This book is the story of the cell. It is a chronicle of the discovery that all organisms, including humans, are made of these “elementary particles.” It’s a story of how cooperative, organized accumulations of these autonomous living units – tissues, organs, and organ systems – enable profound forms of physiology: immunity, reproduction, sentience, cognition, repair, and rejuvenation. Conversely, it is the story of what happens when cells become dysfunctional, tipping our bodies from cellular physiology into cellular pathology-the malfunctioning of cells precipitating the malfunction of the body. And finally, it is a story about how our deepening understanding of cellular physiology and pathology has sparked a revolution in biology and medicine, leading to the birth of transformational medicines, and of human beings transformed by these medicines.
I confess, I’m a biology nerd. One off my most crammed-full bookshelves holds books on medicine, from a 1992 Merck Manual to everything Oliver Sacks, Berton Roueché, and Harold Klawans wrote to all the how-I-became-a-doctor books to terminal-illness memoirs to forensic pathologist tell-alls. Of the 40-odd science moocs I’ve taken, more than 30 were bio: biochem, anatomy, physiology, molecular biology, immunology, etc. etc. So this book was a dream come true: a review of nearly all of it, from the first microscopists discovering cells to the components of blood to how muscles contract to IVF and COVID and genetic engineering.
As with many general readership books about science – in the vein of Ed Yong’s An Immense World, which I read earlier this year – the book combines science information with stories about their discovery.
Mukherjee takes us briefly through the founding years of the discipline. How did these scientists figure out how cells work? The cell membrane was a puzzle: the cell has to communicate with the rest of the organism, but how? Thus were discovered pumps and channels and receptors: “Porosity, in short, represents an essential feature of life – but also an essential vulnerability of living.” Where did cells come from? One of the earliest tenets declared, “all cells come from cells,” and that led to embryology.
Mostly, scientists cooperated. Matthais Schleiden and Theodor Schwann added to François-Vincent Raspail’s tenets of cell theory (“each cell selects from its surrounding milieu, taking only what it needs”) and founded the field of cell biology. Rudolf Virchow added what is a central point of the book: all pathology is cellular pathology. But that isn’t to say there were conflicts, as in the story of the anatomy professor murdered in 1642, possibly over a credit-sharing dispute regarding the recently discovered pancreatic duct: “I cannot think of another murder incited by a duct,” writes Mukherjee.
One of the sections I found most interesting was on homeostasis, the body’s drive to keep things stable, predominantly via the kidneys, liver, pancreas, and brain. Mukherjee takes us through what happens when we have lunch, thus disturbing our balance of water, salt, and sugar:
The concept of homeostasis (the word is derived from the Greek words homeo and stasis, loosely meaning “related to stillness”) was first described by the French physiologist Claude Bernard in the 1870s and further developed by the Harvard University physiologist Walter Cannon in the 1930s.
For generations before Bernard and Cannon, physiologists had described animals as assemblages of machines, sums of dynamic parts. Muscles were motors; the lungs a pair of bellows, the heart a pump. Pulsing, swiveling, pumping; physiology’s emphasis was on movement, on actions, on work. Don’t just stand there, do something.
Bernard inverted that logic. “La fixité du milieu intérieur est la condition de la vie libre, indépendante“: the constancy of the interior environment is the condition of free and independent life, Bernard wrote in 1878. In shifting physiology’s focus from action to the maintenance of fixity, Bernard changed our conception of how an organism’s body works. A major point of physiological “activity,” paradoxically, was to enable stasis. Don’t just do something, stand there.
While the clear explanation is from his ability as a scientist and teacher, that reversal is the mark of a storyteller.
Our immune system is also explored in some depth. The book was partly written during the early part of the COVID epidemic, so it features prominently, but so does HIV and cancer, Mukherjee’s primary field of research. Some of his passages are highly emotional: his despair over the frequent failures of the first bone marrow transplants, his narratives of beloved colleagues he’s lost along the way.
He doesn’t veer away from the mistakes science has made along the way: a researcher who overstepped and used genetic modifications inappropriately (and went to jail for it), attitudes that are slowly being revised:
The paper by Edwards, Steptoe, and Bavister, “Early Stages of Fertilization in Vitro of Human Oocytes Matured in Vitro,” was published in the journal Nature in 1969. Unfortunately, Jean Purdy, who had performed the experiment, was not credited, consistent with the conventional practice of cutting women out of science. Later, both Edwards and Steptoe made several attempts to acknowledge her contributions, for IVF was born in Purdy’s hands. In the lab, she created the first human embryo produced through IVF; in the hospital, she would later cradle the first IVF baby. In 1985, she died of melanoma at just thirty-nine years of age, never able to fully garner the scientific recognition due to her.
The title of the book comes from two directions. In an interview at the Jaipur Literature Festival, Mukherjee uses the metaphor of an orchestra: just as two orchestras can play very different music though they have the same instruments played by the same musicians, so cells can serve different functions and have different structures though they have the same genome. It’s all a matter of the score and director, which in cellular terms, translates to the complex topic of gene regulation: biochemical signals that encourage production of one protein while discouraging another.
But it’s in the book itself that he reveals his key metaphor:
In his 2021 book on ecology and climate, The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis, Amitav Ghosh recounts the story of an eminent professor of botany who accompanies a young man from a local village to guide him through a rain forest. The young man is able to identify each of the various plant species. His acumen stuns the professor, who compliments him on his knowledge. But the man is dejected. He “nods and replies with downcast eyes. ‘Yes, I’ve learned the names of all the bushes, but I’ve yet to learn the songs.'”
Many readers might read the word song as metaphorical. But in my reading, it’s far from a metaphor. What the young man laments is that he hasn’t learned the interconnectedness of the individual inhabitants of the rain forest – their ecology interdependence – how the forest acts and lives as a whole. A “song” can be both an internal message – a hum – and, equally, an external one: a message sent out from one being to another to signal interconnectedness and cooperativity (songs are often sung together, or to one another). We can name cells, and even systems of cells, but we are yet to learn the songs of cell biology.
This is Mukherjee’s fourth book. I overlooked his books on cancer (The Emperor of All Maladies) and genetics (The Gene: An Intimate History), and his lecture-turned-pamphlet The Laws of Medicine. I must correct these oversights.
Symposium scene: fresco, north wall of the Tomb of the Diver (Paestum, Italy, c. 475 BC).
In fact, your question does not find me unprepared. Just the other day, as it happens, I was walking to the city from my home in Phaleron when a man I know, who was making his way behind me, saw
me and called from a distance:
“The gentleman from Phaleron!” he yelled, trying to be funny. “Hey, Apollodorus, wait!”
So I stopped and waited.
“Apollodorus, I’ve been looking for you!” he said. “You know there once was a gathering at Agathon’s when Socrates, Alcibiades, and their friends had dinner together; I wanted to ask you about the speeches they made on Love. What were they? I heard a version from a man who had it from Phoenix, Philip’s son, but it was badly garbled, and he said you were the one to ask. So please, will you tell me all about it? After all, Socrates is your friend – who has a better right than you to report his conversation?
About thirty years ago – pre-internet, if you can imagine that – I saw a silly rom-com titled The Butcher’s Wife. The particulars aren’t important, but there’s a scene in which a country bumpkin and a New York psychiatrist bond over the story that people were once bound together in twos, then split-apart, giving us all the urge to find our lost halves. When the naif is shocked that someone else knows the story her grandmother told her, he tells her, “Everybody knows it. It’s Plato. A corruption, but Plato nonetheless.”
I found that odd. In spite of the fact that this guy thinks “everybody” knows Plato, I didn’t know much about Plato – I’d read the Cave thing and some assorted excerpts in college, I don’t think I’d even read Sophie’s World yet – and from what I did know, he seemed too rational to believe something so fanciful. It’s one thing to propose a plane of existence above ours with ideal forms, and another to change biology. But I didn’t know what to do about it.
At some point I encountered some article that indicated this split-apart theory, as I thought of it thanks to Demi Moore, was indeed part of Plato’s corpus, but he’d had it relayed via Aristophanes, a comic dramatist he didn’t particularly respect and who’d written a play ridiculing Socrates. This was Plato’s way of making the idea, and the playwright, seem ridiculous.
That was my first exposure to Plato’s Symposium.
It took me thirty years to read the actual work. And that, friends, is one of the primary benefits to me of the Catherine Project – it gets me to read stuff instead of reading about stuff.
Granted, I didn’t sign up for the Spring Seminar (a one-session group read) only because of that. I’d just finished a Reading Group that included Xenophon’s Symposium, and I was curious to compare the two. That was an interesting exercise as well: whereas Xenophon’s work started out crystal clear and then befuddled me with recursive speeches requiring remembering what a half-dozen people said a few pages ago (my doctor keeps telling me I don’t have any memory problems, and I keep trying to convince her otherwise), Plato starts of in an absolute fog of recursion concerning who is relating the story and who told them before settling down into an orderly progression of individual speeches about love.
I brought up that fuzzy beginning, quoted above – yes, it starts in the middle of a conversation – in the Seminar. While the possibility that some piece has been lost to antiquity can’t be ruled out, there was the feeling that it was a deliberate way to emphasize that philosophy itself is an ongoing conversation. Readers also mentioned it fits with the search for Truth: the person inquiring has a distorted view of what happened, and is driven by a love of the good and beautiful to improve his view.
The primary topic of both Symposiums is Love. The myth related by Aristophanes is intended to explain why we so desperately seek out our perfect match. Most of the speeches, given by a mixed group of Athens gentlemen, try to define love, and its importance in our lives: it makes us courageous, harmonizes our conflicting aspects, is the source of virtue. But the star of the discussion belongs to Socrates, who tells of a discussion he had with the prophetess Diotima long ago: the Ladder of Love, in which lust, love of the beautiful body, is a kind of practice in developing love of the beautiful soul, then love of beautiful institutions, and, eventually, for those who are able to keep learning, love of Beauty itself.
The group discussed many aspects of this piece over two hours. It’s unusual that Socrates had taken to heart the view of a woman, since women were, shall we say, not particularly respected in ancient Athens. In fact, the love being discussed was between men; while men had wives with which to create more Athenians, the important relationships were male and were something like mentoring with benefits. Among the more interesting points was the role of love as the mediator between man and the gods, a way to come closer to divine perfection.
In my preparation for the group, I also found a long-ago lecture – one of many on Youtube by the recently deceased Columbia professor Michael Sugrue – which further tied together structure and meaning, He shows the zigzagging of the discussion from the ridiculous to the sublime: Aristophanes’ hiccups interrupt a beautiful speech on love as mediator of our conflicting passions, and Alcibiades, the Bad Boy of Athens, comes stumbling in right as Socrates finishes his impassioned plea for climbing love’s ladder and hits on him, claiming he loves the beautiful soul of the ugly philosopher. This inability to live up to one’s potential seems to be a common problem with humanity, one we deal with in every era.
It’s through Alcibiades, however, that I feel a renewed need to delve into the history of Athens with more deliberation, as it plays out in every aspect of writing, both philosophical and dramatic. I again made up a quick-and-dirty Timeline of the important events, which include both Symposiums and, to the degree I can, the career of Alcibiades:
Aristophanes wrote The Clouds in 423 BCE
Xenophon’s Symposium took place in 422 BCE
Alcibiades made general for the first time 420 BCE
The Symposium itself, celebrating Agathon’s winning of the prize for his first play, would have occurred (if it occurred at all) in 416 BCE
Mutilation of the Herms 415 BCE blamed on Alcibiades; he denied it but skipped to Sparta
Alcibiades lived with Tissaphernes (Persia) then in 412 deserted Sparta and was welcomed back to Athens.
Athens lost the Peloponnesian war and banished Alcibiades in 405 BCE.
Alcibiades was murdered in Phrygia in 404 BCE.
The account of the Symposium given by Apollodorus – the “action” of the envelope of the story – is set between 406 and 400 BCE
Plato wrote The Symposium between 385 BCE and 378 BCE
Xenophon wrote his Symposium in approx. late 360s BCE
I have a lot of work to do to fill this in and, specifically, to better understand how Alcibiades was viewed at the time of the party verses when the story was recalled – and, for that matter, the time when Plato wrote it. A lot happened in between those three moments.
This summer, however, I’m detouring to the Middle Ages in my Catherine Project participation; I hope to go back to 400 BCE next Fall. I believe Socrates, and the rest of them, will be patient and wait.
– The English understand wool.
My mother sat on a small sofa in our suite at Claridge’s, from which the television had been removed at her request. She held in her lap a bolt of very beautiful handloomed tweed which she had brought back from the Outer Hebrides. She had in fact required only a few metres for a new suit.
I use the word “suit” because I am writing in English, but the French tailleur – she would naturally think of clothes in French – makes intelligible that one would travel from Marrakech to the Outer Hebrides to examine the work of a number of weavers, perhaps to establish a relationship with a weaver of real gifts. It makes intelligible that one would bring one’s daughter, so that she might develop an eye for excellence in the fabric, know the marks of workmanship of real quality, observe how one develops an understanding with a craftsman of talent. The word “suit,” I think, makes this look quite mad.
My admiration for Helen DeWitt only continues to grow. Look what she’s managed to do in just sixty-two pages: It’s a captivating story, written in a way that maximizes surprise; and without sacrificing drama or humor, delivers on the themes central to DeWitt’s work: uncompromising aesthetics/ethics, nontraditional education, and the treachery of (much of) the publishing world.
I’m tempted to go through the book, writing about what caught me on each page, each subtle phrasing, each twist – but, alas, to discuss the details would be mauvais ton, spoiling the delight the reader feels in encountering surprise, revelation, depth, nuance, on their own. And so I’m going to take a different approach: with a brief overview, I’ll stick to the themes and motifs I’ve mentioned above. To see how they are executed, and how they impact one’s reading, you’ll just have to read the book.
Surprise: Let’s start with the physical book itself. The text is short-story length, and has been published as part of the Storybook ND series from New Directions Publishing. Featuring eight selections at present, the collection “aims to deliver the pleasure one felt as a child reading a marvelous book from cover to cover in an afternoon.” In his review for The Millions, Ryan Lackey mentions “[t]hey remind me of the Little Golden Books;” yes, exactly! That was my first thought when I finally had the book in my hands (it was sold out for months after Ann Patchett talked about it in her Tiktok series): it looks like a kid’s book from the 60s: hard, glossy cover, small size, a total of 72 pages, 62 of which is story text.
But don’t worry; there’s enough in those 62 pages to keep a reader occupied. Obsessed, even.
In briefest terms, it’s the story of a young girl who, having been raised in a rather extraordinary way up to the age of seventeen, encounters a life-changing surprise. It’s about how she handles that change, and how she handles the pressures others, wishing to capitalize for themselves on it, place upon her.
“I was conscious, above all, of extreme anxiety not to be guilty of mauvais ton.”
