I want to know and be known and laugh a lot at stupid stuff—but not at how stupid other people are. Robbie’s the same. We love juvenile movies like Airplane! Robbie just says anything, like I used to do. No context, no modesty, fast and loose with facts. He thinks I’m normal. I am normal!

In my exuberance at being able to speak without effort, at not having to pay attention to another culture’s manners, at not trying to predict and disarm my husband’s next mood, I maybe went overboard: I accidentally ate an entire tureen of lentils that I thought were for me, but it turns out were for the whole table.

 

 

Day Six

I am so emotional since regaining the world of light and sound that comes from sources other than me. When Robbie didn’t appear at breakfast or the afternoon activity, I was like an actress in a Mexican soap opera twice betrayed. When he showed up at dinner, I was so joyful I forgot I’d ever been anything else until … this redhead came late and enthralled the table with tales of her past life when she was a Chinese woman who loved her husband and he didn’t love her and she got hooked on opium because of it and died giving birth to their sixth child … Robbie joined in with one sentence only: “A shaman told me my spirit animal is a turtle.” “Turtles are so wise,” the redhead noted, and began giving a tutorial on the subject. “Turtles are so cute,” I interrupted, “with their little E.T. heads.” “Little E.T. heads!?” cried Robbie, and we both burst out laughing while the redhead remained stone-faced. Touchdown! There’s not room enough in Robbie for two new best friends.

The redhead shot back that my marriage was unsustainable. I said, “Well it is or it isn’t, I don’t really care which.” But inside I was thinking, I don’t think you’re one to decide about some else’s marriage, after having six kids in a row on opium until you died.

 

 

Day Seven

To get to breakfast, activities, or dinner, I’d walk to the common area from my little stone house (dark no more—all you have to do is turn on the lights … and it shrinks! I can’t believe how huge my room got in the dark!) down a hilly, winding, lonesome road flanked by vineyards twenty minutes each way. Dogs would bark my coming as if passing a torch, alerting the next dog two minutes away of the demon who dared step foot on their land. When they’d discover—a hurtful surprise each time—that they couldn’t break through their fences and maul me, they did the next best thing and peed at me. A chorus of urine streams. I never shared the road with another human or vehicle … just me and the grapes and olives and figs and birds … until this morning, my last (maybe my last ever, I thought), when an escaped German shepherd trotted straight at me and I thought, Feel no fear, feel no fear, feel no fear. It worked: He let me pass. I feel more in sync with everything in this world since I found out what it’s like to be just with myself. To meet even an attack dog is welcome in its not-me-ness.

Enormous pink ribbons tied to the gates of two houses across from each other at the entrance to the farm proclaimed that each had been blessed with the birth of a daughter. Since no one ever leaves here, I imagined these two little girls growing up together and then growing old together. I’d seen their grandmas a few times, with their plain clothes, plain faces, plain attitudes, bending over to yank weeds or do some other earth business; slow, placid, belonging. That will be these babies someday.

For my last breakfast, I asked for cold water, and the staff acted like I was a zoo animal who broke out, hitchhiked to a diner, and demanded crickets. “Antonello won’t let us have cold water in the morning as it’s not good for the health,” a French guest explained. “ ‘You don’t wash dirty greasy dishes in cold water,’ ” she quoted.

“I don’t wake up as a dirty greasy dish,” I protested.

An edict of Antonello’s can be griped at, but it cannot be overturned. I drank my water tepid.

Robbie was steadily sucking down coffee. “I didn’t sleep at all last night,” he said. “I was lying on the hammock under three blankets staring at the full moon and it came to me: You met Lisa for a reason.” He decided that reason was to make me the scriptwriter for his TV dramedy about his mother coming back from the dead to give him gay dating advice. I fly to Thailand in January to begin shooting!

 

 

Lisa Carver published the nineties zine Rollerderby. She lives in Pittsburgh and wants a divorce. Her latest book is Lover of Leaving, and her Patreon is called Philosophy Hour.

There Is Another World, But It Is This One

Freeman Gage Delamotte, Illuminated Initial from Hymnal, 1830–1862. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1966. Public domain.

1. Before my mum died I was a rain guy. Weren’t we all? Now I get it: the wind. Its shoulders. Smooth and deep as a bowl. Like a lullaby about a big old brush. Glowing, of course, but on the inside, far away from our world. Who could possibly go through the death of their mother and come out the other side anything less than a total idiot for wind? It is the golden whistle. God’s first attempt at a dinosaur. A holiday from all that silence and color.

2. In her final text messages, sent the night before she died, my mum invites her friend over for sex, a reminder that two things can sometimes meet the same need.

3. The invitation to sex in the midst of death is my mum at her most desperate, so it’s also my mum as I most love her, miss her. Like the embroideries she made of my stepdad’s poems when he was dying of cancer, it weaves together death and love into something that can be shared, a made thing amid all the unmaking.

4. My mum always had a needlework going, though she called them her tapestries. Big old castles were a particular specialty. So were grumpy bowls of fruit. But what I remember most about her tapestries are the backs, that mess of colored thread that looks like a vomited version of the castle or sunset or pineapple on the front. When you live with a tapestry maker (tapestrist? tapestreur?) you get used to seeing this frayed mass of color, which they carry around with them at all times like a small shield. The hours my mum spent tapestrating appeared to be spent inspecting the reverse of a mysterious hairy object.

5. She had a funny idea of fun, my mum. As a librarian and schoolteacher, she had a habit of parceling off excitement into manageable packets called “activities.” We didn’t “do stuff,” we completed “projects.” She treated fun as something that needed to be safeguarded, as though there were only so much of it. Or as though it were something there was only one of, like a library book that had to be returned before it could be borrowed again. As one of four children, I seemed to spend a lot of time waiting for permission to access fun, which was always on hold somewhere else, or stuck in some administrative hinterland between borrowings.

6. I felt this frustration all the way into my twenties, but by then the frustration had moldered into contempt. I was ashamed of her for making fun unfun. I was embarrassed by her difficulty being happy. What I failed to understand is that my mum’s librification of fun had been a compromise. Like so many mothers, she was the scaffold upon which other people’s pleasures secretly depended. By organizing her fun, she was trying to protect it from the corroding forces of everyone else’s chaotic enjoyment.

