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Amanda Holmes reads Nizar Qabbani’s poem “When I Love You,” translated by Lena Jayyusi and Jack Collum. Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: [email protected]. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman.
This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.
The post “When I Love You” by Nizar Qabbani appeared first on The American Scholar.
Amanda Holmes reads Adam Zagajewski’s poem “En Route,” translated by Clare Cavanagh. Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: [email protected]. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman.
This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.
The post “En Route” by Adam Zagajewski appeared first on The American Scholar.
For American farmers, life changed dramatically in 1937. That year, electricity began flowing to hundreds of thousands of rural households, including some 12,000 in Wisconsin. The Rural Electrification Act (REA), which President Franklin D. Roosevelt had signed into law the previous year, provided stimulus for utilities to install poles and wires where, until then, it hadn’t been economical to do so. Most farmers were thrilled. One who lived near Janesville, Wisconsin, said of the power company crew, “I thought sometimes that they weren’t ever goin’ to get here. The organizers told us we’d have juice by spring. But we finally did get it, and, by golly, I’m goin’ to shoot the works.” He showed a city reporter every electric light in his barn. His newspaper profile reads like REA propaganda, and it might have been. To persuade skeptical farmers—who were still feeling the effects of the Great Depression and balked at the prospect of a monthly electric bill—REA advocates mounted a forceful public relations campaign. Agents traveled across the country demonstrating electric appliances. Theaters presented a popular film, Power and the Land, which touted the benefits of electricity for agricultural operations and concluded with the line, “Things will be easier now.” Part of the campaign focused on convincing women. Electricity would give them lights, refrigerators, ovens, vacuum cleaners, washing machines, and irons they could plug into an outlet. It would end their drudgery, the government promised.
But Jennie Harebo, a 64-year-old woman from central Wisconsin, wasn’t having it. After her town’s rural electric cooperative set eight poles and lines on her property, she sawed down one of the poles and parked her coupe on the downed wires. She stationed herself in the car, armed with a shotgun and a hoe. Newsmen called it a “sitdown strike,” a “vigil,” a “blockade.” Her husband, an “invalid,” brought her food. At dusk, she gathered blankets around her shoulders and lap and cradled the shotgun. One night, two nights, three nights she stayed. A sign on the windshield read, NOTICE: NO TRESPASSING. Harebo allowed no negotiating, entertained no tit-for-tat. Months earlier, she and her husband had won a case in the state’s supreme court that saved a riparian corner of their property from being seized by men who wanted to build a dam. The government’s lawyer must have suspected that his client’s case was doomed.
I imagine that Jennie Harebo, a woman of a certain age, was fed up with men’s impositions. Now they were trying to force lines through her vantage, light into her dark. Maybe she wanted to hold fast to twilight powers—the wonderment, the wisdom, the privileged views. Maybe she was simply cantankerous in the original sense of the word, which is rooted in the notion of “holding fast.”
What could she have seen in her three nights’ vigil? North Star, both dippers, crescent moon’s shine on the pump handle—the fixtures of haiku masters. Also, quotidian country lurkers and skulkers. Her night vision undefiled by electric shine, she surely saw scavenging raccoons, ambling possums, scuffling skunks. Maybe a lynx’s glassy gaze. She heard more, too, than her city relatives in their wired homes with their humming lights and fans and blathering radios. She could have made out the lawyer’s Pontiac approaching from a distance of 10 miles. She had plenty of time to aim her Remington out the driver’s side window.
Eighty years after Harebo’s stand, I took up wandering my rural Wisconsin property after nightfall. I longed for whatever sights diurnal living denied me. Trail cams mounted in the forest or by the creek had offered only glimpses: beavers adding branches to their dams, stock-still deer staring straight into the lens. The cameras, I was sure, didn’t reveal a fraction of the night’s secrets.
On clear nights, I stood under the Milky Way’s sprawling, splotchy canopy. I saw planets, constellations, comets, and once, a meteor afire and dying as it plummeted to Earth. The darkness of my rural township, an hour’s drive from the Harebos’ farm, was rare for modern times. In 2005, our town board passed a dark sky ordinance (whereas, whereas, whereas … and so, lights must be shielded, directed downward, calibrated, kept modest). Nevertheless, a yard light down the road, a sign at the corner bar, and the glow of a distant city interfered.
