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To be human is to continually mistake our frames of reference for reality itself. We so readily forget that our vantage point is but a speck on the immense plane of possible perspectives. We so readily forget that there are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives.
The discipline of countering our reflex for self-righteousness is a triumph of existential maturity — one increasingly rare in a culture where most people would rather armor themselves with judgment than tremble with uncertainty, would rather be right than understand.
The pioneering psychologist and philosopher William James (January 11, 1842–August 26, 1910), who coined the term “stream of consciousness,” explores the making of that triumph in a pair of wonderful lectures — “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings” and “What Makes Life Significant” — posthumously collected in the 1911 volume Talks to Teachers on Psychology: And to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals (public library | public domain).
With an eye to “the price we inevitably have to pay for being practical creatures,” James considers those rare moments when our habitual blinders fall away and we see a fuller picture of reality:
Only in some pitiful dreamer, some philosopher, poet, or romancer, or when the common practical man becomes a lover, does the hard externality give way, and a gleam of insight into the ejective world… the vast world of inner life beyond us, so different from that of outer seeming, illuminate our mind. Then the whole scheme of our customary values gets confounded, then our self is riven and its narrow interests fly to pieces, then a new centre and a new perspective must be found.
That new perspective includes the recognition that other people strive for happiness and meaning in ways other than our own, just as valid in the making of a life. James considers the value of this shift in understanding:
It absolutely forbids us to be forward in pronouncing on the meaninglessness of forms of existence other than our own; and it commands us to tolerate, respect, and indulge those whom we see harmlessly interested and happy in their own ways, however unintelligible these may be to us. Hands off: neither the whole of truth nor the whole of good is revealed to any single observer, although each observer gains a partial superiority of insight from the peculiar position in which he stands.
Observing “the falsity of our judgments, so far as they presume to decide in an absolute way on the value of other persons’ conditions or ideals,” observing “how soaked and shot-through life is with values and meanings which we fail to realize because of our external and insensible point of view,” observing how often and how readily we judge the outward choices of others while losing sight of the “inward significance” of those choices, James writes:
The first thing to learn in intercourse with others is non-interference with their own peculiar ways of being happy, provided those ways do not assume to interfere by violence with ours. No one has insight into all the ideals. No one should presume to judge them off-hand. The pretension to dogmatize about them in each other is the root of most human injustices and cruelties, and the trait in human character most likely to make the angels weep.
Complement with Joan Didion on learning not to mistake self-righteousness for morality, then revisit William James on the psychology of attention, how our bodies affect our feelings, and the four features of transcendence.
For a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
While the French seamstress turned scientist Jeanne Villepreux-Power was solving the ancient mystery of the argonaut, her compatriot Jean Baptiste Vérany (1800–1865) — a pharmacist turned naturalist and founder of Nice’s Natural History Museum — set out to illuminate the wonders of cephalopods in descriptions and depictions of unprecedented beauty and fidelity to reality. Half a century before the stunningly illustrated Cephalopod Atlas brought the life-forms of the deep to the human imagination, Vérany published Mediterranean Mollusks: Observations, Descriptions, Figures, and Chromolithographs from Life — a consummately illustrated catalogue of creatures entirely alien to the era’s lay imagination, suddenly and vividly alive in full color.
When Vérany began working on his dream of bringing the underwater world to life on the page, chromolithography — a chemical process used for making multi-color prints — was still in its infancy in France. Determined to capture the living vibrancy of these creatures that had so enchanted him, he set out to teach himself the craft. Looking back on his long labors at mastering this art-science and applying it to his dream, he reflects:
Despite having no practice at lithography and no knowledge of chromolithography, I launched myself, with courage and confidence, into this enterprise… Thanks to trial and error and patience, I have often succeeded in depicting the softness and transparency that characterize these animals.
The German marine biologist Ernst Haeckel, who coined the term ecology, was introduced to the wonders of cephalopods by Vérany’s work and incorporated some of the art into his own studies of symmetry. Victor Hugo copied one of Vérany’s illustrations in ink for his 1866 novel Toilers of the Sea. The book itself became a catalyst for the study of octopus intelligence.
Radiating from the chromolithographs is Vérany’s shimmering passion for his subject. He was especially captivated by the red umbrella squid, Histioteuthis Bonelliana, which he saved from a fisherman’s net and placed in a tub to study and draw from life, wonder-smitten by its beauty. He recounts:
It was at this moment that I enjoyed the astonishing spectacle of the brilliant points whose forms so extraordinarily decorate the skin of this cephalopod; sometimes it was the brightness of the sapphire which dazzled me; sometimes it was the opaline of the topazes which made it more remarkable; other times these two rich colors confused their splendid rays. During the night, the opaline points projected a phosphorescent glare, making this mollusk one of the most brilliant productions of Nature.
Complement with Ernst Haeckel’s otherworldly drawings of jellyfish from the same era, then revisit Sy Montgomery on how the octopus illuminates the wonders of consciousness.
For a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
A few days before the Review’s new Spring issue went to print, the poet Rita Dove called me from her Charlottesville home to set a few facts straight. She and her husband, the German novelist Fred Viebahn, are night owls—emails from Dove often land around 9 A.M., just before bedtime—and they had just spent several long nights poring over her interview, which was conducted by Kevin Young and which spans Dove’s childhood in Akron, Ohio, where her father was the first Black chemist at the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company; her adventures with the German language; her experience as poet laureate of the United States, between 1993 and 1995; and her love of ballroom dancing and of sewing, during which she might “find the solution for an enjambment” halfway through stitching a seam. Working their way through the conversation, she and Viebahn had confirmed or emended the kinds of small but crucial details that are also the material of Dove’s poems: the number of siblings in her father’s family, the color of the book that inspired the poem “Parsley,” the name of the German lettering in which her childhood copy of Friedrich Schiller’s Das Lied von der Glocke was printed (not Sütterlin, it transpired, but Fraktur). We talked through her corrections, and then Dove produced a final fact that caught me by surprise. Two decades ago, she said, she had been preparing to be interviewed for The Paris Review by George Plimpton. He’d called to set a date for their first conversation, and the next day, she said, came the shocking news that he had died.
This spring rings in the magazine’s seventieth anniversary, and twenty years since the loss of its visionary longtime editor. To mark the occasion, issue no. 243 has a cover created for the Review by Peter Doig—inspired, he told us, by a birthday card he made for his son Locker—and includes not two but three Writers at Work interviews: with Dove, with the American short story writer and novelist Mary Gaitskill, and with Olga Tokarczuk, winner of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature. In many ways, though, this issue is consistent with the others in our long history, featuring the best prose, poetry, and art that we could muster, by writers and artists you’ve heard of and some you haven’t. You’ll find prose by Marie NDiaye, Elisa Gonzalez, Rivers Solomon, Daniel Mason, and Elaine Feeney; poems by Nam Le and D. S. Marriott; and artworks including a portfolio by Tabboo!, featuring paintings inspired by words he associates with the magazine (including “high falutin,” “bon vivant,” and “wreaking havoc”). We are grateful to everyone who has appeared in our pages, and to all the people who have shepherded the Review over the past seven decades, so that this one can land in your mailbox as the season turns.
There is a nonspecific gladness that envelops humanity in the first days of spring, as if kindness itself were coming abloom in the cracks of crowded sidewalks, quelling our fears, swallowing our sorrows, salving the savage loneliness. We are reminded then that spring — this insentient byproduct of the shape of our planet’s orbit and the tilt of its axis — may just be Earth’s existential superpower, the supreme affirmation of life in the face of every assault on it.
That superpower comes alive with dazzling might in a century-old poem by E.E. Cummings (October 14, 1894–September 3, 1962), originally published in his 1923 collection Tulips & Chimneys (public library) — that epochal gauntlet at the conventions of poetry, which went on to influence generations of writers, readers, and daring makers of the unexampled across the spectrum of creative work — and read at the fifth annual Universe in Verse by the polymathic creative force that is Debbie Millman, with a side of Bach.
[O SWEET SPONTANEOUS]
by e.e. cummingsO sweet spontaneous
earth how often have
the
dotingfingers of
prurient philosophers pinched
and
pokedthee
,has the naughty thumb
of science prodded
thybeauty how
often have religions taken
thee upon their scraggy knees
squeezing andbuffeting thee that thou mightest conceive
gods
(but
trueto the incomparable
couch of death thy
rhythmic
loverthou answerest
them only with
spring)
Couple with spring with Emily Dickinson, then revisit E.E. Cummings (who, contrary to popular myth, signed his name both lowercase and capitalized) on the courage to be yourself.
For other highlights from The Universe in Verse, savor Roxane Gay reading Gwendolyn Brooks’s “To the Young Who Want to Die,” Zoë Keating reading Sylvia Plath’s “Mushrooms,” Rebecca Solnit reading Helene Johnson’s “Trees at Night,” and a series of animated poems celebrating nature.
For a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“How can the bird that is born for joy sit in a cage and sing?” wrote William Blake, who lived in the golden age of the cage as entertainment. Zoos were new and exciting, and people readily overlooked their cruelty to slake their curiosity about creatures from faraway lands. But even so, zoos held only a tiny fraction of the dazzling variousness of the animal kingdom — in the age before photography, before easy global travel, the average person encountered the wondrous strangeness of animals not in the cage but on the page.
In the 1820s, a French natural history encyclopedia titled La Galerie de Oiseaux set out to bring to European eyes the most exquisite birds of North America, many of them now endangered, some extinct. Radiating from the consummate illustrations is the quiet dignity of these bright emissaries of our planet’s evolutionary history — feathered inheritors of the dinosaurs, winged with a kaleidoscope of joy.
Complement with some consummate centuries-old illustrations of monkeys, owls, lizards, butterflies, and flowers.
For a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
Illustration by Na Kim.
As I was going to enter college that fall my parents felt that I should build myself up at a summer camp of some sort. They sent me down to a place in the Ozarks on a beautiful lake. It was called a camp but it was not just for boys. It was for both sexes and all ages. It was a rustic, comfortable place. But I was disappointed to find that most of the young people went to another camp several miles down the lake toward the dam. I spent a great deal of time by myself that summer, which is hardly good for a boy of seventeen.
It was a dry summer. There were very few days of rain. But the Ozark country with its gentle green hills and clear lakes and rivers did not turn ugly and brown as most countries do in seasons of drought. The willows along the lake remained translucently green, while the hillside forests, toward the end of July, began to look as though they had been splashed with purple, red, and amber wine. Their deepening colors did not suggest dryness nor stoppage of life. They looked, rather, like a flaming excess, a bursting opulence of life. And the air, when you drove through the country in an open car, was faintly flavored with wine, for the grapes grew plentifully that season. While the cornfields yellowed and languished, the purple grapes fairly swarmed from their vines, as though they had formed some secret treaty with nature or dug into some hidden reservoir of subterranean life, and the lean hill-folk piled them into large white baskets and stood along the sunny roads and highways crying, “Grapes, grapes, grapes,” so that your ears as well as your eyes and nostrils and mouth were filled with them, until it seemed that the whole body and soul of the country was somehow translated into this vast efflorescence of sweet purple fruit.
Perhaps it was the intoxicating effect of the wine-flavored air, perhaps it was only the novelty of being so much by myself, but I fell that summer into a sort of enchantment, a sort of moody drunkenness, that troubled and frightened me more than a little.
I had led an active boy’s life. I had always been the typical young extrovert, delighting in games and the companionship of other boys, having little time for reading and abstract thinking, having little time for looking inward upon the mystery of myself, and so this dry summer on the beautiful lake, as I fell slowly into the habit of deep introspection, brooding and dreaming about myself and life and the meaning of things, I felt as though I were waking up from a long dream or sinking into one. I was lonely and frightened and curiously content.
It became my custom that summer to go down to the lake by myself right after breakfast, unmoor a rowboat or a canoe from the rickety grey wharf, and row or paddle out to the center of the lake and then lie down in the boat’s bottom, take off all clothes but my swimming trunks, and let the slow current carry me along under the golden-burning sun while my consciousness surrendered itself, like the boat, to a leisurely tide of reveries and dreams.
Sometimes I would fall asleep while I drifted. I would awake to find myself in an unfamiliar country. I had drifted several miles from the camp, perhaps, and the sun had climbed to its zenith while I slept. The lake had narrowed or widened, or perhaps I had drifted in close to shore and directly beside me was a wet wall of grey rock from which obtruded strange ferns and flowers, or over my head was a fantastic, green-gold, feathery dome of willow branches, overshadowing myself and my stranded vessel with barely a motion, barely a whisper, in the windless noon.
Always beyond me, further down the lake, were the open fields of grapes, and however still the air was, it always held faintly the flavor of wine.
I would lie there in the bottom of the boat and continue to stare at what my eyes had opened upon, never turning my head or moving my body for fear of breaking the spell. I would imagine that I had actually drifted into some unknown place while I slept, some mythical kingdom, an Avalon or something, in which all kinds of things could happen and usually did.
