“He was a socialist?” I’d asked.

“They’re the worst!”

She was packing up her things to leave, the only student left in class after the other three had dropped out one by one, beginning at Christmas. The most recent had quit three weeks earlier, in May, after injuring his knee in a fall. So my sole survivor had already won “last man standing.” Would she continue until the end of the academic year in June?

Víctor Manuel is a singer-songwriter from Mieres, in mining country, and from his first success in the 1960s through to the present, he has sung about working men and women, their lives and struggles. I saw him in concert in Gijón in the mid 2000s at the Universidad Laboral, when he was already a legend, so he came to mind when my student mentioned the Laboral as architecture she admired. That was how spontaneous our conversation was—she mentioned architecture and I jumped to singers. And yet the connection was stronger than his concert at the Laboral auditorium.

The Laboral, built in the 1940s and ’50s, is a huge complex constructed around a grand courtyard, where a monumental bell tower rises above an oval chapel. Originally conceived as a residential and educational institution for miners’ children, particularly orphaned children, it was instead inaugurated as a vocational and residential school for boys. Partly abandoned in the ’80s and ’90s, it was revived in the 2000s as a cultural complex with the city’s conservatory, a performance hall and theater, and conference rooms and exhibition spaces. All in stone quarried from the mountains of Asturias.

I’d seen Joan Baez at the Laboral, too, I added.

“Joan Baez?” my student asked.

“The ’60s, counterculture, folk singers—Bob Dylan and all the rest?”

She didn’t know Joan Baez. She wouldn’t know “the rest,” either.

She wished me a good weekend and left. Her class was my last. I put my desk in order, wiped the board, and looked out the window. No sign of the neighborhood protest group that met many Wednesdays to march down the middle of the six-lane highway, stopping all traffic. They were rallying against the trucks using the main thoroughfare through their area to reach El Musel, the industrial port at the far end. The residents didn’t like the noise, pollution, and the lumbering weight and size of the semis shouldering through their streets.

Many of the residents of La Calzada are former miners—or people whose families come from La Cuenca, the mining region in Asturias. When the mines began closing in the 1980s and ’90s, many who worked there were given early retirement with good severance packages. The population of La Cuenca dropped as many families left the area. Now they live beside the ocean instead of in a narrow mining valley. Instead of black lung, their worries are the windows rattling when a semi passes. A good trade, though some mourn the lost traditions of generations.

But mining worries were more than gradual exposure to coal dust and the threat to health. In a song he wrote in the late ’60s, “La Planta 14,” meaning the 14th level in a mine, Victor Manuel describes the way a mining accident might play out. The reports, the fear, the miners and families gathering at the entrance to the shaft, the mining officials and government figures, the mine rescue brigade sent in to retrieve the bodies, a boy crying against a tree, and the long wait as one by one, the dead are brought out. In the song, it takes hours to bring up the last body; in real life, it might take much longer. Based on no particular accident, the song is a composite picture from the era. But the conditions in mines hardly changed for decades.

In contrast to deadly accidents, semis rumbling through your neighborhood seems a small thing. Especially since there’d be no trucks without the ships full of cargo, and no cargo without the consumer demand. You can’t have your cake and eat it, too.

But even without the trucks, there’d be other inconveniences and other complaints. There always are. Darse con un canto en los dientes is an absurdly violent saying that means literally, “Hit yourself in the teeth with a stone.” The message is to count yourself lucky that things are not worse. This saying, with its stone suggestive of blasted rock, seems especially well suited to miners. Had the Laboral been dedicated to miners’ orphans, some would likely have seen the gesture as compensatory, to keep people quiet. Even then, you can imagine bashing a stone against your teeth, because labor accidents are a given, and sympathy and recompense are not. It could be worse. Or so it would be said. And in fact, it was worse: That relief from hardship was never extended to the orphans.

Still, be grateful it isn’t even worse. Winning isn’t everything. Surviving is enough. Sometimes it’s the same. So I reflected as I got in my car and maneuvered between cars, trucks, taxis, and buses—everyone changing lanes and changing again, wanting nothing to impede them in their slot in the flow.

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This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.

The post “Homecoming” by Henry Sloss appeared first on The American Scholar.

Cunat begins each painting by sketching geometric forms on tracing paper, then paints primarily with Flashe—a vinyl-based paint that dries quickly with a matte finish—and acrylic on canvas, building layers of nuanced, shifting color. Unlike oil or casein paint (the latter, Cunat says, “smells like a baby smoking a cigarette”), Flashe has “surface resiliency, and as you consecutively put coats onto the surface of the canvas,”—her paintings require four to eight coats—“you get this wonderful, slight undulation within each field of color.” Acrylic, too, allows Cunat to “play with gradation and how one hue can shift to make a flower look like it’s in a sunset or certain shapes look like they’re receding or coming forward.” As with many color-field or abstract paintings, viewers often project their own associations onto the forms. Cunat doesn’t mind these interpretations of her work, so long as they don’t state the obvious. “If I have to hear one more person say that my paintings are really colorful, I’m going to lose my mind,” she says. “Only because yes, I get it. That was the point.”

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Amanda L. Andrei is a playwright, literary translator, and theater critic based in Los Angeles.

Go beyond the episode:

• Amanda L. Andrei’s “Found in Translation”
• Explore her plays, both original and in translation
• Photographs from a stage reading of Oana Hodade’s play Scene din viața familei Stuck
• The American Literary Translators Association offers resources and events for literary translators of all genres

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No doubt she offered insight and instruction along the way, but my enduring memory of her is the disappointment that crossed her face when, waiting for the train that would take us to Dachau, a few of us posed irreverently with candy cigarettes. It was winter then, and I remember standing in front of the elaborate fountain outside the Salzburg Cathedral, mugging for more photos in the bitter cold. We skipped the funicular, which may have been closed for the season, and walked the steep, winding path to the hilltop fortress. The day was cloudy, and the otherwise dramatic views were obscured in every direction. The Alps were invisible, and still somehow they loomed. A sharp wind lashed the hillside, penetrating our parkas.

This time around, it was August, and the streets were jammed with tourists and concertgoers attending the Salzburg Festival. Everywhere I turned, Mozart was streaming from some hidden speaker. I didn’t understand all those years ago why we had come to Salzburg, but climbing the footpath to the fortress a second time, I saw what Frau Bell must have wanted us to see: a beautiful city wedged between hills, a river running between them, rolling plains in one direction, mountains in the other. Atop the walls of the fortress, plein-air painters worked at their easels. The Austrian novelist and playwright Thomas Bernhard, noted for his polemical criticisms of his country, called Salzburg a cretinous, provincial dump, but the way the painters lovingly rendered the domes and crags and cupolas made it clear that his opinion is not universally held.

I was staying in a 500-year-old building, but my room had been renovated to look like a corporate hotel along a highway. Only the casements, opening onto the baroque façade of the opposite building, retained an air of the hotel’s past. All day below my window, children played in a kind of fountain that carried brightly colored plastic balls from one end of the sloping block to the other. Near the spot where the balls collected, a middle-aged man played Mozart on the goblets of a glass harp. Every now and then, a few notes from the Piano Concerto No. 21 would drift into my room.

The city’s wealth had originally grown from the salt mined in the region—hence the name (Salz meaning “salt”)—and with the earnings from their white gold, the prince-archbishops of the city-state built lavishly and defensively in an architecture of absolute power. Across the river from my hotel, for instance, stood the cathedral-cum-palace, now a living museum, preserved (like so much of the city) with spectacle in mind. A 17th-century visitor might recognize much of the cityscape, but the experience would still be surreal. Imagine returning home one night to find that your house had become a gift shop. And yet without those souvenirs, without the simulation of memory, the old fortresses would have long since crumbled into ruin. The hotel was comfy enough, but could you really say it had been saved?