Ah, so you see, I did not suddenly acquire a French fetish when I used the term above; I had my reasons. Mauvais ton appears repeatedly throughout the book. The French phrase, the reverse of bon ton, is typically translated as “bad taste.” However, the publisher site indicates that the phrases “loses something in the translation” and some sources imply a breach of etiquette or protocol, or vulgarity.
What this opens up for me – particularly in how the story plays out – is that there is this melding of aesthetics and morality. Now, I may be sensitized to this having just encountered it in connection with Elif Batuman’s The Idiot, but consider how Maman uses the term mauvais ton: she takes her annual six-week tour of Europe during Ramadan since “it would be mauvais ton to be waited on by persons who were fasting”; she pays her household staff for that period, including a two week posts-Eid recovery period, because “it would be mauvais ton to make the exigencies of religion an excuse to curtail their salaries.” She has an electronic keyboard installed in her London hotel room – replacing the removed television – because “it would be mauvais ton to inflict one’s music on persons who have expressed no desire to hear it….” This view of taste goes well beyond proper tailoring; it might be considered courtesy, taking others into consideration; that is, morality by other means.
It so happens this is a motif in DeWitt’s The Last Samurai as well. Sybella’s aesthetics are her morality, and are the tenets by which she raises her son Ludo so he will be able to recognize – and despise – artifice and shallowness when he meets his father. The question is whether this goes too far. In Maman’s case, her view seem to be a bit milder, though she’s clearly conveyed a similar worldview to Marguerite.
That too is a similarity; both novels focus on the education of children. In Samurai, the child Ludo was the instigator, taking an interest in reading Greek when he was four; his mother merely cooperated, and it grew from there. In Wool, Maman seems (since we never hear from her directly, and can only surmise based on Marguerite’s description of her actions) to be preparing the girl for a particular way of living, one fitting someone with more money than is good for anyone. Marguerite learns bridge, tennis, horsemanship, piano, and apparently learns them all quite well. Whether she learns algebra, history, or literature is uncertain, though it becomes very clear that she is a fine practical logician, an astute judge of character and behavior, and she knows how to read. I don’t say that last part lightly: I mean, she really knows how to read. And what. And when.
She also learns something we might think of as privacy. Encouraged, after the surprise in the book, to be more forthcoming about her feelings, particularly the juicy dark negative feelings she might naturally be having, she conducts a little experiment. She visits a high-end members-only club and displays her talents at bridge; on being invited to a party given by another member, she livens things up by playing the piano, and receives more invitations.
I did not think they would have given me invitations if I had been talking about my feelings instead of dressing with éclat and playing bridge with flair and playing the piano when a party was off to a dull start. So perhaps there were people who would like to hear about feelings, but I did not think they were people I would want to know.
As someone who is more prone to leaking feelings all over, I couldn’t follow this lead, but it does seem to work for her. I can hear DeWitt’s voice in there, responding when editors kept insisting, she make changes, major and minor, to Samurai. Had she listened, I would not be writing this now, because they would have turned it from a master work into a run-of-the-mill novel, probably about feelings.
And that brings us to my final point. DeWitt has had some of the worst publishing luck in history. Beyond editors who wanted to dumb her down, there were publishers who couldn’t handle the work, either. And the piece de resistance, a publisher who went out of business in a way that trapped Samurai in out-of-print purgatory for over a decade while reader demand grew, then slipped away.
This book is, perhaps, more than anything, a slap in the face of publishing. That may seem strange, given that a book must be published, but New Directions is the publisher that rescued her. If this is all new information, you might want to take a look at Lee Konstantinou’s wonderful bookThe Last Samurai Reread, which takes a close look at how Samurai reflects what she went through to get it published.
And so we come to the core plot of the book, a struggle between a writer and a publisher who isn’t above dangling threats of financial disaster to get the book she wants.
The French understand wine, cheese, bread.
The Belgians understand chocolate.
The Italians understand coffee and ice cream.
The Germans understand precision, machines. (She in fact kept a Porsche in Paris.)
The Swiss understand discretion.
The Arabs understand honor, which embraces generosity and hospitality.
When I speak of these forms of understanding I do not mean that they are instantiated in every individual of a nation, a culture…. It is as if certain qualities flourish in certain social conjunctions. Who can say why an English tailor knows what to do with Scottish tweed? If you explain yourself to him he will be able to understand.
So if you do business with an Arab, oh, of course, you can haggle over a brace of partridges in the street. But if it’s a matter of importance, you might spend many hours drinking mint tea talking of other things. You wait until each has decided whether he is dealing with someone he can trust. If there is no trust, there is no point in signing a piece of paper. This they understand.
If you deal with people who don’t understand that, be very careful about what it says on a piece of paper.
How that plays out may not be totally realistic – the whole book skates at the boundaries of realism – and might easily be challengeable in a court of law, but is nonetheless a joy to read. If they ever make a movie of this, there will be cheering for a seventeen-year-old who refuses to descend into maivais ton, even for a couple of million dollars.
DeWitt’s characters aren’t always likeable, or even understandable. We may not agree with them; we may think they’re downright wrong. But they make their way in the world nonetheless, and there’s always something to admire in them, if only their stubbornness. She has admitted, in a Vulture interview about Samurai, that she doesn’t understand this insistence readers – and editors – have about loving a character or a book:
But in some ways DeWitt has the bullshit of the publishing world nailed. “I don’t know,” she said, “how to deal with a world where there’s this language of infatuation that people use. ‘Well, I didn’t fall in love with the book.’ Or: ‘I fell in love with the book!’ ‘Infatuated!’ ‘Besotted!’ ‘Obsessed!’ I’m not sure that that has ever been my attitude toward any text. Throwing around this language is really a way of denying the mechanics of attachment. You hear this all the time: If they don’t fall in love with it the first time, that’s it. Well, that’s a psychological issue. Look, I sometimes think I have Asperger’s syndrome. I’m really bad at people’s emotional investment in things.” She compared editors who don’t respond to rational arguments about a book to Thrasymachus, Callicles, and Gorgias — sophists who sulk whenever Socrates frustrates their conventional arguments.
“Publishing Can Break Your Heart”, an interview with Christian Lorentzen, available online at Vulture
With apologies to DeWitt, I love this book; that is, I have a strong emotional attachment, but that’s because it does such a good job of limning the themes she’s already expanded on in Samurai, in a very different setting.
And it does something else as well. Wool encourages us all to get some sense of what it is to understand things – wool, cheese, legal deals – and to gain some understanding of our own. In the same way Ludo, in Samurai, came to understand what was and was not of value in a father, and how he could best help his mother, at the same time, Marguerite comes to know who she is, and what she has that is of value to her, if not to a publisher wanting yet another bleeding-heart tell-all. Marguerite – who, by the way, had another name, a name not revealed to us, a fascinating detail I hadn’t realized until I read Heather Cass White’s review of the book in the Times Literary Supplement (UK) – knows the value of her education, and doesn’t judge her experience as a tragedy but a blessing. She could cry like a rainstorm and howl at the wind over what she’s lost, or she can look at what she was given, and carry on. Whether she’s made the right choice is not for us to decide.
And that’s another interesting twist to this tiny little book: it’s as if there are a couple of other novels hovering in the ether around it, the before and the after. DeWitt could have made this another doorstop of a novel, including those elements. She chose not to. She didn’t want to explore feelings; she wanted to deliver a surgical strike at the heart of her relationship with the publishing industry, and she did a superb job of it. We can enter into the fictional world and create our own novels, if we wish. Or we can just enjoy what we’re given, and carry on.
On this spot one afternoon in the tenth century, three hundred years before the teahouse was built and our story began, a Taoist priest and a Buddhist nun were strolling together and came upon a beggar. Filthy and poor, he lay by the side of the road and called out to them, “Come over here. I am dying. I have only this legacy to leave.” The beggar was waving something and the Taoist priest and the Buddhist nun moved closer to see what it was.
“Look,” said the beggar, “it is a piece of the very silk with which the emperor bade a dancing girl swaddle her feet that they might look like the points of the moon sickle. She then danced in the center of a six-foot lotus fashioned out of gold and decorated with jewels.” The beggar fell backward, exhausted by his tale, and gasped for breath. The Taoist priest and the Buddhist nun examined The dirty, bloody, ragged scrap of cloth and glanced at each other with great skepticism.
“Ah yes. It is an interesting way to step from Existence into Nonexistence, is it not?” said the Buddhist nun.
“Indeed,” replied the Taoist priest. “So much easier to escape Desire and sidle closer to Immortality when one can follow only a very few paths. But alas, in time, this too will pass.”
There was a rattle in the beggar’s throat then, and his eyes rolled upward and grasping the scrap of silk. He died.
The Taoist priest and the Buddhist nun murmured some words of prayer over the beggar’s body, linked arms and continued their travels. The ragged scrap of bloody cloth fluttered to the ground and was transformed by the Goddess of Resignation into a precious stone that lay at that very spot until the year 1266, when it was discovered and made into a ring by the famous courtesan Honey Tongue, star attraction of the Five Enjoyments Tea House, which had been built nearby some years before.
From “A Visit from the Footbinder”
I have no idea what prompted me to get this book. I’m guessing it was one of those “What are you reading?” threads that crop up on Twitter and Bluesky every so often; apparently it really intrigued me, because instead of just adding it to my TBR list, I bought it last December. Possibly I was swayed to action by the Goodreads reviewer who pronounced it “a little too offbeat for me.”
Offbeat? I’ll say.
The collection, first published in 1982, has only five stories. Two are regular story-length, one is quite long, and two are fairly short. One of the longer stories is absolutely over-the-top bananas, and has to be read in the spirit of Emily Prager, Feminist Humorist-Satirist of the 80s. The other stories are more straightforward. The title story is the standout, at least for me, and the final story makes an impact as well. But even the craziest story has an ending that resonates, in spite of, well, everything else.
Leading off, we have “A Visit from the Footbinder,” set in 13th century China. It follows six-year-old Pleasure Mouse as she looks forward with great excitement to her foot binding scheduled on the following day. Language does a good deal of work in the story. From the start, Pleasure Mouse dances, runs, darts, pounces, scampers, twirls, races; her mother, Lady Guo Guo and other grown up women who went through the procedure long ago, totter, shuffle, toddle, lose their balance, are carried.
The warnings at first are subtle. Pleasure Mouse visits her thirteen-year-old sister, Tiger Mouse, who kneels in her room counting her thousand pairs of tiny shoes, denying that there was pain. But just as Pleasure Mouse leaves, she breaks down a bit. But only a bit. “Why should I tell you?”
The others Pleasure Mouse visits – an artist decorating her mother’s future tomb, her father’s friend at the Tea House, his pregnant concubine, her aunt – yield more details. The pain will only last for two years, and then she will have the benefits: access to a high-ranking husband, the upper echelons of society, say all these limping, tottering, shuffling women. It isn’t until the footbinder, a Buddhist nun who is not only natural-footed but barefoot, binds her to a chair for the procedure that she realizes this may be more than the joyous coming-of-age celebration she expected.
Her mother’s interaction with her father deepens the story as he threatens to withhold the credit Lady Guo Guo is using to build her tomb – until she threatens to leave his daughter’s feet unbound. This exchange gives us a look into why traditions continue, how hard it is to buck them. The eventual revelation of why the mother, who performed Tiger Mouse’s footbinding as was the general tradition, hires this one out, makes her more sympathetic.
The quote above is a reasonably accurate version of the mythical origin of footbinding: Smithsonian Magazine gives a historical view of the practice, including its acceleration during the Mongol Invasion. And lest you gloss over this as just one of those awful things people did a long time ago, consider that footbinding persisted, though in more limited numbers, into the 20th century. Then look at the cover art, featuring a woman’s bruised, misshapen feet aside the sexy, elegant red pumps with four-inch heels.
The final story, “Wrinkled Linen,” also has an emotional impact while exploring the social pressures women face in the most trivial aspects of their lives. A woman and her boyfriend – she uses that term, “boyfriend,” as in, “I just don’t see what good it is having a successful boyfriend if he never talks to me” – go out to dinner. It’s a tense relationship, where she tries to talk and he pretty much shoots down everything. The Romantic vs the Realist. You have to wonder just why it is so important to have a successful boyfriend, when she says:
“Something happened today that made me understand the eighties: I was shopping and I came across these fabulous beige linen jodhpurs which I bought right away. I had vowed never to wear jodhpurs after seeing Elizabeth Taylor from behind in Reflections in a Golden Eye. But they look okay. They look good; I’m like a mini Ronald Reagan. Anyhow, linen is a classy material, really fine, and it was ‘in’ when I was in high school too. We had linen dresses, and when you wore them, your whole life was about keeping them pressed and starched. Linen wrinkles like a motherfucker but here’s the thing, it was really low and slutty and ill-bred if you wore a linen dress with a wrinkle in it. I remember never sitting down, never raising my arms, and still always having wrinkles. So, today, I’m trying on these jodhpurs and I glanced at the label and what do you think it says? ‘Guaranteed to wrinkle.’ And I realized that’s what the eighties is all about: off-color coordinates.”
She views this as a kind of freedom. I took a more cynical approach: there will always be a company, or a life partner, to tell you a bug is actually a feature. And by the way, my recollection of the 80s is quite different. This would have been the early 80s, granted, but – and I’m helped here by having recently watched a few episodes of LA Law, one of the pop culture tentpoles of the 80s – my impression was of the most buttoned-down, tightly-constructed era in recent history. Her boyfriend, in any case, sees catastrophe. Just wait ‘til you get to the 2020s, man, then you’ll know impending doom.
I was reminded of the Frederic Tuten story from this most recent Pushcart 2024, “The Restaurant, The Concert…” etc. There, we had a couple having what seemed like a brittle conversation, one that attracted a stranger at the next table to join in, but the mood was very different. Tuten’s banter was cooperative, comfortable, borne of years spent together, and of a shared struggle. In Prager’s story, it’s a woman in a cage she’s voluntarily entered, because she doesn’t seem to think there are better options.
Now let’s take a walk over to the monkey house and see what Prager can do when she’s whipped into a frenzy.
“The Alumnae Bulletin” features a periodic reunion of high school friends who get together to talk about experiences that have, um, widened their horizons. That sounds reasonable, but it goes from being a support group to a parody of the male brag session. Why is it when women want to be liberated, they emulate the most distasteful aspects of male behavior? The reunion begins with them strapping on wooden penises carved when they were back in school, and the experiences they discuss are primarily sexual. Because what other horizons are there for a curious girl? When Edda talks about her experiences with bondage, she waxes a bit poetic:
“It’s curious,” she began. “In bondage, you are forced to make a mental choice. You can either feel the sensation as pain, which is simple and immediate, or you can relax completely and investigate it further. If you make enough effort, you can even turn it into pleasure. It is a parody of the female experience in concrete physical terms. Going through it was simply extraordinary. Not sexual. Far more important than that.”