It was hard to shake myself out of these dreams. It was hard to turn my eyes—staring as though hypnotized at the wet wall of grey rock or the dazzling dome of sunlit willows—back to the olive-green expanse of the lake. I would feel strangely dull inside and fagged out when I finally roused myself. It was not merely the drowsiness that you feel after a long midday sleep. It was more like the aftereffects of a powerful drug. Sometimes I would feel so weak that it would be hard for me to row or paddle back against the current. Still I would never know exactly what had gone on inside me during the dream or how long it had lasted, or why, in heaven’s name, I behaved like this! Was I losing my mind?
As summer slipped by the population of the little camp increased. Each weekend a new crowd or two would drive down from Saint Louis or Kansas City or still further away. When I first arrived, early in June, the place had seemed deserted and I had felt bitterly lonely and wished that some people, any kind of people, would come. But now I had changed. I no longer felt a thrill of anticipation when a new group or family arrived at the camp, wondering each time how this bunch would turn out, observing with pleasure their equipment for sports, but disappointed, usually, because most of them were either too young or too old. Now the sight of a dust-covered car rolling up the camp drive with tennis racquets and fishing rods, and eager faces protruding from the windows, faces smiling and begging to be accepted into this place and its life, gave me no pleasure, but filled me instead with a vague annoyance. I was becoming like a grumpy old man who wanted nothing so much as a quiet place to sleep, only it was not to sleep that I wanted, but to dream.
Then I began to be really frightened of myself. I quit going out alone on the lake. I made friends with a young professor who was spending his vacation at the camp. I played tennis and learned contract bridge with some young married couples. I tried not to think of the sun on the lake and on my naked skin and the faint, delicious fragrance of the purple grapes.
Toward the end of the summer I met a young girl. I did not think her especially attractive. She did not seem either pretty or homely. Perhaps she was really beautiful but I was then too young to find beauty in anything but the outlines of a woman’s face and figure. She was considerably older than I, she was about twenty-five, and I could see that she was lonely, terribly lonely, and was wanting with all her heart to get close to somebody, just as I was wanting to slip away, to float alone on the lake.
The young professor had loaned me some books. He had loaned me a book by Nietzsche which I found especially disturbing.
Was it possible, I asked myself, that all things could be so useless and indefinite as Nietzsche made them look? I shrugged my shoulders, after a while, remembering the sunlight on my body and on the lake, and the mysteriously suggestive fragrance of the grapes. Such colossal doubt, I thought to myself, was more or less irrelevant to life after all!
I was reading this book one evening on the porch of the main cabin, overlooking the lake, and I was feeling particularly rebellious against its doctrines, when the girl came onto the porch and seated herself in the wicker chair next to mine. Without turning my eyes from the book I knew she was looking at me, maybe wondering whether to speak. She had looked at me before. She had been down at the camp for about two weeks. I had only been vaguely aware of her presence, since she was not attractive to my unawakened senses and was easily seven or eight years older than I. But I looked old for my age that summer. I was tall and had acquired a small mustache along with my unusually serious and reflective manner.
When the light became too dim for reading I laid the book across my knees and glanced cautiously at the girl’s profile. I was suddenly stabbed with pity. A look of hopelessness had settled over her face. She was not looking at the sunset or the lake or anything visible from the cabin porch, but her eyes were wide open.
She is a little stenographer from Saint Louis or Kansas City who has come down here to meet some young people and have a good time, maybe fall in love and get married at last, and she has found only two young men, myself and the goggle-eyed professor who hates the sight of a skirt, and here I sit reading Nietzsche and considering the abstract problems of life and wishing only to be left by myself …
It was only a minute or two since I had laid down my book but I had considered the girl since then with such intentness and such a feeling of peculiar clairvoyance that it seemed to me I had known her already for quite a long time. I started talking to her. I was pleased to see the hopeless look drop away from her face. It became quite animated. She started rocking in the chair, then pulled it closer to mine, and soon we were chattering together like intimate friends.
“There’s a dance at Branson tonight,” the girl suddenly remarked, “would you like to take me?”
Surely if I had thought twice I would have refused. Before I went to college my legs behaved like stilts whenever I started to dance and I hadn’t the faintest notion of how to move myself around to music.
But my head was light from reading too much and the girl’s manner was peculiarly importunate. Before I knew it I had accepted the suggestion and we had started to Branson. This little hill town was the location of a popular summer resort; it was a mile or two down the lake from our camp. We walked over, along by the lake and hills, and all the way we talked with a strange excitement. Maybe I had been terribly lonely, too, without knowing it, and had only wanted someone to break the ice. Anyway, in the twilight along by the lake, the girl no longer seemed rather too old for me or too heavy. I noticed something Gypsy-like in her appearance, something wise and significant in her dark eyes and large, aquiline nose, and full, over-red lips. I noticed the deep swell of her breasts, and when she walked a little ahead, the swaying strength of her hips. I had a dizzy feeling of wanting to get close against her and be enveloped in that warmth which she seemed to possess.
“Do you like wine?” she asked me as we started across the bridge.
I admitted that I had never tried it. The summer before, when my grandfather took me to Europe, I had drunk some crème de menthe as soon as the bar opened, a few miles out at sea, and had become violently seasick immediately afterwards. I had disliked the smell of alcohol ever since.
“But this will be different,” she said. “Do you smell those grapes?”
We paused in the middle of the bridge and sure enough the wind from down the lake carried to us the grapes’ elusive fragrances.
“It’s delicious!” I cried.
“I know a place, an old hillbilly’s cabin near the town, where we can stop and get some swell grape wine,” she went on, “and it will make us feel like dancing our feet off!”
Laughing, she caught hold of my arm and we started running along the road. Her black hair blew back from her face and in her running figure, throat arched and deep bosom swaying, there was something excitingly pagan.
“You are beautiful,” I heard myself saying in a husky voice. “You’re like an ancient goddess, or a nymph, or a …”
She squeezed my arm. “You’re funny!” she said.
The hillbilly’s cabin was a little frame house on the road to town. In the yard a white goat was munching the grass. An old woman sat on the wooden steps with her hands folded in her lap. She got up slowly as we approached. Wordlessly she held the door open and we slipped in. These were the days before repeal. I felt quite adventurous, sitting down at the rickety old table with its worn checkered oilcloth and kerosene lamp, while the old man in overalls and the witch-like old woman pulled bottles out of a hidden barrel, opened them with a loud popping sound, and poured the sparkling purple stuff into cold tin cups for us to drink.
At first it seemed rather bitter. But there was not the alcoholic taste that I had feared. So I ordered a second cup and a third. The girl across from me drank slowly. She kept glancing at me in a calculating way, as though she were trying to surmise my age or other potentialities, as she had looked at me on the porch and several times before that, but I found myself no longer annoyed by that look. It pleased me, in fact, more than a little. Here was I, drinking wine with what was obviously a woman of the world, a Gypsy-like girl no longer very young, with a look of strange wisdom in the back of her eyes.
Who knows what may happen tonight? The possibilities began to frighten me a little.
I leaned far back in my chair, tilting against the stovepipe, and returned her smile in a manner that was supposed to be replete with sophisticated suggestion. We looked at each other for some time that way, as though with an understanding too deep for words. Slowly the girl lifted her eyebrows, then narrowed her eyes till they were two slits of luminous black. Her heavy, painted lips fell slightly open, and she, too, relaxed in her chair, as though a question had been asked and a satisfactory answer been given. It almost seemed that I could hear her purring under her breath, contentedly, like a cat.
“I have been so lonely at the camp,” she murmured, “that it hasn’t seemed like a real vacation until tonight.”
She lifted the cup with both hands but instead of drinking she breathed its fragrance deeply. She smiled slightly over the brim of the cup:
“It’s sort of bittersweet, isn’t it?” she said softly. “It always makes me feel like laughing or crying or something.”
When we left the cabin the white goat in the yard looked to me like a fantastic horned monster. The dusty road rocked under my feet. Everything seemed quite unreasonably amusing. Laughing loudly, I caught the girl’s arm, and she, more than returning my pressure, laughed with me, but all the while kept glancing speculatively up at my face.
“Are you sure you aren’t too tight to dance?” she asked. Her voice seemed absurdly serious.
“Too tight!” I screamed. “Why, I’ve never been so loose in all my life!”
I was startled by the hysterical sound of my voice, almost like a girl’s. I staggered against the dark young woman and she put a sustaining arm around my back. It seemed awfully silly. She was nearly a foot shorter than I, and here she was holding me up.
“Leave me alone,” I told her severely. “I can walk all right by myself!”
She laughed a little. “How old are you?” she asked abruptly.
“Nineteen,” I lied.
“Really? I didn’t know you were quite so young as that,” she said. For a while afterwards she seemed quieter and more distant. Then we came into Branson. There were clusters of glazed lamps along the street. There were bright drugstores and restaurants and a picture show with a shiny tin portico and gaudy placards. Everywhere there were gay holiday crowds in white linens and flannels and colorful sweaters. Down by the lake the band was playing noisily and everyone was flocking in that direction.
Then she seemed to come alive again. She caught my arm.
“I’m crazy to dance!” she said. “It seems like my vacation is just beginning!”
The dance hall was a long log building, open except for screens, and lighted by Japanese lanterns that swayed constantly in the wind. My physical drunkenness left as soon as we stepped on the floor. For the first time I found that I could move myself to music. My feet slid effortlessly along the wax floor and the girl’s body was suppliant to mine. It was more than suppliant. I caught her tighter and tighter against me. The warmth of her body surged through my linen suit. Her breath was damp against my throat. Her fingers caught at my shoulder. She seemed to be asking for an even closer embrace than I could give. Then I experienced something that I had never before experienced with a girl. I felt ashamed and tried to loosen my hold. But to my amazement she only clung tighter. She pressed her lips against my throat and clung as though she were drunk, drunker than I had been on the moonlit road. Her feet became tangled with mine, her body drooped, and I seemed to be dragging her along the floor. My warm feeling passed. I looked around at the strange faces surrounding the floor. It seemed that everyone was staring at us. I stopped abruptly at the edge of the floor.
“Let’s go out for a while,” I said, without looking at her.
She must have misunderstood my averted face, the strained quality of my voice. She repeated the words like an echo, “Let’s go out for a while.”
We went down the wooden steps from the dance hall and down the wooden walk to the beach.
Here it was all smooth sand, a pale silver in the moonlight, stretching for a mile or two up and down the lake. The wind was blowing with a new coolness that hinted of rain, although the clouds were still scattered.
The girl caught my arm and stopped for a moment at the end of the wooden walk.
“Do you smell the grapes?” she asked.
I shuddered slightly. I had drunk too much of the wine. The intoxication was passing and the taste in my mouth was cloyingly sweet.
“Where are you going?” I called to the girl.
Laughing wildly, she had started running along the sand.
After a while we both looked around. We discovered that the amusement resort and even the lights of the town had disappeared. There was only the moon and the stars and the wide silence of the lake and the sand crunching under our feet. I felt like an inexperienced swimmer who finds himself suddenly beyond his depth. But the girl’s face was fairly shining with some inner violence. She fell down on the sand and pressed her hands against it and swept them out like a swimmer, again and again. It seemed to me that she was moaning a little, deep in her throat, or purring again like a cat. I was tempted to slip away from her. All my lightness and exuberance were gone. I didn’t feel like awaiting the development of that which seemed to be possessing the girl. I was no longer flattered or stirred. She didn’t seem to be aware of me, for the moment, but only of something inside of herself, a drunken feeling, that made her rub her hands over the sand in a gesture that seemed to me vaguely obscene.
It may have been that I was fascinated, it may have been that I was frightened or repelled. My emotions were cloaked in a dullness that made them for a long time afterwards hard to describe. At any rate, I found it impossible to leave her there. My feet were rooted in the silver sand. I stood above her, breathing the cloying sweetness of grapes on the wind, and waiting for the girl’s private ecstasy to pass.
At length she lifted her head, from where she was stooping low upon the sand, swept her hair back with one hand and extended toward me the other. Dizzily I fell down beside her and somehow or other we were kissing and her tongue had slid between my lips. All the while, though my actions were those of a male possessed by passion, my mind was standing above her with a dull revulsion. Her Gypsy-like darkness, the heaviness of her form, the black wisdom of her eyes were now laid bare of secrets. I knew why she was lonely, why she said she had been so terribly lonely until tonight. For all my manly aspirations, I couldn’t help fearing the girl. Catching at my shoulders, she fell back on the sand. She was breathing heavily and her breath smelled of wine.
“Let’s go back to the dance,” I muttered.
“No, I’m tired of the dance,” she said. “Why do you act so funny? Don’t you like me? Am I ugly or something?”
Good God, what is wrong with you? I said to myself. You know what she wants! You aren’t a kid anymore!
But I couldn’t endure the winey sweetness of her breath. I turned my face away and got up from the sand.
“Let’s go swimming!” I suggested wildly.
