The work of The Curator for the last six years or so has been completed by volunteers. While proud of the prose and poetry we’ve been able to share with our readers, we’ve often felt overwhelmed by the responsibility of putting out two to three pieces of new writing every week while also balancing domestic life, work, and other responsibilities. In the end, we were reduced to just two volunteers from, at its peak, a team of eight. It became too much for us.

The money we earned from our Patreon account has been used to pay hundreds of writers. We’ve been grateful that we’ve been able to do that. The money left over will be used to keep the domain name and WordPress account alive so that the thirteen+ years of writing The Curator has published will remain available to our readers. At least until that money runs out.

It may be that The Curator will rise again and publish beautifully crafted prose and poetry. We hope that’s the case. For now, we wish to thank anyone who has contributed work to the magazine and all who have read it.

Knotwork, in the splits of sidewalks,
here: harden our utterance. Leach
loose antonyms along some jawline:
sand and gravel. Water. Lime.

Unattended handprints, things we
never thought to stroke again are here,
there in the fissures. Here you are, then,
they are saying. Have something to eat.

Maybe when you see them they’ll appear,
unstain steps that stammered, maybe then
they’ll fix the old saw. You will step on a crack
and find a poultice. You’ll listen, heal as you go.

It’s hard to ignore that kind of impatience.
Makes you hesitate a little. Those sad and ancient
eyes of yours—all these years of waiting to offer
your pregnant part, and now to be upstaged
by a little god who just wants you to finish up.

So, maybe it is time to revise. Say something
a bit different than what you have long intended.
Promise a little pain ahead, a speaking against.
Falling and risings. Swords. Piercings.
For, why not? It’s probably coming anyway.

Someone in a hat watches the pair;
he is hidden by a small rise and a little scrub grass.
The sea is in the distance, hints at places
neither the man nor his pale friend will ever go.

The trail ends where they stand—
horse and man. One hand holds the reins
near the horse’s mouth, the other hand is folded
onto his middle, holding back—what?—

Fear? Curiosity? A painful dream?
The horse is an icon of patience as is
the small black dog, barely seen in the shadows.
What remnants of trees those are,

I’ll never know. Blown, broken, bare, skeletons.
They might be frightening in the dark,
but here, in the overcast daylight,
they struggle to mean anything except,

perhaps, that all things broken inevitably
passage into something entirely else.
The red saddle outlines itself in the way blood does,
as if it is flowing over the white horse’s back

and down its sides.
It is the afternoon before a storm. Tomorrow,
the young man will bury his older brother,
Phillip, who was thrown by a horse.

The occupants have evidently been day drinking.
Homer has a pain in his side
and calls a doctor.

Only later do the men ask him
to check on Wilby who lies in the bed,
blankets covering her cold face. The woman
is dead. Was the oven to blame, the exhaust
filling her lungs? Or was it too cold
and she, too drunk? Police take a photo, but not before
pulling the blanket off her face. No one
asks whose hand had pulled it up
to cover her face, how the chair got broken.

The men seem grieved.
Like the sneer of a great white shark,
a crosscut saw hangs from a hook.
A woman lies dead in a bed

pattern of maggots. Now

you cannot not see
the perched flies of eyebrows,
their green and blue bodies twitching
above her dead-sea eyes
that watch you hatching
into her, your un-combed hair
tied-up by trespass, your mind
her infested larvae of plague.

This is a short story, a very short story. Is it called an anecdote? 

Auschwitz, no date, because I don’t remember dates. But it must have happened in late summer or fall, potato harvesting season, I assume. The year? 1944? 

A miraculous day happened. They, the rulers of the universe—SS for short—let us stay in the barracks. I don’t know what day it is, but now somehow, it feels like Sunday. Not only are we allowed to stay in, but…we are also given a whole boiled potato. 

Even the Olympian Gods didn’t feast like we did this day. 

The potato’s skin has that fresh, earthy smell and taste to it. The flesh, the inside, is creamy, deliciously so, yet solid enough to the bite. We savor every minute, minuscule drop of it. We inhale the scent, an aroma which only imagination is made of. And it is hot! I don’t, I can’t recollect when I had something warm inside my body. The watery morning tea slash purple-grainy-liquidy cereal, which even for our empty bellies is quite disgusting, and the so-called soup are always cold, by the time they reach us. 

As we reverently, slowly consume our heavenly treat, the women start to talk. We are on the top bunk, my mom and I! A great spot, not as claustrophobic as the lower ones, a little more space and light above our heads. 

If I remember correctly, I think we are actually sitting. 

The chatter rises in whispers… 

Here in the dreariest, the most God-forsaken place on this beautiful earth, the chatter is about cooking. 

The women tell each other, give to each other—as if there is a world to come—recipes: Torts and cakes and beef stews, puddings, fruit tarts and what not? And my Mamusia (mom) tells of the goose she used to make using the black cast iron, white-porcelain-inside roasting pan, the goose roasted to golden perfection. She let us—my brother Oskar and me—dip a piece of the freshly baked Challah bread in the delicious gravy, the nectar straight out from the Garden of Eden. To this day I savor the taste, although my mom never had another chance to make it again. 

The scene melts into nothingness, speck embedded in my memory, like a pleasant dream from which one awakens with a smile! 

It’s a short story as I promised. Every moment, every split second in Auschwitz–Birkenau, can be told as a story, a story tattooed in our brain never to disappear.

Apply 2 drops of Hope to the rim of the ears –
to the other organs of sense: the eyes for light,
the mouth for the weeping & wailing &
gnashing of teeth. There is no spirit

but that which you can see: the wind
in the thousand grasses, clouds like contrails
from the wings of birds. The river a path
for sorrow.

Present Time may also be beneficial: proceed
along the bottom of the deepest ocean,
even though you cannot see
what’s coming next.

At the deepest point there is only stillness.

Apply 1 to 2 drops of Surrender.
There is no spirit but that which you can touch –
the slender blade of grass that slices your finger
as you pluck it from its place on the hillside –

the light of the one sun behind, for the time being
a pillar, or lantern. The earth & sky, apply
2 to 3 drops of Forgiveness.

There is no spirit, & there is only spirit –
the taste of the sun on your tongue,
your forehead slick with oil & with blood,

for the time being on one knee
apply 1 to 2 drops of Harmony.

Chapel of the Magi,
Mary’s ghost holds

the ghost of a baby
with all the tenderness

of her transparent arms.
Other women

walk still between
the columns of the cloister,

their stone faces
worn away, their thoughts

their own at last.
No one needs to know

what words hover
on the half-open lips

of this sister, whose right hand
clutches a book, while

her left draws close
the folds of her robe.

The Big Red was originally a supersize red fountain pen that the Parker Pen Company introduced in 1921. In 1970 Parker revived it as a Deco-styled ballpoint that took a Jotter refill (with the help of two black plastic adapters) and came in a rainbow of colors. It cost $1.69, and I got three: red, orange, and black. Once, talking to an editor at the publishing company where I worked, I noticed on his desk a cup holding all the other Red colors and coveted every one. I should have run out and bought them, but I told myself three was enough.

Before laptops and smartphones, pens were critical. Research and interviewing meant taking notes by hand, writing as fast as possible. Big Reds were perfectly designed for my hand, with a curved flange set exactly the right distance from the tip. I could spend hours in libraries scribbling on yellow pads or—with a personal shorthand I’d developed—catch most every word an interviewee said without getting a cramp. I kept the red one in my handbag, the others at home. They were my go-tos for years. Then one day, doing research at the library for a book I was writing, I got up to use the restroom and stashed the red pen in my pants pocket. At some point it slipped out, but I didn’t realize that until I heard a clunk and saw it spiraling down the drain as I flushed. 

Gone! My first wild thought was to go after it somehow. But since that was impossible I had to abide the ache of loss, blaming myself for being so careless. Worse, I discovered that the nouveau Red was now passé. I couldn’t find one anywhere. My black and orange Reds became more precious than ever and I was afraid to take them out of the house. (I was raised by the daughter of a pogrom survivor with the philosophy that if disaster can strike more than once, it will.) I bought other pens that resembled the Red—a sleek black one with a similar flange comes to mind—but none had the right angle or grip. 

These days I don’t take notes by hand. I scan printed pages into PDFs to mark up. I type as I interview. And it’s all searchable! Writing is now much more efficient, though I worry that my material doesn’t sink in as deeply as it used to when I had to search repeatedly through reams of yellow note pages for the details I wanted. 

Though I no longer need my orange and black Reds for sustained writing, I keep them sitting on my desk. And I still miss the red one, as though it had left a hole in me. Once I went on eBay, source of old lost things, and discovered that the same Reds that cost me $1.69 are now valuable antiques. Unused “vintage” Big Reds, still enclosed in plastic on the original piece of cardboard, range from around $35 up to $199. “The Big Red is a magnificent writing instrument,” urged one seller. “Own a piece of history.” An object so venerable and precious should be worth $35. But I didn’t buy it. 

Then why do I still miss it? I found a clue in an interview with Ruth Ozeki about her novel The Book of Form and Emptiness, in which a boy hears objects speaking to him. Ozeki, a Zen priest, explains that in Shinto, the traditional animist religion of Japan, “things … have spirits.” Marie Kondo operates out of this tradition, which is why she instructs us to treat objects with “recognition and care.” “We have a real relationship with our objects, right?” asks Ozeki. “They’re not just things that come into our lives and that we throw away.” 

I had thought of  Kondo as just a fashion of the moment. But Ozeki’s comment landed. I’ve always felt a relationship with objects I prized—certain dolls, an alexandrite ring, my ancient three-speed Rudge bike. One reason I haven’t traded in that bicycle for a 10-speed is because I’d feel much as I did when I realized I couldn’t take care of my dog properly and had to give her away. The Big Red remains the best writing implement I’ve ever used, and that’s a kind of connection, isn’t it? 

“Wouldn’t it be better if we treated our objects with more respect,” Ozeki asks, “if we didn’t build obsolescence into our things so that we had to throw them away and buy new things?” Thinking about objects this way “enchants” them, as she puts it. And an enchanted world vibrates with aliveness and meaning.

In Kondo’s decluttering ritual, you ask whether an object sparks joy in you. Those pens did spark joy in me. They still do, enough that I don’t want to throw them away. So I use them when I can for that joy’s sake. 

in its imperceptible transitions, transitioning through God’s
fantastic rocks, God’s

object as the stand in for the greatness that is God’s
not lessened in the layers: glazes, thin oil

the angel Uriel who points to truth away
from benediction

toward God as light, the incandescent face
both male and female.

Unlike an actual rose, this one is mammoth in size–almost eleven feet tall and weighing just under 2,000 pounds. It is composed of layers and layers of gray oil paint supported by wood and mica, but it looks like a slab of carved and scraped concrete. DeFeo abstracted a rose–a symbol of love, femininity, and beauty–into sharp lines exploding from a central core. That center is light, delicate, exact, and smooth. As the lines push outward, the paint cracks, breaks, and darkens into rubble. It is a vortex that pulls the world down its chutes. It throbs beyond the tightly confined edges of the frame. In both directions, the energy is palpable. It’s the heaviest painting I’ve seen, summoning me deep into a dark and overwhelming pit. It also liberates, throwing its arms out and running free and unfettered—a sunburst of light. How can it contain such extremes?  

The Rose is inextricable from DeFeo herself. In 1958, Wallace Berman photographed her naked with arms outstretched to the edges of the work. Her head is perfectly positioned at its center. Like Leonardo Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, DeFeo has used her body to create perfect symmetry. With this photograph, The Rose reveals itself to be a self-portrait, an indexical relationship of the artist’s body presented to the viewer. Berman’s photograph is one of many taken of the work with and without DeFeo. This work existed beyond its physical form. For its inclusion in the Museum of Modern Art’s 1959 exhibition Sixteen Americans, DeFeo chose not to send the work itself, claiming it was unfinished, but allowed a photograph of it to be printed in the catalog. She did not deny inclusion in the show but allowed it on her own terms. Was a photograph of the work the same thing as the work to her?  

The Rose has a mythic history that surprisingly neither overshadows the work nor impedes its physical presence, as explored in Jane Green and Leah Levy’s 2003 book, Jay DeFeo and The Rose. DeFeo worked on the painting from 1958 to 1966. It went from being called Deathrose to The White Rose (also the title of Bruce Conner’s film capturing its eventual removal from her apartment) to its final title, The Rose. She lived with it in her Fillmore Street apartment, snugly blocking out an entire wall and window. It finally left her apartment when she was evicted and a team of movers cut out the window to lift the work down and out to the street. It traveled once to Los Angeles for exhibition at the Pasadena Art Museum (now the Norton Simon Museum) before it returned to San Francisco for exhibition at SFMOMA. In 1969, it then was loaned to San Francisco Art Institute where it resided not just in the drab setting of a conference room, but was encased in plaster (part of an unfinished conservation effort) and hidden behind a false wall that displayed student artwork. For two decades, it languished. In 1989, the artist passed away. 

Interest reignited in the 1990’s with a renewed conservation effort and a Whitney curator hoping to include The Rose in an exhibition on the Beat movement. An unheard of effort of funding (over $250,000) and resources was used to restore it, conserve it, and ship it across the country for exhibition and eventual acquisition by the Whitney. 

I have now seen the work over a dozen times. It’s been on view at the Whitney since June 2019, featured in The Whitney’s Collection: Selections from 1900 to 1965. There is no other work in the entire city I intentionally visit again and again. Museums rotate most collection works on and off view, so one of these days, it will be taken off of display. I imagine it will be a long while before it comes back. Its physicality and frailty (supposedly requiring eight art handlers to install and serious support behind the wall to hold it up) make The Rose complicated to lend out too frequently, and, sadly, DeFeo doesn’t currently garner huge demand. Perhaps I will be proved wrong and an institutional retrospective is somewhere forthcoming.

For now, whenever I get off at that seventh floor, a magnet activates within my chest. My body is gently tugged. If I’m coming from the west, I begin to see the painting through the door frame as I pass through a dark-walled gallery of smaller paintings crawling up and along the wall. I am like a young child: peering around the corner, attention diverted, anticipatory. Norman Lewis, Jackson Pollock, and Lee Krasner all fade away. There I am, The Rose and I.

How stern a moral may be drawn from the story of poor Sam Patch! Was the leaper of cataracts more mad or foolish than other men who throw away life, or misspend it in pursuit of empty fame, and seldom so triumphantly as he? –  Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1835

The fad of jumping off or over things in nineteenth century America—counters, tabletops, fences—originated with Sam Patch’s leaps from heights into rivers, celebrated in poems, anecdotes, tall tales, and theatrical sketches. A spirited jump was “doing a Sam Patch.” 

Patch made three successful jumps over Niagara Falls into the Niagara River. A reporter for the Buffalo Republican described the second jump over the Falls as “the greatest feat of the kind ever effected by man. He may now challenge the universe for a competitor.” A Dayton, Ohio man weighing 360 pounds, attempted to jump over his bed in the middle of the night, landed on his sleeping wife, and killed her instantly. President Andrew Jackson named his favorite horse “Sam Patch.” A character in William Dean Howells’s Their Wedding Journey expresses dismay that his young wife had never heard of Sam Patch: “Isabel, your ignorance of all that an American woman should be proud of distresses me.” 

Someone asserted that Patch and his imitators shouted “Geronimo!” before leaping. There is no evidence of this. However, American parachutists are known to have done so during World War Two when jumping from planes. (This practice is believed to have originated among novice parachutists in the 82nd Airborne Division who shortly before their first jumps saw the 1939 action film Geronimo.). 

An oft-repeated non sequitur of Sam Patch’s, “If God can make cataracts, men can certainly jump over them,” was condemned by some as an impious challenge to Divine Providence.

Another saying of Patch’s, worthy of Yogi Berra, was, “Some things can be done as well as others.”

The Saturday Evening Post called him a “hare-brained fellow.”

Gerald Parsons described him as a young crackpot given to “feebleminded extravagance.” A contemporary newspaper editor urged Patch to run for Congress.

*

Patch was born about 1807. His birthplace is uncertain. However, he lived as a young man in Pawtucket, Rhode Island with his mother Abigail Patch at 277 Main Street. The house later became Jones’ School where many of Pawtucket’s leading nineteenth century citizens acquired the rudiments of their education. The house no longer exists. However, the Pawtucket School Department’s administrative building is right down the street at 355 Main. 

As a boy of seven, Sam was working fourteen hours shifts at the Slater cotton mill in Pawtucket. Off-duty employees jumped from a nearby bridge over Pawtucket Falls into the Blackstone River. When the practice became competitive, they began jumping from the greater height of the Slater mill roof a hundred feet above the river. Later, the even higher roof of an adjacent building attracted their interest. When jumping from this roof, if one hoped to splash down in deep water rather than landing, thud, on the river bank, one had to make a running jump. Sam Patch succeeded in this. 

When authorities in Pawtucket learned of leaping at the mill, they forbade it as dangerous and immoral. Legend has it that when Sam heard this, he uttered an obscenity rhyming with Pawtucket, and left the city. 

Sam’s abandonment of Pawtucket may have been just as well. At the time, that city hadn’t much to offer a young man eager to rise in the world. Neither did Passaic, but Sam soon rose, precipitously, dropping from heights. 