7. After David died I watched Mum flourish through a kind of second adolescence. She colored her hair, bought a guitar, went traveling. On New Year’s Eve she emailed to say she was staying in an Ecuadorian “jungle lodge.” A few weeks later she wrote again to let us know she was “on a bus to the Grand Canyon.” Finally she quit her job and announced that she was leaving the UK for good. She was moving to a small, treeless island off the southern coast of Argentina, where there are more penguins than people. In our conversations it was always this odd fact about the penguins that she emphasized.

8. I think perish is a very beautiful word. She has perished. This bag contains perishable items. At its root the word means literally “to go through.” In the nineteenth century people used the form perisher, which meant either a person who destroys or a person who is destroyed. They couldn’t decide. When someone killed someone, they were a couple of perishers, but one of them had drawn the short straw. When I hear perish I picture a crate of Spanish oranges in the sun. Then I see a magician pulling threaded handkerchiefs from his sleeve. Then I hear parish, and I imagine a vicar eating a really juicy orange, with the juice dripping onto his shiny black vicar shoes.

9. A couple of months after Mum died I received a text from an unknown number. It was from a woman called Jo. She said she was Mum’s best friend in college, but they’d lost touch. She’d heard about her death and felt confused, wanted to understand. I deleted the message.

10. I’ve already done the work of forgetting the day we scattered her ashes, so I couldn’t tell you where they ended up. I don’t remember who went first, or how many fistfuls we got out of her. I vaguely remember someone tapping out the dregs like sand from their shoe.

11. In 1847 Kierkegaard writes in his diary, “Being trampled to death by geese is a slow way to die.” It turns out he’s upset because people keep on saying nasty things about his trousers.

12. In the years after Mum’s death something happened to my reading. In short, it stopped. I realized I hated reading, and that I had always hated it but had pretended to like it for social reasons. Now I saw clearly. Books are stuffy and ludicrous. Full of quotations from other books, and people saying simple things in confusing ways because they want to be loved but aren’t sure how.

13. When you’re happy, you don’t sit down and write about the stars or the mountains or whatever it is you love. You go out and be with them, in them. That’s why there’s no such thing as a happy book. A book is always about the world, and happy people don’t have time for “about.”

14. Through writing, if you’re lucky, you discover the importance of not writing. Reading, when it’s done well, is a lesson in the importance of not reading—that is, in living. A writer’s highest achievement, which is also the reader’s, is to fucking stop.

15. Only once have I put a book I was reading in the bin. It was Ted Hughes’s Rain-Charm for the Duchy, which collects the poems he wrote as poet laureate—never a promising period in a poet’s career. There is something uniquely awful about destroying someone else’s book. Saying no to it so thoroughly. Or not even destroying it: we put things in the bin we don’t care about enough to destroy. And it was a public bin, next to a bus shelter, which I imagine only adds insult to injury. To be fair, they were terrible poems.

16. A few months before she died my mum sent me an email saying she was reading D.  H. Lawrence’s The Virgin and the Gypsy and Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton. There’s only one bookshop on the island, she says, and its selection is “somewhat bizarre.” I haven’t read either of those books, but I just found the Lawrence online. It appears to be about a woman who leaves her husband and children. The opening page contains one of the strangest sentences I’ve ever read. “The ill wind that blows nobody any good swept away the vicarage family on its blast.”

17. The last time I saw my mum was at a Mexican restaurant in a shopping mall. It was happy hour, and we were having drinks and tacos. My brother, my sisters, my mum, and me. Her visits home had become fewer and farther between, but we were all together for once. After a couple of glasses of wine she asked whether she had been a good mother. A poster on the wall by the bar said “Life always needs a little salsa.” I said I didn’t know. I said the trouble with mothers is you only get one, so it’s impossible to say whether yours is good or not. I regret it every day.

18. I walk around with a chest inside me. It’s buried, like all good chests, and full of air, like all bad ones. My hands look naked and amazed. They unlock doors and go in. They scissor light. I can feel the wind from the window in the openings between my fingers. We have to love our way through it, this life. This luckiness. In a moment it’s going to stop being almost 5 p.m.

19. Nowadays I take a lot of supplements. One of them is called choline and it helps you think better. Another is D3, which helps you not to be sad. I take these together and swoon, sort of inside myself, at the amazing victory of it. If you’re going to be clever you had better be happy too, otherwise why bother.

20. Another one I take, but less often, contains tons and tons of bacteria. Usually Vala and I take it together, and we wonder what all the bacteria who are already inside us think about it. One of the pleasures of taking a probiotic, it seems to me, is the experience of putting billions of things inside yourself at once. You feel like you must be breaking some kind of record. But then you remember atoms. And protons. And the way a single mozzarella stick contains, god knows, a trillion quarks? And the dream crumbles. I guess we’re always putting billions of something inside us, but it’s the knowing that makes it weird. If the front cover of this Walmart ready-pour meat gravy advertised “billions of meat gravy atoms in every bite” I think that would be a game-changer for me.

21. Perhaps my favorite is the multivitamin. The one I take comes in a see-through capsule and inside it you can see lots of little white beads floating in a sort of golden plasma. Picture a snow globe but for a mouse, and instead of Christmas it’s your future but without any suffering. When you put that in you, you really feel like a million bucks.

22. It’s nice to outsource things like that. Knowing the snow is going on even while you make a sandwich. The world is so efficient because it doesn’t need you. It is in shock and emits a tree. It is a meaningless failure of rock and light.

23. In my earliest memory I’m standing next to Mum in the corner shop, in the village I grew up in. We’re at the till, by the door, and a man walks over, puts his things on the counter, and says to Mum, “I’d know those legs anywhere.” I must have been young because I’m holding on to her knee. She’s wearing sandals, so I guess it’s summer. But here the memory fizzles out. I can’t picture the man’s face, but I can hear his voice very clearly, and it’s one of those voices where you can tell, without looking, based on a slight foxing of the sound around the edges, that it has passed through a mustache. Unless, of course, what time and mustaches do to sound is the same. But I don’t think that’s true.

24. When she was twenty my mum broke both her legs. She was on her way to visit my dad and drove her motorbike straight into the back of a parked truck. When I ask my dad, forty years later, what caused her to drive into the back of a truck, he says it was raining and there were raindrops on her glasses.