“All right!” she agreed.
Too late I realized that we had no suits for swimming. The girl was already tearing the clothes from her body. She plunged quite naked into the lake. I could only do likewise. Numbly I removed my clothes and followed her. The cool of the lake broke through the dream-like numbness of my body and mind. I felt chilled and awakened. For a while my exuberance of the earlier evening returned. We swam and played in the water like children. I didn’t think of her nakedness nor of mine. I swam far out and then swam in again. When I climbed out on the sand I was exhausted and lay down and looked at the starry sky, almost forgetting the girl and what had happened between us a few minutes before.
The wind from the lake turned colder. I began to shake uncontrollably. The girl was still splashing and swimming in the water, crying out as though she had gone quite mad. I rose from the beach and started to get my clothes. But then she dashed out of the water.
“You’re still wet!” she cried. “Why do you act so funny?”
Weakly I sank down again on the sand. The girl was laughing at me. She ran over to the willow where she had hung her clothes. She came back with the little white coat that she had carried to the dance.
“Here!” she said. “This will keep us both warm!”
Staring up at this garment that whipped above me like a white ghost in the wind from the lake, observing its length and its breadth and even its thickness, I slowly understood her words, what they meant, what they could only mean. I saw that she was smiling in the moonlight. Her black hair blew away from her face. She stood between me and the wind and I breathed the warmth of her body mingled with the cloying sweetness of the grapes. With a sudden fury I caught at her white legs. I pulled her down in the sand. The coat was forgotten, and the cold wind and the lake, and I scarcely knew whether I hated or loved.
It rained the next morning, starting quite early, before breakfast, and continuing till noon. I didn’t get up. I lay all morning on my bed in the small log cabin, feeling exhausted and rather ill. I looked out at the grey rain and listened to the grey sound of it on the roof. When I finally came out I found that the Springfield bus had come and gone. The girl’s vacation was over and for several hours she had been on her way back to her job in a Kansas City life insurance office. I was relieved.
By noon the rain had dwindled away. The wind rose up again, the clouds were scattered like foam. The grey lake was turning green beneath a blazing sun. But in the rain-freshened air there was already the tonic coolness of the coming fall.
After dinner I stood facing the lake, breathing deep, and suddenly there rushed in upon me the old longing to escape from the camp and the restless gaiety of its population and to be by myself on the lake. I ran back to the cabin and put on my swimming trunks. I took a pair of oars from the manager’s office and sprinted down to the rickety wharf. I felt the eyes of the porch loungers following me down, the eyes of new young girls and young men who had arrived at the camp that morning, and I felt proud of myself, proud of my deeply bronzed skin and my well-conditioned body, but most of all, proud of my freedom, my loneliness that asked only to be left alone. It seemed to me that only I and the lake belonged here; I and the lake and the sun. The others were presumptuous intruders. These weekenders with their pale skins and slow muscles and feverish friendliness could never belong in this country, could never share in my mystical companionship with the lake and the hills and the sun.
The girl was gone. They would go, too.
Without glancing back I loosened one of the boats from the wharf and rowed out to the center of the lake. I lay down in the bottom of the boat and surrendered myself to the leisurely tide of dreams.
But there was something wrong. Maybe it was the unusual coolness of the wind, the lightness of the rain-freshened air, the barely perceptible decline of summer. But I was restless. I turned from one side to the other. The hard ridges in the bottom of the boat irritated my skin. The sun wasn’t warm enough, the wind was too cool.
Swiftly the boat moved down between the hills. The rain-swell on creeks had made the current strong that morning. The wind was bearing from up the lake. The boat moved swiftly, easily, as if carried by sails. The hills dwindled, the bare cliffs fell away, the lake widened and widened till finally I found myself in an open country. On either side were the vast fields of grapes, grapes, grapes! And though the boat drifted now in the very center of the wide lake, their odor came toward me stronger and sweeter every moment till it seemed that my mouth was filled with their purple wine and my whole body suffused with their warmth.
I lay in the bottom of the boat, twisting and groaning aloud, crying with the terrible loneliness of the flesh, remembering the lips of the girl against my lips, remembering the warmth of her body, remembering the Gypsy-darkness of her face, the wildness of her hair and eyes, and most of all, the passionate sweetness of her embrace, dark and sweet, almost cloyingly sweet, like the rich, purple fragrance of the grapes.
In a sort of terror I grasped the oars and started rowing furiously back to the camp. I no longer wanted to be alone. I had never drifted so far as the grape fields nor breathed their purple haunting sweetness so deeply before. Now I wanted to return to the camp and its people. I wanted to feel them moving closely and warmly around me. I wanted to hear their loud voices and feel the strong pressure of their hands. I wanted to lose myself among them.
The story will be published in Williams’s collection The Caterpillar Dogs and Other Early Stories, forthcoming from New Directions in April.
Narratives that feature the history and intrigue of Black Southern culture draw me in. De’Shawn Charles Winslow’s 2019 debut novel In West Mills featured characters mining the untold to understand their place in their small town and the world. The book gave a multigenerational look at secrets and revelations, and his second novel, Decent People, adds the urgent draw of an unsolved crime with a sleuth driven by love and a sense of justice.
A character in his first novel refers to another character as “blood but not family,” a clear insight that echoes through both books. Winslow likewise builds the bonds that are family but not blood, showing how people find and create kinship and support.
Decent People begins with Jo Wright, set to retire in West Mills after decades in New York. She is on the verge of completing the dream, finally sharing a home with her long-distance love, Olympus Seymore. That plan is upended when Lymp is accused of the murder of his three half-siblings. Their estrangement seems reason enough for the sheriff to assume Lymp’s guilt and stop investigating. This is where Jo begins the challenging task of finding the truth.
Winslow sets the story in the 1970s. The official markers of Jim Crow are gone, but the West Mills canal remains the divider between the Black and white communities, a parallel to so many remaining divisions. The town is a junction point that features Black characters seeking exodus, those returning, and many making do where they are. Queer characters search for community amid judgment. The reckoning between unacknowledged children and their parents becomes central. Adult friendships and intimacies are solidified. The family tensions coexist with the solace of chosen kin and unlikely allies.
We spoke via telephone and email about distance, unknowing, and returning to a complicated home.
***
The Rumpus: While reading Decent People, I thought about the literary and mystery bones of novels by Walter Mosley and Attica Locke. In addition to Black Southern settings and migration, they show characters finding answers that can be hard to reconcile. In In West Mills, a central character wants to “unknow” what she has just heard. How does the desire to “unknow” work as an idea in Decent People?
De’Shawn Charles Winslow: Once the person learns something about their history or a close friend or family member’s history, they have to change the way they view themselves and their personal situations. Sometimes that knowing can become work, an opportunity, or a burden to face a bunch of realities they’ve been ignoring. Well, it forces you to face the fact that they are imperfect.
Rumpus: You set this story in the 1970s, so you had characters with a backstory during Jim Crow, and they’re dealing with the aftermath of major legal changes in America. The book is in the aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and the Loving decision, but you show clearly that changes are slow and challenging in West Mills. How did you balance that will to change versus the more general idea of progress?
Winslow: There was a continuity that I didn’t realize was happening. The town and the people weren’t changing. The town was changing physically with new businesses popping up, but the people’s mindsets were very much the same. Black people stay out of white folks’ way and largely vice versa, and you have the respectability politics of it all.
My mother is the second oldest of nine children, and she and the first three or four of them went to segregated schools. When her younger siblings graduated high school, it was integrated, but I also know that my aunts and uncles, the younger ones, didn’t have close white friends. Even though they were in an integrated school, things were still highly segregated. That speaks to what you just said about the will to change being there.
Rumpus: One way to find some change was through migration, and In West Mills centered characters who migrated. You feature characters leaving for educational opportunities. Queer characters leave to find community. The reasons for leaving were always central to character development. How did that movement away from West Mills become important as you shaped identity?
Winslow: Some characters from In West Mills definitely moved away to find more people, more community, and feel less like pariahs. I know education was available, and I won’t say a lot, but I know a fair amount was available to Black people in parts of the South. But so many people went north because they felt there would be less resistance and maybe access to more types of education instead of just becoming a schoolteacher, a nurse, or a nurse’s assistant. Leaving was about trying to protect themselves and succeed in a way they felt the South wouldn’t allow.
Rumpus: On the other side of that, Decent People shows the hopes and the challenges of returning. What factors shaped this reverse migration that’s central in the novel?
Winslow: The returning is about rest in a way. I would imagine that it was also work for them, leaving to go and pursue safety, community, and higher education, moving to these very fast-paced places with a lot of competition and a higher cost of living. By coming back home with some money and some education, they felt they could rest a little bit easier.
Rumpus: The mystery in Decent People is compelling, and I don’t want to ask anything that might disrupt that reading experience, but I want to ask about the sense of truth-telling that the characters manage. Someone in Decent People says, “There was no way out, so lies would have to suffice.” Let’s talk about lies and secrets as different literary elements. I’m interested in how you used the unspoken, unsaid, or untrue and how those are so necessary to the storytelling, especially when the lies and secrets are protective.
Winslow: As a writing technique, I think having secrets gives the reader a question that’s dangling out there. If they remember that, most readers grasp that question and carry it with them. Propels them through the book. It creates that suspense, but it also creates the opportunity for more bad behavior because people are trying to hold on to these secrets or these lies. They just keep committing these acts, whether big or small, to protect the lie or protect the secret. That creates suspense and a propulsive experience for the reader.
Rumpus: Jo returns to West Mills, but her closest ally and sounding board is her brother Herschel, who supports her from New York. How did that relationship become central to the storytelling?
Winslow: I wanted Herschel to be a little bit like a therapist to Jo. I kept him in New York the whole time because he was old enough when they left to know so much, and I didn’t want him to end up becoming Jo’s co-sleuth. I wanted him to be like, “Listen, I worked hard for this life, and I have safety here in New York as a queer man. This is your battle because you want this man, and you figure it out. Here is a little bit of advice I can offer you as someone who lived there and is older.” I wanted them to have a close relationship.
Rumpus: Herschel is a gay man who found some distance from judgment and hate, and we see that harm threatening the next generation of queer children in West Mills who are too young to seek the safety of exodus. How did you define that harm in both novels?
Winslow: I was showing a combination of patriarchy and religious beliefs—and then some people would say that’s the same thing depending on the religion. In small towns that are largely Christian, people uphold these teachings, these beliefs that a man should be supreme in the home or that he should procreate so that the family name can carry on. People who aren’t even necessarily religious can uphold these ideals of hypermasculinity, and sometimes I don’t even know if they realize it. Some will try to uphold those beliefs so much that they will put their children through different types of torture, whether it’s physical or emotional, to uphold an ideal.
Rumpus: The book gives us a sense of migration and return, and I’m also interested in how those journeys work in your life as a writer. Ernest. J. Gaines spoke about living in California while writing about Louisiana. Jesmyn Ward has touched on her return to Mississippi. What was your experience writing about the South from a distance?
Winslow: I was in New York, and then I went to Iowa. That’s where I started In West Mills. I was able to visualize my hometown so much more keenly, having not lived there in fifteen years. I believe it allowed me to write about the place with a little bit more compassion than if I had tried to write these books living there. I really do. It amazes me how vividly I was able to see the town of South Mills, North Carolina, and a lot of little details just came flooding in. I would write the name of the road down, and I’d say, “Let me change that. Let me make a name up for that because it was getting too real.” The distance allowed me to be able to write about the place with a little bit more compassion and with less tsk-tsk.
Rumpus: I’m thinking about the idea that writing and publishing mainly default to heterosexual relationships. Have you seen that at work in your experience?
Winslow: A little bit. Because heterosexuality is what’s given to us in the mainstream, sometimes I fear that if I wrote an all-out queer book, I would have a lower readership. That is a real fear that I have and something publishing needs to work on. There’s a lot of queer representation out there, but I have seen articles about how queer books by and about queer people are published at a much lower rate than books that center completely around straight people. I definitely want to acknowledge writers like Robert Jones, Jr. and his novel, The Prophets, because he took a really big leap to write about two enslaved gay men. I think that book is going to open doors for a lot of young queer writers, especially Black male queer writers.
Rumpus: The Prophets was groundbreaking work. Any upcoming releases you’re excited about?
Winslow: Maurice Carlos Ruffin has a forthcoming book, The American Daughters, that is historical and centered around Black women in New Orleans. So, I’m excited about that. Regina Porter is working on her second book, which might be linked to The Travelers.
Rumpus: You’ve shown the importance of a deep connection between place and identity, especially when we consider the historical period. In your teaching life, how do you encourage students and other writers to develop those links between setting and character?
Winslow: I advise my students who write realism to try to know a great deal about the place they are writing about. I believe that if a writer knows a place well, the characters will, too. That familiarity with place tends to guide characters’ decisions and/or the plot.
Rumpus: Do you care to share any news on the next project?