Wikimedia Commons

This is how old music arrives in our young century. Maybe you’re making breakfast, and a piece drifts into the kitchen like a ghost. Or you’re on the subway, your ear buds are in, and it is delivered to you via algorithm in slow triple time. Or maybe, as it happened with me, you’re running on a snowy day along a stretch of road in Longmont, Colorado—a business park to your left, a vacant field to your right, a creek path just beyond—when you hear it: four descending notes scratched out against the silence.

Heinrich Biber’s Passagalia [or Passacaglia] in G minor, recorded by the violinist Andrew Manze, did not, as the etymology of the word passacaglia suggests, make me want to dance in the street. It made me want to rend my clothes and weep. I kept running down Pike Road instead, fluff falling all around me.

It’s a familiar feeling, I suspect, with or without the weeping. A song or a piece of instrumental music comes on, plays through for the first time, and no sooner has it finished than you queue it up again. And again. And again. And again. It was like that for me with the Passagalia. I couldn’t get enough. The music just felt right; for some reason, it resonated. At the time—this was 2010, maybe 2011—I was living, so to speak, in a minor key, sulky and gloomy and feeling a bit too much like a solo performance. The piece has its lively passages, but the takeaway mood for me, the one that fed my obsession, felt a little like grief. I wanted, perhaps perversely, to wallow in it.

I knew nothing about Biber or his world. I did not yet know that he was born in Bohemia in 1644, or that he later settled in Salzburg, where he rose to the rank of Kapellmeister, or that he was one of the most important composers for the violin in the history of Western music. Nevertheless, I was immediately aware that the music I was hearing wasn’t written for me, that I was eavesdropping on a conversation between composer and listener that had first taken place some 350 years earlier—one that was intended for only a privileged few, perhaps the noblemen who visited the Salzburg palace, seeking audience with the prince-archbishop. The Passagalia was not, as I would learn, music for the masses. In the 21st century, however, we tap and swipe our bundles of circuitry, as I did that day in Longmont, and it’s as if we all have the keys to the palace.

“You see,” the musicologist Eric Bianchi had told me, a couple months before my second trip to Salzburg, “music comes into the 17th century one way and it comes out another. It becomes what we think of as art, a form of expression. Prior to that, it was thought of as a kind of math.”

It was early May in New York City, and we were meeting in a borrowed office at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus. Lined with shelves of journals and books, the windowless room contained a few tattered chairs and a keyboard, which would later come in handy. The desk between us was covered in disordered piles, and Eric had placed his feet on its edges, such that he looked out at me over his shins.

“For the longest time,” he said, “people believed that music described the structure of the universe. You may know the story about Kepler, that he discovered the third law of planetary motion while reading a book about music. He was trying to work out the harmony of the spheres. That doesn’t mean, incidentally, that music itself was all that important in Biber’s time. What music was in the 17th century, or the work it could do, was different from what Kepler and Boyle and Newton were doing. The musicians would come in, they would play, and only after they had left would the important conversations start.

“It was a time of real scarcity, dominated by the Church and the Holy Roman Empire, and so when Biber entered the employ of the prince-archbishop of Salzburg, it wasn’t as an artist. As a court musician, he was in the same rank as builders and wall painters.”

It would be wrong, Eric suggested, to read the 17th century as some sort of interdisciplinary intellectual salon. Figures like Descartes and Galileo may have been altering our understanding of the universe, but their work wasn’t exactly common knowledge. Biber’s music and his worldview were likely quite unaffected by heliocentrism or analytic geometry. Despite his brilliance, the composer’s understanding of the stars, and much else, was probably not that different from that of the builders and wall painters.

“The other important thing to know,” Eric went on, “is that since about 1800, although it’s dying away now, the most prestigious forms of music have had no words. And that’s because these forms have been seen as portals into boundless realms of subjectivity and emotion. But in the 17th century and before, the most important music was vocal because words fixed the music’s meaning. It wasn’t just this wash of pleasure. The idea that people might listen to hours of music with no words, music that works by abstract structural cues—that doesn’t make much sense to a 17th-century mind.

“Now Biber did well and was eventually ennobled, but people weren’t looking to him to generate meaning in the way that people look to Justin Bieber, whose pronouncements on all sorts of things are widely reported because he said them. No musician got anything like that kind of treatment in the 17th century. Nobody cared what a musician thought, because why would you?”

A gallery selling stylized versions of famous photographs—Marilyn Monroe in The Seven Year Itch, those workers eating lunch on a steel girder—occupied the ground level. A specialist in Chinese medicine had an office one flight up, and above him was a hair salon. Private residences, as I found out when one of the doors opened, took up the top floors. A blond woman in her early 50s asked whether she could help me. I was looking, I told her, for the house where Heinrich Biber died. Aber, nein, the woman said. And then, switching to English: “There is a plaque around the corner. Up the street, then left.” I smiled and thanked her. She looked at me, laughing, maybe a little bewildered, and said I was welcome.

I walked the street where Mozart was born, past the house long since turned into a museum. I remembered visiting it all those years ago, taking pictures of his tiny violin, his first clavichord—pictures in which the most stunning element to me now is the elaborate parquet floor. It didn’t register back then that the Mozarts lived in only part of the house, an apartment on the third floor, but I remembered thinking that it was an odd attraction, the place where somebody was born. And yet here I was, 25 years later, looking for the place where someone else had died. The tourist shops teemed with Mozart memorabilia, but other than a sign advertising, in Gothic font, the Biber Apotheke (Biber Pharmacy), I found no trace of the composer, and so I returned the way I’d come, past the other man’s birthplace, where a line trailed out the door.

I was a block or two away, taking photos of an ornamental frieze, when I saw it, at the corner of a clothing store in the middle of what appeared to be a going-out-of-business sale. The composer and violin virtuoso Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber 1644–1704 lived and died in this house. Outside, a Bavarian brass band in lederhosen was playing polkas. Inside, to my surprise, all five floors, and even its cellar, contained racks of women’s clothing. The position of the staircase was likely unchanged, but its tile and railings appeared to be 19th-century additions. Otherwise the physical floorplan would have been unrecognizable to Biber. Each level was open, with dressing rooms in the back and an elevator in the center. Somewhere among the formal gowns and blouses, the casual shoes and athletic wear, Biber had died more than 300 years earlier. The room where he expired no longer exists, and yet I had likely walked through it. The blond woman had undersold the house’s proximity: It was practically across the street from her. From one side of the shop’s top floor, near a circular rack of cocktail dresses, I could see into what must have been her apartment. Why she hadn’t said so was beyond me.

A few weeks after I spoke with Eric, I met the violinist Rebecca Harris in a Philadelphia café with large street-facing windows. It was early on a Saturday morning, and up a short flight of stairs, overlooking the service counter, a couple of students were studying. We took a spot along the opposite wall.

Her family hadn’t been particularly musical, Rebecca told me in her faint British accent, and in fact, neither of her parents cared much for classical music. Her father had worked as an architect and, much later in his life, had taught himself to play the guitar. As a child, she had access to a free violin program at her school, and when she began to play, she knew immediately that music would be her life. She was eight years old. She couldn’t say why or how, but it felt physically good to make sounds with the instrument.

“From early on,” she said, “I obsessed over this distance between my brain and the sound, because what happens in your head is not what happens outside of it, in your fingers. The other hand holds the bow, but it does not in itself produce the sound any more than the string it chafes against. All of this works through a series of intermediaries to create resonance in the instrument, but beyond understanding technically what you’re doing, you also have to consider where you think the sound is coming from. We talk a lot about playing the instrument rather than the string.”

