Each month, we comb through dozens of soon-to-be-published books, for ideas and good writing for the Review’s site. Often, we’re struck by particular paragraphs or sentences from the galleys that stack up on our desks and spill over onto our shelves. We often share them with each other on Slack, and we thought, for a change, that we might share them with you. Here are some of the curious, striking, strange, and wonderful bits we found, from books that are coming out this month.

—Sophie Haigney, web editor, and Olivia Kan-Sperling, assistant editor

From Hélène Cixous’s Rêvoir (Seagull Books), translated from the French by Beverley Bie Brahic: 

I lie, I say I’m going to the hairdresser, secretly I’m off to see you, I am on my way right to the day when the Question peeps up, I no longer know which day that was. Dispatched on the instructions of Time, of Age, like a sprite ready to demand the Shadow’s identity card, proof of domicile, like the spirits of dates delegated to persecutions, of retirement dates, of warrants of life, of entry into silences, of fateful anniversaries

          Day broke, the tale was back on the road, I followed it

From The Silver Snarling Trumpet, a memoir by Robert Hunter, the primary lyricist of the Grateful Dead, written in the sixties. The manuscript was long thought to be lost, but his wife recently rediscovered it in a storage unit. It will be published in full by Hachette:

It was the people who made the “scene” revolve; wonderful, inexhaustible people we thought … until we began to question things that perhaps we ought not to have questioned, things such as, “Can we live this way forever?” Perhaps we could have if we hadn’t asked, but by the very act of becoming conscious that a question existed, an answer became imperative. Part of the answer seemed to lie in the realm of whatever it was that society demanded of us … and what it demanded was our lives. Given impetus by this snatch of what seemed to be an answer, we began to ask the question of one another, and from there, it was only a small step to becoming frightened. And that, of course, was the end of being carefree, for we had begun, if only by the act of questioning, to care. 

Others came along, others who would have belonged with us before, except that we began to question them too. Not seeing fit to acknowledge that such a question existed, they took over our philosophy and our guitars, our beards and cigarette butts, and left us with the world.

I remember coffeehouses and empty pockets, the unplanned, unending parties … the bad wine, the music that is inseparable from the impoverished decadence, and wonder sometimes if it was a fair trade. 

From Elsa Richardson’s Rumbles: A Curious History of the Gut (Pegasus Books): 

To quieten his patient’s obstreperous belly, Darwin devised a specially tailored course of treatment: she was to swallow ‘ten corns of black pepper’ after dinner, take a daily dose of crude mercury and allow a ‘small pipe’ to be occasionally inserted into her rectum to ‘facilitate the escape of air’. This dispiriting prescription would seem to imply that they were dealing with a purely physical problem, but in his notes Darwin pointed to another possibility: an excessively noisy gut, especially in a young woman, was often a symptom of ‘fear’.

From Jean Giono’s Fragments of a Paradise (Archipelago), translated from the French by Paul Eprile:

 On L’Indien the captain started to curse. Calmly. At his pipe. At his lighter. At a button on his tunic. Just for the fun of it. The officers were cursing, but not in anger, and the crew began to indulge in the sheer pleasure of cursing. One evening when the moon was out, Hourdeau, on the night watch, went looking for the cabin boy, who’d gone to sleep on a stack of tarpaulins. He wondered where that little fool had gotten to. Then Hourdeau went below, took off his boots, and started to curse, calmly. First at the candle. Then at a flask of rum in the pocket of his peacoat. He went back up on deck, not worried, simply wanting to find the cabin boy. He called to him to windward. As it left his mouth, the boy’s name had no substance. It was immediately torn away. But what had real substance, and hit just the right note, was an old swear word he recalled, which he started to repeat with glee.

 

From Paper of Wreckage: An Oral History of the New York Post, 1976-2024 (Atria). “Wood” here refers to the front page of the New York Post:

David Rosenthal: Murdoch was very harsh with all the editors. He went around to every editor, whatever your purview was, and made you recite what your lineup was for the next day. He really wanted to get down into the weeds. I mean, what was your tenth or eleventh story that you had for the next day? I have a very firm recollection, because it shook me up, of going through the whole lineup, which was fairly standard, it was not a busy day. I came down to the bottom of the list, I said, “Oh, yeah, we have the shooting of a bodega owner in Brooklyn. It turns out, it looked like a drug deal gone bad with the owner of the store or some shit like that.” I just then went on to the next thing. He said, “Wait a minute, go back for a moment. Tell me more about the bodega murder.” I told him what little I knew. He said, “This is what we want to do. We want to get a reporter and photographer out to the wake tonight. And we want to hire a priest to say some prayers, ‘Brooklyn mourns’ that kind of thing. And we want to make a picture of that.” You could have heard a pin drop in the room. I actually said, “We don’t really do that.” He said, “Oh, yes, you do.” I said, “I don’t remember ever doing that”—because I’m a fool, you know, I know nothing. He says, “You’re going to do it. Otherwise,” he said, “when I’m stuck for a wood at 4:30 in the morning, I’m going to call you at home and ask, ‘What do you suggest?’ Do you understand?”… I went out of the meeting very shook … I forgot which photographer it might have been. I said, “You’ve got to get out to Brooklyn. I’m sorry. This is like a bullshit story. But it’s now a big bullshit story.” Aida [Alvarez] got me some copy, from what I remember. What would have been two graphs turned into books or something like that. I don’t think we ever did get the priest. Then we worked the cops on it. It was nothing. It wasn’t even a sympathy story because it was a drug deal that went bad, as I recall. It wasn’t the typical crying heart story. It was a fuckup story. I don’t think they played it as wood but they played it big the next day.

From Deborah Levy’s The Position of Spoons and Other Intimacies (Farrar, Straus and Giroux):

I have measured out my life with the sea urchins that have pierced my feet with their spines. I have now lost my fear of sea urchins. I don’t know why. There are other fears I would prefer to lose, after all. I know they have to survive in the wilderness of the ocean; their cousins are the sea star and they can grow for centuries. There are sea urchins that are almost immortal, older than the mortal mothers and their mortal children fleeing from wars on boats that sometimes sink. Life is only worth living because we hope it will get better and we’ll all get home safely. If we were to measure the love of mothers for their children with coffee spoons, there would never be enough spoons for that kind of love. 

Hannah Arendt, 1958. Photograph by Barbara Niggl Radloff. Münchner Stadtmuseum, Sammlung Fotografie. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

For a while there in the late nineties, it seemed to me like every other book of poetry that I flipped open in the bookstore was prefaced by an austere epigraph from the writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Plato, Rousseau, Nietzsche, Sartre, and Wittgenstein—for all their many differences—enjoy a special status as “poets’ philosophers” in the annals of literary history. Other lofty thinkers fly under poets’ collective radar; I have yet to come across a volume of verse prefaced by a quotation from David Hume. What makes some philosophers, and not others, into poets’ philosophers remains a mystery to me. But I’ve never really thought of Hannah Arendt as one of them.

Unemotional, anti-Romantic, and doggedly insistent on expunging unruly feelings from collective life, Arendt may seem to possess the least lyrical of temperaments, but a new volume of her poetry reveals that the author of sobering works like The Origins of Totalitarianism and The Human Condition was writing ardent and intimate verse in her off-hours. We’re pleased to feature Samantha Rose Hill’s new translation, with Genese Grill, of an untitled poem from Arendt’s manuscripts in our Fall 2024 issue.

Now housed in Arendt’s archive at the Library of Congress, the poem is dated to September 1947, six years after the philosopher’s arrival in the United States. Though she had by then settled on New York’s Upper West Side, Arendt reflects upon what she’d left behind on her life’s journey in this wistful poem:

This was the farewell:
Many friends came with us
And whoever did not come was no longer a friend.

The bracing conclusion of Arendt’s opening stanza lands with the impact of a practical realist’s rebuke to a sentimental fool: Friendship is companionship; therefore, whoever is not a companion cannot be considered a friend. (There’s something syllogistic to the philosopher’s adoption of tercets for this poem’s form.) In her introduction to What Remains: The Collected Poems of Hannah Arendt, which will be published later in December, Hill chronicles how Arendt’s notebook of poems accompanied her through a succession of farewells: when she fled Germany after her release from the Gestapo prison in Alexanderplatz in the spring of 1933; when she left her second life in Paris to report to the internment camp at Gurs seven years later; and when she escaped on foot and by bicycle to Lisbon, where she boarded the SS Guinee for Ellis Island on May 22, 1941. “This was the train: / Measuring the country in flight,” Arendt writes, “and slowing as it passed through many cities.”

From its melancholy opening to its bemused conclusion, Arendt’s poem reflects the emotional passage of many who leave home to take up residence in a foreign land. It begins as an aubade, or song of parting, and it ends with the enigma of arrival:

This is the arrival:
Bread is no longer called bread
and wine in a foreign language changes the conversation.

For the German speaker newly arrived in America, bread is no longer Brot. One irony of Arendt’s historical displacements lies in how her original German word for bread is now effaced by “bread” in the English translation. A further irony is to be found in the poem’s final line, where “a foreign language” intrudes on what would otherwise read: “and wine changes the conversation.” The essential purpose of wine—at a dinner party, for instance—is to change the conversation. But what is wine in a foreign language? When many of your dinner guests are, like you, serial émigrés who’ve fled Europe in the political wake of World War II, wine serves an additional purpose; anyone who’s found themselves a little more tipsily fluent at a dinner party abroad will understand how “wine in a foreign language changes the conversation.” Arendt made a home away from home for herself—and for others—in New York at 317 West Ninety-Fifth Street and, later, at 370 Riverside Drive, where she entertained fellow expatriates like Hermann Broch, Lotte Kohler, Helen and Kurt Wolff, Paul Tillich, and Hans Morgenthau. The slightly slanted rhyme of “Stadt” with “Gespräch” that concludes the poem in Arendt’s original German links the author’s mid-century Manhattan to the bonhomie of intellectual exchange; “city” sounds a little like “conversation” in the poet’s mother tongue.

Arendt’s poem, then, tells the story of her farewell to Europe and her arrival in the United States in a dozen lines of verse. But it’s also a self-aware work of art that quietly asserts its own place in the German poetic tradition—the bread and wine invoke the literary sacraments of Friedrich Hölderlin’s celebrated poem “Brod und Wein.” (“Bread is the fruit of the earth, yet it’s blessed also by light,” writes Hölderlin. “The pleasure of wine comes from the thundering god.”) German poetry, for Arendt, was a constant presence in both heart and mind. “I know a rather large part of German poetry by heart,” she said in a 1964 interview on German national television. “The poems are always somehow in the back of my mind.” She wrote her first poems when she was a teenager; some of these early literary efforts were addressed to her teacher—and lover—at the University of Marburg, Martin Heidegger. Those early love poems remained secret, like the affair that produced them, until after her death. Reading them now, we can see the intimate association of poetry and philosophy during this formative period in Arendt’s life. Yet her poems, unlike her philosophy, remained a private affair for Arendt to the end. We don’t know if she ever showed her poems to her close friends Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell, and W. H. Auden in New York; to our knowledge, only her second husband, the poet and philosopher Heinrich Blücher, read her verse. The final poem to be found in the Library of Congress archive is labeled “January 1961, Evanston.” Its author was about to depart from a residency at Northwestern University to attend Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem. What she saw there may have marked the end of poetry for Hannah Arendt.

Srikanth Reddy is the poetry editor of The Paris Review.

Photograph by J. D. Daniels.

Let me begin by insisting that I learned nothing.

What is left of it now, my electronics project, other than the names of these things? A solderless breadboard, and another one, and another one. A fifty-foot roll of twenty-seven-gauge insulated copper wire. Tactile switch micro assortment momentary tact assortment kit, not clear to me what that means. All these jumper wires with their connector pins, I tend to blank on their correct name and call them pinner wires. (When I was a kid, a pinner was a tightly rolled joint. Its opposite was a hog leg.) All the resistors in the whole world, and enough alligator clips to fill the Everglades, and a couple of bags of fuses, and a sack of capacitors, and a box of transistors, and my multimeter.

Starting Electronics, Electronics for Beginners, Electronics for Dummies, Getting Started in Electronics. Schopenhauer is right again: “As a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents.”

An Eveready super heavy-duty 6V carbon zinc battery, with its classic black cat logo.

Red and green and yellow and blue LEDs. Even the kid who dropped out of my electronics class knew that Shuji Nakamura had solved the challenge of the blue LED. And why was that a challenge? Don’t ask me, man, I’ve got troubles of my own.

***

Here is my Ohm’s Law Simple Circuits Workbook. What is the voltage in this circuit? What is the amperage in this circuit? What is the resistance in this circuit?

I took my workbook to Florida. Creamy yellows, pastel blues and pinks, bleached whites, stucco, cinder blocks. The flat low buildings and the giant sky. Ibises, herons, egrets, sandhill cranes, crows and vultures. The world of the backward baseball cap.