Sorry, I’m someone who doesn’t understand pain as pleasure, so I’ll just leave it for those who do. That isn’t even the craziest part of the story: that happens when Jerzy Kosiński shows up. I guess if you’re going to have an uninvited guest to your party where you’re wearing strap-ons and talking about sexual exploration, he’s the guy to have drop by. In her Acknowledgements, Prager thanks him for allowing poetic license. I’m not sure what that means, but that’s why I’m not the 80s guru of feminist satire. That’s where the story suffers, I think: in the 80s it might’ve been viewed as outspoken and gutsy; now at best it’s nostalgic for a time when women talking about sex was courageous.
If that wasn’t crazy enough for you, we then come to the longest story, “The Lincoln-Pruitt Anti-Rape Device: Memoirs of the Women’s Combat Army in Vietnam.” Think of it as a feminist Dirty Dozen. A small, diverse group of women – a Black Smith graduate who wants a career in the Foreign Service Office but finds it hard to get in, a small-town girl gone bad, a madam, a Bob Hope USO Tour performer – are recruited by Major Victoria Lincoln-Pruitt (whether that’s an official Army title or not isn’t clear) who has taken “Make Love Not War” to heart and invented a device that comes to be know as the Leopard: this machine kills rapists.
The L.P.A.R.D. has four instantaneous modes: the probe, which poisons the human intruder; the shredder, which polarizes wooden implements such as broom handles; the laser, which melts glass bottles and metal bayonets; and an iron cap which descends and makes penetration of any kind impossible. And it runs on – the major smiled mysteriously – microchips.
I have to wonder about the wisdom of shredding and melting items inserted, involuntarily or not, into the vagina, but maybe I don’t really understand how the thing works. It’s powered by pubococcygeal muscles, which becomes a plot point when it turns out the women of the unit don’t really know what those are.
The idea is to disguise the group as Buddhist nuns and drop them into enemy territory to lure, then destroy, the Viet Cong. “Visibility, vulnerability, and accessibility are the names of the game in this woman’s war. The success of this operation depends, oddly enough, as does the Miss America pageant, on poise, a neat appearance, and your ability to look adorable under pressure.” And of course, things don’t go exactly as planned. And while the difficulty of zipping up a body bag over an erect penis is a big reason why, it’s only the beginning of the problems. But they don’t go as planned for the VC, either: the sole female member of their squad tries to warn them that it’s a trap, but of course the men dismiss her.
For all the bawdy satire, the story closes with a surprisingly powerful moment if you can get past the bizarre circumstance: feminine solidarity across enemy lines. Because Major Lincoln-Pruitt wasn’t kidding around when she said her mission was to free women by making them feel safe.
While these more raucous stories aren’t my cup of tea, I have to admire Prager’s range: she’s able to go from exquisite subtlety of the Footbinder to conversational drama of Linen to the broadest bawdy humor. And yet, even in that humor, she captures recognizable moments of truth. If Prager’s mission was to highlight the social pressures women face, she succeeded, and it’s only because that territory has been well-trod in the forty years since publication that it falls a bit flat.
“For a while now, I’ve been conscious of a tension in my relationship with you,” Svetlana said. “And I think that’s the reason. It’s because we both make up narratives about our own lives….“
“Everyone makes up narratives about their own lives.”
“But not to the same extent. Think about my roommates. Fern, for example. I don’t mean that she doesn’t have an inner life, or that she doesn’t think about the past or make plans for the future. But she doesn’t compulsively rehash everything that happens to her in the form of a story. She’s in my story – I’m not in hers. That makes her and me unequal, but it also gives our relationship a kind of stability, and safeness. We each have our different roles. It’s like an unspoken contract. With you, there’s more instability and tension, because I know you’re making up a story, too, and in your story I’m just a character.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I still think everyone experiences their own life as a narrative. If you didn’t have some kind of ongoing story in mind, how would you know who you were when you woke up in the morning?”
“That’s a weak definition of narrative. That’s saying that narrative is just memory plus causality. But, for us, the narrative has aesthetics, too.”
A long time ago, my favorite ice cream flavor was Cherry Vanilla. Oh, the ice cream was mediocre – the vanilla was more aspirational than actual – but the cherries were amazing to my very young palate. It was a delight, on taking a mouthful of bland milky coldness, to suddenly come across a sweet piece of maraschino, just waiting to be bitten into and chewed.
That was my first read of this book. Overall, it seemed… disconnected, aimless. But it was loaded with wonderful cherries, like the quote above. So I kept reading.
My second read – really, at first more of a skim, looking for cherries to pick out and quote, that turned into a semi-read – was more like when I discovered Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia years later. The ice cream had a wonderful flavor and texture of its own, and the cherries – oh, the cherries were even better, because they were real dark red-black cherries, often whole ones, not the slivers of candied maraschinos from my past. And then there were the fudge flakes, which weren’t there before at all.
It all started, that second read, with the ultimate fudge flake, the epigraph from Proust:
But the characteristic feature of the ridiculous age I was going through—awkward indeed but by no means infertile—is that we do not consult our intelligence and that the most trivial attributes of other people seem to us to form an inseparable part of their personality. In a world thronged with monsters and with gods, we know little peace of mind. There is hardly a single action we perform in that phase which we would not give anything, in later life, to be able to annul. Whereas what we ought to regret is that we no longer possess the spontaneity which made us perform them. In later life we look at things in a more practical way, in full conformity with the rest of society, but adolescence is the only period in which we learn anything.
MARCEL PROUST, In Search of Lost Time, Volume II: Within a Budding Grove
What made this stand out a lot more than it had before was reading it almost immediately after reading the final paragraph of the book:
When I got back to school in the fall, I changed my major from linguistics and didn’t take any more classes in the philosophy or psychology of language. They had let me down. I hadn’t learned what I had wanted to about how language worked. I hadn’t learned anything at all.
That final paragraph struck me as seriously ironic. Selin – the protagonist of the book – maybe hadn’t learned what she expected to learn, or what she wanted to learn, as reality rolled over her naïve assumptions of what she’d learn. But she’d definitely learned a lot. If nothing else, she’d learned that nobody knew what they were doing, and knowing you don’t know is the beginning of wisdom. Ahem, forgive me, I’ve been hanging out with Socrates way too much over the past few months, scratch that last thing as my own imposition upon the text.
I chose to read this because so many reviewers were wetting their pants over it, both when it was originally published in 2017, and when her second book, Either/Or, came out in May 2022. Initially I’d demurred, because I felt like I would have to read Dostoevsky first, and while that’s something I’m probably going to have to do some day if I live long enough, I didn’t feel like slogging through 700 pages of Russian angst quite yet. Then I found out Batuman’s Idiot was a Harvard freshman, which made it a campus novel, and since I love campus novels, I brought it home. Too late, I discovered only the first half is a campus novel. And, like a lot of campus novels, it soaks itself in a blighted romance before it turns into a combination travelogue and coming-of-age story. If eighteen – nineteen, actually – seems a little late for coming of age these days, well, either there was a resurgence of virginity in the 1995 Harvard freshman class, or Batuman chose to make her character – several characters – especially naïve.
The naïveté starts with the very first paragraph:
I didn’t know what email was until I got to college. I had heard of email, and I knew that in some sense I would ‘have’ it….
Insofar as I’d had any idea about it at all, I had imagined that email would resemble faxing, and would involve a printer. But there was no printer. There was another world. You could access it from certain computers, which were scattered throughout the ordinary landscape, and looked no different from regular computers. Always there, unchanged, in a configuration nobody else could see, was a glowing list of messages from all the people you knew, and from people you didn’t know, all in the same letters, like the universal handwriting of thought or of the world. Some messages were formally epistolary, with “Dear” and “Sincerely”; others telegraphic, all in lowercase with missing punctuation, like they were being beamed straight from people’s brains. And each message contained the one that had come before, so your own words came back to you—all the words you threw out, they came back. It was like the story of your relations with others, the story of the intersection of your life with other lives, was constantly being recorded and updated, and you could check it at any time.
It’s a bit disorienting to read that someone who is smart enough to get into college – Harvard, no less – might not know much about email, but, although it isn’t clear for quite a while, the story begins in 1995. Yet it presents the recurring surprise with which Selin experiences the world. When you read her description of email, you begin to get the sense of how strange the world seems to her. It’s also notable that email plays a large part in the blighted romance that eventually serves as something like a backbone of the story, combining the strangeness of the world with the strangeness of language: she and her love interest, fellow students in a Russian class, begin an email correspondence as characters in a Russian story used as a text in the class, but their conversation eventually moves towards actual communication while allowing them both to hide behind the pretense should it be necessary.
Language, with all its strangeness and wonders, comprises many of the cherries in the book. No, it’s more than that: Selin’s journey through language, from wanting to learn about it, to being befuddled by it, to giving up on it, may be the core plot of the book, via both her Russian class and the Creating Worlds class. Then again, I’m fond of language, so it’s what stood out to me. Maybe someone else would find another core.
She notices the story used in the Russian class only uses the grammar they have learned so far: “while you were reading you felt totally inside its world, a world where reality mirrored the grammar constraints, and what Slavic 101 couldn’t name didn’t exist. There was no ‘went’ or ‘sent,’ no intention or causality.…” This brings her to the already discarded Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that language affects how we see the world. It strikes us both that the Slavic 101 world was created from the language that was available, not the other way around. Her study of Russian leads to her relationship with Ivan, a Senior who she too late discovers not only has a girlfriend but is leaving for California at the end of the semester. Oops. Over the summer, she follows him to his native Hungary as part of a program to teach English to rural Hungarians, then watches him leave the airport for Japan: “He turned and walked into the revolving doors. When the compartment reappeared, it was empty.” Ouch. I felt that. Some cherries are painful.
Facing literature in academia is another struggle for her.
It was hard to decide on a literature course. Everything the professors said seemed to be somehow beside the point. You wanted to know why Anna had to die, and instead they told you that nineteenth-century Russian landowners felt conflicted about whether they were really a part of Europe. The implication was that it was somehow naive to want to talk about anything interesting, or to think that you would ever know anything important.
I wasn’t interested in society, or ancient people’s money troubles. I wanted to know what books really meant. That was how my mother and I had always talked about literature. “I need you to read this, too,” she would say, handing me a New Yorker story in which an unhappily married man had to get a rabies shot, “so you can tell me what it really means.” She believed, and I did, too, that every story had a central meaning. You could get that meaning, or you could miss it completely.
On second read, this became a fudge flake: it’s one of those things she might have learned, that maybe there is no “real meaning” to books, that why Anna had to die is as valid an approach to Tolstoy as the Russian economy. She just doesn’t have the confidence to own it yet.
Russian literature comes up a lot during the book, though not Prince Myshkin so much as other Dostoevsky and Tolstoy characters. In an interview with the Harvard Crimson, Batuman said she saw similarities between Selin and Myshkin, but she really felt the “idiot” title was generated by her embarrassment on reading, after almost twenty years, her mostly autobiographical first draft. The rewrite became more fictional, but Selin remained baffled by the world.
She brings up War and Peace in connection with her trip to Hungary: how the book had so many characters who became important for a chapter or so, then disappeared. She relates that to staying with a family for a couple of weeks, then moving on to another family. I see it as relating to the book as a whole. There are three main characters who persist – Selin, Ivan, and Svetlana – but everyone else fades out pretty quickly.
She has a marvelous epiphany while reading the Russian story about Nina searching for her lost Ivan:
I found myself remembering the day in kindergarten when the teachers showed us Dumbo, and I realized for the first time that all the kids in the class, even the bullies, rooted for Dumbo, against Dumbo’s tormentors. Invariably they laughed and cheered, both when Dumbo succeeded and when bad things happened to his enemies. But they’re you, I thought to myself. How did they not know? They didn’t know. It was astounding, an astounding truth. Everyone thought they were Dumbo.
Thing is, as much as I love this particular cherry, I don’t agree with it. I’ve been in groups where nearly everyone thinks either Dumbo should stop whining, or should start kicking ass. Empathy and compassion seem to be in short supply these days.
Selin encounters all manner of absurdity throughout the book. A fellow student tells how he went to an interview to apply for a science class, and the professor merely had him wash lab equipment. She and her friend Svetlana take a trolley to Euclid Circle, and discover there is no Euclid Circle: “just a concrete platform with a pay phone and a sign that read EUCLID CIRCLE.” Then ensues a debate about whether Euclid would be mad, or honored.
Then there’s Just Enough Hungarian, the phrase book she gets for her trip to Hungary to teach English:
I leafed through the phrase book. If a Martian read it, the Martian would probably decide to avoid Hungary.
“I’d like something for (snake bites, dog bites, burns, sore gums, bee stings). I’d like some (antiseptic, gauze, bandages, inhalant). It’s a (sharp pain, dull ache, nagging pain). I feel (sick dizzy, weak, feverish). I have (heart condition, rheumatism, hemorrhoids). It hurts. It hurts a lot.…
“The toilet is blocked. The gas is leaking. The boiler is not working. I have a toothache. I have broken my dentures. I have lost (my contact lenses, a filling, my bag, my car keys, my car, everything)….”
… The “butcher” vocabulary included a drawing of a cow divided into thirteen numbered sectors. How remarkable that you were supposed to be able to name thirteen cuts of beef, after you had been bitten by a snake and your car was stolen.
I use dictation software rather than typing out all these things, but reading this aloud had me laughing so hard I had to give it up and type. What really takes the cake is that there is an actual book with that title and with the cover she describes: “three women or dolls, with a long skirts and no feet, balancing beakers of red wine on their heads.” I’m tempted to get a copy. In the meantime, I’ve been collecting weird Duolingo quotes like “The elephant doesn’t like the bathroom” and “For my lawyer, a sparking apple juice.”
Chalk up another learning experience: the world can be an absurd place.
Writing comes up with some frequency as well. Selin writes a story for her Creating Worlds class; it wins a prize. Email writing is of course a big part of things. But there’s a lot of consideration of a philosophy of writing as well: “Suddenly it occurred to me that maybe the point of writing wasn’t just to record something past but also to prolong the present, like in One Thousand and One Nights, to stretch out the time until the next thing happened….” I wonder about that. People write about their failures, traumas, mistakes; they regularly code them into fiction. Why do we want to prolong such things? To desensitize? To understand?
The most direct view of the writing life comes when Selin, staying with a strange Hungarian family (because why bother with normal ones), thinks about a fellow classmate:
Meredith Wittman was doing a summer internship at New York magazine, and for a moment now I reflected on the fact that, although Meredith Wittman and I both wanted to be writers, she was going about it by interning at a magazine, whereas I was sitting at this table in a Hungarian village trying to formulate the phrase “musically talented” in Russian, so I could say something encouraging by proxy to an off-putting child whose father had just punched him in the stomach. I couldn’t help thinking that Meredith Wittman’s approach seemed more direct.
Different people, different paths. One may be easier, but who’s to say which is best. Batuman hasn’t done so bad: she published a collection of essays about her graduate years at Stanford in the memoir Possessed way back in 2010, and though the novel took a while, The Idiot was a finalist for a Pulitzer.