Winslow: All I’ll say for now is that I’m stepping away from the fictional town of West Mills for my next project. I’m going to use a real North Carolina town, and it’ll be set in the ‘80s. No murders this time, but there will be deaths.
Rumpus: What lessons from In West Mills were most helpful as you completed Decent People?
Winslow: Writing Decent People felt like the first time all over again, so I honestly don’t know, haha.
***
Author photo by Julie R Keresztes
“Yours is a grave and sobering responsibility, but it is also a shining opportunity,” Rachel Carson told a class of young people in what became her bittersweet farewell to life, after catalyzing the modern environmental movement; she urged them: “You go out into a world where mankind is challenged, as it has never been challenged before, to prove its maturity and its mastery — not of nature, but of itself.”
More than half a century later, another visionary of uncommon tenderness for the living world addresses another generation of young people with a kindred message of actionable reverence for the ecosystem of interdependence we call life.
In Heart to Heart: A Conversation on Love and Hope for Our Precious Planet (public library), the fourteenth Dalai Lama and artist Patrick McDonnell — who illustrated Jane Goodall’s inspiring life-story — invite an ethical approach to climate change, calling on young people to face a world of wildfires and deforestation with passionate compassion for other living beings, and to act along the vector of that compassion with the Dalai Lama’s fundamental philosophy:
Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible.
Told with the simplicity and sincerity of language native to Buddhist teaching, the story begins with an improbable visitor showing up at the Dalai Lama’s doorstep: a giant panda — the vulnerable bear species Ailuropoda melanoleuca, endemic to China and beloved the world over, both ancient symbol and Instagram star.
His Holiness greets the furry visitor with the same attitude he greets everyone:
I welcome everyone as a friend. In truth, we all share the same basic goals: we seek happiness and do not want suffering.
Together, they venture out into the wilderness to savor the natural gift of the forest and contemplate the delicate interleaving of life within it. Along the way, the Dalai Lama tells his life-story, laced with his relationship to the natural world — the wild yaks, gazelles, antelopes, and white-lipped deer he encountered on his first journey across Tibet when he was recognized as the next Dalai Lama as a young boy, the comfort he took in the smell of wildflowers after leaving his home, the long-eared owl he watched soar over his first monastery, the mountain foxes, wolves, and lynx roaming the surrounding forest.
With a wistful eye to the decimation of wildlife populations in his lifetime, he tells his new friend and his young reader:
We must never forget the suffering humans inflict on other sentient beings. Perhaps one day we will kneel and ask the animals for forgiveness.
But forgiveness, he intimates, is not enough — we must urgently amend our actions and recover our respect for other living beings, which demands nothing less than a transformation of the human heart and a radical unselfing. Leaning on the Buddhist precepts, His Holiness writes:
Compassion, loving-kindness, and altruism are the keys not only to human development but also to planetary survival.
Real change in the world will only come from a change of heart.
What I propose is a compassionate revolution, a call for radical reorientation away from our habitual preoccupation with the self.
It is a call to turn toward the wider community of beings with whom we are connected, and for conduct which recognizes others’ interests alongside our own.
There is, of course, nothing radical in the notion itself — it is a simple recognition of reality, consonant with the great evolutionary biologist and Gaia Hypothesis originator Lynn Margulis’s insistence that “we abide in a symbiotic world.” The radical portion is the commitment to actionable course-correction and recalibration of habitual action — something young people are uniquely poised to do as they take our planetary future into their growing hands and growing hearts.
A century and a half after the great naturalist John Muir observed that “when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe,” His Holiness writes:
Everything is interdependent, everything is inseparable.
Our individual well-being is intimately connected both with that of all others and with the environment within which we live.
Our every action, our every deed, word, and thought, no matter how slight or inconsequential it may seem, has an implication not only for ourselves but for all others, too.
In a sentiment that calls to mind philosopher and activist Simone Weil’s poignant meditation on the relationship between our rights and our responsibilities, he adds:
We are all interconnected in the universe, and from this, universal responsibility arises… Everyone has the responsibility to develop a happier world.
He goes on to explore how this change begins within, with cultivating “a peaceful mind and a peaceful heart” for oneself — the fulcrum of all kindness and compassionate action. Again and again, he returns to Hannah Arendt’s insight that “the smallest act in the most limited circumstances bears the seed of… boundlessness, because one deed, and sometimes one word, suffices to change every constellation,” inviting his young readers to remember that the smallest actions in the present accrete into sizable change for the future:
There are only two days in the year that nothing can be done.
One is called Yesterday, and the other is called Tomorrow.
Today is the right day to love, believe, do, and mostly to live positively to help others.
He ends with a prayerful meditation on the inner transformation necessary for a civilizational evolution of consciousness:
May I become at all times, both now and forever,
A protector for those without protection
A guide for those who have lost their way
A ship for those with oceans to cross
A bridge for those with rivers to cross
A sanctuary for those in danger
A lamp for those without light
A place of refuge for those who lack shelter
And a servant to all in need.For as long as space endures,
And for as long as living beings remain,
Until then may I, too, abide
To dispel the misery of the world.
For a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
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William Gaddis and David Markson. Courtesy of the estate of William Gaddis.
Although William Gaddis’s first novel, The Recognitions, is now regarded as one of the great American novels of the second half of the twentieth century, it was panned upon its publication in March 1955. Among the early few who recognized its greatness was the future novelist David Markson, who read it shortly after it came out, was so impressed that he reread it a month or two later, and then decided to write Gaddis a fan letter. Too depressed by the book’s reviews, Gaddis filed away the letter unanswered. Markson proselytized vigorously on the novel’s behalf over the next six years: he talked the publisher Aaron Asher into reissuing the remaindered novel in paperback, and in his own first novel, Epitaph for a Tramp, Markson included a scene in which the detective protagonist is poking around a literature student’s apartment and finds in the typewriter the conclusion to an essay: “And thus it is my conclusion that The Recognitions by William Gaddis is not merely the best American first novel of our time, but perhaps the most significant single volume in all American fiction since Moby-Dick, a book so broad in scope, so rich in comedy and so profound in symbolic inference that—” Learning of Markson’s efforts from another fan named Tom Jenkins, Gaddis finally answered Markson’s 1955 letter: “After lo these many (six) years.” They would continue to correspond and saw each other occasionally until Gaddis’s death in 1998.
Markson opens the exchange with a canceled salutation to a minor character in The Recognitions who receives a long, rambling letter, and he continues with allusions to other characters, books, and topics in the novel, rendered in Gaddis’s style.
—Steven Moore
717 Greenwich Street
New York City
11 June 55
Dear Dr. Weisgall William Gaddis:
Christ. Christ, Christ, Christ, Christ, Christ. What I want to know is, outside of perhaps The Destruction of the Destruction of the Destruction, what the hell is left to write? Or read, I mean Chrahst! This drunk staggers up to a sandwich man in Times Square, seeing: Filth in our food, spit in Pepsi Cola, free circular … and lurches off screaming: “Jesus, now there’s nothin left to eat even!” Which is how you make me feel. Of course there’s always the chance of Otto’s Return (to Sorrento?) or, say, They Survived: The Saga of Mr. Inononu and Mr. Schmuck, or even Daddy Was a Monk, by the Bildow baby’s baby (as told to of course Max), but why bother? I mean, Chrahst!
But thanks anyhow.
I get it: the method and the matter, although sometimes less of the matter than I might, lacking certain knowledges; but when where the matter is, as it were, foreign, the patterns are there, and more’s the pity if all the expansion can’t be followed. But then hell, you do explain everything, one time or another, in literal terms: I mean Valentine does actually tell him [Wyatt] he’ll eat his father, and his father does actually tell him that when a king is eaten there’s sacrament, and he does actually say his father was a king; or if you miss the poodle running in circles, can you also miss the uneven teeth and the shape of the ears, or lavender used as a “medium”? (Forgive this: I’m merely trying to indicate awareness of more than the literal.) It’s a remarkably great book, and if there have been two (which I know of) which came before it, the step you’ve taken beyond them is this: that you not only relate present to past (act to myth, I mean Chrahst) but also present to present, reducing things so delightfully to absurdities, yet destroying them not. (I might say “a little always sticks,” or would that be pressing it?) And what in hell am I doing telling you what you’ve done, when all I want to say is … (My, your friend is writing for a rather small audience, isn’t he?) … all I want to say is that if I didn’t write the book myself in another life then you wrote it for … (O Doctor, how the meek presume) … for me. And so thanks.
Listen: what I mean is, there are “moments of exaltation” in discovery, also. And obviously I don’t merely mean that I “get it.” There are things like, say, Anselm, after raving, suddenly: “A duet … sung by women, women’s voices,” or … say, Esme, alone … or for Christ sake even poor old Mr. Feddle and that faked dust jacket. And God God the laughter, and where were you when the … Oh the hell, I just thought you would be pleased to know that someone knows what Gaddis hath wrought.
Thanks.
Does this make any sense? I don’t write to “authors” (although I must admit I’ve been known to scribble authors’ inscriptions in friends’ books—bibles only—and damn it no matter how far beyond it all a guy thinks he is, you do manage to have him squirming at times). Anyhow, nothing is intended here. Probably there is a customary way: Dear Mr. Gaddis, I just loved your gorgeous book and I think Mithra is so charming and … I ask you, if Rose was mad, is rose madder?
Do you know Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano? It is the only other thing I know outside of Joyce with so much “amplifying experience” tied together so well. (The terms are difficult to avoid; I mean much more than that.) Anyhow I don’t know many better compliments than the comparison. Or do I sound like the reviews: this book must be compared to Ulysses BUT. God, how they are unaware of the self-devastation of their own ironies, or for that matter of their ironies themselves. Must be compared but: and oh, the militant stupidity of that piece by Granville Hicks [in the New York Times Book Review]. What a charming bloody situation it is when you have to accustom yourself to the profound subtleties of their unawareness in order to know which books are probably worth reading. But what the hell, a work of art is more than a think of “perfect necessity”; it is also an undeniable fact. It exists. Est ergo est. And damned few other brands can make that statement.
In the Viareggio [a bar in the novel]:
—Willie Gaddis? Who doesn’t know him?
—If you can call my mother Jocasta, and me narcissistic …
—That book. He used to run into Harcourt Brace twice a week screaming about this great conversation he heard last night, he had to get it in.
—Listen, your mother still slips a toothbrush into her purse before she goes out to the bar.
—Well, a couple hundred pages, but I mean Chrahst, so the guy’s read everything, I mean why bother …
—My mother …
—I know this guy, says it’s the best book in years. Symbolic for Christ sake. I mean anything that’s a little obscure …
Listen, listen, listen: this could go on forever. You done good, which is all there is to say. If you are ever around I would very much like to catch you for a drink or two (above Fourteenth Street) but that is neither here nor there. But you’ve heard the bells, ringing you on, and what else matters?
With much admiration,
David Markson
New York City 3, New York
28 February 1961
Dear David Markson.
After lo these many (six) years—or these many low (sick) years—if I can presume to answer yours dated 11 June ’55: I could evade embarrassment by saying that it had indeed been misdirected to Dr. Weisgall and reached me only now, but I’m afraid you know us both too well. In fact I was in low enough state for a good while after the book came out that I could not find it in me to answer letters that said anything, only those (to quote yours again) that offered “I just loved your gorgeous book and I think Mithra is so charming …” Partly appalled at what I counted then the book’s apparent failure, partly wearied at the prospect of contention, advice and criticism, and partly just drained of any more supporting arguments, as honestly embarrassed at high praise as resentful of patronizing censure. And I must say, things (people) don’t change, just get more so; and I think there is still the mixture, waiting to greet such continuing interest as yours, of vain gratification and fear of being found out, still ridden with the notion of the people as a fatuous jury (counting reviewers as people), publishers the police station house (where if as I trust you must have some experience of being brought in, you know what I mean by their dulled but flattering indifference to your precious crime: they see them every day), and finally the perfect book as, inevitably, the perfect crime (the point of this last phrase being, for some reason which insists further development of this rambling metaphor, that the criminal is never caught). So, as you may see by the letterhead on the backside here, I am hung up with an operation of international piracy that deals in drugs, writing speeches on the balance of payments deficit but mostly staring out the window, serving the goal that Basil Valentine damned in “the people, whose idea of necessity is paying the gas bill” … (a little frightening how easily it all comes back). But sustained by the secret awareness that the secret police, Jack Green and yourself and some others, may expose it all yet.
This intervention by Tom Jenkins was indeed a happy accident (though, to exhaust the above, there are no accidents in Interpol), and I was highly entertained by the page-in-the-typewriter in your Epitaph for a Tramp. I of course had to go back and find the context (properly left-handed), then back to the beginning to find the context of the context, and finally through to the end and your fine cool dialogue (monologue) which I envied and realized how far all that had come since ’51 and 2, how refined from such crudities as “Daddy-o, up in thy way-out pad …” And it being the only “cop story” (phrase via Tom Jenkins) or maybe second or third that I’ve read, had a fine time with it. (And not that you’d entered it as a Great Book; but great God! have you seen the writing in such things as Exodus and Anatomy of a Murder? Can one ever cease to be appalled at how little is asked?)