I was in the Sarasota-Bradenton airport bar. They’d seated us on our plane, then led us back off it. A four-hour delay, they told us. I wasn’t calm, more like numb, but numb was close enough to calm for me to be helpful to the other passengers, who were angry or panicked. They told me about the important appointments and opportunities they were going to miss because of our delayed flight. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this,” they said to me, one after another. I sat in the bar, ate a sandwich, and solved problems in my Ohm’s Law Simple Circuits Workbook. But our four-hour delay became a thirty-six-hour delay, and a horse walked into the bar. I stopped solving problems and I started causing them.

***

Electronics, for three reasons.

One. My COVID lockdown pod included the writer of an electronics textbook. All behaviors are contagious.

Two. Chris Miller’s fantastic Chip War, the 2022 Financial Times Business Book of the Year, with its description of extreme ultraviolet lithography in the manufacture of integrated circuits.

Three. The bonkers ending of Norman Mailer’s The Deer Park, where God says to Sergius: “Think of Sex as Time, and Time as the connection of new circuits.”

All right, I will.

***

I was doing okay until my parents lost their house in Florida to Hurricane Ian the same month my girlfriend was diagnosed with cancer. Suddenly I needed someone to tell me what to do. I needed rule-governed activities.

I started with chess. An ice-world of rules, I told myself, to sustain me in my burning-down life. I took mate-in-one puzzles to the waiting rooms of oncologists and thoracic surgeons, to chemotherapy and immunotherapy infusions. Mate-in-ones are considered a pastime for children. One book had a cartoon squirrel on its cover.

I read Irving Chernev’s Logical Chess: Move by Move, Every Move Explained and The Most Instructive Games of Chess Ever Played and replayed classic games on my little folding chessboard at the dining room table after dinner and read Chernev’s commentary, while she snored on the sofa in a heap of her falling-out hair. She hadn’t cut her hair before treatment, and now it was falling out everywhere, making a mess and driving her crazy, but by now her scalp hurt too much for us to cut it.

On Sunday mornings I played chess with my next-door neighbors David and Austin, now and then stepping away from a game to drive my girlfriend to the emergency room.

***

I thought electronics could be the same way. Predictable outcomes, repeatable results, the artist’s dream of science. I took an electronics class because I wanted someone to stand at the front of a classroom and tell me what to do.

I told one doctor, “I wasted my education. I should have gone to medical school like you, because now I am a full-time nurse, but I don’t have the temperament, the technology, or the support team. I don’t have the expertise, I don’t have the peer group. Because I studied the poetry of Edmund Spenser, like a big dummy.”

An example of my bedside manner: “Will you shut up? I am trying to empty the blood out of your lung drain.”

I stayed up late, watching introductory instructional videos about basic electronics, about resistors. I tried not to drink too much, and failed. Farts were funny, until she farted blood. Until the weight loss, until the sigmoidoscopy, until the colonoscopy, until.

As the immunotherapy-induced rash on her leg worsened, I saw with mirthless self-awareness that the title of the book I was reading, Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God, was doing double duty as Cancer: A Crisis in the Life of John. In tonight’s performance, the role of God will be played by John. But I don’t have the temperament or the technology.

I was having trouble reading, but I could still listen to stories. One afternoon between doctor’s visits, I found myself listening to a sexy one. “I’m too stupid. I’m just a stupid little girl who needs her daddy to tell her what to do. Please. It’s so hard. Everything is so hard. Oh, I’m so stupid, Daddy, tell me what to do. Tell me what to do.”

It was soon obvious to me that I was the girl in the story I was listening to. I disowned my own fear and helplessness and projected it outside of myself, refusing to recognize it as mine, flattering myself that instead I was the omnipotent authority the helpless girl was pleading with. But I was the one who was pleading.

That is not pornography, it is a famous prayer. I’m too stupid, Daddy, please tell me what to do. Our Father who art in heaven, tell me what to do.

***

I was the only nonscientist in the electronics class. It was held in a fifty-thousand-square-foot open facility just over the bridge. Battery engineers, software designers, X-ray technicians. I kept my mouth shut. I think I was assumed to be a scientist, too.

I had an awfully good time. But I didn’t understand much of the lectures, and I didn’t understand most of the questions the other students asked, and I rarely understood the answers to those questions. I listened to the fans of the solder fume extractors.

Photograph by J.D. Daniels.

Here’s the “joule thief” I built by following instructions.

Photograph by J.D. Daniels.

What does it do? It does whatever I tell it to do.

 It “can use nearly all of the energy in a single-cell electric battery, even far below the voltage where other circuits consider the battery fully discharged (or ‘dead’).”

Yet again I have built myself. The golem scratches its head.

***

“On Margate Sands,” T. S. Eliot wrote, “I can connect / Nothing with nothing.” I can connect metal to metal with metal: I am good at soldering. I put on my safety glasses, turned on my fume extractor fan, clamped my circuit board, unrolled my little coil of solder wire, heated up my soldering iron, and got to work. One of our teachers said, “We have a winner!” My girlfriend thought it might be due to the summer I had spent learning about welding. I’d taken two safety courses to be allowed to use the metal shop, then a MIG-welding intro, then a more focused and thorough welding course, then a kit course, if you want to call it that, where we all built the same project, a simple grill. Cutting, grinding, drilling and punching, the vertical bandsaw, the belt grinder and belt sander, the hydraulic ironworker, tack welding and stacks of tacks, drag welding, fillet welding, butt welding, cutting and patching, rooster tails of sparks thrown across the room by the angle grinder, pounding headaches from arc flash. I had performed adequately, not excelling but not having any accidents, unlike two of my welding classmates, who were always setting something on fire. Those classes had been years ago by now. But I thought it might be true that I had learned not to be paralyzed by a fear of burning metal.

Then, too, my electronics classmates, as friendly and smart and funny and good-looking as they were, seemed like they might be that commonly sighted species, the Northeastern achievatron. They wanted to get it right the first time and get an A-plus, a gold star, whereas I was confident I was going to do it wrong. So what. I’ll try anything once. I’ll go first. Here, hold my beer.

***

Tell me what to do. I followed instructions and I built little toy desk models. A forty-two-cylinder diesel radial engine model, based on the Zvezda M503 from Soviet missile boats. Before that, a U12 based on the GM 6046 twin-straight-6 from the Sherman M4A2 tank, an H16 based on the Formula One 1966 U.S. Grand Prix winner Lotus 43, and an X24 based on the Rolls-Royce Vulture. I built a toy model of a Schmidt coupling, a constant-velocity joint, a double universal joint, bevel gears, a slider-crank linkage, a sun and planet gear, a Scotch yoke, and a Chebyshev lambda linkage.

I bought a copy of Small Engines and Outdoor Power Equipment: A Care & Repair Guide for: Lawn Mowers, Snowblowers & Small Gas-Powered Implements, and I mail-ordered a used lawnmower-engine power head from an OEM Lawn Boy model 8243AE and a used Toro single-stage Tecumseh AH600 1627 snow-thrower engine to dissect, remembering the happy summer month I’d once spent ruining a weed eater’s two-stroke engine. But did I dissect them? No, I did not. They are still sitting on a rectangle of particle board in the next room. I can see them now.

All of this was playacting and pseudoscience, I see that now. All of it was sorcery. The nurses used telemetry to monitor her vital signs. I bought a blood-pressure cuff and kept a log of my own vitals. I was coming with her, like it or not. Down with the ship.

Tell me what to do, in order to—what? No one knows what I want, and, even if someone did, no one could tell me how to get it. There isn’t any way to get what I want. What I want doesn’t exist.

***

“Burn things out, mess things up—that’s how you learn,” said the cover of one of my electronics textbooks. It was somewhat reminiscent of my old drug-use textbook. The title of this present article is drawn from that textbook’s author, William S. Burroughs, who once asked: “Is Control controlled by its need to control?”

“A friend of the interviewer, spotting Burroughs across the lobby, thought he was a British diplomat. At the age of fifty, he is trim; he performs a complex abdominal exercise daily and walks a good deal.” —Conrad Knickerbocker, The Paris Review issue no. 35 (Fall 1965).

“ ‘Naked Lunch would never have been written without Doctor Dent’s treatment.’ … Burroughs also took up the abdominal exercise system of F. A. Hornibrook—author of the once best-selling book The Culture of the Abdomen (1924)—whom Dent seems to have introduced him to personally.” —Phil Baker, William S. Burroughs (2010).

“Burroughs took a room in the Hotel Muniria, at 1 calle Magallanes, with a private entrance that opened on a garden. He was off junk for the first time in three years, and he was on a health kick. In the morning he did the Hornibrook abdominal exercises he had learned in London, which guaranteed a flat stomach. Then he went rowing in the bay.”—Ted Morgan, Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs (1988).

“The special abdominal exercises that he received from a man named Hornibrook in London, who learned them from the Fijian islanders.”—Barry Miles, Call Me Burroughs (2014).

This would seem to settle the question of what the “complex abdominal exercise” referred to in Knickerbocker’s Paris Review interview with William S. Burroughs was: The Culture of the Abdomen: The Cure of Obesity and Constipation, by F. A. Hornibrook, preface by Sir William Arbuthnot Lane, Bart., C.B., M.S., Consulting Surgeon to Guy’s Hospital, etc.

Now I have on my desk a hardback copy from 1935. It is eighty-nine years old. It smells bad.

And it was on this same desk, with its alarming amount of scorch marks, that I did my electronics self-teaching, such as it was. I didn’t want to simulate circuits using software. Instead, unskilled but insistent, I improvised.

What am I supposed to do with all of these resistors now? I guess I could resist something.

***

The rabbits had eaten the coreopsis. The blue jays were interested in something under the Fothergilla, or maybe it was in the yew hedges. The daphnes in the raised bed were all in bloom. The trilliums had become gargantuan. The tree peony was swelling, ready to open. The clematis was swarming over its trellis. A butterfly, a Zabulon skipper, landed on my hand. A hornet dozed on the windowsill. The cardinal skipped and flitted in the hydrangea. I heard the strange call of a catbird who had learned that sound elsewhere and had brought it home.

I saw and heard all of this while I bound the rotten back fence’s top rail and leaning post together with wire from an electronics hobby kit. Turned out it was good for something, after all.

J. D. Daniels is the winner of a 2016 Whiting Award and The Paris Review’s 2013 Terry Southern Prize. His collection The Correspondence was published in 2017. His writing has appeared in The Paris Review, Esquire, n+1, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere, including The Best American Essays and The Best American Travel Writing.

From Ernst Lehner’s Symbols, Signs and Signets.

For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets to dissect the poems they’ve published in our pages. Sara Gilmore’s poems “Mad as only an angel can be” and “Knowing constraint” appear in the new Fall issue of the Review, no. 249. The poem she discusses here, “Safe camp,” is published on the Daily.

How did this poem start for you? Was it with an image, an idea, a phrase, or something else?

Originally this poem began with the lines “Delay and pressed the reeling available / Would-be constant down this inhabited suddenness.” It never troubled me that the words together didn’t make sense or that I didn’t yet know what they were pointing to—I thought of them as an assembly of beautiful raw material to work with.

As I continued to work on the poem, the image that rose to mind was a ditch along a narrow country road I often strolled down with my son near Mairena del Aljarafe when we lived in Spain. It was filled with trash and reels of unwound VHS tapes. We walked by it hundreds of times. The poem began to grow around the word “reeling”—the “real” along with everything the real is not, the dizzying motion of “reeling,” Anne Carson’s notion “under this day the reel of another day.” This figure of reeling gave into the poem’s circuitry as a whole—the way it shorts out as if its webbing could open to reveal layers underneath, suggesting a kind of sinkhole that either delivers us from or constricts us into a frame of reality that runs along our lives eternally. For me, these sinkholes are dangerous and fascinating.

This is one of the poem’s anxieties—the possibility of a circularity of circumstance or time in which what I’m living today could be the actual present, or a day I lived long ago, or a day I haven’t lived yet at all.

The poem surfaced into clarity in the lines that, in the version published here, appear first. “I was still but tried, in a burst it’s all lit up by.” I like to think the original lines are still there—what my friend Timmy calls the rungs of the ladder that we’re no longer standing on but got us here.

What were you listening to, reading, or watching while you were writing?

The day I started writing, I read Wallace Stevens’s “A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts” for the first time, my son’s stepbrother was born an ocean away, and I went on a walk with my son in Hickory Hill Park in Iowa City. It was April Fools’ Day, a year into the pandemic. My son made a set of cardboard claws to wear. That’s the day the poem emerged, but of course many other days and markers are also embedded into it. I date all the poems I write, maybe to have some anchor in what feels like a sway. I take pictures with my phone of the passages I read, the places I go, people I’m with. With all this underneath, the finished poem can seem like a little white flag waving surrender over a frighteningly infinite and invisible mountain—how do you get at that? I don’t know. I keep trying. What I like about “A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts” is the strength it finds in intimacy. It’s not afraid to say things like “In which everything is meant for you / and nothing need be explained.” In “Safe camp,” I think I got a little closer to conveying strong emotion and feeling outside explanation—strong love, strong belonging, without a tether to fixed place or meaning, the resistance to have those things outside any formal permission.

