The Paris Review's Blog, page 80

Infinite Novel Theory: Jordan Castro and Tao Lin In Conversation

Castro and Lin working on their novels in 2019.

Jordan Castro’s forthcoming novel The Novelist takes place over the course of one morning in which the protagonist tries to write his first novel. During this time, he sometimes G-chats and emails his friend, Li. Tao Lin’s  Leave Society is about someone named Li who is writing a novel documenting his recovery from dominator culture. Castro and Lin have been friends since 2010. This conversation was composed from October 31, 2021 to June 8, 2022 on Google Docs and sometimes on Gmail and G-Chat. That material has been shortened and then reorganized freely to suggest thematic continuities, but also discontinuities, in the time, mood, and medium of the interview.

LIN

It’s December 19, 2021. Yesterday, I opened the galley of The Novelist and looked for something to quote in my tweet of a photo of it. I flipped around a little and saw and chose this: “I opened Gmail. Li had emailed me again. ‘Fuck off,’ the email said, simply.” I wonder what readers of that tweet—who know my novel’s main character is named Li—thought about that quote. In the context of your novel, the “Fuck off” is playful, causing the first-person narrator of your novel to grin. What’s your narrator’s name?

CASTRO

I didn’t give him a name. But the name of the protagonist of the third-person, autofictional novel he is initially trying to work on is named Calvin, which is the name you gave to the character based on me in your 2013 novel Taipei. 

LIN

Yes, I remember choosing the name Calvin. It sounds like Jordan. What time period does the novel that the narrator of The Novelist is writing span?

CASTRO

His book takes place during three days in 2015, but has a flashback from 2014, and another flashback from “years prior” to 2015, and another undated flashback, during which “Calvin is Gmail-chatting with Paul—a character based on Li—and rationalizing their drug use: children were prescribed Adderall and Xanax, and in some cases opiates, to take daily; others ate junk food which, in many ways, was less healthy than drugs; Calvin listened to music every day, and while alone, which didn’t mean he ‘had a problem’ with listening to music; drugs helped him to be productive, to cope with stress and anxiety and depression; they were fun.” 

LIN

It seems original to me that your dark novel about heroin addiction is embedded as a small thing within the more positive and hopeful The Novelist. It would be like if my novel Taipei existed only as a fragment in Leave Society.

CASTRO

Thanks. The Novelist literally contains Taipei inside of Leave Society, since Calvin—a side character in Taipei—is in the narrator’s novel-in-progress, and Li—the protagonist of Leave Society—is in the novel itself.

 

A G-chat on February 22, 2022

TAO: worked on interview some. maybe we could try the gchat idea. i feel like my question was not good

JORDAN: laughing a little re how this is going. the commentary, in gchats etc, vs the actual content so far

TAO:  just laughed at how it’s going too. it would be good to use one of these for one of the sections, or could be a meta section

JORDAN: grinning, that sounds good. i had this in a document, re our most recent interaction in the google doc: “I vaguely remember, a long time ago, reading an interview in which you talked about how bands like Rilo Kiley had bleak albums initially, then something changed and they weren’t as bleak/relatable anymore… Do you remember this interview? Have we become ‘Kileyed’?” im not gonna start with that. just showing u the “b sides”

TAO: laughing again. imagining our interview just being mostly this, mostly trying to do it

JORDAN: our novels, our worldviews. we have to snap out of it. it’s go time

TAO: laughing still

JORDAN: im laughing too. the structure of the interview could be “experimental.” we could “throw it together” …  from many different sources.. google docs, email interview… a dynamic mix of this kind of thing.. and longer, more serious things….

TAO: finally stopping laughing and smiling. yes, that would be good

JORDAN: nice

TAO: it seemed like we had a lot of time, and now it’s been 2 months

JORDAN: 2 months, laughing. we still have a lot of time until the book comes out

TAO: laughing again. we should have a section about the first section, criticizing it like we did, that seems original

JORDAN: that sounds good. i feel like we didn’t even really criticize it though. just sort of softly abandoned it. laughingly abandoned it

TAO: we started suggesting other ways we could do the interview. back-up plans

JORDAN: right

TAO: laughing

***

 

CASTRO

Tao…

LIN

Jordan… It’s March 10, and we’ve completed one section. We’ve discussed this conversation—commenting on the slow rate of production, suggesting back-up plans—more than we’ve had the conversation itself. We’ve done 222 words in ~2.5 months. Now it’s your turn to say something. I’ve said more than you in this conversation so far. 

CASTRO

I have a question that might lead to more of me talking eventually. There can be a dynamic flow of lengths. Early on in Leave Society, you write that Li was inspired to “try to understand his own reality” and so started paying less attention to “fiction, newspapers, and magazines” and began reading more nonfiction books. As a result, “The world seemed more complex, terrible, hopeful, meaningful, and magical than he’d previously thought or heard.” What do you think the nonfiction books offered that fiction, newspapers, and magazines didn’t, that produced the effect you described? 

LIN

The nonfiction books offered perspectives outside of what Li had encountered before 2014. The fiction he’d read was about characters who were depressed and lonely; this offered a larger perspective than the newspapers and nonliterary magazines, which were mainly from mainstream liberal and conservative perspectives. When he started to consume media from outside of those perspectives, he noticed problems with them: they believed governments and corporations too much, promoted pharmaceuticals over natural health, trusted technology over nature, and often viewed the other political party as the main or only problem. They seemed limited or inaccurate in many ways. 

Relatedly, you’ve become interested in Christianity over the years. I’ve known you since you were sixteen, and now you’re twenty-eight. What is your history with Christianity? 

CASTRO

I wasn’t raised in a religious context, and by the time I was ∼12 years old, due to the influence of punk music and books, I hated Christianity. I related to some of Li’s experiences: seeing “God” on money, for example, and feeling totally alienated from the God concept. Religion, and Christianity specifically, seemed obviously fake, something used by powerful people to keep less powerful people in their place. 

When I was younger, I thought I was really smart. But now I feel like I was scared and prideful and hid behind a flippant dismissal of any worldview that would require me to focus on changing myself before I tried to change others. I’d come up against myself, and I’d try to exert my will, but it seemed like the harder I tried, the worse things became. Someone suggested I try prayer and meditation, and I started doing that, and I started changing, and my life got better. I still didn’t “believe in God” or even know what that could mean, but the fact that I felt different after I prayed, even though I viewed it as something like a trick of the mind, was undeniable. When Nicolette and I started dating, she had recently become a Christian, and she didn’t fit into any of my previous ideas about what a Christian was like or believed. I started to read more, and met more Christians who were smart and nice, and slowly my defenses eroded, and I realized that everything I thought I knew about Christianity was wrong. At the same time, everything in the world—politics, culture, academia, the lit world—was seeming increasingly insane. My experiences repeatedly came up against my conception of reality, and my conception of reality couldn’t account for my experiences without becoming incoherent. Far from being irrational, Christianity made these disparate aspects of myself and the world more comprehensible and harmonious. I was baptized during the pandemic.

Riane Eisler, whom you frequently cite, promotes Jesus’s “partnership” qualities: that he associated with women, preached nonviolence and spiritual equality, and more. Leave Society criticizes Yahweh—God in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament—but seems to praise Jesus. What are your thoughts regarding Christianity?

LIN

I hate it. No, just kidding. I constantly heard negative things about it, growing up listening to punk music, and felt alienated from it and/or far from it for most of my life—I wasn’t raised in a religious context either—but I like what I’ve increasingly experienced of it, over the past five or so years, through you and Nicolette, and through books by Riane Eisler and others with a positive view of Jesus. 

CASTRO

During your Zoom conversation for Bookpeople with Deb Olin Unferth, she asked you about the partnership societies that Li learns about in Leave Society, and whether or not it matters to you whether or not they actually existed. As you know, I’ve been interested in Rene Girard’s work for the past couple of years. He has a different view of humanity’s past—that we emerge from societies of ritualistic, violent scapegoating—but, interestingly, comes to a similar conclusion, that we need to personally eschew violence, domination, rivalry, and so on. Like Eisler, he also has a theory about human history/evolution, and cites evidence from Çatalhöyük—a city that existed from around 9,000 to 7,500 years ago in modern-day Turkey.

LIN

Interesting. I’ve heard you talk about Girard for years, but I haven’t heard you connect him with Eisler’s work in that way. Where does he write about that conclusion?

CASTRO

I can’t remember if he ever phrases it in such prescriptive ways, but it’s there in most of his books, I think, especially I See Satan Fall Like Lightning and Battling to the End. He was a Catholic, and one of his main ideas was that most of our problems stem from what he called mimetic desire: the idea that we want what other people want because they want them, and so we imitate them, and this can lead to rivalry, envy, etcetera. For Girard, Christ entered into a world rife with imitation, and tells us to imitate him instead, and a lot of what he did involved eschewing violence, vengeance, etcetera, in favor of forgiveness, love, and so on. Relatedly, I’ve thought that the partnership society idea reminds me of the Garden of Eden idea, that, in the past, humanity was in a harmonious situation, but then, due to “the fall”—or as Girard would say, “mimetic rivalry and the scapegoat mechanism,” or, as Eisler might say, “dominator values”—humanity has been caught in an escalating web of violence for some time. Do you conceive of us as needing to “return” to a former way of being, or as needing to “progress” toward something new? 

LIN

I think both returning and progressing, and also that history might be cyclical too. I’ve been reading about The Great Year. It’s ~25,800 years. Ancient Egyptians, Greeks, Mayans, Ancient Indians, and other cultures knew that every ~25,800 years the stars “precess”—moving across the sky in one cycle. The dominant modern theory is that it’s due to the Earth having a wobble, but a more convincing theory to me is that the sun moves in a spiral, maybe due to orbiting a shared center with a binary star. According to Laurie Pratt, Vedic texts say that we’re currently in an ascending period, after reaching a low from 498–1698 A.D. 

 

***

 

LIN

I started my reread of The Novelist. I’ve read eighty-six pages. I enjoyed grinning and laughing and thinking while reading. I liked the variety of sentence lengths and forms, and the range of the gaps between sentences: “I felt disturbingly similar to a fish. What a shitty way to start the morning.” This sentence seemed innovative and effective: “I ran my hand through my hair—I hated Facebook.” This surprised and pleased me: “To my delight, I had finished pooping.” This made me snicker: “My body felt at once empty and full; my neck felt weak, like it might crumple under the weight of my head, leaving me with no neck.” Your prose is clear and particular despite its task of describing complex processes that seem hard to notice. I’m interested in your use of poop instead of shit or something else. What was your process with that word choice?

CASTRO

Thank you for noticing the sentences. In general, I chose poop because shit sounded too vulgar, and defecate sounded unnaturally literary. There are some uses of shit later in the book—when the narrator is “projectile shitting” on the walls due to withdrawal—because Kendall, my editor, thought poop was “too silly” for that particular moment. I just realized that the narrator goes from shitting in the past to pooping in the present… A sign of progress…

LIN

I like poop also because it seems to treat solid human waste as the normal, not-bad thing that it is, instead of some vulgar and obscene thing, shit. I’m glad your book uses both. Your book also has around five pages on peeing. I enjoyed this sentence: “In the past, due to opioids, I would often have to stand in front of the bowl for inappropriately long stretches, waiting for the liquid to flow forth, oozing slowly like squeezed sludge through the tube to my tip, like something thick.” Do you know of other poop and/or pee scenes in literature?

CASTRO

I didn’t when I wrote mine, but when I was editing I Googled it, and learned that Beckett and Joyce had famous poop scenes. I went back in, after learning a little about each poop scene, and tried to add some subtle things that obliquely referenced them, so reviewers who knew of them would be more willing to take my book seriously, but I edited them out later. In the Kirkus review, however, the reviewer mentions Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, which I think might have poop in it. When I search “poop” in Leave Society, it references Dudu’s poop, rodent poop, and a note from a super that says “Please do not poop in the stairway, people can slip.” 