Had he remained in Pawtucket, he might have seen his native city rebound to become in the nineteenth century a center of forge and nut manufacturing, tanning and leather belting, lace leather production, wadding (the process of compressing several layers of textile fibers to one another in order to stiffen fabric), book printing, dyeing fire engine construction, and paper and cardboard box assembly. 

But would he have availed himself of vocational opportunities associated with those industries? He would undoubtedly have lived longer. However, his remarks to the throng gathered at Genesee Falls in Rochester, New York, November 13, 1829, for his final, fatal leap, suggest otherwise.

“Napoleon,” he said, “was a great man and a great general. He conquered armies and he conquered nations. But he couldn’t jump the Genesee Falls. Wellington was a great man and a great soldier. He conquered armies and he conquered nations, and he conquered Napoleon, but he couldn’t jump the Genesee Falls. That was left for me to do.”

Or not. Sam had leapt the Falls successfully once. However, the audience for that leap had been disappointingly small, which was why he chose to do it again. To enhance interest in the second jump, he arranged for it to be from an even higher elevation than the first. A crowd estimated at six to eight thousand people were attracted to Rochester from as far away as Buffalo, Canandaigua, Batavia, and Syracuse, to witness it.  

While Sam did not conquer the Falls on his second try, his jumping companion, a black bear—by all accounts a very gentle dog-like creature—may have. Patch’s advertised jumps were ordinarily double features. In a reversal of Shakespeare’s stage direction in The Winter’s Tale, “Exit pursued by a bear,” the bear, given a shove, would exit an elevation first, with Patch following. 

One journalistic account of what happened at Genesee Falls on November 13 claimed that the bear was with Patch, but Frances Trollope in Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832) stated that Patch had left the bear behind in the care of a friend, having perhaps intuited that things might not go well that day.

Patch, when jumping, had always kept his arms clamped close to his sides, and his legs together, toes pointed downward. He would enter the water slick as a knife. He was said to have been drinking that day, which may explain why he lost control of his arms and legs in mid-descent and went into a spin. When he smacked down in the water noisily, onlookers groaned, and when he did not resurface from the water it was clear to most that Patch was a goner. A poet wrote in the Providence Journal a few days later:

Full six score feet they say he jumped,
And struck upon his side.
He sank beneath the roaring flood,
And thus, Sam Patch he died.

Deaths are always untimely, Sam’s especially so, since he had just arranged with a ship’s captain to entertain passengers bound for Liverpool with daily with leaps from a ship’s mast into the drink. He was also negotiating a jump from London Bridge into the Thames. 

*

Patch’s body was not recovered immediately from the Genesee River. Certain of his fans, like Elvis’s, refused to believe he had perished. During the winter of 1829-30 there were Sam-sightings in Albany, Canandaigua and Pittsford. A letter ostensibly written by him turned up, stating that a proxy had leaped over the falls, not he. There were speculations that he lived on in a cave at the base of the Falls he had stocked with food and dry clothes. (An earlier prank of his in Rochester lent some credence to this notion. After jumping from the Fitzhugh Street Bridge there, he had swum underwater to a hiding place where he remained concealed for some time before reappearing.)

On St Patrick’s Day, 1830, four months after the jump at Genesee Falls, a hired hand at the Latta House downstream from Rochester was hacking through the frozen Genesee River seeking water for horses when Sam’s remains encased in a block of ice bobbed up. Identification would have been difficult, had it not been for the white pantaloons and black sash he had worn for his leap. 

He was buried in Charlotte Cemetery, near where his body was found. A wooden board placed over his grave read: “Here lies Sam Patch – Such is Fame.” The anthropocentric press did not report what became of Sam’s gentle bear. 

No womanly woman you
Hold your chisel, your smoothing thumb, you
Make not a man but
One of your own –
Joan raises her sword fist to the sky,
Alive already ready to leap into
Battle and you say
Me too
That chisel, that pressing thumb, you
Say this is the way I create,
This is the way
I fight now.

My father was very involved in my clothing, and I have vivid memories of him chasing me into dressing rooms at Saks Fifth Avenue in Millburn, New Jersey, as sedately clad, sternly coiffed saleswomen looked on, frozen, aghast.

I knew he wanted to adjust a hem or a sleeve, and boundaries be damned. He bought his suits off the rack in the men’s department and wars, The Great Depression, and his inner misery had, he believed, given him the right to go where he pleased. True to form, my mother was silent, and as Tillie Olson and others have demonstrated, a woman silenced is a woman warped. My father took his ability to shape what he saw and twisted it to extraordinary extremes.

*

Sam Radin’s bar mitzvah was coming up, and, because Sam’s father was my father’s cousin, and Sam’s mother was one of my father’s closest friends in our extended family, I correctly assumed that my lobbying would pay off because Dad would want a smile on my face all day. 

He chose the dress, a sleeveless, aquamarine shift with quarter-sized white polka dots and a high, ruffled neck. I was pleased to discover that it had a discreet side pocket into which I could sneak lipstick, and that the lightweight fabric would be comfortable in the middle of July in a place where air conditioning was unlikely. 

The morning of the event things got so weird that years later, in 1988, when I wrote the incident that follows into a terrible short story, the friend who read it, a lawyer from a very stable family, put it down and said, “This is too bizarre. Nothing like this happens.”  

Except it did.

“Come here,” Dad called as I reached the front hall at the bottom of the stairs. To my left was a narrow passage that led to my parent’s room. When I entered he was sitting on the edge of the bed, a four-poster monstrosity he’d found God knew where. He wore a navy blue cotton bathrobe and the black leather slippers he often threatened to use on my bottom or on my older brother’s. On his lap he held a cellophane-wrapped pair of stockings.

“Stockings that sag are disgusting,” he declared. “I will show you how to make sure that doesn’t happen.” He opened the package and lifted his right leg as a slipper landed softly on the dove-gray wool carpet he’d chosen. Then he rolled one limp nylon, put his foot in it and deftly slid it up. I stopped looking when his large sturdy hands reached the middle of his calf, and I’m relieved that I don’t remember the rest of his advice. 

The bar mitzvah was held in a Paterson synagogue that was gloomy and old. Norman Mailer, who was Sam’s mother’s cousin, was the first adult male to remove his jacket, revealing a loose, pale-blue, short-sleeved shirt. I thought he was tall and sensible as he said a pleasant “Hello young lady,” when my father introduced us.

The year before the bar mitzvah my father remarked to my mother and some guests—fellow doctors and their wives—that he couldn’t understand how gynecologists did their work, because looking inside a woman was so revolting. When I was in my thirties, I told my mother how devastating that had been to hear. 

“I thought you were too young for it to register,” she said with a sigh that spoke volumes about what it had been like to share a life with such a man.

A few years later she corrected me when I spoke bitterly about my Uncle Walter, assuming he’d prescribed the Appetrol (active ingredient, Dexedrine) to which she became addicted. “Honey,” she said. “It wasn’t Uncle Walter. Daddy prescribed the pills.”

Walter was married to Aunt Norma, my father’s youngest sister, and they had three children. Judy, the girl Norma longed for, was the youngest. I was ten when she was born and every year on my birthday, until Judy was five, I got dresses from Aunt Norma, who consulted with my father on her own apparel and probably sought his shopping advice for Judy and me.

Walter was a notorious gossip, which is why I learned about the heroin habit of the boy my mother hoped I’d marry. It’s also why I learned that Norman Mailer roared about “mutilation” when his mother was diagnosed with breast cancer and a mastectomy was recommended.

That was around the time my brother, born a year a half before me, started counting the days until the Sports Illustrated annual swimsuit issue appeared.

Walter adored Norma, which is probably why he kept my father’s secrets and left the outing to Uncle Carroll, my father’s brother. 

My husband and I were having Thanksgiving dinner with Carroll and his wife, Aunt Mona, a tradition that began when their daughters worked abroad. Mona asked my husband to get something in the kitchen and Carroll, whose voice was always soothing, spoke awkwardly about my father’s preference for men. He was honest enough not to hide his mortification, and gracious when I said I wasn’t surprised. Mona, the kindest woman in the family, kept her large brown eyes on me until my husband returned with a gravy boat.

*

I don’t think it’s an accident that my only disastrous sexual encounter was initiated by an Adonis who was obsessed with blonde women. I was his token dark, zaftig conquest and was expected to be grateful. I wasn’t.

In my twenties I wrote a short, incoherent screed dedicated to “Bellow, Roth, Mailer & Co,” inspired by a crush who liked to call his mother Sophie after a character in Portnoy’s Complaint. Bellow’s tedious self-indulgence and Mailer’s fascination with Marilyn Monroe were also my targets. Bellow and Mailer were painful examples of the common phenomenon of enormous talent serving as an excuse to abuse those nearest to them and to codify stereotypes. My father did the same, caught in the trap of his need to control what he saw, and blind to a reality of distortion.  

My Jewish mother was five feet 5 inches tall, with long legs, blonde hair and large, gray eyes. Unlike the blondes Norman wrote about, she had a degree from Vassar, and I have sometimes asked myself if Norman wondered how Dad snagged Mom. Most of what I’ve heard doesn’t add up.

*

The second time I met Norman, in 1984 or 1985, he was a guest at a PEN event at the National Cathedral. He was drunk, but sobered up instantly when I introduced myself.

“Joe’s little girl,” he said. Then he listed a number of relatives, adding short, punchy, descriptions, and saving for last a question about my father’s middle sister. “Jean,” he whispered. “Jean still beautiful?” (He did not say, “IS Jean still beautiful?” His spoken sentences were often short. It was part of his performance.)

He staggered back into the crowd after I nodded my head, leaving me to muse about Jean’s delicate features, generous bosom, and summer afternoons at yet another relative’s oceanfront hotel, long before I was born. 

The next time I met Norman he was speaking at the Commonwealth Club of California. It was 2003, and his thoughts about his wife and fighting were painfully retrograde. By then I was married to an environmental lawyer I’d met in San Francisco. We decided to have the wedding at my parent’s house at the Jersey Shore on their 40th anniversary because we knew my mother would want a party and my father wouldn’t. 

My mother refused to fly west to help me find an outfit because, she said, my father’s health was too fragile and he needed her.

“Bullshit,” I hissed before I hung up the phone. “You’re afraid Dad will blame you if he doesn’t like the dress.”

I found a white linen skirt and matching jacket on sale at an elegant shop, and when I called my parents to tell them what I’d bought, and how much under budget I was, my mother answered the phone. “Oh sweetie,” she said with relief. “Daddy was just saying how nice you’d look in a little white suit. “

My brother and I often discussed our parents’ unnerving behavior, but as we got older, certain rules became clear. My brother stopped speaking to me for six months after I said something mildly critical of our father. My inexcusable error had been to speak the truth in front of two of my brother’s best friends.

The worst thing I said to my brother: “You’re everything Dad was, without the poetry.” 

The worst thing he said to me: “You have to stop writing.” He said that in 1982 when my poem “Say No” appeared in an issue of The Village Voice that Norman Mailer surely saw. He was a founder of and booster of the publication, and the poem was in a special issue on nuclear disarmament.

*

The last time I saw Mailer, shortly before he died, he was on a book tour, and after a talk that included lacerating comments about George W. Bush, I dutifully got in line so that he could sign Harlot’s Ghost. 

Again I introduced myself, and he said something quick and sad about our dead relatives as I looked down, struck by the delicacy of his small hands. I wanted to ask what he knew about my father’s sexuality, but he seemed weary, his schlepper was hovering, and there were a lot of people behind me. 

During a visit to Aunt Jean in the 1990s, she volunteered that my father had a decorating business that failed before he went to medical school. That was not a major reveal because I’d spent hours with him at fabric shops while he lovingly caressed contenders for slipcovers and drapes. He died in 1990, and in less than a month my mother rearranged paintings and reupholstered his beloved Queen Anne reproduction chairs, with turquoise Naugahyde. 

I’m pretty certain that Mailer never crossed the threshold of that house, though his best and worst novels were on the bookshelves. 

My father loved a good story, and I no longer feel confined by memories of his warped, domineering ways. “Tincture of time,” is a phrase I’ve come to be increasingly grateful for. A gifted therapist said that to me in the 1990s. Robert Hass, in Time and Materials, paints a devastating scene of his mother’s alcoholism. It’s in the voice of a young boy, written by a man who wants the reader to feel what an adult’s addiction can do to children. It gave me the courage to write and publish a piece about my own mother’s Dexedrine dependence.

Norman Mailer wrote dazzling sentences and some of his narrative structures are brilliantly original. None of this excuses the damage he inflicted on men and women. He and my father abused their gifts, and their examples caused other men to behave just as badly, if less creatively. It will take generations to undo what they and less flamboyant men have done, yet I hope my words contribute to the ethic of saying no to damage, and yes to naming, surviving and thriving.  

and polished by years’ employment
in meditation, an idle hand grasping it

to rub and shine, as a mind
strokes History or notions of Being.

Its cool skin never returns the answer
to any question, not to the fingers

that try its bumps and hollows, and not
to the silence of the empty room,

where it squats toad-like while light
crosses the desk, slowly, from the window,

in the turning of the day. When no one knows,
the stone uncurls and loves the light.

Its silver tongue flicks precise, shivery
gleams from the air. It hums.

When we begin to acquire words, they are rare and magical to us. There can be understanding in a glance, meaning in a gesture, but words are, quite literally, a spell. 

“The poets made all the words,” writes Ralph Waldo Emerson in his 1844 essay “The Poet,” “and therefore language is the archives of history…For, though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was at first a stroke of genius, and obtained currency, because for the moment it symbolized the world to the first speaker and to the hearer.”

Our relationship with words, though lifelong, grows transparent, like a pane of glass—invisible until it gives back a flash of light or we catch a glimpse of our own face reflected there. As when, walking through an open doorway, you brush against a spiderweb: sometimes the word itself, and not the meaning of it, catches your attention. 

*

For twenty years, Lea Feinstein has been working with Tyvek, the sheets of polyethylene material, manufactured by DuPont, that are used to make FedEx envelopes and to wrap buildings under construction. Lighter and stronger than paper, Tyvek resists water: to hold paint, its surface must be prepared with a skim coat. 

Tyvek can be folded and crumpled, and Lea’s work often explores the behavior of this industrial material and its interaction with paint. In her large-scale paintings of succulent plants—some as tall as seven feet—the drips and runs of the acrylics evoke a blurred and living freshness. As the surface resists paint, the paintings resist the illusion of immediacy. Standing in front of them, you see the layers of argument between the surface and the brush.

Lea is interested in resistance, in difficulty. She is right-handed, but for twenty years, she has been painting with her left hand.

*

Now, though, she is using her right hand, the hand she has been writing with all her life. Her new text-based paintings do not begin with a blank canvas. Like all words, hers are layered onto what already exists. She is painting over the older paintings of succulents with words. 

In her studio, Lea thumbtacks the Tyvek sheets to the wall. When they are dry, she hangs them in overlapping stacks. 

The word page comes from the Latin word pagina, a column of text. According to my dictionary, pagina is also one leaf of a double door.

*

From German Ohrworm, an earworm is a song that gets stuck in your mind. Sometimes a line of poetry sticks like that: When I have fears that I may cease to be. Or He is dead and gone, lady, he is dead and gone. 

On a chilly February morning, Lea is thinking about Ophelia’s song from Hamlet, and about her brother Tom, who died in 2020. It is his birthday. She hangs a small painting of a plant on the wall: gouache on paper, mounted on board, one of a set of four, all with light green backgrounds. “From last summer in Maine,” she says. She turns the board ninety degrees to the right, so that the plant seems to be growing sideways. She selects a vinyl emulsion paint in a color called terre verte claire—”light green earth,” mossy and subdued—and, over the painting, in large bold capitals, begins to transcribe the words of Ophelia’s song:

HEISDEADA

NDGONEL

ADYHEISD

EADANDG

She has to go over letters twice—up, down or down, up. “It’s sticky,” she says of the surface. “More like plowing a field than painting on Tyvek, which is like ice skating.” The letters crowd the paper. The lines begin neatly aligned to the left margin, but often run off the side of the paper, as though they are moving beyond its edge, leaving the room. When she gets to the lower right-hand corner, she turns the board ninety degrees, so that the letters are standing on their heads. She hangs another plant painting and continues:

ONEATHIS / HEADAGR / ASSGREE / NTURFA 

THISHEE / LSASTON / NEATHIS / HEADAGR 

ASSGRE / ENTURF / ATHISHE / ELSASTO

It is hard to read letters as shapes only. Words keep emerging: THIS and HEAD and ASS, as though a mischievous spirit were teasing us through this colorful, chaotic Ouija board. 

(Google Docs suggests that where I typed the middle part of “dead and gone”—EADANDG—I really meant to type READING.)