How did writing the first draft feel to you? Did it come easily, or was it difficult to write? Are there hard and easy poems?

Writing a poem is the easiest and hardest thing in the world to do. Easy in the sense that it’s a human impulse, like singing in the shower, and difficult as far as the huge emotional and intellectual toll it takes. I wrote “Safe camp” quickly, first in my head and then on my phone. I repeated its lines over and over to myself. Two days later I had my second COVID vaccination in Washington, Iowa. When I drove back home, I had a sense of calm, and I knew the poem was good.

How did you come up with the title for this poem? Were there other titles you thought about? Why didn’t you go with them?

“Safe camp” belongs to a cycle of serial poems written around the symbols that itinerant communities have historically used in the U.S. After the Great Depression, as people (many of whom were teenagers) moved across the country looking for work, they would leave scratch marks or markings in chalk outside the places they visited, to tell others what those places were like. For many years I’ve had a copy of Ernst Lehner’s Symbols, Signs and Signets, which includes a catalogue of these visual symbols and verbal descriptions of their meanings: “Owner is in,” “Keep quiet, “Bad dog,” “Safe camp.” There’s something flat and solid about these descriptions that contrasts with the way I write.

So, I would write as I do but title the poems in the order the symbols appear in Lehner’s book. And I knew where I was. Placing any material or element next to one another generates a force field, which can be very unexpected and wonderful—like a safe camp, in fact. But that notion of safety also signals the privilege of authority, signage, the ability to grant permission. I think that bled into the line “In the quiet permission / I took my unit of heart and wondered if it was enough.”

I was also influenced by Joyelle McSweeney’s The Red Bird, which includes many different poems with the title “The Voyage of the Beagle.” This is something I stole from her—I actually have several poems titled “Safe camp.”

When did you know this poem was finished? Were you right about that? Is it finished after all?

This iteration of the poem is probably finished. I read Benjamin Krusling’s Glaring many times around the time I wrote “Safe camp.” He has a gorgeous poem at the end of that collection that begins, “first there’s love…then there’s synchronized time.” And, in Triple Canopy, another poem that begins “it’s love , but there’s no time.” In both poems, variations on the lines are repeated in different orders. I asked Krusling, during a Q&A after one of his readings, about the relationship between these two poems, and he had this beautiful idea of a poem’s mutability—that it should never become an artifact, closed-off, museum-displayed. And that the most important things must be said many times in many ways. I’m interested in how this idea contrasts with the fixity that the page and publication provide.

Poems can also gather great force in their immutability, like the transformations produced by the repetition in chant. That’s what I was thinking about in the lines “An artifact // Gathered and became immobile, and even so / Changed year to year until its recognition fell to wind itself.” “Fell” then shifts to “felt” in the lines “I felt myself. I felt myself inhabiting it so I felt myself.”

Did you show your drafts to other writers or friends or confidants? If so, what did they say?

I workshopped this poem with ten other poets one week after I wrote it. My notes from that session have fragments like “voice of poem hears ‘self’ and is startled outside of itself” and “memory as we perform it for ourselves, and disintegration,” “whirring in contained location.” There is something about an “animal mind” and reference to the “weight of mammal body” and the “underside of gristle.” There are recommendations for other poets, like Wyatt and Petrarch, who wrote poems including deer. Talking about this poem with those poets was like becoming aware of the aliveness of a shared mind.

Sara Gilmore is a poet and translator. She teaches at the University of Iowa and works as a phlebotomist.

Photograph courtesy of the author.

I was still but tried, in a burst it’s all lit up by.
In the quiet permission

I took my unit of heart and wondered if it was enough.
Can’t in cannot, the backwater was canceled

So a quiet commercial
Could play inside instead. An artifact

Gathered and became immobile, and even so
Changed year to year until its recognition fell to wind itself.

I felt myself. I felt myself inhabiting it so I felt myself. In everything
To see a circular tape, again and

Again I see it, determining the summer was suddenness
Netting how images can melt, can melt

the video lengthening some dream
Because exhaust is unmanageable and so released. I push in the tape,

Iridescent and wet. I’m soggy and failing at no end in sight
And just figures on their way, where are they going,

What is their position. Let me place you inside the deer
To keep you warm.

You can read two more poems by Sara Gilmore, “Mad as only an angel can be” and “Knowing constraint” in the new Fall issue of The Paris Review, no. 249. You can also read Gilmore’s thoughts on writing “Safe camp” here on the Daily. 

Sara Gilmore is a poet and translator. She teaches at the University of Iowa and works as a phlebotomist.

Photograph by Carl Van Vechten. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

A young Henry James, writing about Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1879, notoriously remarked, “One might enumerate the items of high civilization, as it exists in other countries, which are absent from the texture of American life, until it should become a wonder to know what was left.” For James, Hawthorne’s country had been a void, as immensely small, you could say, as it was big (which presented a daunting prospect for the writer), but certainly different from the clearly marked boundaries of nation and class that European writers had been accustomed to patrolling and negotiating. The problem of America is in effect a problem of scale and measure, not just how to measure the immeasurable but how to measure up to it, and in that way it anticipates the problems of accounting for the unaccountable that confronted the twentieth-century novelist. Gertrude Stein, twenty-six as the century began, saw this as clearly as anyone. America, she wrote in 1932, is “the oldest country in the world because by the methods of the civil war and the commercial conceptions that followed it America created the twentieth century, and since all the other countries are now either living or commencing to be living a twentieth century life, America having begun the creation of the twentieth century in the sixties of the nineteenth century is now the oldest country in the world.” In this nicely gnomic pronouncement there’s the wit of Oscar Wilde as well as—looking at the Civil War as method—an almost Leninist realism and sangfroid, not to mention the familiar twang of American self-promotion. It is a characteristically insightful and provocative comment from a brilliant woman who grew up in America with an ineradicable sense of the foreignness of her German Jewish immigrant family and went on to live all her adult life as an American in Europe. Stein, of course, was not in any sense alone in seeing America as a central presence in the new century—the American Century, as it would be called by many people with varying degrees of hope, resentment, and dread—but she was unusually sensitive and responsive to American formlessness. She found, not without a good deal of searching, a way of working with it that worked for her. In doing that, she also helped to transform not only the American novel but the twentieth-century novel.

Stein began in an unlikely, lonely place. The youngest of five children of Daniel and Amelia Stein, first-generation German Jewish immigrants and members of a prosperous merchant family, she grew up between America—she was born outside of Pittsburgh in 1874—and Europe, to which her restless father removed the family for a spell of years almost immediately after her birth. She grew up between continents, and she grew up among languages, speaking German (the language of her home) and French before English, which she initially picked up from books, and once back in the States, she grew up between the coasts. The Stein family was largely settled in Baltimore, until Daniel decided he’d be better off in Oakland, of which Stein would famously quip “there is no there there.” In a big house on the sparsely settled suburban outskirts of the expanding western port, Stein’s mother fell ill and slowly died while her father grew ever more irascible and demanding, and Stein buried herself in books: Shakespeare, Trollope, A Girl of the Limberlost.

Daniel died suddenly in 1891 and was neither mourned nor missed. His son Leo, to whom Gertrude was close, went east to Harvard; Gertrude followed him to attend classes at Radcliffe, where she studied English literature and took an interest in psychology. Henry James was a favorite writer of hers, and his older brother, the psychologist and philosopher William James, now became her teacher. He made a strong impression, and she impressed him; he encouraged her scientific ambitions, urging her to go to medical school at Johns Hopkins at a time when few women had MDs and those who did were often unable to practice. Leo was already at Hopkins, pursuing a degree in biology, and Stein joined him at the university, but instead of studying, she fell in love with a fellow student named May Bookstaver and became entangled in a tormenting lesbian love triangle. Leo left for Europe, in order to learn “all about art” at the foot of the famous connoisseur and socialite Bernard Berenson; escaping Bookstaver, Gertrude once again set out after him. At Berenson’s house in England, Leo and Gertrude met and argued about politics with Bertrand Russell, and Gertrude stayed on through a bone-chilling London winter. But then she went back to Baltimore and Bookstaver, only to flunk her qualifying exams. A medical career was not to be.

She wanted, in any case, to be a writer. Imitating Henry James, she wrote a novella called Q.E.D., about her relationship with Bookstaver, that she promptly packed up and forgot about. Then she started a novel about a German-Jewish American family like the Steins. It was to be called The Making of Americans, and it seems to have begun conventionally enough, until Stein, apparently dissatisfied with the results, had another idea. Recalling some of the research she had conducted under William James, she decided that her novel should constitute not just a family history but a comprehensive inventory of every type of human character. “I began to be sure,” Stein would remember, “that if I could only go on long enough and talk and hear and look and see and feel enough and long enough I could finally describe really describe every kind of human being that ever was or is or would be living.” This was certainly an unusual project, but the more Stein pursued this encyclopedic butterfly, the farther out of reach it flew. She would come back to The Making of Americans in time, completing it after almost a decade—an immense work—and she would always promote it as her greatest achievement. She did not hide what a struggle it had been. Years later, as a traveling celebrity in America, she delivered a lecture on “The Gradual Making of The Making of Americans,” and the quotes she culls from the book’s pages are telling: “I am altogether a discouraged one. I am just now altogether a discouraged one … I do a great deal of suffering.”

It was 1905, and Stein had picked up and followed Leo to Paris, but in a sense she was still where she had always been: betwixt and between continents and languages and caught in the thick of family. Leo, however, had at last found his calling: having discovered Cézanne, he set up as a “propagandist” for modern art. Leo and Gertrude and their oldest brother, Michael, who looked after the family business and had also come to Paris, were all busy collecting the work of young artists, and they were surrounded by them—Matisse and Picasso were their friends—and absorbed in questions about art and innovation and the somehow related question of their Americanness, which  defined them in their own and others’ eyes. (“They are not men, they are not women,” Picasso said of the Steins. “They are Americans.”)

And for Stein of course there was the question of her own character and loneliness and work. Leo suggested that she translate Flaubert’s Three Tales, a literary touchstone of the turn of the century. The task would improve her French and perhaps give her ideas. It did, but not in the way Leo intended. “A Simple Heart,” the most famous of Flaubert’s Three Tales, tells the simple story of the life of a French servant woman. No, Stein would not translate it. She would write three lives of her own: American lives—American lives and women’s lives and lives that all bear a certain resemblance to the life of Gertrude Stein. The lives of the Gentle Lena and the Good Anna bookend Stein’s collection. These are poor German immigrant women toiling away dutifully as servants all their life long, their gentleness and goodness as much bane as boon. In the middle is the story of Melanctha, a “complex, desiring” young woman, a searcher. Melanctha is Black and, by the conventional standards of Stein’s day, not good at all. All three women live in a fictional American city called Bridgepoint (which is to say neither here nor there, but on the way to somewhere, the American situation par excellence), and all three are poor and, though very much American, in another sense, not: foreign-born, Black, speaking nonstandard English, they are very much outsiders, just like their creator in Paris.

“Melanctha” is the longest story in Three Lives, and it was in telling the story of Melanctha that Stein discovered herself as a writer. Melanctha is the child of parents who resemble Stein’s—the father angry and threatening until he simply disappears from his daughter’s life, the mother present only in her being interminably ailing—and the story starts when she is a teenager, avid to find out what she can about life. Hanging out at the train station, she finds out something about sex and men. She finds out more about sex and men from an older woman, educated, experienced, hardened—her name in fact is Jane Harden—who takes her under her wing and perhaps into bed, and then she begins to find out about love from the young doctor attending to her mother. Jefferson Campbell is very much the opposite of the mercurial Melanctha—he is “very good” and “very interested in the life of the colored people”—but then opposites attract. Melanctha and Jeff grow close—he is infatuated—yet when Melanctha hints suggestively at her sexual history, Jeff turns jealous. Melanctha resents what she encouraged, and the relationship turns into a torment. Melanctha and Jeff break up, and she takes up with “a gambler, naturally a no-good.” Depressed, Melanctha comes down with TB and dies. “Melanctha” is done.

The story is quickly told and in a sense not much of a story at all. Sometimes it seems like a nineteenth-century cautionary tale about how bad girls come to a bad end, or perhaps a tongue-in-cheek send-up of such a tale. At other times it might be taken as the story of a good person whose life is blighted by racial prejudice and social intolerance, a sad story, though told with a certain off-putting ruthlessness. “Melanctha all her life did not know how to tell a story wholly,” Stein writes, as if preparing the way for her premature demise. In places, it appears to be a kind of modern fairy tale, almost willfully naive, while elsewhere and quite differently it comes off as a near clinical examination of the psychological dynamics of love, not unlike the sorts of things Marcel Proust and D. H. Lawrence were starting to write at around the same time.