Your sentences in Leave Society are the most varied of any of your novels, I think, ranging from long and complex to two words. I thought the style of the book was great; a progression from, and a mix of, your other styles. One thing I noticed was that the prose seemed to become elevated in proportion to Li’s imaginative lucidity, and during bleaker sections—like when describing the effects of society on health—the style was much starker. The book as a whole, as opposed to what I’d call “flat and bleak” (Shoplifting from American Apparel) or “neurotic and hyperaware” (Taipei) is instead more dynamic, more human. Why is the style of Leave Society the way it is?

LIN

I wanted a varied style that offered unusual language and techniques, but remained clear and readable, especially for the parts that reference nonfiction books. I wanted many places where the reader could pause, like paragraph, chapter, and other breaks. I viewed nature as a model, which encouraged me to be fractal and diverse. Also, I had a neurotic aversion to words being on their own line; this encouraged me, across drafts and font sizes, whenever there was a hanging word or words, to try to find words to delete so that the hanging word, or sometimes words, could fit on the previous line. That affected my style too. Why is the style of The Novelist the way it is? 

CASTRO

I wanted to make The Novelist fun to read, and for the sentences to propel the reader forward. One thing I got from you originally, I think, was using concrete language to describe things. I remember, with the first draft of The Novelist, you underlined a couple of things—the phrases “let my guard down” and “had come to a head”—and wrote “cliché.” 

LIN

I haven’t seen anyone use semicolons like you do. Your consistent and semi-frequent semicolon usage expanded the basic form of your sentences. Your style seemed to teach me its semicolon philosophy through examples, and then to do innovative and funny things through that philosophy.

CASTRO

People are biased against semicolons, and I’m not sure why. When I was a pre-teen, some of the first “literary” books I read were by Kurt Vonnegut, and I still remember a line he has where he disparagingly calls them “hermaphrodites,” or something. I just found the quote—it’s even worse than I remembered: “Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.” 

I wrote The Novelist without a bachelor’s degree, and edited it a little more after getting one, but I’ve never taken a creative writing class. I recently watched a Vonnegut documentary and found him to be basically repulsive. Full of cynical, empty “wit” like this… Did you ever read Vonnegut?

LIN

I did. I read eight to ten of his books from ages ~17–25. My favorite was The Sirens of Titan, a science fiction novel. What else do you remember of his writing?

CASTRO

I can’t remember much, besides that he drew a butthole that looked like an asterisk, and had some pun related to “beaver” in Breakfast of Champions, which I liked a lot as a teenager. I also remember that he promoted Eugene Debbs, an American socialist, in at least one of his books, then seeing a bust of Eugene Debbs’s head in a museum at some point later in my life, and having a vague good feeling that I knew who this bust was, since often I don’t know who the busts of heads at museums are. 

LIN

I strongly remember that Vonnegut smoked a lot of Pall Mall cigarettes. It seems like a lot of writers used to smoke cigarettes and have author photos with cigarettes. 

 

***

 

LIN

We haven’t had any short sections in this interview. We’d planned to have a variety. What’s an exercise you’ve enjoyed doing recently?

CASTRO

Bench press. It used to be one of my least favorites, but I’ve been focusing more on it lately, and enjoying it. Hbu?

LIN

Clearing land with a machete and a handsaw, and other gardening-related activities, like digging and shoveling.

CASTRO

Nice. What are you gardening?

LIN

Pineapple, mango, lychee, longan, watermelon, jackfruit, jalapeño, luffa, aloe, okra, rosemary, arugula, eggplant, thyme, basil, bay leaf, bamboo, catnip, inch plant, snake plant. tobacco, yarrow, mugwort, mullein, and probably 30+ other plants.

 

***

 

LIN

Here’s a photo of my partner and I’s cat Leo. He’s around a year old. He was lost for 3.5 months.

Can you send me, as part of this conversation, a photo by you of one or more clouds? (I like imagining this post having calm nature photos.)

CASTRO

 

***

 

CASTRO

 You write about “the mystery,” which at one point Li thinks is “revealed through connections.” Can you give an example of this?

LIN

Connecting hydrogen and oxygen atoms produces water. 

 

***

 

A pot with hibiscus, oregano, papaya, and avocado.

 

Five Emails from October 31 to November 3, 2021

JORDAN (October 31, 2021 / 5:32 P.M.): i think there is this way in which people can kind of “worship death” – they say “death makes life absurd” or “death gives life meaning” or “we’re all going to die, so live in the moment” – always framing things in the context of death, and giving death primacy. but more and more i’ve been thinking that life gives life meaning; death doesn’t make life absurd – not embracing life, or not ‘stepping forward”into your own life makes life feel absurd. so many of the “death is horrible and makes everything meaningless” ppl seem already dead, their thoughts and lives. it’s almost like they say ‘i’m afraid of death” but they really mean “i’m afraid of life”…

i have a line in the new novel I’m working on, “muscle man” about how literary people and academics will say things like ‘life itself is absurd,” but it’s really just because their lives are absurd lol

i view your stuff about the possibility of a life after this life, that is unimaginably “more real” than this life, etc, and some of the other ideas in leave society, as a move away from death worship

TAO (October 31, 2021 / 5:59 P.M.): i like your idea of death worship. giving death primacy, people do seem to do that

daoism is good at talking about death, viewing it as just a change

JORDAN (October 31, 2021 / 7:19 P.M.): this could be good for our novels convo

TAO (November 2, 2021 / 3:01 P.M.): yes. we could paste this into that file to remember to talk about it. we could, like, build the conversation, transplanting stuff from emails

did you ever find a word for things surrounding on inside and outside? i’ve been needing to find a word like that, currently i’m using ‘surround and permeate”

JORDAN (November 3, 2021 / 9:21 A.M.): I asked on Twitter and i didn’t find a word for it. someone made up the word “immermeate” (immerse + permeate), which i liked. my friend hunter replied with “blessed,” which got the most likes of my replies, and though it isn’t actually what i was asking, it was nice in a poetic way, since its implications involve both inside/outside.

 

***

 

LIN

What’s something positive you’ve thought about our conversation?

CASTRO

I’ve laughed every time I’ve read the first meta section, and thought that the interview seems “pleasant.” I also like that we talk about UFC and Liver King [now deleted]. How about you?

LIN

I typed, “It’s starting to have more variety in section-lengths.” Then scrolled up and down and saw it was still almost all long sections, then came back here and typed this answer. I’ve been feeling negative in part due to being inflamed from some rashes I got a week and a half ago.  It’s May 9. We’ve worked on our conversation for almost five months. 

 

***

 

CASTRO

Leave Society deals with larger expanses of time than any of your previous novels, and engages with different ideas about cosmology, prehistory, religion, and more. The Novelist takes place over the course of only three hours, and is, on the surface, very ‘tethered’ to the material world. But both of the novels share an orientation, or an attempt at an orientation, away from oneself and toward something larger and more meaningful. I was reminded of the Infinite Universe Theory… and came up with Infinite Novel Theory. If you zoom in very closely or expand out to millennia, you can get to the same place…

LIN

Nice. And for readers who don’t know what Infinite Universe Theory is, it’s a theory, by Glenn Borchardt, that says the universe is infinite in both directions—going down toward atoms or up toward stars, with smaller and larger things appearing forever.

 

***

 

LIN

There’s a character in your novel named “Jordan Castro” who, mysteriously, seems only vaguely based on you. For example, while you’re the author of one novel, Jordan Castro the character is the author of two novels—one on weightlifting, one on drug addiction. Your novel’s narrator, who has published zero novels, says, “I looked at Jordan Castro’s Twitter frequently, but didn’t follow him, because I didn’t want to have to explain to anybody why I followed him.” Have readers of your book asked about Jordan Castro?

CASTRO

In a now-deleted line from our (forthcoming) BOMB interview, Juliet Escoria said she “took [the Jordan Castro character] to be some Jordan Peterson, Bret Easton Ellis, Slavoj Žižek hybrid—a public pseudo-intellectual person that is definitely not you.” Dean Kissick, in an email, said, regarding the Jordan Castro character, “I couldn’t decide how important this gesture is to the book; whether it’s the experimental, avant-garde heart of the story (a Kafkaesque nightmare of the self, a Girardian performance of mimesis), or just a running joke, or both.” In a potentially-to-be-deleted line from our (forthcoming) Los Angeles Review of Books interview, Crow Jonah Norlander asks whether there is “something inherently fraught about creative inspiration,” because of how the narrator catches himself parroting Jordan Castro and then feeling embarrassed by it. 

I had some articulated thoughts about the character while I was working on it, and I thought I wrote some notes about it too, but I can’t find the notes, and I seem to have forgotten again… Did you have more thoughts about the character?

LIN

When I read the final draft recently, I was surprised that it now seems to be based on a combination of people, and I felt excited imagining readers, not knowing what I knew, having a strange and new reading experience, wondering who “Jordan Castro” was, giving your novel a sci-fi or fantasy element. 

CASTRO

I remember you mentioning that you might want to write a sci-fi type novel. Have you thought more about that? 

LIN

I have. I’ve worked a little on a novel written in first-person by an extraterrestrial—an advanced humanoid from another star system.

CASTRO

Are you “done with autofiction”? 

LIN

I don’t know. I think it could be interesting to write, however elliptically, about my whole life in fiction across like 6 or 8 novels. I’m excited to read your second novel. In an email from February 12, 2022, you told me, “Working on Muscle Man somewhat feverishly […]” The Novelist references this second novel. Will Muscle Man reference or foreshadow a third novel?

CASTRO

It doesn’t currently foreshadow a third novel, but I’ve only written some notes for my third one, so I’m not exactly sure what it will be. 

 

A G-chat on May 11, 2022

TAO: i feel like the conversation is long enough actually
i just worked on it
i added a place where we can have some photos earlier on, pet photos
you adding a dated section in end seems good
can i see one of your questions?
or more. it could produce some short sections, helping with variety of section lengths
added a question requesting a photo, after the vonnegut addition

JORDAN: yeah i’m in the park waiting for la times phone call but when i’m home i’ll send them

TAO: succulent
my photo question might be bad

JORDAN: no i like it, i can take one now
your answer… feeling negative “in part” due to rash….
are you feeling negative about our convo
for non rash reasons
i was gonna ask in document but didn’t want to make it another long section

TAO: no, i like it a lot. it just has felt hard to work on it, and also it seems like we have enough or nearly enough

JORDAN: sure…
sure, tao

TAO: i’m telling the truth
i just feel bogged down from the rash to work more on it

JORDAN: sure…

TAO: fortunately, we have enough already
so all is good
laughing

JORDAN: idk if i can trust that you’re laughing
were you laughing before, truly, on the first meta section…
you’ve hated it this whole time just say it
jk
im taking pics of clouds

i’m at a park near my house where i come to do phone interviews and podcasts but it’s infiltrated by groups of ppl

TAO: these are good. we could end with what we just said maybe
bring back the gchat theme

JORDAN: laughing

TAO: it would make sense to have another gchat section

 

***

 

CASTRO

It’s May 12, 7:16 P.M. EST. I just had the thought that it could be good to end with the line “it would make sense to have another gchat section,” but I am adding this additional tidbit, because we agreed to close it out with a dated section, thus “rounding out” the meta component, and bringing our many-parted interview to a close. 

 

 

 

Jordan Castro is the author of two poetry books and the former editor of New York Tyrant Magazine. He is from Cleveland, Ohio. The Novelist is his first novel.

Tao Lin is the author of ten books of prose and poetry. His fourth novel, Leave Society, was published by Vintage in 2021. He edits Muumuu House.