She reached into her New Yorker tote and pulled out her scores, pushing her coffee to the side. She opened the one for Biber’s Mystery Sonatas (also known as the Rosary Sonatas), the set of 16 works for solo violin and continuo that culminates with the Passagalia. She flipped through the pages for a moment, looking for something. Her hands, though not especially large, were muscular. With Weezer playing in the background, she pointed to a place on the page and explained why the idiosyncratic tunings Biber asks for result in a range of unexpected timbres, textures, and harmonies.

“This is what you play,” she said, indicating one line of notes, and, indicating another, “this is what you hear. You put your finger down, and it’s not the sound you remember. All but one of the sonatas,” she said, showing me first one page, then another, all of it inscrutable to me, “have you tune the top string down, which takes tension off, which means you cannot play as loudly, which means it makes the sound more mellow. But there’s symbolism in the tunings too. In ‘Resurrection’ [the Sonata XI in G major], you have to restring the instrument—you cross the middle two strings below the bridge of the violin and also above the neck, so that reality gets turned upside-down, which is also like a secret only we performers know. You don’t know the strings are crossed just by listening.

“Or let’s look at ‘The Carrying of the Cross,’ ” she said, flipping the pages to the Sonata IX in A minor. “Biber has you tune the bass string up four notes, and the next string is also up a pitch. This puts the violin under so much strain that when you play, it feels brittle. It’s like a mistuned piano, like something designed not to work. It’s almost frightening because the instrument is not built to sustain that much tension. As a musician, you just want to get through it.

“Then there’s the bass parts—look here.” Rebecca pointed. “It’s just a single note for several pages. The accompanist has to make decisions about how to voice this. They have to improvise off a single note. They also have to choose the instrument, since it’s not specified. In later music, like Mahler and Schumann, there’s tons of guidance on how to play every note, but the earlier the music, the less information there is on the page. Biber—he’s hardly alone in this—makes a huge offering to musicians. He makes you participate, makes you question your role. And that spirit of having to decide, of having to invent and not just read what’s on the page, well, it’s a relationship to literature. And that’s important at a time like our own when it’s easy to replicate, and to a high level. With Biber, you have to interact.”

“Say It Ain’t So,” I noticed, was now playing on the sound system. It seemed to me almost intentional, I said, pointing at the ceiling. The songs streaming in public spaces don’t require us to interact.

“Plenty of 17th-century music was just background,” she countered. “It doesn’t get performed anymore because it was trash. It was never designed to be paid attention to. And to some extent this is true of the entire repertoire of what we think of as classical music. So much of it was decoration. The whole idea of what it means to listen, and to pay attention, has changed.

“As for this,” she said, gesturing toward the ceiling, “I’m uncomfortable with music that doesn’t even occur to me. I wouldn’t have even noticed it unless you had pointed it out.

“But it’s an interesting question,” she mused, “what it really means for us to listen in the 21st century. Your experience with Biber was very physical, but that’s not something we tend to discuss. What if we did? What would we say?”

From the building where Biber died, I walked to St. Peter’s Cemetery, where he was buried. The place had been a monastery for more than 1,300 years, but on the day of my visit, there were no monks to be seen. Pink flowers lined the narrow stone paths running between the graves and tall trees. I moved among the markers, pausing at the gruesome image of a skeleton riddled with snakes, surrounded by Gothic script. The only employee I could find sat sentry at the entrance to the catacombs, carved into the sheer rock face. Could he point me in the direction of Biber’s grave? He nervously rubbed his beard and apologized. The monks didn’t like the cemetery workers to say where people were buried, he said. Surely he could make an exception, I insisted, as the man in question had been dead for three centuries. Whatever descendants of Biber’s had survived probably didn’t even know of their lineage. Was there really no one I could ask? The man just shook his head.

I took in the small graveyard once more, wondering what was up with these tight-lipped Austrians. I didn’t understand why they were so unforthcoming, especially about things that couldn’t possibly matter. Around the perimeter—and maybe this was the answer—were gated family crypts for the city’s well-heeled. It was as if, in death, the elites wanted to maintain their separation from ordinary people. As if the cemetery, like the country club and private school, operated through exclusion. More than privacy or propriety, the man may have been guarding cachet.

I had come to Austria in search of Heinrich Biber. I had come to honor the visceral effect of his music on me across cultures and centuries. And I had been rebuffed, once and now twice. It was appropriate, I thought, that the objectless—but also bone-deep and boundless—grief I had felt in the Passagalia should find its endpoint here, in a cemetery where I couldn’t locate the marker for the person I meant to commemorate.

I had once been a very sad person, but I wasn’t that person anymore. Biber had given me a vocabulary for, a soundtrack to, that sadness. His music was true. I had come to Austria because I wanted to know how a piece becomes indexed to a chapter in one’s life. And I wanted to know how much, in making that connection, the piece’s context really mattered.

As I stood there in St. Peter’s, deciding where to look next, a couple passed by me, arm in arm, the older man in a fedora, the younger with a satchel. They were speaking a language I had never heard. Nearby another man emerged from a doorway, a red handkerchief peeking out of the breast pocket of his black blazer. He quickly looked to his right before moving decisively to his left. For some reason, I started to follow him, and it was only then that I noticed the memorial plaques lining the walls, where, after just a few moments, I found inscribed in Latin a commemoration of the anniversary of Biber’s death. I picked up a stone and placed it atop the marker, glancing over my shoulder, half expecting the bearded young man to appear, shaking his head in the doorway.

“On a technical level,” and here Eric had stood and turned to the keyboard, where he noodled out some chord progressions, “this music tends to establish a home tonality. First you go away from it”—the chords in his left hand ascended—“and then you return to it”—they descended once more. “You generate tension as you go away, resolution as you come back.

“You see, baroque music is actually very standardized,” he said, improvising a jaunty dance on the keyboard. “Music only becomes more complex with Arcangelo Corelli, who created harmonies within harmonies, systems within systems”—and now Eric’s progressions became more surprising and dissonant. “Biber wasn’t working in a language quite as orderly, but it still had its conventions. It’s just that the baroque encouraged these odd and paradoxical and florid forms of virtuosity. That’s not to take away from what’s weird and quirky about Biber, but to say that his weirdness and quirkiness were cultivated.

“Then again,” Eric continued, “as someone who works on context, I don’t think the meaning is in the music or how it was created. I think it’s in how we listen, and in that we’re completely free to form judgments. I’m not saying music is universal. I’m just saying that we make meanings of stuff. The past is not just a place with less technology and outdated ideas, but a whole way of making meaning that is penetrable only to the smallest degree. The mental universe of a guy like Biber was so different from that of anyone in our time that we might never be able to capture what music meant to him. Not only could you never recapture the music exactly as it was performed, you could never get inside the minds that heard it. And you wouldn’t really want to. Because while 17th-century Salzburg was a world with certain tolerances for sensuality and creativity, it was also violent and bigoted and miserable.

“Maybe you’ve heard of the golden record, the sounds of Earth put on the Voyager probe? The idea was: Ah, yes, aliens will find it, they’ll figure out how to play it, and when they listen, they’ll think, What a civilized people, capable of the greatest beauty; we won’t demolish their planet after all. But the thing no one considers is that an alien could listen and think, Christ, these people are maniacs. Who would ever think that sound, that what you do with sound, is divided up into these discrete bands, and that you can only work with this division of 11 sounds? That this sound [Eric played a note] and this sound [the same note, an octave higher], even though they’re different, we’re going to base the system around them, saying that they’re the same. If we make it strange to ourselves and think about the cultural baggage that endows it with worth or meaning, it’s pretty weird. Why should anyone read Shakespeare? Why should anyone go to the symphony? Well, no one should. But if you do, and if you frame some things that someone is likely to get out of confronting something different, or maybe different on the surface, the experience could be world altering.