I found it interesting that Selin encounters the distinction between aesthetics and ethics several times. Batuman’s second book, a chapter of which is included in the paperback edition of The Idiot, is titled Either/Or, which of course is Kierkegaard’s debate between the aesthetic life and the ethical approach, a theme I understand is central in her book. It does continue Selin’s college career, and both Ivan and Svetlana appear in the first chapter. After my first read, I doubted if I’d continue the saga; after my second, I’m looking forward to it.
This is the examination, men of Athens, from which I have incurred many hatreds, the sort that are harshest and gravest, so that many slanders have arisen from them, and I got this name of being “wise.” For those present on each occasion suppose that I myself am wise in the things concerning which I refute someone else, whereas it is probable, men, that really the god is wise, and that in this oracle he is saying that human wisdom is worth little or nothing.
…..From among these men, Meletus attacked me, and Anytus and Lycon, Meletus being vexed on behalf of the poets, Anytus on behalf of the craftsmen and the politicians, and Lycon on behalf of the orators. Therefore, as I said when I began, it would be a wonder to me if I should be able in this short time to take away from you this slander which has become so great.
Plato, The Apology of Socrates, 23A, 24A
Plato’s The Apology of Socrates is one of the most frequently assigned pieces of writing in classes across the spectrum of the humanities. This reading group combined it with two other works and asked the question: Who were these accusers of Socrates – Meletus, Anytus, Lycon?
We find out the specific gripes of Meletus in the Apology itself, and Socrates refutes them quite well, in that way he often does: by using logic to hang his interlocutor by his own petard. He disposed of the charge of atheism by dint of his long-time devotion to what he considered the command of the Oracle to find someone wiser, and his belief in his own personal diamon that told him when he was wrong (one of the group participants referred to it as “his Jiminy Cricket,” the most memorable line of the course). And he would never, he argued, corrupt the youth of Athens, since it wouldn’t make sense to foul his own nest, so to speak. He may have won the argument in terms of logic, but it might not have been the wisest course to pursue against someone petitioning to have him executed.
We read about Anytus in the Meno, a dialog often subtitled “What is Virtue?” Anytus comes in at the end, and seems to take offense when Socrates asks, in his pursuit of whether or not virtue can be taught, why such Athenian greats such as Themistocles and Pericles were able to teach their sons horsemanship and music and other skills, but not wisdom, as they all turned out to be Failsons of the first order. While this was not specifically in the formal charges, Anytus seemed to think he was disrespecting the icons of Greek society.
Lycon might be a bit tricker, since it’s assumed, though uncertain, that this is indeed the same person that participated in the Symposium recorded by Xenophon. Lycon’s son, the object of great admiration for his athletic skill and attractiveness, attended as well, and was being wooed by Callias, the party-giver. Socrates refers often to himself as a ‘pimp’ at this party, though more in the sense of bringing together people who can benefit from each other rather than as part of a sexual transaction. It would be possible to infer some resentment of this by Lycon as the father of a prize specimen, but as the party is breaking up, he declares Socrates to be “a noble and good human being.” What changed his mind is not clear.
The ten-week group spent three weeks – each week a 90-minute Zoom session – on each work, then did a wrap-up in the last session. I was interested in this reading group because I’d just read Xenophon’s Anabasis of Cyrus and wanted to read more of his work. I’d also encountered Meno in the Anabasis; he was rather sneaky and incompetent, came to a very bad end, and was harshly dys-eulogized, if that’s the appropriate word, by Xenophon. So I wanted to refresh my mind on his interaction with Socrates in his eponymous dialog, one I’d read several times before – including once in a math class, since there’s an impromptu geometry lesson in the middle.
To my surprise, I found Xenophon’s Symposium to be very confusing: so many characters, so many motivations and interactions, appearing in so many different times. Who is this person here, what has he said before? Why is this person’s comment significant? In retrospect, I should have done far more analytical work on the piece, separating the threads by who was speaking instead of re-reading it over and over. I got tangled up in my own head and really failed to approach it properly; that I wasn’t able to course-correct when I realized I was lost, affected my always-shaky confidence to read anything intelligently. I obviously have more work to do on this one – and it is a crackable nut; plus I took copious notes from the group discussion – but for the moment I’m too traumatized to take it on.
One of the tasks I undertook to better understand the readings as a whole was to put together a timeline. All of these works were written well after the events they narrate took place, and they relate to other events such as the Peloponnesian war and the Thirty Tyrants.
Peloponnesian war: took place 431-404 BCE
Xenophon’s Symposium: set in 422 BCE; written ~360 BCE
Reign of the Thirty Tyrants: took place 405-404 BCE
Meno’s dialog with Socrates: set in 402 BCE; written ~385 BCE
Xenophon’s Anabasis of Cyrus (Xenophon and Meno in Persia/Armenia): took place 401 BCE; written ~370 BCE
Trial of Socrates: took place 399 BCE; written at some uncertain point between 399 BCE and 387 BCE
The opening question raised by the group facilitator in the last wrap-up session was the very pointed: “Why did Socrates have to die?” There is no clear answer to that question, but we all recognized he was a destabilizing force in a society that was under stress, having just lost the war with Sparta and having been, if briefly, subjected to tyrannical rule. Several of us felt there may have been more historical influence than was contained in the works we read; I’d like to know more about the history of the period myself, and have set my sights on Thucydides as a possible next step in that direction.
My rather smart-ass answer to the question “Why did Socrates have to die?” would be, “Because he wanted to.” After the jury votes – and the vote was relatively close, 280 to convict, 220 against, so, as Socrates himself notes in his Apology, changing the minds of 30 jurors – just 10% – would have freed him. He was permitted to make a last appeal, to propose a less drastic sentence, which, given the slimness or the margin any light slap on the wrist would probably have been accepted. But he went all smart-ass, saying he should get a free lunch daily, as was the custom for heroes of the city. Was he thinking of himself as a martyr? Is there an analogy here with Achilles, choosing glory in death instead of staying safe and living a long, unknown life? These are the debates of Philosophy 101 classes everywhere.
As always with Catherine Project groups, it was a productive ten weeks, even given my mental meltdown over Xenophon. I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to participate.
Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. But every animal can only tap into a small fraction of realities fullness. Each is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny silver of an immense world.
There is a wonderful word for this sensory bubble — Umwelt. It was defined and popularized by the Baltic-German zoologist Jakob von Uexküll in 1909. Umwelt comes from the German word for “environment,” but Uexküll didn’t use it simply to refer to an animal’s surroundings. Instead, an Umwelt is specifically the part of those surroundings that an animal can sense and experience—its perceptual world.…
…Uexküll didn’t exalt the inner worlds of humans over those of other species. Rather, he treated the Umwelt concept as a unifying and leveling force. The human’s house might be bigger than the tick’s, with more windows overlooking a wider garden, but we are still stuck inside one, looking out. Our Umwelt is still limited; it just doesn’t feel that way. To us, it feels all-encompassing. It is all that we know, and so we easily mistake it for all there is to know. This is an illusion, and one that every animal shares.
Way back in 2016, when philosophy moocs were still being presented as actual courses instead of bulk youtube content, I had an argument with the TA (yes, they had real live TAs, graduate students who knew what they were talking about instead of roping students like me into playing hapless hosts) about a topic from a mooc on the neuroscience of perception (ah, those were the days, my friend). The neuroscientist claimed that what we call optical illusions are ways our brains have evolved to interpret sensory signals, ways that provided an evolutionary advantage at some point in the development of our species. The philosophy TA asked me something that has resonated in my head ever since (hear that, Damian, you live rent-free in my head, and that’s a good thing), something that seemed odd for an MIT grad student in philosophy to ask: “Wouldn’t the best evolutionary advantage be to see reality as it is?” I tried to argue back about reality as the product of perception, but I was not really equipped for the fight.
This book is the sword and shield I needed. What we consider to be reality varies by species. Our Umwelt determines what parts of reality we perceive.
Yong goes through each sense – the ones we know about, like smell and sight and hearing, and ones we lack, like echolocation and the determination of magnetic and electric fields – and shows the wide range of ways various species have adapted for each. Familiar to most of us is the ability of some species to see ultraviolet light, or hear ultra- or infra-sonic vibrations, but it goes much further than that. And he explains it all – hundreds of examples, experiments, anatomies, and perceptive traits – in an engaging style, with energy and wit.
In the first section, “Leaking Sacks of Chemicals,” Yong shows how smell and taste are far more important to some species than to humans. He starts off with the familiar, examining how dogs use smell, the sense that is the core of their Umwelt, as sight is to ours, then proceeds to more unusual species and how they smell the world.
But these are not abstracts from scientific papers; often they’re adventure stories. Gabrielle Nevitt, aboard ship to research tubenoses (a group of bird species), was injured when a storm tossed the ship about; while recuperating, she had the opportunity to speak with Tim Bates, another scientist who was researching the chemical DMS, dimethyl sulfide. It’s a chemical that results from krill eating plankton in the ocean, so it indicates a sea full of life, “a bountiful sea.” Sailors can smell it, too, but it occurred to Nevitt that maybe this was the signal tubenoses were using to find food, “a secret topography that was invisible to the eye but evident to the nose.” When she recovered from her injury, she carried out the research to confirm that DMS was a signal to even the youngest hatchling tubenoses; it’s not learned behavior, but an instinct.
In “Endless Ways of Seeing,” Yong turns to vision. He introduces the theory Dan-Eric Nilsson developed of four stages of eye development, from simple light detection (hydra, cephalopods), to recognizing shades that give direction to the light (“the Japanese yellow swallowtail butterfly has photoreceptors on its genitals” that aid it in reproduction), to primitive image formation by clustering photoreceptors (regarded as the first true vision), to high-resolution vision such as we and other mammals enjoy. It’s hypothesized that the Cambrian explosion of species might have resulted at least partly from the development of this fourth stage of vision.
I was struck by a particular passage explaining how our vision connects individual images to perceive motion:
This is called the critical flicker-fusion frequency, or CFF. It’s a measure of how quickly a brain can process visual information. Think of it as the frame rate of the movie playing inside an animal’s head—the point at which static images blend into the illusion of continuous motion. For humans, in good light, the CFF is around 60 frames per second (or hertz, Hz). For most flies, it’s up to 350. For killer flies, it’s probably higher still. To its eyes, a human movie would look like a slideshow. …
Many birds have naturally fast vision; with a maximum CFF of 146 Hz, the pied flycatcher—a small songbird—has the fastest vision of any vertebrate that’s been tested, perhaps because its survival depends on tracking and catching flying insects. And those insects have eyes that are faster still. Honeybees, dragonflies, and flies have CFFs between 200 and 350 Hz.
It’s possible that each of these visual speeds comes with a different sense of time’s passage. Through a leatherback turtle’s eyes, the world might seem to move in time-lapse, with humans bustling about at a fly’s frenetic pace. Through a fly’s eyes, the world might seem to move in slow motion. The imperceptibly fast movements of other flies would slow to a perceptible crawl, while slow animals might not seem like they were moving at all.
I confess much of my delight was rooted in pop culture: Star Trek (TOS) 3:11, “Wink of an Eye”, teleplay by Arthur Heinemann, story by Lee Cronin, in which Capt. Kirk seems to disappear but is merely “sped up” to the time frame of the Scalosians, a time frame too quick for the human eye to see; at the same time, his crew, in his old time frame, seem to be standing still. Ok, yeah, it doesn’t work that way, but there’s a core of science in there if you squint.
This is also the section that deals with vision beyond our range via birds that have four, rather than three, varieties of cone cells in the eye, via Mary Caswell Stoddard’s research into these tetrachromats leading to Yong’s sense of humor again asserting itself:
If our red and blue cones are stimulated together, we see purple — a color that doesn’t exist in the rainbow and that can’t be represented by a single wavelength of light. These kinds of cocktail colors are called non-spectral. Hummingbirds, with their four cones, can see a lot more of them, including UV-red, UV-green, UV-yellow (which is red + green + UV), and probably UV-purple (which is red + blue + UV). At my wife’s suggestion, and to Stoddard’s delight, I’m going to call these rurple, grurple, yurple, and ultrapurple*. Stoddard found that these non-spectral colors and their various shades account for roughly a third of those found on plants and feathers. To a bird, meadows and forests pulse with grurples and yurples. To a broad-tailed hummingbird, the bright magenta feathers of the male’s bib are actually ultrapurple.
*I am still hung up on whether UV-purple should be called ultrapurple or purpurple.
It’s also in this section that I found a Jane Austen reference: “Imagine that you’re a mantis shrimp. It is a truth universally acknowledged that you are in want of something to punch.” It isn’t until we get to the sense of touch that a Brontë reference shows up: “Reader, Hugh oripulated me.” There’s a reason this book was so popular.
In Section 8, “All Ears,” we are again amused by British zoologist David Pye. In 1968, he wrote a poem, printed in Nature, titled “On the Variety of Hearing Organs in Insects” that traces the development of hearing in insects to the emergence of bats, and the necessity of avoiding them or becoming dinner:
In days of old and insects bold
(before bats were invented),
No sonar cries disturbed the skies –
Moths flew uninstrumented.
The Eocene brought mammals mean
and bats began to sing:
Their food they found by ultrasound
and chase it on the wing.
Now deafness was unsafe because
The loud high-pitched vibration
Came in advance and gave a chance
To beat echolocation….
David Pye, reprinted in Microscopy Research and Technique, online, from Nature (1968) 218:797
In 2004, he published a sequel listing some of the unusual places ears could be found, including stanzas like:
Two beetles go some way to show
How all this seems to check:
One has its ear upon its rear
The other on its neck.
David Pye, reprinted in Microscopy Research and Technique, online, originally from Nature (2004)
It should be noted that the poems are footnoted with scientific references to substantiate the claims. Pye wasn’t just fooling around here!
And so the book goes on, covering varieties of touch, pain (including an examination of whether animals suffer), and the aforementioned electric and magnetic fields. Reducing it to a compendium of facts would ignore the storytelling aspects, the respect for stringent research, often over decades, to verify hypotheses, and the implications of the varieties of Umwelt. However, I’ll include a sample of some tidbits I found particularly amusing (in case the butterfly that can see with its penis wasn’t enough):
“Hibernation isn’t sleep….The two processes are so different that hibernating ground squirrels actually incur sleep debt and must periodically rouse from inactivity and raise their body temperatures so they can get some actual sleep.”
The grasshopper mouse has pain receptors – nociceptors – that turn off when scorpion venom is applied, a useful painkilling adaptation for a rodent that feeds on scorpions.
Owl’s ears are asymmetrical; the left one is higher, making it able to determine position of a sound with greater accuracy than we can.
Bat ultrasound signals are extremely loud, jet-engine loud; to avoid deafening themselves, the muscles in their ears contract when they send out a signal, muting the sound.
I found section 11, “They Know The Way,” to be a fascinating exploration of navigation by magnetoreception. Whales and birds migrate huge distances and reliably get to specific locations, then return to where they started. This is an area that’s undergoing research right now, so is more theoretical than other material.