Jottings, 2022

I did confide in a diary from the time I was nine or ten. I remember one diary well from this era—red plaid vinyl, with a strap and a fancy lock. The key was lost and the strap had to be cut. I gushed into spiral, lined notebooks in my twenties. Rereading any of these created massive disappointment, so I destroyed them—I am not sad to say. I feel anger toward them, about them. That little girl or the woman understood little or was unable say what she meant to say, and this is one reason I labor on with my fiction. Most of these daily jottings for stories in progress will remain forever lost or hidden, but this sketch work represents, for me, a purer form of diary. Here is one page from this morning.

Diane Williams is the author of ten books of fiction. She has a new collection of stories forthcoming from Soho Press next year. She is the founder and editor of NOON.

New Eyes

Francisco de Zurbarán, Saint Lucy, 1625–1630; Francesco del Cossa, Saint Lucy, 1473. Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington.

Maybe you know this, if you’re Catholic or hang around in churches: in paintings of Saint Lucy, she’s usually holding a pair of eyes. In most cases they’re on a plate, like some sort of local delicacy she’s about to serve up to a tourist. These are her old eyes, the ones she plucked out when a man wanted to marry her, because she wanted to marry only God. She looks down at them with her new eyes, the ones God gave her to say thanks. The version I like best is Francesco del Cossa’s, from 1473. In it, Lucy’s eyes hang drooping from a delicate stem, a horrible blooming flower. She pinches them gingerly, pinkie out like the queen. To me they look like the corsage I vaguely remember wearing at prom; later, who knows, she might put them in the man’s lapel, a consolation prize.

I have been drawn to this painting for nearly a decade, though my feelings toward it, toward Lucy and her two sets of eyes, have changed over the years. The first feeling was a slightly delusional but sharp sense of envy. I was seventeen or eighteen, seeing the painting for the first time in the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., and for as long as I could remember I’d wanted what Lucy had: to pluck out my eyes and get new ones. I believe this is the sort of fantasy often held by people with certain ailments, a childish notion that makes no sense but is still somehow grippingly tantalizing—like how the chronically congested dream of one triumphant nose-blow that clears them out for good, or those with bad backs imagine some kindly giant pulling them apart until every vertebrae gives a magical crack and their pain is banished at last.

I wanted new eyes because for almost as long as I could remember I had gotten frequent migraines, which were, I believed, caused by light. I won’t pretend that this is particularly remarkable or interesting to anyone but myself. (A memory: A doctor listens blankly as I describe the particular contours of my pain, how my head feels like a balloon and all I need is the prick of a needle. A small part of me hopes he will be fascinated, be spurred to action, and recommend a lobotomy on the spot. Instead he says, “Well, some people get migraines, yes,” and sends me home with a large co-pay.) But I will say this: the pain and ritual of these migraines, and the many futile measures I have taken daily to avoid them and consequently to avoid light, have been since childhood the unfailing constant of my life. I’ve worn sunglasses every day, sometimes inside. An unexpected flash is all it takes. The sun’s sudden gleam off an ocean wave, headlights passing on a dark country road; these are the things that have left me crumpled in bed, a damp towel over my face, writhing. It begins with a spell of blindness, my world tunneling down to black. The pain comes soon after. In old family vacation photos my face is always hidden. There we are on the beach in Maine: my brother and sister, my mom and dad, their faces shining, smiling, thrown open to the brilliant light of the world—and me, under a hood and a headscarf and Maui Jim wraparounds, some sort of NASCAR babushka.

***

What is it with the saintly and their eyes? It’s not just Lucy, though she’s the patron of both light and of eye ailments. Paul—the saint formerly known as Saul—fell trembling to the ground after seeing Jesus on the road to Damascus, went blind, and then later got his sight back and went to heaven. It’s a good metaphor for conversion, the restoration of sight. The scales fell from my eyes; I was blind but now I see. “The change made by this spiritual opening of the eyes in conversion,” wrote the seventeenth-century American preacher Jonathan Edwards, “would be much greater, and more remarkable, every way, than if a man who had been born blind, then at once should have the sense of seeing imparted to him, in the midst of the clear light of the sun, discovering a world of visible objects.”

Migraineurs are, I think, a superstitious lot. I know others who secretly nurse the same flimsy beliefs as I do: that we are actually the ones causing the pain, through psychosomatic delusion or mental weakness or—this, really, is the reason—a shadowy and ineradicable sinfulness. Joan Didion saw her migraines as “a shameful secret, evidence not merely of some chemical inferiority but of all my bad attitudes, unpleasant tempers, wrongthink.” This is the kind of thinking that only makes sense within the narrow, spectered cosmos of the migraine. I should confess, though, that I’m not much interested in other people’s migraines, nor in their superstitions. Nor have I ever particularly conceived of myself as within a group of people bonded by our common ailment. (I don’t speak for any others here; I wish them good health.) It’s just that my migraines feel so deep-stained into, hard-etched into, wherever it is in my mind that I sit manning the controls as to seem inseparable from myself—mine alone, like a childhood memory everyone else has forgotten, existing now only in my head. In my head. How could I not be fussy and quibbling and irrational about a thing at once so painfully real and, like the monsters in the closet, all in my head?

What I’m trying to say is that the simplest explanation for these migraines—what the philosopher and psychologist William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience would call the “medical materialist” explanation, or a neat chemical chain of cause and effect that begins with the play of light on my retinas and ends with a pain-inducing dilation of cranial blood vessels—doesn’t satisfy me. Migraines, instead, have made me feel somehow chosen, guilty, doomstruck. I know this is embarrassingly grandiose. I prefer to think of migraines in the way James thinks of religious experiences: occurrences better understood through “tracing [the] practical consequences” of one’s notions about them, rather than by dwelling on causes. I don’t believe in God on most days, but I can’t shake the sense that migraines represent an intelligent and malign visitation, an obscurely deserved punishment. If I were saintly—if I were Lucy—I wouldn’t get them. So went my reasoning.

So it went, at least, until last fall. I got a migraine on Friday, September 3, 2021, and another the following Sunday. Then: nothing. A week without pain, a month, a winter and a spring. I stopped wearing sunglasses. I got new eyes.

***

Imagine it—the slow, fragile flowering of those first few weeks, my wariness growing into confused delight. After a couple of months I began telling people, sharing it over dinner. A fun fact. Friends weighed in with theories. Had I given up dairy? Started yoga? Had there been some momentous internal shift in my worldview? No, nothing, I swore. An acquaintance languishing in graduate school pointed out that I’d recently abandoned a PhD program. Look, she demanded triumphantly, look at what leaving behind the stifling halls of academia can do for a person! My therapist declared a breakthrough; a vegan friend wondered if I’d cut back on meat.

In time this reprieve began to feel like a genuine miracle. Not unlike a religious convert, I began cautiously to conceive of my life in two parts, before and after. I supposed, only half joking, that I had always been ripe for a religious experience of this kind. “There are two things in the mind of the candidate for conversion,” William James wrote. “First, the present incompleteness or wrongness, the ‘sin’ which he is eager to escape from; and, second, the positive ideal which he longs to compass.” The wrongness, I figured, was the migraines, and whatever obscure sin it was that brought them on. What I longed to compass was a state of pure and permanent cure.

It didn’t take long before this reasoning began to wobble. Nobody, and certainly not God, had handed me a little certificate saying NEVER AGAIN. I passed a paranoid winter, eventually growing more fearful and irrational than I’d been when migraines had been so reliable. The streak came to feel like a fluke; I wanted it to end so that I wouldn’t have to wonder anymore when it would. In moments of madness I even missed the migraines themselves, recalled the wonderful stretches of clarity and calm that always followed them—why not think of the migraine as a trial with a reward, I thought, paid passage back to this golden after-hour? I realized that the thing about Lucy that I envied—even resented, to the extent that one can resent a person who exists as a painting—was not just her new eyes. It was the smug certainty in her downward gaze, the security and finality of her cure, the knowledge that God thought she’d earned it.

A cure is a slippery thing: you have to know what you want. Sometimes this is obvious, when health is easily envisioned as the absence of illness. But other times such a notion of cure can seem too knowing, too permanent, a hangover from the old days of religious redemption—you were a sinner, now you’re saved. Freud struggled with this, trying to work out what the goal of psychoanalysis was. What sort of cure was on offer? What did health look like? If you could say what it was in advance, you were already wrong; the cure was in the finding out. “Much will be gained,” he wrote, hedging his bets, “if we succeed in turning your hysterical misery into common unhappiness.” This doesn’t sound all that appealing. But I know he’s right, because for so many years I have chosen the opposite, preferring the romance of hysterical misery—marooned in the comfortingly predictable regime of superstition, ill-fatedness—to drudgery and uncertainty.

This, I think, is what was meant by common unhappiness: a recognition of the impossibility of knowing the future, of a complete and final cure. Perhaps it’s a cure for wanting to be cured in the first place. James, it’s worth adding, aimed at the same thing. He wondered how a religious conversion could be an opening, not a foreclosure, of possibility—how to make “converts without self-stultification.” The ideal, he believed, was not to end up like Lucy, uncommonly happy and secure for all eternity. It was to be something lowlier, a creature of ambivalent freedom, deserving neither punishment nor salvation. People don’t deserve either; deserving isn’t the point.

***

On a Thursday night in May, I stood alone on a subway platform, waiting for a train. I heard a far-off rumbling and looked out into the dark of the tunnel. There were the train’s headlights, a pair of angry eyes. I looked away, but too late. By the time I got home it had begun. I lay awake until the sun rose, the stabbing in my head as bad as it had ever been, and for a time I imagined I felt the presence of a vengeful thing, like some awful magic had returned.

But in the morning that feeling was gone. I drank coffee, read the paper, called my sister. For some reason I wanted to laugh. All that day it was as if I saw a different brightness in everything, in the leaves, in the eyes of people passing on the street. Perhaps another migraine was on its way, perhaps it wasn’t; I had an overwhelming sense that from then on, either way, migraines would simply exist as something deeply inconvenient, like living in a country where frequent and unforeseen rain often ruins one’s picnics. This, I think, I can manage.

My reprieve lasted eight months, almost to the day. I am grateful for it.

 

Charlie Lee is an assistant editor at Harper’s Magazine.

Diary, 1999

In 1999, I traveled around Europe with a friend from college, going from hostel to sofa to hostel, sharing a bath towel, both of us with $350 Eurorail passes in our pockets. These passes would cover seven cities in twenty days. Correction: eight cities. Who could forget the eighth city?

I have no recollection of how it happened, but we boarded the wrong overnight train leaving Barcelona. We thought we were bound for Nice but woke up in Geneva. To be fair, there were no signifiers of our error in the dark. No, say, alps. When the train arrived, I checked the time and assumed it had simply run late. It had not run late.

My friend and I proceeded to get in a massive fight in the Geneva train station. I suspect it had something to do with who should speak to the ticket agent and my confidence in my bad French over her bad French. At some point, I stormed out of the station. What was my intent? For this to be the story of how I moved to Geneva? Probably. At that age, there is a kind of marriage between the logical act and the dramatic act. They consciously uncouple as you get older.

I have no idea why we didn’t just stay in Geneva, a city worth seeing, for a night, but we didn’t. Maybe we were punishing each other. Maybe we were too anxious to stay. This was before we had any money or way to get money and certainly before smart phones.

I like how the diary entry of this experience opens, as if for an audience. That’s unusual. To this day, I only keep a journal when I’m traveling or away from home for long periods of time and the entries are a banal recapping of events. But here we have: “Geneva was fantastic. Thanks for asking. Hmmm overrated chocolate, Swiss banks … ” Not bad! I’m also surprised, considering how enraged I was, to see glimmers of self-deprecation, of me copping to being “a sick, cranky whore.”