“The life of a work”—and here Eric slowed as he bent toward precision—“is a strange and beautiful thing in its contingency. And if you stop thinking that you owe it to Biber to get it right, that you owe it to posterity, you may find that you can learn a surprising amount. About him, yes, but about yourself, too.”

It would have been easier by far, passing through Salzburg’s pedestrian quarter, to be a Mozart fan. At every turn, the place would have endorsed my pleasures, validated my taste. It would have said, in effect, that I was right to like the things I did. I tried to content myself, typing these notes in my modernized late-medieval room, with the thought that cultivating one’s tastes, however much that process breaks into or reflects social registers, is ultimately a lonely endeavor. But then, in the next breath, I asked myself what was wrong with all of these conformists. My initial experience with Biber had been very physical, Rebecca pointed out, particular to my body. We ostensibly engaged with the same music, but how she felt it and how I felt it were different enough that we might as well have been referring to different pieces.

“You can also turn this inside out,” Eric had said near the end of our meeting. “With a pop song, you can’t ignore the claims the singer is making, what they appeal to in society. It’s so in your face that there’s no way around it. Biber’s lesser legibility, by comparison, might offer a refuge—or an excuse.

“A few years ago, when I had returned from living in Italy and had become fairly fluent in Italian, I went to see some Verdi at the Met. I was just sitting there, not reading any subtitles, and for the first time in my life, I realized I understood everything. And though Verdi may write very beautiful music, the plot was just the stupidest imaginable.

“On the other hand, I remember reading E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, and there’s this scene where one of the characters is playing Scott Joplin. Now that’s music I’ve known since I was a kid, and I could sit down right now and copy the scores out from memory. I read Doctorow’s descriptions, and I remember thinking, Oh, here’s a guy who doesn’t know anything about music. And it didn’t matter. I didn’t need him to explain that there are shifting groups of three and two with semi-dissonant tone clusters in the right hand against some Sousa-style bass in the left. I didn’t need him to make the music real to me.”

Given what Eric had said and having received something like permission, why did I still fantasize, in Salzburg, of an alternate city? One in which Biber’s house was not occupied by a failing retailer? In which not one but two museums were dedicated to his memory, a school of music as well? Maybe even an airport. I wanted the place to make the man real. I wanted it to explain him to me, which might, in turn, explain me to myself, if not others.

Instead, when the hotel clerk, a young woman outfitted in period dress, asked me while I was checking out what I had been doing in Salzburg, whether I was there to see a show, and I mentioned the old Kapellmeister who had come to the city from Bohemia all those centuries ago, who had composed music so intensely visceral that I had felt it in my blood and in my bones, she could only squint and ask, Who?

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Not knowing why is not the issue, because Student A, getting it right every time, also has no idea why. An example is the use of emphatic doubling—repetition that emphasizes meaning instead of being inelegant imprecision. Safe and sound, great big—these are legitimate uses of repetition, whereas large huge is mere redundancy, the repetition adding nothing to the meaning.

Classes are over for the summer, and I know my students are happily taking a break. And so am I. Yet I keep thinking about them. Some will return to class in the fall a bit rusty; others will not be so much slow and creaky as diminished, having lost some of their store of English—as if it dries up and evaporates from lack of use. A few students will keep learning, despite themselves. A song lyric, a bit of advertising, a slogan on a T-shirt—they take it all in.

And then one or two students have a small germ inside them that grows in the dark as well as the light, that needs no watering but cannot be drowned. No such thing as too much or too little attention threatens this germ. It grows. That germ—it is instinct. Those students just know. And know, and know.

But most of my students, though they still have the knowledge, will have buried it somewhere. They won’t find it immediately. That first week back, when I demand they look for it, they will tell me it’s gone.

“It’s there,” I’ll say.

They’ll shake their heads, all of them, in unison.

“Say it to yourselves. No—better, say it aloud to your partner. Which is right?” I’ll write a few phrases on the board. Tiny little, huge fat, big fat, small little. I already know who will fail, who will think and pass, and who will pass as easily as they breathe, no thought needed. Some are lucky that way—surprisingly good results for surprisingly little effort. I once read that Virginia Woolf couldn’t write an inelegant sentence. Lucky her! I write and rewrite and then rewrite again most of mine. Ah, but then she didn’t get the payoff of the struggle.

I picture my students. Is there any way stodgy Student B is better off than Student A, who can’t give a wrong answer? Maybe I’ll ask Student A. But why expect A to be knowledgeable about everything? If she has never had to struggle, how could she know the satisfaction of a breakthrough at last?

Camus said we must imagine Sisyphus happy, so I don’t worry too much about B. And though it is easy to envision the gifted as tortured, I don’t really—I thought A had it made. But what if instead of satisfaction, she feels bored to death by always getting it right, again and again, day after day? No mystery and no doubt.

Sisyphus or no Sisyphus, I still wonder whether B’s “I finally got it” is a greater satisfaction than A’s effortless grace.

The post Sweet Success appeared first on The American Scholar.

This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.

The post “Now That I Am Forever With Child” by Audre Lorde appeared first on The American Scholar.

I live with thee; come be my love
again, as on that trip we drove
for our first date. Three days we spent
inseparable! Each moment meant

we were both sent by fate, or by
a previous life. We used to ply
each other with our songs and tales.
Now our love quails. It stales. It fails.

Let’s win love back from Time’s chariot.
We’re not too old to turn Iscariot
on obligations we can toss
in favor of time in the sauce

of sex. We’ll start by sending texts
while we’re at work, with kisses. Next
we’ll have a date. We’ll dine. We’ll dance,
drink wine … In bed by nine. Romance!

I admired Josie’s rhymes—mostly simple and exact, but with the added brilliant touch of “chariot” (as in Andrew Marvell’s “Time’s winged chariot”), which rhymes with “Iscariot.” The rhyme implies that time is a traitor whose lips promise the kiss of death. Notable too are the reiterated rhymes that conclude stanza two—“quails,” “stales,” “fails” following “tales”—and the alliterative phrase “the sauce / of sex,” where the enjambment underscores the surprise in the phrase’s conclusion.

“Next Line, Please” has helped create a community of appreciative critics who can articulate well what they value most in their peers’ writings. Paul Michelsen demonstrates this in his insightful take on Josie’s poem:

“Especially love the title, the first line(s), and ‘turn Iscariot’! Really captures the essence of ‘post-honeymoon blues’ and the longing to rekindle things. There’s so much tricky truth in the line ‘Let’s win love back from Time’s chariot.’ Time, the thing that supposedly heals all wounds, is also responsible for wounding all heels, as they say. These things can both be (potentially) true, I suppose, though to varying degrees, depending on what we ourselves bring to the table, of course, but also on what our tablemates bring, and then our reactions to each other, and to our respective presence/presents, ad infinitum; the alchemy created by our sauces, if you will.”

(To which Josie replied aptly and happily with thanks for the “saucy” comment.)

Palevanilla submitted a poem that begins with a truncated version of Marlowe’s opening line. “Cleave” is a splendid title. The word is, as Palevanilla points out, a “contranym,” a term that in this case means both to split (as with a cleaver) and to stick or adhere:

Come live with me and be.
My love, you have become
a stranger to me,
some idealogue from

hell—indoctrinated
by groupthink ignorance,
a mouthpiece for hatred,
thoughtless in your grievance.

Remember who you were?
Tolerant. Forgiving.
Accepting of others.
Have you forgotten living

with the fear of violence
for being who we are?
I fear you now, relentless,
taunting others for their stars.

