Susan Stryker is a foundational figure in trans studies, beginning with her 1994 academic article/performance art piece, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix.” She’s written histories of trans people in America, edited volumes on transgender studies, and directed a film about a Compton cafeteria riot that predated the Stonewall rebellion by three years. Stryker retired from the University of Arizona as Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies in 2020, and currently holds a distinguished visiting appointment at Stanford University.

Go beyond the episode:

• Susan Stryker’s Changing Gender
• Watch her documentary Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria and her short film Christine in the Cutting Room
• Read her 1994 article “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix”
• Read James Anderson of Hermiston’s 1792 argument in favor of a gender-neutral pronoun
• Or the 1857 short story “The Man Who Thought Himself a Woman”

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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The post Call It Macaroni appeared first on The American Scholar.

Sayers was one of the queens of detective fiction’s so-called Golden Age, a period in the 1920s and ’30s that featured such virtuosos of the genre as Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham, and Ngaio Marsh. When I read Sayers in my youth, I was immune to Peter Wimsey’s charms, but my idea of a heartthrob has changed considerably since the 10th grade. Lord Peter is no orphaned, alienated bad boy. He is the wealthy second son of a duke, with a family estate and a devoted valet (the imperturbable and supremely competent Bunter). He took a first-class degree in modern history from Balliol College, Oxford, and is knowledgeable about most everything, from the symptoms of thyroid disease to the fine points of ballistics and dental identification. He collects incunabula (books printed prior to 1501) and is competent in the art of campanology. He is a champion cricketer, so well known during his Oxford days that an elderly man, seeing him play on an amateur team some 20 years later, recognizes Wimsey of Balliol who scored 112 points for Oxford in 1911. He is fluent in several languages, including French, having also been schooled in manners and sex by his French uncle. He is a connoisseur of music and plays Bach on the piano. Finally, he served valiantly in the First World War and is often called on to resolve knotty diplomatic issues for the British foreign service (in the mid-1930s, his fluency in German is a useful adjunct to his diplomatic skills).

Lord Peter, as he is known to all, hearkens back to an era when England had a strict and immutable class hierarchy. And yet, he makes good use of his advantages, working tirelessly and spending lavishly in the cause of justice. For example, he underwrites an entire employment agency for unmarried women, whom he deploys on special missions related to his cases. He is also compassionate, prone to falling into paralyzing depression after the culprits he has unmasked are sent to the gallows.

Sayers’s hero is not without flaws, however. He has a big nose and wears a monocle. He is a bit of a dandy (his socks match his pocket square). He is often flippant in conventionally grave situations and frequently cites lines from poetry that few people recognize. He also speaks with a slight stammer, the result of the PTSD he suffers from his service in the war. But these little quirks that mar his perfection, far from reducing my affection, make me love him all the more. Unlike many other Golden Age detectives, Wimsey has depth, increasingly so as the series of books featuring him progresses. When I happened on three 1980s BBC adaptations of the novels on YouTube, I was enchanted by Edward Petherbridge, who, in the role of Wimsey, could stammer and say “frightfully sorry” with aplomb. Each time Petherbridge’s Wimsey adjusted his monocle, my heart fluttered.

I have extravagantly extolled Peter Wimsey to my friends, bullying them to read at least one of Sayers’s novels, only to find myself disappointed when they aren’t charmed by the character. One woman, who shares my taste in most things, called him foppish and effeminate. How could she so misread a figure of such consummate, if complex, masculinity? Fortunately, I found a group of enthusiasts on Reddit who are, like me, smitten with Wimsey down to the monocle. I have concluded that we are a happy few and share qualities with his creator, a woman admittedly not to everyone’s tastes.

Dorothy Sayers was opinionated and intellectually curious. The only child of doting parents, she was born in Oxford and grew up in rural East Anglia, where her father, an Anglican priest, was headmaster of a school for boys. She went on to attend Somerville, one of Oxford’s first women’s colleges, and earned a first-class degree in medieval French. As a young woman, she had many flirtations, fell in love and was jilted, had an affair and secretly bore a child out of wedlock, and worked as an editor, a teacher, and an advertising copywriter before hitting on the recipe for her detective novels. At the height of their popularity, she abandoned the series and took to writing religious plays and translating Dante.

For those of us who are in love with Peter Wimsey, Sayers’s turn away from detective fiction seems a loss. We want more Wimsey novels. By the same token, there isn’t more to say after Busman’s Honeymoon (1937), the culmination of a four-novel romantic arc that focuses on the relationship between Lord Peter and the mystery novelist Harriet Vane. This arc begins with Strong Poison (1930), when Wimsey reads in the newspaper that Vane is on trial for the murder of her lover. During their first meeting, in the prison where she is being held, he immediately concludes that she is innocent and proposes marriage. She rejects him, finding the proposal ridiculous. After he solves the case and she is acquitted, he continues to propose regularly, every three months or so—and she continues to reject him, not wishing to feel beholden for his having saved her life. Finally, in Gaudy Night (1935), the penultimate novel in the series, she succumbs. Set in a fictional women’s college at Oxford modeled after Sayers’s Somerville, Gaudy Night includes some stirring descriptions of the beauties of the university and the delights of academic scholarship. A running point of discussion involves the relative merits of body and mind, marriage and work, scholarship and popular writing. Wimsey’s final proposal comes in an intoxicating passage at the end, after the mystery at the college is resolved. Here he is addressing the woman he loves:

“I have said a good deal to you one way and another, lately; but you may have noticed that since we came to Oxford I have not asked you to marry me. … But I will ask you now, and if you say No, I promise you that this time I will accept your answer. Harriet; you know that I love you: will you marry me?” …

She stood still; and he stopped perforce and turned towards her. She laid both hands upon the fronts of his gown, looking into his face while she searched for the word that should carry her over the last difficult breach.

It was he who found it for her. With a gesture of submission he bared his head and stood gravely, the square cap dangling in his hand.

“Placetne, magistra?”

“Placet.”

Yes, the culmination of the proposal (Does it seem good, mistress/teacher?) and its acceptance (It seems good ) are in Latin! As one of my sisters online put it, “Maybe it’s just me and my love for languages. But this is the most romantic proposal I’ve ever read.”

Harriet finally capitulates to Lord Peter not only because she has fallen in love with him but also because she realizes that he will never use his wealth, class, or male prerogative to bully or coerce her. In a moving scene toward the end of Gaudy Night, she is advised by a senior scholar at the college:

“You have had the luck to come up against a very unselfish and a very honest man. He has done what you asked him without caring what it costs him and without shirking the issue. He hasn’t tried to disguise the facts or bias your judgment. … He’ll never make up your mind for you. You’ll have to make your own decisions. You needn’t be afraid of losing your independence; he will always force it back on you. If you ever find any kind of repose with him, it can only be the repose of very delicate balance.”

Lord Peter, as Harriet comes to see, loves her as a singular intellectual and moral being. They are matched spirits, an equality that carries an irresistible romantic charge.

Which brings me to my own case. My husband has had to weather my infatuation for Peter Wimsey for more than a year now. He has had to listen to me go on and on about the character’s wit, wealth, and athletic prowess, his fluency in French, his piano-playing, and his diplomatic sensibility. Who could live up to such talent and accomplishment? It’s an impossible standard. Fortunately, my husband and Lord Peter share one quality that is, for Harriet and for me, the most important. Rare even in this seemingly progressive age is my husband’s conviction that I am his intellectual and moral equal and that the vestiges of male superiority that cling to him, as they do to Peter Wimsey (we are not so far removed today from 1930s patriarchy), are to be continually and strenuously resisted. To be loved with that awareness and determination by someone of worth is very attractive, whether he wears a monocle or not.

The post Adding Wimsey to My Life appeared first on The American Scholar.