“Melanctha” is all those things and none of those things, and sometimes it seems like it is really nothing much at all. The main reason it’s so hard to pin down what “Melanctha” is getting at is that the story is so very long in the telling, not to mention the ever more peculiar language in which it is told. “Melanctha” is 120 pages long, composed in a manner that might be best described as conspicuously wordy:

Life was just commencing for Melanctha. She had youth and had learned wisdom, and she was graceful and pale yellow and very pleasant, and always ready to do things for people, and she was mysterious in her ways and that only made belief in her more fervent.

What wisdom had she learned? What did she do for other people? Whose belief is it that grew more fervent? Her own beliefs (in what?) or others in her? (Both readings are possible.) “Melanctha” is full of vague sentences like these—filled out with conventional descriptions and polite nothings and sentimental or racist turns of phrase like “the wide, abandoned laughter that makes the warm broad glow of negro sunshine”—and as it goes on, those sentences tend to grow longer and more and more and more repetitive:

“Melanctha Herbert,” began Jeff Campbell, “I certainly after all this time I know you, I certainly do know little, real about you. You see, Melanctha, it’s like this way with me … You see it’s just this way, with me now, Melanctha. Sometimes you seem like one kind of a girl to me, and sometimes you are like a girl that is all different to me, and the two kinds of girl is certainly very different to each other … I certainly know now really, how I don’t know anything sure at all about you, Melanctha.”

“I certainly know now really, how I don’t know anything sure”: I am not sure that Stein knew for sure what she was up to as she hit on this style, which—with its limited vocabulary, ever-expanding paratactic sentences, and repetition compulsion—might be dismissed as both flat and flatulent, maddening and even perhaps a bit mad, but as “Melanctha” proceeds becomes ever more recognizable and unignorable. Stein may have been up to a number of different and not, at first sight, necessarily compatible things. Here she is finding words at last to tell her own story, the Bookstaver story. Bookstaver would later remark that Jeff and Melanctha’s grinding exchanges were little more than transcripts of hers with Stein. In that sense, the language of “Melanctha” might be considered symptomatic on the one hand and therapeutic on the other, a way for Stein to get something off her chest and put it behind her. Then again, she is also finding words to tell the story of a woman, Melanctha, deprived of the authority or capability to tell her own story, someone whose sex and race and life place her outside the space of “proper” storytelling. To that extent, her writing of Melanctha is as public and political as it is private and therapeutic. Though Stein was never an overtly political writer—she didn’t do messages—and her actual politics involved an unsavory fascination with such putative strong men as Napoleon and Marshal Pétain, she was alert to politics (those “methods of the civil war”) and to the political nature of language.

In the end, however, “Melanctha” is not so much about telling anyone’s story as it is about putting story aside. Here, Stein, trained in scientific experiment and emboldened by the experimentation of the artists around her, turns from story to take a new look at what stories are made out of: language, sentences, words. “Melanctha” is written out of an intense, even desperate awareness of how language shapes experience—its imprecisions, its evasions, its formulae, its structure, its unavoidable limitations. She takes, for example, the clogging –ings and jingly –lys intrinsic to the English language, and instead of playing them down, as “good” writers have long been taught to do, she lets them loose. Is what results “bad” writing? It is writing that tends toward a drone, and a drone is perhaps the tone of boredom, depression (the melancholy inscribed in Melanctha’s name). Certainly, to echo Stein, one of the things this sad tale of an unrealized life is designed to do is to make the reader feel language and also feel language fail.

And it does that, but then again (as I keep having to say) it does something else: it gives language, rather miraculously, a new life. Stein’s drone begins to gather overtones, until Melanctha’s story breaks the bonds of story and conventional usage to become an exploration of and a meditation on the possibilities of language, language that exists in and for, as she would come to define it in a later essay, “Composition as Explanation,” a “continuous present.”

Repetition renders Stein’s simple words and chain-link sentences surprisingly complex in effect, opening them up to multiple and shifting registers. The language of “Melanctha” can be read as Black American dialect (at least that is what a lot of Stein’s early readers took it for), and Richard Wright later told a story of reading it aloud to an illiterate Black audience who responded with immediate recognition. The language of “Melanctha” is dialect, and it is also language as it is spoken, in which we often return again and again to the same words to try to get a point across. Then again (again), the language of “Melanctha” is very much written language, an oddly unreal and quirky idiom of the printed page on which, by dint of its repetitions, it practically prints patterns (which is to say that the language of “Melanctha” is visual, too). It is also musical, echoing and chiming, and abstract and philosophical: all those reallys and certainlys and trulys reflect not only how we speak but raise the question of what we speak in the hope of, what certainty, what truth, what reality? Finally, the language is erotic, shot through with sexual innuendo—“Jeff took it straight now, and he loved it … it swelled out full inside him, and he poured it all out back”—and the rhythms (and perversity) of sex:

“But you do forgive me always, sure, Melanctha, always?” “Always and always, you be sure Jeff, and I certainly am afraid I can never stop with my forgiving, you always are going to be so bad to me, and I always going to have to be so good with my forgiving.” “Oh! Oh!” cried Jeff Campbell, laughing, “I ain’t going to be so bad for always, sure I ain’t, Melanctha, my own darling. And sure you do forgive me really, and sure you love me true and really, sure, Melanctha?” “Sure, sure, Jeff, boy, sure now and always, sure now you believe me, sure.”

Much influenced by visual artists, Stein’s work would in time prove an inspiration to such very different American composers as John Cage and Philip Glass, while “Melanctha,” shot through as it is with the rhythms of Black American speech, brings to writing something of the incantatory eroticism of the blues and soul music.

With “Melanctha,” Stein had found a way of writing that was all her own, a no-language and a new language that sounded a little bit like lots of things and like no one else. Overcoming the sense of uncertainty and inadequacy and isolation that had marked her childhood and her intellectual and sexual coming-of-age, she had fashioned an instrument that allowed her to air and explore her most characteristic and intimate concerns—her sexuality, her femininity, her philosophical turn of mind, her love of words and wordplay at once childish and sophisticated—in entire freedom and in depth.

It was her way of writing, and it was her way of being an American writer. If, as a child in America, Stein had felt hardly American, and as an adult in Europe felt at times helplessly American, on the page she was free to be her American self and, more than that—having arrived at this moment of revelation, she would have an unwavering sense of prophetic purpose—to free American literature to be itself.

She returned to The Making of Americans, and as she worked on this, her magnum opus, she also worked out a theory of the Americanness of American literature, in which the problem of scale (something Melville and James and Whitman had in various ways confronted without, however, formally defining it) became—this was Stein’s discovery—central to its promise. She develops her ideas in a lecture on English literature that she delivered in 1934. England, she said, an island nation, had naturally produced a literature marked by a delimited sense of scale, which provided a background for stories of “daily living.” English literature had been a glory in its day—Stein was steeped in it, and she paid homage to it—and it had gone through several phases, from the invention of English as a literary language in the work of Chaucer through the subsequent enlargement of its vocabulary to the muscular and mature syntax and sense of Dr. Johnson. By the nineteenth century, however, English literature had been reduced to mere phrasemaking, saying the expected thing and saying nothing much while having things both ways, a convenient accommodation of God and Mammon that you would expect from an island empire anchored in the harbor of its self-regard. Here Stein rebels against the balance of the nineteenth-century novel.

English fiction, the fiction of a closed circle, had lost its honesty and its power, just as England had lost the power to dominate a world that had begun to expand continuously and violently outward—a world that could be said to have begun with the discovery of America and that looked like America more than anything else. England had the defined shape of an island, but America had no defined shape: it was a frontier, moving, the eccentric center of a widening world, a world not of settled definitions, but of unending exploration, where everything was in question. James, in Stein’s view, had been the first American writer to catch a glimpse of this new, decentered reality, for though he had worked with an inherited English sense of the shape of the novel, he also had, in her words, “a disembodied way of disconnecting something from anything and anything from something [that] was an American one.” This accomplishment had paved the way for Stein, who not only recognized it for what it was but formalized it, isolated it, as a researcher might a strain of bacteria, and made it into a matter of conscious procedure:

I went on to what was the American thing the disconnection and I kept breaking the paragraph down, and everything down to commence again with not connecting with the daily anything and yet to really choose something.

So she characterizes her way of working in “The Gradual Making of The Making of Americans,” and she goes on from there to describe how this new way of breaking things down became a way of building things back up, and so on. The work was forever ongoing, a continuous revelation of the writer’s power not to reflect given realities in given forms, but, as Stein says, “to really choose something,” and from it emerged a vision of a new kind of wholeness born of words: “I made a paragraph,” she boasted, “so much a whole thing that it included in itself as a whole thing a whole sentence.”

And this is the key thing that Stein discovers and passes on: putting the sentence at the center of writing, a sentence that can go on and on or be cut as short as can be, but that one way or another, as a kind of exploratory probe, takes precedence over the idea of the work as a whole. You start with the sentence and the sentence finds out where it is going and you go from there. This American “disembodied way of disconnecting something from anything” goes on finding its own path across the page: “Then at the same time is the question of time. The assembling of a thing to make a whole thing and each one of those whole things is one of a series.”

She concludes: “I felt this thing, I am an American and I felt this thing, and I made a continuous effort to create this thing … a space of time that is filled always filled with moving.”

From Stranger than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth Century Novel, to be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux this November. 

Erin O’Keefe, Circle Circle, 2020, from New and Recent Photographs, a portfolio in issue no. 235 (Winter 2020) of The Paris Review.

I did not have a good time reading Vigdis Hjorth’s novel If Only. I felt, in fact, kind of abject—but something about the novel compelled me forward, in a way that sometimes actually confused me. I found myself reading fifty pages, putting it down, picking it up a week later and once again being unable to stop reading, then abandoning it for another week. It was a discomfiting instance where in returning to the bleak narrative world of the novel I felt almost like I was mirroring the behavior of its main character, Ida, who returns again and again to a love affair that seems to offer her nothing but pain. Why was I reading this book that made me so angry, uncomfortable, irritated? Because it was, maybe, the kind of discomfort that can reconfigure certain aspects of the way you see the world, whose insights or the shadows of them seem to recur long after you’ve closed the book—and so they have, as I thought last night of an image from it, Ida and her lover at a restaurant in Istanbul, gorging on champagne, telling the waiter they were just married even though they weren’t. 

If Only—published in Norwegian in 2001, but published in English translation by Charlotte Barslund for the first time this month—is a novel about obsessive love. It is one of a spate of recent novels that take all-consuming desire as a theme: Miranda July’s All Fours and Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos both deal with a passion that veers into misery at times, the kind of passion that is transformative only because it shatters lives. But If Only is by far the bleakest of these; in fact, it is one of the bleakest depictions of a relationship I have ever encountered. The affair obliterates Ida; it cuts her off from the people around her, including her young children; it makes her act erratically and occasionally dangerously. The relationship has many of the same qualities as prolonged substance abuse—and it is no coincidence that Ida and her lover constantly binge on alcohol, too. The novel offers neither redemption nor transcendence as its resolution. And yet Hjorth makes this relationship and its aftermath legible to us as a part of the human experience—one that we can’t extract from the type of love we do consider desirable or healthy. At the end of the book, we might find ourselves wondering, as Ida does: “If only there was a cure, a cure for love.” And we might realize, even as we wish this, that we don’t actually mean it at all. 

—Sophie Haigney, web editor

I want to recommend the final, fourth volume of Michel Leiris’s autobiographical project, The Rules of the Game: Frail Riffs, recently published by Yale’s Margellos series. Lydia Davis—whose fiction, essays, and translations of Proust and Flaubert amaze me—rendered the first three volumes; volume four is excellently translated by Richard Sieburth. Alice Kaplan has written an incisive essay on Leiris, and Frail Riffs, for the current issue of The New York Review of Books. Alice K. is another international treasure whose books will be known by anyone who reads The Paris Review, I would guess. Especially, but not only, The Collaborator, which summons so much about the political winds of the twenties and thirties blowing through the Parisian literary world, and about the postwar epuration in France, which Céline eluded by fleeing to Denmark, and which Robert Brasillach didn’t. Elude, I mean. (Whether this “fine literary writer” should have been executed for treason or not is, for me, a question one could settle one way at breakfast and the other way at dinner. Sartre or Camus, take your pick.) Anyway: Leiris, who writes the most pellucid and persuasive sentences. Whose abjection I welcome more than anybody’s egotism. His writings a bonanza of formidable insights conveyed with the unrushed elegance of a Saint-Simon. Leiris is incomparable, a Vermeer in a world of Han van Meegerens. Frail Riffs is pure pleasure, in the way Proust is pure pleasure—you can open to any page and just surrender yourself to the music of time that saturates it. The early entry in Frail Riffs, describing the prologues of Goethe’s Faust and their effect upon him as a teenager, is enough to turn any reader into a Leiris devotee.