For instance, “Magnetoreception remains the only sense without a known sensor.” One of the hypotheses involves quantum entanglement, and a cell in the visual apparatus. ““Songbirds might be able to see Earth’s magnetic field, perhaps as a subtle visual cue that overlays their normal field of view.” I don’t know enough about quantum entanglement to really understand it (no kidding) but it’s still an amazing idea: birds have evolved a kind of neuronal GPS without the benefit of Google Glasses. And we think we’re the advanced species.
The book ends with a look at noise and light pollution, and its effect on creatures that aren’t human. Some solutions are surprisingly simple: different color light bulbs, shades that keep the light focused on the parking lot or road rather than radiating into the night sky. Other issues are more complicated. But we all saw the “Nature is Healing” images during the shut-down year of the pandemic. We do share the planet with others, and it might well be to our advantage ultimately to be more considerate of their needs.
It’s a book that contains the best of both worlds: science and entertainment. I’m particularly impressed with the notations: in-text footnotes are explanatory; endnotes are for academic references. I’ve always been annoyed with the need to flip to a separate section after note 26, only to find it gives the work referenced, not an explanation or expansion of the idea. Here is the best of both worlds. There’s also a 47-page bibliography (!) for those who want to do further research, an extensive index, and two glossy inserts of full-color photographs (those with severe arachnophobia, ophidiophobia, or other animal-sensitive phobias might want to take care, but the butterflies, birds, fish, and manatees are worth it).
I recently noticed my “summer reading” introductory post for 2019 showed up on the list of posts viewed by readers. These entry and exit posts are rarely read, so I went back to see what I’d written, what might have caught the attention of some google search. I don’t know, but I was struck by how organized I was back then: categories of books, names of individual books I planned to read.
I haven’t done it that way since.
Though I’ve gotten sloppier in my accounting, I do still read books in certain categories, most of which were enumerated back in 2019: books touching on religion and philosophy, nonfiction about unusual jobs, classic reading-list books I never read, books about medicine and the practice thereof, books about music, about science (especially biology), books about books and words and writing. These tend to be the topics that interest me. I seem to be reading European writing in translation lately. I’m finding re-reads to be rewarding for new insights. Then there’s random contemporary stuff that I’ve encountered. In 2019, I moaned that I could rarely recall when, where, or how they’d come to my attention; I’ve fixed that, to some degree, by entering a note in my Goodreads TBR list: usually a tweet responding to a “What are you reading this weekend?” query, or a “Best Books” article in FiveBooks, Lithub, or similar media.
I have stopped listing books I plan to read. That became less of a motivation and more of a way to beat myself up, or force myself to read beyond the point of interest in some cases. I have books on my TBR shelf from last year, two or three years ago, as well as stuff I’ve been buying over the past year. Every once in a while, a book finds its way from my TBR shelf to my Purge Pile. But which is which will remain my little secret.
In February, TIME Magazine (wow, I’m old enough to remember when it came in the mail) listed ways to read more books: start small, track your reading, join a reading community, etc. Other outlets have similar suggestions. Some of these I do or have done; some don’t seem like good ideas to me. Motivating myself to read has never been a problem. The problem is mental focus: I seem to need more ‘down time’ as I get older, time literally doing nothing. Or maybe I’m just getting lazier.
I’ve kept up the practice of starting these in-between reading periods with a kick-off post, since it helps me transition from short form reading to book reading. There’s a big difference, both in how I read, and in how I post about what I’ve read. Short forms fit nicely into transit reading; books might, but they have to be selected for reading in spurts. As it happens, the first book in this year’s lineup – An Immense World by Ed Yong – was ideally suited to such technique; though I’ve been reading it for a couple of months, I didn’t lose any momentum since topically it’s already divided into related but easily isolated sections. Short story collections also fit this niche. But novels require reserving longer stretches of time.
Time to get started. I’m looking forward to exploring a strange collection of works over the next six-plus months, until late October when BASS again becomes my project.
In his introduction to PPXVI (1991), Ted Hoagland saluted small press people as “Holy Fools” because we insist on thoughtful, passionate, non-commercial writing as if life were somehow sacred.
Never have Ted’s words meant more to me than at the present moment. All of the authors nominated for this volume care deeply about our sojourns on this bit of Stardust.
Bill Henderson, Introduction
I noticed some interesting patterns in this year’s anthology.
One was the increased blurring of the line between fiction and non-fiction. In one case – Kathryn Scanlan’s “Backsiders” – the piece was put together from actual interviews with a horse trainer. The author calls it fiction, presumably because the comments have been rearranged and probably edited, but it’s based on someone’s actual words. What an interesting technique! Jim Shepard’s “The Other Spoke” took a more time-honored approach of historical fiction, imagining, from actual tapes and interviews, Adolph Eichmann’s scheme, cooked up in Argentina, for exonerating himself for the Holocaust. Then there’s “The Emperor Concerto” by Julie Hecht, which reads so non-fictional that the notation “fiction” was overlooked. I found Peter Kessler’s “Butterfly” to read either way, a phenomenon that’s rarer than you might think.
Another notable pattern was the emphasis on ecological themes in almost half the nonfiction pieces. It’s not unusual for what’s increasingly being called cli-fic, and “green” non-fiction, to appear in these volumes, but there were more this year, perhaps reflecting the increasing urgency of the climate crisis.
Two-fifths of the fiction pieces are what I’d call “weird fiction”: that is, using non-traditional forms, or less-than-realism in content. This isn’t unusual; Pushcart, in their best years, is considerably more edgy than BASS. It’s also not unusual that most of my favorite pieces came from this two-fifths:
Michael Czyzniejewski, “Jorie, Jr.”
Grey Wolfe Lajoie, “The Locksmith”
Frederic Tuten, “The Restaurant, The Concert, The Bar, The Bed, The Petit Déjeuner”
A. J. Bermudez, “The Real India”
I so enjoyed Tuten’s story that the collection from which it comes sits now on my TBR shelf, and will, I hope, appear in a post later this year. I also had a delightful exchange with Grey Wolfe Lajoie about his story, and writing in general, via his website, and found Michael Czyzniejewski on Bluesky.
I didn’t blog any poetry this year. A couple of the pieces interested me, but in each case I found my poetic incompetence stronger than my curiosity. Maybe next year.
My non-fiction favorites:
Scott Spencer, “Dreamers Awaken”
Leah Penniman, “Black Land Matters: Climate Solutions In Black Agrarianism”
Tyler Sones, “Memorials”
After a slow start, I managed to apply some discipline to this year’s read, posting (mostly) every other day. That eliminated a “thinking about it” day; I’m not sure it was to the detriment of my read. I may change my mind in the future when I realize what I’ve missed.
It occurs to me that this is volume 48, which means 50 is just around the corner. I wonder if that milestone will bring any changes. Then again, I wonder if I’ll make it that far.
Our Holy Fools embrace the universe.
….
Our devotion extends to all of the editors and writers worldwide who helped to gather this Small Good Thing.
And of course our thanks to you Dear Reader. Without your caring it is all futile.
White supremacy is a major catalyst for the destruction of earth’s life support systems. Embedded in the theory of the supremacy of white people over other races is the theory of human supremacy over nature. This is exemplified in the white supremacist philosophies of the Doctrine of Discovery, private property, and Manifest Destiny, which led directly to the exploitation of land and natural resources, and the displacement of indigenous people globally.
Leah Penniman is not come to play. If, as I mentioned in an earlier post, Rob McCall was the Wendell Berry of Maine, Penniman might be the Rosa Parks of agriculture.
Throughout this essay, she traces the history of African farming techniques from earthworm research in ancient Egypt, to compost science in medieval Western Africa, to topsoil measuring techniques used for generations along the coast. She mentions the same topsoil depletion that Molly Gallentine discussed in her article “The Blob,” and ties it to the attitude of white supremacy, which is part of the European impulse to dominate everything in some imagined fulfilment of God’s purpose. One would think that, when we started realizing all this domination was getting destructive, someone would’ve thought twice about it, but doubling down is part of the belief system.
It stands to reason that any hope of solving the environmental crisis will require an examination and uprooting of the white supremacist ideologies that underpin the crisis. The voices and expertise of black, brown, and indigenous environmentalists, amplified by all those who have eschewed white supremacy, must be heeded if we are to halt and reverse planetary calamity. Ecological humility is part of the cultural heritage of black people. While our 400+ years immersion in racial capitalism has attempted to diminish that connection to the sacred earth, there are those who persist in believing that the land and waters are family members, those who understand the intrinsic value of nature. The same communities that are on the front lines of climate impact, are also on the front lines of climate solutions. A new generation of black farmers are leading the way as climate stewards by putting carbon back in the soil where it belongs.
I don’t know much about farming; I struggle to maintain my few “beginner” houseplants. So I have a feeling there are valid arguments against some of the practices Penniman is advocating. Scalability is one. But even that is based on the domination of agribusiness, which, as long as politicians need campaign war chests, will own certain states. And whether all the corn and soybeans they grow is used to feed people, or to feed livestock that feed people – tying in to the growing awareness that we need to reduce consumption of animal products for many reasons – or, for that matter, into the mountains of junk food snacks base on corn and corn syrup, seems to be immaterial. It’s complicated. And it’s hard for alternatives to be heard.
For such a hard-hitting, fact-based essay, Penniman has nonetheless enveloped it in a personal story. She starts out describing her experience, on Soul Fire Farm in upstate New York, when the superstorm Sandy hit in 2012:
We were alerted to Sandy’s arrival on our farm in the middle of the night, when we heard a deafening and perplexing roar from the forest. Jonah and I sat straight up in bed, looked at each other wordlessly, and headed outside. The powerful sound was comiing from a newly formed “river” cascading from the forest and headed right toward our crop fields. It was dark, windy, and cold, yet we knew that if we did not act, we might lose our fall harvest. We woke up the children, put shovels in their hands, and got to work digging a trench to divert the waters from the crops…. Our youngest child wore a life jacket around the farm for days, terrified of being swept away by waters that were slow to recede.
Other neighboring farms were washed out, their crops destroyed, their topsoil eroded. This leads into Penniman’s discussion of farming techniques and the reason they have been overlooked in favor of agribusiness. At then end of the essay, she brings us back to this opening scene with a happy ending:
When the waters receded, we found our farm relatively unharmed. The Ovambo-style raised beds, Dr. Carver-inspired cover cropping, and African Dark Earth compost made our once fragile soils resilient in the face of flooding. The excess water slowly seeped into the ground, supported by the high organic matter that had been restored to pre-colonial levels through Afro-indigenous farming methods. Our soil was not only capturing atmospheric carbon, but it was mitigating climate impacts. Our son could safely take off his life jacket and trust that food would abound.
That motif of the child in his life jacket completes the circle, and provides a very human look into what could have been harsh polemic.
It’s an extraordinary, engaging essay with an important message. Yet I find it an odd way to close out Pushcart. I guess I’m just culturally trained for the Hollywood feel-good ending, especially when there seems to be so little to feel good about in the world right now. To be clear: I wouldn’t want this article to change, not in the slightest. But I might want a different piece to serve as the final note. I’m willing to consider this as my flaw: if it makes me uncomfortable, the author has done her job. Maybe we need a wake-up call, a call-to-action, rather than a round of Kumbaya.
* * *
Find out more about Soul Fire Farm an the author at their website.
The big yellow machine casts up a brown blizzard of dust, adding to the trouble of seeing any small bodies attempting to run or slither for their lives. I chase the fleeing field mice and pocket gophers, pinching them at the backs of their necks, and stuff them into the pocket of my orange safety vest, already bulging with the wriggling bodies of alligator lizards and western skinks…..
To the rest of the construction crew, I must look ridiculous — stooped over, racing this way and that through a cloud of dust, filling my pockets with small creatures as the rotary mixer nips at my heels. But I’ve learned not to care. No matter how I appear, the biologist will always be the outcast on these projects.
One of the reasons some of us – yes, me included – get so impatient with “green” articles is that there’s always another animal that’s dying off, that needs immediate attention, and it’s always for good reason. So please forgive me if I seem less than enthusiastic about this essay. It’s well-written, it includes interesting examples and thought-provoking analogies as well as insightful observation of human behavior – and I can’t wait to get it off my plate and move on. Part of that is because I’m almost done with Pushcart and am really ready at this point to start reading actual books, reading activity people (outside of the weirdos like myself) understand. But a lot of it is: oh, no, another Northern Spotted Owl Catastrophe.
I will say that Scott’s point of view is an interesting one: he’s a biologist assigned, by law, to new construction projects in the Santa Rosa Plain of northern California, in the hopes of preserving any tiger salamanders that remain before the machines pulverize the earth. He records some of his interaction with the construction crew, who, like me, just want to get on with it, and who view their job, their mission of creating housing, to be important. In this piece, he tries to argue back, in a way he can’t in the moment, why his job is even more important.
As a species, we suffer from a sort of collective amnesia brought on by a phenomenon called “shifting baseline syndrome.” Shifting baselines are what allow each new generation of people to be born into a world that appears “normal” to them, even as their grandparents loudly lament “the way things used to be.” Those lamentations die with the older generation, and the new generation begins the process over, now bemoaning the changes they’ve witnessed in their short lifetimes, while their children and grandchildren are born into worlds that appear perfectly normal to them. And so on.
….We keep smiling, ignorant to the fact that the natural world, which we rely on for survival, is disappearing beneath our feet, and in our very hands.
The time period he’s writing about is a very special moment. He has two separate face masks, one to protect against pre-vaccine transmission of COVID, and one to protect him from the smoke of the California wildfires that were turning the skies orange at the time. Neither of these have that much to do with the vanishing of the tiger salamander. Except he argues they are indeed related, as signs of our abuse of our ecosystems, our intrusion into lands filled with wildlife, our – my – dismissal of the importance of the tiger salamander and spotted owl and whales and bees and butterflies.
We need tiger salamanders, and all other plants and animals, because what’s killing them is also killing us. A California with a healthy tiger salamander population is a place where we’re all healthier….
I think of these animals as ambassadors to the apocalypse. Tiger salamanders are trying to tell us something by their very disappearance — if the world isn’t healthy enough for us, it isn’t healthy enough for you either. We would be wise to heed the warnings of those species who are showing us where we’re all headed, because there is no more urgent form of communication than going extinct.
I was in high school on the first celebration, if that’s the right word, of Earth Day. I’d say ecology hasn’t become much more popular in the past fifty years. But there is a biologist who’s trying to keep hope alive, and maybe I should let him, rather than brushing him aside to move on.
Photo by Don Seymour: “Orange moon rising over Blue Hill Bay, Maine”
I am not a Christian by any prevailing definition. Christians can say the Apostle’s Creed without crossing their fingers. They believe in the second coming of Christ and the resurrection of the body. Christians are sure that accepting Jesus Christ as their personal Lord and Savior will gain them a place in heaven . . .Christians are confident that theirs is the only way, and do not hesitate to convert others by force or guile. Christians believe that humanity and the Earth are fallen and can only be redeemed by Christ. They believe that animals have no souls and that mankind is master of the Earth.