I should add I am somewhat stirred at the moment regarding the possibility of being exhumed in paperback, one of the “better” houses (Meridian) has apparently made an offer to Harcourt Brace, who since they brought it out surreptitiously in ’55 have seemed quite content to leave it lay where Jesus flung it, but now I gather begin to suspect that they have something of value and are going to be quite as brave as the dog in the manger about protecting it. Though they may surprise me by doing the decent and I should not anticipate their depravity so high-handedly I suppose. Very little money involved but publication (in the real sense of the word) which might be welcome novelty.
And to really wring the throat of absurdity—having found publishers a razor’s edge tribe between phoniness and dishonesty—I have been working on a play, a presently overlong and overcomplicated and really quite straight figment of the Civil War: publishers almost shine in comparison to the show-business staples, as “I never read anything over a hundred pages“ or, hefting the script, (without opening it), “Too long.” The consummate annoyance though being that gap between reading the press (publicity) interview-profile of a currently successful Broadway director whose lament over the difficulty of getting hold of “plays of ideas” simply rings in one’s head as one’s agent, having struggled through it, shakes his head in baleful awe and delivers the hopeless compliment, “… but it’s a play of ideas”—a real escape hatch for everybody in the “game” (a felicitous word) whose one idea coming and going is $. And I’m behaving as though all this is news to me.
Incidentally—or rather not incidentally at all, quite hungrily—Jenkins mentioned from a letter of yours a most provocative phrase from a comment by Malcolm Lowry on The Recognitions which whetted my paranoid appetite, I am most curious to know what he might have said about it (or rather what he did say about it, with any thorns left on). I cannot say I read his book which came out when I was in Mexico, 1947 as I remember, and I started it, found it coming both too close to home and too far from what I thought I was trying to do, and lost or had it lifted from me before I ever resolved things. (Yes, in my case one of the books that the book-club ads blackmail the vacuum with “Have you caught yourself saying Yes, I’ve been meaning to read it …” (they mean Exodus).) But I am picking up a copy for a new look. Good luck on your current obsession.
with best regards,
W. Gaddis
Gaddis’s letter to Markson will be published in The Letters of William Gaddis, to be published by NYRB Classics in November 2023.
William Gaddis (1922–1998) was born in Manhattan and reared on Long Island. The Recognitions was published in 1955 to largely negative reviews, though it found an underground following. J R, his second novel, and A Frolic of His Own, his fourth novel, both won the National Book Award.
David Markson (1927–2010) was born in Albany and lived in New York City until his death. His novels include Wittgenstein’s Mistress, Reader’s Block, Springer’s Progress, and Vanishing Point.
Those of us who have lived with depression know the way it blindfolds us to beauty, the way it muffles the song of life, until we are left in the solitary confinement of our own somber ruminations, all the world a blank. It might feel like the visitation of some monster, but it is not something that happens upon us from the outside — it is our own undulating neurochemistry, it is the parts of ourselves we have not yet befriended, integrated, understood. “The gray drizzle of horror induced by depression takes on the quality of physical pain,” William Styron wrote in his timeless account of depression. The pain can feel interminable. It is a lifeline to remember that it is not — that there is an other side, that the blindfold and the muffler can come off just like they came on.
That is what Swedish-born, London-based printmaker and graphic artist Staffan Gnosspelius explores with great subtlety and soulfulness in Bear (public library) — a wordless picture-book for grownups about life with and liberation from depression.
We meet a bear with a body bent in the shape of sorrow and a cone on its head — a cone that won’t come off, only plunging the bear deeper into despair with each failed attempt.
One day, a white rabbit comes along and tries to help the bear take the cone off, but the small creature is powerless to remove it by force — the cone remains, and through it the bear growls the terrifying growl of menacing despair, terrifying his new friend.
So blinded to the reality of the wilderness, the bear comes to perceive the branches of the trees as the tentacles of some monstrous octopus and the blades of the grass as an assault of sharp swords.
Still, the rabbit persists, embracing the bear’s large cone-bowed body and simply being near, bearing witness to the suffering — that best aid for a friend in sorrow.
Watching its friend struggle, the rabbit begins gently singing to the bear.
Everywhere bear and cone go, rabbit and song go.
But when the bear tries to sing back through the cone, only those terrifying growls come out.
And so they continue — the sorrowing bear, the singing rabbit — until one day a trap in the forest snaps shut on the bear’s foot.
It is then, as pain mounts onto pain and becomes unbearable, that something breaks open in the bear and it sings out for help.
Across the forest, the rabbit hears the faint song and rushes over to release its friend.
Set free, the bear thanks the singing rabbit and timidly begins singing back, until a storm of song fills the forest — that great operatic scream of catalytic release, primal and numinous.
So it is that the song of life begins singing itself through the bear and the cone comes gently off — a tender reminder that no one can save anyone, not even with love; that we only ever save ourselves when we are ready: but love is what readies us to be our own savior.
Complement Bear with Bloom — a touching animated short film about depression and what it takes to recover the light of being — and The Rabbit Box — a wondrous vintage picture-book for grownups about the mystery of life — then revisit some of humanity’s most beloved writers on the mightiest antidote to depression.
For a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“There is hardly any activity, any enterprise, which is started with such tremendous hopes and expectations, and yet, which fails so regularly, as love,” the great humanistic philosopher and psychologist Erich Fromm wrote in his timeless treatise on learning love as a skill. We fail at it largely because, given how profoundly shaped we are by our formative attachments, those of us who grew up with instability and violence from our primary caregivers — the people tasked with loving us and teaching us about love — can feel woefully handicapped at love, unconsciously replicating the emotional patterns of those familiar relationship dynamics known as limbic attractors, only to emerge with a colossus of shame and self-blame for what feels like failing at love.
There is no greater consolation for that feeling than the knowledge that one is not alone in it, and that there is a way through it, past it, beyond it, within reach.
That is what artist Tara Booth offers in a largehearted and courageously vulnerable illustrated reckoning she published on that industrialized emblem of shame and self-blame, Valentine’s Day.
Complement with the great Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh’s field guide to learning love, Alain de Botton on love and vulnerability, Eric Berne’s classic Games People Play, and the heartening science of how healthy love rewires the brain, then revisit Shel Silverstein’s lovely illustrated allegory for the simple secret of lasting love.
HT Debbie Millman.
For a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
Maggie Millner. Photograph by Sarah Wagner Miller.
It’s easy to feel happy for a friend who has suddenly, and seemingly irrevocably, fallen in love. It’s just as easy to wonder, privately, if they might, one day, fall out of it. Love stories, like rhymes, are initially generative. Both begin with the promise of infinite possibility: the couple—and the couplet—could go anywhere! But anywhere always winds up being somewhere, and that somewhere is very often a dead end.
Couplets, Maggie Millner’s rhapsodic debut, is officially described as a novel in verse, but the poems that comprise it buck constantly against their generic container. Some are in prose, others are in rhyme and meter, and all are spoken by a young woman straddling two relationships and a shifting sense of self. Affair narratives are all about reversed chronologies: they end where love begins. But when the speaker leaves her long-term boyfriend for a first-time girlfriend, her timelines get all mixed up: she becomes a “conduit / between them: a conversation they conducted / with my mouth.”
Couplets is preoccupied by triangulations. The speaker is intensely jealous of her new girlfriend’s other girlfriend, a novelist who every other weekend also has a “tryst” with a married hedge fund manager and his lover, who is a novelist, too. When he ejaculates into one of the novelists, the other pretends that she is a voyeur, peering in on her competitor, the hedge fund manager’s wife. Meanwhile, the protagonist, a poet, finds that her own love triangle produces shifting meaning. She and her lovers are bound together, but she can’t seem to harness them. “Our own story made no sense / to me and twisted up whenever I tried / writing it.”
At the end of January, Maggie and I spoke over Zoom about the language that attends love and the desires that animate the life of any writer, who will always find herself, no matter the genre, struggling between the impulse to act and the compulsion to self-analyze.
INTERVIEWER
Was there a moment when it suddenly became clear to you that you were writing a book, as opposed to a series of poems?
MILLNER
I hadnt imagined writing a single, book-length narrative poem. When we learn to write poems, we usually learn to write these very small, discrete lyric objects, and so I had always imagined that my first book would be a collection of things that I had foraged from various years of my life. But because I had two year-long fellowships, the ostensible goal of which were to write a book, I was able to be more ambitious. The momentum of this particular poetic form took hold, and I followed it until I had the bulk of a manuscript. Then I realized the prose sections also belonged in it—that the verse needed to be aerated.
INTERVIEWER
What was missing in the couplet form that the prose was able to provide?
MILLNER
There’s a relentlessness to writing in rhyming couples that for the reader can be exhausting and claustrophobic. I was concerned about the lack of formal surprise. But also, life has formal qualities, and a relationship model is a formal question. The book was also very much about putting things in dialectical relation to each other, so I realized that there needed to be some other secondary mode or interlocutor.
INTERVIEWER
The title of the book, Couplets, is a pun, but I also felt it to be a kind of joke, because the couples keep being interrupted by the intrusion of third parties: the speaker’s girlfriend’s girlfriend and the speaker’s ex. I wonder if you find this third necessary in matters of love—if the two depend on it.
MILLNER
Three is a more interesting number than two. There’s a romance to the love triangle. There’s an inherent asymmetry, a more volatile set of relationships. Our desires are most manifest when we’re being pulled in two directions, when there are disparate, orthogonal, or even oppositional forces inside us. Those are the moments when complex self-knowledge happens. The times when you have to prioritize multiple, competing selves lead to personal transformation, I think.
I was thinking of Aristophanes’ idea about the source of romantic love: that people were originally conjoined and then split in half, so we’re doomed to wander the earth until we find our missing counterpart, at which point we become complete. His myth actually makes a provision for gay couples, but it unfolds only within a strictly binary gender system, and only within the premise that there’s a single lasting partner for each of us. If you depart from the idea that the couple is the default, preordained arrangement, suddenly the constructed dimensions of relational structures start to open up. The book’s jacket copy says something about coming out: one woman’s coming-out, coming undone. But I do think those two things are discrete. The consummation of queer desire is a realization that anticipates a later realization, which is that relationships are not inherently meant to be durable.
INTERVIEWER
In Couplets, the only mention of coming out is immediately related to climaxing. Was it important to you to describe this supposedly outward and public-facing process as something very intimate?
MILLNER
The speaker is in part resistant to that climactic, self-actualizing narrative because she is also very reluctant to renounce her previous relationship. If we code her as stepping into some presupposed fate, it turns her previous life into a pretext for this other, truer moment. The cultural incentives to read things that way are both very appealing and very abundant. But the reality is that she still feels real love for her ex, which doesn’t neatly coexist with the role that she is stepping into; the relationship with her ex has an integrity that this book wants to honor. I don’t feel that time is teleological and progressive: that we’re always heading somewhere, but we’re not there yet. I believe that everyone has many lives.
INTERVIEWER
Much of the story of these two couples takes place in a rapidly gentrifying Bedford-Stuyvesant, and the highly specific proper nouns that anchor your speaker to a sense of place and social milieu aren’t easy to square in verse. Eckhaus Latta, Saraghina: I find them to be rather ugly words. Why did you include them?
MILLNER
Through this new relationship, the speaker is stepping into an identity, but she’s also stepping into a social class and milieu that is not entirely comfortable to her, where queerness is the opposite of marginal, and where being a person in an alternative relationship model is actually quite common. She is hyper-attentive to the signifiers that attend this world, which she too finds ugly (and alluring). On the one hand, she longs to be naturalized into it, but on the other, there is also this inevitable friction between the person she knows herself to be within the social contexts that she has occupied, and the world that these proper nouns stand in for. Part of why this isn’t a more triumphant coming out story has to do with the fact that queer life, within the circles she’s in, doesn’t attract public shame. On the contrary, there’s social cachet in stepping into that identity. Which is not to elide the homophobia and queerphobia that continue to dominate most spaces in this country, or the elders and activists who have made communities like this one possible. But for the speaker, there’s something disingenuous about claiming her queerness only as a socially marginal identity.
INTERVIEWER
Toward the very end of the book, the narrator declares that in verse, as opposed to in prose, there are “barely any characters at all.” What do you think about the differences between character as it can be constructed in prose versus poetry?
MILLNER
As contemporary readers of poetry, we often assume that the lyric “I” is the writing self, which does seem to preclude characterization, because that “I” is seen as pointing to a nonfictional human figure. But we’re wrong when we make the assumption that the “I” and the self are coextensive, even in poems that seem totally autobiographical. I want to be taken seriously as a maker of artifice, and I’m interested in inviting my readers away from that assumption, while also maintaining a sense of intimate disclosure, which we typically associate with the lyric poem.