The old town sits on a hillside above the Tormes River. Entry on foot is across an old Roman bridge, built two millennia ago, which is, fittingly, called the Roman Bridge. Portions damaged over the years, especially after flooding in the 17th century, were rebuilt, and the bridge has provided steady access to the city, century after century, for 2,000 years. Nothing flimsy about it, as my running partner and I agreed. On our recent visit to Salamanca, after having parked the car on a quiet street just across the river from the city, we walked over the bridge and then up into the old town. The impression was of controlled austerity: no bright colors, no shoppers laughing or chatting, no signs, no ads. Just discrete placards on plain building façades, heavy wooden doors, and small windows.

Instead of heading straight for the Plaza Mayor, we skewed to the right toward the university quarter and found ourselves in that quiet green alcove above the river. From there we wandered narrow streets between enormously tall buildings, admired the perfectly solid walls, the sturdy corners, the functionality declared in the lines. And then in awe we raised our eyes to the surprise of the astounding stone carvings covering the façades of major buildings. These were not decorative touches along the roofline or at the corners but a stilled waterfall, motion and immobility together, washing over the face of the building.

The stone throughout the old town, cut over centuries from the same quarry, has a recognizably golden hue. I had been to Salamanca once before, very briefly. What I remembered was this stone—its glowing golden hue. In contrast to the almost severe walls, the caramel-colored stone is consistently warm in tone—a color not exuberant in any way, I would say, but gently inviting.

The enormous doors on several of the university buildings are a dull brick red—again, not thrilling, but almost warm, like the stone. The color gave the buildings a friendly feel, despite the austerity of their lines, making it even harder to believe how old the university was. Founded in 1218, the University of Salamanca is the oldest in Spain and one of the oldest in Europe. Students come from all over the world.

In July, however, classes were out for the summer, and the throngs of youthful people we began to see as we got closer to the plaza did not impress one as being particularly studious. They were there, on that Sunday evening, for the same reason we were: to watch Spain take on Argentina in the final match of the World Cup, to be shown on a giant screen erected in the Plaza Mayor. So we wandered on, pausing to snap pictures of a spire against the blue sky or the odd tower.

By the time we reached the grandly impressive baroque Plaza Mayor, all the surrounding streets were alive with people, couples and groups, young and old. At least half of those people were wearing Spanish team T-shirts, or were draped in Spanish flags. Some tooted on red and yellow plastic horns; others sported scarves or hats with the emblematic red and yellow stripes. The sun no longer burned but the heat lingered. An ice cream from an Italian gelateria was perfect while we sat on a bench in the small Plaza del Corrillo, watching the crowds gradually grow denser. At 8:30, when the screen in the plaza and the smaller ones at the restaurant terraces were hooked up and pregame commentary began, we moved into the Plaza Mayor. It was full of milling crowds. The reserved seats at outdoor tables were filling. And still people came. My friend and I picked a spot just behind the tables of diners on the terrace of a restaurant opposite the giant screen.

At halftime, with the game still scoreless, we went to find something to drink at a bar in one of the side streets. At the barra, a young man was waiting for a beer. He smiled as if we were friends. Then, guessing I was a foreigner, he asked me in English where I was from. Twice during the first half, the camera had picked out a frowning President Trump behind bulletproof glass, getting boos from the crowd in the plaza. “From the Land of Trump,” I answered, still with the image of the president exposed behind the glass, as if he were the Wizard of Oz.

“Who are you rooting for?” the young man asked.

“Spain, of course!”

After a few more minutes of chat about Colorado (where he had never been) and New York (where he had visited and where he wished he was at that moment), he took his beer and his leave. “Here’s to a happy ending! I hope we can do it,” he said, raising his mug. We raised our glasses.

My friend and I finished our drinks and went back for the second half.

If only I had bumped into that nice young fellow again after the game. “We did it!” I’d have proclaimed. Because we had. Spain 1, Argentina 0, the winning goal coming in extra time, thousands of fans together in the packed plaza cheering Spain’s second World Cup triumph.

An ice cream before, a glass of tonic water mid-game, and a shot of mild euphoria afterward. All this a week before my flight to the United States for my usual summer month at home. There is no place like home, but unlike Dorothy’s, mine seems less a physical place in a real world than a desire to reconnect with the past. What does that mean? It means that when I’m home in Colorado and New Mexico, with friends and family around me, my days following the pleasant pattern of past days, I might wander in my imagination back to Salamanca, climb the hill, skip the secret garden as I pass the oddly angled corners and cross the narrow streets, and step into a bar close to the Plaza Mayor, looking around for a stranger who knows me.

The post On Returning appeared first on The American Scholar.

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

The post “Everybody Who Is Dead” by Frank Stanford appeared first on The American Scholar.

Amanda J. Bradley contributed “Thoughts on Devotion in Detainment”:

Imprisoned here, shackled to the shadows
of your words, I roam the confines of my cell
reciting them. I am your biggest fan: your captive,
rapt audience, slave to your genius. What pin
stuck in me—voodoo doll, acupuncture patient,
lover of words—would lance my heart?

The heart of a prisoner adores her captor, proves
her devotion in drops of blood and spit spilt
on pages and pages, reams and reams of words
in lines and letters. Surrendering to handcuffs,
I am adherent, devotee, whether the warden earned
or demanded it, beside the point. There is nothing
like a gun in the mouth behind lock and key.
There is nothing imagined that is not real.
There is nothing to do but order a last meal,
make a deathbed confession, declare false
when questioned, knowing the genuine flails
and fails in all of us, determination be damned.
But from here, hidden by force, how could I not
adore and understand your words, your conviction?

The rhetorical prowess is extraordinary, especially following the stanza break. Emily voiced her enthusiasm prior to making one crucial suggestion: “I love the confident line breaks. Reading down all the final words along the righthand margin is like a getting the poem in concentrated form. So many wonderful moments, including ‘There is nothing / like a gun in the mouth behind lock and key.’ I have to wonder if the first stanza adds all that much?”

I agree with Emily and hope that Amanda will further improve her outstanding effort by shortening the title to “Devotion in Detainment”—a title that Coleridge would have liked.

As for Emily, her “Unhinged Fan Mail to the Wasps” begins with an alliterative phrase in the beguiling manner of Wallace Stevens, then elaborates a conceit likening a hornet sting to a woman’s midlife changes:

Hairless hymenoptera, come for me stinging,
slinging spit to form your nest, our paper anniversary.

Come for me in spring, but don’t stop when
menopause hits August, the planetary hot flash.

Come close to my lips while I’m swimming laps;
play favorites with my flowers.

Come at me, on occasion, from the grass.
Whirling in this waltz, like lovers in the London

season that stole your waist—your petiole—for fashion,
I forget which of us begat the stalking.

I have but one suggestion for Emily: that she shorten the title to “The Wasps.”

In “Consuming Literature,” Millicent Caliban mixes a consumption metaphor with the canine’s fabled hunger for homework:

In regard to your submission,
after I printed it out,
my dog ate your poem.

It gave him something to chew on
and lifted his spirits
on a hot, dull day.

His digestion responds to verse:
makes him frisky and alert.
He enjoys playful metaphors.

Please send more of your work
as long as it has good taste
and no toxic invective.

Insincere flattery is reliably fruitful, as Brian16 demonstrates in “Parasocial”:

Thank you for buying
all of my novels.
Following on Tumblr,
Bluesky, Facebook, X.

YouTube videos—
curated life bits
promote the next book
keep old ones in print.

Regretfully, your
pages might inspire.
I dare not read your
seven thousand words.

My Sweet Lord showed us—
cautionary tale.
Your genius might spark
my plagiarism.

Not intended, of course.
Who among us hasn’t
copied Shakespeare by
mistake? Best of luck!

“Your genius might spark / my plagiarism” is brilliant. I would love the poem even more if it were briefer—I suggest removing the first two lines of the penultimate stanza and the final stanza altogether. Would “Sorry” or “Best of Luck!” work better than “Parasocial” as a title?