The poem’s ambivalence is striking. The lover has become a “stranger” who has been “indoctrinated / by groupthink ignorance.”  The entire second stanza is a pertinent response to much of the mindless banter, insensitive if not insulting, that one comes across in social media—and even in conversations among friends or soon-to-be ex-friends. In a sense, the poem makes as much a political statement as a personal one. Josie Cannella expressed her appreciation for how the poet has “broken up the opening line.” The title, she adds, “is a word I played with at length in a poem I called ‘Cloven Clay Feet.’” Palevanilla complimented Josie on that title, writing that “the sound and image work perfectly with ‘cleave.’”

For imagery as striking as her poem’s title, it would be hard to do better than Ana P.’s “foraging in Circle”:

When you come live with me
and be my love again, remind me of my shape
before I started turning to a small ocean,
a bed for your voice

to sleep in. I want to leave
your waters, cling to the moonlight
at the sky’s small ribs
and trail across salted tree rings

and mountain ash. Except
you would peel me back ashore
through clenched eyes.
My insides, little more than willow

twigs, thrown clean in a pot. Elsewhere
I pick myself again from ticking glass,
tear through the same slices of moon
caught in my throat.

When we encounter “my shape,” we may expect a picture of a woman’s body, but the shape swiftly shifts into a “small ocean”—an oxymoron I wish I had thought of. This body of water then metamorphoses into “a bed for your voice / to sleep in.” That’s marvelous, and only the start of a series of images that include a celestial personification (“the sky’s small ribs”). The writer likens her insides to “willow / twigs,” and the moon, in slices, is caught in the speaker’s throat.

Noteworthy efforts from Rachael Watson (“Forever lives on a country hill”), Emily (“Crepuscular”), Michael C. Rush (Come Live My Love”), and others deserve mention.  If I seem unequal to what would usually be a pleasurable task, it is because two weeks ago, my dog chased a cat, and as I quickened my pace to follow, I fell hard, face first, on a bump in the road. The stitches have been removed, but doctor’s appointments still dominate my schedule, and my time online is limited.

I have thought of a new prompt all the same. Like most writers, I enjoy receiving unsolicited fan mail. But I sometimes get suspicious about the letter writer’s sincerity—when, for instance, a few paragraphs of praise are followed by indication that the writer has taken the liberty of attaching a manuscript he or she would like me to recommend for publication. How to respond, if at all?

So, I ask you to consider writing either an insincere fan letter or a clever rejection of an unwanted submission or invitation. This can be done either in verse (12 lines or fewer) or in a prose paragraph. An unoriginal example that comes to mind:

Your work
will be read
long after
Keats and Shelley
are forgotten

but not
until then.

Deadline: two weeks from the day this is posted. In poetry, deadlines are flexible, and “late beats never” is my byword on the subject.

The post “A Bed for Your Voice to Sleep In” appeared first on The American Scholar.

Vance’s message played down ideals in favor of rights and duties. His insistence on the gratitude we owe to the founders of this nation evokes the rhetoric of the 18th-century New Englanders who led the way to independence. They were defending not just basic liberties but also the way of life in which these were embedded. Theirs was a call to honor the legacy bequeathed by their forebears. It was a family story of inheritance, gratitude, and duty, not unlike that prescribed by the vice president. But in the course of their mobilization against Britain, the Yankee rebels and their allies in the Continental Congress came to embrace a broader, more universal mission.

How they did so is a tale of widening horizons that gave every Patriot a place in the fight, no matter how long-settled they were in New England or how new they were to the cause. They did not treat love of country, with a sense of belonging, as incompatible with devotion to democratic ideals. Far from being mutually exclusive, these commitments can and ought to strengthen each other. You can be at once a champion of your community and a citizen of the world.

Consider the Massachusetts towns of Lexington and Concord, where the war began on April 19, 1775. On that date, 251 years ago, 800 British Regulars were dispatched from Boston into the countryside on a mission to seize the weapons and military stores the colonists were stockpiling in anticipation of war with the mother country. Concord was the destination of the king’s men. Eighteen miles west of the capital, it was the principal armory of the popular resistance. Passing through Lexington, the Redcoats confronted 70 militiamen on the town common and fired on them without orders and without apparent provocation. After that volley, six men lay dead, most of them shot in the back; another nine were wounded.

At Concord, the invaders met opposition at the North Bridge, where local forces, augmented by reinforcements from surrounding towns, sent them packing in a clash that Ralph Waldo Emerson would later memorialize in his 1837 poem “Concord Hymn,” hailing “the shot heard round the world.” As alarm bells rang throughout the land, men from “every Middlesex village and farm” and beyond headed for Concord. Close to 4,000 provincials harried the British retreat along the “bloody battle road” back to Boston. Only the arrival of another 1,000 troops at Lexington with heavy artillery spared the expedition from becoming a complete rout. In the end, 73 Regulars lay dead, 174 wounded, and 26 missing, for a casualty rate of close to 20 percent. The American toll was comparatively slight, with losses amounting to two or three percent.

Concord and Lexington arrived at their battle stations by different routes. Concord was the older, richer town. The first English settlement above tidewater, beyond the sight and scent of the sea, it had grown to some 1,500 people (265 families) by the eve of war. Most of those residents were farmers, reaping the benefits of fertile soils along the rivers flowing through town and succeeding to “planting fields” made ready for cultivation by the Native peoples they displaced. Concord also had a lively commercial sector. Well-located on the King’s highways, the village was a center of trade, a seat of courts, a staging ground for military expeditions, a hub of communications with nine taverns, and a gathering place for town meetings and Sabbath worship. Its top leaders were plugged into the royal government in Boston, which rewarded supporters with military commissions and judicial appointments. With good reason it was chosen as the principal depot for military provisions.

By contrast, Lexington was a backwater, with no retail stores, no major thoroughfares (except for the highway on which the Redcoats passed through), no river for transportation or milling, just two taverns, and few cosmopolitan connections. First settled around 1642, it grew slowly as a section of Cambridge and did not become a separate township until 1713. Six decades later, the population numbered 750—half that of Concord’s.

Despite these differences, the two towns would make common cause in defense of a shared way of life. Concord was at first hesitant to put its opinions on record, and until the summer of 1774, it kept its distance from the gathering protest movement. Not Lexington. Residents at a town meeting were quick to denounce the Stamp Act as an infringement of the rights guaranteed the colonists under the Massachusetts Charter of 1691, including “their Darling and constitutional right, Never to be Taxed but by their own Consent, in Person or by their Representative.” Parliamentary taxation was an affront in two ways at once. It treated the people of the Bay colony as second-class subjects, without the same rights enjoyed by their English brethren, and it betrayed the legacy of liberty their 17th-century forebears had secured from the Crown through “Firmness and resolution.” It was thus incumbent on Lexington to defend that inheritance and to maintain it intact for “ourselves” and “posterity.” Let the world see and “future Generations know” that they honored the gift of the ancestors, “valued the Rights they enjoyed, & did not tamely resign them for Chains and Slavery.”

This rhetoric of gratitude foreshadows the vice president’s speech last year. In the Revolutionary movement it was a mark of militancy to appeal to the ancestors in protests against British policies. Such statements rehearsed the history of New England from the Puritans’ first settlements down to the latest generation. Lexington elaborated on this narrative in January 1773. The saga opened as the Puritans fled the tyranny of Charles I and Archbishop Laud, made the hazardous Atlantic crossing, and carved out new homes in the American wilderness. “Our worthy ancestors … [endured] many Struggles with their Enemies in the Face of every Danger and at the expence of much Treasure and Blood,” the Lexington town meeting declared. They thereby “secured to themselves, & transmitted to us, their Posterity, a fair and rich Inheritance, not only of a pleasant fertile Land, but also of Invaluable Rights & Priviledges both as Men & Christians, as stated in the Royal Charter of this Province, and … [guaranteed] by the Faith of the British Crown & Kingdom.” So precious a legacy came as a sacred trust. It was the townspeople’s duty to protect and preserve this birthright of liberty and pass it on intact to the next generation. To do otherwise would betray their very character as a people.