*

His beard was white as snow,
All flaxen was his poll…

The sun is higher now. The studio is brighter, warmer. Lea returns to the first painting—back to square one—still hanging upside down. She opens a jar of golden color: jaune de Naples, Naples yellow: HISBEARD / WASASWH / ITEASSNO /WAFLAXE / NWASHIS // POLLHEIS / GONEHEIS / GONEAND…

The earlier lines of the song begin to disappear under the newly painted lines, but I can still see their protruding limbs. I think about what I read once about the evolution of the alphabet: how the Egyptian hieroglyph of an ox head came to stand for the first sound of the word ox, became simplified into a Phoenician letter that looks like a sideways A. The Hebrew aleph, the Greek alpha, the Latin A. And now, here on the canvas, the A is sideways again, is green, is gold, is disappearing under a third layer of red ochre. The visible crossbars and curves and verticals of the previous layers are adding a visual static, so that a C can be misread as a G or an I behind the curve of an S can make it look like a D or the edge of the painting makes a D look like a T.  Amid the contesting letters of 

GODAMERCYONHISSOULGODAMERCY 

I see: GODAM BEYOND SOULS GOT AMERCY

When you concentrate on the word, you don’t see what reveals itself through the letters.

When you listen to people’s words, you don’t always hear what they are saying.

*

Lea turns the paintings again. Now she’s adding dark strokes that follow the shapes of parts of letters, sometimes the layer on top, sometimes the layer behind. Sometimes these strokes are the shapes of letters themselves—a V nestling inside an N. And what comes into my mind is about voices—the way they aren’t smooth, the rasps and cracks and ridges in them. The way they overlap. 

Lea is speaking to Tom through her painting. And Tom is speaking to her.

The studio is silent. And loud.

*

Many of Lea’s paintings are based on poems—her own and those of others. She began her first painting in this series with a Denise Levertov poem, “Living.” In the layers of the paintings, the words seem to travel through time, as words do. The source text influences the painting’s color, the size and style of the letters.

Lea shows me the painting, layered over one of her succulents on Tyvek, that she made of my poem “Loss”:

She calls the painting “Losss.” I can see how the letter S comes forward, how the hiss of nothing at the end is made visible in the letters. How HISSON, upside down and disappearing into the right edge, looks like the word LOSS. (Later, I will show this image to a friend whose son has died, and she will see nothing but HIS SON.) Or the whole line like NAH IS SO. How the whole poem—given a shape, a size, colors—looks, sounds, like a closing mouth. 

How small our language is. Just twenty-six letters. Just forty-four sounds. 

And also how vast.

LOSS

A thousand-year-old word is a loosening, too.
The human hand opens eventually,
lets go of what it held.
A thousand-year-old word escapes the mouth,
the l rolls off the tongue, the vowel splays wide,
aww, the teeth close on a hiss, on nothing.

“Loss” is from a chapbook I wrote of poems of thousand-year-old words—loss, spell, hand, home—words that have been in English since at least 1000 C.E. These words seem like objects to me, worn smooth from use. A thousand years of strangers using them, yet they are perfectly recognizable, like an ancient Egyptian pitcher or a medieval buckle.

Looking back through my drafts of this poem, I find a brief quotation from Karl Ove Knausgaard’s Winter, translated by Ingvild Burkey: “While the past is lost for ever, everything that didn’t happen in it is doubly lost.” 

These paintings recall lost conversations: the ones we had, the ones we didn’t. The thoughts that filled our heads one day and not another. The way we treasure words and also carelessly spend them. How we remember, how we forget. On these pages, we start to see the way we live in language, and alongside it.

I came here to find something, some feeling, some inspiration in art or nature. I grip the map in my hands until the paper begins to fray. How am I supposed to find myself when these days I can’t even find my way out of bed.

A tour guide passes, describes Rodin’s “Eve” as sad. Eve stands there covering her naked, bronze body and hiding her face and I suppose you could see “sad,” but I sit behind her and see her fingers clawing her ribcage, as if to pull the covers of her skin back over her body, curl away in anguish and hide and I understand. I pull my jacket closer around my own body and move down the path.

The silence is broken by black walnuts hitting soft earth. Crack. Above me, a squirrel tests the thinner branches at the top. Crack. He wants, but is unsure. Crack. He decides the reward is not worth the risk, finds another branch to hold him. Crack. I put away my pen and empty notebook.

I love the transitional seasons and the way they make me feel like something is coming.. This morning the red trees set the horizon on fire, by evening, that fire is extinguished. When I leave the garden, there is no heat left in the ashes.

I emerged and went to the place they sent me
wearing the right color shirt, mostly.
Mine had red flowers machine-stitched across
the front—I didn’t choose my own clothes yet.

I hoped to be an excellent bead, maybe the best
one ever. I was so still except for smiling,
twisting this way and that as I nervously
talked to the people watching on camera.

It’s what I remember from those years
more than anything else—one stone, one bead,
one bubble, shining at the world like a birthday,
like all our birthday candles and the fragrance
of cake. Look at us: art! Look at us.

In the beginning, I hated them. They were grotesque in their own way, the way all cherubic art is a disturbing perversion of their Biblical counterparts and the children who serve as the basis for their form. Like the minotaur, their horror is rooted in their compromise: they sit somewhere between the human and the angelic, and their inability to decide, to be human or other, adds to their mystery and the unease I feel when I look at them. I prefer Ezekiel’s angels—burning, all eyes and wings, decidedly otherworldly and distant, untamed by the human imagination. But at some point we decided to turn angels into half-nude children with elderly faces floating on the clouds and playing harps.

As time passed and I grew used to their presence, I began to see them for what they were: a prophetic warning against the art that dominates our time. The cherubim are useless, devoid of function. Worse than that, they have outlived their usefulness. No chandelier hangs below them, and the old gas lines that funneled fuel to them are rusted and in disrepair. Despite this, they endure, a sign that some things still exist even if they have no practical value. They exist for their own sake, their aesthetic value triumphing over and against their practical virtues. In a world where NFTs exist and online hustle culture demands that talent must turn into profit, art is on the cusp of becoming like the dollar: a mere representation of perceived economic value used solely to exchange goods and services, devoid of wonder and relegated to the markets for mindless consumption, where dollar signs represent success and art is assessed for worth rather than contemplated for meaning.

Maybe that’s why the cherubim began to grow on me. For all their kitsch aesthetic, with their rotund bellies and blank faces, they existed in and for themselves. There was a nobility in their existence. They existed despite themselves as if for the sheer pleasure of existing. They were no longer a means to a marketable end. Their very presence was an act of defiance, a reminder that in a world obsessed with the “value” of things, art still exists for its own sake, beyond the interests of the bottom line.

The cherubim on my ceiling call us to consider what art might be beyond a system that calls for its monetization. They ask us to redefine our modern meanings of beauty, which aim not at consumption but at contemplation, experience over money. What if people learned to make for the sake of making? Not to make a quick buck or a second income but to simply enjoy the process of making and the beauty of a thing made? We can imagine the plaster artist carefully carving angels onto the ceiling of an apartment building, reveling in the work of his hands. Thomas Aquinas notes that the “good” in art is dependent on “the goodness of the work done.” He continues: “For a craftsman, as such, is commendable, not for the will with which he does a work, but for the quality of the work.” Here, Aquinas outlines that art ultimately needs to be assessed against itself. Its goodness is identified not with any value placed upon it but from its own intrinsic value. If the work is good, it is valuable because art “is nothing else but the right reason for certain works to be made.” So art exists as valuable outside of any economic system that seeks to denote its worth. The cherubim exist not because they are practical, nor because they possess some form of monetary value. 

They are valuable precisely because they are devoid of any practical value. They played no role in selling us on the apartment, nor do they help make our lives easier. They simply exist. They exist for no other end but to be enjoyed, and there lies their value. Even if we ignored them they’d still be valuable. Because when we’re gone someone after us will rent this place. They will look up and see them for the first time. They may even find pleasure in their presence. It’s that exchange, that interaction between object and observer that gives art its value.

Aquinas’ value of aesthetics draws us to consider art for its own sake. To ask the question: is it good? and not: is it valuable? Art’s primary function is not the exchange of value but the exchange of meaning, communicating beyond itself to the artist and the onlooker. This transcendent exchange supersedes the market. It depends entirely on the artist and onlooker and the trade of meaning between them, their shared experience of the good. For “good” work is tied up in The Good, and any contemplation of temporal good leads us out and in to face the grand Good that undergirds all beauty. The plaster cherubim that adorn my ceiling no longer need to serve any practical purpose. They fulfilled their purpose when I looked upon them and divined something outside them. Their “usefulness,” if you can call it that, lay within their ability to clarify my sight, sight clouded by ideas of monetary “value” and pragmatic “usefulness.” In this they draw me out of myself and towards a contemplation of the good, “since the good is that which all things desire,” and the good properly understood exists for itself.

In reality, I could paint over them, obscure them with a new battery-operated fixture. I could again try to convince my landlord to tear them down, but I don’t think I will. In a world dominated by its need to assign dollars-and-cents value to things, it’s nice to have close at hand something utterly useless and infinitely valuable.

I’m a sixty-seven-year-old professor at a small university driving to graduation, a ceremony faculty suffer through. Grads, too, until the glorious moment they cross the stage. Graduation requires creativity during COVID. We were going to do it drive-by, but drenching April rain predicted this Saturday morning means we need a Plan B. We, the faculty, dressed in our regalia, masked and socially-distanced, will form a line in the halls of the main building. One-by-one, each student, accompanied by invited family members, will parade past as we cheer. It’s different in another way, too. It’s my first graduation ceremony since the University decided to terminate my college, including both the program and department I teach in. And perhaps my last.

I think about this when I arrive early, before the rain. The lot where I’ve parked for twenty-five years feels the same, except it doesn’t feel like it’s mine anymore. I turn off the ignition, mask up, get out of the car. The day is gray all around, but in the southwest sky clouds bunched together are moving slowly toward campus. I grab my black gown with three purple stripes on the arms, cape, and tam, and carry them across the parking lot, searching right and left for faces, wondering if those faces will still feel familiar. 

I travel downstairs to the faculty office. During the past year of teaching virtually, I’ve been here only a few times. The lights are on, but all the cubicles are empty. I’ll continue teaching out the program for several more months, so technically it’s still my office. I feel like a ghost lingering in the house where I died. I hurriedly slip into my gown as if, at any moment, someone might bust in and challenge my right to be here. I fasten my cape so the purple and yellow face out. 

I join other faculty upstairs to receive instructions for this ad hoc ceremony that only a fraction of graduates will attend. My colleagues mill about like exotic birds in black gowns caped and striped in Bright Gold, Kelly Green, Violet, or Royal Blue. I know many of them well, but because we’ve been teaching virtually during COVID, it’s been a while since I’ve seen them in the flesh. 

Everyone makes a point to greet me. As we exchange greetings, I study their faces to see how I am reflected, look for averted eyes. I’m being let go. I no longer smell like the other cows in the herd. To dwell on this fact creates unresolvable awkwardness for others, asks for something not within their power to give. My boss, a good guy not involved in the decision to euthanize my program, says “You look mighty sharp in your regalia.” I’m a wound to be bandaged, a leper to be kissed.   

We sit in chairs arranged six-feet apart along the hallway. Stephanie strides back and forth like a lead singer in a rock band, bouncing on her toes, both cheerleader and drill sergeant.

“Each grad will check in one at a time. They’ll march down this hall with their guests. Hold up your signs and cheer.” She points to signs stacked against the wall, professionally-produced, brightly-colored, that read Congratulations! or You Did It!

“We want to make this special for them, right? We have pompoms too!” She’s not kidding. She makes us practice cheering and shaking pompoms. We do a dry run with a couple of school employees pretending to be students marching in. “You can do better than that!” she shouts. “Louder!” I’m impressed by the force of her will, her implacable enthusiasm that will prevail over all of us. 

Because of COVID, there’s no designated gathering of all graduates. Instead, they’ll drop by whenever they like during a two-hour period, with only a single student and his or her family allowed in the lobby at a time. It’s early, so I join conversations in progress, moving from circle to circle, listening, taking a pulse. My department is not the first to be taught out and may not be the last. I can tell one department chair in particular worries that hers will be next. I know this not because of anything she says, but because of the disquiet she emits in every word and move.  

The first student arrives, and Stephanie gives us a heads up to grab our signs. Employees in Admissions set an example, cheering and congratulating, but they’re used to manufacturing zeal—it’s part of their job description. When the faculty joins in, however, it sounds like we’re being forced to sing at a concentration camp. But that changes for me when I focus on the graduate coming towards me, the shine on her face, a floodlight illuminating the whole hall. For her, this cheesy graduation ceremony is real, and her reality is bigger than my self-pity, so I give it up, and I hear my cheers for her echo from a place deep inside me.

For a while, a succession of students parade by at intervals of three to five minutes, most with at least one family member, some with a sizable entourage. I’m interested in all of them and speculate about their lives as they walk by. Particularly striking is the fortyish woman in cap and gown trailed by a little boy and a little girl wearing T-shirts that read Mommy Graduated,  with a pair of teenagers and a husband bringing up the rear.  

Then we hit a dry spell, no grads in the queue, and conversation circles form again. A colleague who is a fellow gardener shows me pictures of his father’s container garden and lettuce sets he’s grown from seed the way women show pictures of their grandkids. Another colleague reminisces about prior graduations conducted in a megachurch in Louisville and things we thought up to pass the time. One professor created a bingo card with squares like “stiletto heels,” “Tennis shoes” “Family screams inappropriately” and as grads came to the stage, faculty players marked off squares until someone got bingo. My colleague says, “I was telling Dave about how you used to bring crosswords you hid inside the graduation program.” His story reminds me how long I’ve known and been known by these folks, something I took for granted that soon will not be part of what defines me.

“We were smart to move graduation inside,” someone says. “Now it’s pouring!”

I find a classroom door with a window and peer through it. I see blossoms on trees shaking from the impact of raindrops. I imagine myself out there, underneath a tree, surrounded by rain and smelling spring. I feel soothed, cleansed.  

We get another heads up, and the parades resume. I get a contact high from the positivity and pride of the grads and their families. My favorite is a young man barely old enough to drive, followed by nine family members that span three, maybe four, generations, from toddlers holding hands to an old man with a cane and a limp. All of them are giddy. 

Noon is the deadline, so at about 12:15 we are released. Graduation is over. Students have stepped across the line into the future that awaits them, a future swollen with possibility. Our cheerleader/drill sergeant collects the signs and pompoms. My colleagues head for the doors with their own futures in their pockets, not the boundless future of youth, but futures in which, for now, they have jobs.  

My future is retirement. That’s okay. I’m tired of working, I’m old enough to draw Social Security, and my wife and I have 401-Ks. But as I step across the line between what was and what will be, my future is formless. Retirement is defined by what is not—not working, not earning, not mattering. Hallmark cards and Senior Centers don’t change that—they reinforce it.

I return to the faculty office, remove and hang my regalia on my coat hanger, and leave, crossing the parking lot by myself. The rain is over. The air is still heavy with moisture, but the sun is lurking behind the clouds. Nature’s future is green. I press my Toyota fob and hear the click of unlocking. I toss my clothes in the back, slide into the driver’s seat, insert the key, and twist right. 

The engine turns over. 

Inexplicably, I’m surprised. My surprise is an opening instantly filled with power surging from my feet to my head, as it occurs to me that I’m being released from a comfortable prison. I’m free, now, free to create a new world of my own. Sunlight, breaking through pompom clouds in the west, whispers Congratulations. You did it.

and breathe in, calm
then stare at the soft flame.

Images swirl, cardinals, bluebirds.
Crow emerges into view,

and I contemplate her message, consider
painting an abstract

reds rage and shriek across the canvas,
jagged midnight blues,

me, a tiny white dot against the chaos
of my violet cancer.

As for the future, I ponder
paining a giant canvas awash

with yellow sunshine radiating
in every direction. But I am not

like Crow. I cannot see the future.
Life is never only one

color. I pick up a feather Crow leaves for me,
reach for this moment where I may choose

any color, all colors. Again, I stare into the light,
breath more deeply than before

as I weigh this moment, this tiny second
alive with possibilities. I poise

my brush, gather pigments, splash and overlap
ocean blues and greens rolling in,

rolling out and off my canvas. In the distance
the amethyst horizon beckons

and I imagine Crow is waiting there,
but I stand with my feet centered

in the sugar white sand beneath my feet
at the water’s edge. Overhead,

billowy clouds dance
across a periwinkle sky.

A champagne sun dazzles the water,
dazzles me,

like laughter, and frolicking, and good health.

In her most recent work, Beautiful World, Where Are You? Rooney has taken aim at her literary celebrity, portraying a young novelist’s discomfort with her fame and the expectations that come from speaking so aptly to and for a large demographic, in her case the Millennials, which may or may not be “the Snapchat generation.” In creating the character of Alice, a famous author who has just released her third novel and laments both her success and her valuing of that success, Rooney takes a meta-fictional and clearly sardonic approach to being the latest Salinger. As Alice secludes herself in a seaside cottage for much of the novel, though occasionally jetting off to Paris for a book tour, it’s easy to understand the tug-of-war that has been the life of celebrity novelists in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Would Rooney’s fans actually be impressed with the comparison to Salinger? Would they even consider being the next Salinger a compliment? With what we know now of Salinger’s not-so-private life, the answer is probably not. And that’s all more reason to end the tradition.