Emily’s proposed revision of Palevanilla’s “Dear Predator, uh um, Editor” is excellent. Here’s the original:

Dear Predator, uh um, Editor

I received your letter addressed to “Esteemed
Professor.” I’m almost flattered. Thank you
for the kind invitation to provide
a 2-page article or brief review
on otolaryngology. It seems you’ve
confused me with someone who
is actually a physician,
biologist, or epidemiologist.
Alas, I am the wrong kind of ist, with
extremely low tolerance for bullshit.
I am merely a psychologist whose
recent research focuses on ethics
surrounding publication practices.
If you agree to waive your exorbitant
fee, I could provide a 2-page opinion
piece summarizing my thoughts on poor
quality predatory journals with
mimicked names meant to deceive
desperate academics in need of publication.
And, though not entirely consistent
with your mission, at least I will not confuse
laryngitis with cholecystitis.

And here’s how Emily edited it:

I’m almost flattered
by your kind invitation to provide
a 2-page article or brief review
on otolaryngology. Alas, I am the wrong
kind of ist, with an extremely low
tolerance for bullshit.
Merely a psychologist whose
recent research focuses on ethics
surrounding publication practices,
I could, if you agree to waive
your exorbitant fee, summarize
my thoughts on predatory journals
attempting to deceive
the desperately-in-need
of publication.

Ana P.’s “I must tell you the truth” is a winner:

your unsolicited submissions are so copious
that I’ve started launching them into space

maybe the poems are gathering right now
to be seen by the sun

every single one of them basking in its attention
as they vanish, at ease with the unknown

I will continue until the craters of the moon
are chock-full of carbon

or I can no longer tell a poem from the moon,
whichever comes first.

Emily certified her status as the team’s official bench coach with her suggestion that, “gorgeous” as the poem is, it might be even stronger if Ana changed “the first couplet to: ‘I’ve started launching your unsolicited/submissions into space.”
Honorable mention to Paul Michelsen for “Shoulda Been a Nine Liner”—with its beautifully parenthetical last line, “(Please see attachment.)” Palevanilla, happily prolific, wrote a poem about “gentle” rejection letters, “And it comes with a subscription.” The poem ruefully acknowledges that some rejection letters “are better than some acceptances,” but this doesn’t console the writer aware that “99,900 / hopefuls received the same exact letter / with their name following dear.”

Finally, Anna Ojascastro Guzon wins this week’s award for best title—“To Be Honest”—a phrase implying that most of the things the speaker says are untrue. Her use of erasure is exemplary:

Hi Pam!
Dear Pam,
I appreciate your faith in my abilities to
Thank you for thinking of me as your replacement
as head of the fundraising committee
for the varsity cheerleading squad.

Honestly, I wish I could but unfortunately
Honestly, there’s no fucking way that I’d
I would but honestly, your request makes me want to cry
Honestly, why don’t you ask Jen to get off her
However, I am unable to commit to this position at this time.
Sincerely,
AG

For next month, consider anew the sonnet. We love those of Wyatt, Sidney, Milton, Wordsworth, and Keats, but none of them rivals Shakespeare in his command of the form. I have modernized the first lines of three of Shakespeare’s sonnets: numbers 40, 43, and 104. Your prompt is to write a sonnet of your own, using any of these three lines as your opening:

1. Take all I love, from dolls to jewels to guns,
2. When I wink, my eyes see things as they are
3. To me, dear friend, you never can be old

Deadline: two weeks after this post goes up. Good luck, everyone, and thanks.

The post “In Regard to Your Submission” appeared first on The American Scholar.

Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s The Samurai and the Prisoner is an attempt to fill in a historical blank. We open in 1578 during Oda Nobunaga’s campaign to unify Japan. Araki Murashige, one of Nobunaga’s former allies, refuses to join him. A messenger arrives at Murashige’s castle to warn him that he has chosen the wrong side: if he doesn’t join, his kingdom will be destroyed. Rather than send the messenger, Kuroda Kanbei, back to his leader with a response, or else make that response immediately clear by having the messenger executed (as custom would demand), Murashige orders Kanbei’s arrest and imprisonment. He thus sets off a series of events that will change the course of the war and lead to one man’s disappearance: his own.

The film is an adaptation of Honobu Yonezawa’s 2021 historical novel of the same name, which is based on a set of known facts. When Araki Murashige betrayed his former ally and his kingdom came under siege, he abdicated his position and disappeared. He left behind his wife and his people, and his kingdom was overrun. But Murashige’s reasons for disappearing—the feelings, thoughts, and processes that inspired a man to act in such a mysterious way—remain ultimately unknowable.

What makes a man relinquish power? What would make a man who has fought through great sacrifice and pain give up what he has accumulated? And if we don’t know his intentions, how are we to judge whether this was an act of great cowardice or bravery? If he had abandoned his kingdom to spare the lives of his men, who have sworn to die protecting their leader, couldn’t this act then be reframed as one of mercy? But how to know the difference if we can’t see inside the mind of the man? And, of course, why does that matter? These historical anomalies, when a person or a nation behaves in a way that is mysterious to us, invite speculation. The unsolved murder, the historical quandary—the gap is a place for the imagination to play, even if what we create there will say things only about us and never about the period itself. Murashige himself is an anomaly—even his wife comments that she “can’t see into [his] heart.”

In the Yonezawa/Kurosawa version of events, Murashige develops a distaste for power. Or, at least, a distaste for power as it is practiced at the time. He seems disgusted with certain demands for violence and retribution. Adhering to the samurai code of honor would require that both Kanbei and the young son of a man who betrayed Murashige are killed. He dismisses the advisors who remind him of his responsibility to take these lives. “If I only obeyed custom,” he reminds them, he wouldn’t have his position of power. His reluctance to commit these acts at first looks like mercy, grace extended by a benevolent leader. But mercy makes the world of the castle strange. No one knows how to act because the leader is suddenly unpredictable. Even his decision to betray Nobunaga starts to look less strategic and more the result of some private inner process that will have tragic consequences for everyone around him.

Murashige’s ultimate decision to abdicate the throne violates the traditions and codes of the era, but it also goes against what we think of as human nature. In classic stories of the powerful, those who have power cling to it, bringing on destruction as a result. (This is the story behind one of the most famous samurai films of all time, Throne of Blood by the other, unrelated Kurosawa, Akira.) Murashige attained his position of power through violence and force. But his unwillingness to continue to use force creates uncertainty around him. As Kanbei warns him from a prison cell, “If you do what is contrary to the customs of the world, there will be consequences.”

Reality within the castle starts to warp. During each season of the ensuing year something impossible seems to happen—a murder structured much like an Agatha Christie locked-room mystery, the seemingly supernatural mutilation of a corpse, the killing of a priest and disappearance of treasure, and the death of a traitor by a lightning strike—and Murashige must solve these incidents, lest his people succumb to superstition. He turns to his prisoner to help him solve the mysteries, but Kanbei gives enigmatic answers and it’s never quite clear if he’s assisting or undermining his captor.

We as viewers know the samurai is violating codes of conduct because that is precisely what the film is communicating. But those of us who have seen a lot of samurai films will also know that like the Western or the detective story, the samurai film is a genre with clearly delineated rules and processes. And their prolificacy—from classics like the other Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai and Takashi Miike’s 13 Assassins to FX’s surprise 2024 hit Shogun—has established a set of expectations for the viewer. We are entering a world of rules and traditions, there will be erotic restraint but grandiose bloodshed, and someone is probably going to commit seppuku.

When we think up some aspect of World War II, we are likely to picture something from a movie we saw (Saving Private Ryan, perhaps), rather than anything based in historical knowledge. But screen-based entertainment distorts reality, influencing how we interpret and remember historical events. As Elizabeth D. Samet documented in Looking for the Good War, Hollywood films about World War II had a profound, worldwide effect on how people understood the war itself. As the films continued to come out, certain ideas solidified in people’s minds: The United States was the ultimate victor, the Soviet Union’s contributions were sidelines, and the Nazis were the pinnacle of evil. The bad things the United States had done (firebombing Japanese and German cities, perpetrating mass rapes through France and Italy, welcoming Germans and Japanese scientists who had been accused of war crimes, for example) diminished in both people’s minds and in the historical record.

Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s only other dip into historical features was his 2020 film Wife of a Spy, fittingly enough set during World War II. The plot concerns an amateur actress, Satoko, who discovers that her husband is working with the British to smuggle out evidence of Japan’s war crimes and medical experimentation in Manchuria. She has seen and acted in spy movies before, and she thinks she can effortlessly step into the role created for her by genre entertainment to assist him in his treasonous activities.

It’s never clear if she is betraying her country because she believes, like her husband, that what Japan is doing makes it worthy of violent retribution. It could be that she is simply choosing one loyalty (to her husband) over another (to her homeland). But when the world doesn’t respond to the role she is playing in the way she has come to expect from films, she finds herself unable to adjust. By the end, she loses all sense of self, and she ends the film alone with the city behind her in flames, screaming in grief and madness.

There is the historical time of the samurai, and then there is the distorted entertainment of the samurai. For those of us in the audience who are not historians or experts on this period, it is distortion all the way down.

Kurosawa invites these genre expectations and then disrupts them by centering a samurai who refuses to behave like a samurai. He has an almost modern sensibility, with his sense of mercy and restraint, but also his longing for a different way to live. Given the opportunity, he would follow his heart and build his life around tea. He also has a more contemporary understanding of trauma and the aftermath of violence.

The film features two short anomalous sequences, which appear like intrusive thoughts. The first is a vision of Murashige’s wife Chiyoho, rocking back and forth on the floor, comforting a doll as if it were a child. When she was young, she witnessed a battle that turned into a massacre, and this vision, which will be repeated later in the film, is either a memory of her trauma or a fear of what Murashige is about to inflict on the ordinary people he is sworn to protect.

The second sequence is also either a vision of the future or a memory of the past. Murashige greets Nobunaga, his once ally and now enemy, and maidens are lined up as an offering or a sacrifice. Nobunaga beheads two of the women and demands that Murashige kill the others. These are not the stoic, voluntary deaths we associate with the samurai. They are horrifying acts, performed amid painful screams and sobs.

Murashige’s refusal or hesitation to act during the present opens up a space for divine intervention. If the leader can’t get things done, maybe God or Buddha will have to do it. (There is some wonderful dialogue after the first appearance of Christian missionaries about how believers of different faiths are interpreting the strange events around them.) The first murder, of the traitor’s son after Murashige refuses to order his death, seems to have been committed with an invisible arrow, shot at an impossible angle. Even if the murderer had been human, divine guidance had to have helped. Murashige’s people, unable to source logical reasons for these strange events and finding their leader unreliable, are quick to blame supernatural sources. They have been living under uncertain conditions, waiting to be subsumed by an invasion or perhaps saved by an ally, for months. His wife cautions him, that the thing “ordinary people” fear most “is what comes next.”

These sorts of anomalies are Kurosawa’s thing: In all of his films, something or someone behaves differently than you would expect and that reveals the weirdness of the world. It’s always been weird, you just haven’t had to notice.

In Tokyo Sonata (2008), a man named Ryuhei loses his job but tries to prevent his family from learning the truth, and as a result the whole household starts to break apart. His son suddenly enlists to fight in another country’s war, his wife is abducted during a home invasion, and a fellow unemployed man loses his mind and commits a horrific murder. Because of Ryuhei’s inability to fulfill the expected role of the patriarch and provider, all of the people around him lose their way as well. In Cure (1997), a strange patient asks his doctor about her history of being mistreated by the men she works with. She had repressed her suffering in order to keep functioning. But with a simple question, the repressed bursts through into her consciousness and all of a sudden she is in the men’s bathroom, peeling a man’s face off with a scalpel.

In order to survive our time on earth, we consciously sort out a lot of information that might disturb our ability to function, by which we mean go to a job, fulfill our boss’s demands, cook and eat dinner, get in a car and drive to Costco. If we paid attention—real attention­—to any one of these acts, we might notice how strange they are, how devoid of meaning, how close everything is to coming entirely undone. Kurosawa presents moments of inescapable weirdness, disrupts the unconscious flow, and shows the world its uncanny reflection.

In most of his films, someone tries to put the weird world back into order through an investigation. Within The Samurai and the Prisoner there is a detective procedural, as Murashige and his men attempt to gather evidence to establish the facts of the seemingly supernatural events. But as soon as they solve one mystery, another emerges. In Cure, a detective tries to wrap up cases like that of the homicidal doctor, but hers is just one in a whole string of murders that all seem to have been committed by separate, unrelated people but in identical ways. In a Kurosawa film, it always looks like the mystery is going to be solved, the world is going to be put right again, but then the detective’s gaze strays back toward the mysterious and the more profound questions that lead to a dangerous psychic space. Once his characters notice the weirdness of the world, its fundamental uncanniness, they’ll never be able to unsee it.

Murashige’s problem is that once he gets a good look at the code of honor and the acts he is expected to commit in order to retain his position of power, he can’t unsee how much blood and suffering and terror such a code requires. Even as he re-establishes equilibrium after solving each mystery, he can’t unsee what he has seen. He is only able to see all this because his prisoner directs his gaze in a certain direction, but is it out of benevolence or revenge? The knowledge is a gift and a curse.

In the 1970s, American psychologist Edward Tronick conducted an experiment in which women with young children were directed to present their infants with a “still face.” They were asked to show no expression at all, not even when their babies exhibited distress. It turned out that babies could cope with expressions of disapproval or even anger from their caregivers, but being met with no expression at all, with a blank face, upset them greatly. They would cry or coo or fawn or reach out, desperately trying to get some sort of reaction. Only when the mother’s face returned to its responsive state could they settle down.

I often think that what Kiyoshi Kurosawa is depicting is the reaction to a kind of divine still face—not absence, but cosmic indifference. And how people, faced with that, will wriggle and scream and flirt in an attempt to provoke a reaction. Murashige’s characters seem to prefer to believe the fantasy that the mysterious acts they witness were the result of divine intervention. The heavens might be ruled with violence, but at least they are responsive. Murashige himself, having seen the world’s weirdness, knows that there is only blankness, and he cannot help but become a blank himself as a result. Thus he disappears from history.

The post Who Is the Samurai, and Who Is the Prisoner? appeared first on The American Scholar.

In 2013, a 52-year-old lab technician in England bludgeoned his wife to death with a perfume bottle, then killed himself. However shocking, this crime probably wouldn’t have made headlines beyond their hometown if not for the man’s suicide note. “The balance of my mind,” he wrote, “was disturbed by …  a patch of Japanese Knotweed which has been growing over our boundary fence.” Knotweed is a tenacious invasive species, nearly impossible to eradicate, and often causes property values to plummet. “The worry of it migrating onto our garden and subsequently undermining the structure,” the man concluded, “has led to my growing madness.”

As science writer Amy Crawford demonstrates in her thought-provoking new book, Undesirable, invasive species have a way of unbalancing people. Even among biologists and conservation officials, any pretense of objectivity often gets tossed out the window: They regularly liken invasives to “metastatic cancer,” “merciless killers,” and “public enemy no. 1.”

Still, that rhetoric is understandable sometimes, given that invasives cause $2 trillion in economic damage worldwide each year—destroying crops, spreading diseases, undermining buildings, and choking out native plants and animals. Invasive bugs and earthworms have even reached Antarctica. The United States has been hit especially hard, with a reported 51,000 non-native species having crossed its borders.