25. Seneca says we can’t choose our parents, but we can choose whose children we want to be.

26. At 4 P.M. on Friday, October 24, 2014, the afternoon before she died, my mum drove to the island hardware store and bought a handful of disposable grills. She was served by Olivia, and the transaction took place at 4:44. My mum seems to have been plagued by fours that day. In her witness statement, the till girl says she has tried to picture the person she sold the grills to but can’t. Then she asks the policeman whether this is about the teacher she read about in the paper, and he says it is.

27. “Almost from prehistoric times, the number four was employed to signify what was solid, what could be touched and felt. Its relationship to the cross (four points) made it an outstanding symbol of wholeness and universality, a symbol which drew all to itself.”

28. In China the number four is distrusted because of its similarity to the word for death.

29. In her final week, on the way to the swimming pool, my mum asked her friend how they would kill themselves. She’d read online that the “fashionable” way to do it was to light a few single-use grills in your bedroom and seal yourself in. She and her friend joked about what they’d cook on the grills while they were dying. It’s a good joke, I think. “I’m afraid I have some terrible news. Terrible, fingerlickin’ news.” I like it more and more as time goes by. Even in her darkest hour, her sense of humor remained intact. When she died, she was still herself. It makes it worse and better. It means she truly chose it. And it means she truly chose it.

30. When we were kids, my friend Jon and I played a game in which we yelled goodbye to each other at increasing distances on our separate walks home. We lived about a mile apart. I could still just about make out Jon’s voice at the top of my road. But at some point along the way I had become, at least from the point of view of our worried neighbors, a child screaming goodbye to no one.

31. They dug up a time capsule at a school in New York today. I read about it on the news. Students at the school were asked to write predictions of what would be found inside. The school’s principal unsealed the capsule during a live streamed ceremony. There were trombones, and the principal read aloud some of her favorite predictions. Finally she unsealed the capsule, which was filled to the brim with mud.

 

Luke Allan is the editor of Oxford Poetry and the author of Sweet Dreams, the Sea, forthcoming from the Poetry Society of America in 2025. This piece is adapted from a book-length work in progress, titled “The End.”

John Ashbery’s Analyst

John Ashbery, 1975. Photograph by Michael Teague, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

John Ashbery was analyzed by Carlos Carrillo. Jane Freilicher was analyzed by Edmund Bergler. Bernadette Mayer was in analysis with David Rubinfine. Kenneth Koch was analyzed by Rudolph Loewenstein. James Schuyler was hospitalized at Payne Whitney and Bloomingdale, where the day got slowly started. John Wieners was sent to Medfield and then sent us Asylum Poems. Was Barbara Guest analyzed? Someone told me she was, but I couldn’t prove it. Alice Notley told me she was in treatment for a bit after Ted Berrigan died. There is no information about Frank O’Hara being analyzed. No information about Amiri Baraka being analyzed, save for when Vivian Gornick imagined how it might go down, in the Village Voice.

We have long known that psychoanalysts love poetry—though I think the jury is out on whether they, as a class, can be said particularly to love poets, whether as patients or otherwise. Elsewhere, psychoanalysis has been found guilty of plundering the poets: we see evidence in the field’s overreliance on Keats’s negative capability, and on Shakespearean drama as illustration of Oedipal conflict. The number of papers on poetry alone that I had to proof, across just a few years’ time as the managing editor of The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, offers us data on the import of poetry to psychoanalysis, and that’s without going to Freud, who basically owned up to the fact that the poets invented psychoanalysis.

What we have looked at less is whether poets love analysis, being analyzed, what use they make of it. On the one hand, we know poets—artists generally—tend to be afraid of the cure. Sublimation must hold. My friend Joshua Clover recently said to me, “We all know that the poems get worse after analysis, Hannah.” Suffice it to say, he has not been analyzed, and his work remains excellent. On the other hand, sometimes poets seek treatment precisely because they can’t even make their art anymore—anecdotally, from the archive: they’re too depressed or drinking too much—so they might as well get free of the thing that spurs them to sublimation, given that sublimation is now impossible.

We know about H.D. (analyzed by Freud himself) but also Sylvia Plath, Muriel Rukeyser, Elizabeth Bishop—I could go on, I could move on to the living. But I won’t, and anyway, to keep cataloguing names, despite its formal pleasures, might not tell us much. Or the much it might suggest is that many poets who made it were white and middle class or richer. (Josef Kaplan’s Kill List comes to mind; we could cross-reference it with a list of poets who have been analyzed.)

When we come to the New York School, what do we make of the fact that so many of that first generation, the second, the third, were on the couch? In a way nothing much, or nothing more than I’ve just stated: it makes perfect historical sense, which is the kind of sense I’m tempted to make of the world. That New York, becoming at midcentury a laboratory for psychoanalysis both conservative and radical, might see analysts mixing it up with practitioners of the arts. That, at the height of Freud mania, some poets, especially those Harvard-educated, might go in for a bout of the talking cure. And anyway, poets tend to be verbal, and many analysts (not all) tend to like their verbal patients. 

So, by one token, this one, there’s nothing to do with the prevalence of analyzed poets sitting in the Cedar Tavern. But it is also somewhat strange that when American psychoanalysis ostensibly got conservative—homophobic in particular, and violently so—more and more New York School poets, and particularly queer poets, made use of, and I’ll add, at least sometimes voluntarily, psychoanalysis.

It turns out that the New York School does this and it does that, and, yes, one of the things it does in its poems, and does to make them, is analysis. Oh, and analysis didn’t make the poems worse either.

***

Ashbery had read Freud in college and had been on the couch before he turned to Carrillo. While an undergraduate at Harvard, Ashbery actively sought out an analysis to do one thing that it was promising it could do then: work as a conversion therapy. He wanted to become straight. This, we can thank God, ended when he could no longer afford the treatment. According to Jimmy Schuyler, he may have also had another treatment in the early fifties but was “obsessed with the idea that somebody was listening outside the door.”

This first treatment—if Schuyler was indeed right and there was a second one immediately—would have ended in 1949, and the next year, when he registered for the draft, Ashbery listed himself as “homosexual.” From this view, we can see the contours of Ashbery’s own deep ambivalence about being thought of as gay, escorted through the world under the sign of this identity, even if he resolved his ambivalence about being gay and stopped trying to be something else. Ashbery’s distaste for being thought of as a gay poet was something he didn’t shed at least into the nineties, when he was still angry about John Shoptaw’s work on his poems, although Charles Bernstein reports he would eventually, grudgingly offer, “Well, I guess I am a role model.” (We might hear this shift emerging as early as the ambivalent moment in Three Poems: “You are the Mascot of that time.”)