The entry goes on for many pages, but what’s not there is me coming back into the train station, where my friend had found the correct track on her own. She was waiting on the platform, sitting on her overstuffed backpack. We were silent for a long time and then she said, “They only take Swiss francs, and I’m so hungry.” I would like to report that I had food on me, maybe some trail mix, and that I shared it with her. But I don’t remember what happened next.

 

Sloane Crosley is the author of three works of nonfiction and two novels, the second of which, Cult Classic, will be published on June 7.

On De La Soul and Elif Batuman

A still from De La Soul’s music video for “Stakes is High.”

I wanted to recommend a different song this week, but it seemed like every news story, headline, and push notification I encountered kept nudging my consciousness into some area within my brain that contains lyrics about firearms, some mental storage locker I rarely open: “I gets down like brothers are found ducking from bullets / Gun control means using both hands in my land, where it’s all about the cautious living.” Kelvin Mercer, aka Posdnuos, rapped those lines on De La Soul’s 1996 single “Stakes Is High.” The eponymous album, Stakes Is High, was a kind of rebuke against the first glimmers of hip-hop’s big money “shiny suit” era and the hackneyed materialism and narrative clichés that came to be associated with it. Posdnuos and his partners Dave “Trugoy the Dove” Jolicoeur and Vincent “Maseo” Mason, were tired of mafioso rap, “video vixens,” weed talk, brags about luxury gear. Dave’s verse, a list of the things that make him unwell, cleverly flips what it means to be “ill” in the hip-hop sense: 

I’m sick of bitches shaking asses 
I’m sick of talking about blunts
Sick of Versace glasses
Sick of slang
Sick of half-assed award shows
Sick of name-brand clothes 
Sick of R&B bitches over bullshit tracks 
Cocaine and crack which brings sickness to blacks 
Sick of swole-head rappers with they sickening raps 
Clappers and gats making the whole sick world collapse 
The facts are getting sick, even sicker perhaps
I stick a bush to make a bundle to escape the synapse

Although Dave’s delivery is fierce, this litany of mid-nineties rap’s most overdone iconographies has a lulling effect; as flashy as it is, the music he calls out in that list is thematically listless, of no real consequence. It’s all about the minutiae of the moment, the micro-timeline of rap stardom. There is no consideration of the future. On this song, De La Soul considers a more expansive timeline: the fate of meteors, the trajectory of bullets, but also the lifelines of children. The Stakes is High album cover is a black-and-white photo of a group of kids: the kind of gathering Kathy Fish references in her flash fiction story “Collective Nouns for Humans in the Wild” (2017), which has been recirculating after the Uvalde massacre—“Humans in the wild, gathered and feeling good, previously an exhilaration, now: a target … A group of schoolchildren is a target.” The song’s music video illustrates the perplexing apathy of the grown-up world: the trio vacillate between performing the song with brio and hanging out lethargically, letting the external world dictate their energy levels. Except for a mural in the background of one scene and a couple shots of a school bus, there are no images of children in the clip; it features adult angst and malaise. 

The video is framed by the group’s appearance as guests on The Maury Povich Show. They’re there to discuss how much rap music “dictates real life,” and vice versa, ways “to keep it real.” Shots of Povich posing questions to them on a studio set are intercut with clips in which the men carry out everyday tasks: folding laundry, cutting grass, raking leaves, buffing a car, washing the dishes, falling asleep with a newspaper in hand, playing basketball with friends. American daytime talk shows, especially those that aired in the nineties, often showcased the country’s worst fears, or otherwise the most provocative topics in the national discourse. Rap was one of them, but so was white supremacy and domestic terrorism; Stakes Is High was released just fifteen months after the Oklahoma City bombing. By appearing on this faux-episode, De La Soul commented on their public perception while also situating themselves as participants in the spectacle, and as possible consumers of it. 

This music video presents the kind of melancholy known to those familiar with the daytime TV bloc: court shows, commercials for class-action lawsuits, accident lawyers, and structured settlements. If De La Soul were at home during the daytime in 1996, as this video suggests, they probably watched a lot of Maury. Chronically consuming that programming—much of it about litigation and justice denied—can leave you enervated; in the video, the men appear as though drugged on downers. Their movements are frequently lackadaisical; even as they rap, with urgency, about the destabilizing nature of living in a violent world, they seem out of it. They traipse through a soccer field as Posdnuos relays a harrowing image of suicide: “People go through pain and still don’t gain positive contact / Just like my main man who got others cleaning up his physical influence / His mind got congested, he got the nine and blew it.” At the end of the sequence, Dave claps his feet together. Are we in a musical, or some other space of suspended disbelief (or belief)? A scene in which Dave rides a mechanical bull in Times Square further emphasizes the dissonance between what viewers see and what they hear. Against a J Dilla loop of Ahmad Jamal’s anthemic “Swahililand,” an epic jazz composition marked by escalating conga patter and the drama of a stabbing piano and horn riff, De La Soul play smoothed-out soothsayers, anesthetized by media and life’s recurring brutality. But that’s the point: stakes are high, and many people are higher, or else checked out, like the napping, newspaper-holding Maseo, who is, one can infer, both literally and figuratively tired of the news. How utterly devastating that, in the era of shootings at nail salons, grocery stores, and schools, “Gun control means using both hands in my land” is as true as it ever was, wherever in our land you might be.

—Niela Orr, contributing editor

At the start of Elif Batuman’s Either/Or, the narrator asks a simple question: What is “good” fiction? Selin, a sophomore in college and aspiring writer who has just enrolled in her first-ever philosophy class, spends the book looking for an answer. Although she doesn’t find one, Batuman herself does: if Either/Or itself is indeed “good,” then good fiction, perhaps, is what gives us a new, formally-determined awareness through which to perceive our lives. In this novel—the sequel to her debut, The Idiot—Batuman captures life in its shape as a chance encounter. Plot points mingle in surprising ways with Selin’s interiority—her attendance at a literary party leads directly into her thoughts on Kierkegaard’s Seducer’s Diary; from there, she considers her parents’ failed marriage and the socioeconomic status of her roommates. This sense of randomness is mirrored by the book’s larger arc, which leads us, through instances of supposed happenstance, from one romantic misencounter to the next, in Cambridge, then in Turkey. With a wry wink at the reader, Selin begins the semester by picking up a copy of Kierkegaard’s Either/Or for a course titled merely “Chance;” throughout the book, Batuman foregrounds the metafictional nature of a novel which links contingency and craft, life and literature. Selin notes that Balzac once called chance “the greatest novelist in the world.” In its radically random-seeming structure, Either/Or is a novel so artfully composed that it serves as an answer to the troubling question with which Selin follows her reference to Balzac: “How was one to be so artful that the end product seemed to be free of art?”

—Camille Jacobson, business manager

Writing Is a Monstrous Act: A Conversation with Hernan Diaz

Novelist Hernan Diaz. Photograph by Pascal Perich.

Money talks—so goes the truism—but rarely is it the subject of fiction. “Class? Sure. Exploitation? Absolutely. Money? Not so much,” Hernan Diaz observed during a conversation in early spring about the impetus behind his latest novel, Trust. Taking the mechanics of capital as its inspiration, Trust seeks to fill this gap. The novel features a New York financier and his wife, moving between genres (a novel, a memoir, a diary) and time periods (the Gilded Age, the roaring twenties, the Great Depression, the eighties) while exploring the fabular nature of capitalism. As one character declares halfway through, “Money is at the core of it all. An illusion we’ve all agreed to support.”

Diaz’s first novel, In the Distance, published in 2017, also reimagines America’s particular illusions. The novel, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, follows a Swedish immigrant during the California Gold Rush. Born in Argentina, raised in Sweden, and now living in Brooklyn, Diaz is erudite and energetic both on the screen—our conversation began as a Zoom call when Diaz was on a fellowship in Italy—and on the page, in the email back-and-forth that followed. As he would go on to explain toward the end of that initial call, “Writing, to me, is an attempt at becoming someone else.”

 

INTERVIEWER

Trust, the title of the book, is a financial term and a legal relationship, but it’s quite literally an experience. What do you think is the role of trust between the reader and the writer?

DIAZ

Reading is always an act of trust. Whenever we read anything, from a novel to the label on a prescription bottle, trust is involved. That trust is based on tacit contracts whose clauses I wanted to encourage the reader to reconsider. As you read Trust and move forward from one section to the next, it becomes clear that the book is asking you to question the assumptions with which you walk into a text. Genres are a great example of trust in literature—we feel a great sense of betrayal when conventions are violated for no good reason. Point of view is another clear example of trust in fiction—I foam at the mouth whenever a narrator suddenly becomes omniscient just to present us with some cheap reveal. Memoirs and historical documents offer yet another example of trust—and my novel aims to defamiliarize a certain tone we’ve come to trust and take for the unmediated truth in those documents.

INTERVIEWER

Both of your novels explore iconic moments in American history that are formative to the national identity. What draws you to these sorts of American mythologies?

DIAZ

Although they’re immensely different novels—formally, thematically, in tone, in scope—In the Distance and Trust have some things in common. This wasn’t intentional or planned, but if In the Distance is, in part, about the consolidation of a territory into a nation, Trust is about the consolidation of that nation into a financial empire. In the Distance shows the cogwheels of capital slowly starting to churn; Trust shows a perfectly oiled machine. Both books do deal with American mythologies, as you say. In its modern meaning, myth is a term that describes how narratives can saturate and eventually hijack reality. I think this is the right word to refer to how we perceive certain moments of our past—how naturalized some fictions have become. These two specific moments (the Gold Rush and the years around the 1929 crash) are beyond iconic. They have become petrified, fossilized. And I love working with clichés and precipitated historical narratives, hardened over time. They call for geological exploration.

INTERVIEWER

Do you find you have to expunge the cliché of something, or do you think that there is something relevant in the cliché itself?

DIAZ

There’s always something relevant in clichés. If you think about it, every literary genre is a collection of clichés and commonplaces. It’s a system of expectations. The way events unfold in a fairy tale would be unacceptable in a noir novel or a science fiction story. Causal links are, to a great extent, predictable in each one of these genres. They are supposed to be predictable—even in their surprises. This is how we come to accept the reality of these worlds. And it’s so much fun to subvert those assumptions and clichés rather than to simply dismiss them, writing with one’s back turned to tradition. I should also say that these conventions usually have a heavy political load. Whenever something has calcified into a commonplace—as is the case with New York around the years of the boom and the crash—I think there is fascinating work to be done. Additionally, when I looked at the fossilized narratives from that period, I was surprised to find a void at their center: money. Even though, for obvious reasons, money is at the core of the American literature from that period, it remains a taboo—largely unquestioned and unexplored. I was unable to find many novels that talked about wealth and power in ways that were interesting to me. Class? Sure. Exploitation? Absolutely. Money? Not so much. And how bizarre is it that even though money has an almost transcendental quality in our culture it remains comparatively invisible in our literature? There are exceptions, of course—Upton Sinclair, Theodore Dreiser, and John Gaddis, for example, come to mind—but it’s easy to see a disproportion between the outsized role money plays in the American imagination and the marginal presence it has in our canon. Moreover, the novels that brush the issue without fully engaging it tend to reproduce the dynamics of the world they supposedly set out to denounce. Most of those books end up bedazzled by the excess they meant to critique, and they also perpetuate a series of exclusions that have always defined the epic of capital, beginning with the exclusion of women, who have often been erased from narratives of accumulation.

INTERVIEWER

Trust is composed of four different books, and in each, the language is very different. The first, for instance, reads a bit like Edith Wharton—were you intentionally trying to mimic the prose of the nineteenth and early twentieth century?