Biologists and angry amateurs alike have developed all sorts of methods to combat invasives: traps, nets, electric zappers, specially trained beagles to sniff them out, as well as some dastardly ways of culling them. The latter includes a truly dystopian device called the Felixer, a solar-powered, AI-driven unit that senses feral cats—which slaughter native birds at abominable rates—and sprays them with poison, which the cats ingest while licking and grooming themselves. Although these measures are deployed in the name of preserving fragile species, as one of Crawford’s sources grumbles, “Killing plants and animals doesn’t seem to me like the best way of celebrating biodiversity.”

Uglier still, with the rise of modern populism, the rhetoric about invasives crossing foreign borders often echoes the language used to denounce human immigration. Sometimes, the contentious debates over human and biological migrants overlap and feed upon one another. Invasive cane along the Rio Grande has exacerbated droughts by sucking up groundwater, while simultaneously providing cover for both narcotraffickers and undocumented people crossing the southern U.S. border. In Australia—where invasive species wreak particular havoc—young people have floated conspiracy theories that immigrants first imported invasive flora and fauna from their homelands, perhaps to sell in exotic markets.

However, the politics of invasive species don’t map cleanly onto the left-right spectrum. As Crawford writes, liberals “see the right-wing anti-immigration position as morally repugnant, while opposition to invasive species remains an uncontroversial tenet of standard-issue progressivism.” Conservatives, in contrast, “consider border security paramount” with regard to humans, but “dismiss environmental regulations that might tamp down biological invasions as a threat to freedom.”

All this gets even more muddled when you realize that, in nature, many assumptions about invasive species are wrong. Native species rarely just succumb to invaders. Most do fine. In certain cases, invasive species provide critical shelter or food for endangered native birds that would likely disappear otherwise.

Horror stories about invasives don’t always survive scrutiny, either. Remember the 1990s scare over “killer bees”? Or take kudzu, the vine that once seemed poised to devour the South. It currently covers 0.1 percent of the South’s 200 million acres of unoccupied land—hardly a calamity. But the places it thrives are telling: empty cropland and cleared sections alongside highways. Places, in other words, that humans regularly see. Our fear is seemingly just a psychological sampling bias.

Even deciding whether a species is invasive or not can be tricky. Horses originally evolved in North America, where early human settlers encountered them thousands of years ago and helped wipe them out via hunting. Spaniards reintroduced them while colonizing the Americas in the 1500s, and some escaped and went feral. So are horses invasive? And is that judgment based on sound ecological principles, or the fact that modern humans find wild horses romantic? A related issue is determining at what point in the past we draw the line between native and non-native. After all, every species originated somewhere, and as Crawford notes, any point we pick to stand athwart biology and yell “stop!” is arbitrary, “a screenshot from a movie that has no clear beginning or end.”

Crawford contends that much of our fear of invasives actually stems from larger worries about climate change and other looming environmental catastrophes. Those are overwhelming problems that no one human can solve. Moreover, every one of us who drives or uses plastics is complicit in them, which feels crummy. In contrast, we can oppose invasive species with clean consciences. Moreover, individuals can do something about them—tramp through the woods and tear out groves of garlic mustard, or participate in bounty hunts for pythons (at least in South Florida). Alas, the separation between climate change and invasive species isn’t so clean, since rising temperatures often push species to migrate into new territories.

Undesirable is a short book, and could have been shorter: There’s a bit too much about the infighting among, say, academics or animal-rights activists. Ultimately, though, Crawford does exactly what good nature writers should: She illuminates why this potentially nebulous topic matters, wades through the complexities, and offers a deeper understanding than perhaps even the scientists involved possess. After reading the book, it’s simply untenable to argue that native always equals “good” and invasive always equals “bad.” Above all, Crawford invokes a sort of Serenity Prayer of Biology as we navigate the tumultuous world that invasives have thrust us into—a plea for the wisdom to “recognize what we can fix, what we can’t, and when we might just have to accept that our world has changed forever.”

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Why can’t we go where our better selves point—down the path through the overgrown field of stuff and into the stubble of a cleared field?

I think it has to do with fear of making the wrong decision. Throwing out cannot be undone, because what’s gone is gone. You need to be very sure. To justify saving, we might reason that it doesn’t have to be forever. Placing an item in the save pile is a stopgap; it gives you time. It isn’t so much a commuted sentence as a stay of execution. We’ll retry the case in a month, after a little more time for careful consideration.

Some saving is different from this insidious postponement. It is saving in the best sense: restoring to the fold. Yes, this cup will remain in use, with a place assured in the cupboard among the other cups. This promise often comes at a cost: A different cup must be sacrificed for the saved cup to remain.

But the majority of pieces in the save pile are not saved in the sense of being recognized as among the chosen; they are saved only in that they are not discarded. They are left in the limbo of “keep for now,” their final fate still unknown. Saving is really procrastinating.

Or is it? Maybe more than procrastination, it is a way to recognize fallibility—a way to rethink a decision, akin to buying a pair of shoes you can return. A smart move.

So putting off a decision isn’t all bad, though it certainly isn’t all good. But what if instead of a series of apologies for saving our stuff, we had a celebration? How might this happen?

Well, suppose, like my mother, you are determined to finally free yourself of stuff. All that clutter on shelves and in corners will be gone. Light and air will flood your home. Dust will still accumulate, yes, but not for long. Dust and cobwebs will be defenseless on the cleared surfaces and in the empty corners. So you ready yourself, and you enlist your daughter to help. Because of course she will be better at throwing out your memorabilia than you are. She won’t be sentimentally attached to it. She will be heartless when you would yield.

Such was our thinking as my mother and I sat down to clear clutter from her house one recent August afternoon. I was with her for my usual summer visit, to talk, read, gossip, debate, compare, complain, and to be the backbone for this most difficult of jobs. “What shall we toss?” was the question. A phrase from my college days came to mind. Tossing was a euphemism for throwing up that I learned as a freshman, specifically tossing your cookies. Sticky, clumpy, half-chewed cookies spewing forth. A stream of lumpy projectile vomit. But couldn’t it be like tossing rose petals at a wedding, or confetti and candy in a parade? Cookies! Flying through the air! Wouldn’t you want to catch a few?

But what if the celebration wasn’t to toss things away, but to toss and catch?

What shall we save, I rephrased, suddenly on the side of the things, not on the side of cleanliness and order. Clean and orderly—sterile and vacant. These objects were the loot of a lifetime—not gold and silver or jewels but, here in my hand, a snapshot of my grandfather in a white suit, so tall and substantial, standing beside my mother, his arm around her bare shoulder, squeezing her to him. She was grinning in her sleeveless black and yellow dress. The occasion was Easter morning, 1964 or ’65.

I’m not in that picture but must be around the corner of the house, if you could just peek: a two-year-old in a pale yellow dress with flounces. The rest of the family in the garden under a tree. Let’s not lose the trinkets and baubles of these lives, the photos and letters and ordinary things that, like stories we retell, are the real family heirlooms, the keys to the past. What good is the stash without the key?

The post The Save Pile appeared first on The American Scholar.

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

The post “The Giver” by James Baldwin appeared first on The American Scholar.

Olivier’s work addresses subjects from environmentally destructive housing practices to humanitarian crises around the world. In one piece, Powers of 10 (Home Kit)—a nod to the Charles and Ray Eames documentary of the same name—a ring of gypsum, the primary component of drywall, encircles a ring of pink fiberglass insulation, which itself encircles cement, and so on. The work is a commentary on modern building practices in cities such as Philadelphia, where Olivier now lives. “I’m reading about a beautiful historic building that’s being taken down to put up one of those ‘showing houses’ that go up in a second and are not going to withstand the test of time.” Another work, Shelter, is a simple enclosure formed by an emergency aluminum heating blanket. Olivier was struck by how the flimsy blankets, used by marathon runners to warm up after a race, are also commonly seen in refugee camps from Gaza to Sudan. “This material is so thin, so light, it’s like air. And it becomes someone’s shelter, comfort, and architecture,” she explains. “What I’m using is so basic, there’s not much to the work. But how they’re arranged maybe makes you realize the simplest, most familiar material or object can be the most profound.”