From at least the time of F. Scott Fitzgerald, the title “voice of a generation” has been assigned endlessly to best-selling or culturally significant writers of a given era. Prior to Fitzgerald spotlighting the Jazz Age and the Lost Generation, however, it’s more difficult to apply such a label to other eras and authors. Certainly, writers such as Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Edith Wharton, and Mark Twain wrote profoundly of their time and place, and each could certainly be a voice of their generation. And, of course, Shakespeare would have to be the voice of the Elizabethan Age, though it’d be tough to assign him to a single demographic. But since the time of Salinger the title has become an all-too-common if not excessive moniker tagged to the zeitgeist. Granted, at precisely the same time Salinger was publishing short stories and his iconic novel, Jack Kerouac was emerging as the voice of the Beat Generation, which morphed into the Hippie generation, and his became the voice of any group pushing against conformity. Yet, with the angsty but unforgettable Holden Caulfield expressing the frustration of youth so aptly that it still rings true in the twenty-first century, it was the Salinger-esque tone that became the quintessential voice of a generation in terms of emerging youth culture, as readers and the media appear to be forever on the lookout for the “next Salinger.” 

Granted, for the purpose of this discussion it’s often the coming-of-age novels which align an author with a generation, and noting Rooney as the Salinger of her generation marks the significance of perhaps the last widely known and easily marketable author as having the “voice of a generation.” Such a voice has to be about the characters, what they’re saying and what they’re thinking. 

An author prior to Rooney widely tagged as the voice of a generation was Canadian writer and artist Douglas Coupland. In 1991 it was blatantly scripted on the back cover of Coupland’s Generation X: Tales for An Accelerated Culture where the moniker was applied, with one critic calling the quirky paperback novel “a modern day Catcher in the Rye.” Coupland subsequently and uncomfortably faced the burden of being the “voice of a generation.” Within a few years, he responded by declaring the “Death of Generation X” in a column for Details magazine. And to be honest, most members of Generation X never actually read Generation X, if they’d even heard of it. The same might be said of Rooney, though her book sales and the film adaptation of Normal People indicate resonance with and relevance to a wide audience. Ultimately, the voice of a generation reflects how it feels to be alive at a certain time for people of a certain age, and it’s fair to acknowledge the authenticity of Rooney’s stories to Millennials and Gen Z.

Voice of a generation is a particularly tough distinction in an increasingly global and diverse society, especially when a definitive group isn’t actually designated. Who exactly makes up the “Snapchat Generation”? Because it seems like teenagers of Gen Z are the primary users of the platform, it’s hard to believe the writing of twenty-seven year old Millennial Rooney is resonating with tweens and high school kids. Who really speaks for and to the under-forty set these days? And could the same voice resonate with both thirteen and thirty-year-olds? In terms of subject matter, attitude, and popularity, Billie Eilish is a much more apt voice of young people. Don’t musical artists like Khalid and Drake or Arianna Grande and Olivia Rodrigo speak to and for them far more than an author? In terms of novelists, especially those geared toward and writing to younger audiences, it seems reasonable to argue John Green or J.K. Rowling is a better, or certainly more significant, widely known, and relevant voice for Generation Z, not to mention the Millennials. In fact, is there a more influential writer of the past thirty years than J.K. Rowling? While perhaps not the “voice of a generation” of young readers, she was certainly the voice it listened to most, at least until an ongoing Twitter battle over the issue of gender created a pariah out of the best-selling and most impactful author of recent history.

It’s tough to identify the voice of a generation when some people are even scrutinizing the idea that generations of people actually share a common identity. In that regard, the question of whether the “voice” speaks to, for, or about a generation is worth considering, for that perspective is a key difference in the roles played by Rowling and Eilish for Millennials and Gen X. In an increasingly diverse and cosmopolitan world, there’s not one voice but many, all speaking for varied groups and subcultures of the contemporary age. Yet many people are still inclined to believe loosely in the idea of common associations linking people of a specific age and even calling them a generation. Often a generation has less to do with a person’s age and more about the allusions and references they understand. Douglas Coupland asserts that Generation X was never meant to describe a demographic of people born during specific years. Having said he drew the title from sociologist Paul Fussel’s book Class, Coupland explains how the term “category X” actually refers to people who exist outside the established social classes. Coupland adapted the term to refer to twentysomethings in the early 1990s who had turned their backs on the traditional career tracks of their parents and instead entered adulthood living a job-transient existence in the service industry, choosing lifestyle over career. 

For her part, shortly after being applied with the moniker—or albatross, as the case may be—Sally Rooney told The Guardian she knows she’s not her generation’s Salinger, and that we should all know and acknowledge that, too. There are no more “voices of a generation, “if there ever even truly was one. There are no more J.D. Salingers. In a contemporary world that, to quote Coupland from Generation X, “has grown beyond our ability to tell stories about it,” there’s no room nor reason for a single voice, a Salinger for this generation, or any generation for that matter. In today’s society, even J.D. Salinger himself wouldn’t be the next Salinger.

Places pass through you | needle and thread | The car
rumble | attenuates your ugly crying | Berry bushes
blaze | good-bye red | too-soon gold | Arseholes in trucks
think twice | before crowding your tail | Late afternoon sun
looks over its shoulder | pissed off and gassy | Rest stops

converge | except that crusty one | near Maple Creek | Even
the Moose Jaw cops | hiding in bushes | take you for a local | You
can almost outrun | smoke billowing | from the burning heart
of the west | By day six, you forget why you ever dreamed | you
could stay | It feels like you never left | or maybe yesterday

“So, where’s home for you?” 

From their expectant expression, the other party was clearly waiting on a quick answer. I garbled out the name of the city I currently lived in before the amiable atmosphere could congeal. But even after mercifully pressing “End call,” I stewed in the sudden silence. For someone like me, that ice-breaker question is loaded. And it’s very rare that I give anyone my real answer: Home is everywhere and nowhere at once. 

I was three months old when I was taken to Nigeria. Through the seasons— head-baking summer heat; Harmattan months that wove cracks into my skin like it was arid land; torrential rains that caused muddy water to flow from slopes like a giant pot of tea, upturned— I grew. I lived close to life, each moment more intense than the last. I was Nigerian, and I was not. Despite chattering in Hausa with the man selling MTN recharge cards, exclaiming “Nawa oh!” whenever I was disappointed, and wielding Pidgin English like an extension of my arm, at the end of the day, I came back to a home that spoke fluent Kannada and BBC English. 

There are thousands like me: Army brats, expatriate children, children of diplomats and oil and gas workers who spent their formative years in a culture other than the one associated with their nationality or parents’ heritage. Social scientists have a name for us: Third-Culture Kids. We inhabit a unique culture of our own: an alien third culture spawned to spackle the gaps between the ones that wouldn’t fit us. 

A month after my tenth birthday, we moved to India. I shuttled between Dubai and Bangalore — six months at dad’s, six months at mom’s until the months ran into years. At 21, I moved to England to study, forgoing a life in glitzy London for the more down-to-earth Sheffield. At 24, I moved back to Bangalore. Today, at 26, I don’t know who I am. 

*

Every year until I turned 10, we spent a month in India, touching base and reinforcing our relations. Ironically, we flitted even there, from one relative’s house to another’s. Between the hours spent stuffing my face with kodubale and chasing stray dogs down the street, I’d agree to sit down and answer aunties, each as different as they come but asking the same opening question: “Which do you like better: India or Nigeria?” When I was younger, I’d tell the simple truth: I like Nigeria. My friends are there. The cartoons are fun. I miss the taste of ananas after a long day at school. As I grew older, I said what they wanted to hear, what would safely get me out of the conversation without ruffled feathers: India. By the age of 8, I was seasoned in diplomacy. It’s a tool of the trade. 

Third-culture kids stitch together facets of a fractured self-identity to present a kintsugi-like visage to the outside world. The gold used to line the cracks is code-switching: adjusting behavior, speech, appearance, language, even expression to optimise our and others’ comfort. To shed light on similarities while masking differences. To say, “look, I’m just like you. Please treat me fairly.” In doing so, we develop a rare ability to deal with situations with increased awareness, empathy and tact. After all, we’ve learnt the hard way that it pays to be a careful observer and a smooth talker — in security, success, or a few moments of peace. 

*

Spaces that are most familiar to me are the ones others consider transient. Airports, taxis, waiting rooms, rest stops: places we enter with the sole purpose of leaving are places I feel most at ease in. Textbook blandness and cookie-cutter architectural designs fast became the rare fixed points in my crisscrossed history. Associations were flipped on their head. Where others would walk into a perfume store and say, “Smells like perfume,” I would say, “Smells like duty-free.” As others would wait in unveiled impatience for their bags to arrive, I would take secret delight in matching bag to owner: This red wheelie belongs to the lady in the matching horn-rimmed glasses. This worn backpack has to belong to that guitar-carrying person. I thought this duffel belonged to that buff guy, but it belonged to this petite girl. As a child, I invented this game to keep myself busy. As an adult, I play this game to keep my eyes open to the multitudes these liminal spaces contain. 

The memory of Amsterdam airport in particular—our most-frequented layover spot—is almost tangible. I see four-year-old me drumming my heels against the lobby chair; five-year-old me watching our bags while my pregnant mother finds a bathroom; ten-year-old me chattering away, blissfully unaware of how well and truly I had been uprooted. Here, in these spaces between places, there was refuge. 

In the school I joined in India, everybody lived close by, and there was no mercy for transplants. No transition support for a child who had been grafted into a new culture like a cactus in the middle of the ocean. My face grew hot when I was made to stand outside after entering the classroom without permission. My accent grew wilder when I realized that one: I had an accent, a cross-breed of Yoruba, Igbo and Hausa inflections that gambolled from octave to octave in the span of a single sentence. And two: it was a far cry from the rolled-Rs-and-dropped-Ts American accent my classmates would have accepted as cool. I was not cool. But I was being reforged. I surrendered my passport. I gave up my identity. In both cases, I was minted a new one. 

*

Today, my Facebook messenger folder is a study in third-culture kids trying to piece together their identity in retrospect. To open these messages is to see how third-culture kids deal with being rootless but free: by either flitting from place to place, forever nomads, or planting roots firmly in one city, like a stubborn tree, never moving. The casual comments—“remember me?”, “I was your classmate in school”, and “we met at that Indian Cultural Association party”—belie the urgency in stitching together episodes of our lives into a semi-cohesive whole. They mirror how we mythicise that which we have left behind, almost always for good. They edify a lingering sense we carry with us even as we laugh with our new friends, make new memories, and create new homes: an irrevocable sense of loss.  

If anything, shuffling between countries and homes has taught third-culture kids to root identity not in places, but in people. We leave pieces of ourselves with people from our past, like a nostalgic Horcrux that houses reminders of who we once were. If we ever meet them, we ask, “Do you remember how I taught the carpenter and the plumber English using our front gate as a blackboard?”

“Was I really a great babysitter?”

“Did I really dance confidently on stage every single year?”

“Was I really all that?” 

We hunger after their memories and unearth the person we used to be in what seems like another lifetime. Like a sedimentary rock that houses a precious fossil, we are layers upon layers of fabrications. We are mangroves, complex and enigmatic, with roots that exist but never really stay in the ground.  

We don’t just make Horcruxes out of people we know. Driven by our desire to explain what it’s like to be between cultures, we make them out of others like us in the media, in art, in places of power, however sparse. We recognise a part of ourselves in Barack Obama, who spent boyhood in a multiracial paradise but threw his hat in America’s ring when the time came to choose. We delight in learning Freddie Mercury was born in Zanzibar to Indian Parsi parents and came of age in glitzy Bombay. We relate to everyone but to no one, and in this limbo, we forge fresh understandings of what it means to be a rootless third-culture kid.

*

“So, where’s home for you?” Home is my family. Home is my collection of books. Home is a memory. Home is a myth. Home is everywhere and nowhere at once.

After the end of World War II, Soviet Jews were convinced that the victory in that war was also their victory and that that war was domestic for them as well. The difficult postwar years were a time of great expectations for Jews. The expectations were replaced by great disappointments. I had no expectations and could not have been disappointed, because I was born in Kiev two years after the end of that war, in the year of the abolition of ration cards, on July 14. I have an unusually high number of impressions of France—family stories, long years of academic work in the country. The language I learned as a child was almost native to my loved ones. I have friends, relatives and colleagues there. For some members of my family France became a second homeland, for others French became the language of secret communication in the USSR. 

My grandmother spoke French with my father. Dialogue in this language was a means for them to shield themselves from unwanted listeners. Voices heard in childhood often sound involuntary, unexpected, and not always harmonious later on. My father and uncle read to each other the poems of the German poet Heinrich Heine in the author’s native language. They did this quietly, so that outsiders did not hear the language that a few years ago was associated with the Enemy. Less and less often they spoke the poet’s native language, preferring the language he spoke during the last 25 years of his life in Paris. They wanted to shelter, fend off and protect themselves from an alien world that they often and mistakenly took for their own. Not Yiddish, which many people understand, but French, which they have spoken since childhood with their mother, the language of their secret communication. Not Yiddish, the language of the ghetto and places of the Pale of Settlement of the Russian Empire, but French, the melodious, beautiful language favored by Russian aristocrats. My family wanted to feel human when one persecution campaign succeeded another all around: the Cosmopolitan case, which struck my father and aunt (1949), and led to the execution of members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, writers, poets, and actors who wrote and acted in Yiddish (1952); the case of “murderers in white coats,” “poison doctors,” doctors of Jewish origin (1953), which struck my uncle, whose wife was a doctor. 

On March 8, 1949, my father Yakov Ilyich Gordon, Professor of French and German Literature at Kiev University, and my mother’s sister Liya Yakovlevna Khinchin, Professor at the Kiev Academy of Music, Head of the Department of the History of Russian Music and Dean of the Vocal Faculty, were declared “homeless cosmopolitans,” “rootless cosmopolitans” and dismissed from their jobs. Two of the four adult members of our family simultaneously lost their jobs, were subjected to extrajudicial persecution, prosecuted at meetings, condemned in newspapers, and expelled from Kiev. The wanderings began. Each of them changed seven cities. Their family life was shattered and their professional careers suffered. After 1949, my aunt wore black, mourning clothes, for a number of years every March 8 to commemorate the repression. When congratulated on International Women’s Day, she shuddered, recalling with disgust the Kiev Academy of Music, where she had been slandered, humiliated, and expelled from, leaving her without her favorite job and livelihood, forced to begin a life of uncertainty away from her hometown and family.  

France played a major role in the life of the man who determined the fate of my father: the German poet Heinrich Heine—whose work my father had been engaged in all his life, who had published several books about the poet in Russian, German and Japanese—found refuge in France. While doing research in Germany in 1998, I took my son up to the house on Bolkerstrasse 53 in Düsseldorf and, pointing to the door, said: “Here was born and raised the man who ruined my parents’ family life and robbed me of my father.” Harry Heine (he received the name Heinrich when he was baptized at the age of 27) was born on December 13, 1797. My father was born on June 14, 1913. My father and I parted ways after he fell victim to the persecution of the “cosmopolitan” cause in 1949. He was declared an “agent of foreign intelligence” (it was not specified which one), fired from his job and actually deported from Kiev. My mother and I stayed in Kiev due to the total uncertainty of my father’s future employment prospects. In the early 1990s I used my own funds to publish his autobiography, Confessions of a “Foreign Intelligence Agent.” My father led a double life as a Jew who wanted to be like everyone else but could not do so. 

Also an independent thinker, one of the wittiest men in Europe, Heinrich Heine led a double life as a German and a Jew. Heine was loved and hated by the two nations to which he belonged. The Germans loved his lyrics and disliked his political poetry. Jews loved to credit his genius and disliked his conversion to Protestantism, about which he often joked, “What do you want? I found it impossible for me to belong to the same religion as Rothschild without being as rich as him.” 

Heine was a doctor of law. The German poet was baptized to become a lawyer, but Germany did not give Dr. Heinrich Heine the right to practice her laws, and he began to describe her lawlessness. Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich deemed Heine unworthy to be a professor of German literature, so he became its creator.

Heine had his own understanding of history. He believed that Germany and the Germans were degenerating. While Hegel regarded Prussia as the ideal state, Heine believed that all of Germany was backward and reactionary. According to Hegel, the Jews, who created Christianity, must disappear, for the new religion is universal and more reasonable than the old Jewish religion. 

My father had his own understanding of history. He treated the Jews as the English historian Arnold Toynbee treated fossils or petrification. The fallacy of Toynbee’s grand historical concept can be seen in the light of what happened to the Swedish biologist Linnaeus. He was against evolution. Having classified all the plants and all the animals that, in his opinion, had always existed, he suddenly saw an insect during a walk, whose existence contradicted his classification and argued in favor of evolution. What did the scientist Linnaeus do? Admit his mistake? Reconsider his views? No. He crushed the insect! What did Toynbee do when he realized that, according to his theory, the Jews should have disappeared in the second century AD, but they did not? He declared the Jews a historical fossil or petrification. 