All my life I have read the same scriptures, prayed the same prayers and sung the same hymns as other Christians, but I have been led another way. I do not believe these things. Nor do I find much evidence that Jesus believed these things either.
It may surprise some readers to discover that the writer of these words is a minister. Not an internet-ordained minister with a church that exists only in cyberspace, but a graduate of Harvard Divinity who pastored a Congregationalist church in Downeast Maine for 28 years until retiring in 2014. I’ll admit, I’d always assumed he was a Unitarian minister, the Unitarians being fond of the “bring your own theology but respect everyone and care for the gift of the earth” foundation, but Congregationalists tend towards individualist enclaves, so it makes sense. He was a fixture in Maine, sort of the Wendell Berry of our part of the country.
There is an Old Faith that survives out in the country, in small towns, tribal reserves, and the hearts of spiritual people all over the globe who want little to do with organized religion. It is the faith that was from the beginning. It is faith in the earth and the weather, the sun and the moon, the land and the sea….. It has two natural laws: “You reap what you sow,” and “Do to others as you would have others do to you.” It has many teachers. It is the original faith of humankind and will never be extinguished.
Organized religions, born in the cities, have stolen from the Old Faith and then tried to stamp it out. But the Old Faith lives on, quietly and joyfully, in the country. That is why it is called ‘pagan’ and ‘heathen.’ Pagan comes from the Latin word for country; heathen means from the wilderness.
Rev. McCall died last year. Although it’s listed as being from the Awanadjo Almanack, a series of spoken essays McCall published periodically until 2022, this essay is more directly extracted from his book, Great Speckled Bird: Confessions of a Village Preacher which was published in 2012 by Pushcart Press. As such, this is one of the tribute entries that sometimes appear in these volumes. It was nominated by Genie Chipps Henderson. So I’d say that, in addition to being important to the people of Maine, particularly rural Downeast Maine, he was also important to the Hendersons, and thus, to Pushcart.
Addendum: I just noticed the Dedication page of this volume of Pushcart.
It shouldn’t be lost that his message is particularly earnest right now, when organized religion seems intent on giving itself a black eye and then claiming martyrdom while demanding power to rule over everyone. It’s only a small slice of organized religion that is doing this, of course, but the other components aren’t doing all that much to combat the impression.
To you whose religion is fishing or farming or gardening or handicraft or hiking or fiddling or drumming; to you whose saints are your neighbors and children, to you whose temple is the earth and whose creed is the turning of the seasons; to you whose matins are sung by the birds and whose evensong is the rising moon and the setting sun; to you who remember and remain fearless and joyful in the Old Faith: Have courage. Your hour approaches. You are to be the redemption of the world.
I’m not sure I fit this kind of religion either; I live in the middle of the biggest city in Maine (albeit an incredibly small biggest city), and the internet is my cathedral. But for all that, I do care for an assortment of beginner-level plants, and I always feel better when I can see the moon. So maybe I can squeak in.
And by explaining how he came to be in Pushcart, and how I relate to him, I take the opportunity to let him explain his views, through his own words, to whoever may read here.
* * *
A tribute to Rev. McCall appears on Robert Shetterly’s site Americans Who Tell the Truth.
The motel is permanently closed now. When I type “Nutel Motel Los Angeles” into my laptop’s keyboard, Google feeds me newspaper clippings and one-star Yelp reviews, along with a few photos of the sign, large and red and of another era, “iconic,” according to the captions. A page deep into Google Images, I find a missing-person flyer with a grainy image of a shitty butterfly tattoo on the pale skin. The picture of the shitty butterfly tattoo is also a picture of the thigh of a woman found rotting between mattresses in the motel thirty-three years ago.
Writing is all about choices. So when Catlin sat down to write her memoir of the years she spent drifting on a shoestring, living an unstable life in fleabag motels like the Nut, she had some choices to make. She could have started off with one of the more dramatic scenes from that time. She could have started with a more stable time in her life, shown how she fell off the mainstream. She could have started at the beginning, if she could figure out where it began. But instead, she chose to start in the after years, looking back.
She looks back, not at herself, but at someone she could have been: a dead Jane Doe who was found at the same motel where she herself had stayed for some time. This accomplishes two things: it shows, without telling, how she somehow turned it around. And it shows she’s aware how lucky she was to do so.
Jane Doe’s missing-person flyer says she was maybe white, maybe Hispanic, maybe fifteen, maybe twenty-three. It says her corpse wore a blue-and-white necklace, that a pair of earrings were found near her body. I wonder if she took the earrings off herself. If they were important to her. If she laid them carefully on the chipped brown nightstand with the wobbly leg and made sure they didn’t fall.
Again, Catlin conveys a lot here. There’s the uncertain identity of Jane; not just her name, but her age and background. The use of the word “corpse” harshly underlines the reality of her death. The details afforded the earrings show not just compassion, but a connection: we can imagine that Catlin once did the same with her earrings when she stayed at the Nut, remembering the wobbly nightstand. And, again, a sense of there-but-for-the-grace-of-God.
This also conveys a sense of trust in the writer, a sense we might not have if she’d started with one of the splashier paragraphs, like the one from which the title is taken:
Somewhere there is a photo of me that was taken at The Nut by a friend of a friend of a friend from Denver, who was swinging through LA to buy a stolen identity….. My Dollar Tree red lips are wrapped around the black barrel of his Glock 19 9mm. Though we were just drunk and fucking around, I liked the feel of that gun in my hand, cold and heavy. I liked the taste of it between my teeth, so much like the copper pennies I used to suck on as a kid.
I wasn’t planning to die in that moment, the gun in my mouth, but I wasn’t actively trying not to die either. The distinction is narrow, but for a person like me, it’s a good idea to have an active plan not to die. It doesn’t always come naturally.
We find out that Catlin started out in Denver, and ended up in LA at the Nut by following another drifter who planned to go into rehab. We find out how scary these places can be, places you go when you don’t have much choice. We find out she early-on abandoned drugs for liquor. We learn that it takes a lot of luck, and some kind of strength, to survive in these circumstances.
What we don’t find out – and it’s always interesting to think about what is not said – is how she got there. When she lived at the Nut, Catlin was in her thirties. What was her early home life like? Is this all the product of alcoholism, or was there something else? And how did she pull out of it, attending college in middle age (as I did), earning an MFA so she could write her story, including this chapter, as her thesis? Maybe those details are in the other chapters of her thesis. Maybe they’ll be in future essays. Maybe she’ll move on to other topics, won’t ever tell us what is now behind her.
Something else that opening connection does: it helps the reader feel a connection to Catlin, a connection we might not have felt with the woman sucking on the barrel of a gun. We might have our own there-but-for-the-grace-of-God moment. If writing is about choices, so is living. I’ve made some decisions that kept me from being in her shoes, but they weren’t made out of wisdom; they weren’t even carefully thought out. One was just casually checking a box because I thought I was supposed to. Another was in opposition to a lot of advice at the time. Another was prompted by unrequited love. Those were coincidental rather than wise choices, but they may have saved me from ending up between the mattresses at the Nut. Or, in my case, since I’m prone to diagnoses other than addiction, in a state hospital.
I vaguely remember, in one of my how-I-became-a-doctor books, or maybe one of my neuroscience-for-dummies books, a doctor mused that all that separates him – or her – from the patient in four-point restraints is chemistry. A tattered chromosome here, a neurotransmitter out of balance there, and all the academic prizes, the MD, the high-end career goes out the window. You think your high work ethic makes you deserving of a blessed, comfortable life? What kind of work ethic do you think it takes to pick vegetables all day in the hot sun, to clean offices all night when you’re in your 50s and your knees were shot years ago from kneeling on linoleum and tile, to serve drinks in a seedy bar to guys who’ll grab your ass a few times an hour? Everyone deserves our compassion, and no more scorn than we give ourselves.
Catlin managed to get that point across with a lot less verbiage.
There are only two stories for a woman like me in a place like The Nut. It’s either a story of passing through, if you’re as lucky as I was, or it’s a place of staying forever, whether it’s on the outside stairs, opening and closing a filthy, meaty palm, or between mattresses, earrings left on the night stand. I wasn’t the only woman to land in that baby-shit brown room. There are a thousand indistinguishable places and people like this scattered across the US. The Nut wasn’t special, and neither was I.
This isn’t the kind of memoir I typically get invested in – I’ve mentioned my aversion to drug stories before – but it was written in a way that drew me in. It’ll be interesting to see what Catlin comes up with in the future.
* * *
The author’s MFA thesis, including a slightly different version of this essay, is available online.
The Jane Doe with the butterfly tattoo and earrings – from 1984 – is still on the Unidentified Awareness board at Fandom.
Years later they met on the threshold of a motel room door. He’d driven through the night and still arrived too late. Henry died while he was still in Ohio on the interstate. He’d just passed the pocked lights of the derelict oil refineries of Sandusky when Claudia texted. He kept driving because what choice did he have?
This is one of those stories that grad students write about in their theses, but that leaves less academic readers – like me – uncertain. It also is one of those stories that appears to have been written for me, for where I am at this moment. But that’s a personal matter.
Four short sections, all but the first with their own subtitles, show little dramas of loss and regret. The details are incomplete. The emotions of the participants are not always clear. They’re all what those grad students might call open; that is, open to interpretation. Some basic facts are given, and some provocative details, and at least one powerhouse phrase, but it’s up to the reader to put it together. As someone who’s insecure about my ability to properly read, I find it a struggle to pin anything down, because I might be wrong. But if the author had wanted to lead the reader to a clear interpretation, he would have written these four stories differently.
As it is, I spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to see the four sections as linked stories. I’m still pretty sure they are, but they’re linked less by characters or locations and more by the common emotional tone: loss, missed opportunities to connect, ended relationships someone meant to restart but never did. Loves, friends, relations that could have been but, like a plant one forgets to water (oops), wither from neglect, fear, awkwardness, fear of awkwardness.
The first section tells us about a man returning to his former home, a place he’d left because he was in love with the wife of a friend. Twenty two years earlier he left, as it was “the only way to live without her.” But he loved her husband, too, presumably (though not clearly) a different kind of love. So this tripartite love was suspended, and is now being resuscitated because the husband is dying. Dies, actually, before the man can reach him to say goodbye.
You made it.
Not quite.
I told him you were coming. He smiled. He did. He thought of you and he smiled.
They crumple into each other. If someone passing by on the two-lane between the motel and the VA happened to glance their way it might have looked like a woman fainted into some old man’s arms. But really
it’s his knees that just buckled.
The only way to present this emotional jumble is in this brief scene. Each person must be feeling, must have felt, many things, some sweet and beautiful, some dark and painful. To try to separate them out would be to burden the reader with facts, with evidence, with words, when all that’s needed is this glimpse to evoke in the reader what’s happening for these people. It’s that smile that breaks my heart.
The second section, “West Lafayette,” starts with the abrupt, “They’d lost a child.” It’s again about a couple plus one, but this time, the romantic intrigue is replaced by casual friendship. It’s more a story about the overall process of making and losing temporary friends one makes because we find ourselves, temporarily, in the same place at the same time.
He was a writer, and she, if I remember, was finishing a master’s in public health. This happened. I’ve become less and less interested in invention. Don’t we have enough sorrow already? Why concoct more? But facts don’t make any of this the truth. What did I know about them? Two people I was acquainted with for a couple of years? We were part of the same group of friends, mostly grad students and adjuncts at Purdue. All of us passing through West Lafayette on our way somewhere we were all convinced would be better, a lot better.
There’s a reference to a book the husband loaned our narrator, The Trolley by Nobel Laureate Claude Simon, a book that, as I understand it from various reviews, is less about plot and more about memories, somewhat in the style of Proust. This is the second time I’ve encountered Proust in these stories, the theme of memories, in a story about memories. The section ends with one of those idyllic scenes prior to the couple splitting up, a group of friends gathered on the grass, a happy communal moment, and closes with the comment, “What made us all so sure we’d find a place better than this?”
“Her Brother” is the third section. A woman is talking to our narrator about her brother, a troubled child who could one moment be clever and witty, and the next require police restraints or a locked ward. It’s made clear the narrator knew him, as he recollects some things about him. I get the sense it’s a wake for the brother, and the narrator is a casual friend from the neighborhood, paying his respects:
Mostly I remember him as gentle, with a hangdog but still handsome face, and there were always flashes of what she called his old wit, his old flair. Like he was some retired entertainer. As a kid she said he never stopped joking, never stopped moving, and when he walked he often danced. I’d see it too in his eyes, when he seemed to suddenly think of something clever to say. They’d open wider, not without a struggle, as if fighting against the droop. Sometimes he’d manage to get it out, to say whatever he thought of to say. Other times he couldn’t and his eyes would cave in again.
The fourth section, “Caroline,” has some similarity to the first. Our narrator once had an illicit relationship with Caroline – she joked about them having assignations when he came over and they did it on the sofa because “she didn’t want to sully her and Jimmy’s bed” – but that was seventeen years ago, and they hadn’t spoken since though they still lived in the same town and saw each other regularly.
Our silence, all that accumulated silence, there wasn’t hostility in it. We got used to it, passing each other at Donahue’s market without a word, just the weight of what we might have said. Maybe we both thought, even after years, that it was just a pause. That at some point we’d – Because we were stupid. Everybody’s stupid.
The occasion for this recollection is another loss: Caroline is found dead inside her home. Whether it’s a peaceful, natural death, or a more tragic one, is not disclosed, only that she’s been there, alone, for a while, judging by the smell.
A collection of four stories – sketches, really – is at heart about how everybody’s stupid, the opportunities we never took to connect, and how one day it’s too late. They invite thoughts of “What if.” And they invite us to look at what we’re overlooking now.
Why title this “Four More Stories”? Does this refer to Orner’s extensive oeuvre? I’d guess this is the case; I’ve even encountered him before, in Pushcart 2021.
But I have a more idiosyncratic, personal interpretation. I recently experienced a loss after a long silence, a silence not of my choice. My brother had refused to have anything to do with me since the late 70s. For that matter, he’d had nothing to do with our family at all once our father died. Last Fall, he ended up under state conservatorship due to a brain tumor that incapacitated, then killed him. The conservator, unable to find any record of family, finally found me via a box of personal items that included old ham radio contact cards from the 60s when he was a teenager (oh, the ascendant days of Heathkit and the OG nerds, the beeping away in Morse code well into the night as I fell asleep in my bedroom next door to his), and a couple of letters I’d written him, trying to establish some contact. And now, I am alternately gratified, and tormented, by the thought: Why did he keep those letters?
That’s my story. And now Orner has written Four More Stories on the same theme.