In the consulting room Ashbery couch surfed and left, we can likewise see the contours of the psychoanalysis we all know and hate at midcentury, the moment psychoanalysis became an ever-more-stereotyped image of itself in this country, before it would give us queer, left analysts like Richard Isay, who perhaps treated Ashbery’s friend and coauthor of Nest of Ninnies, Schuyler, down at Payne Whitney in New York. They overlapped, so who’s to say.

After at least one, if not two, failed analyses—a failure in its own terms, a success in mine since it ended before it could do too much damage—Ashbery eventually sought another treatment sometime in the sixties. This was when he was back from France but, just to be as direct about it as the poet himself, falling-down drunk a lot. He would show up to dinner parties and leave before the food was served. He would get off the plane to give a reading and be too drunk to give it, other poets having to carry him down the gangway. And he sought help in Dr. Carrillo—never fully named in Ashbery scholarship, sometimes called the “Chilean” or the “South American concert pianist” after how Ashbery spoke of him in interviews.

As I tried to figure out who treated John, I found Carrillo. Carrillo was an alcohol addiction specialist, who, as the latter moniker might suggest, was also sad to be a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst and wished to just make his art. And in referring to him only as an artist or as “my shrink who actually is an artist”—Ashbery was perhaps also lowering the stakes of the treatment while increasing a kind of mechanical solidarity with his analyst. But Carrillo really was a shrink, too; he had been a resident in psychiatry at the notorious Bellevue hospital. In 1963, around when John sought him for treatment, he was at the Westchester Community Mental Health Service, where he oversaw an alcoholism clinic. He also wrote for medical journals—and once sent an irate letter to the New York Review of Books, which they felt moved to print.

Carrillo didn’t help John get sober—John wasn’t sober when I knew him, and I don’t really know if he ever was. But he did help John drink less, it seems, and helped him immensely in other, related modes, first by placing him in a more structured treatment, and then eventually through something closer to a friendship (and we might recall friendship as that all-important New York School mode of relating). What did he help him with? Many things, we might presume. Sometimes the alcohol problem got renamed as writer’s block by the two of them. Sometimes Carrillo was remembered as a specialist for writers (perhaps because John started to send his friends to him). Ashbery once reported a conversation between the two, apparently from a session:

CARRILLO: So tell me what your daily schedule is.

ASHBERY: Well, I wake up and get up and—

CARRILLO: You do what?

ASHBERY: I get up—

CARRILLO: You must never, never get up. Okay, pee and make a cup of coffee, but then get back in bed if only for half an hour every day and write longhand in a notebook.

ASHBERY: Why?

CARRILLO: That way your inhibitions will still be low and you’ll be closer to your dreams. That’s the surefire way out.

Stay closer to your dreams. That’s the surefire way out. Don’t get up—stay down to become free. This is the principle of analysis. In this treatment, trying to write seems to have been contiguous with trying to figure out who John was, in part because he was insistent that he didn’t know who he was, couldn’t put a finger on the him of himself, between drastically different impressions he could give off. After all, he once declared, “I’m John. Ashbery writes the poems”—splitting himself into the name of the father and the son, the poet and the person. As much as he worried over who “John” was, he he worried equally over “Ashbery”: “I often wonder if I am suffering from some mental dysfunction because of how weird and baffling my poetry seems to so many people and sometimes to me too.”

To access the person who might write the poems, Carrillo once asked Ashbery to hand over his boyhood diaries—which Carrillo then subsequently claimed to have lost. Writing to Mark Ford, John would say, and he did love to use non sequiturs to begin letters or speech (my favorite being his reliance on the term incidentally):

Au fait, I mysteriously received some lost diaries of mine I wrote in high school. I’d lent them to my Chilean shrink 25 years ago, imagining they might be helpful to my therapy. I don’t think he ever looked at them though, and then he told me he lost them, except for the first one (1941). Then he died about ten years ago. Last week out of the blue an antique dealer called me at Bard saying he had some diaries of mine and did I want them back—he’d bought the contents of the shrink’s apartment quite a while ago and just happened on the diaries again. So then he came by and gave them to me! It’s like having a time capsule dropped on your head. I just looked in the 1941 one to see what happened 60 years ago. Are you ready? … At my art class in Rochester: “One of my pictures was kept. It was a picture of Nazi boots crushing Holland tulips—’Tulip Time in Holland – 1940′.” (And they say I don’t have a social conscience!)

We hear John’s frustration with Ashbery’s reception here—it’s something John would remark upon across his life, never settled with how he was seen, not quite able to get past it. He was neither comfortable being the queer role model younger men wanted him to be nor happy to be seen as abdicating the political. (In his essay “Closet-Laureate: John Ashbery’s Contrarian Queerness,” Nick Daoust argues that rather than existing without a “social conscience,” Ashbery had politics aplenty. These politics were “not apolitical, but rather politically inconvenient, both to the heteronormative literary establishment of which his loudest critics are a part, and to the emerging liberationist gay establishment of Ashbery’s career-peak.”) Relatedly, John also had a problem with himself. He said once, “It doesn’t seem to me like my voice.” Ashbery was uncanny to himself. Carrillo understood—and John understood him as understanding—that the poems came from somewhere else, although, to that, Ashbery would add, “My reason tells me that my poems are not dictated, that I am not a voyant.” It apparently wasn’t his reason after all: the authorship of his poems was the subject of a routine fight between Ashbery and his analyst. John felt that he didn’t author his own poems and described the problem in a number of different ways; his analyst was pretty sure he did.

But there was a kernel of truth to this: Ashbery did not author the poems on his own, per se. Eventually, we see the analysis all over both the poems themselves and the way they were made. John would finally decide the poems came from “part of me that I am not in touch with very much except when I am actually writing.” Another time he would say, “As far as my own poetry goes, while there’s a lot of my unconscious mind in it, there’s a lot of the conscious mind too, which is only normal, since we do sometimes think consciously—not very often, but sometimes.” This is to describe, twice over, sublimation as well as anyone ever has, although I love Jimmy Schuyler’s notion, written from Payne Whitney, of the end of sublimation as the beginning of thought and thus the beginning of trouble: “when I stop to think / the wires in my head / cross: kaboom.”

So: What we do know? Carrillo helped John manage the urge to drink somewhat, he helped him write, they discussed how and where that writing appeared. But what of the content of this poetry? Yes, that, too, sometimes came from session.