What is the connection between Heine and my father? At the end of the 1940s my father published a number of articles and defended a dissertation on the influence of Heine on the poetry of the famous Ukrainian poetess Lesya Ukrainka. And although Lesya Ukrainka herself wrote about the influence of Heine on her work  and translated into Ukrainian from German about 100 poems by Heine, my father, living in Kiev, was declared a foreign, “petty-bourgeois” cosmopolitan for claiming the influence of the foreign, “petty-bourgeois” poet Heine on the national poetess. In his memoirs, my father wrote, “My Achilles’ heel was Heine. In articles devoted to me, the pathos of denunciation of Heine …  was very strong. Not a single orator-writer forgot to mention that Heine was a Jew and that I dared to speak about the influence of a third-rate German poet on the great poetess Lesya Ukrainka: ‘He cared about Heine, but our national poets are alien to him.'” 

One of the main pogromists, the poet Ljubomir Dmyterko, said, “Behind this group of cosmopolitan critics were a number of their accomplices and henchmen. Among them, the most aggressive aesthete and cosmopolitan is Ya. Gordon.” Dmyterko demanded that the “weevils” be removed from Ukraine. In the literal sense they meant pest beetles, but it was clear that they were talking about Jewish noses. Michael Mitzel’s book quotes a note from the secretary of the communist party committee of the Kiev University, Machikhin, dated March 24, 1949, which contains this “conclusion”: “An active cosmopolitan, Gordon slandered the work of Lesya Ukrainka, belittling her role as a national poetess.” 

My father behaved with courage. In the newspaper For Radyanskiye Kadri (“Soviet Personnel”) it was said that “only Gordon alone had the audacity not to admit the accusations that the people had brought against him.” Other “cosmopolitans” repented, but it did them no good: they were denounced for incomplete, insincere admission of their sins. My father was fired from the Kiev University, from the editorial office of the literary magazine Vitchizna (“Homeland”), and from the Theater Institute, and he was forced to look for work far from Kiev: in Chernivtsi, Bukhara, and Dushanbe. He had two congenital vices—a heart defect and Jewishness.       

The authorities were not wrong in branding my father a cosmopolitan. He was a cosmopolitan and proud of it, yet rushed to prove the opposite to the authorities. He was saved from final destruction by the same man who had unwittingly caused his misfortune—Heine. The “cosmopolitan” Heinrich Heine was mobilized to clear my cosmopolitan father of the charge of cosmopolitanism. Marx was a friend of Heine, and Lenin was an admirer of his almost revolutionary poetry. In 1844, on Heine’s 47th birthday, Engels published the following message in an English newspaper: “The great poet Heinrich Heine has joined us and published a collection of political poetry preaching socialism.” To count Heine among the revolutionary socialists was an exaggeration of the twenty-four-year-old Engels. Heine—poet, journalist, satirist—never had any doctrine. He did not join any political current. In those years, however, attempts were made to portray Heine, a student of Hegel at Berlin University, as the “mediator” between Hegel and Marx, trying to make him the John the Baptist of Jesus Marx. Heine was too complicated a person and too profound a personality to be painted in a single, red color. 

My father managed to prove, with quotations from Marx, Engels, and Lenin, that Heine was a great revolutionary poet who could influence the national poets of the Soviet republics as well. After months of pounding the high doorsteps of Moscow, he received a certificate that he was not a cosmopolitan. In his memoirs he writes about this event: “Dear comrade, to whom my memoirs may reach in one form or another! You do not have a certificate that you are not a cosmopolitan like your friends, relatives, teachers, teachers of their teachers. Probably none of the 180 million Soviet citizens have it. Only I have it.” On October 28, 1949, the Higher School Administration under the Council of Ministers of the Ukrainian SSR issued my father a document of rehabilitation, which contained the following conclusion: “In the critical articles and works of Gordon Ya. I. we should note his desire to promote the achievements of Russian and Soviet literature, to assist young poets and prose writers in their work, the development of Soviet patriotism, the heroism of the Soviet people, the heroism of socialist labor, etc. In connection with the above, the Office believes that the doctor of philological sciences Y.I. Gordon, despite a number of serious mistakes in his work, which, however, are not anti-patriotic or cosmopolitan in nature, can be used for teaching work in higher education in the department of general literature.” 

My father received this extraordinary certificate while concealing from the authorities Heine’s attitude toward the Communists. In 1855, in the preface to the French edition of “Lutetia” Heine wrote, “If the Republicans represented for the correspondent of the Augsburg Gazette [i.e., Heine himself] a very touchy subject, then an even more touchy subject was represented by the Socialists, or let us call the monster by its real name—the Communists. […] This confession that the future belongs to the communists, I made with infinite fear and longing. […] Indeed, it is only with disgust and horror that I think of the time when these grim iconoclasts will reach power.” 

The certificate my father received seemed like a miracle, and rumors spread that the miracle worker was the famous writer Ilya Ehrenburg, whom Father met in Moscow in the summer of 1949. From my father’s autobiographical book, however, it is clear that Ehrenburg did not even let him tell the story of his persecution: “Well, hang in there, Professor. […] It’s good that you didn’t tell me anything about your epopee.” Indeed, although Ehrenburg was a famous writer, he was very much afraid of the Stalinist regime. He was afraid of being overheard by the KGB listening devices installed in or around his home. So, he thanked my father for not telling him about his persecution and any anti-Soviet sentiments in case he, in turn, might have been overheard by the KGB.

This certificate, probably the only one of its kind, brought my father back to Kiev. And then it turned out that they did not want to reinstate him. It was not a matter of cosmopolitanism, which my father had disavowed with the help of the hard-won certificate. He had brought a certificate from Moscow stating that he was not a cosmopolitan. But he did not bring a certificate that he was not a Jew, a certificate that Heine had after his baptism. Therefore, my father was not rehabilitated in Kiev. This was a local initiative, not a directive from Moscow. Heine could not find work as a lawyer because of his political views and had to emigrate from Germany. My father could not be reinstated to work and stay in Kiev and had to “emigrate” from Kiev because of the indelible stain of Jewishness. After two years of exile in Chernivtsi, where he was spied on, his lectures recorded, he found himself in Central Asia, which became for him a haven of freedom, tolerance and internationalism—something like France for his beloved Heine. But the Islamic revolution in Tajikistan shattered his eastern fairytale and brought him to Moscow. My father wrote a number of books about Heine, some of them published in West Germany and Japan. One was published in Heine’s hometown of Düsseldorf in his native language (1982). My father died on February 17, the same day as his idol.

Jewish writers, branded as “cosmopolitans,” were assimilated Jews, patriots of the USSR, experts in the literature of the republics in which they lived. They were educated people, well acquainted with foreign literature. Yet they were robbed of their socialist fatherland, which they sincerely loved and with which they felt close to. People without a fatherland, whose people had suffered genocide in the recent war, were robbed of their right to represent the art of the peoples of the USSR. “Homeless cosmopolitans,” “rootless cosmopolitans” introduced, in the opinion of the authorities, “foreign” influence and “polluted” the “pure” and “authentic” art of the peoples of the USSR. The Soviet ruling international-socialists were shedding the burden of internationalism and turning into national-socialists. Socialists, who, by definition, were supposed to be internationalists, proletarian internationalists, in the USSR turned into possessors of the only truth and pretenders to the “right,” “just” power over the world, the Vladimirs (Vladimir translated as “rule over the world”). The first ruler of Soviet Russia, Vladimir Lenin, proclaimed the conquest of the world by means of a permanent world socialist revolution. The Soviet ruling International Socialists were shedding the burden of internationalism and turning into National Socialists, for they asserted the superiority of the “Soviet nation,” while the Jews were perceived at times as an “anti-Soviet nation” and at times as a second-class citizen nation unfriendly to the Soviet Union.  

One of the heroes-victims of the “cosmopolitan” harassment, writer Alexander Borschagovsky, my dad’s friend, wrote: “they blame the blood.” The notion of “homeless cosmopolitans,” “rootless” was inaccurate: cosmopolitanism is usually associated with broad-mindedness, tolerance, and is contrasted with narrowness of nationalism. In the 1940s, Jewish cultural figures were connoisseurs and patriots of local art, but they were deprived of the right to represent it, so they were “homeless patriots,” “rootless patriots,” “stateless patriots.” Their homeland was stolen from them. This was a phenomenon that could be called in Greek “kleptopatria.” Their high expectations were crushed.

that needed money and here I was such
a fixed fact at an awkward age, not old enough
as in useful, not small enough to send to bed.
So from those stale-smelling seats I watched
the outsized selves on a long, loud screen,
thieves like me, singers, sorcerers, sexy stuff,
this mix that made me walk back different
every time until no one could make out

who I was anymore. After the crisis came
with the mortgage and its money, it was
no surprise the Strand blew itself up the way
I later would when even my one life was too
much for me. But just as in sleep night after
night, whatever burns down in you will still
stand in the morning, and you will still
have to pay for it by the light of the day.

It seems to me that since art is, at least in part, born from reality, it must serve those of us still stuck in it. Art must see things as they actually are and honestly grapple with the conditions from which it emerges. 

This is simple enough in theory, but just reflecting hopelessness back to a hopeless world is not appealing. This is perhaps why I found myself so depressed after watching Adam McKay’s 2021 movie Don’t Look Up. I admired it and appreciated its message, but won’t be re-watching it anytime soon. Its insights about the blundering incompetence of American institutions in the face of demonstrable existential crises seem keen enough, but, for the sake of my emotional health, the movie is too immersed in the catastrophe of the world as we knew it. One might say its comet hits too close to home.

So if neither a detached “art for art’s sake” nor a cynical wail at reality is the best function of art now, what is? How can art convict while leaving room for hope?

Might I suggest Wesley Stace’s recent album, Late Style, as a possible model?

After a quick trip to check my claim on Spotify, the reader may hear the album’s opening line, “You wanna be where the bands are, baby,” and dismiss me out-of-hand. The line has an undeniable “party vibe,” as does much of the album. Furthermore, that vibe is one straight from a 60s pop, lounge-singer era. How could such a well-crafted throwback record mean anything to a world in full collapse? 

In his thirty-plus year career, Stace has covered more ground, both stylistically and in terms of genre, than most pop singers ever do. For most of his musical career, Stace recorded and performed under the name John Wesley Harding, a moniker taken from the Bob Dylan album of the same name. Early on, his music heavily tilted toward various versions of the singer-songwriter archetype, each inspired by his broad array of influences from folk to late-70s New Wave. 

By the time John Wesley Harding recorded 2000’s The Confessions of St. Ace (the title containing one of the great puns in the history of pop music), the Cambridge-educated singer had perfected a highly literate form of melodic pop music. Stace began professionally using his birth name in 2005, when he published his first novel, Misfortune (he has four books in total). Beginning in the mid-2010’s, Stace began recording some of his albums under his given name as well. And as if writing songs and novels were not enough, he periodically curates a traveling variety show featuring dozens of artists called Wesley Stace’s Cabinet of Wonders. In short, Stace’s career, not unlike that of Dylan himself, has been one of endless reinvention and Late Style shows that his creative fire isn’t nearly exhausted yet.

It’s worth taking a moment to gush over how richly pleasurable it is to listen to. Instrumentally, the album is dominated by bass, piano, glockenspiel, organ, acoustic guitars, and subtle drumming that features a lot of hi-hat cymbal. Its bossa nova beats and infectiously whistleable melodies mesh perfectly with Stace’s smooth voice and clear delivery of his always clever, poetic lyrics. The listener can put on some headphones, pour themselves a fancy drink, close their eyes and imagine being in a classic nightclub or stylish lounge. It is a record to luxuriate in. 

Late Style so effectively captures the spirit and aesthetic of a smoky, bygone era, one may accuse it of being escapist, an aloof exercise in “art for art’s sake.” And indeed the album creates a nostalgic aesthetic, which could be a problem if not for Stace’s skill as a songwriter. So many of the album’s lyrics peer into the heart of our tormented present that the listener cannot help but reflect on our sorry state. Stace is smart enough to recognize the traps nostalgia lays for an artist and he actively resists falling for its allure. What he has created in Late Style is a nostalgia that resists nostalgia.

The record is a paradox, and it creates a cognitive dissonance that offers a blueprint for honest, yet hopeful, art to consume as the comet approaches. Stace never lets us forget where we are, but he lets us look at it from a distance where it doesn’t seem so hopeless. Late Style offers both critique (in its lyrics) and perspective (in its style). It is both honest and therapeutic, providing a reflective distance from the fray.

Let’s get back to that pesky opening number, “Where the Bands Are,” as an illustration. The lyrics paint a romantic picture of the live-music of yore / “oh what a beautiful vibe,” Stace proclaims at one point. The image of this vibe doesn’t look like any concerts I’ve recently attended, with its “cool table set just for you. / Right back where the bands are baby; / there are no plastic forks, / just the popping of corks, / and the catering’s all cordon bleu.” Added to this lyrical other-worldliness is the bouncy nightclub rhythms, instrumentation, and arrangement. All this “vibe” serves as a remote-viewing opportunity to peer into a mythical, romantic past. The song bursts with nostalgia for an era of lost aesthetic pleasures. 

But the song’s contemporary relevance lies just below its seductive surface. No industry suffered as much under the weight of the Covid-19 pandemic than the live music scene. Music venues and recording artists who rely on touring have faced existential crises. Add to this economic burden the cultural loss of fans unable to gather in person for a shared, intimate group experience, and we can see that the song all taps into an entirely contemporary crisis for its impact. The historical romance softens the blow of the tragedy from which the song emerges. 

So many of Late Style’s songs draw their inspiration from contemporary crises, while crafting the anxiety of their lament into the soothing styles of easy listening. 

The labor market, for example, has been thrown into turmoil in the pandemic’s wake as well. Mainstream media outlets have seemed to settle on the phrase, “The Great Resignation,” to describe the masses of workers who have left their jobs for one reason or another. Many people have quit their careers after achieving a clarity about “what really matters.” It seems to me that Late Style has a song or two for that as well. The lyrics to “Hey! Director” capture the regrets of a man coming to the realization that he has mutilated himself to fit someone else’s mold: “fifty years in makeup and I don’t look like me,” the singer laments. The song ends with an epiphany: “I can’t believe you talked me into this so easily; I’m going back to music; it makes more sense to me.” Though crafted as a 60’s pop song, it captures the melancholia driving The Great Resignation.

But what about the dangers of nostalgia? Stace’s work has always been grounded firmly in received artistic traditions. When he rooted his artistic identity in a Bob Dylan reference, Stace’s connection to great art of the past was forever sealed. His best work has always reinvented those traditions, however, and Late Style is merely the most recent example of that approach.

What ultimately saves Late Style is the fact that Stace understands that nostalgia as an end to itself is an opiate that dooms art to perpetual irrelevance. The song that makes this clearest on Late Style is “Come Back Yesterday,” which is devoted to shouting down reactionaries who want to turn back the clock in a nostalgic effort to return to a mythical past. The song has the feel of a late-sixties Kinks tune, when Ray Davies was nearing the peak of his satiric, social-commentary powers. The style of the song may be antique, but the target of its scathing critique of right-wing politics is utterly of our contemporary political moment: “Your clothes will be way back in style like your views; / and women in kitchens or maybe as muses; / and old worlds to conquer and slaves with the blues; / and ask but don’t tell, except when you’re cruising; / and problems you’ve caused, you can blame on the Jews.” If a listener comes to the record with the hope that the artist will just “shut up and sing,” they will be utterly disappointed. The record, despite its throwback style, is inseparable from politics of the 2020’s. 

One of the most acclaimed works of the pandemic has been Bo Burnham’s hypnotic, self-made Netflix film, Inside. Though darker than Late Style, the film and album share one vital quality: they are simultaneously honest (Burnam’s songs brutally so) and beautiful. Each employs an otherworldly aesthetic that creates a possibility of “after” the collapse, something to look forward to in hope. Stace includes two songs here that align nicely with the social commentary of Burnham’s apocalyptic view of society and technology, “Everything All the Time” and “Well Done Everyone.” 

“Everything All the Time,” in soft, relaxing tones, ponders the long-term effects of the perpetual immediacy of ubiquitous smart phones and streaming services on our attention spans and imaginations. He sings, “I used to dream of the silver screen, / lost in the dark with my black and white queen; / now it’s screen upon screen upon screen upon screen; / in every hand, including mine. / It used to be few and far between; / now it’s everything all the time.” As a topic, it shares a lot of common ground with Burnham’s recent obsessions. Yet neither allows the bleak truth of their observations to drive the listener to nihilism. Burnham’s humor and Stace’s command of style have the effect of releasing some air from the balloon before it pops. Its failure to do so is my main complaint about Don’t Look Up; McKay’s film twists the knife until hope is all but dead.

Likewise, “Well Done Everyone,” with a bouncy, comedic style not unlike Burnham’s, surveys our collective political disasters, including the fact that, as a body-politic, “we thought a madman might be fun,” with both keen perception and good nature. 

Late Style closes with a step outside Stace’s late style, a move that draws even more attention to the power of the record’s style. “How You All Work Me,” is a quiet, Americana-inspired ballad that would have fit nicely in with Stace’s 2013 self-titled release Wesley Stace, which saw the former John Wesley Harding reclaiming his birth name for professional purposes. It’s a subtly funny song in which the singer, with purposeful irony, places the blame for his burdensome creative impulses on his audience, a group he imagines pushes him against his will to undergo all the many artistic transformations that have defined Stace’s fascinating career. But it also emphasizes the art and artifice of Late Style as a whole. It’s an album intricately crafted to exist both inside and outside its moment in history. 