DIAZ

Absolutely. In Wharton and in James, we see the formal precepts of realism taken to their absolute limit—the breaking point before modernism. The traditional nineteenth-century novel aspired, for the most part, to reflect the world objectively. Stendhal famously wrote that the novel is a mirror carried along a road, which sums it all up. But toward the end of the nineteenth century, I think many novelists were turning that mirror away from the road and toward its bearer. Who is looking at the world and how is this observer, too, part of the picture? Eventually, the mirror shattered and the novel found itself looking at the scattered reflections on the shards. As literature no longer was required to reflect a cohesive, unified world, the gaze also began turning inwards. I’m abusing Stendhal’s simile and presenting all this in a rather schematic, linear fashion. But I think that toward the end of this trajectory, where I would place James and Wharton, the novel is trying to do things that were unimaginable a few decades earlier. More than accurately depicting objective reality, the emphasis was on conveying certain forms of experience. More than capturing social “types” (Balzac hoped to portray a mere two or three thousand of them), the novel became increasingly invested in selfhood and difference—not in archetypes but in what is untransferable about each individual experience. This, of course, came with immense formal shifts. I don’t think the syntactical opacity in James’s late work, for example, is irrelevant in this context—it enacts the difficulties of seeing and knowing life only through language; it shows us how hard it is to reach the world. But I don’t feel he ever fully broke with the novel as a form. He was, rather, making it do things for which it wasn’t designed at that point. And this is so beautiful to me. We may hear something similar, also, in certain Romantic music that holds on to a Classical vocabulary to express what can’t be conveyed through it. We may see it in painters who, while still being figurative, teetered on the edge of abstraction—because figurative accuracy was no longer accurate enough. I’m very interested in those transitional moments in art. It’s not by coincidence that the last section of the novel is so invested, both formally and in its subject matter, in the avant-garde and high modernism.

INTERVIEWER

Mildred, in her diary at the end, feels a bit more modern.

DIAZ

That was my hope. She has a very modern sensibility. Before I even started writing it, I thought her section would be a modernist cabinet of curiosities of sorts. The way I described it to myself was that it should sound as if Virginia Woolf had written the Philosophical Investigations. In the end, it doesn’t really sound like that (how could it ever!), but this was the impossible tone I had in mind. There is something in the journal as a form that lends itself to this treatment, and I learned a lot about this genre while reading for this project. I tried to focus on diarists more or less contemporary with my author, such as Dawn Powell, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Denton Welch, Alma Mahler, Iris Origo, and, of course, Woolf. I also read several personal journals written by the wives of some real-life American tycoons. The experience of going through these files was intense, mostly because in many cases they had never been opened since being archived decades or even a century before.

INTERVIEWER

There’s so much, also, about money and the relationship between the artist and capital. At one point, Ida’s father, an Italian anarchist who works as a typesetter, gives a speech in which he calls money a fiction, going on to say, “History itself is just a fiction—a fiction with an army … Reality is a fiction with an unlimited budget.” Were you trying to probe this relationship between art and commerce?

DIAZ

There’s a widespread tendency to think of art as some sort of ideological frosting on real power structures. Commerce, we usually believe, dictates the direction of aesthetic currents. Patronage, in overt or covert forms, and the market condition artistic production. Obviously, this is true. But it’s important to remember that the reverse is also true: power relies heavily on narratives to perpetuate itself. Political and financial supremacy is simply not possible without a collection of myths to prop it up. This is why I think fiction can teach us a lot about history and politics. One of the premises of Trust is that the relationship between power and art is not as linear as many so-called engaged novels would like us to believe. I’ve always found the idea of engaged or committed literature suspicious, because it subordinates literature to some higher truth. If anything, I’d like to invert the terms in the discussion around mimesis and representation: rather than asking how literature can accurately imitate life, I’m interested in how reality can be shaped by fiction.

INTERVIEWER

In the third section of the book, there’s an emphasis on another very American experience, that of immigration—Ida, the section’s narrator, is the child of an Italian immigrant and was raised in an Italian immigrant enclave in Brooklyn. What were you considering when you wrote that section?

DIAZ

Immigration is a central concern for me because I am an immigrant. I also happen to be half Italian. My maternal great-grandparents went from Campania to Buenos Aires, but they could just as easily have ended up in New York. Not by chance, the Italian immigration wave that started in the 1880s coincided with one of the greatest periods of economic expansion in US history. On one side of the East River, there was a world of incalculable wealth and skyscrapers. On the other side, immigrants were living in utterly pre-modern conditions and completely segregated. In fact, the parallels between that reality and ours were shocking and devastating. I wrote most of the novel during the Trump presidency. While I was reading about the Immigration Act of 1924 that barred most Italians and Asians from entering the country, Trump was proposing mass deportations, enacting travel bans, and separating children from their families at the border. This is just one of the many ways in which the Republican policies of the 1920s mirror those of the 2020s. Calvin Coolidge’s appalling record is usually forgotten in favor of fizzier legends from the jazz age.

INTERVIEWER

How did you conceive of Ida? How did you see her in relation to these histories of exclusive immigration policy and rampant capitalism?

DIAZ

Ida, the daughter of an Italian anarchist, starts working on Wall Street as a secretary. A central concern of Trust is how women have been, for the most part, suppressed from all the narratives spun around capital. If given any role at all, it has been either that of wife or secretary—or victim. Trust takes these stereotypical roles, subverts them, and moves them from the periphery to the center of the narrative. Ida follows a new path toward economic independence that opened to women in the twenties and thirties, when they joined the white-collar labor force. This was a major revolution that transformed the workspace and destabilized gender roles in society at large. In her section of the novel, Ida looks back on her youth in the thirties from the vantage point of 1985, after a long and successful career as a writer. Finding Ida’s tone was quite challenging. It’s the section that was most heavily edited because she and I are very different writers, and I had to learn to inhabit her voice. I created strict style guides for every section, but that part of the book was very demanding. Among other things, I read a lot of New Journalism while trying to teach myself Ida’s syntax and punctuation.

INTERVIEWER

How did you approach your research?

DIAZ

There’s always the danger of fetishizing one’s research, becoming obsessed with a little archival gewgaw one has found, and then starting to write just to create a display case for it. I dislike novels that feel like show-and-tell. And although I don’t want to make egregious mistakes and am terrified of anachronisms and inconsistencies, I’m not obsessed with referential accuracy. That’s absolutely not a primary concern for me. To me, archival work has to be in the service of imagination. Instead of becoming a factual straightjacket, research has to open up your vista and let you imagine things that were unimaginable before.

INTERVIEWER

Both of your novels have so far been historical. Can you see yourself writing a novel set in contemporary times?

DIAZ

I find the term historical novel abysmally depressing. To begin with, proposing that such a thing exists would also imply the existence of an ahistorical novel, and I’ve yet to come across one of those. But in addition to being rather useless, this category is actually disrespectful to fiction. Because this notion implies a hierarchy: there is history, which is supposed to stand in a closer relationship to truth, to be verifiable, to be fact-based, and then there is fiction, which is a mere fancy totally divorced from truth. Yet haven’t we been taught, over and again, how much of history is fabricated? Haven’t historians repeatedly shown us that many of the accounts taken to be true for decades or centuries can be debunked as ideological narratives? And conversely, isn’t there a robust body of fictional texts that throughout millennia have shown us at least a hint of truth (however mutable this term may be) about what it means to be human? In short, I’m not into “historical fiction” and refuse to accept it on the ground of the use of “period” props or costumes. I would even say that Trust aims, to an enormous extent, to question the boundaries between history and fiction.

INTERVIEWER

There’s a line that Mildred writes towards the end of the book, in her diary, “A diarist is a monster: the writing hand and the reading eye are sourced from different bodies.” Do you think that’s true for the novelist as well?

DIAZ

I love this question. I never thought about it but think this may be true for me. Writing is a monstrous act because it implies a metamorphosis. Writing, to me, is an attempt at becoming someone else. Every novel is a long way of tracing an x, of crossing myself out. I don’t want to be on the page. I want someone else to be there—someone else to “happen.” Still, despite my best efforts, I always remain, deformed and disfigured. The final paradox, of course, is that I am the one striking myself out. And isn’t this duality also quite monstrous?

 

Hernan Diaz is the author of two novels translated into more than twenty languages. His first novel, In the Distance, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. His work has appeared in The Paris Review, Granta, Playboy, The Yale Review, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere.

Barry Lopez’s Darkness and Light

Barry Lopez, McKenzie River, Oregon. Photograph by David Liittschwager.

Some days after Barry’s death on December 25, 2020, I pulled every book of his I owned from the shelves around my apartment and stacked them on a corner of my desk. Then I walked down the hill to the used bookshop in the small Oregon town where I live and found several books of his I did not yet own. For a year, I picked at the stack, revisiting passages I recalled vividly or had forgotten. The words would come when I was ready, I figured, so I scribbled sentences on scraps of paper, lost them, found them, rewrote them, in an ambulatory manner I thought might have pleased Barry. He was the only writer who made me feel virtuous for my slowness, which I once heard him call “patience,” though I believe even Barry knew the fine line between virtuousness and slacking off. He had told me he sometimes admonished his students, “I cannot teach you discipline, and I cannot teach you hunger. You have to find those things inside yourself.” 

It was his request that I write this essay. Or maybe it was not a request, but a suggestion. He had asked it in a way so gentle, so lacking in urgency, that I would sometimes feel as if I dreamed it, but then I would relisten to a voicemail he left me, which I had saved, and there it was: “I’ve got a kind of favor to ask.” 

When I returned his call, he told me a man was writing a profile for the alumni magazine of the college Barry had attended. The man was interviewing some celebrated writers about Barry’s legacy, but it had struck Barry that these writers were all of his own generation or one below him. Did he even have a legacy if few young people read his work, he wondered? Was there any space for his work in the collective conscience, amid an economy of distraction and a literary world enamored with speed? This was two months before he died. I had known Barry only four months.

He asked me to “think about this,” in case the man writing the profile gave me a call, and maybe also to write about his legacy myself if I felt compelled. This is how he was, his profound gestures composed of language so light it seemed to drift off. I told him I would. 

 

***

 

I knew Barry Lopez’s name from the spines of books on my parents’ shelves, but the first work of his I read were essays and short stories in Orion, to which my parents subscribed when I was sixteen. I thought of Barry then as a “nature writer,” a label I would later learn he resented, but which, at that time, I liked. He had published his first book, Of Wolves and Men, to great acclaim in 1978, when he was thirty-three years old, and would write another twenty books of fiction and nonfiction in his lifetime. By the time I became aware of his writing, Barry was a bard among an international community of writers and artists defending the natural world against industrial exploitation. One of the short stories in Orion that glimmered out at me was about a man who comes across a sliver of obsidian while walking in the desert and considers pocketing the stone for his daughter, then decides against it. “He had come upon a time in his life when everything, even the things of God, needed protection,” Barry wrote of the man’s restraint. He implied that in removing it from the landscape, the stone became only an object, but if the man left the stone, he would “have to use his imagination” in telling his daughter about it, thus preserving its particular mystery. 

I saw him speak at my college around the time I read the story. I recall, mainly, his bearing—turned-inward, serious, his words impeccably chosen.  

After college, I moved West, and that year a friend sent me a link to an interview Barry had done with Bill Moyers. I watched the interview, rapt. Then I watched it twice more. He articulated beliefs I did not yet know I had, but in which I recognized myself clearly and immediately. “We have a way of talking about beauty as though beauty were only skin deep,” he said. “But real beauty is so deep you have to move into darkness in order to understand what beauty is.” He meant that to opt for beauty but not darkness was to cling to false hope, that real hope required an awareness of both darkness and beauty at once. To make space in one’s own mind for both was to remain open to a “full expression” of life. 