INTERVIEWER
The book is classified as “a novel in verse,” and your speaker is, for a period, intensely jealous of her girlfriend’s girlfriend, who is a novelist. Although she never says so outright, you get the sense that she fears the story this novelist will make of her love for the speaker’s girlfriend will be more compelling than the story the speaker can make in verse. Which makes me wonder, how do you feel about novels and novelists?
MILLNER
There might be more references to novelists in the book than to poets, which is reflective of the speaker’s taste and of a desire to be maximally immersed in experiences of every aesthetic kind. Novels provide that exhaustive immersion. It’s not that poems don’t, but poetry is more condensed and demanding and doesn’t act on attention the way that novelistic prose acts on attention. There’s a passivity and submissiveness that the reader of a novel gets to enjoy. The reader of poetry is invited to focus on granular particulate dimensions language—it’s a less submissive experience, or at least a less passive one.
As a poet, I have an inner conflict around the desire to write a novel while being a poet. I feel pulled in two different directions: I have a strong affinity for narrative, characterization, and durational storytelling, but it’s very hard for me to imagine turning off the poetic apparatus. The speaker is entertaining the possibility of being otherwise, of existing in a slightly different shape. She wonders if her life might be radically different if she could find a form that better reflects what’s going on with her.
INTERVIEWER
The couple form is said to be infinitely transformative, and yet many experience it as a restriction. The same can be said of rhyme and meter. On the one hand, it produces infinite meaning; on the other, it can feel laden with rules. How do you feel about living and working within these two forms?
MILLNER
A foundational belief that undergirds this book is that one way to feel free, to experience agency within the repressive systems that govern our lives, is to historicize and try to understand the material conditions through which they came to be. The idea that to write in free verse is an exercise in unmediated personal expression presupposes so many things about what that form does. The shift away from rhyme and meter is extremely recent relative to literary history; the phrase “free verse” is only a century and a half old. It’s also somewhat oxymoronic; to me, as soon as anything becomes compulsory—as soon as it’s presented as the only available option—it doesn’t make much sense to attach the adjective free to it. Contemporary poets are generally expected, with the consensus of the commercial and academic institutions, to write in ways that sound more like speech than like oldfangled verse forms. So the idea that writing in an inherited form is a deviation from the default is, ironically, a basically presentist idea. Still, if radical forms are those that stage a departure from the status quo, we live in a time when using rhyme and meter can actually qualify. I would argue that they can even take on a new political charge when used by people historically excluded from the institutions that propagated them.
I feel similarly vexed about relationship structures. I do feel there is something amazing and irreplicable about the experience of being in a couple. And I don’t think that experience is only a cultural production—there’s something genuinely special that can happen between two individuals. Moments of intimacy with one other person have been the most transformative, spiritual moments of my life. The speaker of Couplets is magnetized toward those experiences. They’re real, they’re important, and they’re beautiful—they’re what it’s all about. But through those experiences, she finds herself unwittingly signed up for a certain kind of partnership—caught in a default she didn’t necessarily choose.
INTERVIEWER
Do you feel as if the couplet is a flawed form that we have to reinvent, to the extent that reinvention is possible? Or do you believe that the couple is an ideal form that is tarnished by lived reality?
MILLNER
I think the issue is not with the structure of the couple, but with the telos of any relationship being eternity—the idea that the couple is a form you only step into and never out of. There is something exalted about the experience that two individuals can have with each other. Suddenly, you’re not really an individual, which is the profundity that you experience in the presence of an other. I feel very attached to that. But this book is an experiment in thinking through the question, What if staying together wasn’t the tacit objective of every relationship? In Poetic Closure, Barbara Herrnstein Smith writes that the couplet is a unit that enacts closure. Every two lines, there’s resolution. And so there’s a propulsive momentum to the form, but it also pretends to arrive at closure over, and over, and over again. There’s an assumption that the couple is a closed container, but the couplet unravels that assumption through repetition.
INTERVIEWER
I was struck by how resistant your speaker is to the endings that might otherwise be imposed upon her; she leaves her boyfriend but feels herself conducting his mannerisms in her relationship with her girlfriend, so that the two meet in her. Why were you drawn to that choreography, which seems impossible for a book about couples, written in couplets?
MILLNER
On the one hand, we are all familiar with the story of falling in love—we all know how it can go. And at the same time, we don’t, as a culture, have many urtexts about voluntary breakups, because divorce only stopped being taboo, like, yesterday. The idea that a marriage is composed of two subjects who are equally entitled to an experience of self-actualization is not very old—even younger than free verse! If we look at our great foundational texts, especially within the Western canon, relationships end nonconsensually, either by death or by some other nonmutual event.
There’s a reason that literature is still being written about the fundamental question of how to know when a relationship is over, even if you still have an attachment to that person. We don’t have cultural scripts for those questions, and the way they are legislated is still retrograde and dependent on conservative notions of the sanctity of the nuclear family. The speaker of my book is very much reckoning with the residues of historical expectations of what women owe men. There’s a great temptation on the part of women in hetero partnerships to feel an outsized sense of responsibility for their demise.
Maya Binyam is a contributing editor of the Review.
Felicia Chiao was working as an industrial designer at IDEO when A24 reached out and told her that Daniel Kwan, director of their highest-grossing film, Everything Everywhere All At Once, wanted to collaborate. The project was not a movie, but one of two picture books that Kwan had written (24 Minutes to Bedtime and I’ll Get to the Bottom of This), to be published by A24 as part of their expansion into children’s literature. Neither Kwan, Chiao, nor A24 had gone through the process of publishing a picture book from start to finish, which is perhaps why the final product is so strange and delightful.
Much in the way that Everything Everywhere All At Once layers dimensions in the multiverse, 24 Minutes to Bedtime layers dimensions of time. Each set of facing pages counts one minute closer to Winston’s eight o’clock bedtime. “Why can’t we stay up later?” he mourns, to which his dad answers, “Because . . . this is all the time you get.” With the help of a time machine, Winston fills every minute with chaos, as four different versions of him time-jump between pages, running from the inevitable. Chiao embedded mini storylines throughout the illustrations, and readers can choose to follow any of the Winstons, countless hidden easter eggs, or his frazzled parents. As Winston tries to slow the minutes, his parents wish they could fast forward. When he finally falls asleep in their arms though, they realize that truly, this is all the time they get.
Chiao has been drawing since she was a child, and thought of it not as a profession, but as a coping mechanism. Struggling to express her feelings, she drew in notebook after notebook through her school years and beyond. She began sharing her drawings on Instagram, but her account didn’t take off until the pandemic. When lockdowns began, she steadily gained an audience, and now has a following of over half a million. At the beginning of 2022, she left her job to become a full-time illustrator. On a phone call from Texas where she was visiting family for the holidays, she spoke with me about being part of this inexperienced yet brilliant team, working with Daniel Kwan, her own artistic process, and how her mental health has both shaped her work and transformed within it.
***
The Rumpus: Looking at your body of work, one of the things I notice is the dreamy state it creates. There’s a sense of both mundanity and magic, a melancholy about the passage of time, but also humor and joy. Your art seems like a perfect fit for something that Daniel Kwan would write. How did this partnership come along?
Felicia Chiao: A24 had a list of people they were interested in working with, and Daniel had his own list. It seems I was on both, so they reached out to me. I knew A24 as the movie house, but I didn’t know anything about publishing or children’s books, and they didn’t really have a clear idea of how it was going to be done either, so it was new for all of us.
Rumpus: Traditionally, a children’s book author and illustrator might work separately, but it seems there was so much integration between the text and the images. Did you and Daniel work closely together on these things, or follow a more traditional model?
Chiao: I originally anticipated the more traditional model. I thought they were going to give me a storyboard and I was going to translate it into my style. But on one of the very first calls with everyone, they said, “We don’t know what we want the characters to look like or how we want anything done,” and they turned to me and asked, “Do you want to help us figure that out?” This wasn’t what I signed up for originally, but I’m glad it turned out that way because it gave me a lot more freedom.
Rumpus: As I was reading the book, I was thinking the family looked a bit like Daniel’s.
Chiao: I hadn’t actually seen a picture of his kid until later in the process, but, you know, every Asian child has that bowl cut. Originally, I’d drawn the dad as a bald man with a mustache, very stereotypical, and the mom with her hair up in a bun. They said, “Actually, we’re aiming for the A24 audience now—Millennials becoming parents—so the dad can be a little more hip.” I realized both dads on the video call were wearing beanies and had long hair, so I thought, “Well, I’ll take from life.”
Rumpus: What was the creative process of working with Daniel like?
Chiao: We would go through his stick figure storyboard online together and try to catch all the errors, because it’s a very complex book with connecting lines in different chronological orders. So there was a lot of conversation, a lot of back and forth. For example, triple-checking that the pajamas matched up on the right page, and that what each version of the character was talking about made sense in the time jumps. I didn’t really understand this book until I had to draw every single page.
It was also an interesting process because I work traditionally. I don’t do anything digital really. For a book, especially with the repeating imagery of this one, we had to tailor it to fit my process. I was able to make a few drawings and scan them, then I would Photoshop in the different elements and characters and move around the speech bubbles that I hand-lettered.
It was a very strange process because of the way we all work—the A24 team versus Daniel, versus my abilities and the tools I had—to make this book come to life. We thought we would be done in June or March of this year and we finished maybe August or September. It all started in November last year, before Everything Everywhere All At Once came out.
Rumpus: The book reminds me of Everything Everywhere All at Once in the way it plays with time and dimension, and how there are so many threads to track. I imagine it was a challenge to illustrate.
Chiao: Yeah, I was having a really hard time in the beginning figuring out the book. Then when I went to the screening and saw Everything Everywhere All at Once, all of it clicked. Suddenly, it made a lot of sense. I got what he wanted, and what he was doing creatively. After that, it made the book a little easier.
Rumpus: I can see how that would happen. Artists are often preoccupied with getting at deeper truths around the same themes, and there were many that crossed over between this book and the film.
Chiao: Yeah, there was that vibe of nothing matters, do what you want, but everything actually matters so much. Wrestling with that idea was inspiring. A lot of times, I think artists are paralyzed by the fear of making something bad, so they procrastinate or don’t start a piece at all. When I first started concepting the house and the characters for the book, I spent so much time agonizing over small details. I drew several versions of Clarence, the stuffed rabbit, and nothing felt quite right. Eventually I just said “fuck it” and made what we called “long Clarence.” Did the shape really matter in terms of the story? No. But giving the stuffed toy an irregular shape added to the overall vibe of the story.
Do what you can or want and have fun with it; you’ll be surprised how much impact something you’ve made can have on other people when you’re not stressing about how to do it the “best” way. I’m so used to consultancy life where you just deliver what you think the client wants. And Daniel is such a big proponent of saying, “Well, what do you think? What do you want to do? What’s interesting to you? Let’s make it happen.” It was a really lovely reminder that I’m going to enjoy the work more if I do what I think is best. They hired me for my work, so I should be able to push my ideas a little bit stronger.
Rumpus: The subtitle of the book is “a 4-dimensional bedtime story,” and its nonlinear nature invites the reader to revisit it again and again, even more than the usual return to a children’s book, because you can read it differently each time. You did such a wonderful job of creating these layered reads and offering something new to discover with each one.
Chiao: Well, thanks. In my drawings that are interiors, I always love adding little details and objects all around the page. I think it gets people to look at your work a lot longer, especially in the time of social media where you stare at something for three seconds and keep scrolling. People tell me that they stop and zoom in, and they look for all the pieces. When you spend twenty to thirty hours on a drawing, you want people to look at it.
Growing up, I loved Richard Scarry. He had a book about vehicles and all I remember is looking for gold bugs on all the pages. I don’t remember the story. I don’t remember the rest of the book. I just remember every night I would go look for the bug even though I knew where it was already. So, I like the idea of a kid being able to enjoy little elements of the illustration and the art, even if they’re not reading per se.
Rumpus: Can you tell me more about your influences? For this book but also for your work in general?
Chiao: I didn’t use too much for this project besides the vague nostalgia of the books I grew up on. I knew this wasn’t about reading a book front to back like adults do. It’s more of a journey. I knew whatever Daniel was coming up with probably wasn’t going to be a standard children’s book, and I didn’t want to have that gut feeling where I’d be thinking, well, that’s not how it’s done. I also felt that if I looked at a stack of children’s books now, it would influence me too much in a way that isn’t authentic to my style, which is kind of how I handle life, too.
I don’t like looking at too many artists or illustrators because I don’t want to inadvertently copy what they’re doing. A lot of my work is inspired through film and music and the world around. If a song I like has a strong emotion in it, I try to go off that feeling. I want to portray that in my illustrations. My biggest inspiration, I think, is the artistic process itself. I like making things, so how I feel while I’m making it, that’s what translates into the drawing.
Rumpus: I was sharing your work with a writer friend, and she remarked on how every image felt like being dropped into the middle of a story. When you create your own art, does it stem from a larger narrative playing out in your mind?