No photograph could have ever communicated the power of these paintings to me. When I finally walked out of the Rothko room I felt vulnerable and small and my face prickled with the faintest tingle of shame, because I’d almost cried at a painting, for God’s sake. That, however, is the power of The Seagram Murals: to give the viewer a glimpse of how small and fragile they are; to drive home the fact of one’s placeness.

One of the privileges of being a writer is the freedom to invent words. Sometimes a gap appears in my own vocabulary (I won’t say in the English lexicon, as my knowledge of it isn’t comprehensive) and I invent a word to fill it. “Placeness,” defined as the awareness and feeling of the smallness of one’s significance within the grand scheme of things, is probably the word I am most proud of. I forget exactly how I came to create it. You look out over a valley one day and there it is. Or you’re flying home, over wide open fields and oceans and the invisible, arbitrary borders of countries, and there it is again. It is feeling your awareness suddenly opening up to take in something far greater than yourself, while, simultaneously, you feel all the limitations of your powers of comprehension, and you have to acknowledge that a person, this collage of experiences, characteristics, and actions, has only the smallest significance within the universe.

Art that can land that punch is a rare thing. To do so requires looking squarely at those basic dichotomies of humanness which are also our simplest but most baffling mysteries: light/dark, freedom/bondage, infinity/finiteness, fullness/emptiness. Their mysteries lie in a person’s inability to even perceive one without help from its polar opposite: there’s no light without dark; no full without empty. Standing in the Tate’s Rothko Room, moving from one canvas to another, seeing the borders of the squares fade into the coloured spaces around them, which are themselves made of shifting shades of crimson and red and oxblood, it’s made clear that The Seagram Murals draw their power from these mysteries. Their sheer size and lack of any fixed point to draw the eye gives the viewer a glimpse at an infinite, empty space; a space and emptiness that could only be conveyed by including the finiteness of the rectangles’ edges. The sense of freedom which that openness brings would be meaningless without bondage to escape from. The darkness of the reds and blacks could only be perceived if there is light for them to swallow. In these paintings all the mess has been cleared away, leaving only these raw, terrifying, all-consuming absolutes. Is it any wonder, then, that many a viewer has broken out in tears at Rothko’s work? When, as he said himself, he was only interested “in expressing basic human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on”?

Rothko, though he denied being a colorist, labored over his shades, taking great care to blend the colors of The Seagram Murals together, so the layers of paint do seem to move around and over each other very slowly, like tectonic plates shifting. This blending—this slow, slow movement—deepens the pictures, making them three-dimensional, almost as if they were rooms themselves. When you stop in front Red on Maroon (1959), with its wide red square borders almost invisible against the deeper maroon background, you find yourself surrounded by “basic human emotions.” They lay themselves out in front of you as plain and honest as a confession, and the frightening thing is that you know, on some level, that Rothko did not make these emotions, and that all this joy and terror and passion and peace walked in here with you.

Rothko: “The progression of a painter’s work, as it travels in time from point to point, will be toward clarity, toward the elimination of all obstacles between the painter and the idea, and between the idea and the observer. As examples of such obstacles, I give (among others) memory, history or geometry, which are swamps of generalization from which one might pull out parodies of ideas (which are ghosts) but never an idea in itself. To achieve this clarity is, inevitably, to be understood.” This “elimination of all obstacles” is really the stripping away of all a person’s layers of assumption, expectation, preconception, knowledge, and identity. All these things come into the Rothko room from outside, are seen by us and used to create personhood, and all of them dissolve into nothing before his paintings. His art, including The Seagram Murals, seems more a process of uncovering than an act of creation; the act of uncovering the vulnerable, naked, quivering core of humanness, which was there before a solid and functioning identity was built around it. Rothko’s paintings, John Berger wrote “are about colours or light awaiting the creation of the visible world.” These absolutes were here before we were fully-fleshed humans. They are the most fundamental elements of one’s subjective experience, and the fact that to get right down into their fundamental self one must relinquish everything that makes them themselves is the greatest paradox of The Seagram Murals, which makes it also their greatest power source.

Standing in front of Black on Maroon (1958), staring into the black space between the two maroon rectangles that float in the canvas’s center, there’s only the gap, with the maroon’s bloody faded fringes on either side, and the experience of it, which is what I’ve called placeness. By only giving his colors the vaguest forms, Rothko leaves us nothing to hang definitions on; by painting these colors across such vast canvases, he gives us a glimpse at something primordial and very nearly infinite: “basic human emotions” and the paradoxes of our human condition.

It’s a glimpse big enough to lose yourself in. These paradoxes are vastnesses that cannot be fully comprehended, and when confronted with them, our senses reach their limits and then stop. Art that wields that power is called Sublime, and it has been discussed since antiquity. This is art that confronts the viewer with power so great in size, strength, age, and scope that all that can really be felt when we look at it is placeness, and we come face-to-face with the smallness of our significance. 

Placeness is not the same thing as insignificance. With modernity came the realization that one human being cannot seriously affect the cosmos: Stephen Crane’s short story “The Open Boat” (1897) talks about a man’s realization “that nature does not regard him as important, and that she feels she would not maim the universe by disposing of him”; H.P. Lovecraft’s characters are always being driven to madness by their littleness when they encounter the Great Old Ones. As our worldview expanded to include the universe beyond the night sky, we were faced with the fact of our minuteness, and to face this fact squarely means undergoing massive ego-deflation, and, in the process, coming to terms with our very finite limitations, our cosmic anonymity, and our vulnerability. To stand in front of The Seagram Murals, to feel that torrent of awareness and emotion, and then despair, is understandable. We put much stock and worth in our identities and egos, and to feel them fall away from us, leaving us feeling raw and exposed before these great powers, hurts. But this is not a belittling. Belittling someone means making them feel less than they are, which is to tell them a lie. The experience of The Seagram Murals is a rightsizing—an acknowledgement of one’s true power, size, capabilities, and worth. As such, it is a deeply humbling experience, for it shows the viewer that their worth comes from nothing quantifiable, like achievement or money, but from their place as part of this grand back-and-forth between those paradoxes that drive the wheels of Creation. The question of a person’s worth becomes obviously more complicated when concepts like sin and crime are factored in. But now, in the middle of the Rothko Room, it’s enough to feel that terrific sense of placeness, knowing that it is not the same thing as insignificance, but is rather the fact of one’s worth within a universe that only looks indifferent.

Praise be brother mouse 
whose tiny feet and teeth 
keep me awake so as to pray. 
Fill your stomach and grow fat 
with straw. Diminish
my comfort, empty 
my pallet, bring this ruin 
of a body ever closer
to the earth.

Before I knew the name “Shiva Nataraja”—which simply means Shiva, Lord of the Dance—before I had any idea of its history or the meaning of the intricate symbolism it embodies, before I’d read Coomaraswamy and other experts, this sculpture was something that moved me. There was an immediate effect when I first saw it. It stopped me in my tracks and left me transfixed. The lithely potent dancing figure suggested a sense of precisely controlled yet untamed movement that was almost hypnotic.

I’ve sometimes wondered if sheer exoticism might have played a part in the impact of my early, uninformed encounters—the appeal of something wholly alien. Growing up amidst the insular certainties and antagonisms of Northern Ireland, I was raised in a milieu that was Christian, conservative, unimaginative, and almost wholly lacking in cultural diversity. The religious aesthetic I was used to was Presbyterianism’s stark minimalism. The portrayal of a four-armed god dancing within a circle of flames, a cobra coiled around one wrist, hands laden with unfamiliar devices, one foot raised, one foot crushing a figure lying on the ground beneath it, was something very different from what I was used to. But far from feeling the magnetism of what was strange, it felt more familiar than foreign; it gave me a profound sense of inner homecoming rather than the feeling that I’d journeyed to some exotic destination.

I know now that the Shiva Nataraja is regarded as one of the triumphs of Hindu art, conveying in its essential simplicity of form a wealth of symbolic detail. Its aesthetic merits have not gone unnoticed in the West. Rodin praised its beauty. Titus Burkhardt suggested that it is perhaps “the most perfect fruit of Hindu art.” It moved Heinrich Zimmer, that great commentator on Eastern art and philosophy, to write some of his most lyrical interpretative passages. As I’ve learned more about the Shiva Nataraja, I’ve come to a more finely textured appreciation. But this is underlain by the realization that its initial impact happened quite independently of such knowledge. When I first encountered the Shiva Nataraja, I knew nothing about Hinduism or India, still less Indian art. Yet these sculptures spoke to me with an immediacy and authority that was arresting. I like to think this is a small example of how great art is not confined to any niche of history, locality, or belief. Instead, it has a universality about it; a quality of relevance that’s timeless. It leaves those who encounter it feeling vivified.

One of my favorite Shiva Nataraja’s is in the St Mungo Museum of Religious Life and Art in Glasgow, Scotland. It’s a large, South Indian bronze dating from around 1800. Shiva is depicted as a human-scale figure, close to six feet in height. This sculpture is displayed on its own, dominating a side-room off the main gallery. I like to go there every now and then and just stand before it, feel its energy run through me, watch other visitors become stilled before it.

The Shiva Nataraja has been in existence for millennia. There have been—continue to be—countless examples of it as artists repeatedly attempt to express what it represents. Whether ancient or modern, each attempt follows the same defining motifs—but different regions, materials, artists, and periods of history have acted to impose a slew of variations on the basic underlying design.

What meanings do the elements of that design convey? Shiva’s multiple arms denote power and, taken singly, each one expands on this key theme. The upper right hand holds a drum on which the god beats out the rhythm of his dance,which is the rhythm of the universe. His upper left hand bears on it a naked flame, testimony both to Shiva’s destructive prowess and the creativity with which it’s tempered. The lower right hand is held in a gesture meaning “fear not,” inviting humankind to approach without dread what appears terrifying. The lower left hand points to the prostrate figure of Apasmara—whose name means “ignorance”—trampled by the god’s dancing feet. Shiva dances within a ring of flames, the prabhamandala, representing the flickering vitality of life. Asymmetrical earrings show that Shiva transcends the dualism of gender, a point emphasized in some images by the inclusion of a single female breast. Neither “he” nor “she” is appropriate in referring to this deity. The crescent moon, the miniature figure of the goddess Ganga, the skull and flowers in Shiva’s unshorn hair, the god’s third eye, the figures at the base of the pedestal and the lotus flower engraved into it, the trailing scarf—all these features add further symbolic significance.

But though I find it instructive to unravel the symbolism, I rarely think about it when I’m standing in front of the Shiva Nataraja in the St Mungo Museum. The way this sculpture strikes me doesn’t rely on such details for its impact. This is a form that speaks directly to the heart. It possesses an aesthetic and, I think, a spiritual charge that requires no specialist knowledge to conduct it. The current jumps from sculpture to onlooker without the need of specialist knowledge as intermediary. The Nataraja addresses us in a way that’s immediate; its fluency transcends the limiting specificities of language, culture, and religion. We are all part of the dance of being it depicts.

Notes:

There are many pictures of the Shiva Nataraja readily available online. Alas, the one referred to in the essay – in Glasgow’s St Mungo Museum – is not among them.

A comparable (albeit much smaller) Shiva Nataraja can be seen in London’s Victoria & Albert Museum. See: http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O25011/shiva-nataraja-lord-of-the-bronze-sculpture-unknown/.

For images in the public domain that can be reproduced freely, without copyright restrictions, see Wiki Commons. For example, a Nataraja from the Musée Guimet (Paris) is given here: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Shiva_Nataraja_Mus%C3%A9e_Guimet_25971.jpg 

References 

Ananda Coomaraswamy, The Dance of Shiva: Fourteen Indian Essays, New Delhi 1976, p.78

Titus Burkhardt, Sacred Art in East and West, tr Lord Northbourne, Middlesex, 1967, p.38

Heinrich Zimmer, Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization, New York 1946, pp.151, 174; The Art of Indian Asia, New York 1955, pp.122-4

We did get to the top of the Mist Trail, through the more arduous stretch where you have to climb the stone steps. We swam in frigid water that sent my lungs into spasms; we thawed on granite boulders. Throughout, I was baffled at how my fatigue persisted and resolved to get in better shape. Soon after the trip, my symptoms worsened and proved to be a case of mononucleosis. I forgave my 19-year-old self for having nearly passed out on a log while the world zoomed by, and spent much of the remaining academic year battling a series of respiratory bugs and cleaning up my study habits and sleep schedule.

*

There’s a pen-and-ink drawing of Vernal Falls in my mother’s apartment. The artist is another former schoolmate, an accomplished graphic designer. I’ve moved this piece between residences, including my own, several times. For the past decade, it has quietly cohabitated with artwork my mother inherited late in life. Downsizing and moving this collection and the rest of her belongings—first from the suburban house my siblings and I grew up in, and now from a large retirement apartment—has been an ongoing lesson in more ways than I can name. It’s probably unfair to label the lot as strictly “her” belongings, since much of it belonged to my father as well, and some of it to my grandparents. 

Given the state of the stuff, and my psycho-historic-poetic leanings, the current move’s challenges of sorting and “dispersal,” as the professionals call it, have consumed at least as much emotional energy as time and expense. It’s impossible to know if a yellowed folder will hold department store receipts from the 1970s, or the only known photograph of a long-departed family member. Brittle envelopes let slip the deeply creased black-and-white snaps, their scalloped borders missing a corner or two. 

I am maybe halfway through the non-furniture items when I find the drawing of the Falls, and once again must decide its fate. 

Despite an unflattering frame, it is a fine piece and good likeness, probably made with Rapidograph pens, another bit of nostalgia. A spray of pine needles in the foreground always catches my eye. As artwork goes, it’s fairly small, but neither my current home nor my mother’s has much wallspace now. And we’re supposed to evolve beyond stuff-gathering, anyway, learning to let go of things, and of our attachments to them. I hold “Vernal Falls” by its beveled edges as I sit between stacks of files, books, housewares, and memorabilia. I am some two hundred miles from Yosemite, and over thirty years past the era that birthed this drawing and those friendships. The figurative connections are more tenuous. As a poet, I am used to eliding or implying such connections, but am finding this moment messy, like a pastiche of Groundhog Day and Fen Shui.   

*

Every aspect of this transition is heightened by the global pandemic. We move my mother first, as quickly as possible, into an assisted-living studio with a lower exposure risk, and the higher level of care she needs due to a recent injury. I try to hurry through the rest of the move, under quarantine’s drawn-out protocols and tenor of dread. I let go of more, and let go of it more quickly, postponing the most tangled decisions in the interest of deadlines (read: storage unit). I’m dwelling less, for now, in emotions surrounding my mother’s changing cognitive skills, which throw stark light on the role of memory in attachment. 

Her resilience astounds me. She wants little more than essentials, even as she might pivot to an item of personal importance. Have you seen the letter your father sent me when he was away in the army? It’s tissue-thin, typed on airmail sheets, signed with a loving flourish. She loves reading it. I made a point of keeping it on the display shelf of her buffet cabinet so that we wouldn’t misplace it. I just gave the cabinet away; the letter, safely packed, awaits a new station. My mother, in her new, smaller-yet-safer quarters, has all but forgotten this apartment I rush to clear out amid flurries of doctor calls, paperwork, administrative conflicts, and parenting my teen via text.  

I empty another closet, another bookshelf. I seek homes among family, friends, and charities for as many things as I can, hoping to avoid squabbles, delays, landfill, and contagion. I tire of making decisions. The movers can pack up “Vernal Falls” with the larger items headed to storage. I am grateful for these expert movers, for their attentive blend of compassion and dispassion. I am grateful for my family’s patience as boxes and bags arrive for sorting in our tiny home, and for the privilege of being able to do this when so many are suffering beyond measure. I sift through trinkets, dishes, clothing, photographs, and proliferating piles of paper, savoring parts of my parents’ and grandparents’ lives, and of my own.  

I think of the Falls, their kinetic example of transfer and progress, not to mention grace. I am trained, after all, in the fitting of images. But I am also the barefoot cobbler, improvising. A girl gasps for air in a cold mountain stream. A woman wades through papers toward a steep, far shore. On every level, there’s more to climb and swim through, and more to unpack.

I knew how the dog felt, begging for bones.
It was a chocolate delight, but the work
of begging is hard.

As I grew, the cookie seemed closer
the price was not the same. Hard work:
clean the house, feed the pets, rake the yard,
but I knew reward was waiting.
It would be sweet.

Behind the seemingly unreadable complexity of the lines’ intersections is color, which stitches the painting together. Strands of gray overlap explosive primary hues of red, blue, and yellow, like fireworks contained beneath webs of the neutral chroma. In the confinement of the bright primary colors, there is a sense of contained chaos, of a voice clamoring to be heard. Lines strain past the limits of the canvas. Their movement is a reflection of Pollock’s own motions in flinging paint onto the canvas, lending the painting immense physicality and dynamism, which is accentuated by the contrast between colors. In the absence of conventional perspective, there is nonetheless body rather than flatness, with the overlapping layers of crisscrossing streaks of paint providing dimension. Furthermore, and somehow, a sense of balance is found, so that there is a visual flow among lines.