—Gary Indiana

Emily Witt’s Health and Safety begins in Gowanus in 2016, where the Future Sex author is set to give a lecture called “How I Think About Drugs.” She speaks from a Google slide about Wellbutrin, which she used to take, and the distinction between “sort-of drugs” (pharmaceutical) and “drugs” (illegal). After quitting Wellbutrin, at thirty-one, Witt broke a yearslong illicit-substance fast by smoking DMT at Christmastime. This was the beginning of a drug journey of sorts, one involving ayahuasca retreats in the Catskills with her then boyfriend, a sensory-deprivation-tank attendant, and a large dose of mushrooms taken in a Brooklyn apartment. After her speech she meets Andrew, a Bushwick DJ. He soon introduces her to another context for and type of drug-doing: raving. She falls in love. They soon move in together at Myrtle-Broadway.

“Being in love made me happy,” begins chapter five, “and I lost interest in channeling all of my knowledge about nutrition, disease, and medicine into a life of perpetual risk management.” Witt began to see her former orientation toward health and wellness as narrow and individualistic, whereas raverly values were collectivist, abolitionist, and harm reductionist. To be one of techno’s real appreciators meant thinking through its lineage in Black American Detroit and how it morphed in Berlin clubs; it meant learning about Afrofuturism, Deleuzian metaphysics, and Narcan administration. It could all feel overly theoretical, because the real point of doing ketamine at Nowadays is having fun, but even the most pretentious scene fixtures were interesting in their own ways. Witt is intrigued by techno’s embrace of pessimism as praxis: a deep-house artist named DJ Sprinkles uses part of their set to drive home why they use the term transgendered instead of transgender, then tells their audience they’re all a bunch of normie losers. Sprinkles is compelling because their unapologetic manner gets at realer issues than does the tone-deaf #Resistance-era small talk that was unavoidable at the time in New York.

Witt’s partying coincides with Trump’s election, the beginning of the #MeToo movement, Parkland, Kenosha, the protests in the wake of George Floyd’s killing, January 6. The Trump administration disturbed many Americans’ sense that we shared a definite political reality; our widened Overton window, at least, began to reveal the racial and socioeconomic injustices that white, middle-class liberals had claimed ignorance of. During this period, Witt joined The New Yorker as a staff writer while attending Black Lives Matter protests on the side with Andrew. Health and Safety poses sharp questions about what it means to watch history unfold versus to participate in its making, and about what it means to write about brutality when your friends are in harm’s way. These questions don’t resolve, as if to remind that discourse has little impact on the machinations of capital and state violence.

Witt’s reflections on the loop of reporting assignments—like being sent to watch Lizzo play a Shake Shack–sponsored set at a D.C. March for Our Lives rally—and sleepless nights at Bossa Nova Civic Club that comprised her pre-pandemic life are spectacular. So are her extremely specific notes on tripping: “I just saw some patterns that faintly buzzed in the marker colors of my childhood—the ‘bold’ jewel-toned spectrum that Crayola started selling in the early 1990s.” While reading Health and Safety, I couldn’t stop thinking about how the defamiliarizing effects of psychedelics are not unlike those of a well-constructed sentence, the kind that catches you off guard with its accuracy.

—Signe Swanson

The Kármán line, in astronomy, is the definition of the edge of space: the line at which Earth’s atmosphere ends and outer space begins. It’s a geopolitical rather than physical definition—it’s about fifty miles above sea level, though it is not sharp or well defined, and below the line, space belongs to the country below it, while above it, space is free. Daisy Atterbury’s new collection of poetry, The Kármán Line, to be published by Rescue Press next month, describes the line’s psychological import, characterizing it as a clearly defined yet impossible-to-name boundary between the known and the unknown. From the poem “Sound Bodily Condition”: “I want to learn how to get at the thing I don’t yet know, the blank space in memory, the experiences I should have language for and don’t.” Atterbury’s book is at once a math-inflected lyric essay; a rollicking road trip; a field guide to Spaceport America, the world’s first site for commercial space travel, located near Truth or Consequences, New Mexico; and a collection of intimate poems.

Atterbury spells out how you can, in a few steps, arrive at a relatively simple equation for calculating the latitude of the Kármán line for any planet, (2𝑚𝜌(𝑟)𝐴𝐶𝐿𝑟=1), but though the math might be legible in the abstract, things get more complicated in concrete terms: “To work out the Kármán line on an extraterrestrial planet I suspect you’d need to know the temperature.” The book’s energy comes from its application of the idea of the Kármán line to borders of all kinds. “We are thinking a lot about mindset,” says a man on the radio in the poem “Uranium Yellow”: the distinction between thought and the mind is a kind of Kármán line between reality and metareality. “I think he calls himself a neurobiologist,” recalls the speaker: the blood/brain barrier is the Kármán line of the body. The Kármán line might even be the signature line that the speaker deletes “when writing / personal emails,” tracing the edge between the public and private virtual versions of the self.

In the poem “What the Boundary,” I hear in the title an echo of William Blake’s “The Tyger” (“What the hammer? what the chain? / In what furnace was thy brain?”). The Kármán line divides space into a Blakean fearful symmetry that makes the known world seem safer—we can measure it, mark its delineations, perhaps even explore all of it—but also makes the unknown that much more vast and wild. As much as we crave the escape beyond the Kármán line into the infinite, Atterbury writes, we fear in exact parallel what lies beyond what we can measure. The formula for the Kármán line is simple—having the variables to plug into the equation to get an answer is the impossible part.

—Adrienne Raphel

Photograph by Helen Rouner.

The evening is balmy on Little Island. Already, I’ve forgotten that there’s a highway just on the other side of the slope, beyond which programmers are riding scooters home from the Google offices and tourists are taking selfies with a globally migrating installation of rattan elephants meant to symbolize “coexistence.” The carefully overgrown flora, maximalist and faintly tropical, is still lush here in early September, and it’s been a long time since the Meatpacking District felt more like a neighborhood than a novelty.

It’s an impression, I’m learning anew, that gets stranger with repetition. I’m standing in the same place I was last night when the authorities canceled the performance of Anthony Roth Costanzo’s The Marriage of Figaro for a rainstorm that never quite materialized. The crowd then had exhibited all five stages of grief at the news: The Marriage of Figaro is sold out for the entirety of its nearly four-week run, and there is no rain date. Returning to the pier tonight, having been granted a reserved seat by the gracious staff, I have a vague sense of traumatic reenactment, that retracing my steps like this and expecting a different outcome might be a sign of my impending insanity.

Behind me in line for the show, a professor from the NYU Stern School of Business is holding forth on the strategies his digital marketing class will have to leverage this term so that their mock businesses might maximize fake shareholder value; in front of me, two women are debating whether the headshot on a CEO’s bio page does, in fact, match another photo one of them has open on her phone, of a man on vacation in a rainforest. The skyline glimmers before us here on Barry Diller’s $260 million pleasure park, on stilts in the Hudson River, and one man wears a fedora with an ace of spades tucked into the ribbon. The opera’s three-and-a-half-hour running time has been cut to an Ozempic-thin ninety minutes, and the exquisite Italian libretto is being projected in internet-speak English surtitles accented with the occasional emoji. The show promises to be art in line with that great contemporary ideal: frictionlessness.

Performances of Beaumarchais’s Le mariage de Figaro, the play on which the librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte based the opera, were banned in Louis XVI’s France and its author imprisoned. Lore has it that Joseph II, the Holy Roman emperor and a self-styled liberal reformer, permitted the opera adaptation on the condition that it omit the protagonist’s iconic speech, about how working for a living ought to earn Figaro a greater right to power than his master, the Count, who has done nothing of value with his life but be born noble. Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro debuted in 1786; in 1793, a public that had imbibed Beaumarchais’s rhetoric decapitated Joseph’s younger sister Marie Antoinette.

But tonight, any radical politics have been safely contained—so contained as to find voice in a single person. The star countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo is singing all the major roles himself, cheerfully covering seven jobs, alongside a cast who mutely provide more bodies to fill out the stage. Thus, Costanzo is both the servant girl Susanna and the predatory Count Almaviva, who intends to exercise his medieval droit de seigneur and bed his employee on her wedding night. Susanna resists; antics ensue. Opera companies have taken to billing Mozart and Da Ponte’s Don Giovanni, which can play light or dark, as a #MeToo opera. No such luck with Figaro, indisputably a buffa—even when not performed à la Monty Python, as it is tonight. Conveniently, a solo production can sidestep the issue altogether: the complicated erotics of jealously and coercion are now essentially masturbatory, the audience’s complicity downgraded to invited voyeurism. The nobleman gets to have his cake, and we get to eat it.

When the lights dim on the amphitheater, an eight-piece ensemble begins an electronically amplified rendition of Mozart’s overture beneath a credit reel (all credits to Costanzo, of course) of JibJab-style chattering heads. The spotlight catches our star, who grins: we’re off. In the opening scenes, the production really is a one-man show: Costanzo acts out each role in a tightly choreographed swapping of signifying garments and spinning doors. It’s an astounding feat of vocal stamina and physical comedy, and it’s obviously unsustainable. Sure enough, by “Ah, son perduto!,” the first real ensemble number, Costanzo has retreated into a curtained chair and sings out of sight while other actors hammily lip-synch the libretto in his place. For the rest of the production—with the exception of a genuinely stellar, if unavoidably Ed Sheeran–adjacent, use of a loop pedal in the act 2 finale—our star essentially provides a backing track to deliberately bad acting, accentuated by innumerable stage slaps and shrieking and shooting confetti into the air and bouncing on a trampoline in a desperate bid to hold the attention of an audience who, despite seeming to enjoy the chaos, is already lighting up the theater by scrolling Instagram. It’s a strange mode of attention, in any case, to ask an audience to inhabit, to resist becoming immersed in the scene before them and instead remain aware of how it’s being produced.

An audience unfamiliar with Mozart’s opera has no idea what’s going on, and the tween down my row wants everyone to know she’s upset about that. This, too, the production tries awkwardly to fix: during what presumably would have been an intermission had the production been less afraid of losing its audience, an actor reads out a summary of the plot thus far, forcibly swapping out whatever magic has been made onstage for digestible bullet points. Playing for time so Costanzo can rest his voice, actors explain that Beaumarchais’s play started the French Revolution “because the servants had opinions or something,” and they riff on Figaro’s illicit speech, with a big punch line about his being so desperate to make a living that he resorts to stealing—“I became a banker!” The audience howls with laughter, not a guillotine in sight.

The big joke as we enter act 3 is that the overwork his feat requires nearly kills Costanzo. He collapses after “Voi signor, che giusto siete” and is rushed offstage on a gurney. (One review of the production celebrates Costanzo as “the hardest-working countertenor in the biz.”) He returns to sing the opera’s great seria lament, “Dove sono,” with a medical scope down his throat, his frantically vibrating vocal folds projected onto two large screens. The intubation echo may be inadvertent, but it’s fitting that here grief is literally being swallowed: Little Island was being built during the horrors of spring 2020, just down the Hudson from the USNS Comfort, the ship that became a widely detested symbol of the city’s belated and inadequate COVID-19 response. The association between the two did not help reassure vulnerable New Yorkers about the city budget’s relationship to private wealth.

These kinds of elaborate public parks funded by the aristocracy were popular in Europe in the eighteenth century, their heyday coinciding with Mozart’s. They often have been theaters for the politics of inequality. Families were taking Sunday strolls in the Place de la Concorde when skirmishes between the armed foreign instruments of the ancien régime and the citizens of Paris escalated to the storming of the Bastille. During Little Island’s construction, the Hudson River Park’s sunbathers and rollerbladers gave way to vast choruses of marchers protesting state violence. Three hundred were kettled, assaulted with batons and pepper spray, and arrested in the Bronx. The city promised greater police accountability. Before long, it could seem that American social forces had been placed behind the fourth wall once more, from where they could be applauded.

Amid the final act, fireworks start going off over New Jersey. Costanzo has to project even louder over the explosions, the actors mime even more manically as the crowd en masse turns to look elsewhere. The trampoline has moved behind the stage, to the edge of the railing; one bad bounce and the jumper will launch himself into the Hudson. But it’s all under control. They’ve done this before. As the final minutes of the show arrive, after over an hour and a half of Costanzo singing for them, the actors finally lend their voices to the opera’s ultimate number, grinning and playing directly to the audience from the lip of the stage: “Gente, gente, all’armi, all’armi!” (Gentlemen, to arms!)

Helen Rouner is an associate editor at Penguin Press and the fiction editor of the Cleveland Review of Books. She lives in Brooklyn.