With John, and for John, Carrillo occasioned Ashbery’s poems, like a lover or a friend or the muse. And those poems, the ones we know about, that came from elsewhere, were not just sublimative in the sense of not being in touch with oneself while making art from the self one can’t bear another way—but John was also given the instruction to work through. What was he to work through? His losses. A dead brother. A dead mother. The results: One of them is Three Poems, which I’ve already quoted. The other, again, that we know of, is Flow Chart, which Carrillo expressly demanded he write; and Ashbery did write it, right at the end of his treatment, to mourn his mother, not knowing his analyst would soon die, the same year as that book appeared. We could make a case for “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” too, as already analytic, written amid his treatment:

Each person
Has one big theory to explain the universe
But it doesn’t tell the whole story
And in the end it is what is outside him
That matters, to him and especially to us
Who have been given no help whatever
In decoding our own man-size quotient and must rely
On second-hand knowledge.

It turns out that for Ashbery, the big theory was psychoanalysis, the process by which secondhand knowledge becomes firsthand.

***

Jane Freilicher was in treatment with Edmund Bergler. Bergler had been a handmaiden to Freud, working at his Vienna Ambulatorium until he was forced to immigrate to the United States, where he achieved prominence in American psychoanalysis. Particularly invested in Freud’s notion of the superego, and sure that most psychic life boiled down to masochist instincts, Bergler was especially interested in sexuality (and gambling). He was the author of such books as Homosexuality: Disease or Way of Life, Counterfeit-Sex: Homosexuality, Impotence and Frigidity, and One Thousand Homosexuals. As this list suggests, he thought queerness a defense mechanism, and not a good one. And if you don’t know or can’t guess: he was one of the most prominent U.S. psychoanalysts on the topic of homosexuality—remembered as violently homophobic by my friend, now passed, Kenneth Lewes.

I would be remiss not to say that Bergler is also the person who coined the term writer’s block, in his 1950 book The Writer and Psychoanalysis. There, Bergler evidenced a theory of the artists and writers (or those who “bothered others with their unjustified claims of being writers”) rendered unable to work. Bergler begins by offering his reader a composite case, drawing on a sample of thirty-six such stymied patients, half of whom he estimates are considered first-rate by critics: “the poor man sharpens his pencil to take notes, then finds the point still not sharp enough; the typewriter stares up at him like a reproachful face; he is simply not in the mood … and at the end of all his twisting and turning feels only deep depression.” Bergler ventures that we (psychoanalysts, but also T. S. Eliot) know that the muse is basically just the unconscious at work, and that the unconscious’s supply of ideas is then subjected to “manipulation.” Writing stops when the writer is stopped up: there is an inner conflict that can no longer be resolved through sublimation. Or, for Bergler, the blocked writer fails to sublimate his masochism, his guilt. Instead, he, like all melancholics, turns the masochism against himself. Writer’s block, then, is like all blockages, all forms of psychoanalytic resistance. Writers think they want to give but actually do not and cannot. The takeaway: writers need analysis.

Is this why Freilicher sought Bergler out? Or was she referred by Joseph Hazan, her husband, who was also his patient? Was she having difficulty painting, perhaps after the birth of her daughter? Was one of her friends in the New York School one of his “first-rate” patients? We don’t know. Freilicher’s treatment with Bergler was, according to Evan Kindley, often a subject of in-jokes in letters between Jane and John. For instance, John wrote on November 12, 1959: “I read a review of Dr. Bergler’s new book in Time, and I’m mad at him for swiping the title I was planning to use for my memoirs.” (The book was probably Principles of Self-Damage, but possibly One Thousand Homosexuals, both published that year.)

***

Bernadette Mayer, who has written the best description of the problem of psychoanalysis—“Nothing outside can cure you but everything’s outside”—was in analysis with David Rubinfine. She was referred by Ed Bowes, and then seen for free. But she wasn’t just an analysand—she was analytically inclined, and significantly (enough to dream about fucking Freud’s pseudonymous patient the Rat Man, which, I never). She’d read Freud but also Ferenczi, Lacan. By the time she wound up on the couch in ’72, Rubinfine was no less controversial than Bergler, but for other, albeit still classic, reasons. Rubinfine was known to violate boundaries—and Mayer claimed the two had an affair in the course of their treatment. Rubinfine was actively shunned by the analytic community for sleeping with Elaine May, the comedian who was also his patient, and then marrying her, just weeks after his wife died by suicide. All of this had happened by the time Mayer became his patient.

So if Carrillo occasioned Ashbery’s poems by telling him what to write through, Mayer wrote an entire book around writing to and for her analyst. This became Studying Hunger Journals, about which she wrote, “I wanted to try to record, like a diary, in writing, states of consciousness, my states of consciousness, as fully as I could.” She did this all the time, making a method by which she would use two notebooks, which Rubinfine would buy for her. When she wrote in one, she gave Rubinfine the other, who would read and study it, bringing what he found there into the analysis. Then they switched back and the process was repeated. She color-coded her feelings, wrote a great deal about sex (and sex dreams; see also, Rat Man). And these radical, out-there workbooks of her own analysis became her breakthrough book. It was this book that Ashbery blurbed, calling it “magnificent”—bringing Mayer fully into the New York School.

***

Kenneth Koch was analyzed by Rudolph Loewenstein. Loewenstein is important to the history of psychoanalysis—analyzed by Hanns Sachs, sent to France by Freud himself to bring psychoanalysis there, where he trained the first two generations of French analysts before fleeing the Vichy government and settling in New York. There, he became the imago of what was called ego psychology—working at the most conservative institute in New York and holding the presidency of the American Psychoanalytic Association. Perhaps no other analyst exerted as much influence across such different terrains within the nascent and maturing field.

Koch included a poem titled “To Psychoanalysis” in his last book, New Addresses (a pun on both the New York address lived in and experienced and the occasional form itself). First published in 2000 in The New York Review of Books, the poem begins like every bad O’Hara copycat: with a subway trip up Lex. But here the destination is a time:

To arrive at you in your glory days
Of the Nineteen Fifties when we believed
That you could solve any problem

This is the poem’s addressee, psychoanalysis of the fifties:

I dreamed
Exclusively for you. I was told not to make important decisions.
This was perfect. I never wanted to. On to the hartru surface of my emotions
Your ideas sank in so I could play again.
But something was happening. You gave me an ideal
Of conversation—entirely about me
But including almost everything else in the world.
But this wasn’t poetry it was something else.