The rhetoric of filial duty became ubiquitous in 1774–75 and with good reason. To punish the Bay Colony for the Tea Party and to curb what royal officials deemed a disorderly democracy, Britain effectively revoked the revered 1691 Massachusetts Charter. Under the Massachusetts Government Act (MAGA), the Crown took over the hiring and firing of all judicial officials and excluded the assembly from its previous role in choosing the provincial council, the upper chamber of the general court. Most important, the new law barred town meetings without the governor’s consent, except for an annual session to elect municipal officials. MAGA was a direct attack on local autonomy and on popular influence in government. To the inhabitants, these arbitrary changes, imposed from above, amounted to disinheritance, and as worthy heirs of virtuous forefathers, they rose up in outrage. Concord’s minister, William Emerson, grandfather of the philosopher, prepared his congregants for war with a call to “Arise my injured Countrymen, and plead … with your Arms, the Birthright of Englishmen the dearly purchased Legacy left you by your never to be forgotten Ancestors, and if God does not help, it will be because your Sins testify against you.” The very manual of “rules and regulations” that guided the Massachusetts army highlighted at the outset of the text the trials of “our pious and virtuous Ancestors” and pledged the soldiers to restore and preserve “the free Exercise of all those civil and religious Rights and Liberties for which many of our Fore-Fathers fought—bled—and died.”

The appeal to the ancestors evoked a people with a shared history, a common religion, a source of collective pride, and a duty to posterity. As an origin story, it bonded the Patriots together as a united family stretching across generations and rooted in a particular land. To a reader today, it brings to mind Vice President Vance’s rhetoric of patriotism, with its dangerous potential to devolve into ethnic and racial nationalism. The New Englanders were certainly racially exclusive. In their accounts of the past, Native people were as dispossessed from history as they were from the land, mattering mainly as aids or barriers to the English advance. Nor was there room for men and women of African descent, whose tribulations and losses in the involuntary Middle Passage into American slavery—“servants for life,” as they were known in Massachusetts—vastly exceeded anything the English endured in their “errand into the wilderness.” The Puritan saga rested on genealogical privilege.

The appeal to the ancestors eased the route to revolution. Clinging to the charter, the people of Massachusetts portrayed themselves as conservators of history and trustees of a patriarchal bequest. The British, under the sway of corrupt, power-hungry rulers, were the innovators and aggressors. But the convictions animating the rebels of 1775 broke out of this backward-looking frame. There was never a single discourse of opposition to British imperial policies. For all its reverence for New England’s patriarchs, the town of Lexington recognized that the “Rights and Priviledges” set forth in the royal charter were not just concessions from a benevolent Crown. They inhered in the people of Massachusetts “as men and Christians” and rested on the foundation of universal natural law. Nor could George III unilaterally break the royal compact with the Bay colony. “If Charters are not deemed sacred,” Patriot leader Joseph Warren declared, “how miserably precarious is everything founded upon them.”

Defending the homeland transcended considerations of “blood and soil.” Some Patriots saw the revocation of the royal charter as a golden opportunity to break with the past. As the town of Worcester argued, Massachusetts was legally in “a state of nature” and hence free to establish a new government, even a simple democracy, by popular consent. So thoroughgoing a rejection of the ancestral legacy had advantages. Every colony had its own origin story; the descendants of Roundheads and Cavaliers invoked different—and incompatible—pasts. Better to rest the colonists’ case on a foundation of “the principles of our natural, essential, and unalienable rights,” as an Essex County Convention argued in 1774 and, as Thomas Jefferson would carry out so eloquently in the preamble to the Declaration of Independence.

The idealism inherent in that perspective had an expansive potential. Joseph Warren, president of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, led the way. As Massachusetts stood on the precipice of war, he foresaw an opening of the American mind. The debate over Parliament’s right to tax the colonies had inspired “an allmost [sic] universal enquiry into the rights of mankind in general, and of British subjects in particular.” And this investigation, he predicted, would result in “such a liberality of sentiment, and such a jealousy of those in power as will … secure us against the future approaches of despotism.”

Martyred on Bunker Hill, Warren did not live to see the Massachusetts defense of the forefathers’ legacy transform into a fight for the universal rights of man. The Patriots of 1775 did not see an incompatibility between loving your homeland and supporting the democratic rights of humankind—and welcoming seekers of liberty to our shores. For all the debt owed by the new arrivals to the Puritan fathers, freedom did not depend on descent. On April 19, 1775, the Patriots were still thinking primarily of charter rights on Lexington Common and at Concord’s North Bridge. Thanks to their sacrifices, they helped to make possible a revolution in the name of universal rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” for which we, in turn, can still be grateful.

The post Gratitude Isn’t Everything appeared first on The American Scholar.

Consider the dramatic twist. For 120 minutes, two opposing sides circle the pitch, attempting to play the perfect through ball or cross in pursuit of that most difficult of breakthroughs—a decisive goal—only to have the final result come down to a series of one-on-one encounters: goalkeeper versus penalty taker, just 12 yards separating the two. That the advantage lies definitively with the penalty taker only adds to the already inconceivable pressure of the occasion, the fate of one’s nation riding on the outcome. The players spent, cramping, in the delirious haze of expended effort, now forced to march to the penalty spot and deliver the strike that will determine their fate: immortality or infamy.

It wasn’t always this way. Remarkably, among other tiebreaking mechanisms, soccer once relied on the drawing of lots, which is how Israel lost its quarterfinal match with Bulgaria in the 1968 Olympics, after the match ended 1-1 in regular time. That prompted Michael Almog, the future president of Israel’s soccer association, to write a letter to FIFA, in which he called the outcome “immoral” and “cruel.” Instead, he outlined a then little-used alternative as a more sporting way to resolve a draw: the taking of five penalties by each team. “I am not suggesting that this system is the best one,” Almog acknowledged—and many critics agree, viewing penalties as an ugly appendage to the beautiful game. “Rock, Paper, Scissors would arguably be a fairer way to choose a winner, or a breakdance battle at the very least,” writes Roger Bennett (of Men in Blazers podcast fame) in his new book, We are the World (Cup). But the shootout has endured, giving us a snapshot into something beyond just sports.

The Italian midfielder Andrea Pirlo, who took a penalty in the 2006 World Cup final, described the slow journey to the penalty spot as “an endless and terrible walk into one’s own fears.” But the experience awakened in him a profound sense of national pride. “Only in that moment I realized how great it was to be Italian,” he writes in his autobiography. “Looking back, I can say that tepid shiver I felt before scoring was by far the truest feeling I’ve ever felt in my life.”

When Pirlo and his teammates triumphed over a French side that had lost its talisman, Zinedine Zidane, after he headbutted Italian defender Marco Materazzi, they ended a streak of World Cup shootout misery. The Azzuri had lost in the quarterfinals to the French in 1998 on penalty kicks, in the semifinals to Argentina in 1990, and most infamously in the 1994 final to Brazil, when the sainted Roberto Baggio sailed his shot over the goal in Pasadena’s Rose Bowl. “The only players who miss penalties are those who don’t have the courage to take one. That time I missed,” Baggio writes in his autobiography. “I still dream about it.” After Baggio’s flub, an Italian band parodied it with a song, “La Cinica Lotteria Dei Rigori”—the cynical lottery of penalty shootouts. Indeed, anything can happen in penalties. Fast forward to the shootout on that same Pasadena pitch that decided the 1999 women’s World Cup final, when Brandi Chastain of the United States relied on some subtle subterfuge to bury China. Proficient with both feet, she surprised the Chinese goalkeeper by using her left foot for the first time from the penalty spot, her double-fisted celebration in a sports bra making the cover of Sports Illustrated and marking a breakthrough moment for the women’s game.