From Six Drawings by Robert Horvitz, a portfolio published by The Paris Review in 1978.

The following entries came from notebooks the writer and psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas kept between 1974 and 1977. These notebooks were not written or edited for publication–Bollas says they were more like “mental scratch pads where the author simply writes out what he is thinking in the moment without, ironically, thinking about it.” The entries touch on things Bollas was reading at the time, scenes he saw in London, what he was observing in patients–and, more often than not, the ways these all intersected in his thoughts. We selected these entries in part because they cover a period of time when he was reading and thinking on and off about the work of Herman Melville, alongside many other questions about character, the self, and others.

Undated entry, 1974

Let us imagine that all neuroses and psychoses are the self’s way of speaking the unspeakable. The task of analysis is to provide an ambience in which the neurotic or characterological speech can be spoken to the analyst and understood. It is not so much [a question of] what are the epistemologies of each disorder but what does psychoanalytical treatment tell us about them? We must conclude that it tells us that all conflict is flight from the object and that analysis restores the structure of a relation so that the patient can engage in a dialogue with the object.

The style of the obsessive-compulsive, for example, is in the nature of a closed cognitive and active world. If obsessive-compulsive behavior is memory, what is being recalled? It seems to me that obsessive-compulsive behavior is a mimetic caricature of rigid mothering. It is caricatured self-mothering which [may] recall [interpret] the mother’s handling of the child.

How else can we account for the shifts in disorders if we don’t take into account the paradigms which generate them? Insofar as we know that patterns of mothering vary historically, can’t we assume that each disorder remembers the primary object relation? Indeed, why else does psychoanalysis go back to childhood when presented with conflict? Because it is understood by most to be functionally derivative of infancy.

The only problem is that the philosophical assumptions of this hypothesis remain unappreciated, to wit, all disorders speak the individual’s past and they ultimately speak the subject’s interpretation of the past and therefore are a form of remembering. The advantage of this to the person is to value his disorder as a statement, not simply a dysfunction. This is the difference between the hermeneutic and functional traditions of psychoanalysis.

A symptom is a way of thinking. Remembering is a way of thinking. Symptoms are some form of the subject’s thinking about himself. Psychoanalysis is a way of two people thinking together about one person’s thinking.

A patient brings a mood, thought, confusion, a blank—collages of himself—and the analyst provides the space. The therapeutic alliance is simply: we are thinking and working together. The transference and countertransference: we are feeling for each other together.

Undated, 1974

“American literature”

American writers speak the true self, while the country doesn’t listen. Melville tries to identify with this American false self—the external explorer and conqueror—but fails and the true self breaks through.

Undated, 1974

“Ahab”

What is absolutely essential is to keep in mind that Moby Dick is an invention, a projected object. The horrid irony of Ahab’s effort to break through the “pasteboard mask” is that he is the object behind the mask! He is the originating subjectivity. Does Melville make this irony specific?

The five phantoms loosed in chapter 47 are the loosening of Ahab’s internal objects: or the objectivization of internal selves. Rage permits the dissociations to be loosed though never integrated. Rage—especially in the search for the whale—is a loosening of or an exorcism of internal objects. The whole point of the trip is to exorcise the phantoms and to put them into the whale.

Undated, 1975

It is one of the ironies of existence that you can love the other only after you have lost the other. With ego development the fusion with the other is lost, a necessary precondition for recognizing the other’s separateness, but nonetheless a losing of one’s [fused] self.

Undated, 1975

“Melville’s ethics”

At a time when the other is sought outside, as a deity, an idea, or history, Melville’s hero points toward the struggle to find other as the unconscious self. In a sense as man has destroyed culture (collective dream/play space) he then assumes the responsibility of it and comes to a point of wisdom: culture always reflected him; he created it, it came from him. The sacred, profane, shared, etc., all experienced as outside; Melville says we must experience an inside other.

Thus he has in Mardi and in Moby-Dick a transitional metaphysical and psychical moment between other as outside (the whale) while Melville gently proves it to be inside the self. It is important to see this as Melville’s ethic. Outside, there is neither solution nor absolution; nor is either ever possible. Insight, the seeing into the self, to witness and behold the other as inside is the shock of re-cognition that Melville asks of us. It is the venue of the psychoanalyst as well, but the psychoanalyst after Freud’s metapsychological works processed the other and ethically disowned it.

Free association, which was a way of access, against the resistance of man, became a means of disowning the other by processing it. A novelist like Melville searches inside himself, comes to the point of seeing and holds the fundamental fact of the internal other.

December 10, 1975

“On good interpretation as poetry”

It is the form of an interpretation that is most effective. We must know that our best interpretations are poetic in their structure and delivery, so that the form holds words in such a way as to deeply affect the patient. In the same way, poetry rather than prose gets to us in a deeper way.

January 22, 1976

Out of the debris of our dying culture (early twentieth century) comes a new mythology and a new language. We see this early in Baudelaire who finds the symbolic inside the city; we discover it in Barthes (Mythologies) who creates a new mythology. It is godless. It is ordinary. As Barrett points out in Irrational Man, cubism is the ontologizing of the banal object, because out of the debris only objects are left.

The psychoanalytical experience is, in free association, the use of the ordinary (i.e., trivial language) to remythologize the person, to find his myth, his culture, through the debris. From the debris of his own words, which up till now he has found barren, a wasteland, he discovers meaning and then his own myth.

The analyst is the person, par excellence, who carries the person through the wasteland of the self, and who holds.

Where has the debris come from?

From an explosion in the nineteenth century of human value and belief. We are commodities, objects-to-ourselves, defined by use or function.

The death of culture. Debris. Playing with debris (Dadaism). Creating a new language.

The analytic process: death of the old self; debris and the sense of dislocation; playing with the debris; searching in anger, despair; through reflection, finding one’s self.

Barrett says that before man is a being, he is a “being-in” (111): taking Heidegger’s point about Being in the World. In modern man this Being in, or the essence of our being, has been lost. It can be re-found in psychoanalysis.

In Coleridge’s “Dejection: An Ode” and in Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts we see man expressing his sense of loss of being-in the actual world. We have seen this earlier with Pascal, though in his situation it was as much the losing of a spiritual world: being in a world of spirit. Being-in spiritually (mythically) and Being-in actually (materially) have been severed. It is this loss which writes the “Wasteland” and founds existentialism.

Out of this comes man and world as debris, cut up in Dada and Joyce, and now a new myth of man emerges. What is the new man?

The silence of the patient comes after despair over the word. They have said, perhaps, a great deal, but begin to have a feeling of despair over the word. This despair sponsors a silence; it is silence in the face of the unthinkable; the absence in the core of a person over a truly spontaneous sense of being-in the world. Their speech has been a narrative account, a construction, often beautifully or bravely rendered.

The patient of today can speak only for so long. Speech is an effort. It is an attempt to hold off the void. (Pascal.) The silence denotes emptiness and the absence of the other. The analyst must be absence coming eventually into presence through holding.

We focus on the mother as the cause, but in fact, she is all that is left of one who gives meaning, breathes life into the other, and so we focus on her. She can never make up for the void in the culture. Our search into this relation, solely, is a misdirected one.

Character and creation. Our being does have voice through character. To hear it is a task, painful, awful. It is the voice of our emptiness yet through the transference—the analytic paradigm—our character changes.

In Moby-Dick the myth explodes (capitalism, Protestantism). We are left with Bartleby, mute among the debris—dead letters. The Confidence-Man remythologizes by manipulating the ordinary into the fantastic. He picks up debris and maps the fantastic.

After 1914 man learns, according to William Barrett, that the solitude of being a self is irreducible regardless of how completely we seem to be part of a social milieu. Man is no longer contained in a social fabric. But with our patients the tragedy is that each must fashion a life out of a wasteland.

In the sixties, politics, group movements, the therapies, communes, etc., were all attempts to fashion cultures. The Beatniks (Kerouac, etc.) were the first.

It is silly to say “counterculture” as there was no culture there in the first place.

Each of us carries within our own debris. It is our past: a past not held within a familial, social, and cultural container to be given recurrently back to us. We don’t know our past. We only have images, memories, pictures etc. We bring this flotsam to the analyst who gathers the pieces; he gives form to our content—if we can trust him to do this—we find our past. This is the analyst as the transformational object: the one who gives form to our content and thereby transforms the content itself, by giving it meaning.

Out of the debris of our past emerges our own mythology. Why have I been so moved when on one bright day I witnessed from a 10,000-ft. peak of the Sierra Madre a tiny train thousands of feet below crossing the California desert? Why should this experience be so close to me, seem to hold me? It was a question, in fact, that I had never asked at the time. Its essence evaporated into the diversions of my life, though now and then I recovered it.

In analysis I found two things about myself. One was that, as my father had gone off to war when I was three months I did not see him until I was nearly two. I was overly eager not to see my mother disappear as well. At nursery school, it was my fate to stand up high on the steps of the slide—not to go down—in order to watch in the distance for the first sight of my mother who would come to collect me.

So being up high and searching for something vital and joyful was part of my personal idiom: the creation of my myth of significance and order.

The other mythical object was the train, which has always filled me with sadness and, strangely, contentment at the same time. So it was in my analysis that I discovered that it was by train that I left my birthplace and my father and also it was to the train station that every day my grandfather took me to see the train go by. Perhaps he did it out of his own love of trains or perhaps it was because I indicated my desire to see trains and he, in kindness, facilitated this wish. What the myth of trains gave to me in analysis, with the understanding of the essence of the aesthetic experience on the mountaintop, was how an experience visualised for me a deep myth: searching for recovery from my mother, longing to be reunited with my father. The experience of looking on the mountaintop was me.

May 9, 1976

“Metaphysical psychology”

Is it the eventual affirmation of the negative? Is Moby-Dick an affirmation of brotherhood, through the destruction of isolated fanaticisms? Ishmael lives to share a narrative with others, unifying men through discourse, while Ahab uses men to fulfill the fantastic demands of his private culture.

November 4, 1976

“On a character serving in a restaurant”

I am watching a young woman who is the waitress (wife) in an artificially lit Italian café that serves sandwiches to the English. The surroundings are without character, rather like the set of a television film, suggesting its impermanence. There is little here, except the come and go. The first time I ate here, she paid me no attention—flung the food on the table. Yet, tonight, I have discovered her use of herself as a character. She dissociates from the surroundings, defying the anomie by being a character. She throws her hands through her hair, punches out the orders, laughs or teases the locals—yet she is totally self contained. I find this interesting as I am reminded of Marx’s theory of alienation. She deals with it all by laboring her character: it becomes the surrounding of the self, and she looks no further.

Undated, 1977

“The text dreaming”

The text would have to undergo an experience of its own dream. Like the dreamer, the text would have to be confused. It is not simply the author who has the dream as the dream elements are already in the text at hand. With Stubb’s dream I must see what holds up to the dream and then what occurs after the dream.

The point is to establish the composition of the dream space, in literature or in life. It is an area of

1. Wonder or terror
2. Actualization
3. Enigmatic meaning
4. The place where the thinker is the thought of himself, or, the thinker the participant in the thought

The dream in literature must be a region of wonder, separate from yet reflexive to the rest of the text. It must be the dream’s text, as it must use and pit itself against the text, in order for us to consider it as a dream. A space in relation to the context of events in the fiction. Is it an allegory within an allegory?

What is the difference between a vision and a dream?

I am concerned with a text which has a dream, a moment when the continuity of its presence of mind is interrupted by a dissociation in its consciousness, in a space that I have called the dream space. The text can have its own dream if at this moment the cumulative experience of imagery-making, of plot construction, of characterization, breaks down into a self-reflexive dream process. This is rather like a breakdown, but a breakdown of a very special kind. In such moments the author yields, under the demand of the text’s unconscious logic, to the text’s (and his) need to share a dream with each other. (So, the author shares a dream with his text!) We could say that this moment will be more available in the modern novel, where the author already has found an intimacy of rapport with the text, where he uses more the idioms of his own internal psychic structures than the conventions of literary creativity. Even so, few authors—as Poulet insists—achieve a level of sincerity toward their own text. I should say, an intimacy where the text is the container of unintegrated subjectivity, and where the author’s Other is not an alienated moi, but a subjective object.

To the person writing or dreaming, writing (or textualization) and dreaming are processes of thinking about being, not products. We must, as E. Said argues, reacquaint ourselves with writing as a process, not a finished product.

This can also happen because an author, like Melville, needs to dream within the text; though the experience of the dream will be in the textual space, will use the history of the text for the dream material, and, as such, will be the text’s dream. If an author, like Melville, yields himself to the text, then we can say that the text will dream him, or dream about him.