This is an occasional poem, much like one that would be read at a celebration—whether a funeral or a wedding. Of that form, the scholar and poet Noah Warren argues, “the occasional poem is beset by an ontological flicker, a nagging insubstantiality, as it leads our readings away from itself, back from the text to the history and sociality it subordinates itself to.” Thus, we read such poems differently; the successful occasional poem sends us reading, Warren continues, “for values such as wit, utility, conversation, lightness.”

Quickly, Koch’s poem becomes to and of and from and for his analyst, and the scene of termination:

After two years of spending time in you
Years in which I gave my best thoughts to you
And always felt you infiltrating and invigorating my feelings
Two years at five days a week, I had to give you up.
It wasn’t my idea. “I think you are nearly through,”
Dr. Loewenstein said. “You seem much better.” But, Light!
Comedy! Tragedy! Energy! Science! Balance! Breath!
I didn’t want to leave you. I cried. I sat up.
I stood up. I lay back down. I sat. I said
But I still get sore throats and have hay fever.
“And some day you are going to die. We can’t cure everything.”

Despite his focus here on Dr. Loewenstein, who died in 1976, the address is named as to the discipline itself, a lyrical compensation for the loss of intimate speech, sent wide to the practice like poems are eventually sent to a public. If poetry is meant to be overheard, unlike the protected speech of analysis, then this poem about analysis means to let us overhear a session right when there will, so we were told, be no more.

No more what? No more addresses. And I mean this three ways: Koch wrote the poem, and not long after publishing it, he did die. But before doing so, Koch gave psychoanalysis its send-off (while sending up the hallmarks of his own art form). Two more deaths. After all, this was the moment psychoanalysis had become understood as lost, both as cure and as social form. (Freud’s cultural obituary had been collectively authored, incidentally, also in the New York Review of Books, in a series of communiques from what was called “the Freud Wars.”) The poem is thus an elegiac address, on the occasion of psychoanalysis’ funeral, even if Koch’s actual analyst had died a quarter century prior. But also, we can hear in the poem a quiet elegy, through near parody, to another form that had everyone checking for signs of life: the poem.

If the poet is addressing his analyst, long dead, just before dying, so too does poetry celebrate what analysis had done for them—as one dies, and then the other. If, in 2001 we ostensibly entered a new millennium unfriendly to both poetry (thanks, internet) and psychoanalysis (thanks, insurance), now, just a quarter century later, it seems clear that rumors of both deaths have been at least somewhat exaggerated.

 

This essay was originally presented at the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church, in New York City, on April 11, 2025. The author wishes to thank David Kermani, Emily Skillings, Lytle Shaw, Noah Warren, Evan Kindley, and Geoffrey G. O’Brien.

Hannah Zeavin is a scholar, writer, and editor. She is the author of The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy and Mother Media: Hot and Cool Parenting in the 20th Century. All Freud’s Children: A Story of Inheritance is forthcoming from Penguin Press. She is an assistant professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley, and is the founding editor of Parapraxis.

The Hobo Handbook

Between Bakersfield and Fresno, California. Photograph by Rondal Partridge, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

The name of the book is a ruse. Camping on Low or No Dollars, the dingy cover page reads. An older edition bears a similarly anodyne title: From Birmingham to Wendover. Both are a misdirection, intended to keep the wrong people—cops, journalists, nosy normies like me—from realizing what they’re holding. The Crew Change Guide is a set of best practices and guidelines for hopping freight trains anywhere in the U.S. and Canada. A “crew change” refers to a train’s personnel shift, a brief window of opportunity for those brave enough to take it. In the heist movie, this is that ten-second gap after the night watchman clocks out and before his replacement takes over. For a train hopper, it’s a rare chance to clamber up a wagon undetected.

The Guide is either the train hopper’s Bible or an outdated relic, a must-have or a crutch, depending on whom you ask. The subtitle dubs it “An Alternative Hiking and Camping Guide,” but you won’t find any trail maps inside. Instead, what you see in these unstapled pages are dense walls of highly acronymized text in a miniature nine-point font. “East Joliet YD is becoming a major CN GM YD and c-c point for thru trains,” reads a line headed “Gibson City.” “E. Jackson crosses over S end of YD IM NE of DT.” The acronyms are more shorthand than code, a way of packing as much information as possible into 154 pages. The aesthetic ethos here is lightness, economy, discretion.

The first Crew Change Guide appeared as a partly typed, partly handwritten pamphlet in 1988. The true identity of its author, a reclusive seventy-six-year-old Vietnam veteran known only as Train Doc, is as fiercely protected as the Guide itself. Train Doc disguised his voice for his sole interview, and of the three people I’ve spoken to who claimed to know him, none agreed to go on the record. The most consistent report about him is that he is remarkably litigious—he’s purported to threaten anyone and everyone who uploads the Guide to the internet with copyright infringement.

True or not, the document remains conspicuously absent online. It exists only in the physical, and this scarcity has made the Guide a sacred writ to train-hopping circles across the country. Scans have been known to surface on the darknet now and then, and scammers exploit the unmet demand by selling bogus pdfs of blank pages and blurry photographs. Train Doc, however, insists on keeping the Guide free and “low profile.” “It is not meant to be sold for more than the price of copying,” he writes in the introduction. “Only give copies to riders who will be responsible.”

There are other texts in this misfit family (I’ll call them folk texts, for lack of a better term), though by definition they’re not easily discovered. The Israeli Traveler’s Book is perhaps the most organic and decentralized example. A sort of unofficial Green-Book for Jews, it served to identify safe, unprejudiced restaurants, bars, and hostels in Latin America in an age before Google Reviews. That’s the primary purpose of a folk text: to pass from hand to hand the secret knowledge of the marginalized and the outcast. Many of our ancient scriptures, including parts of the Bible, would once have fit this description. You can’t buy such a book, can’t download it, can’t trace its often multiple authors. But if you run in the right circles, all you have to do is ask.