But in our age of big data, what was once considered a matter of fortune has become—to the extent that this is possible—one of preparation. Geir Jordet, a former player and now a professor at the Norwegian School of Sport Sciences, has pioneered the study of penalty kick psychology. Apart from everything his research has uncovered—turning your back to the goalkeeper after placing the ball on the spot makes you more likely to miss; so does rushing your take immediately after the referee’s whistle—he found evidence supporting the lingering effects of shootout-induced national trauma: Teams with a history of failure, even if the players responsible had long since retired, tended to fail at penalties time and time again. It’s as if the ignominy had somehow become embedded in the national psyche, the stigma of the past afflicting successive generations. An almost epigenetic sense of failure. Consider England, which, much like Italy, has suffered recurring shootout horrors in the World Cup. They were losers in the semifinals to Germany in 1990, in the round of 16 to Argentina in 1998, and in the quarterfinals to Portugal in 2006. Defender Gareth Southgate, whose missed penalty precipitated his country’s defeat against Germany in Euro 1996, reversed England’s fortunes when he became the national coach in 2016. England worked extensively on replicating the shootout format in training, and as he said, he would be the one to shoulder responsibility for the outcome. After all, he—and not the players themselves—would determine who would take the penalties and in what order; more than anything, his ambition was a psychological reset. His efforts were rewarded in the 2018 Cup, when England dispatched Columbia after penalties in the round of 16. The achievement, wrote Bennett in We are the World (Cup), “ranked up there with the Industrial Revolution, the works of Shakespeare, the development of the scientific method by Sir Isaac Newton, as great moments of English history.”

And yet the shootout resists too much study; it remains an enigma, an unpredictable and mystifying product of nerves, instinct, mental fortitude—and yes, luck. This year, in a shocking twist, Germany—winner of four previous World Cup shootouts—lost to Paraguay on penalties in the round of 32. Even more shocking was that the German side, this perceived paragon of reason and efficiency, had no predetermined schedule of shooters; instead, when a few key players demurred, defender Jonathan Tah volunteered, even though he had never before taken a penalty in a match. He missed, and gone was the illusion of German shootout invincibility.

In the same round, when Holland also crashed out in penalties, against Morocco, the failure highlighted the pressure-induced ineptitude the occasion can inspire. Four of the 10 strikes either hit the frame or missed the goal completely. (No one exhibited the stylish class of Zidane, who, before getting his red card for assaulting Materazzi in the 2006 Cup, had scored a panenka—a chipped penalty into the center of the goal that floated devilishly over the diving Italian goalkeeper. This cheeky bit of artistry was popularized in the 1970s by the Czechoslovakian midfielder Antonín Panenka.) But even so, the drama drew me in, like a scene from Scorcese. The Moroccan goalkeeper, Yassine Bounou, a penalty-defending wizard according to Jordet, put on a master class in psychological peacocking: double feints, hand jerks, bizarre motions—anything to get the taker to rethink his strategy when approaching the ball. His tactics especially frustrate penalty takers who deal in the art of the stutter step, halting their run up as they entice the keeper to dive one way before calmly delivering the ball into the opposite corner. For Holland’s final take, Bounou—or Bono, as he’s known—guessed right, making the save that dispatched the Dutch.

In the final this year, down a man entering extra time, Argentina’s hopes rested on making it to a shootout. But Spain managed to stave off the penalty lottery with an electric finish—and with it ended the Lionel Messi–mania that had animated the Cup with its near messianic zeal. Perhaps in four years, penalties will once again decide the final. These shootouts may have none of the physicality of an Erling Haaland headed goal, none of the pace of a Kylian Mbappé run into the box; none of the beauty of a confounding Messi finish. But they may reveal something far more intimate: the fortitude of a footballer having reached a sporting hinge point, with life forever divided into before and after. Cruel? Perhaps. But more dramatic than drawing lots.

The post It All Comes Down to This appeared first on The American Scholar.

How to describe the sound? Demanding, worried, and hesitant. Half, “Well, what?” and half, “Oh dear, oh help!” Half low moan, half high and wavering supplication. It’s a sound, like birdsong, that I’d have to replay endlessly to describe even half-right. And yet I recognized it immediately as different from the bleating of the small herd my neighbor’s nephew Jesús keeps in the fields across the lane from my house. This mournful bleat proclaimed, I am alone.

I looked out the window and saw the animal, emerging from the shadows where the lane dead-ended at the gated entrance to a field. It hesitated, then, almost deerlike, it advanced. What was it doing here, and where had it come from? Behind it I could see the fence at the entrance. It appeared intact. Beyond were the green fields where the sheep grazed among the partially built houses of an abandoned project on the ridge above the river. The bank owns the land now, but my neighbor’s family has the use of the fields. No other sheep were in view.

My son had heard the sheep, too, and we both stepped out into the lane. The sheep retreated into the corner against the fence. We didn’t have the nephew’s number, so we called my neighbor instead. He was in Holland, visiting his son for a few days, but he assured us he’d call his nephew right away. For good measure, he also gave us the number.

My son and I kept an eye on the sheep. I knew that my neighbor’s sister and nephew lived five minutes away. I expected them any moment. The sheep made a couple of tentative starts into the lane but retreated each time to its corner. The third time, instead of turning back when it came up against us in the lane, it stood its ground. Then it took courage, gathered itself, and made a mad dash around us—to the freedom of the open lane, nothing to stop it or impede its progress. It looked like a young male—I could see its testicles. I followed and saw it turn off the lane onto the grassy slope behind the sports center. If it continued in that direction, it would hit city streets. I moved back, hoping it would not press on. The grass on the slope was very green. Maybe the sheep would linger to nibble.

Back at the house, I wondered what was taking the owner so long. I went inside, but a few minutes later, from the corner of my eye, I saw a sheep in the lane, just like the earlier one, drumming up its courage to get past my son, still outside. Wait! I shook my head. It felt like déjà vu.

“Same one?” I asked, stepping back outside, and my son said yes, same one—back in its dead end, only to try to escape again. And still no nephew. My son sent a WhatsApp message.

The sheep made a last attempt. My son and I, prepared this time, jumped in front of it, waving our arms. At the last moment, the sheep veered, turned, and charged back to its corner. It made a funny little leap into the air, twice, to come down on all four feet in a show of petulance. Then it lay down on a patch of grass by the gate. Shortly afterward, a car pulled up.

Instead of the story ending, however, it took a turn. Rather than the nephew, it was his mother, with his girlfriend driving. The women explained that they got a call from my neighbor, explaining that the nephew hadn’t picked up. The mother and girlfriend couldn’t get in touch with him, either—the man was at work. So they’d come.

I pointed out the sheep, lying quietly in the shade of the wall. The sister wore a worried expression. The girlfriend seemed amused. How do we catch it, I asked? Oh, we won’t, the sister said. Another nephew in the family, cousin to Jesús, was coming. He would catch it.

So while we waited for the cousin, we watched the sheep. It was on its feet again. Was it favoring the front left leg, injured perhaps while wriggling free through a fence? Would it put up a fight? While we talked, a call came: Jesús, finally alerted by my son’s message. His mother passed the phone to the girlfriend. The cousin appeared, climbed out of his car, engine running and door wide open. He was looking past us as he advanced toward the sheep, backed up against the gate. Almost immediately, even before he’d had time to size up the situation, he turned to us. “That’s not Jesús’s,” he declared. The girlfriend passed the phone to the cousin, and in a minute he passed it back to her. She passed the phone to Jesús’s mother, as if rewinding a skein that had come unwound. A few words to Jesús, and the mother hung up.