April 26, 1977

“Melville”

The core fantasy seems to be of a desire for an object to be plundered. In Moby-Dick this was the whale, but this leads to annihilation. In “Bartleby” there is a desire for the experience to be provided by the other (the employer), with a dead ending in the brick-wall prison. In “I and My Chimney” there is an attachment to the object as inanimate and under the fantasy control of the self.

What can we call this cluster? It is a private phantasy: an autistic phantasy that materializes within the fiction, but isn’t made explicit as such. In “Bartleby” it is addressed to the other. In Pierre what do we make of the episode when the character crawls under the rock, to be born again? Is that another cluster? Is the fictional space a place where Melville can have this phantasy? An autistic voice?

May 2, 1977

“Melville”

Literary perversion.

Idiot event.

Burlesque.

Are there certain fantasies of the text that are not thoughts per se but ritual enactments of ego structures? Deep memories, paradigms, of the subject’s experience of the other?

Is an allegorical personification a character? Insofar as this structure speaks structurally, it is.

The idiomatic arrangement of character structures is the voice of character: the interpretation of self.

Does character speak in fiction more uniquely as the other becomes a phantom (death of God) eliciting a mute yell from the subject—as the voice of character? All character is utterance to an absent other, and with the death of God, this absence provokes deep language cries.

In some characterizations—especially sagas—we must ask, What is left out? The character may be noble, set against a surrounding world that is very violent. This is the split-off voice of character, which in the nineteenth century is joined to the self. Character defends the self against the internal world.

How does character relate—i.e., to us, the objects around it? Such use, does it reveal idioms?

The absence of a specific character language, particularly the person who seems to be strong and induces our projective identifications, creates a dream space for us. Character is the container of the reading subject’s pure self. We are Other.

May 3, 1977

“Character in fiction”

Does character in fiction depend on what the hero deals with or transforms? Where are the events of being? Character has to do with the idiom of transformation: an interpretation of the self. Where is the locus of transformation in fiction: in the author, or, is it yielded over to character?

What is the relation of character to the author’s use of character?

Character in fiction is a type of speech which may or may not occur in fiction. It is an interpretation of the self. If it is only a rhetorical device, it will only be interpreting the self as a rhetorical act. However, if the self experiences an internal world and relating, then character speech may occur as a reading of that self.

Rhetorical versus psychological character.

How do we experience the character in fiction? Or, how do others [other characters in a novel] experience the character in fiction? He is set up in others and in the reader. Is the text, the Other for the character? Does it reply to him or hold him?

Does character reflect the mental process of the text? Is character an interpretation of being inside the text? Where text is the psychical process, does character interpret this?

Undated, 1977

“Character”

Character in a text expresses something. Invariably, it is the discourse of structure, of handling by a self, and is a different hermeneutic. A character may say “I love you” but the formality of his being may say “Only at a safe distance do I love you.” This speech is the discourse of character and is a subjective interpretation of the self rather than the professed themes uttered by the subject. Think of Heidegger’s notion of the existence-structure of the self. Ishmael and Ahab transform the subject “I will hunt the whale” in different ways. Their style of handling is an interpretation of the self. It will speak fundamental paradigms of transformation of need, desire, fear, etc., of instincts and relating to the object. When an author releases different characters into fiction he is releasing varying ego structures in himself, different selves, to personify aesthetics of being.

“The Aesthetics of Being: Character as Discourse on the Self.”

We cannot decenter character from the crucial reality that there is an interpretive presence in character. The structures of character are idiomatic internalisations of self-object (and self as instinctual presence as object) relations. These are matters of choice. Ishmael and Ahab make choices derived from their different ego structures.

By releasing character the author uses different styles of transformation of desire and relating to the other.

In fiction, each character embodies a character memory.

Does any of it have to do with the experience of the text? In the sense that an author may release his internal world into the text, characters are different modes (ego structures) of handling and interpreting these themes. This handling (transformation) is the aesthetic of character.

Ego structure. The infant experiences the mother. On the basis of the infant’s experience of the mother he makes choices about handling the mother.

In Moby-Dick Melville puts one ill and one healthy ego structure alongside one another, in the juxtaposition of Ahab and Ishmael.

The mother’s handling of her infant is an aesthetic and points the way to her notion of the baby’s body and self. Her handling complements the baby’s emergent ego (handling) functions. As the mother handles instinct and impulse, so the baby internalizes her paradigms. This is the internalization of an interpretation of the self.

Undated, 1977

“Metaphor as secret”

Metaphor takes a word which applies to one thing and transfers it to another because it seems a natural transfer. This occurs in Melville’s pyramid fantasies where clusters of metaphor sequester hidden meanings. The chimney has hidden spaces and is a metaphor of secret places. Such an act is at the root of fiction. Keeping the source a secret, yet communicating from it. Is it some deep ego structure that finds symbolic equations for itself?

Undated, 1977

“Character versus subjectivity”

Character is memory. It is an aesthetic of being that forms and transforms experience according to an unconscious hermeneutic. It is mute in the sense that the receiver is absent (except in analysis) and the subject who enacts his character is blind and deaf to his aesthetic.

In a sense, character reserves an interpretation of being that may be at variance with the person’s subjective notion of their essence. It is a clash between the discourse of character—which speaks through the aesthetic of being—and the voice of desire: the subject’s play of the imaginative possibilities of self.

This is, perhaps, best illustrated in a person who is (as existent-structure) a certain way. He handles himself and others in a certain style. A syntax of being and relating. Now, all this may be unknown by the subject and, indeed, at wild variance with his own “internal world” or, at least, his experience of the world.

It raises the question: What is subjectivity? Or, can there be a genuine subjectivity without hearing from the discourse of character? I think the discourse of character is a mute speech. It means “listening” to one’s silent speech, almost as if we bear with us a shadow self who prints in an aesthetics of being a dialogue with an absent object. In psychoanalysis, this absent object may reappear in the transference.

In fiction, at least the modern novel, character may exist alongside consciousness; in particular, the consciousness of the author … or the world of the novel. What is the discourse of the self? Does the consciousness of the author grapple with the violence of character; or, is it remedied by superficial placing in indexical tongues (sociological matrices) rather than as an idiomatic—unconscious—discourse of the ego: the impersonal self?

What novels do I know of where the subject grapples with character? Moby-Dick, Crime and Punishment. It means a conscious confrontation with the mute determinacy of one’s idiomatic discourse. Character is autistic, in that the receiver of the discourse is absent (the object of all characterological defenses) and the language is, thereby, a dead language. It is the fact that character is a dead language—a language no longer spoken between the original speakers—that gives critics the sense that character is conservative, or inhibiting.

Most novelists understand only the effect of character—that is, linking it with mute determinacy—and this principle is then reprinted in a novel, in social terms (cf. Goffman), but that is not the truth of character, which is deeply enigmatic and aggravating.

Many novels are an attempt to escape the enigma of character by a manic-omnipotent staging of character, giving to themselves a control over character—“characterization”—that is a denial of the very experiences of one’s character.

Recent psychoanalytical studies of the self—in particular, the borderline and narcissistic—are concerned really with a patient whose primary speech is character, whose “subjective” life is blank or chaotic and who refuses to be informed as a subject, of themselves as a character.

Character is destiny if understood, and fate if not understood.

Few authors permit this determinacy to be with them. Their act of omnipotent creation defies destiny. Yet some writers do: Melville, Shakespeare.

December 15, 1977

“Denial and paranoia”

A patient denies memory and both severs and dissolves linking, so he has no internal, accrued sense of self. He has no tradition upon which he can rest. His unconscious motivation is to deny the absence of a transformational object and to reject what is, to use the semiology of the self as a reproach to the other, who must feel guilt.

But, the attack on linking leaves him without structured psychological means of living-in-the-world. To survive, he uses paranoid vigilance—to scan the environment—instead of psychic insight, to know the self. Hence, paranoid thinking is a defense against anxiety surrounding survival of the self, that occurs when there has been an unconscious subversion of psychological insight. That is why he is not concerned with knowing himself or with insight, but only with how I feel about him and whether he is in trouble or not.

Christopher Bollas is a psychoanalyst and writer whose books include The Shadow of the Object, Cracking Up, and Meaning and Melancholia, among others. This extract is adapted from Streams of Consciousness: Notebooks, 1974-1990, which will be published by Karnac Books in England in October.

Excerpt from a Joe Brainard letter/booklet (“My New Plants”) to James Schuyler, December 1965, used by permission of The Estate of Joe Brainard and courtesy of the Mandeville Special Collections Library, University of California-San Diego.

The artist and writer Joe Brainard and the poet James Schuyler, both central figures in the New York School of poets and painters, met in 1964. The two soon became close friends and confidants. Brainard’s letters to Schuyler included here span the summer of 1964 through 1969 and were written while Brainard was moving from apartment to apartment in New York City and spending summers in Southampton, Long Island, and Calais, Vermont.

You can read an interview between James Schuyler and the critic and poet Peter Schjeldahl in the new Fall issue of The Paris Review, no. 249, here. Schuyler and Schjeldahl were nominally meeting to discuss the poet Frank O’Hara, but the interview became a wide-ranging conversation about poetry, New York in the fifties, and the cast of characters that surrounded them. 

August 1968
Southampton, Long Island

Dear Jimmy,

Wouldn’t you know it? My rose petals didn’t work out. Some of them were not dried enough when I put them into those small Welch’s grape juice bottles and so they mildewed and turned green. So I had to throw them all away. Now, however, I have begun sand bottles. (At night) I don’t waste my time with such stuff in the daytime. At any rate—I have many colors of sand now (food coloring) all in many dishes all waiting for tonight (everyone is leaving tonight) when I’m going to see if it works. I have seen beautiful ones with very intricate designs but for my first one I will only do stripes. A nice size, those Welch’s bottles. I don’t, however care for the juice. When Pat and Wayne [Padgett] were here they would drink it for me (and loved it) but now I’ve nobody. I had (just had) several days of bad painting (sloppy) but today was very good. Today was (is) the most beautiful day I can ever remember: very sunny and very cool. And very quiet: Sunday. Many Sundays seem somehow odd to me, but today was just perfect. I do love it here. It just doesn’t make sense to go back to the city. Except for people. That’s where so many of the best people are, to me. The phone is ringing but I am in the studio. Kenward  is out watching the annual tennis tournaments. John and Scott are at the beach. John and John Scott (I don’t mean John and Scott, I mean John and John) are driving back tonight to the city. John to visit his mother for her seventy-fifth anniversary. I am talking of John Ashbery and John Scott, John’s new colored boy friend. I was afraid that perhaps you would get confused with John Button and Scott Burton. John and Scott, you may not know, have broken up. As I understand it tho, it was a mutual split. I am drinking a rosé wine. It’s about five o’clock. Once everyone gets back together we are going to an opening around the corner of Leon … (can’t remember). He is a very old romantic-realist and slick with lots of birds and fish nets. You know his work I am sure. Very much like Bernard. Morris Golde says that Fairfield [Porter]’s paintings looked terrific at the Biennale. He was very impressed with the number of them: said there were “lots.” I did some yellow pansies this morning with Fairfield’s yellow-black for green. I think that I would have done it anyway (?) but I always think of it as Fairfield’s thing: yellow-black for green. Actually, I have seen it in very few paintings that I have seen it in: one being the one I have. I hate to see today go. Will write more tomorrow, or soon—

Well—they didn’t leave around six as planned but instead we all (except Kenward) went to a queer beach party with Safronis [Sephronus Mundy]  and Jack (know them?) Safronis is from Sodus, like John A[shbery]. At any rate, it got 40 degrees and so we didn’t go to the beach but instead to some terrible interior decorator’s place. His name is Jack. I have never (no exaggeration) met anyone so disgusting in my entire life. Also there was a beautiful Indian boy who has been after me for several years now. I must admit that he turns me on terrifically. There is something fishy tho as he is so beautiful he could do a lot better than me. He is the Gerard Malanga type but he really has what it takes to be that type. He may know him he is quite notorious: Tosh Carrillo. At any rate, I have come to regard him as somewhat of the devil. Anyway, it was upsetting seeing him last night. (Temptation) I think you know me well enough to know that I am rather liberal. I’ve had many affairs since I started going with Kenward and I don’t feel one ounce of guilt. But this Tosh guy, there is really something dangerous about him. I hope you don’t mind my telling you this. It shook me up so much to see him again as, of course, I’m very attracted to him too. I hope by telling you about it I can forget for a while. So—today is another beautiful day: cool and hot. There is (like yesterday) a bit of autumn in the air and yet the sun is shining very brightly. It’s really the best of both seasons and I love it. This morning I got up at seven and picked three pansies and put them into three small bottles. One yellow pansy, one red-purple and yellow, and one solid blue-purple. I did three paintings of them (all three in each) and I am sure that at least one of them will look good in the morning. They are not so loose as before. More like summer before last. When I finish writing you I am going to read “Le Petomane” (about a French farter) And tonight I planned to do my first sand bottle.