Kai Carlson-Wee is somewhere near the center of the right circles. I first met him at Hippie Hill in San Francisco almost ten years ago. A poet, Stegner fellow, and Stanford lecturer, Kai started riding freight in his twenties and had just published his first book, Rail, a kind of love letter to the open road. “Part of the fun of reading the CCG,” he told me, “is imagining the riders who scouted the yards, rode the lines, and went through hell and high water to catalog everything … Train Doc spent years riding trains around the country, taking notes, coordinating with other riders to keep things current.” New editions trickle out each year, photocopied in public libraries and private offices around the country to keep up with ever-changing train schedules. On the first page, there’s a caveat—“Some info included is sure to be out of date and innaccurate (sic)”—followed by a warning: “Riding trains can be dangerous.”

***

For the average Joe, train hopping is an all-risk, no-reward activity. There’s the danger of arrest, obviously, but also of serious injury or death. Stories of train track amputations are a common feature of local news stations everywhere. Why toss the dice for the privilege of a slow trip on a jerking, whining, uninsulated slab of steel?

As a kid who grew up reading Jack Kerouac and Jack London and listening to folk music, the answer was obvious. I’d fantasized about riding freight since watching Into the Wild at thirteen. At twenty I got my first chance to try it. I’d moved to New Orleans to write for a local magazine and stumbled onto the city’s transient underbelly by accident. Traveling buskers were everywhere, their hands black with soot and train grease. From my backyard in the Saint Roch neighborhood, I could see packs of young people with banjos spilling out from the Oliver Yard in broad daylight. New Orleans is one of the country’s biggest hubs for illegal train hopping. It’s the vagabond’s answer to the Denver Airport. But it’s not just the visibly grimy or the voluntarily homeless who ride trains. I soon learned that all three of my housemates—working artists buying groceries and paying rent—had at one point each had their own train-hopping experience. I asked my then girlfriend if she’d consider hopping a train with me, but she wasn’t especially interested. She’d done it already.

On a walk by the levee one autumn day in 2015, I passed a crawling freight car and jogged beside it for a while. I reached out and grabbed hold of the steel ladder and tested what it would feel like to pull myself up on the fly. I didn’t know where the train was going or how I’d get off. I didn’t even know what the penalty was for such a trespass (anywhere from three hundred dollars to ninety days in jail). After a hundred yards or so I let go and watched the last of the cars rumble away.

***

It was my girlfriend who first told me about the Guide. That word, guide, seemed to promise so much. I pictured a manual with step-by-step instructions, illustrations, tips and tricks. I sniffed around for it among my housemates, their guests, anyone under forty who rolled their own cigarettes and smelled unwashed.

The etiquette around giving and receiving the Guide is inconsistent, to say the least. For some, it’s a commodity. Among true believers, it’s a rite of passage. Generally, the recipient raises their right hand and swears some kind of oath in which secrecy and discernment are common themes. They promise never to give it to children, cops, strangers, et cetera. To dispose of it by fire whenever possible. Sometimes there are witnesses.

The swearing-in ceremony typifies the central tension of the train-hopping community. The irony of anarchists imposing a structure on the clutter of the information age is apparently lost on the propagators and protectors of the Guide. These are people who preach the porousness of private property while guarding the gates of their church. Trespassing isn’t a sin to them, but copyright infringement is. It’s a symptom of the kind of tribalism that permeates the corners of so many subcultures. To spend any time on the relevant forums and discussion boards is to encounter a familiar brand of gatekeeping, mudslinging, and divisive rhetoric.

“YOU WILL NOT LEARN HOW TO HOP FREIGHT FROM THE FUCKING INTERNET!” reads an average response to a Redditor’s request for advice.

“I think you should find something else to write about,” another user warned me in a private message, claiming he and Train Doc were “connected in some ways.”

Many of these standoffish types identify as something of a victim group, an endangered community insulating itself from the brutality of a capitalist police state. They’re modern-day outlaws, rebels without a cause, and everyone else is either a “housie” or an “oogle”—a square or a tourist.

I was undeniably both when I made the move out to the Pacific Northwest in 2016. I’d done my share of hitchhiking and van-dwelling by then, but my parents were paying off my student loans. I found work as a baker in Eugene, Oregon, and gave a friend $275 each month to rent out an insulated plywood shed in her backyard. I took to walking the train tracks at night, learning the routes and schedules and watching the gutter punks scurry out noiselessly from under a bridge near the rail yard. I even packed a sleeping bag once and spread it out on the bucket of a parked grainer—a train car with a small covered porch. I lay there in the dark for hours before stumbling home at first light. The train hissed and sputtered but never moved an inch.

When I relayed this latest disappointment to a friend, he finally pitied me enough to give me his copy of the Guide. He was a mid-thirties seasonal firefighter with a long blond mullet and a black canvas jacket he rubbed with beeswax to waterproof it. He handed me a bundle of unbound pages. No raising my right hand, no oath, no witnesses. “I think you need it more,” he said, tossing the bundle in my lap.

Kai Carlson-Wee’s initiation looked much the same. It took him about a year to get a copy of a copy from a well-connected friend. “Reading through it for the first time was like gaining access to a sacred text,” he told me. He kept it in a Ziploc bag and taped the pages back together when they ripped. For him, this marked an induction into a new world. He and his brother, Anders (also a train-hopping poet), had been eyeing the Northtown Yard in Minneapolis, a sprawling, seven-mile industrial zone along the Mississippi River, but the scale of the yard had made it unmanageable. The Guide told them about “specific streets, specific jungles, specific holes in specific fences,” he told me. “It helped us tremendously, especially the first few times.”

***

I read on my stomach in bed that night. The train lingo was intimidating, but there were also surprising flashes of accessibility.

“Rolando’s Diner is the only decent greasy cup of coffee left in this town,” reads an entry for Binghamton, New York. Another, for a remote outpost in Quebec, stumbles into philosophical territory. “Does this place really exist? Is it really in Quebec … or Labrador? Can you get there from here? A train-hopper’s existential dilemma.”

The Guide signified more than information to me; it signified the courage to act on it. I knew that no guide, no matter how detailed or digestible, could substitute for experience. But I returned to it again and again over the following days, craving some conclusive invitation. A word, a sentence addressed directly to me. It occurs to me now that maybe riding trains was never what I really wanted, that maybe it was always more about being someone who rode trains, but at the time it felt like an honest calling. I hadn’t considered that those disclaimers at the start of the book (“This guide is not intended to encourage people to hop trains and is for informational purposes only”), those warnings online, the reluctance to give out the Guide—all of this was meant to keep people like me from doing something stupid.