After I saw the interview, I began reading Barry’s books, and I noticed how violence and beauty cohabitated in all his work. In Of Wolves and Men, he wrote of both the admiration and hatred humans have for wolves, the former rooted in a longing for intimacy with nature even as humans grow more distant from it; the latter, in a species of fear called theriophobia—“fear of the projected beast in oneself,” or, as Barry saw it, fear of the darkness we all possess. In “Orchids on the Volcanoes,” from his 1998 essay collection About This Life, he observed a wreckage of dead birds in the Galapagos, “crumpled on the bare ground like abandoned clothing,” and “the stark terror” of the place, where “innocent repose and violence are never far apart.” He often invoked the concurrence of light and dark by pressing life’s fragility against the brutality of landscapes. Arctic Dreams, which won the 1986 National Book Award, was constructed almost entirely from this dichotomy, beginning in the introduction, where Barry wrote, “I had never known how benign sunlight could be … How run through with compassion in a land that bore so eloquently the evidence of centuries of winter,” to the end, where, after hundreds of pages of detailed observation, his point strikes the reader as startlingly succinct: 

If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the midst of such paradox. One must live in the middle of contradiction because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse. There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of a leaning into the light.

I loved that line when I read it—“leaning into the light,” a stalk tilting toward the sun—and I love it now, even after Barry’s death when the passage containing it became one of the most quoted in his oeuvre. 

In 2013, Barry published the essay “Sliver of Sky” in Harper’s about being raped as a child. His rapist had been a doctor, a friend of his mother’s, who feigned charity by offering to entertain her sons. In the years Barry suffered these serial assaults, he wrote, “the deepest and sometimes only relief I had was when I was confronted with the local, elementary forces of nature: hot Santa Ana winds blowing west into the San Fernando Valley … ; winter floods inundating our neighborhood when Caballero Creek breached its banks on its way to the Los Angeles River.” Looking upward at a flock of birds filled him with “encouragement.” 

This nesting of natural beauty inside the horror of the essay’s disclosures was perhaps a better explanation than any for why pairing dark with light felt necessary to Barry. “I took from each of these encounters a sense of what it might feel like to become fully alive,” he wrote. But it was recently, in reading his posthumous essay collection, Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World, that this necessity struck me with more devastating clarity. “The linchpin of my existence as a California boy was the ever-forgiving, ever-soothing light,” he wrote in “Missing California,” published for the first time in the collection: 

That, and for me the flocks of birds that pulled me into the sky, pulled me up and out of myself … Of course, it was the pedophile who gave me eight tumbler pigeons on my birthday, the pigeons that deliberately lose aerodynamic life and plummet to earth as though shot by a gun, only to pull out of it a few feet from the ground and soar stiff-winged toward the open sky.

The essay ends there, on the realization that the birds who relieved his suffering were a gift from the man who caused his suffering. He makes no attempt at explanation.

This is something else Barry wrote about often: the unfathomable. He wrote about unfathomable violence—his visits to Auschwitz, and the Washita River in Oklahoma, where, in 1868, the Seventh Cavalry massacred dozens of peaceful Cheyenne men, women, and children, then slit the throats of their horses.  

He wrote about the unfathomable in a spiritual sense, too, for which he preferred the word mystery. In Of Wolves and Men, he advised his readers that he was incapable of answering all our questions, but we shouldn’t worry, since “to allow mystery, which is to say to yourself, ‘There could be more, there could be things we don’t understand,’ is not to damn knowledge. It is to take a wider view.” He dealt similarly with a conflict he perceived between Indigenous knowledge gathered through generations of immersion in nature and knowledge derived from Western methods of scientific study. The latter, he argued, too often discounted what couldn’t be proven by science, while the former tended to allow some things to remain beyond human understanding. “A solution to a mystery is perhaps not a sign of wisdom,” he told Moyers. “I am perfectly comfortable being in a state of ignorance before something incomprehensible. And it’s in that moment that you’re driven to your knees and you believe. I wouldn’t call it religious. It’s just what happens when you open up to the extraordinary circumstances of being alive.”

But it was religious, in a sense. Among the revelations that have come to me from reading Barry’s work was one I found in his posthumous collection, in an essay titled “Madre de Dios.” He described his Jesuit upbringing and how he found in Catholicism a “sphere of incomprehensible holiness which, in the Western imagination, stands beyond the reach of the rational mind.” Then he recalled an encounter with the spirit of the Blessed Mother, when he was eight years old, trapped in the bed of his rapist. She hovered above the floor, hands reaching toward him, and said, “You will not die here.” 

The people I know who have endured unimaginable violence are also those who appear more open than most to spiritual or supernatural occurrences. This does not surprise me. To accept as real an act so evil, for which reason and motive could forever elude its victim, is also to accept that there are things we can’t explain. This humility, Barry seemed to argue, is not just virtuous but essential to our survival, the antidote to unimaginable darkness being unimaginable light. 

Still, spiritual belief is a hard thing to write about. Once, a writing professor told to me that he avoided teaching Barry’s work for fear his students might, in attempting to imitate him, “get a little mushy.” 

I admit I’ve found Barry’s work, dense and sprawling, difficult to read at times; if I don’t quiet everything around me, my mind wanders off. I’ve wondered if this was deliberate, if Barry was challenging readers to a meditation. “Pay attention,” he wrote over and over in his books, as he did again in an essay titled “Invitation” from his new collection: “Perhaps the first rule of everything we endeavor to do is to pay attention.” And when I do pay attention, I am mesmerized: I see Barry’s syntactical precision, the carpentry of his paragraphs, the framing built from the crossbeams of his experience. In fiction, especially, his philosophizing was tactile, as in a passage from his only novel, Resistance, in which he made the case, yet again, for mystery: 

For me, the terrifying part was the ease with which you could lose your imagination … In every quarter of life, it seemed then, we were retreating into fundamentalism. The yes/no of belief, the in/out of fashion, the down/up of pharmaceuticals, the on/off of music, the hot/cold of commitment, the dead/live of electricity, the forward/backward of machinery, the give/take of a deal … People endorsed the identification of enemies and their eradication, just to be rid of some of the inevitable blurring.

What I loved so much about this novel, told from the perspectives of nine artists and academics who each receive a letter from their government declaring their work “unpatriotic” and thus a threat to national security, is that it precisely conveys the ideas integral to Barry’s writing without straying into moralization or sentimentalism. Yet what made Barry’s work radical, I now believe, was in fact his willingness to risk these qualities—to reject the common urge to construct from language a bulwark against emotion. “The things that make us uncomfortable in public are a person who wishes to speak of what is beautiful,” he told Moyers. “That makes everybody a little bit nervous, because many of us keep this jaded, cynical separateness with the world.” 

I saw Barry speak once more, in the fall of 2019, at an event he facilitated for his friend, Robert MacFarlane, who had just published Underland. I watched, as rapt as I had been during the Moyers interview. When they finished, I left without introducing myself. What do you say to a person whose work has influenced you so thoroughly that you feel their words and ideas as a substance coursing through your body? How do you convey to a person who has never read your work how much theirs has become a part of yours? You can’t. It’s desperate, and a little bit creepy. 

So I left before I met Barry. I did not need to tell him that, in my own work, at his urging, I had gone into darkness to find beauty, and by beauty, I mean love. 

 

***

 

And so the call came as a surprise. I was driving across Colorado one day in July of 2020 when a friend in New York forwarded me a voicemail. I pulled over, hit play. I recognized his voice, serious but kind in its formality. He was explaining to my friend—whom I now realized was his friend, too—that he had finished reading the book I wrote. My friend had recommended it, and now Barry was asking my friend to pass along his number to me.

I sat on the roadside a long time. I dialed the number, got an answering machine. I hardly remember what I said. I was headed into the mountains to camp for a while. A few weeks later, in early August, I received another voicemail: 

Hi Sierra, it’s Barry Lopez calling. I hope you had a good trip. I’m looking at some photographs this morning of Blackfoot people trying to find a way out of their dilemma in 1915, moving through a whiteout on horseback, so I Xeroxed the image and wrote a letter to a friend and said, “How I’m starting to feel trying to get out of here, wherever we are.” 

We spoke on the phone not long after that. For the same reason I fear meeting writers I admire, I now fear having to distill our first conversation onto the page. Can I just say it was one hour among the most essential of my life? 

He said kind things about my book. They seemed the kindest things anyone had ever said about my book, I believe because Barry was a writer whose perspective on the world I had long nurtured in myself, so the parts he chose to notice were parts meaningful to me already. Then he told me what he had been reading and writing and asked what I was writing, too. I explained my new book as precisely as I could, adding, when I stumbled, that I had only begun, that I had not yet decided how much I should write before I sent pages to a publisher. He replied that with every book he ever wrote he had, at some point, inevitably wondered, Why wasn’t this given to someone smarter than I am? Then he advised me to never build an outline too soon because “the idea of writing is not to find what you’re looking for.” He added, “And you have to know what you stand for. You have to resist the temptation to do things for money or fame, because you’ll wake up when you’re forty years old and not know who you are.” 

I had turned thirty-three that week. I felt young all of a sudden, my life full of possibility. I felt a warmth toward Barry rising in my throat. He asked for my mailing address in case he came across an article or book he wished to send, and he suggested I visit him soon; we both lived in Oregon, a few hours’ drive apart. It was the beginning of the pandemic, but I could stay in his guest cottage, we could eat outside, and his wife could take me kayaking on a river beside their house. In the meantime, Barry advised, I should call his landline whenever I wished. He would answer ninety percent of the time, and his wife, the writer Debra Gwartney, would answer the other ten. 

“She’s—” Barry began, pausing long enough for me to wonder what adjective he would choose. Then he said, “—first-rate.” 

 

***

 

We spoke a handful of times that summer and fall. We would talk about what he was working on and what I was working on, about books he recommended and ideas that had come to him lately, and then he would say, “Well, I shouldn’t keep you from your writing.” I could have talked to him forever, but I hung up because I didn’t want him to think I was greedy, and of course it was not me who had limited time, but Barry. He only once mentioned his cancer. He was rationing his efforts, he said, finishing an essay collection and some short stories. He often referenced his most recent book, Horizon, published in 2019, which I sensed he was proud of. Later, Robin Desser, Barry’s editor at Random House, and previously at Knopf, would tell me it had taken so long for Barry to write the book that she feared he might die before he finished it. He had signed the contract before Desser became his editor, and in her first years working with him, he wrote other books, until they agreed, in her words, “that it would be better to direct his energies to his major opus.” Whenever Barry visited New York after that, he hand-delivered a typewritten manuscript, requesting that Desser not read it but keep it on her desk so she knew he was writing. “Of course, I would sort of look at it,” Desser said. “But I also thought, I’m preserving my own reaction to this, because I felt somewhat shamanistically that if I didn’t read this version, maybe the final one would come sooner.” 

Horizon is indeed an opus—not a memoir, exactly, but a literary consummation of his wanderings. It revisits places that shaped his thinking, reinforces the stitching of his ideas across landscape and time. “A long life might be understood … as a kind of cataract of imperfectly recollected intentions,” Barry writes:

Some of one’s early intentions fade. Others endure through the inevitable detours of amnesia, betrayal, and loss of belief … But, too, the unfathomable sublimity of a random moment, like the touch of a beloved’s hand on one’s burning face, might revive the determination to carry on, and, at least for a time, rid one of life’s weight of self-doubt and regret. Or a moment of staggering beauty might reignite the intention one once had to lead a life of great meaning, to live up to one’s own expectations.

The book rarely gets more personal than this, yet it strikes me as some of Barry’s most intimate writing, deepening the idea fundamental to his work that what people most desire is “to love or be loved,” and that all human pain, particularly loneliness, emerges when a person fails to feel either.

In the same way that he repeatedly invoked the coexistence of light and dark or insisted we pay attention, this idea is a refrain from much of his prior work. In About This Life, Barry wrote, “Although I’m wary of pancultural truths, I believe in all human societies there is a desire to love and be loved.” Years later, in the interview with Moyers, he mused that everyone, at some time, “is driven to a point of despair … I think they don’t quit because there is a capacity for, a desire for reciprocated love that brings you back to life.” 