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Christopher Kondrich is the author of the previous collections Contrapuntal and Valuing, which won the National Poetry Series and was named a best book of 2019 by Library Journal. His poems have appeared widely in such venues as The Atlantic, The Believer, The Kenyon Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and The Yale Review. He is currently Visiting Poet in Residence for the Creative Writing MFA program at the University of Maryland.

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If there is a striking (and, for some, unexpected) aspect to Matt Damon’s portrayal of Odysseus in Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey, it is his explicit embodiment of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Hardly the unflappable mythical hero many of us remember, Damon’s Odysseus is haunted by what he’s seen in war, and haunted by his own culpability.

Of all the Homeric translators and commentators over the millennia, Nolan seems most explicitly in dialogue with Jonathan Shay, a psychiatrist who discovered the therapeutic value of reading The Iliad with Vietnam veterans. Through his clinical practice, Shay came to believe that Homer’s Achilles is suffering from all the symptoms of complex PTSD as we now recognize it. But unlike the American military, Greek culture had numerous cultural means of treating this trauma that have since been either lost or actively suppressed.

From that experience came Shay’s 1994 book Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character. Shay pinpoints the beginning of Achilles’s suffering—what he would come to call his “moral injury”—to when Agamemnon betrays him (paralleling how many Vietnam vets felt betrayed by their government). “When a leader destroys the legitimacy of the army’s moral order by betraying ‘what is right,’” Shay writes, “he inflicts manifold injuries on his men. The Iliad is a story of these immediate and devastating consequences.” Numbed by wrath, Achilles turns his back on the fellow Greeks for whom he formerly cared deeply. In this compromised state, the death of Pátroklos destroys him, engendering a berserker rage in which he desecrates the corpses of his fallen enemies, unable to control himself or observe the traditional laws of war.

For Shay, “The Iliad is the tragedy of Achilles’ noble character brought to ruin—moral ruin in his own terms … Achilles’ moral unluckiness, his tragedy, was that events—simply what happened—created the desire to do things that he himself regarded as bad.” It is something he found again and again in the American veterans he was treating. One of Shay’s patients, for example, was horrified by the barbarity he saw when he first arrived in Vietnam, but soon found himself participating in those same atrocities, benumbed and broken. Another became totally focused on revenge, even after returning home (“I lost all my friends, beat up my sister, went after my father,” he confessed.) While at war, they were taught to channel whatever emotion they had left (grief, sorrow, self-loathing) into a kind of berserker rage to be turned against a dehumanized enemy.

Unlike these men, Achilles at least has the means to cope with some of this trauma. “An American soldier who wept for a fallen friend was warned not to ‘lose it’ and to ‘get your mind straight,’” Shay relates, unlike the Greeks who openly weep and perform elaborate funeral rites throughout Homer’s epics. The contrast proved illuminating for many veterans. Walking traumatized soldiers through a reading of The Iliad, Shay found, helped them work through much of their own trauma by emphasizing mutual respect toward the enemy, recognition of the damage done by unjust superiors, and the importance of active griefwork for one’s fallen comrades.

In 2002, Shay published Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming, which focused on the perils combat veterans faced reintegrating into civilian life. It was something the ancient Greeks seemed to understand well: After all, of the great Greek heroes who see combat in The Iliad—Achilles, Odysseus, Agamemnon, Ajax, Menelaus, and Diomedes—only the last two make it home unscathed and untroubled. Ajax was famously second only to Achilles as the most powerful fighter in the Greek army, but upon his return went mad and ultimately committed suicide—as clear an indication as any that the experience of war had irrevocably damaged him (in Hades he’s still traumatized, refusing even to speak to Odysseus). Homer’s audience, in other words, was acutely aware that homecoming—nostos—was a fraught endeavor, and the reintegration of the soldier into peacetime life was not to be taken lightly. If The Odyssey has survived and endured while so many other oral epics were lost, it is in no small part because it was—and still remains—the work of literature most seriously engaged with the question of how to reintegrate a damaged, troubled soldier back into civilian life.

Shay reads Odysseus’s fantastic journey, with its monsters and goddesses, as an allegory for the series of problems that beset returning veterans. Odysseus’s first act after Troy is to raid Ismarus: Unable to let the war go, Odysseus, like numerous vets, “simply remains in combat mode, although not necessarily against the original enemy.” From there he and his men engage in numerous self-destructive behaviors, from drug addiction (amid the Lotus eaters) to sexual dependency (with Circe and Calypso), to thrill-seeking behavior (the needless risks they take on Polyphemus’s island). “I see the adventure with the Cyclops as an emblem for combat veterans’ attraction to danger,” Shay writes, “an attraction that has cost so many of them their lives after returning home, and tortured those who love them with untold hours of fear for their safety.”

And yet, Odysseus himself does not exhibit any of the symptoms that Achilles does. He shows an almost complete absence of moral pain, guilt, or self-reproach, and seems to lack any real sense of self-criticism. He is not beset by unwanted memories or flashbacks, nor does he exhibit avoidance behavior. At least according to the diagnostic criteria set forth by the American Psychiatric Association, Shay concludes, Homer’s Odysseus does not qualify as traumatized. His actions are haunting, but he himself seems unhaunted.

Matt Damon’s portrayal of Odysseus in Christopher Nolan’s adaptation brings the hero’s internal psychological state in line with his actions: He is explicitly scarred by his participation in the Trojan war and his later war crimes. His subsequent wanderings become more explicitly symptomatic of a man whose mind has been broken by the horrors of war. The rapid back-and-forth timeline cuts characteristic of Nolan’s work are here more akin to flashbacks, even as key memories are suppressed until later in the film.

Odysseus’s behavior in Nolan’s film, too, is more explicitly aligned with the actions Shay describes his patients exhibiting. In Homer’s epic, it is Polyphemus who refuses to host Odysseus and his men as guests, breaking the laws of hospitality and attacking them instead; the ploy to blind him as a means of escape is thus both justified and crafty.  But in Nolan’s film, once they’ve escaped, Odysseus turns one last time and fires an arrow into the Cyclops’s already wounded eye. Arbitrary, churlish, and entirely devoid of any emotion, Matt Damon shoots his bow like a bored child trying to hurt a stray cat. The scene echoes an anecdote from one of Shay’s patients who, upon returning from Vietnam, punched his sister’s husband in the head while passing him in the house. As he told Shay, “I just wanted to see what happened.”

In Nolan’s film, nearly every heroic or crafty action by Odysseus is countered by a mean or pointless one. He is constantly castigated for his failure to honor the dead, for which he offers only self-serving justifications and dismissals. (“He died helping us escape,” he says of one fallen comrade. “We honor him by escaping.”) His is less a hero’s journey and more the antisocial wanderings of someone ill-prepared to return to civilian life. The encounter with the Laestrygonians is rendered briefly in the film, but it captures the flip side of Odysseus’ heroism and cunning, showing a directionless leader who takes his hungry, wasted men into slaughter without any sense of purpose or even awareness of what’s happening. Flailing, lashing out without reason or direction, and entirely at war with his own mind, Odysseus is a protagonist with whom we are invited to identify and empathize, it seems, only so that his failures sting more deeply. Every decision he makes is another version of Scylla and Charybdis: there is no correct choice, only a question of how much damage will be inflicted.

In following Shay’s advice to listen to combat veterans as a way of making sense of Homeric epics, what also emerges is a more complicated reading of Nolan’s film itself. What Shay became most known for was the concept of “moral injury” (which contributed to his winning a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” grant in 2007), and it is this idea of a breakdown in the moral order that drives much of his reading of Homer. As Shay writes in Odysseus in America, “I regard the ethical use of power to be one key to prevention of psychological injury, particularly complex PTSD and deformed thumos [“spirit”]. Simply, ethics and justice are preventive psychiatry.”