“The Crew Change Guide can save you a lot of frustration,” Kai told me, “but it can’t actually teach you what riding trains is about. If I had waited around for the clouds to part and the train gods to usher me into their secret cult, I would have never started riding trains. Nothing could have reasonably prepared me.”

I stuffed the pages between hardcovers in my bookshelf and planned to revisit them when the time was right. With work and holiday travel and my disintegrating relationship, I had enough on my plate. I found myself avoiding the tracks on my nightly walks, took up motorcycle riding to get my thrills. There was comfort in the thought that I had some forbidden knowledge. That I could use it to disappear at a moment’s notice. I never relinquished my desire to hop a train, I just stopped pursuing it.

These days the Guide’s value is largely nostalgic. A souvenir of a short time—thirty years at best—when the printed word held disparate people together. Train hoppers still exist. Many have migrated to niche forums and message boards to stay connected. Some even thrive as influencers on YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram, where millions can watch their adventures from home.

Kai suspects that, in the future, the Crew Change Guide will exist as a Google Doc or some kind of open-source document. Though there are still debates about the effects a widely accessible, digitalized Guide will have on the scene, the point is somewhat moot. “The last time I was riding trains,” Kai told me, “everyone was using Google Maps.”

 

Jeremiah David is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His work has appeared in Salon, Camas, and The Indianapolis Review, among other publications.

The Last Dreams

All photographs by Diana Matar.

Dream 203

I found myself in a strange and sad place when suddenly there was my old love, B. She walked burdened by old age. Knowing that I will never see her again, I felt such deep sorrow.

Dream 204

I saw myself in my forties, caressing a pale rose. It responded, encouraging me, but, given our age difference, I hesitated. My reluctance persisted until she left, leaving me alone to contend with my aging self.

Dream 206

I found myself in a spacious and elegant hall. Gathered to one side were my family and friends and, at the opposite end, a door opened and through it my sweetheart B. entered laughing, followed by her father. I lost all self-restraint and held my arms open wide. The Imam began writing in the marriage book. Joy overtook everyone. My mother congratulated the bride and burned incense.

Dream 207

I found myself walking down a long road. A window of one of the houses to my left opened and through it appeared a woman’s face. Although her beauty had disappeared behind a thick veil of ill health, and it had been fifty years since I had last seen her, I immediately recognized her. In the morning, I was deeply unsettled when, reading the newspaper, I came upon her obituary. I was profoundly saddened and wondered, Which of us had visited the other at that hour of death?

Dream 209

I found myself sitting with President Gamal Abdel Nasser in a small garden, and he was saying: You may be asking why we don’t meet as often anymore.

I said: I did wonder about that.

He said: It’s because every time I consult you about an issue, I find that your opinion either partly or entirely contradicts mine, and so I feared for our friendship.

I replied: For me, our friendship—no matter our differences—can never end.

Dream 210

I found myself at Café El Fishawi. A short distance away was the famous artist and ballerina soon to announce her retirement. I couldn’t help looking at her with great curiosity. She gracefully turned around and her lips gave me a faint smile. My companion said: Be glad, you won’t embark on life’s final battle alone.

Dream 213

I found myself in the local wedding photographer’s studio. Among the gallery of photographs, I spotted B. I examined her picture closely, taking my time, all the while enduring desperate regrets, and yet recognizing that I had not lost hope completely, and gleaning some solace from that fact.

Dream 214

I found myself at the tram stop just as I realized that I had been pickpocketed. I then spotted my friend Ahmed, who appeared in a hurry. I rushed up to him and told him what had happened to me. He laughed, saying: I too was robbed. I said: Then let’s go to El Abbassiya police station to find who took our money. He said, I urge you instead to volunteer for the new civil division working directly with the minister of the interior, whose chief goal is to rid the country of pickpockets.

Dream 222

I saw myself living through an era of great change, where all national borders were erased and—under the banner of justice, freedom, and the respect for human rights—all travel restrictions were lifted. I journeyed through the cities of the world and in each place found suitable employment, pleasurable distractions and excellent companions. Then I missed Egypt. I returned home and was greeted by my childhood friends. They asked me to tell them about my travels. I said: Let’s first go to the old town and pray at Al-Hussein Mosque, may God be content with him, and next have lunch at Al Dahan, then go on to Café El Fishawi to drink green tea and there I will tell you sheer wonders.

Dream 223

I saw my wife and myself struggling with a large suitcase when suddenly my old love B. came to help us. I turned dizzy with joy. I touched her hand and said: I will never forget this for as long as I live. She replied: You must forget, for believe me I am happy with my husband and children. It was as though the very last candle had gone out.

Dream 232

I found myself in the Al-Ghouriya district and there were twice as many police as civilians. I saw my father walking toward me with a policeman on either side of him. I panicked, thinking he was under arrest. But then he greeted me and said: I see a policeman on either side of you, and I’m afraid you’ve been arrested.

Dream 237

I saw myself entering the Garden of the Immortals in the El Gamaleya district. I was an adolescent again. I had on a pair of shorts. I saw a group of beautiful girls approach. They were about my age, led by the immortal Miss A. She smiled and my tears flowed till all her beauty vanished behind them.

Dream 243

I found myself searching for evidence that my love was not an illusion but real. My lover had departed in the glory of her youth, and by now the witnesses too were gone. The features of our street had changed, and in the place of her house with its flower garden a high-rise block stood, densely populated. Nothing remained of the past except memories without proof.

Dream 245

I found myself in the middle of a large crowd gathered to witness the state visit of the Emperor of Japan. At the same time, the prime minister Mustafa al-Nahas was leaving a dentist’s office: we followed him with our hearts and eyes until he disappeared inside his car. I thought how odd it was that the two men, and for completely different reasons, shared the same tragedy.

 

From I Found Myself … : The Last Dreams , translated by Hisham Matar, to be published by New Directions in June. 

Naguib Mahfouz (1911–2006) began writing when he was seventeen. Of his nearly forty novels, the most famous is The Cairo Trilogy, consisting of Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, and Sugar Street, which focuses on a family in Cairo through three generations. In 1988, he became the first Arabic-language writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Hisham Matar is the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize, a PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, a Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, an Arab American Book Award, and Germany’s Geschwister-Scholl-Preis. He is a professor at Barnard College.

Diana Matar’s photographs have been exhibited at the Tate Modern in London; the Institute du Monde Arabe in Paris; Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Photography; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.