The centerpiece of Lark’s studio is the Cunt Bodhisattva, an eight-foot architectural marvel of sedimentary vermiculite clay, sustainably retrieved from someplace in South Africa, molded in the shape of a woman bent backward in an Ūrdhvadhanurāsana pose, feet planted, legs spread, and vagina on display, stomach arching toward buoyantly upside-down tits and a neutral, choiceless face, palms firm on the ground astride a thicket of load-bearing hair.
“What do you think?” Lark asks.
“I think it’s a striking confluence of the obverse elements of female fetishization and empowerment.”
“I want her to feel playful. Does she feel playful?”
“She does.”
“Really?”
“Extremely playful.”
My heart sank as I read this first paragraph. Oh, no, I thought. It’s about art. About sexualized art. And about art jargon. And about academic feminist rhetoric: not about real women dealing with real problems but about throwing words around. Men can just say “Women should shut up and do as they’re told while we rule the world” while women have to get tangled up in words like fetishization and obverse elements. All while being playful.
I shouldn’t have worried. It’s a playful piece. It’s just that, before you can play, you have to describe the game board.
Lark is the artist with plenty of money, even more ego, but not much depth, and our narrator is her complementarily equipped assistant.
When she begins to understand something like this, something she’s made, you can’t help but believe that it’s your doing. You’ve taught her the words for this, penned index cards thick with the micro-vocabularies of feminism and post-feminism and post-post-feminism. You’ve gently guided the pronunciation of eurocentrism, hegemony, intersectional transmedia narrative….
It occurs to me, often, that I’m a traitor to the authors of books she hasn’t read, the artists who couldn’t afford the buy-in, the other artists whose work has nothing to do with her work but whose catalogs are referenced in her list of influences; to women, to PhD candidates, to people whose last names end in –ez, like mine.
Nonetheless, I cash the checks, and this is the thing that Lark has always understood. To be paid for something is to consent to it. To endorse it, as it were.
Her dead-serious, highly educated, guilt-ridden narrator. But, hey, everybody’s got to make a living.
There’s a scene later in the story, when the two are in India, that seems an embodiment of this contemplation. They drive by a village where many poor women are doing the arduous labors of the poor, and our narrator wonders what it would be like for one of these women if someone just gave her money. Lark hands her a hundred-dollar bill and goads her into doing it. The result is far less satisfying than she might have hoped, since the village is now full of women who feel aggrieved. “It’s clear now that I’ve coronated a target, if not of theft then of envy…. I haven’t just given a person one hundred dollars. I’ve given hundreds of people nothing.” Does she connect this to how Lark’s patronage reflects on her?
Now, those who are paying attention (those few, those nerdy few) will notice something. The story sometimes lapses into second person, a voice that serves a multitude of purposes. This happens in several long passages throughout the story, and I’m still wondering about the choice of those passages. They’re “musing” passages, thoughts in the head of the narrator. But there are other musing passages that stay in first person. I think it’s more about the guilt, the self-accusation – You! You! You! – that becomes private. When Lark comes up with the idea of going to India; when our narrator (who, obviously, isn’t named or I wouldn’t be calling her by her literary function) takes an interview as the artist at her request; when she does a little heroin just to see what it’s like because she’ll never do it otherwise. She’s no longer writing for a reader, but for herself. Second person as privacy. As – and here I hate to use the word – authenticity.
Because it’s a story about authenticity. About how authenticity gets covered up with artifice, pretense, sham. How our idea of authenticity doesn’t always match the reality of authenticity. It’s a story that laughs at the question, “Is this the real India?” Because it’s all the real India, from the dirt and the poverty to the fancy hotels and the tourist traps.
Throughout there are references to this reality vs artifice, as when Lark wears nail polish and lipstick the exact same shade as her nails and lips, blurring the difference. The sky is described as “a violent orange, leaking upward toward a murky swath of Liatris blue, looking less like an actual sunset and more like a cocktail named after one.” Lark asks her assistant to tell her stories of her travels, then finishes them with her own imagined ending. At one point, our narrator says, “I’m so happy here” and then adds, in narration, “And I am.” Because most of the time she says things Lark wants to hear, so when she’s telling the truth, it’s an event to be emphasized.
But of course the most dramatic example is the project itself, because India is not a vacation, as our narrator discovers on the plane over ersatz champagne:
It’s clear now, with twelve collective ounces of brut or blanc de blancs or whatever is bubbling before us that Lark has set me up. That whatever she says next will have the de facto portent of a toast. “I’ve been thinking,” she says, “about the real reason for India.” She leans in, conspiratorially. “It’s the Cunt Bodhisattva. Imagine her sixty feet tall, arched over the border between Jammu and Kashmir, half her body in one state and half in the other, her belly button skyward right at the border. Body the same color as the sand.”
I nod and, because I’m exhausted and secretly drunk and trapped on this airplane, I say, “Yes. Of course yes. You’re a genius.”
“You get it though, right?”
“Of course. It’s the interstice of postcolonial conflict literally embodied by the intrinsically female dichotomy of religious idolatry: the contraposed irony of deification and objectification.”
Lark smiles, lifts her glass. “Exactly.”
Now, most of us read through this without pause, but those who know a little bit about India – or about international news and politics – are aware there’s something wrong here. And our narrator discovers it, halfway into the project: Jammu and Kashmir is one place. There is no border. Or rather, there are lots of borders, but there is no border between Jammu and Kashmir. This is what comes from hearing without listening, of remembering without understanding.
Fortunately, their driver, Sai, picked for his attractiveness but clearly affiliating with the narrator as workers united, has a solution: “We can drive out to Hikkim, through the Spiti Valley. There’s a route where the signs are all in Devanagari. She won’t know the difference.” Artifice can be your friend.
The climax of the story is wonderful, combining the sexuality of the statue with the sexuality of the word climax and the graphically depicted wages of all that artifice. Our narrator makes her final, fatal mistake, in pointing out where the responsibility lies. It’s immensely satisfying.
I discovered that Bermudez developed the story in part while the Artist in Residence at the Bethany Arts Community in New York, which may explain how precisely she was able to skewer a certain type of artist, a certain type of art. Lesson learned: a heart-sinking first paragraph can lead to wonderful things. In fact, I’ve added the short story collection in which it appears, Stories No One Hopes Are About Them, to my TBR list.
This isn’t a story I often share. I’ve feared others’ judgments, and I become flooded with the temptation to explain – we’re not gun people and my grandparents are more than just grandparents and, and, and . . . . Plus, despite the public nature of this event and the fact that strangers have dissected it in their own articles and posts, I’ve wondered which parts are mine to tell.
I’ve never been the center of a media storm. The closest I’ve come was when a neighbor in our apartment complex was murdered, presumably by her boyfriend. This was pre-Internet, so it was a week of local news reports filled with people claiming what I’d always experienced as a quiet, ordinary suburban neighborhood was actually filled with roaming bands of escapees from a local youth detention center and drunken enthusiasts of a nude bar a few blocks away. Other than puzzled amusement at these characterizations, and a typical vague sense of sadness for someone else’s tragedy, I had little emotional reaction. They weren’t talking about me, after all, or my family.
Farmer was not so lucky. After a routine trip-and-fall left her 80-year-old grandmother completely paralyzed and in intractable pain, her grandfather attempted what would be called a mercy killing / suicide. The description evokes far more compassion than outrage from me, but apparently the blogosphere thought differently.
This essay traces Farmer’s journey through her emotional minefield. It’s the lead-off essay in her collection Dear Damage (this piece is titled “Mercy” there), as she explores that period of time, among other events in her life.
Despite the tragic onset and the emotional ravages of those months, she makes a positive note her landing place and ultimately the point:
[W]hile I’m skeptical about mining beauty from pain (Francis certainly didn’t find her pain beautiful) or landing on a diamond takeaway or even claiming good can come from it, I’ve learned that time-freezing anguish makes for micro-moments of unexpected reverence. Even when grief scrambles the big picture and clarity remains decades – or maybe forever – out of reach, the particulars come into focus…. How, in those first days when our family paced my grandparents’ house, sick and sleepless and shocked to our marrow, strangers left meals wrapped in cellophane on that same front stoop next to my grandparents’ initials. One time, a card and carnations. One time, a bottle of wine like a sacrament. Holy, these details, even to me, a heathen fumbling prayers on the 405.
There is mercy and goodness even in the storm, and one can choose to notice and celebrate it even with a broken heart. And one can extend such blessings to the grieving no matter what the Internet is saying.
It was the 1990s, and my father was at last fully out of the closet. He compensated for the years of concealment with a deliberate exaggeration, a bravado that I had not seen in him throughout my boyhood.
…I was home from my junior year of college, and it was early in the summer, and I was young enough to think nothing of a vacation with my father and his lover. My father and I were still at a stage where we were doing everything together. I was not quite a boy and not quite a man but was nevertheless tethered to him for allotted times, and during such times, I lived as best I could the life of a student, my father openly and belatedly lived as best he could but life of a romantic.
I don’t think I’ve ever read a story in which a grown but still young son deeply contemplated his father’s romantic life. It seems the sort of thing daughters do all the time with their mothers, but somehow it seems strange when transferred to males. As the son narrates, he thought nothing odd about spending his summer with Dad and lover. That the father is only recently out of the closet makes it seem both stranger and more understandable to me.
Son’s mother is mentioned only once in passing. We don’t know for sure if that means she is an ex-wife or if this was a less formal liaison; we don’t know when, or how dramatic, the breakup was, or if Dad’s acceptance of his sexuality was the cause (well, of course it was, at some level, but I mean directly) or the effect of divorce. Son does tell us it could have been worse, much worse: “[I]n my earlier years he might have broken entirely with me, and with his past, and moved to a place that better catered to his being….. He might have done this. Many men do.”
The story focuses on a weekend trip to Provincetown, which leaves the son feeling “more an ambassador than a citizen.” Carlos isn’t portrayed in a particularly good light, and it only gets worse when he leaves suddenly. This apparently is a pattern for the father: his fondness for younger men almost guarantees it. They’re looking for a father figure; Dad is looking for someone to let him be vulnerable.
Carlos’s return a few weeks later, on the day the son is scheduled to leave for his own solo cross-country trip, only emphasizes his unreliability. It’s that return that gives rise to an interesting little scene involving Dad playing the violin. There’s an intensity to it: he stares at the listener while playing. In this case, he watches his son, not his lover. There’s some kind of communication going on here – an apology? A plea? – and Carlos is aware he’s not part of it. I got the sense of Dad looking through the f-holes of the violin somehow: a narrow opening in a protected space (his playing) from which to look out on the world.
Then the voice turns retrospective: son is now older than his father was at the time, and there’s an implication that Dad is no longer living.
Carlos was a little leaf drifting atop the ocean. My father was the ancient rocky crag upon which Carlos had once alighted, only to feel himself, within minutes of his arrival, coming dislodged again, tugged back toward the broad, dark, wind-crazed world. Carlos had no part of the adamantine pull between father and son, and he was dishonest in so many of the ways that mattered, yet unlike some of those who followed, Carlos had the grace, when at last a short time later he left for good, to take only what he had brought with him. In that regard, I see even more clearly now that the love affair between Carlos and my father, however short-lived, had been predicated upon a feeling that was real. For this I offer Carlos my retrospective gratitude. Sometimes only after twenty years are gone do you realize that you were fairly dealt with.
Chanteuse of late summer, bringing of my father’s joy! – you too, must be in your fifties now. On whom did you permanently alight?
This poetic final paragraph allows for that punch line: “Sometimes only after twenty years are gone do you realize that you were fairly dealt with.” The son is speaking of Carlos, but it’s clear he’s also thinking of his father. I think back to “He might have done this. Some men do.” That could have been – or, more accurately, not-been – almost twenty years before. Time is a powerful but subtly used element in this story.
I was a little off balance with this story, first because, once again, I wasn’t sure if it was fiction or non-fiction. The “fiction by” notation was missing, so I’d initially assumed it to be a memoir. Yet the Chicago Quarterly Review lists it as fiction. The Pushcart index lists it, bizarrely, as Poetry. It reads as non-fiction, but I’ll take the initial publisher’s word for it.
For breakfast, lunch, and dinner. On slices of rubbery white bread buttered with margarine so that the marmalade slides under the spreading knife. In the glass jar, the orange jelly with bright shavings of orange peel absorbs light and invites hungry eyes. And so, dreaming of marmalade, the brothers, always in need of sustenance, arrive on a snowy March morning at Heathrow. Their mother stands at the bottom of the aircraft boarding stairs, her arms full of four gray wool coats. She’s given special permission to stand by the plane with the coats because of the snow and the fact that her children, categorized as minors in the state’s eyes, materialize with no protection against the English weather. The boys file down, the eldest, age thirteen, holding the hands of the youngest, age five, and the two middle boys, eight and ten, in single file, not touching. Their teeth chatter. Their heads swivel, take in parchments of light.
At first, I thought, This must be an excerpt from a forthcoming novel. So much was left out of the story: there are no clear indications of time, of why the parents are in the UK and the boys were still in Guyana, of who took care of them there, of any school attendance.
Later, I realized those things weren’t omitted, they just weren’t part of the story. The story was about a family that underwent a series of changes over six months, one of which was the immigration of the children to the UK to join their mother. Turns out, I’d change my mind about this evaluation as well.
This family goes through a great many changes, some that make the change of residence seem minor in comparison:
They collect four suitcases helped by a man who is neither Guyanese nor British and who their mum introduces as Uncle Iqbal, which causes the three oldest boys to raise their eyebrows, while the youngest seems oblivious. As they march to a van, stamping on the snow as if the ground were showered with insects to be obliterated, the eldest asks, Where’s Dad? Their mother says she will explain later and she invites them to take in the sights of England. The boys, all except the youngest, Tony, who is engrossed in following the things his mother points out to him, look at each other and at the man introduced as their uncle, and again at each other. There is nothing discernible in their expressionless faces; there is everything in the way they catch each other’s eyes.
It’s almost funny how kids know immediately what the term “Uncle” means.
Uncle Iqbal is the force behind another major change: the conversion of the boys to Islam. Several pages of what is a fairly short story are devoted to their circumcision and its (painful) aftermath, but there are also Saturday classes in Arabic and religious practice. The oldest boy, Gavin, seems to take his new religion seriously, but he’s not without conflicting emotions. He’s had a bit of a crush on their neighbor’s daughter Jennifer, and now he imagines leaving her behind as he falls asleep:
He releases a little boat on a lake with Jennifer seated in it and waves at her as the boat drifts from him. He performs this goodbye task by looking askance at Jennifer, at the lake’s reflection of the boat with her in it, and so no pollution of himself. He sees himself seated before a sewing machine and applies butterfly touches to the pedal with his foreskin under the needle as he labors to reattach himself to himself. He floats off, no boat nor water, just his body lowered into a dark that shuts down his conscious thoughts, replacing them with more rhapsodic alternatives.