Chiao: I think I’m very lucky that there’s a storytelling aspect people can connect with, because that isn’t done on purpose. Images show up in my head. Then there’s a queue in my brain of what drawings I’m going to do next, and they stack up until I can get them out. A lot of times, it’s because I love the materials I use, which are alcohol-based markers and pens. I’m dabbling a bit with watercolor now. I know my tools well though. So I’ll think, “Oh, I wonder if I can make colors a certain way,” or “I want to draw this rounder shape,” and it’s just purely selfish. It’s the idea of, oh, I really want to draw a certain shape or certain lighting, or maybe sometimes when things are chaotic, I want to draw one point perspective interiors, because grids and perspective have rules.
Rumpus: It makes so much sense to me that during the pandemic, everyone found your work. The sentiments that I either read in your captions or find in your images signal that here is an artist who really has her finger on the pulse of what we’re all going through.
Chiao: It’s a little sad because I’ve been drawing the figure alone in interiors for a long time, and when the lockdown happened, my work blew up. I recognized, “Oh, suddenly everyone’s depressed at the same time.”
I think because I’ve had mental illnesses for a very long time; it’s not something I’m actively fighting against anymore. A lot of my work is about exploring what it’s like to live with it. There are still good days and then you’re having a bad day, and they’re both equally right. The little blob creature I draw that a lot of people seem to like is mostly anxiety. It’s a mix of things, but it used to be within the figure’s body impacting it. Now it hangs around in the house like a cat as a companion. People have interpreted it 100 different ways. I don’t actually know what’s right, because I’m not thinking too hard about what the drawing means. I do a drawing a week. So I’m glad people are finding meaning in it because sometimes I just want to draw a grid. I’ll put up a drawing that was done purely for technical reasons, and people will comment, “Oh my God, I feel this.” And I’m so curious: What are you feeling?
Rumpus: That’s part of what’s beautiful about your work. You leave space for the viewer to fill it with what they need. I noticed in 24 Minutes to Bedtime that there are multiple pages with illustrations and no words. In the beginning there’s an empty landscape, then the frame of the house being built, which I really only appreciated after I’d gotten to the last pages where you see the decay of the house. It was such a poignant way to show that this is all the time we have and it’s so fleeting. Was having these images without text part of the plan from the beginning?
Chiao: That was all Daniel [Kwan]. You just described exactly what he wanted people to feel. I’m so glad that came across because at first we knew we wanted the beginning scenes of the field and then the house showing up, but I did question the ending because I thought it looks like they’ve all died. We decided to stick with it though, because the story is talking about the passage of time. Even though the parents are so stressed and so tired, they recognize that this is all the time we get. Even if in the moment it doesn’t seem like the best thing ever, we have to appreciate this time.
I didn’t exactly have “this is all the time we get” in my mind before this project, but I had a similar thought in my work about “maybe this is all there is.” It’s the idea that so many of us are waiting for things to work out, for the next big experience or memory to define life by, but maybe life is really just about appreciating the day-to-day ups and downs that make up the majority of our lives. Stuff that seems simple now may carry a lot of nostalgia later, and I think the best we can do is to be grateful that we get to experience it all.
Daniel came at it from a film perspective of having opening shots and closing shots, and the text that comes in like credits. So it’s also been interesting working on a book with someone who normally does movies, because the vision is not what we’re used to seeing in books.
Rumpus: It feels full circle that you aren’t influenced necessarily by specific illustrators, but by film and by music. This partnership between the two of you seems like such a great fit for that reason as well.
Chiao: I still can’t believe it happened. I’m glad it’s done but I’m so appreciative of the opportunity because I don’t regularly freelance, which has been good and bad. It’s like a rubber band. It was stretched out when I was working for other people. Now I purely do only what I want to do. With freelance, I have to give up a little bit of control, but this was one of the first times genuinely working with another creative person that has expanded my idea of what good work is and how I want to work.
***
Self-portrait by author
Birds populate our metaphors, our poems, and our children’s books, entrance our imagination with their song and their chromatically ecstatic plumage, transport us on their tender wings back to the time of the dinosaurs they evolved from. But birds are a time machine in another way, too — not only evolutionarily but culturally: While the birth of photography revolutionized many sciences, birds remained as elusive as ever, difficult to capture with lens and shutter, so that natural history illustration has remained the most expressive medium for their study and celebration.
To my eye, the most consummate drawings of birds in the history of natural history date back to the 1830s, but they are not Audubon’s Birds of America — rather, they appeared on the other side of the Atlantic, in the first volume of The Edinburgh Journal of Natural History and of the Physical Sciences, with the Animal Kingdom of the Baron Cuvier, published in the wake of the pioneering paleontologist Georges Cuvier’s death.
Hundreds of different species of birds — some of them now endangered, some on the brink of extinction — populate the lavishly illustrated pages, clustered in kinship groups as living visual lists of dazzling biodiversity.
Among the cornucopia of species depicted — pigeons and parakeets, warblers and jays, woodpeckers and owls, sunbirds and sugarbirds — none occupy more space than hummingbirds, perhaps due to their enduring enchantment partway between science and magic.
Couple with some stunning 19th-century ink illustrations of owls, dial back a century with the trailblazing 18th-century artist Sarah Stone’s paintings of exotic, endangered, and extinct species, and dive into the fascinating science of feathers.
For a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
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Conversations with Birds charts my transformative encounters with birds over the course of two decades. Whether I am observing the mango-colored western tanager or the prehistoric-looking long-billed curlew, I want the reader to be able to enter this book and sense a real possibility of developing an intimacy with the natural world. In these essays, I animate myself only to the extent that I can serve as a hiking companion and crack a door open for you.
It has been a pleasure over the last couple of months to get responses from readers who are identifying with the work at a philosophical level. Some send me sentences from the book “that jump out” at them. One reader, for instance, sent me her gratitude for this sentence:
“In birding, there is a forgetting, a coming out of oneself, while paradoxically also a going deeper into oneself.”
Conversations with Birds is an experiential book, and I couldn’t have written it without spending many years in California and New Mexico, obsessively listening to the “drumbeats of the Earth.” I am an author who is also a naturalist, and it is perhaps not surprising that my work is rooted deeply in place. As I was putting together this reading list, it became clear to me—and this took my breath away—that I have long gravitated toward books that know where they are situated. Here are some fine examples:
***
The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald
I recently reread The Bookshop which ought to be a classic if it isn’t one already. Fitzgerald was a practitioner of concise prose that resonates over vast distances. At the end of the first chapter, Florence Green has been trusted in one instance—”and that was not an everyday experience in Hardborough.” Trust is something we all crave, and it says a lot that in the village of Hardborough, people do not trust easily. Florence wants to open a bookshop, but she’ll have to earn the trust of her neighbors. Will she? Fitzgerald’s novels function not only on the level of plot, but also on a metaphysical level, which is why I can reread them and distill new insights.
The Man Who Planted Trees by Jean Giono
Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote, “The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.” The French author Jean Giono brings this aphorism to life and illustrates how one man’s generosity can rejuvenate an entire ecosystem; reading this fable feels like re-setting one’s heart and mind, and understanding why an accountability toward the Earth is not only an obligation, but a gift.
The Blue Sky by Galsan Tschinag (translated from the German by Katharina Rout)
It feels like I read this book in one sitting, though I surely must have gotten up at some point to get tea. The mountainous setting of this northern Mongolian village is so palpable that I easily slipped into the connection a young shepherd boy feels for his animals, his grandmother, and their nomadic way of life; sensing modernity tearing away at the fragile beauty of traditional ways broke my heart.
The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen
One of my favorite travelogues, this book maps not only the landscape of the elusive snow leopard and the Himalayan blue sheep, but also charts the landscape of Matthiessen’s mind— and the ways in which Buddhist thought helps him navigate turbulence. The difference in the personalities of Matthiessen and his traveling companion, biologist George Schaller, can be hilarious and revelatory.
Letters on Cézanne by Rainer Maria Rilke
Rilke’s letters brought me closer to Cézanne and his studio than ever before: How the painter saw a mountain (as well as Moses) or the color blue; his taste for work; and a kind of rage that he grappled with. Now when I encounter a Cézanne painting, I stand rapt before it with fresh eyes. If only more writing about art could decode color and line with such brilliance!
The Man-Eater of Malgudi by R.K. Narayan
I have been thinking about how we’re unable to sink into time anymore because our days are splintered by technology. If you want to enter another (very real) dimension of time, walk into the lobby of a printing shop in Malgudi, and meet some friends and extreme hangers-on; there are few better places to travel to if you like to sink into time, and R.K. Narayan is an endearing and trustworthy guide.
Tarka the Otter by Henry Williamson
It is a rare book in which the preface alone is worth the price of admission. “I began to write about 10 p.m. when things were quiet, and continued for three, four, sometimes five hours, while nursing the baby in the crook of my left arm,” Williamson writes. I welcome books that open with men writing while taking care of babies. Karl Ove Knausgaard covered some of this territory, but Williamson’s account in his preface is both comic and tender. The rest of the book indelibly follows the life of Tarka the otter, and Williamson has a boy’s deep love of the English country.
Devotion by Patti Smith
Patti Smith rocks my boat. Consistently. I scarcely know another contemporary artist whose sensibility strikes such resonant chords within me. I recently reread Devotion and marveled at how the ways in which she and I experienced Paris, decades apart, have many points of connection—how could I have not anticipated that she too would fall under the spell of Patrick Modiano? One of these days, I will treat myself to Smith’s newest, A Book of Days.
Duino Elegies by Rilke, Translated by Alfred Corn
Forgive me for invoking Rilke again but I am rapturously reading this intelligent new translation of the Duino Elegies. The introduction by Alfred Corn luminously revisits the place where Rilke began writing these elegies. Recently, at the breakfast room of a historic house, I told an aspiring poet about Corn’s translation. “My favorite is the eighth (elegy),” the poet responded. I didn’t fess up, but my favorite is the first.
Florida by Lauren Groff
One recent afternoon I was at my local bookstore, signing copies of Conversations with Birds. Later I rewarded myself with browsing. In between glancing at which Kingsolver titles the bookstore was carrying (several) and which ones by Shirley Hazard (only one), I came upon a book that I looked at closely. Florida by Lauren Groff. This was my impulsive buy, in part because of the imaginatively rendered panther on the cover, but also because Groff’s characters sometimes literally circle around place—which appeals to me.
***
This was originally published at The Rumpus on September 13, 2017.
No. It’s my mother’s favorite word lately.
Did they feed you?
No.
Are you happy here?
No.
Do you love me?
No.
It’s a Sunday at the tail end of fall. The autumn scents of pumpkin and cinnamon have vanished somewhere with the last of the dying leaves. Above my mother’s bed, skinny leafless branches tap at the glass window in slow rhythmic movements. My mother shifts to her side and draws her blanket close to her face, balling her fists tight under her chin. She shivers like a page caught in a gust of wind.
“No,” she says, although I haven’t said anything. It’s no longer a word, but a sound that’s not meant for anyone but herself. It’s her second day here at Saint Martha’s Nursing Home and although she can’t communicate anymore, I can tell she hates it. Projecting, my husband Jerry said yesterday when I told him about my suspicions. Well, he didn’t say this; he exclaimed it, like a detective would after finally putting together all the clues. He decided I hated Saint Martha’s, I hated leaving my mother here and—as usual—I was making this about myself. Projecting. He was loose with the tongue because he has nothing left to lose: he’s been sleeping on the couch for about two months now, surrounded by his model airplanes and ships. The subject of divorce has been lobbied between us more times this month than a volleyball at the beach.
My mother shakes so much I’m thankful for the rails on each side of the bed. There’s no thermostat in the room, just an absurd antique iron heater that would look out of place except that this whole facility looks like the setting of a Victorian-era novel. Perched on a mountaintop, the structure of Saint Martha’s dates to colonial times when it was used as a lookout during the Revolutionary War. It was abandoned after the war ended and left to rot and ruin, until the late 1800s when it was renovated by Catholic nuns and converted into an asylum. In the 1900s, most of their patients were elderly people with some form of dementia or Alzheimer’s, which led to their decision to turn the asylum into a home for the elderly. This building is so old that all the heat is turned on at the same time—winter. No thermostats; you just open and close the heater’s valves.
I know all of this because I had an argument yesterday with one of the nuns, Sister Frances. She’s in charge of the wing my mother is in, the Alzheimer’s and dementia section of the facility, where they place the residents who suffer from severe forms of these diseases. The ones who repeat the same words over and over like a prayer; the ones who need to be fed and bathed and have their diapers changed.
Sister Frances and I argued because I wanted her to turn the heat on in my mother’s room. She gave me the Saint Martha’s history lesson to explain why she couldn’t do that: it would be too expensive to turn the heat on for the whole building before winter. I told her with what they charged monthly my mother should have her own private sauna if she wanted one. The compromise we arrived on was extra blankets, but even this would take an extra day or two because they “didn’t have any extras.”