I asked Desser if she thought Barry repeated himself because he wasn’t sure his readers heard him. She believed this was true, but added, “When someone writes music, you can tell that this is Beethoven, or this is John Coltrane. There’s a theme that’s recognizable. These are the things that matter to Barry, so they reoccur … And this message about love, how many times can we hear that? Many times. We need to hear it many times.”

She told me that by the time he wrote Horizon, and especially after he published the essay about his childhood abuse, she sensed that Barry felt relief in mostly having said what he wanted to say, and now his task was to unite all he ever said into a single work that refracted his ideas through the variable lenses of the far-flung places in which he had reported. The book, like his life’s work, “contained multitudes,” she said, in how it encompassed vast geographies and histories yet returned, always, to the same idea—to love. 

The book wasn’t everything, though. In the closing pages, Barry warns against taking it as his last word: “We assume sometimes that whatever the dying say at the end, or last write down, represents a conscious final thought, but I don’t believe this is very often true. What is really going on at the end mostly goes unspoken and … remains unknown to the living.” 

Was he saying that death is a preservation of mystery? Those closer to him know better than I do how much of himself he left out of his books. My phone calls with Barry, like my experience reading his work, were intimate but never revealing. We said almost nothing about our personal lives. I never told him, for example, that his first call came the week I ended a decade-long partnership, that our conversations spanned the loneliest period of my life, that his voice brought me comfort, that whenever I conjured an image of him in the house he called me from—a house he had lived in over fifty years, in a forest he once described in an essay as the place a person knows so well they “sense that they themselves are becoming known … and this reciprocity, to know and be known, reinforces a sense that one is necessary in the world”—I felt relief from my own unmooring.  

In September, I moved my belongings into a new apartment, then drove to Northern Michigan to see my parents. The day I arrived, fires caught in Oregon. The late-summer smoke had become an annual frustration, and I was grateful to have escaped it. 

Then a friend wrote asking where Barry lived. His town was engulfed in flames, she said. I called his house; neither he nor Debra answered. 

The next morning, the smoke had drifted over Lake Michigan. I woke to an eerie, familiar light, a muted-orange patch on the bedroom door. I went kayaking with my parents, paddled around a point to a broad beach where we watched the cloud loom like a wave stalled before its crest. I would later learn from my friend in New York that Barry and Debra were woken by firemen pounding on their door and fled with only essential belongings. The house had been saved but not the forest, nor an outbuilding containing Barry’s papers.  

 

***

 

It has become a trope that writers whom publishers have long placed in the box called “nature writing” flinch at the term like it’s an epithet. “ ‘Nature writing’ has become a cant phrase, branded and bandied out of any useful existence, and I would be glad to see its deletion from the current discourse,” Robert Macfarlane wrote in 2015. Their complaint is that the label consigns writers to an obscure literary corner, whereas what they have chosen as their subject—most succinctly, survival—is as fundamental a story as it gets. “I’m not writing about nature. I’m writing about humanity,” Barry told Moyers. “And if I have a subject, it is justice, and the rediscovery of the manifold ways in which our lives can be shaped by the recovery of a sense of reverence for life.” 

I agree with Barry. It was not his descriptions of arctic summer or of forests along the McKenzie River, beautiful as they may be, that drew me to his work; it was the way he made clear our predicament, which is that violence toward land begets violence toward people, and vice versa, that violence of any kind wounds both victim and perpetrator, heaving across space and time, marking land and bodies, drawing us all into a collective trauma that perpetuates by its own momentum. 

Consider the way he describes the Spanish incursion into the New World in his most concise book, The Rediscovery of North America:

It set a tone in the Americas. The quest for personal possessions was to be, from the outset, a series of raids, irresponsible and criminal, a spree, in which an end to it—the slaves, the timber, the pearls, the fur, the precious ores, and, later, arable land, coal, oil, and iron ore—was never visible, in which an end to it had no meaning. The assumption of an imperial right conferred by God, sanctioned by the state, and enforced by a militia; the assumption of unquestioned superiority over a resident people, based not on morality but on race and cultural comparison—or, let me say it plainly, on ignorance, on a fundamental illiteracy—the assumption that one is due wealth in North America, reverberates in the journals of people on the Oregon Trail, in the public speeches of nineteenth-century industrialists, and in twentieth-century politics. You can hear it today in the rhetoric of timber barons in my home state of Oregon, standing before the last of the old-growth forest, irritated that anyone is saying “enough …, it is enough.”

There are few writers who have made so clear that the exploitation of resources—as well as all the displacement, pollution, ecosystemic collapse, and climate havoc this exploitation engenders—is, as it has always been, a colonial project. 

I am even less a nature writer than Barry was, but this is where our work overlapped, in that we each spent much of our adulthood around Indigenous communities. Learning from Indigenous people had conferred on him a certain loneliness, in that he would never belong to nor attempt to belong to the communities he visited, and yet he more often identified with their perspectives and methods of existence than those of European American culture. “You end up on this odd ground where you don’t have many people to talk to,” he told me.   

I wish I had asked him to elaborate. Had I never read his writing, I might have thought he was suggesting we shared some sort of romantic and voyeuristic curiosity about cultures unlike our own. But what I believe Barry meant is that being among people who have struggled and continue to struggle to maintain a relationship to their original home made obvious to him his position as a descendant of colonizers, illuminated the legacy he was part of. It helped him more precisely identify that which he now felt obligated to push back against. 

He wasn’t perfect on this front—no white writer who has ever tried to find their place among Indigenous stories is. If I have a criticism of Barry, it is that he too often wrote about Indigenous people in the past and not enough in the present. Perhaps he felt that history is a commons, while the ordinary, private lives of people today were verboten to him. Regardless, his work reads at times as a kind of salvage ethnography, edging dangerously close to reinforcing the falsehood that Indigenous cultures and people are dead, or that their value diminished as they were influenced by modernity. (In one short story, he implies the Mandan were completely “wiped out,” which I imagine would offend the Mandan descendants I know.) Then there is a collection of coyote trickster tales Barry published in 1978, which, though Barry carefully states his intentions at the start of the book, still strikes me as straight up appropriative. 

I will never know why he made these choices or how he felt about them later on. What I do know is that in all his writing about the people he encountered in his lifetime, Barry was respectful, attentive, humble in his awareness of his own fallibility. Desser told me she saw him amend his approach to writing about Indigenous people over time, and his later work reflects this. What remained consistent was his message: That land and people are fundamentally linked, and that a disregard for both could ruin us all. 

 

***

 

He called me a month after the fire, from a house in Eugene where he and Debra were living temporarily. He had finally gone back to the property, he said, and it looked “like a flayed human being.” His voice broke when he said this, and it occurred to me that the fire erased for him the sense of knowing and being known. Then he brightened a little, explaining that a friend who accompanied him had found a bit of tree root, still alive. In the spring, they hoped to replant the forest.

We spoke only once more, a week later, when he asked me the favor. Eight weeks after that, I learned of his death like most everyone else, from the news. 

I never met him. I know he valued my work, but I also know he nurtured many similar, longer friendships, and ours was more significant to me than to him. I suspect Barry first called me to pass along a gift that he once received when he was young from an older, celebrated writer. The writer complimented him “in such a way that you felt you had to continue, and maybe do better just to live up to the implied expectation,” Barry wrote of the encounter. “Here is this person whom I knew but slightly, who in our first meeting found a way to say, with such integrity, I love you.”

I read of this encounter only recently, in Embrace Fearlessly This Burning World. Barry was working on the book when he died, assembling essays that previously appeared in magazines, as well as several yet unpublished. Debra, his wife, helped Desser finish the collection; Rebecca Solnit wrote the introduction. The essays span three decades, revisiting once again the places common throughout Barry’s work—the Arctic and Anarctic; the California of his childhood—but lingering longer than his writing ever has in Finn Rock, Oregon, in the forests of the Cascades, his chosen home. 

The title of the collection comes from an essay he published in Orion the month we met, before the fires, in which Barry asks if it is “still possible to face the gathering darkness and say to the physical Earth, and to all its creatures, including ourselves, fiercely and without embarrassment, I love you, and to embrace fearlessly the burning world?” 

If he had a last word, perhaps it would be this—a question calling from the dark, turning toward the light.  

 

Sierra Crane Murdoch is the author of Yellow Bird: Oil, Murder, and a Woman’s Search for Justice in Indian Country , which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. 

Barry Lopez’s posthumous essay collection, Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World, was published in May by Random House.

Diary, 1995

I’ve always kept diaries in the style of a catch-all notebook: flipping through them reveals poems, dated journal entries, to-do lists, quotes from books, phone numbers, and overheard dialogue. I found this page in the middle of my diary circa freshman year of high school. I was practicing my grown-up-style handwriting and forgery of my mother’s signature in order to excuse myself, and sometimes my friends, from school. I was failing pretty spectacularly to be convincing, at least to my eye now, but as I recall it mostly worked. I was fourteen or fifteen and immensely frustrated that my teachers insisted on droning about mathematics and the branches of government and books by boring straight people when I had my own reading list to attend to, as well as drugs with which I was eager to experiment. At this point, I had already known for some years that I wanted to be a writer. At the end of the year, I would drop out to pursue a different sort of education.

 

Melissa Febos is the author of four books, most recently, Girlhood, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism, and Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative. She is the recipient of awards and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, LAMBDA Literary, the Barbara Deming Foundation, the British Library, and others. She is an associate professor at the University of Iowa.

On the Far Side of Belmullet

Roger, “Fallmore Granite Stone Circle.” Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

En route to a crime scene down back roads in rural Ireland, Sergeant Jackie Noonan briefly flips down her car’s sun visor to check out the sky. “That is some incarnation of sun,” Noonan announces to her fellow officer Pronsius, and though it falls over a landscape where cows “sit down like shelves of rock in the middle of the fields,” she deems it “equatorial.”

     “You know where Guadalajara is, Pronsius?” 

     “Is it the far side of Belmullet?”

Technically, she concedes, it is. A little later when she asks him, “You ever been anywhere exotic, Pronsius?” he replies, “I been the far side of Belmullet.”

The answer satisfies Noonan, who’d prefer to never cross another time zone or pass through another metal detector again—who considers but never splurges on the expensive coffee in the grocery. She will never be exactly content where she is, but would rather find ways to picture the exotic in the local, to imagine rather than reenter the unknown. 

“The far side of Belmullet” is an ideological state that permeates Colin Barrett’s new short story collection, Homesickness, which opens with Noonan’s character, in the story “A Shooting in Rathreedane.” Like the short stories in Barrett’s fine 2014 debut, Young Skins, which were all set in a fictional small town in his native Ireland, the eight that make up Homesickness (all but one of which are also set in rural Ireland) foreground language. That is, the action of the stories proceeds directly from the tensions between the interior and exterior states of its characters, who share variations on the affliction of the collection’s title. This geographical malaise is expressed in lyricism and in dry dialogue, perfectly delivered in a range of hyperlocal articulations of the black humor of marginalized people all over the world. In their natural swings from the darkly comic to the gothic elegiac, Barrett’s stories share some commonality with Tom Drury’s; in their intuitive omissions, Mary Robison’s. At times the characters pointedly admonish each other to condense their speech.

“It so happens I think telling people about your dreams is fine,” Emma tells her friend Ciara in “The Silver Coast,” who is unsurprisingly inept at conveying the details of her ayahuasca ritual in South America to an Irish kitchen table in January, “so long as the account is brief.”

A number of the characters in Homesickness are writers in one way or another, actively defining themselves within the confines of their world, using language to push at its borders. This is also true even of characters least likely to escape their surroundings. When Noonan and Pronsius encounter the son of the alleged shooter on Rathreedane Road, he identifies himself both floridly and defensively: “I’ve no say in it but every cunt that knows me does call me Bubbles.”