“Well, whose sheep could it be, then?” I wondered aloud.

Nobody knew. Call the police, the cousin said, and left. The two women got in their car to drive off, too. As they turned the car around, I stepped up to the window. “Did you call?” I asked.

“No, no—we don’t have the number.” And they too drove off. I stared after them. Well, why wouldn’t they leave? The sheep wasn’t theirs.

It wasn’t mine, either, though.

To me, it looked like a sheep had been dropped among us, and we should all make a contribution to getting it where it belonged. My 45 minutes counted as my effort. What was theirs?

To them, the situation might look different—as if I’d started it all by worrying about a sheep when it wasn’t my business to worry about it, disrupting the morning of any number of people by involving them, too. And now I was trying to hand off the Old Maid card. They weren’t taking it.

But I didn’t want the card, either. I asked my son to alert the police. Then I went for a run.

But I kept thinking about the mystery sheep. By the time I was on my way back, I had remembered the old fellow, Rafa, whose little ram my dogs had attacked one day several years earlier. Just the day before, I had seen Rafa shearing sheep in a nearby field. So I circled past his place, and when I saw him in the yard among his geese and dogs, I stopped to ask if he was missing a sheep. He said he’d just come back from collecting her.

I looked surprised. “I thought it was a boy.”

The man shook his head. What I’d seen hanging down, he explained—without a word from me about why I’d thought ram—was the ewe’s swollen udder. She was young, he added, strong. “Your son helped me,” he told me. Even so, he’d had trouble. “Look,” he said, pointing to his lip where the leaping sheep had butted against him.

Bleating sheep to leaping sheep. Swollen udder and swollen lip.

I wondered how Rafa had found his sheep. I didn’t ask. With the calls, the messages, the phone passed back and forth, the seven other players in this comedy of errors, there was plenty of mystery already. A little more did no harm.

“Well, as long as she’s back home,” I said.

“Back with her friends,” Rafa agreed. Then, shaking his head, he added, “I don’t know why she ran away.”

That was a mystery, too—the first cause.

Stories, like paths through life, are not always handily linear. My eager involvement in this adventure is a different branch with a different line of investigation and a different first cause. That would be a board book I read to my children when they were toddlers, Sheep in a Jeep. Five sheep pile onto a jeep, patient and good-humored until they can’t get going. “Uh-oh! The jeep won’t go,” they lament. We had so much fun with that book. That might be my first cause when I lifted my head at the bleat of the sheep. Trying to get back. Not an easy one. Ask the sheep, because she knows how much trouble comes from that effort.

The post Sheep that Bleat appeared first on The American Scholar.

This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.

The post “The End of March” by Elizabeth Bishop appeared first on The American Scholar.

Stong begins each of his prints with a drawing on tracing paper, which he places under Plexiglas. He then uses Akua, a soy-based intaglio ink, to trace over the under-drawing before pressing the inked Plexiglas onto the paper substrate. The pigments are vibrant and luminous, he says, in part because the soy oil does not dry in an oxidative process. He’s also able to achieve a higher level of precision, in a nod to his favorite Northern Renaissance artist, Jan Van Eyck. “You’re working on this incredibly slick surface, so every minute detail of your brushstroke, all of the little bristles of the brush, will become evident,” he says. And these small, painterly gestures are the point. His prints, filled with curious minutiae—such as a cat with a snake in its mouth or a skeleton cultivating bees—should make viewers stop in their tracks and focus on the artmaking itself. “I want it to make you wonder if you’ve seen something like this before and to try to notice it the next time you’re out in the world, if you haven’t,” he says.

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Go beyond the episode:

• Jessica Hopper’s The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic
• Read “Building a Mystery,” her oral history of Lilith Fair, and her reflections on Joni Mitchell’s Blue, 50 years on
• Listen to her eclectic playlist of music that came out of Chicago
• Hopper hosted Season 2 of KCRW’s Lost Notes podcast, looking at artistic legacies of the likes of The Freeze and Cat Power

Tune in every other week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek.

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Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes!

The post Riot Girls appeared first on The American Scholar.

Were he here today, my first point would be that Miranda July, writer and filmmaker, once did what he does: hold conversations with aspects of the self. July did it as a teen, experimenting, expanding, as people do when they have a future somewhere that they want to arrive at. Mr. Kansas, sorrowing widower, has no place to go toward, so his motivation is different. He does it as an octogenarian, desperate to combat loneliness and isolation. To speak and be heard. Even so, the habit isn’t sad or pathetic. It’s resourceful and imaginative. It’s interesting, like life. Like the people in life.

Mr. Kansas, however, seems not to care too much about the people in life. Especially now, in the winter of his discontent. Every face he might read, I imagine, must be a disappointment because it is not his wife’s. He’s polite and considerate when he crosses paths with one of the breed (as I can imagine he might say), but in general, he is not sympathetic to people; they are not even curiosities for him. He does not like to speculate about them or spend hours observing their habits. He already (I suspect) knows all he wants to know.

I barely knew Mr. Kansas or his wife during the time before—the summer of their satisfaction. But I believe he and his wife must have shared a happily aloof notion about themselves: that they were united in being different from the striving and noisy mortals around them. They would have wandered hand-in-hand through a garden, gladdened by the peace and quiet they encountered and that they  knew how to value. Nobody interfered with their enjoyment of their heightened pleasures—or of each other. They were, I’m suggesting, snobs.

Or people of refined taste.

And now, in the face of his loss, I suggest he turn to those others that he shunned. Too strong a word? He would think so. But every day I feel a little more certain that if you don’t walk through life with an open face and open arms, then you are keeping people at a distance. Shunning them. To be human is to be needy, and people need people ready to embrace them. You’ll have a million reasons to turn away from any given person, and you will exercise your right to refuse: you’ll sidestep him or her, or look the other way, or at your watch. Or just not look. The least we can do is make a gesture toward the ones we have not yet decided about.

So of all the crazy ideas I’ve had for attaching this twisted human being to the misshapen lives around him, writing to prisoners might be the strangest. Mr. Kansas, who is so courteous and kind, but uninspired by the trauma of the masses—to correspond with a common thief? A murderous villain?

Being courteous and kind, Mr. Kansas has never told me I’m a fool for suggesting it. And suggesting it more than once. But Miranda July in her youth wrote to a convict, told him about driving lessons and heard back from him about prison riots. What she got from it I’m not sure, but the inmate got someone to talk to. He did not have only facets of his own character to work with. I imagine that he would’ve been grateful. And Mr. Kansas can likewise make somebody very thankful by sharing his life such as it is, in his lonely cell, with another person in another lonely cell.

Mr. Kansas may never visit. I have invited him, and he has said he’ll come, but he has also said he doubts that he’ll ever come. He has nothing to lose except the thin rag of loneliness. But he may think that he has nothing to gain, either, as he considers the prospect of the coming years, which stretch ahead as one long bleak winter. But who even talks about a season—a time that naturally gives way to the next season—if you are caught in an enduring weather system of sorrow, loneliness, and despair?

Richard III emerged from his winter, schooled to fight for what he wanted. He didn’t get it, true, but at least he had a reason to fight, and his doom was not a foregone conclusion. What about Mr. Kansas?

Winter gives way. Mr. Kansas may not see the first flowers. But he might, if someone keeps pointing.

“Look,” I might say, and point. “Flowers.”

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