This poetic turn of phrase is in marked contrast to the more straightforward narration that’s covered the rest of the story so far. It’s fitting that a thirteen-year-old might get caught up in romance and fantasy. And this is where I started to think of that important question: Whose story is it? I’d been thinking of it as the story of a family, and it is, but the spotlight shifts to Gavin as the tone turns poetic.
More changes are ahead as Uncle Iqbar exits from their life and Muslim training becomes less important. But to Gavin, it leaves an echo, even as he and Jennifer become friends, to the point of satisfying her curiosity about his circumcision:
She traces the scar with her middle and index fingers. His head falls back and he pulls in his stomach involuntarily. Not a needle’s deep puncture, nor a scalpel parting skin, but the flock that rises from the Quran as its throat opens and the menorah’s many-limbed flames, and his mother in the arms of her first lover, and only love, his father, with Iqbal’s song on his lips, father, who wants nothing more from her than the four children she has given him: Alif, baa, taa, tha.
Again the poetic voice takes over in this closing paragraph, blending all the elements of the story – Jennifer, the circumcision, his mother, his father, Uncle Iqbar and the poet after whom he was named, and the echoes of Islam that remain.
I was still a bit unsettled by the missing information in the story, so I went off to do some elementary research. In the 40s and 50s, many Guayanese people, subjects of British colonial rule, immigrated freely to England. Too freely, it turns out, for the comfort of the British, so laws were passed prohibiting such movement, which ended almost completely with the independence of the colony. While the image of steps on tarmac for exiting a plane might fit with that 40s to 1962 time frame, I just don’t sense this feels right; the story seems to take place later, what with Iqbar’s references to the laxness of the country, a far more mid-60s or later evaluation.
This led me to check out the author. D’Aguiar is best known as a poet, and was, Wikipedia tells me, born in the UK to Guyanese parents, in the mid-60s, and moved back to Guyana when he was very young, then returned to England at age 12. This sounds more like Gavin’s experience, and would fit with the historical restrictions as well. While the story isn’t necessarily even vaguely autobiographical, it does have a certain resonance with the awakening of Gavin’s poetic voice at the same time as his sexual awakening. In that, it’s a double coming-of-age tale, which gives me some confidence that this is, indeed, Gavin’s story.
I’m also curious about the marmalade. It’s apparently very popular in England, and is something of a luxury item. I wonder if it represents the lure of Europe to the family. Considering their experience, I’d guess the taste has some significance as well: yes, you can have that marmalade you dream of, but don’t be surprised when the sweetness turns out to be more bitter than you expected.
“Don’t bleed on the work,” James and I warn each other after each prick and subsequent curse. A pin nips my finger, and I hold my index up to the light to look for a tiny puncture, waiting to see if a red drop will emerge. We’re hand sewing a ten-foot dome from socks, skirts, and other assorted fabrics, including something that might be the hide of Elmo. Every day, our hands receive tiny little injuries. Stitched together, the varying colors and fabrics appear similar to abstractly patterned stained glass. It’s a big project, sewing this tent/installation/ sculpture, so friends come to help. They include a teacher, a historian, a poet, two seamstresses, and a beekeeper whose hives are kept inside a cemetery.
…. The creation of the dome is an intimate and painful experience. James gives the dome a name: The Tent of Casually Observed Phenologies. He paints the words on a piece of wood and leans it against the base of the tent’s frame.
Phenology is the study of cyclic and seasonal natural phenomena. It’s concerned with whether plants and animals thrive or survive, because our food supply depends on the timing of events. Two other words that pop up when the term phenology is entered into a search engine: climate and consequences.
Pre-pandemic, Gallentine answered an ad for an Artist’s Assistant. The result was this project, described as performance art, an art installation, and activism: they sewed a tent from discarded clothing and paintings of animals affected by climate change, sought out diviners of the future whatever their means of divination, got some tarot cards, and toured fifty cities asking people to step inside the tent and discuss their ideas, predictions, and fears about climate change by posting a sign, “Free Climate Change Divination Readings”, outside the tent. This essay is about that experience.
It’s also about many other things, including various details of climate change. I somehow missed the thing about places in Kazakhstan where people, while going about their day, were suddenly falling asleep, or otherwise becoming ill. It turns out an abandoned uranium mine was leaching carbon monoxide into the air in sufficient quantities to cause symptoms. Topsoil in the Midwest, the breadbasket of the US, has thinned from feet to mere inches. The mass of plastics in the ocean will quite possibly exceed the biomass of fish by 2050. For some reason I find this far more interesting than rising sea levels and temperatures. That’s probably a big part of the problem, isn’t it?
Gallentine sets this against the 1958 film, The Blob, starring Steve McQueen as a teenager – who looks like he has four kids and a mortgage, but let’s let that be – trying to save the world from a peril no one wants to believe exists:
Midway through the 1958 version of The Blob, Steve (Steve McQueen) and Jane (Aneta Corsaut) sneak away under cover of night to discuss the gelatinous creature that threatens to consume and destroy the world. The authorities in their town, who are generally dubious of teenagers’ thoughts and actions and see youth itself as a danger to a strictly controlled status quo, don’t believe the teens and so don’t believe the blob exists. A good portion of the film is devoted to the young protagonists assuring each other of their sanity, but, newly awakened to their situation—that humanity is at the brink of being eradicated and that no one believes them—Steve and Jane struggle with the veracity of their own experience as well as what to do about the town’s denial of the blob.
JANE. Steve, you believe you did see it. Don’t you?
STEVE. I don’t kn . . . I don’t . . .
JANE. That’s not true, Steve. Maybe now you don’t want to believe it; maybe you’d like to tell yourself it didn’t happen. Steve, you’re not the kind of person who can turn their back on something you know is true.
STEVE. How do you get people to protect themselves from something they don’t believe in?
JANE. You keep trying and hoping that you can find some sort of proof that will convince them.
How do you get people to protect themselves – the entire world – from something they not only don’t believe in, but ridicule as they complain about having to flush the low-flow toilet more than once some mornings?
Divination via tarot cards is the crux of the conversation that occurs in the tent. People are invited to ask what they want to know about the future vis-à-vis climate change. Their questions range from self-centered (“Can I safely buy a waterfront condo?”) to the constructive (“Should I be doing more?”) to the plaintive (“Is there any hope?”). I find it interesting that while examples of the questions are given, the readings given in response to these questions – to any questions – aren’t listed.
It’s here that, for me, worlds collide:
The Tent of Casually Observed Phenologies garners the attention of a professor at an ivy league school. James is interviewed by the woman (I am off camera, crouched in the box of invisibility), and she puts this filmed interview online so it can be shared with the smartest young people. They are teaching new courses at her ivy league school, teaching concepts like “climate communication,” the lens through which she’s explaining the tent project. Scientists are worried about how to get individuals to care about our climate crisis, and they have discovered that academic charts and diagrams are not the language of the people. So while offering tarot card readings about climate change may mock modern scientific thought, scientists are also recognizing that it might not be a terrible idea to use a communication tool that provides a spiritual and personalized element.
The ivy league university is Harvard, and the professor runs, along with the course mentioned, a mooc that’s part of the series PredictionX. I’ve looked at a few PredictionX moocs; I didn’t finish one because I prefer moocs with specific academic syllabi rather than collections of media. But I found it interesting how this became incorporated into a course on divination. The professor views it as an adjunct to a scientific approach to climate change, an approach that is more personal and thus might be more effective than charts and statistics.
Gallentine takes us through several individual locations of the installation: Rhode Island, where it turns out they are located on what used to be a “sacred spring” used for baptism that was then covered by a Texaco station, now abandoned; that’s a metaphor-and-a-half for you. They visited the Public Garden in Boston where the swan boats paddle in a fake pond. They toured Amish country. The conversations mentioned are alarming, sad, and hopeful, as people confront the future.
The essay closes with the final scene from the film:
The blob cannot be destroyed. The only way to slow down or pause its destructive momentum is to blast it with cold air. In the final scene, it’s dropped from a plane into snow-covered territory. A literal question mark hangs in the sky.
STEVE. It’s not dead, is it?
POLICE OFFICER. No, it’s not.
STEVE. Just frozen.
POLICE OFFICER. I don’t think it can be killed, but at least we’ve got it stopped.
STEVE. Yeah, as long as the arctic stays cold.
In 1958, that probably seemed like a safe bet.
This isn’t my first encounter with Molly Gallentine. Pushcart 2019 included her essay “Powder House,” which was, at least mostly, about gelatin, but it incorporated so many other elements – from an architect to 9/11 to Auden – that it managed to make Jello interesting. And now she’s done it again: I’m not a climate-change denier by any means, but I am rather sick of hearing about it, and I’m fairly cynical about tarot cards and performance art. Yet she had me glued to these twenty pages. I admire how it’s constructed. Initially, I wanted to call it a braided essay, a term I learned a couple of years ago from another essay. But it’s not really separate stories; it’s more like an essay with detours down related paths, delving into details as they come up. Call it woven rather than braided.
I urge readers to take a look at the online version, which includes photographs of the Tent of Casually Observed Phelologies tour. Links to that – and to other matters of interest raised by this essay – are below.
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The article is available online at LitHub, complete with pictures of the project.
Artist James Leonard has a description of the project on his website.
Colorado Review art: photo by Carsten Ullrich (modified)
The apartment had been in my mother’s family for decades, an inheritance that each generation received piously and then forgot. By the time it passed into Ma’s possession, the accumulated neglect was impossible to ignore. Cracks appeared in the ceiling, jagged and ominous, like mountain ranges bearing down. When it rained (short, half-hearted, sputtering outbursts that Beijing summers were known for), the cracks leaked a bilious ooze. A blotch the texture and color of moss had sprouted in the kitchen. Our solution was to hustle dishes and pans, the vinegar and salt and sugar, away from the problem area, and otherwise carry on around it as best we could. Repairs were scheduled, canceled, rescheduled, started, and never finished.
I’m left puzzled by this story. Fortunately, both the story, and a detailed interview with Guo explaining why she wrote it the way she did, are available online (links below) so readers are free to investigate for themselves.
The story consists of the interaction of four major elements, the first of which is the Beijing apartment described above. Who lives in the apartment, and who owns the apartment, make up a kind of sub-plot, the apartment morphing to blend with the other elements. While it starts out as a dilapidated place owned by the family matriarch and used only as a summer residence for her children during their youth, it eventually, in rehabilitated form, becomes a home for Mrs. Yang, the elderly aunt/cousin who took care of the children during those summers. Years later, the disposition of the apartment – whether it should be sold, the very basis of ownership – becomes a point on which the emotional story hinges and the truth of the past is revealed.
The second element is two sisters, ages seven and thirteen at the opening, who come from their New York home to live in the apartment during summers, initially with their mother, but later under the care of Mrs. Yang.
“This is Liping’s little girl,” they crowed. “Where is your father?” When Lin shook her head, the question was repeated twice in slow, syrupy drawls.
“Not here.”
Titters. Lin’s face was a blank little moon. “Where is he from?”
“Germany.”
“Oh, oh.” Hands fluttered in wonder.
“Mine is from New York,” I piped up, ignoring the stares.
“Hmm.” They took a step back, scrutinizing our faces. “Well, you don’t look much alike.” It was true, we didn’t, but it stung no less to hear.
“If it were me,” I said to Lin when we were alone, “I wouldn’t mind being called pretty and cute and sweet by everyone. I’d be happy. At least no one calls you ‘Porklet.’” These little jabs toward my sister never made me feel better; each time the words burst forth, I regretted them. But Lin just smiled as though I were a favorite television show or book and she had come across an interesting part.
The details of Mom’s life – how she came to have two children with two different men, how they travel widely and often, the work she does that seems remunerative but demanding of her time – are left up in the air. The focus is on the two girls, via the first-person POV character Yan, the older girl. She and her prettier, more appreciated sister, take piano lessons from a man in the neighborhood, Wu Laoshi –
<record scratch>
Wait, didn’t we just have a story about a sister jealous of her prettier, more social sister that revolved around piano lessons?
Onward.
The third element is an event that happens during the summer when Yan is thirteen. It’s phrased poetically, and in the language of children, so it’s not entirely clear what happens, but it’s what sets the emotional wheel of the story in motion. And it brings in Mrs. Yang.
Mrs. Yang is the final piece of the puzzle. She comes to live in the apartment full-time when Yan is fourteen, which is the second year of the story’s timeline. Apparently Mom is unable to be with the girls most of the time due to her work, so Mrs. Yang becomes a somewhat unwanted sitter.
The summer I turned fourteen, she had agreed to let Mrs. Yang live in the apartment indefinitely, in exchange for a nominal monthly sum. From Ma’s perspective, come May or June, when she herself had to stay behind in the States for work and our fathers couldn’t take us, we needed to have someone there to make sure we bathed, went to bed at a reasonable hour, and subsisted on more than crackers and red bean popsicles….
Ma said, with the air of someone holding the trump card, that Mrs. Yang never had an apartment to herself before. Her life, up to then, was a series of cramped, stinking spaces. The sink built into the space above the toilet. Someone else’s shit clinging to the bottom of the bowl. The communal kitchen, sugar and soy sauce stolen in inconspicuous increments. Didn’t we think Mrs. Yang deserved to have her own space for the years she had left? It was unlike Ma to be so explicit about death, and this, more than anything else, made me and Lin relent. What was the harm, we thought.
Fifteen years later, when Mom is ill and approaching death. The apartment, due to its location, now has great value. Yan wants to sell it to pay for her mother’s medical expenses. Lin wants to sell it and use the proceeds for her art career. Mom is reluctant. At her urging, Yan visits the apartment, which to her surprise has been substantially rehabilitated, as has Mrs. Yang, still living there. Revelations are made, and, as Guo’s interview makes clear, the theme of generosity is fleshed out:
LF: As indicated in the title, one of the throughlines of this story is an inquiry into what it means to be generous. Throughout the narrator struggles to understand the separation between material and intangible generosity, finally asking Mrs. Yang, “Why would you do that for us?” What does generosity mean to you, and how did it become central to this story?
JG: Through the lens of this story, I wanted to show that generosity, in real life, isn’t always something that has to be recognized and applauded at every opportunity. It’s the small, quiet, day-to-day tasks that you do because you want to. I love that you called out that line in the story. By needing to ask that question, by making it explicit, Yan misses the point and comes off oblivious. It’s also the driving theme for the story about her grandparents that Mrs. Yang relays to Yan, as well as the reason why Yan moves home to take care of her mother. As for how this idea of generosity became central to the story, I wanted to package it as a mystery, something you don’t really see the shape of until the end. Much of it is tied to someone’s interior, the core of their character and motivations, and you need to work really hard at chipping away to find out what it contains.
Joy Guo’s Interview in the Colorado Review with Lauren Furman
I have to admit I don’t quite get the generosity. It seems to involve Mrs. Yang in a protective role stemming from the incident back when Yan was thirteen, but to me, it seems like too little too late, and why Yan is the center of the attention isn’t clear to me. Apparently, I’m not equipped to chip away at the motivations and character to get to the emotional peak of the story.
A Just Recompense 