Impossible Owls: Essays

by Brian Phillips

The Next Generation awakened in me a feeling of serious, almost overwhelming yearning, that suffocating childish escape wish that’s the wake of a certain type of fantasy. That feeling that in a different world you’d be yourself.

K. Rowling’s books exerted magnetic power over every sentient creature on earth is that they resolved, indeed fused, a cultural contradiction. She took the aesthetic of old-fashioned English boarding-school life and placed it at the center of a narrative about political inclusiveness. You get to keep the scarves, the medieval dining hall, the verdant lawns, the sense of privilege (you’re a wizard, Harry), while not only losing the snobbery and racism but actually casting them as the villains of the series. It’s the Slytherins and Death Eaters who have it in for Mudbloods, not Harry and his friends, Hogwarts’ true heirs. What results is an absolutely bonkers subliminal reconfiguration of basically the entire cultural heritage of England—and thus the backstory of much of the modern world. It’s as if Rowling remakes a thousand-year-old national tradition into something that’s (a) totally unearned but (b) also way better than the original. Of course it electrified people.

You could say, roughly, that the Enterprise crew is conservative as a matter of method and liberal as a matter of objective.

I have no idea whether the heroic (but responsible!) individualism of the Enterprise crew is a relic, a quaint throwback that was already being assimilated by the Internet while Star Trek was busy articulating it, or whether the type of humanism Captain Picard represents can survive the transition to online culture more intact than TNG wants us to think. Part of me desperately wants to believe the latter. What I’m certain of, though, is this: I am Locutus of Borg. Resistance is futile. And—another part of me wants to add—oh, God, make it

Stability, tradition, the repetition of symbolic gestures, the preservation in politics of an identity with roots sunk in myth: These are advantages monarchy offers over more republican forms of democracy. In the United States, for instance, the election of each new president occasions panic and fury from the losing side, because the question of what the nation is, how the nation is to be imagined, is forever an open one. It is possible to go to sleep in a country in which one believes and wake up in a country one no longer recognizes. To her subjects, she offers herself as a check against paroxysm, as a continuity. This symbolism has limited efficacy, perhaps, but it has efficacy, and over a long time its influence is enormous. An empire or an island, in Europe or out, what we are is to be found not in a party or a manifesto but in the cohort of things that last.

time since anything so exciting had happened

The Post’s article appeared on November 22, 1958. The cover art for the issue was Norman Rockwell’s painting Den into Nursery. The lead feature was a profile of Yul Brynner, whose Technicolor remake of The Buccaneer, costarring Charlton Heston as Andrew Jackson, was about to open in theaters. The story about Lydie, “Where Is Lyde Marland?,” began on page 19. It continued, with a couple of jumps deeper into the issue, for six densely set pages. The writer, John Kobler, later produced a well-regarded biography of Al Capone,

but in 1958 he was known mostly for lurid, gossipy true-crime stories; he’d published two collections of middlebrow micro-noirs under the titles Afternoon in the Attic and Some Like It Gory. His tone in discussing Lydie’s disappearance keeps to this wink-wink, imitation-Hitchcock vein, playing up a smirking sordidness for a readership of middle-class voyeurs.

She had a statue, she told him, that she wanted to have destroyed. The statue depicted her, Lydie, as the young woman she’d been in the mid-1920s, when a famous artist had traveled from Paris to sculpt her. The monument worker’s name was Glen Gilchrist. She told him to smash the face

first. She watched as he did so. Then she told him to dispose of the rest. Gilchrist hauled the remains to his own land, where he buried them north of his barn. He told no one outside his family. The fragments were buried on Gilchrist’s property in 1953, when Lydie fled from Ponca City, and they were still buried there twenty-two years later, when she came back.

The ranch is the real center of the region. It’s owned by the three Miller brothers, Joe, Zack, and George junior, and it’s famous for more than just its size: It’s also the home of the 101 Ranch Wild West Show, a traveling extravaganza that in the course of its history will employ a young Tom Mix and an elderly Geronimo. (Geronimo’s act involves shooting a bison from the front seat of a car.)

leaping from horseback onto the back of a running steer, biting the steer’s upper lip to subdue it, and wrestling it to the ground. That year, 1908, the show will tour Europe, where in Germany some of its performers, a group of Oglala Sioux, will be arrested as Serbian spies. Mathews writes,

What we’re watching here, in other words, is not only the end of the West. It’s the West memorializing itself, performing itself in the moment of its own ending. There are real cowboys in New Ponca, but one of the ways to make a living as a cowboy now is to become a “cowboy”—to pretend to do, for a crowd, the thing you actually do. There are Indians still living in traditional ways on tribal lands near town, and the region itself is one of the nation’s great hubs of Native American heritage—mostly for tragic reasons, but still—yet the Indians who play “Indians” for the 101 are arguing with the Millers about their overtime pay. The citizens of the town are living out an authentic drama of frontier settlement; at the same time, silent film studios are already cranking out Westerns, and the citizens know this, and have seen them. The point being: This was an exceptionally fertile

Here she is in a stylish dress, striking a comical pose on the veranda. Here she is holding a horse by the bridle, grinning hugely, with her riding hat pulled down over her eyes. Yet her friends later remembered her as somehow reserved, shy in a way that was hard to identify, as if some part of her were always hanging back to observe her own experience from the outside. As if she were consciously testing the fabric of the romance to see if it would

* In my parents’ house in Oklahoma City, there is a painting

She spent her life trying to find things out. Only I think that somehow she could never get the picture to make sense, could never quite locate the key that would resolve the fragments of her reading and experience into a comprehensible whole. The shocks were too great. The surveillance was too terrifying. The changes were too immense.

This was one of the times when I made something up in order to seem understandable.

fact I had not cried when my grandparents drowned. In fact I had not even felt sad when my grandparents drowned, at least not in the way I understood the word. What I felt was something else, a big, loose, empty feeling, and the right words for it didn’t seem to come from the language of emotions at all. I didn’t think I was wrong to feel this way, exactly. But I sensed that in some way it was a wrong answer, an answer that lay outside the interpretive paradigm we were meant to be working within, so without really thinking about it I told the therapist a story I thought he would know how to explain.

The first time I encountered the statue, in the mansion’s foyer, I came close enough to see the pale lines crisscrossing Lydie’s white stone face where the sledgehammer struck it. I tried not to notice them. The hopes I had invested in the mansion, which I saw, impossibly, both as a means of escape and as a power capable of bringing lost things back, made it seem unwise, almost rude, to notice them. You see I was still so young that I thought I should be looking at the statue. I should have been looking at the cracks.