I hate to admit it, but Jerry was right about something: I hate this place. But that doesn’t change the fact that I think Mom doesn’t like it either. I like to imagine she’s pretending to be cold, to shiver so much, just to let me know she doesn’t like it here, because that would mean she’s still in there somewhere. I only put her in this place because she’s always been such a devout Catholic. I thought being around nuns and crucifixes might trigger some memories, make her feel more at home, but I’m not so sure anymore. I also didn’t realize these nuns actually operated with amenities from the 1800s.
My mother turns on her side, now facing me. She looks at me through the silver strands of hair that fall across her face.
“No,” she says. Her face is as thin and sharp as I’ve ever seen it. Her eyes are set in deeper than I remember and dark bags hang heavy under her gaze.
“No what, Mom?” I say, standing up from the red cushioned chair next to the bed and walking towards her.
“No.”
“Are you cold, Momma?” I take a measured step forward.
“No,” she says, still shivering.
“Are you hungry?”
She looks away from me and stares at the ceiling as if trying to solve a puzzle. I haven’t been this close to her in a while. For the last month she’s been confusing me with someone else. She’d look at me and turn red and either cry or claw at me. During one of these instances she called me “Marie,” during another she called me a whore. I have no idea who Marie is or was—I don’t even know if she ever existed.
I miss hearing her say my name. Monica, she’d call from downstairs when dinner was ready. Monica, honey, she’d whisper if she found me crying in my room after school. I place one hand on the bed rail and I slide the other into hers. I never get used to the feel of her wrinkled skin, the fluid movement of bluish veins under my thumb, the warmth it radiates. I feel like a child again. I feel like my mother’s daughter for the first time in months.
“Momma,” I whisper.
She stares at me for a few seconds. I think she’s trying to connect the dots. Get the gears grinding. I fear she’s going to see “Marie’s” face in mine. But she looks away. She stares at the wall and coos like a bird.
“No,” she says. “Coo.”
By the time I leave Saint Martha’s, the sun has set. Rain falls hard and angry from the dark gray clouds hiding the hundreds of stars that can be seen from this hilltop on a clear night. On the drive back home, I feel cheated. The first time my older brother, Gabe, and I visited Saint Martha’s was during its open house last spring, when the trees were heavy with green and flowers scattered through plains like wildfire. We drove up the gravel path that cut through the green hill like a scythe through tall grass, unprepared for the beauty we were about to see. Saint Martha’s during springtime looked magical: surrounded by flowers and greenery—the whole color spectrum on top of a hill.
Gabe flew in to Massachusetts from California, where he pretends to be too busy “working” to come help take care of Mom. He calls himself an actor, despite being forty-three and only having two infomercials and one tiny non-speaking role in his portfolio, or whatever actors call their résumés. I practically forced him to come so he could check out the facility where Mom was most likely going to end up. I even paid for his airline ticket. He had lived here in Greetlebay and worked as an English teacher at a local high school for about fifteen years before having some sort of identity crisis and deciding he was going to make it as an actor. Coincidentally, this sudden burst of passion happened at the same time Mom started getting worse, when she started misplacing memories and faces as often as she misplaced her keys. I don’t know why I made him come. Why I spent that money. I didn’t really have to bring back my brother, who didn’t really want to be here. Maybe it was my last attempt at keeping the family together—at having a family at all. In the end, his contribution to the decision-making process amounted to, “This place seems fine.”
My house looks unfamiliar under rainfall: a black and blue silhouette in darkness, unwelcoming and eerie. I sit in my car and listen to the engine run lazily, a soft murmur under the wash of rain. I don’t know when exactly it transformed from a home to a house. The blinds are shut, but I don’t need to see inside to know that Jerry is either slumped on the couch eating macaroni and cheese and watching television or he’s hunched over the dinner table, working on one of his model airplanes, or a tiny ship in a bottle. He finds comfort in repetition, in rituals. He’s built the same ten or twelve different models over and over again because he knows them by now and won’t find any surprise or complication in the process. Among his favorites are the F4U Corsair with its tiny yellow-tipped propellers, the American Airlines Boeing 767 because it’s the only airline he trusts, and the red 1917 Baron Fokker Triplane, with its three sets of wings and the black cross on its tail.
For our last anniversary, I gave him a custom-made model set of the very cruise ship we were on when he proposed, the Carnival Liberty. I had to do a lot of research to get the details right, online searches and many calls. Decks on the ship: 16. Balconies: 28 (all on the 16th deck). Length: 855 feet. Guest capacity: 2052. On-board crew: 920. Emergency lifeboats: 24 (12 on each side). The model is still in the white and red box it came in, gathering dust next to the model planes and ships and bottles. He gave me a scarf that year. One he knew I already owned, because, as he pointed out, “It’s your favorite scarf, but in a different color!” I wish I’d returned it that very day instead of wearing it to work to protect his feelings.
There’s a finished model of a WWII fighter jet gliding in place over the glass dinner table, its target apparently the cheesy white china plate. No Jerry. For half a second I expect to find a note clinging to the model plane (a grey Messerschmitt Me 262) the way he used to let me know he ran out for a quick second to buy more crazy glue or a magnifying glass because he lost another one.
The model plane is dainty and fragile. They’re always lighter than I expect them to be. I hold the Nazi jet by its wings like a baby bird or a dead moth and push with my thumbs until one of the little wings snaps. I consider breaking the other one as well, but settle for one and leave the jet right where it was before I go to bed.
In the morning I hear Jerry creep into the room. He shuffles socked feet and slides closet doors gently, trying not to make a sound. I pretend to be asleep, because I don’t know what I would say or ask if we talked right now. For the first time in years—in our marriage—I don’t know where he spent the night. I know he didn’t come in last night because I got up after midnight to get a glass of water, and where I expected to find a fat blanketed lump on the couch, I found nothing. I shift to my side but pretend to still be sleeping and he freezes for a moment. I hear him open a few drawers and pick up a pair of shoes before leaving the room.
I get out of bed and walk out of the room after I hear Jerry’s car driving away. If someone asks him what his job is, he’ll say he’s a writer. In reality, he works a nine to five in a government building, writing little blog posts about public health and safety. He’s never written a short story or a poem that I know of, and I’ve never seen him writing outside of work. But he likes to pretend things are better than they really are. It’s his way of life: repetition and denial.
Later, at work, my mind is elsewhere, nowhere near the insurance forms I should be filling out. My mind is in Los Angeles with my deadbeat runaway brother; it’s at the top of a hill in a cold ancient building, watching my mother coo at the walls; it’s wherever my husband was last night, watching him do all the things he could have done with a prettier, younger version of me.
Still, it seems absurd—logically—to be angry with him. Even if he was with someone else last night—why should I be mad? We’ve talked about separation many times, called each other many things we can’t take back and put all our belongings in some intangible mental list of division. Most of these conversations ended the same way, me trying to think of new things we could try—marriage counseling, sky-diving, swinging, something, anything—and Jerry saying he’s tired of trying, or that there’s nothing even left to try because we’ve tried it all. Jerry gave up. Jerry is done. He’s been looking at apartments for a month now. We’re only together on paper. Yet, whenever my mind wanders off I picture tiny model planes set ablaze and soaring through the sky or tiny ships in bottles crashing into jagged rocks, pushed by violent waves.
After work, I drive fast to Saint Martha’s, a little recklessly, because I’m eager to see my mother. I’m eager to be in her quiet room and sit by her side and hold her hand while I talk and she listens. I’m eager to touch her hair and tell her stories—her own stories about her own life—and maybe I’ll even sing to her, like the doctors have recommended or I’ll hum, since I don’t have a singing voice. Maybe I’ll finally tell her about my failed marriage.
Crossing the threshold of Saint Martha’s entrance feels like stepping into a different world, where time moves at the same pace flowers bloom and the general atmosphere is perpetually that of a wake. I pass by portraits of Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary, rosaries hung from their top corners; residents who smile at me, who say hello and hi and good morning (despite the sun having already set), who smell like piss, who look lonely. Some of them seem healthy and alive—more so than my mother. And I can’t help asking why not them?
The Alzheimer’s section of the building is one of the farthest from the entrance. When I’m about halfway there, Sister Frances intercepts me.
“Excuse the intrusion,” she says. “I don’t mean to be nosy, but do you know who Jerry is?”
“Jerry?” I’m surprised because Jerry’s never come to visit my mother. “My husband, Jerry?”
“Oh,” says Sister Frances in a tone that would seem grave, if she didn’t dip every word in the same tenor. “Your mother has been calling for a ‘Jerry’ all day.”
This is odd. My mother was never a fan of Jerry. In fact, when I told her that I was pregnant with his child and that I was planning on marrying him all those years ago, she begged me not to do it, not to have the baby—this was the first and only time I heard her say anything so un-Catholic. It was also the moment I realized how hard it must have been for her to bring me up by herself. It had nothing to do with Jerry, but with how young I was and how hard she’d worked to get us to where we were. I was seventeen and she had raised me by herself, during a time when a single mother was treated like a leper. One day she threatened to poison both our meals if I didn’t abort and promise not to marry anyone until I was at least twenty-one. She was joking—maybe half joking—but it never had to come to that, because I had a miscarriage seven months into the pregnancy, a little after Jerry officially proposed.
“I’ll have to tell Jerry. I’ll bring him with me next time.”
“About that,” Sister Frances says as she fixes the black veil pinned over the white coif, “I didn’t get a chance to talk to you about this during your first visit—transitions and all of that. We find it’s best—this is completely optional and up to you of course—but we find it’s easier for the patients to transition into living here if their families give them space for at least the first one or two weeks.”
“Space?”
“Yes. We encourage families to—”
“Are you asking me not to visit my mother?”
“Well no, it’s just—”
“My mother is seventy-eight. And she’s frail. She could get a cold and die tomorrow.”
“Oh dear. I think I may have upset you.”
“I think you may have,” I say, more coldly than intended. Before I can say anything else, she bows her head and walks away.
I imagine telling my mother, “They don’t want me to visit you for a week or two.” She would be sitting on her bed, her legs crossed at the ankles, a crossword puzzle or a book in her hands. She’d lift a pen to her mouth and pinch it between teeth, the way she always did when stuck.
“What’s a six-letter word for ignoring truth,” she might say, without looking up from the puzzle.
I tell her I don’t know without really thinking of an answer. I’ve made her younger, somewhere in her late twenties. The silver from her hair shed away to make room for a glossy black. Her wrinkles have disappeared and she wears light pink lipstick and blush. For a second I envy her beauty.
“What’s wrong?” she might say and look at me.
“It’s nothing. I’m fine,” I’d say, knowing this answer won’t work. My mother could always tell when something was wrong. She always knew exactly what to say to get me to talk.
“I know you better than you know yourself, Moony.” She only called me Moony on special occasions, particularly when I was sad and didn’t want to talk—post-breakups, job losses, and all the other little failures of life. Days like today.
“Why were you calling for Jerry?” I might ask her.
“Oh, I just wanted to spit on his face one more time, just in case.” She would wait for me to laugh. And I do.
“We’re getting divorced.” Even in this imagined scenario my voice cracks.
“About time!” she would say and maybe throw the puzzle in the air or tear it up. “You’re too good for him, Moony. Too good for anyone! What did I always tell you?”
I know what she wants me to say, but I wait in silence. I want her to say it. And in this scene, she does.
“It’s just you and me in this world. It’ll always be just you and me.”
My mom is asleep when I enter her room. I sit next to her in the red-cushioned chair and I’m glad to find she has an extra blanket wrapped snugly around her. I want it to be like when I was a little girl, when I would walk to her room in the middle of the night and crawl into her bed. She’d wake up and she wouldn’t even say anything; she’d just stroke my hair until I fell asleep next to her, feeling safe by her side.
“Mom,” I say, already feeling guilty about waking her up.
She opens her eyes and stares at me without saying a word.
“I’m getting divorced,” I say, and for some reason I wait for her to say something back. She looks over at the wall behind me.
“I’m sad, Mom. I’m so, so sad.”
“Coo,” she says. “Coo.”
I come home to find Jerry has moved out most of his things. His underwear and sock drawers are empty, his work shirts and pants are missing as well. The model planes and ships have flown and sailed away from the windowsills and shelves where they once resided. I hope to find the cruise ship I gave him has also floated away, but of course he’s left it behind—he has no need for it. I pick up the dusty red and white box from the floor and open it on the dinner table. I spill its contents over the glass and marvel at the infinitesimal pieces that need to be put together. The bright orange lifeboats stand out among the many dull pieces and for a moment I picture myself sitting alone on one of these lifeboats in the middle of the ocean slowly rocking from side to side, letting the ocean currents guide me blindly to my next destination. I hunch over my dinner table inside my new home and I start building the model set of the place where it all began. Coo, I whisper as I begin to put the pieces together. Coo.
***
Rumpus original art by Mark Armstrong.
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