Oh—the opening yesterday was paintings by Leonid. They weren’t very good but I rather admired a very details [sic] : details painted with one or two strokes of the brush. Like birds. Gore Vidal was there he looked quite young (35–40). Today is the twelfth. That means we have about two more weeks.

Right? Some of your house plants don’t look too great. I think that at first I watered them too much. They are not dead tho. So far there hasn’t been any serious damage done. A chunk of black linoleum in the laundry room

came up. Too much water was left at various times on the wooden tops in the new kitchen part: a few black streaks in the wood. I am watching it carefully now. I’m going to get this in the mail now. Do write soon. Summer is almost over and winter will not write much. One thing I forgot to tell you is that

I use your bike. I love riding it and I knew that you would not mind. Did I tell you that we are going to give a cocktail party for Jane [Freilicher] for her opening? Not Sunday (the opening), but Saturday before.

Very much love,
Joe

P.S. Did you see our names in the Sunday Times?
About painter poet collaborations by Peter S.

June 1969
Calais, Vermont

Dear Jimmy__

Last night (how nice it is to be writing to you again) I made a real strawberry short cake. I found the recipe in a “Family Circle.” I must say it was awfully good. And very easy. Egg, butter, milk, flour, baking powder, salt, and bake for fifteen minutes. Today is my second day in Vermont and I love being here. I especially love being here because I know I will be here for ten weeks. What to do? That’s what I am thinking about now. Mainly I just want to paint but also I want to get my manuscript together and do an issue of “C” Comics. This is too much to do in ten weeks but I imagine that I will try. If I had any sense in my head I would just paint and forget everything else but I enjoy “everything else” so much that I find this hard to do. So—as usual—I am torn between this or that or both. And—also I will pick both. It is still a bit cool up here. I continually (so far) wear a sweater. This morning (actually, it is still morning) I wrote a bit on a new thing I am writing called “I Remember.” It is just a collection of things I remember. Example:

“I remember the first time I got a letter that said ‘after five days return to’ on the envelope, and I thought that I was supposed to return the letter to the sender after I had kept it for five days.”

Stuff like that. Some funny, some (I hope) interesting, and, some downright boring. These, however, I will probably cut out. Unfortunately, I don’t have a very good memory, so it’s a bit like pulling teeth. I’ve been eating lots. I weighed in at 140 lbs. and I plan to arrive in N.Y.C. weighing at least 150. I plan to do this by eating lots and:

– 2 glasses of milk with Ovaltine everyday
– 1 big spoon of honey everyday
– eat lots of nuts at night
– vitamin B-12 pill every morning

I might even cut down on my smoking, but I doubt it. I am afraid that I don’t really care that much. In Tulsa I picked up some old school photographs of me. Enclosed is one of me in 1951. I also got some old newspaper photos and clippings of me which are very funny and very embarrassing. I’ll send them to you soon but I would like to have them back. Do keep this photo tho, if you want it. I am tempted to draw a line and write more tomorrow but actually I would enjoy this being your first summer letter so I’m going to go ahead and mail it. Do write.

Love, Joe

July 4, 1969
Calais, Vermont

Dear Jimmy__

You can’t know how nice, really, it was to get your letter. You write such nice letters even when you have nothing in particular to say. I am outside sunbathing again, and so are Anne [Waldman] and Lewis [Warsh]. Kenward is at the cabin he is writing, but surely nobody writes that much. Yesterday I sorted out all my oils, lined them up according to colors and stretched two canvases: 18″ x 24″. I thought I would start painting today but the sky is so clear and the sun is so hot, and actually, I didn’t (don’t) especially feel like it: painting. So—perhaps tomorrow. But I refuse to rush myself. No reason to except nervous habit. And nervous habit only produces works like I’ve done before. Which doesn’t have much to do with “painting,” as I see it. Or as I think I see it. (I don’t know what I’m talking about) Anne and Lewis are terrific people to live with. Lewis (so far) remains just as mysterious,  but in a friendly sort of way. Anne is just as nervous as me, which makes me feel not so nervous. We smoke a lot of “you know what.” Talk a lot. Eat a lot. Play cards some. (Pounce and Concentration) Did you ever play that? Concentration. I like it. If you don’t know how to play it, let me know, and I will explain it in my next letter. It’s very simple really. We read a bit every night from a “Woman’s Circle” or a “Woman’s Household” which reminds me: I want to send you some issues. Will soon. I don’t know how much I weigh now as we discovered that the scales are irregular. So—I am just eating a lot, altho it is not as much fun without being able to see (read) my gains. Next time we go into town, however, we are going to get a new pair. This I have never understood. Why scales are called a “pair.” Today is the 4th of July. Happy 4th! We here aren’t going to celebrate much, as far as I know, except that for dinner we are having a Harrington’s ham. There is a 4th of July parade today in East Calais, but I said “no thanks” to that, which put a damper on going. Nothing is more frightening to me than “Elks and Masons” and their children, etc. Besides, I don’t enjoy being an outsider. Did I tell you of a funny dream I had several nights ago? I don’t think so. At any rate—John Ashbery and I were chatting on my parent’s front porch and John said to me, “I think your Mondrian period was even better than Mondrian.” Actually, I never had a “Mondrian period” but in my dream I remember recalling the paintings I had done. They were just like Mondrian except with off-beat colors. Like slip [sic] peach and plum purple. Olive green. Etc. At any rate, I was awfully flattered. Frank O’Hara and J. J. Mitchell were there too, but I won’t go into that. Other people’s dreams are never as interesting as it seems they ought to be: to other people. Your advice is good. I do eat lots of nuts and I have been trying to eat as much as possible. Actually, getting better looking will probably only get me into more trouble, and make life more complicated. If I was wise I wouldn’t even try—but—once again—pardon the oil on this letter. It does help tho. And a warm shower afterwards. I am enclosing for you some “Button Face” note cards I sent away for from the “Woman’s Circle.” They’re very funny I think. Kenward and I have both been sending away for lots of stuff in order to get mail. Kenward has got lots of seeds. I got a “forget-me-not” necklace (“like grandma used to make”) which is somewhat of a disappointment. Also I got some crocheted butterflies which I gave to Kenward in celebration of the 1st day of July. They will be sewn on to curtains. I also got some “music post cards.” (Post cards with music on them) And some stars you glue to the ceiling and they glow in the dark. Like decals. I put them up in Anne and Lewis’s room and they like them. Someday it would be nice to do a whole ceiling. Also available is a friendly moon. I just went in for a Pepsi. It is now one o’clock. This afternoon I think I will get out my Polaroid and see what happens. Maybe we can swap pictures. Like those clubs do. Of a less intimate nature of course.  In your next letter to me would you please sign your name (your autograph) on a piece of white paper. I am beginning to put together my poet’s scrapbook and your autograph would be a big boom [sic] (Or a drawing?) I have drawings already by Ron and Ted and Frank and Kenward. Also I have many photos and clippings and wedding announcements, etc. It will be a nice book that will never end. The sun is really very hot today. Now I am sunning my back. This will be my first all-round tan since I was a kid. Kenward is doing pretty well too, tho his skin doesn’t tan as fast as mine. Obviously I am running out of talk. Will stop now. Do write again when you feel like it.

Love, Joe

P.S. Anne and Lewis city news:

John Giorno and Jasper Johns are back together again.
Pat and Ron leave for Tulsa this Monday for one week. Then three weeks traveling around California.
John Wieners’ parents had him committed but a plan is being worked out to get him out.
Dial-A-Poem will be continued next year from the “St. Marks Church.”
Bill Berkson has moved. His new address is 107 E. 10th St.
D. D. Ryan has been promoted to assistant producer, and now, is actually in the movie.
That’s about it.

(again) Love, Joe

Mid-July 1969
Calais, Vermont

Dear Jimmy:

Flowers not going too well. All the different greens (which seem to change from moment to moment) are driving me up the wall. Also—there is a red-purple I just can’t get. Also my wild flowers are too curvy (Art-Nouveau) and I can’t seem to straighten them out. A line (stem) like this [draws a smooth upward curve] always seems to end up like this [draws an upward curve with kinks in it] and, when I try to straighten them out, they seem flat (life-less) not that I have anything against curves. But my flowers are practically flying out of their bottles, off the canvas, to god only knows where. I never have liked El Greco much. Except for one pope. So—I am not painting today. A break. I am sunning. Today is a beautiful clear day, very blue, with not a cloud in sight. The sun is hot. It is about one o’clock. Kenward is coming back from the city around seven tonight. The whole back of me is peeling, as one day it got too much sun. So—I will have to start all over, little by little, as for several years it has been totally neglected. (Sun-wise) Not much is new. Except that the day lilies are out. The orange ones. In full bloom. All over. There are many more of them this year. And the milkweeds. They are everywhere. Which is O.K. with me. I like them. I read somewhere the other day that during the war they were used for lining coats. (Their fibers, or something, make good insulation.) Army coats. For very cold weather. It also said that their very small top leaves (the top two or three), when cooked taste like asparagus. I would say they taste more like spinach. And not very good spinach at that. Perhaps we didn’t cook them right yesterday. After oil painting all morning (I got up at 5:30!) I picked some grass and did lots of green ink and brush drawings of it. I am now cutting the grass out (with an X-Acto knife) and then I am going to put it all together, in layers, to make a solid patch of grass. (11″ x 14″) So far I have cut out two layers. It is quite delicate cutting and I have a big blister to prove it. (Delicate, but hard) It will be very pretty I know. It can’t miss. And it’s a good thing to do (cutting out grass) around four or five o’clock when your head is tired but you are still sort of wound up. Just before a drink. I plan to do a fern one too. If we ever get to Burlington (to get some more X-Acto blades). As it is rather intricate cutting one blade will not cut very much so finely. I could always send to the city for some. (Mail!) Now I am not sure what to do about my two oil paintings of two wild flowers arrangements. The actual flowers are gone now so I have a choice of “faking it” (which I am very good at) or forgetting them and start some new ones. I think I will do this (start some new paintings) as, if I’m going to fake it, I may as well wait until I get back to the city. Meanwhile, perhaps I can do some direct, here. I must keep reminding myself that this is not my purpose, now, to “produce good paintings” (rather to learn) about oils. About how things look. About color. Etc. Color is a real problem. I don’t know the tube colors so well as I know tempera jar colors. So I have to think. And thinking isn’t much good when it comes to color. From tempera painting I remember the best “right” colors more or less just happen. Do you know anything about toe nails? My right foot is bigger than my left foot and cowboy boots are not very good for you, but I wore them a lot last year anyway. The result is that my big toe nail is so squeezed together and it is very thick and sort of yellow. My idea is to file the entire nail (the top half, actually) down to how thin it ought to be. Do you think this would hurt? (The nail) That is to say, is a nail the same all the way through? I would hate to file away the surface of the nail and find something different underneath it. There are several health books here, all with toe nail sections, but you know how health books are. (No real information) They are cutting down some trees off to the left. (If one was entering the front door) So for days there has been constant sawing. What we hear, I guess, is like an echo. Like a car trying to start. One does get used to it tho. Mrs. [Louise Andrews] Kent’s son owns that land. Aside from getting lots of wood, it is supposed to be good for the land. (Thinning it) So Kenward said. So Ralph [Weeks] told Kenward Mrs. Kent is in the hospital. I don’t know if you know her well enough that you would want to send a card or not. I don’t know exactly what is wrong with her except that, really, she is very old. It is the Montpelier Hospital. The one Ron was in. Pat and Ron are either in Tulsa, or on their way to California. Or perhaps in California. It’s hard to keep track of the date up here. And I don’t know their plans anyway. (Date-wise) Sometime in August they will come up here next to visit some. Unless, by next year we are not very close. Which is possible. Actually we weren’t terribly close this year. Old friends don’t want you to change. And, of course, it works both ways. Or, perhaps it is just harder, around old friends, to try to change. At any rate—sometimes, around Pat and Ron (and especially Ted) I don’t feel like myself. (1969-wise) Of course, there are compensations. Like—I always feel very comfortable around Pat and Ron. And that’s NICE. I’m going to sign off before I find myself with a whole new page to fill. There has been no mail for two days as Kenward has been away. So—if I have received a letter from you and not mentioned it, this is why I haven’t received it. Do write.

Love, Joe

P.S. Actually, Ron is trying. Two times last year I got a kiss. And after seeing the Royal Ballet he said that Nureyev has a rear end like mine. For some reason I was very touched by that. (Wish it were true).

From Love, Joe: The Collected Letters of Joe Brainard, edited by Daniel Kane, to be published by Columbia University Press this November.

Joe Brainard (1942–1994) was raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and moved to New York City in 1960. He was a prolific writer and artist across many media, including paintings, collages, assemblages, and comic-strip collaborations with poets. His I Remember has been translated into fifteen languages, and his artworks are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, and many others. He died of AIDS-related pneumonia.