Elsewhere, visions of the far side of Belmullet beckon, mirage-like. In “The Ways,” Gerry, reluctantly playing the part of a Yankee ex-mercenary, settles for escaping into the fantasy sunsets of a PlayStation American frontier rendered in Blood Dusk 2. In “The 10,” Danny, a standout soccer player who comes home after failing to secure a league contract, wakes to a screensaver of a “palely glowing green moss … like the surface of an alien planet.” It turns out to be only a lava field in Iceland. Later, when he takes a few drags off a joint while standing in a wind turbine farm, his racing mind sees the field as a mirror of his own dejected state: “The grass shimmered in huge silver chevrons where the coastal winds had rhythmically beaten it down.”

Barrett’s characters must, like short story writers, work within the limitations of form and of place. When Sergeant Noonan drives past a pack of teenage boys in town, she has a seemingly small but perfectly realized observation: “The thing about boys was that they only had the one haircut. That haircut changed every year, but the thing was, they all had it.”

 —Rebecca Bengal
 You can read Rebecca Bengal’s essay on Ellsworth Kelly on the Daily here, and a 2015 interview with Colin Barrett here. 

The Sixties Diaries

My father, Ted Berrigan, is primarily known for his poetry, especially his book The Sonnets, which reimagined the traditional sonnet from a perspective steeped in the art of assemblage circa the early sixties. He was also an editor, a publisher, and a prose writer—specifically one who worked in the forms of journals and reviews. While his later journals were often written with the expectation of publication—meaning the journal-as-form could be assigned by a magazine editor—his sixties journals are much more internal. In these journals, he’s writing to document his daily life and his consciousness while figuring out how to live, and how to live as a poet, so to speak. These excerpts from his journals were originally published in Michael Friedman’s lovingly edited Shiny magazine in 2000. They were selected by the poet and editor Larry Fagin, who invited me to come to Columbia University’s library, where my father’s journals from the early sixties are archived, and work with him on the selection process. We were looking, as I think of it now, for moments of loud or quiet breakthrough—details, incidents, and points of recognition that contributed to his ongoing formation as a person and poet.

“The Chicago Report,” which narrates a weekend trip from Iowa City to Chicago to attend a reading by Kenneth Koch and Anne Sexton put on by Poetry magazine, was written in 1968 in the form of a letter to Ron Padgett, a close friend and fellow poet. It was later published in an issue ofThe World, the Poetry Project’s mimeographed magazine, as well as in Nice To See You, an homage book put together by friends after my father’s death in 1983. It may be recognizable as an affable, freewheeling, and at times incendiary piece of first-person satire, filtering the voice of “Ted Berrigan” through the voice of Ted as known by Ron, or vice versa. My father was a working-class Korean War veteran who didn’t feel comfortable in high-class literary circles but did engage them at times, with amusement and a kind of gentle predilection for disruption. 

—Anselm Berrigan

January 1961

Whatever is going to happen is already happening.

—Whitehead, Aims of Ed.

 

Sunday, February 5

I suppose this situation is revealing concerning the kind of person I am: at my brother Rick’s wedding yesterday, four of my aunts, all about 15 yrs older than I, began to question me about why I am no longer a Catholic. Two of them were very antagonistic; they seemed to be personally offended by my beard and my disaffiliation from the Church. I tried to answer their questions intelligently, but in everything I said I actually had the secret but entirely conscious idea in mind of impressing my beautiful, shy, wide-eyed 14-yr-old cousin, dtr of one of the aunts, who was also sitting in the group.

 

February 6

At moments when things seem to crystallize for me, when life comes together for a minute, when what I am sensing, thinking, reading, ties together for a magic moment of unity, along with the instant desire I have to tell Chris [Murphy], or Marge [Kepler], or the beautiful girl I met yesterday somewhere, comes the simultaneous thought that I am the only one who can know what I mean. My girls must be real—not symbols.

 

[undated]

Ron [Padgett] & Harry [Diakov] & I forged a prescription for Desoxyn. Harry stole it from the Columbia dispensary, Ron wrote it out, and I took it to the drug store & had it filled. No trouble.

The pills are like Dex & Bennies, less after effects than Bennies. They make me nervous, awake, “high” if I allow myself to get out of control.

Great to take them, go to movies, pour over the movie like a poem or book … Makes for total involvement with a consciousness of it.

 

March 4

Heard Allen Ginsberg read last night at the Catholic Worker Hdqtrs in the Bowery. The reading was on the 2nd floor of the Newspaper office, in a kind of loft. The place was jammed, nearly 150 or 200 there. Ginsberg wore levi’s and a plaid shirt, anda grey suitcoat. His hair is thinning on top, and he is getting a little paunchy. He wore thick black rimmed glasses, and looked very Jewish. He is good looking, intellectual appearing, and was quiet and reserved, with a humorous glint in his eyes.

He read Kaddish, a long poem about his family and the insanity of his mother. It was a very good poem, and a brilliant reading. Ginsberg reads very well, writes a very moving driving line; and the poem contained much dialogue. Ginsberg seems to have a perfect ear for speech rhythm. The poem was based on Jewish Prayers and was very impressive in sections, with a litany-like refrain.

There was much humor in the reading, much pathos, and all in all, it was the most remarkable reading I’ve ever heard, very theatrical, yet very natural. Ginsberg was poised and assured, like a Jazz musician who knows he’s good. At the end someone asked him what meter the Poem was in and he replied, Promethean Natural Meter.

*

Sitting alone in Ron’s room at Columbia.

I make a vow—I will try even harder from now on to be a realist. To see. To penetrate the Personae of the world. To be in harmony with my will. To fully develop both my ability for practical reason, and for speculative reason, the methodologies of the tripartite will.

 

Tuesday, March 6

… It was one of those nights when it was good to be alive. I had slept all day. Started working at ten. At four I went out for Coffee. The heat goes off in our place at 12, and stays off until six. But it wasn’t too bad last night. It was raining slightly outside and the air was cool as I walked through the dirty, empty streets in the Bowery, to the all-night Cafe, a half mile away. My mind was full of thoughts about my thesis, about Hobbes four-fold division of Philosophy, about writing to [Dick] Gallup discussing his plans for the next yr. of coming to school here, of Pat getting my letter, of getting a job, enrolling in school, and many others. It struck me that I was happy. Everything, for a brief moment, was amalgamating, and had purpose—

Those moments are rare for me. Much of the moment can be attributed to Desoxyn. I take one or two a day, work fifteen or sixteen hours, reading, typing, planning. And Desoxyn keep[s] me alert, and keep[s] my weight down—in the face of my starchy diet—But it was a spontaneous feeling nevertheless. Even recalling my days in Tulsa, the days in 1959 when I nearly broke down, did not dampen it.

 

March 13, 9 P.M.

. . . While in Providence [in 1959], doing nothing except reading, writing bad poems, and brooding, I slowly came to the conclusion that the best thing I could do in life was to strive for saintliness—that is, to try to be kind to everyone, to hurt no one, to be humble, and to be as much help to people as I cd, by being sympathetic, a listener, a friend. This attitude was brought on by my observation of everyone’s unhappiness.

 

Excerpt from “The Chicago Report”

THIRD DAY

Sunday afternoon. I wake up at 3. Tired, but feeling good. Smoke some chesterfields, turn on the tv. Detroit is playing Baltimore.
                                                                        The motel restaurant is too expensive. So, we pack our things, smoke the last of the pot, and check out. 
                                                                                               Taxi to the bus station, and put our things in a big locker.
                                         Digging the streets. Dig the Picasso sculpture. Dig WIMPY’S, where we dig the cheeseburgers. Henry says, “They have WIMPY’S in Paris and London, too. I saw them.”

          Then we dig the streets some more, dig the people, and dig the postcard scene.
                                                                                                                                              Then, into another taxi, and off to Paul Carroll’s. We debate whether or no to take the acid now. Before dinner, or after dinner? After. OK.

                                                                At Paul’s Henry kisses the hostess, and we have a delicious dinner, with fellow guests Jim Tate, the Yale Younger Poet for 1967, and Dennis Scmitz, the Big Table Prize Poet for 1969. Dennis Schmitz has the flu and can’t eat. Paul Carroll is warm & friendly in his inimitable manner, and I kind of have a good time. His apt. is nice, roomy, lots of painting and photos and books and green plants and light. His wife is terrific, I finally decide.
          Jim Tate I like, but could easily not.
          So, dinner gets finished, and its off to the University of Chicago, to hear the two poets of dinner read. Henry and I secretly decide to take the acid. We do.
          Paul introduces the poets. They read. Tate isn’t bad, but not that good. He’s wild ok, but wild academic, which is only mildly interesting. Dennis Schmitz is ok, but his poetry is boring. We wait for the acid to hit us, and eye the girls. I think of Tony Walters. There is only one beautiful girl, a soft blonde girl with a purple dress.
          The reading gets over, we start for a party. We will have to leave soon, to catch a 12:30 bus to Iowa City.
          The acid hits. Totally freaked out but maintaining a calm exterior, I enter the little apt where the party is. Woolworth’s furniture, no interesting paintings, everybody shy, not too many people, wine. I have some wine and bread, sit in a chair, a big easy chair, smoke a chesterfield.
          Henry heads straight for the beautiful girl in the purple dress. I lose track of him. I am suspended between an acid trip and a party. I drop the burning end of my cigarette into the depths of the chair. I try to put it out. I think Isucceed, but just in case, I move over to the couch. Hundreds of hours pass. Henry and the girl disappear. I drink some wine,most of the people have gone into other rooms. A young kinky blonde girl about 17 comes and talks to me. I mention Korea, and she says, “I wasn’t even born then.” I say, terrific.
          I notice people are carrying cups of water over and pouring them into the chair. Very interesting. It seems to be smouldering. I hear someone say “. . . don’t know how it happened.” I forget it.
          Paul Carroll comes over and says, ride downtown? I say, what time? He says, 11:45. I say, ok. Then I say to Jim Tate: Tell Henry, Bus. He says ok.
                                                                                                               We go. The ride downtown is sensational, I take millions of rich warm side trips. After years we get to the bus station and have the Irish goodbye scene. I can hardly keep from bursting out laughing.
                                                                                                                  Then, into the bus station. Inside, its horrible. I shudder, and begin to feel a little sick, a little lost, a little scared, a little crazy.
                                                                                                                                              In my back pocket are postcards. I think: mail. It takes me hours to get the stamps but I do, lick them, & then go outside and mail the cards. Then I know I am a great competent guy, just a soldier on leave in a strange city like lots of other times and nothing to fear. But Chicago faces are ugly.
          I cross the street outside the bus station in the rain, and go to contemplate the Picasso sculpture. By now I am tired (tho I wasnt then) so I will not go into the incredible things I had happen in my art brain there. Then, back to the bus station, Henry arrives,zonked, but happy to see me.
          We buy tickets, and have 15 cents left. Get bags, get on bus.
          Long interesting mild & thoughtful bus trip to Iowa City, to arrive at 6 a.m. Monday morn- ing, disturbed only once pleasantly when Henry got off bus and bought us M&M’s.
          Iowa City. I get off, shake hands with Henry, say, see you later, I’m going home. He grins and say, see you, I’m going into the bus station and this beautiful girl I met on the bus here is going to buy me coffee.
                                                                                                               See you.
                                                                                          Love,
                                                                                                                                   Ted

 

Ted Berrigan (1934–1983) was a leading force behind the second-generation of the New York School. His books of poetry include The Sonnets, A Certain Slant of Sunlight, and The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan.

City Lights Books will publish Get the Money! Collected Prose (1961-1983), from which these selections are drawn, in September. 

Anselm Berrigan’s most recent book is Pregrets. He is the poetry editor for The Brooklyn Rail, and the editor of What Is Poetry? (Just Kidding, I Know You Know): Interviews from The Poetry Project Newsletter 1983-2009.