As noted by Amy S. Badura-Black, a psychologist at Creighton University who studies PTSD and works with recovering veterans, not everyone with PTSD “experiences moral injury, and not all types of moral injury induce PTSD. But the two can overlap, particularly when someone violates their deeply held moral beliefs in a way that’s connected to a profound sense of guilt or shame.” In her reading of the film, Badura-Black argues that although Damon’s Odysseus clearly suffers from both, it is his sense of moral injury (perpetrated not by his commander Agamemnon, but by himself) that chiefly drives the arc of the film. His wanderings are not a fantastic journey driven by the gods but a self-imposed exile that’s evocative, she observes, “of the social alienation that’s so prevalent among sufferers of moral injury”—a social alienation born of an overwhelming sense that the world before Troy is gone for good.

It is this breakdown in moral order, and the subsequent moral injury of its protagonists, that seems to define Nolan’s film above all. In her review in the London Review of Books, Emily Wilson knocks a number of internal contradictions in the film, arguing that its “own values and vision don’t hang together,” and its characters’ “motivations don’t make sense on their own terms.” She criticizes Nolan for sending mixed messages about, among other things, Odysseus’s fabled trickery (“Slaughtering people with the help of trickery, technology and weapons is presented as bad when the Greeks are killing the Trojans, who have violated xenia, but good when Odysseus is killing the suitors, who have violated xenia”), hospitality (“Strangers in Ithaca are to be treated with gracious kindness, as possible gods in disguise; but strangers in foreign lands are usually monstrous, to be blinded, robbed and slaughtered”), and divinity (“Defying the gods is noble and brave when Odysseus blinds Polyphemus, son of Poseidon; it’s stupid and greedy when Eurylochus eats the Cattle of the Sun”). Wilson argues that any one of these “moral contradictions could make for an interesting and generative theme in a movie, but Nolan lets the fragments of an incomplete set of big ideas spin around in the epic whirlpool, with no plank of solid, specific human experience to which we might cling.”

But reading the symptoms of moral injury in Achilles and Odysseus suggests how even Homer’s audience understood that the Trojan War resulted in a fundamental breakdown in comprehensible order. Via Shay’s reading of Homer, in other words, one might see Nolan’s Odyssey as less the result of confused filmmaking and more filmmaking that depicts a confused world. There is no solid plank to cling to because the world Odysseus moves through has broken down almost entirely—not unlike our own in 2026. The message is incoherent and fractured in no small part because the moral stability of the old world has failed.

None of this to say that Nolan’s film is without flaws. (Nolan’s female characters remain, as always, embarrassingly underwritten, to choose just one example.) But it seems perhaps counterproductive to pick The Odyssey apart for being incoherent when we’re adrift in an age of incoherence, and what we need now more than anything are the tools to help us make sense of how to act during such confounding times. Betrayed by leaders, made witness to an endless litany of crimes and atrocities that many of us feel powerless to stop while still being racked with guilt—ours is a world of near-constant moral injury. Art that responds to such times cannot succeed by presenting a solid vision of the world or characters whose actions are uncomplicated. Enduring art does not give you easy answers; it poses impossible problems and gives you the strength to attempt to answer them, knowing full well any possible solution will be inadequate. It’s by this criteria—rather than any kind of internal coherence—that a work like The Odyssey should be judged.

No one was more aware of this than the poet himself. One of Shay’s most illuminating comments in Odysseus in America is his reminder of what song the Sirens actually sing in Homer’s epic. It is not, as we so often assume, a song of sexual seduction. It is instead the true story of the war, the thing that Odysseus (and every veteran) wants most—a meaningful narrative of what has happened. For they know, in Pietro Pucci’s translation, “everything that the Greeks and Trojans did and suffered in wide Troy.” It is this full and complete knowledge of the war that the Sirens use to try to entice Odysseus to their shores and to his own death. The Sirens offer everything, the complete and total picture—and this is precisely the most alluring thing one can be offered, and also the most deadly. They offer, in Shay’s words, “truth as deadly addiction,” showing us “that returning veterans face a characteristic peril, a risk of dying from the obsession to know the complete and final truth of what they and the enemy did and suffered in their war and why.” The trap here is not in erotic longing, but in longing for narrative coherency, finality, closure.

But as Tim O’Brien wrote in his 1990 collection of Vietnam stories, The Things They Carried, there is no such narrative closure, not when it comes to war. “A true war story is never moral,” he writes. “It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things they have always done. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie.”

To demand of a war film that its values and visions must cohere together, then, is to succumb once again to that old and terrible lie. In times of increasing lawlessness, when the moral order has broken down, Homer’s epics show not uncomplicated heroics, but rather how heroic individuals respond to moral injury and the waste of the world. And by being honest about that reality—showing us these great figures angry, confused, and broken, making poor choices as well as strong ones—they wrestle with how to act and how to live in uncertain times.

And perhaps this is the reason we always return to The Odyssey. As O’Brien writes, “You can tell a true war story by the way it never seems to end. Not then, not ever.” Odysseus’s story, too, never really ends: He’s still out there, along with an endless mass of other combat veterans, all trying to find a way home.  And this is why we keep telling versions of that story over and over, again and again: to help them return. We argue over who got it right, who got it wrong, and then we try to tell it one more time—a little differently, a little better—hoping to bring them a little closer.

The post Fractured Odysseus appeared first on The American Scholar.

My spasm must have traveled down the leash, because Toby again raised his gaze to meet mine, and his look as good as said, “Don’t I get to sniff freely without condemnation?”

“Do you have to?”

Again that look. “Isn’t it enough that I want to?”

“Please don’t unless you absolutely need to.”

“I’m a dog. I need to.”

He looked at me. I looked at him.

What were we really discussing? Get to, have to, want to, need to—not modal verbs exactly, but verbs signaling reasons. These are among the first words children use to assert themselves. Toby had never been so expressive before, resorting instead to tugging at his leash or barking from the end of it at a passing dog. But age was showing, and he was finally doing what people often tell frustrated children: Use your words. Toby was speaking with his eyes.

I thought then of a video a friend had sent a month or two earlier, of her son tasting ice cream for the first time. He was about a year old, sitting in his high chair with a bib on. I’ve watched it a number of times.

“Shall we try some ice cream?” his mum says.

The mother is out of the frame, but her hand with the spoon comes into sight. As the spoon comes closer, the little boy eyes it, already aware that something different is about to happen. He opens his mouth, not wide but cautiously, accepting the spoon with its dab of ice cream. He tastes it, purses his lips. His expression says, “What is this, and have I ever had it before?” You can almost see the decision taking shape on his face: This is worth investigating. The little boy is not speaking yet, but he can certainly give a good imitation. Signaling with his hand for more, he emits a sound that is unmistakably a command. “Brumnn.”

A second later, looking somewhat surprised at having to repeat himself, he issues his command again. “Brumnn!”

I watched him in the video take four tastes of ice cream. By the third and the fourth, I was laughing. It’s hard to convey how fast he advanced from interest to enthusiasm. Not exactly enthusiasm for ice cream. Enthusiasm for repeating the experiment. And each time, surprise. At the texture? The temperature? The sweetness? Or simply the sheer newness?

Still picturing the boy, I smiled on Toby. The morning was still. No wind, no one stirring that we could see. The birds, all chirping at first light, had quieted, like a team finished with the warm-up before a footrace. But the track was still clear; the day was waiting for the starter’s signal.

“Toby,” I wanted to say, “we are here, at the dawn of our day. Witnesses to the slow awakening of the world.”

But I didn’t say anything. What could I say? Toby already knew. How quickly the world begins, and how quickly it all passes.

The post Want to, Have to appeared first on The American Scholar.

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

The post “Wild Nights—Wild Nights!” by Emily Dickinson appeared first on The American Scholar.