Threads of gold that interweave through gray, black, and white suggest the bending of light, of refraction that illuminates. Each small passage of primary colors below the neutral intersecting lines is all the more visible for their juxtaposition, making them stand out more than if the painting had been comprised solely of primary colors, without neutral shades amongst them. By returning to the most basic element of art, the line, Pollock avoids ostentation and the core messages about impermanence, resistance, and hope that could otherwise be lost. Ultimately, the painting stands as a reflection of life that is relevant to our times.

Like his forebears, the Impressionists, Pollock layered wet paint onto wet paint in thick coats, painting rapidly to create a rougher, more tangible texture, giving a sense of immediacy and urgency to Number 9. The chaotic, elaborate intersections of lines mirrors how human emotions can burst at the seams, especially when contained. 

*

During the coronavirus pandemic, containment inside walls made it feel increasingly urgent for many of us to use our voices to overcome the bounds of loss we experienced. Emotions were unbound, conveyed through unique forms of self-expression—online ghazals multiple writers contributed lines to, continuous poems that became mosaics of meaning, kneaded by many hands sowing pain into beauty, together. Amidst adversities, light could shine more radiantly, and losses allowed for every gain to be more appreciated; contrasts between then and now afforded opportunities for enlightenment, to see what had been missed before.

Initially, Number 9’s largeness is its most apparent quality, a quality that emphasizes the extremism of its linearity. However, in its interspersed passages of bright, primary colors, the subtler beauty of the painting is notable. Like the sun’s rays shining from small crevices between tangled tree branches, braids of yellow and blue cut through clouds of gray and white hues. Our eyes are pulled to the understory, curiosity piqued by the smaller details that underlie the broader narrative, emotions peeking underneath the surface, like seedlings of hope. 

Analogously, the magnitude of the pandemic and its aftermath has often appeared overwhelming in its vastness, extending across the world, carrying complex implications. Each individual, however, has a story to tell. Through each voice combining, like the lines in Pollock’s painting, an entire masterpiece can be created, a greater symphony. 

Reckoning with the inconceivable magnitude of the losses brought about by the pandemic, I felt frustrated and powerless. There was so much grieving. Lives, dreams, and familiar patterns of living slipped away. How could I, one person, help to heal these gaping wounds? How could I share all that I had inside? Art, I came to find, is a most powerful balm. While my heart was heavy and words seemed inadequate, I wrote anyway. It was an act of resistance, battling my own self-doubt, the whisper questioning whether anything I could create would matter. It was daunting to reach out in a time of solitude and open my heart, submitting the prose and poems I’d woven from it. I feared rejection, a greater sense of isolation. Inspiration, however, had other plans. I couldn’t be silent, when, under layers of sadness, a flame of hope still burned, joy ignited by the arts, a constant, despite change. 

Watching theatrical performances online, looking at art, and listening to music touched my soul, transcending the circumstances I faced. My determination to share with others the happiness the arts could bring, and the slices of light I uncovered in simple moments at home, transcended my inhibitions. Contributing writing to anthologies, including Pandemic Evolution, composed of responses to art created during the pandemic, I was amazed by the luminescent angles, strikingly different interpretations, of one snapshot in time. So many souls, each tapping into their own unique creativity to break down walls, could truly weave together their own individual works of art, but also impactful was when all the flashes of light could coalesce, enkindling a stronger spark of hope still. Even though I’d felt powerless to make a difference, by connecting with others through the enriching world of art, I began to understand the power of the human spirit. These times wouldn’t last forever, but the incandescent testaments to our will to rise, our ability to stand again, always would. We are each part of the movement of life, of art, effecting change, just as Pollock was actively involved in the process of painting, physically putting himself into his work by throwing drizzles of paint onto the canvas, without being a passive participant in sculpting beauty from an empty frame. As in Pollock’s case, deconstructing what inhibits, like rules about what can be done in art, or fears that hold us back from artistic self-expression, can be what ultimately emancipates. 

In challenging the restrictiveness of rules governing art, freedom was found in the uninhibited gesture of the painting. Lines were drawn, boundaries created. A painting had to be “finished,” not seem incomplete, like Impressionistic sketches. The line was a means to creating shapes, a coherent narrative within the frame, not a subject in itself. Paintings were supposed to reflect nature, art imitating life as traditionally, closely, as possible. Anyone brazen enough to oppose these notions was criticized, ridiculed, ostracized. Thinking differently could impose a kind of social isolation. Being misunderstood was its own form of solitude. 

Nevertheless, Pollock bucked the trend, refusing to distance himself for imagining a different mode of expression, a new breed of art. In his diverging pathways of lines, he challenged us to confront human nature, conflicts and contradictions in life, with all its unexpectedness, and times that don’t always make sense, eluding human understanding. We are met with reflections of the inscrutable depths of who we are. Abstract as Pollock’s painting may have seemed, it ultimately was the truest form of realism, in its evocation of the human need for liberty, in which self-actualization is possible. None of the lines in Number 9 could be neatly restrained, instead, escaping parameters, in a manner emblematic of Pollock’s own liberation from the Academy’s traditional standards of art. 

However, underneath the radical appearance of the painting is a sense of impermanence that hearkens back to ancient times, the very basics that make up art’s essence. The jagged lines that seem to snake into oblivion, fading into corners, and new mazes of color, imply transience. Inspired by sand art that was destroyed after being created, Pollock brought elements of ritualistic tradition to his otherwise unconventional work, serving as a reminder of the age-old message of time being fleeting, and thus, of the importance of savoring life’s beauty, comprised of the many pathways led by fate, intersecting with others’ life journeys, sometimes in ways that are inexplicable, but no less significant. Form and function, an overarching purpose, are discovered despite chaos, or perhaps, because of. Color bursts forth like flames of hope, sunlight from clouds, to illuminate these paths towards understanding, authenticity, growth, and enduring truths in pivotal times of rapid, constant change.

You find the cookbook where you recently put it, the corner bookcase. You brought that bookcase to your new apartment and placed it in a dead space between the refrigerator and the hallway. It fit perfectly, but you never wanted another home for that bookcase. You never wanted a new apartment, either. 

You liked the bookcase best in the finished, walk-out basement of the house you and your second husband had bought together ten years earlier, the one in which you planned to blend your families, the one with enough space for everyone. You let yourself believe that space was the key to blending your families because you could do something about space. 

You created a fifth bedroom so that each of the four girls would have her own. You created a “media room” and a playroom. The “media room”—because it never became one—was to be where the kids would pile on couches for movies with friends, and later, make out with first boyfriends. 

The playroom did indeed become a playroom, so one thing, at least, went according to plan. You stocked it with books, games, dress–up clothes, DVDs, and art and craft supplies. You stuffed it with dolls and Barbies, and of course clothes, accessories, and furniture for both. Each year, new school supplies too—at the end of each summer, new pencil cases, three-ring binders, packs of markers—though the old ones worked just fine. All stored in the playroom, some of it filling the corner bookcase that stands in your new apartment.

To your apartment, you have also brought photos of your children. When you lived together, you covered a wall with framed photos of all four girls. A living, breathing river of photos of those girls, four–feet–high and eighteen–feet–long, filled frame–edge to frame–edge. The point of the wall was to say that everyone belongs, see? But it didn’t work that way. 

Belonging, it turns out, requires more than space, school supplies and photos. It requires a sense of safety, of being on the same team, something you as a couple could not create, at least not for everyone. One of his daughters opted out of the family almost immediately; the other barely opted in. Despite years of trying, the new family’s divided loyalties, insecurities and vulnerabilities kept roiling. One day, it was clear: there would be no blending.

So here you are, new apartment, Betty Crocker Cookbook in hand. You open it and find a printed-out recipe for knock-off Starbucks cranberry bliss bars, the kind you can only get between Thanksgiving and New Year’s. You introduced this recipe to the family years ago, and were surprised when the girls—from both sets—had called them a hit. Seeing it on paper now stops you cold. 

You catch your breath, but the tears are too slippery. The recipe blurs. Black print fades into a landscape of crinkled splats of past years’ batter and crusty traces of brushed-away powdered sugar. Trying to refocus, you realize—these cookies were the only thing his daughter ever let herself love about you. You give up on the brownies, and put the book away.  

is a line of birds

waiting to rise up from still water

is the earth

dark and heavy with spring rain

is the air

as the mist lifts, sighing,

ready to let go—

— Meister Eckhart

A man of uncertain age, he was tall, thin, and awkward in his movements. Crowned with a tangled stack of gravity-defying hair, he’d shamble about in a vintage wardrobe that emphasized his gawky proportions. He’d frequently stumble into furniture or walls, mutter gibberish or burst into an unintelligible yelp. He would throw open the door of his friend’s apartment and burst in unannounced, sliding into the place as though blown by a powerful gust. He was a wiry scarecrow perpetually lit from within by spastic currents. Though he had no visible means of support, he never seemed to need money. Only the indiscriminate food items he would randomly seize from his neighbor’s fridge. He was heedless of boundaries. Despite his perpetual search for the million-dollar idea, he was content to remain in a reality all his own.

Over the course of nine seasons, Michael Richards played Cosmo Kramer on the Seinfeld show. His brand of physical comedy was singular—so nuanced that after countless viewings over three decades he can still make me laugh out loud. Kramer was the archetypal fool. 

A figure rooted in the collective unconscious, the fool says and does what most wouldn’t dream of. He’s unconcerned with others’ opinions, oblivious to social norms, and resilient. Disruptive and seemingly amoral, he continually challenges authority. Appearing in the myths, folklore, and religious traditions of diverse cultures, the fool may also be a trickster, jester, or clown. As with Kramer, his body is often the vehicle that initiates comic situations.

Humor involves the interplay of congruity and incongruity. The intrusion of something unexpected that calls a norm into question. It often derives from a paradox, and Christianity, like humor, is filled with paradox. The Bible itself is replete with seeming contradictions: exaltation through humility, strength through weakness, gaining through loss, and dying in order to live, among many others. (And let’s not forget the virgin birth and the resurrection itself.) This is the paradox of nonduality found in the mystical heart of Christianity. What it shares with humor is the potential to disrupt habitual ways of perceiving reality. Paradox drives the humor of fools in pop culture as it does the Christian Gospels. And the holy fool is an embodiment of Christian paradox. 

According to Paul, the Christian’s belief and behavior, guided by spiritual insight, is seen as folly in worldly terms. Yet by accepting mockery, humiliation, and ridicule as Jesus did, the fool for Christ would challenge norms to awaken society from its corruption and reveal truth: “For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe” (1 Corinthians 1:21). Paul’s “folly writings” in Corinthians 1 and 2 refute the wisdom of men. The role of the holy fool, modeled on Christ (Mark 3:21), involves deliberate provocation and theatricality.

Around 1601, Caravaggio painted The Conversion of St. Paul, an unusual depiction of Saul’s encounter with the light and voice of Christ on the way to Damascus. Here the holy fool Paul relates to the comic fool of our day through his awkward gesture—part of the larger intrinsic humor of the painting. It’s a humor that reflects Christian paradox. 

Submerged in darkness, a muscular young soldier is lying supine on the rough earth. His upraised arms catch a gleaming light piercing the shadows. His eyes are shut, and his legs spread. His helmet’s rolled off and his sword’s fallen aside. A brown and white steed towers over him, its hoof raised like a threat. An old groom, unfazed by the fallen man’s state, works to restrain the horse.

Capturing the moment Saul was blinded by his encounter with Christ to become Paul, the “fool for Christ’s sake,” the painting’s incongruities are like a metaphor of the holy fool’s antics. Saul’s gesture reminds me of a Kramer pratfall, where loss of control over the body is theatricalized. The fool archetype is expansive, its shallow end accommodates the buffoon and its deep waters the visionary. So I tenuously associate Kramer and Saul, and this leads me to reflect on the significance of intention. For physical comics like Richards, the goal is to make us laugh. The theatrics of the holy fool are meant to strip us of our pretenses. Yet, in both cases the body is used to disrupt the social order. Think of Simeon the Holy Fool tripping people in the streets and running about naked. Or St. Basil stealing for the poor, enduring beatings, and weighing himself down with chains. Reveling in paradox, the holy fool’s gestures create unease, surprise, or humor, opening a view to the hidden wisdom of God. 

There’s a continuum between the ordinary fool and the holy fool, in which the latter becomes the terminus of the fool archetype—the point at which identity dissolves. Caravaggio’s painting illustrates the transition from profane to sacred as Saul becomes Paul. The artist’s depiction suggests that a similar trajectory is possible for physical comedy, or humor more generally. That fully understood, the comedian’s embrace of paradox is a foretaste of religious insight. Physical comedy reveals truth in a limited way. Caravaggio’s painting speaks to the revelation of truth in the figure of the holy fool, who goes the whole distance, committing their life to turning the world upside down and eradicating the self. The incongruity at the heart of physical comedy—epitomized by the character of Kramer, is also the basis of the holy fool’s actions as he embraces the spiritual implications of paradox.

Seeing Kramer in Caravaggio’s (soon-to-be) Paul also leads me to reflect on the place of humor in Christian life. Something rarely discussed, but plainly evident to a mystic like Meister Eckhart. Humor can free us from limiting concepts, deflate our self-importance, and build community. Our response to physical comedy is an intimation of the liberation felt through subversion of the world’s order for God. All of this serves the body of Christ. The painting reminds us that our response to physical comedy shares a kinship with spiritual insight. With laughter, we let our pretensions go and a deeper sense of who we are emerges. And in the dissolution of boundaries a healthy disorientation ensues.

The visual disorientation we feel looking at Caravaggio’s vision of the conversion parallels Saul’s disorientation when confronted by Christ. 

In the image a supernatural light pours down on Saul, who’s been thrown from his horse. His form, occupying the lower section of the painting and radically foreshortened, seems to fall out towards the viewer. The composition is askew. With its center of gravity raised, Caravaggio’s monumental figures push forward, filling the dark, confining space in all directions. Saul’s body forms an upended triangle, inverting the classical norm in which pyramids balance multi-figurative compositions. Saul’s horse dominates the image, its legs indiscriminately mixing with those of the groom, its rear end jutting out at us as it steps gingerly around its fallen rider. Clutching its bridle, the older man emerges from the darkness to lead the horse away. The painting’s naturalism emphasizes the miraculous in the everyday.           

Caravaggio has emptied his painting of anything that’s not essential to conveying Saul’s mystical experience. His masterly use of tenebroso, a technique involving bold, dramatic contrasts of light and dark, eliminates anything distracting as it distills the moment of religious ecstasy. While the rough-hewn groom remains unaware of what’s happening, we are intimate witnesses to Saul’s inner transformation. We share the space in which he surrenders himself to God. Interiorization is stressed by our private view, the groom’s obliviousness, and the surrounding darkness. Saul is lit from within, his face illumined in transformative union. Body splayed and arms raised, his act is one of self-emptying. Saul accepts humiliation in love, vulnerably turning inward to embrace the sacred mystery within.

The image is remarkably still. A private moment of concentrated intensity, it’s invisible to the “natural” or unspiritual man, represented by the groom. Saul is hidden away, his conversion unseen by the world. The paired-down composition and intense spiritual drama reflect the holy fool’s life experience. The silent wisdom of God percolates within the painting’s incongruities as an order that inverts worldly wisdom. In its awkwardness, The Conversion of St. Paul portends the holy foolishness of the later life and teachings of Paul. In addition, the holy fool’s critique of power is visualized through the fallen soldier. Saul the persecutor of Christians, armored and fierce, is thrown on his back. He’s upended, fragile and defenseless before the power of the divine. The realism of Caravaggio’s painting extends beyond the immediacy and physical presence of its subjects to say something true about mystical experience. It’s in the staging of holy foolishness amidst the smells of old leather, manure, and hay. It’s the truth of divine presence dwelling in the ordinary.

Denying every new snowfall obscuring the sunlight
The stirring of roots felt all the way up, through the ice
An empty patch of dead grass, bare earth encircles its trunk
Cataloging the warmth of the afternoon sunlight.

To convince more reader to take up that challenge, what’s needed is a better public understanding of each author’s appeal. No one, really, wants to read a book because it’s important. You have to anticipate some fresh and particular kind of pleasure. And with novels as demanding as these, the return on your investment needs to be high. Luckily, both authors reward their readers in excess. Joyce, you could say, is the Schubert of the modern novel: he renovates the genre with every line, while Proust is its Wagner, bringing each hulking stage of his masterpiece to its climax with a brilliant leitmotif. To put things more simply, Joyce experimented with the possibilities of language, while Proust renovated the possibilities of narrative. The only real way to get a sense for what I’m talking about is to grab a copy of Ulysses or Swann’s Way, the first volume in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, and tuck in. Your efforts will not be wasted. 

Anyone who wants to read Proust in English can take advantage of the superb C.K. Scott Moncrieff translation.  Ulysses is, of course, written in a version of English that is all Joyce’s own. Among other things, Ulysses is a novel about the mind at work, its inherent inventiveness that layers the world around it with the shades of our own thought and thus infuses it with meaning: 

It soared, a bird, it held its flight, a swift pure cry, soar silver orb it leaped serene, speeding, sustained, to come, don’t spin it out too long long breath he breath long life, soaring high, high resplendent, aflame, crowned, high in the effulgence symbolistic, high, of the ethereal bosom, high, of the high vast irradiation everywhere all soaring all around about the all, the endlessnessnessness…

What strikes us first about this passage is that it doesn’t make strict sense according to the rules of English. What strikes us second is that it still makes sense: the speaker is watching a bird in flight and, gradually, equating it with his own inner sense of freedom That clarity comes from Joyce’s ability, hard-won and long studied, to give his writing a kind of fidelity to the way language generates and moves inside the mind. If we knit our brows and “close read” a sentence like this, it will take us quite a while to suss out all the nuances of the thing. But if we relax and take each word as it comes—the intellectual equivalent of slackening your vision to see the hidden image in a Magic Eye—we find that the sentence progresses intuitively and naturally. It comes to us as our own thoughts come, piecemeal but sensible all the same. 

Proust’s contribution to the novel was different. While Joyce shattered then reconstructed language at the sentence level to align it more closely with human thought, Proust was more faithful to language’s traditional structures. His innovation was to knock the bottom out of the way that plot is typically understood in literature. One could almost argue that nothing really happens in a book like Swann’s Way but that it happens dazzlingly. In Proust, hundreds of pages can be dedicated to the passage of just a few hours, whole chapters lavished on the way a particular woman wears her clothes. But the purpose of Proust’s style isn’t unnecessary extension. Rather, his obsession is with memory, and the way that recollection can suddenly unite two moments across huge gaps of time. The payoff in a Proust novel, often hundreds of pages in the making, is a sudden epiphany where a moment from the past comes rushing in and snaps the present into focus. When that happens, it’s the sort of thing that will make you lean back in your chair like you’ve been hit in the jaw. 

The most famous instance of this Proustian epiphany is the oft-quoted moment with the madeleine cookie in Swann’s Way:

No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. … Whence did it come? … And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before mass), when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane. The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it.”

The association of smell with memory, and the peculiar thrill of smelling something that recalls a long-forgotten moment, is of course very familiar to us. But Proust was the first novelist to codify thrills like these in literature. What can’t be captured with a simple excerpt is the impact that this passage has after almost a hundred pages of extended recollection. Along the way, we wonder what all this writing is for. Then, with these few phrases, he snaps the whole first part of his novel into focus.  For him, such sudden and thrilling recollections became symbols for the way past versions of ourselves can get lost in time, only to be brought back in a flash by something as apparently mundane as dipping a cookie in a cup of tea. There is a poignancy to meeting those past selves. Doing so reminds us how, as Proust put it, our own desires, loves, and even personalities can seem “as fugitive as the years.” His books give us a chance to catch up with them, albeit briefly. 

From this vantage, exactly one hundred years distant from the last breath of Proust and the first publication of Ulysses, it would be easy to think of each work merely as a helpful landmark, something that brought the modern novel to its present place but which need not be consulted except as a point of orientation. But if we do that, we will be missing out on the supreme enjoyment each novelist offers us. Climbing to the heights of each author’s prose can leave us winded but, despite the demands they make on us, the air at the top is unexpectedly calm and sweet. If Ulysses or Swann’s Way has been collecting dust on some shelf in your house, this could be the year you pick it up and realize why it got famous in the first place: great writing can be complicated, but pleasure never is. 

but he’s found his sheep.
It must

have wandered, who knows
where or why.

The sheep, too, lacks a face.
You can see

the matted wool on its back and haunch,
the folds

of the shepherd’s robe, the knotted
rope at his waist—

just not the faces, rubbed away
or broken off.

The sheep rests lightly on the shepherd’s
stone shoulders,

back straight, hand relaxed
on the animal’s leg.

His entire body breathes relief
if stone can breathe.

In her beloved novel set in Santa Fe, Death Comes for the Archbishop, Willa Cather puts it this way: “Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky.” 

Perhaps it’s this peculiar sense of openness, how the sky feels like it might at any moment swallow you whole, that makes Santa Fe feel like a natural home to seekers and pilgrims. In my case, I’ve come to Santa Fe in late summer for a ten-day writer’s residency, hoping I’ll find myself, or God, or at least a really good idea for a poem. 

I drive up a winding mountain road and turn right into the college campus where I’ll be staying. When I climb out of my car and stretch my legs, the air is heavy with oncoming rain. There’s no air conditioning in my room, so I crack the windows for airflow all day and most of the night. Later, when I leave a bag of dried mangoes open on the shelf above my makeshift desk, my room will pulse with the scent, despite the open windows. The air in Santa Fe is more porous somehow. It carries more on its currents.

During my first days there, I’m not sure how to find what it is I’m looking for, precisely. So in between workshops and classes, I take to the hiking path near campus. It starts out flat, a dirt path etching through sagebrush and cacti. Then it descends down into the arroyo, a dried-out river bed filled now with desert plants and old stones. I set out knowing the daily thunderstorms will come as soon as I’m too far away to turn back. I head out anyway. 

Anthony Doerr’s ambitious novel, Cloud Cuckoo Land, is a book about books. Doerr says so himself in the Author’s Note at the end, dedicating the novel to the writers—and keepers—of stories that buoy humanity through the ages.  But Cloud Cuckoo Land is also a book about longing, about pilgrimage, and about the homesickness many of us carry, often for a place we’ve never been. 

The plot follows the lives of five main characters, set in three timelines spanning from medieval Constantinople to a post-apocalyptic mission to space. We know, from early on, that an ancient text will play a key role in each of the characters’ lives. But what we discover, as we read further, is the particular longings each character possesses for a place both distant and different from their own. 

The ancient text (invented by Doerr though believable as a discovered work by Diogenes) follows this same plotline of longing: protagonist Aethon embarks on a winding and agonizing journey to become a bird so he can fly to a utopia in the sky, called, of course, Cloud Cuckoo Land. 

Doerr specializes in the weaving of disparate stories together, uniting them with humanizing themes, despite unrecognizable circumstances. And while the text itself is what eventually becomes the thread linking these five characters through the centuries, the text really represents, by nature of its plot, an inescapable sense of longing that seems inherent to being human. 

The first character we meet is a girl situated farthest into the future: Konstance, aboard the Argos mission to space to save humanity. Passengers aboard the ship hurtle away from Earth toward Beta-Oph2, where humanity will supposedly find a safe haven. But eventually, Konstance chafes against their future home; instead, she starts looking back, studying virtually augmented renderings of Earth and learning its cities and landscapes by heart. Soon, her longing for a home she never knew, uncovers the startling truth of where they’re actually headed. 

The reader spends the most time with Zeno, an old war veteran set in the present who never seized his chance to tell the man he loved how he felt. His story is one of missed opportunities for agency in his own life. But when one road after another becomes a dead-end, he fixates his longing on a singular task: translating Diogenes’ Cloud Cuckoo Land into English. He spends hours at his town’s local library deciphering partially obscured lines and bringing them into his language. The novel’s climactic scene takes place in the same library, where he leads a group of young children to perform his translation as a play.

Anna and Omeir both live in medieval times near Constantinople: Anna, in the middle of a dying city, longing for transport out, and Omeir, in the country until he’s called into the emperor’s army destined to siege Constantinople. Throughout their storylines, Anna longs for a way out, while Omeir longs for a way back. 

And then there’s Seymour, a loveable but flawed young boy set in Zeno’s timeline. He seems to have sensory processing disorder, and he copes by fleeing to the woods behind his house—until a development company tears it down to put in a slew of vacation homes. He’s poor, isolated, and eventually becomes the perfect prey for a radicalized environmentalist group that nudges him toward violence. His longing, mostly, is for the way things used to be—for a forest he can’t reconstruct—as well as for a place he might belong among a group of radicals who, the reader knows, is really a thinly constructed sham. 

All of these stories are anchored by Aethon’s trajectory toward Cloud Cuckoo Land—excerpts from the ancient text start every section of the book and set the tone for the characters’ journey ahead. Aethon’s journey takes him across the countryside as a donkey, into the depths of the ocean as a fish, and finally into the sky as a crow. His path is Odyssean, stunted and stilted at every turn by hardship and fueled by determination to find the paradise he’s been longing for:

“All my life I have longed to see more, to fill my eyes with new things, to get beyond this muddy, stinking town, these forever bleating sheep. … I have heard of a city in the clouds where thrushes fly into your mouth fully cooked and wine runs in channels in the streets and warm breezes always blow.”

…

“It’s no better out there, Aethon, I promise you,” said the crone. “…Here you have cheese, wine, your friends, and your flock. What you already have is better than what you seek.” 

(From Section Three, Cloud Cuckoo Land)

For Aethon, a truer life waits for him in the clouds; he sees only banality in his life as it is. In this passage, I glimpse my own restlessness. I, too, long to fill my eyes with new things, to flee the ordinary in pursuit of the extraordinary. 

For most of my life, my propensity to seek the numinous has left me with feelings of being misunderstood, a stranger in the world I inhabit. I always felt like I wanted more than other people—like my spirit was an insect’s antenna, constantly probing the air for passage into another reality. 

But in Santa Fe, a trip up to the Sangre de Cristo range or the Old Town plaza leave me with the sense that seeking is a primary way of being. Everyone’s looking for something different, something transcendent. Take the St. Francis cathedral: it’s majestic, other-worldly, the city’s functional heart to which all roads lead. There’s the miraculous staircase in Loretto Chapel, whose origins are the stuff of prayer and miracle. Everywhere, there’s evidence of old superstitions and suggestions for sacred healings; you can pick up palo santo or sage or incense in even the most commercial gift shop. 

Then there’s the landscape, with all its extremes. I don’t know if it’s the painfully blue sky, the silvery sagebrush along winding dirt paths, or the way the weather changes moods on a dime, but the entire place seems to have brushed elbows with the divine. New Mexico’s state slogan is “The Land of Enchantment;” it doesn’t take long within its borders to understand why. 

Every day in Santa Fe I walk the same arroyo in search of something, thinking the landscape’s legends will rub off on me. I voice half-formed questions to God or the Universe, hoping for a response: insight dropped into my brain like pebbles into water. I want otherness—to be transported to a world more enchanted than my own. 

Mostly, I find lizards and rain. 

There are plenty of benefits, in my view, to occupying a state of longing. In my own life, that “homesickness we could never shake off,” as Rilke puts it, has functioned as a compass, pointing toward a better future—a nod to how things should be. 

I want things to be better, to be different, to be whole. I want the environment to return to health, for racial reparations to be made and equity established, for income disparity to be abolished, for people, in general, to feel happy and loved (myself included). On a less noble level, I want to feel like the world is more magical than it often is. I want to be yanked out of daily life and awed awake. I want miracles. 

I can’t shake those desires. And while it’s frustrating to have one eye fixed on how things could be, longing has the capacity to operate as the engine of hope. Its message, it seems, is this: It doesn’t have to be this way. 

Besides, if I know, deep down, that things could be better, then maybe I’m a little more determined to set about actually making things better, however and wherever I can. 

So why not keep longing for my own version of Cuckoo Land—a magical, restored place I hope exists?

The trap, of course, is this: if I’m fixated on some utopian version of society or some hyper-spiritualized reality, I’m in danger of missing what’s already in front of me. Life is, for better or worse, full of contradictions, and full of ordinariness. I can’t take in the bliss of a winter sunrise without also remembering my fellow humans down the street who slept in the bitter cold, or without shivering to the point of exhaustion. I can’t experience visceral, life-altering love for my child without enduring day after repetitive day, the endless replenishing of snacks, changing of diapers, and fights with sleep. 

The place I desire—the magical land, absent of complication and mundanity—does not exist. 

If Doerr is telling us anything in the novel, beyond the power of stories to unite humanity, perhaps it relates to the universality of desire and longing in the human experience. Across centuries, and in widely varied circumstances, every character dreams of things being different and better: either in a figurative future or a distant past. 

Aethon arrives after what feels like years of dead ends in Cloud Cuckoo Land. He will, it seems, find everything he’s hoped for. But as he explores paradise, he can think only of home.

“I had flown so far, I had proven everyone wrong. Yet as I perched on my balcony and peered past the happy flocking birds, over the gates, over the ruffled edges of the clouds, down at the patchwork mud-heap of earth far below, where the cities teemed and the herds, wild and tame, drifted like dust across the plains, I wondered about my friends, and my little bed, and the ewes I’d left behind in the field. I had traveled so far, and it was all so magnificent, and yet…” 

(From Section Eighteen, Cloud Cuckoo Land)

Aethon eventually realizes that utopia was never what he wanted. What he really wanted was life: full of contradictions, painful and joyful. So he returns to earth, altered by his journey most markedly in the way he now sees and attends to both the beauty and sorrow of the world he already knew. 

(It’s worth noting here that the novel leaves this conclusion of Aethon’s journey a bit ambiguous; Zeno’s cast of children recreating the translated text are the ones who ultimately rewrite the ending, claiming that Aethon couldn’t have stayed in Cuckoo Land forever; he must have returned home.)

While not every character comes to the exact same conclusion (many do not return home in the way Aethon does), each faces a choice: continue longing for what will always feel just out of reach, or embrace the world around you for what it is—imperfect, sometimes horrible, and also somehow beautiful. 

Every character must reach their own realization of the truth Zeno’s cast writes into Aethon’s journey: “The world as it is is enough.” 

So then, no miracle or revelation for me in Santa Fe. Here’s what I do receive:

A glimpse of the aspens, not swaying or arcing in the wind but barely shimmying, with leaves the size of half dollars in a shade of green so pale you could mistake them for silver coins from far away. From my view, the whole landscape flutters like this, though the breeze remains imperceptible.

Lining the dirt path are endless sage shrubs in that same silvery green.  The smell is everywhere—wood, earth, mint. I can almost detect it on my skin when I get back from my walks, my shirt wet with rain and sweat. 

When the storms roll in, they do so all at once. The sky is clear, then suddenly not. Everything takes on shades of dark blue, and when the thunder rumbles, I can hear it approaching fast. Raindrops slap onto aspen leaves behind me, small and quick like amplified champagne bubbles bursting. Then the cloud is over my head, and my skin slicks wet, not quite soaked. The rain is sudden, gone as quickly as it comes. 

The dust of the desert is washed back down to the arroyo, and all around the greens and purples shine fresh. 

When I arrive back home after ten days away, I feel a deep, welling sense of gratitude for my street, my house, my blue front porch, and the pink crape myrtle I planted beside it. I hug my husband and my dog, embarrassing tears of joy spilling from my eyes. I am not changed by some mystical enlightenment; I have no revelatory moment to speak of. And here, there is still a coat of dust over our baseboards, and dishes to be washed, and work to be done. I’m back in my real life. But, for the first time in a while, I see all of it as something worth attending to and embracing.

For now, it is enough. 

Minus one parent
equals four, and yet,
each night, the habit
of five forks. Finally,
we get it, four, and then,
minus one daughter
equals three, though
we grow up, that table
no longer set.

When the remaining
parent loses her mind,
the math grows fuzzy.
When one remaining
daughter moves across
the world, again, things
loosen. I sit at another
table remembering
a number only I
can or want to,
the answer maybe
two, less, fewer,
only one
paying attention.

I move to the next case—Delft plates, Rookwood pottery. My grandmother collected Rookwood. She made beautiful quilts, one with a patch for each state and the state bird and flower embroidered in it.  She crocheted intricate doilies that resemble mandalas. I framed them on velvet and hung them on my walls. 

The skills of women in my family were taken for granted, assumed. Of course, they could upholster a sofa using a small Singer sewing machine. Or have their children sketch a shirt or dress they liked in a department store window and sew an exact copy for them in a day. A beautiful meal for ten, last-minute?—no problem. I wonder what these women could have accomplished if advanced education had been provided or encouraged.

Many years ago, I went to a convent boarding school in St. Louis run by an order of nuns that so excelled at business they operated schools and hospitals throughout the state, like CEOs of large companies, while all the while teaching us Latin, Chaucer, Art, and Algebra, and, of course, typing in a class highly recommended as sensible. They had no husbands or children to care for—a trade-off, I guess. I’m old enough to remember how exciting it was when things began to change for women in the ’60s. I was in a consciousness-raising group in West Los Angeles one evening back then when a woman my mother’s age stood and said, “I want a raise, not a rose.” I was impressed at how outspoken she was.

Home from the poetry workshop, I take note of my own artifacts: the handprint of my daughter pressed into clay and dated, her kindergarten gift to me. The picture of her dismounting a horse at her first riding lesson. The photos she takes of hawks, ospreys, herons, and snowy egrets in the reserve near her home. My album of old pictures and fading Polaroids: Mother dressed in overalls, patriotic, working in a factory during World War II as many women did then. When the war ended so did her working career, and she returned to cooking, sewing, raising children. Those nuns in their stiff white wimples, black robes, rimless glasses, taught us to be future wives and mothers, although they denied those roles to themselves. Having it all wasn’t spoken about by that generation. As I’ve grown older, my understanding of their lives has deepened. That day at the Casa, wandering through rooms of memories, brought it all forward.