Vietnam, as I learned when I visited my parents, was a place of many sensations. It was the aromas of fish sauce, coconut, and freshly baked baguettes. It was the roar of motorbikes, the rumble of army trucks, the screeches of hurtling cars. It was grim-faced, beautiful women hurrying in silky, pastel áo dàis and grim-faced men clustered at sandbagged street corners in green khaki and carrying loaded guns. It was skin sweaty and sticky from the oppressive, unrelenting heat. And it was daily meals of rice and fresh fish eaten to a soundtrack of intermittent, belly-clutching blasts from Vietcong explosives and grenades. It was a place steeped in sorrow, where the hardened Vietnamese people did whatever was required to survive and forge viable lives.

My parents were trying to do good. As a clandestine CIA operative, my father aimed to help people under repressive regimes achieve democracy, per the American creed as a superpower of the era. (This whole dynamic and mythology, in some part nobly motivated, was, of course, soon to be disrobed as arrogant and vastly flawed in both conception and execution.) And my mother was trying to help the injured, the sick, the disabled, the displaced, the traumatized, and the impoverished.

I witnessed both of them in action when I visited Saigon for Christmas. At a party held at my father’s radio station, known as House Seven, I sensed a genuine affection and devotion between him and the station’s Vietnamese employees. My mother, meanwhile, took me to visit two houses where women were being taught embroidery and other skills so as to be able to earn a living in some way other than selling their bodies on the street. In tiny living quarters cluttered with sewing machines, cloth, and thread, the women eagerly showed off their latest creations: beautiful dresses and flowing blouses embroidered with orchids and jasmine blossoms. My parents’ house was often filled with orphans who sat on the laps of embassy women. The children, fathered and abandoned by American servicemen, were set to be adopted by American families and would experience the added trauma of being taken away from their home country. The idea was to acquaint them with motherly figures who would cuddle and play with them, and to offer them a little taste of English before their new lives in America began.

Then, as 1974 turned into 1975, the American project in South Vietnam began to collapse. The grand scheme, nearly 20 years in the making, of trying to establish a democratic regime in the country, was failing. The U.S. ambassador, Graham A. Martin, insistently denied this, but all the embassy staff knew the truth. The explosions aimed at the capital from the surrounding countryside grew louder and more frequent each day, and the intelligence corroborated what was now inevitable. Embassy staff developed plans to evacuate the Americans from the country, but the plans were vague regarding the thousands of Vietnamese people who worked for and with the Americans. The administration began floating the idea that it would be okay to leave the Vietnamese staff behind, even though, because of their American affiliations, they would likely suffer punishment, retribution, re-education camps, or much worse.

When my father and his colleagues learned of this possibility, they made a carefully calculated choice. Acquiescing, at least by all appearances, to the ambassador’s belief that the South Vietnamese still had a chance to prevail and insisting that the work of the Americans should just proceed as usual, they moved the entire House Seven staff and family members—a total of 1,300 people—to an abandoned army base on Phú Quô´c Island. The ostensible plan was to keep beaming the radio programs from this new location. And there, under cover, the staff could more easily be evacuated when the North Vietnamese forces inevitably took control of the country.

My mother remained in Saigon. Panicked by the sense of imminent disaster, she hastened to get orphans adopted and out of the country before the city fell. She, like my father, wanted to stand by the people to whom the United States had made promises, with whom she had forged a connection, whose faces and hearts she knew, and whom she had come to love.

One day, I was in my dorm room at Carleton College, poring over my psychology assignments, when another student pounded on my door.

“Sara, you have a phone call. I think it’s from somewhere overseas. It’s really crackly.”

I was puzzled. Long-distance calls were expensive and overseas calls exorbitant, so my parents and I seldom spoke. We wrote letters instead. A phone call from abroad was very unusual.

When I picked up the phone in the stairwell, I heard my mother’s faraway voice through the static.

“Oh, sweetie, don’t worry. He’s okay,” she said. I didn’t know what she was referring to. She continued in the same mode. “We’ll be okay. Don’t worry. I’m in Taipei. He’s still there, but he’ll be okay, sweetie.” Her voice was all mixed up, the sentences rushed together. I didn’t know what she was talking about, but soon I could feel her anxiety like a hundred birds zooming in my stomach.

I was able to make out, as my mother urgently tried to convey her message, that things were really bad in Saigon. She had been evacuated, with the few other embassy wives who’d remained in the country, to Taiwan. She was in intermittent radio communication with my father, who was, she told me, still on Phú Quô´c Island with the House Seven staff. He was going to be okay, she kept saying. “He’s figuring it out. He’ll get out, he’ll get them all out. He’ll find a way.” Clearly, she was worried sick. My mother said, “I love you,” over and over, and she promised to keep me informed.

Before she hung up, almost in passing, she mentioned something about an orphan flight she’d helped load three and a half weeks earlier. “It was awful,” she said. “The babies were shrieking.” I didn’t really register what she was saying—she quickly resumed talking about my father. Only later would I hear of the trauma that wrote itself indelibly into my mother’s nerves.

With the American exodus nearing, my mother and the other American women involved in the embassy’s social service efforts, along with NGOs and orphanage directors, had begun organizing chartered flights to transport the orphans to their waiting adoptive families in the United States. The first flight of Operation Babylift was scheduled for the first week of April 1975. Several American caretakers had volunteered to look after the children during the flight.

On April 4, my mother and many others assembled at the Tan Son Nhut Air Base along with scores of babies and toddlers. My mother boarded the C-5A Galaxy, a cargo plane widely used by the U.S. Air Force, to help get the children settled. After the children were all buckled in, my mother stepped off the plane onto the tarmac, heaved a huge sigh, then turned to join the other remaining women in exhausted jubilation, all of them hopeful that the children would soon find themselves in nice homes.

Twelve minutes later, the massive Air Force cargo plane crashed in a rice paddy near the runway. One hundred and thirty-eight people died, 78 of them children.

The children—the living and the injured; the unconscious and the dead—were brought back to the terminal. My mother was changed forever. All her life, she had reached for the positive and salved herself by helping others. Now, insoluble sorrow settled upon her soul.

This is how my father’s Vietnam story ended:

Not long after he and his colleagues arrived on Phú Quô´c  Island, the House Seven radio man was able to communicate with the embassy enough to know that the situation in Saigon was deteriorating. When my father heard on Vietnamese radio—not from headquarters—that Ambassador Martin had finally agreed to an American evacuation, it took many hours before he could reach his counterpart at the embassy to find out more. When he finally got through on April 29, he was hurriedly told, “Get out any way you can.” As he suspected, there was no plan for the evacuation of House Seven. When the helicopters took off from the embassy roof in Saigon, he and the others were left stranded in Vietnam.

My father was not completely shocked at the turn of events, but he was still stunned by those words from the embassy. One thing he refused to do was abandon those with whom he worked. As he later wrote in his memoir, he was compelled to meet “a moral obligation to deliver [his] Vietnamese employees and their families to safety” and to “give them a chance to rebuild their lives.”

Scrambling to find a solution, my father contacted ships passing through the Gulf of Thailand. Eventually the captain of the SS American Challenger agreed to take onboard the entire House Seven crew. In the early hours of the morning, the freighter was loaded like a pilgrim ship. As the vessel moved eastward across the Pacific, members of the House Seven team were crammed together, slept on deck, and ate food cooked by the sailors. Their quarters were hardly comfortable, and two babies were born onboard, but everyone survived the six-day journey to Guam, where the Vietnamese employees and their families were housed until they could be resettled safely in the States.

My modest father, never one for self-praise, was profoundly moved and grateful that the rescue mission had succeeded, but he was also traumatized by the experience. Those words, “Get out any way you can,” were like an icy lance thrust into his warm, pulsing body.

Both of my parents were trying to help people threatened or harmed by our country’s actions. The truth is, sometimes you try to help and you fail; other times you mess up (or are caught in others’ failures) and succeed. My father triumphed. My mother’s compassionate actions met with tragedy. All we can and must do, perhaps, is try.

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