I sought deeper darkness. I found it at the nature preserve halfway between my place and the Harebos’ farm. One night, a self-made astronomer and his telescope met me and others at the preserve for a moonlit hike. Inside the visitors center, I discovered my friend Liz in the crowd, and we sat together. The occasion was a penumbral lunar eclipse. The astronomer began his program with canned, corny jokes. He introduced his two assistants, women who knew the trails and would guide us on the night hike. He must have mentioned the alignment of heavenly bodies, how Earth’s shadow would fall on February’s full moon, the snow moon, once it rose. But I’ve never retained stargazing facts. I’m slow to make out asterisms. I can’t recall which planets appear where and when or what temperaments the ancient Greeks assigned them. I merely love to bask under them.
We were all traipsing outside into the snow when, unexpectedly, the astronomer announced that hiking would be too dangerous because of ice. Instead, he would talk to us during the half hour before the moon rose. The group groaned, and Liz and I looked at each other. Like the astronomer’s assistants, we knew the preserve’s trails, at least the main ones. We backed away from the others and stole into the darkness.
We padded slowly and quietly over the glazed snow, keeping our eyes on the ground, gathering scant reflected light from unknown sources. The woodland trail was icy only on rocks or railroad ties. In those spots we braced ourselves and reached out to steady each other. Soon we joined the wider trail, formerly the old state highway. There, the snow was ridged from snowmobiles’ belts. As we walked on the crusted ridges, Liz told me about living in Dharamshala a few years earlier. I pictured her humid quarters in the mountains of northern India, the buildings’ bright colors, the Buddhist pilgrims surrounding her. I sensed the peace she had felt there and nowhere else. I shared her desire to return to Dharamshala, although I’d never been there. While visualizing that faraway place, I kept my eyes on my surroundings. Moving in the dark was a balancing art. I felt most adept when I looked out with a broad, allowing awareness, when I didn’t fix on fine details or make assumptions about the terrain. Liz and I arrived at the path’s apogee precisely when the clouds parted, the full moon rose orange, and as if cued by the shifting light, coyotes began howling.
What I have seen by the light of celestial bodies: rabbit prints as lavender shadows in the snow; bare, black elm branches waving; the red glow of varmints’ eyes at the compost heap; stars in puddles and brooks; my lover’s silhouette moving beside mine.
What I have not seen in the night and been surprised by: knee-deep muck; a snorting, thundering herd of deer; a frog on a door handle that I smashed under my palm as I hurried to get indoors during a rainstorm; a pickup truck without headlights barreling down the road—and the drunk young man at the wheel who, after nearly running me over, reversed and asked, “Are you okay? Geez, are you okay?” in a tone that told me his real question was, What are you doing walking out here after dark?
To be moon-eyed is to keep your eyes wide open and to be awed. But to be moony is to be absent-minded, loony, or at least naïve. With better night vision, I thought, I could steer my life toward more moon-eyed moments than moony ones. Maybe I could take in more good surprises than bad and live with heightened awareness, less delusion. Seeing what I’d been missing all along might grant me new, original insights.
Humans are born with the ability to see in low light. But compared with that of other animals, our night vision is feeble. We lack the nocturnals’ giant pupils (think doe-eyed ) and their tapetum lucidum, a structure at the back of the eyeball that acts as a mirror, amplifying starlight into floodlight and reflecting it back onto the retina. Our natural night vision can be eased into—it takes a while for our sight to adjust to dimness—but in general, it can’t be enhanced. Using lubricating eye drops or eating more beta carotene, for most well-nourished Americans, won’t improve it. Other habits, such as staring at computer screens or the sun, can degrade it. Unfortunately for Harebo and me and others past their physical prime, night vision also diminishes with age.
To compensate for human deficiencies, engineers developed night vision goggles during World War II. Now every optics store sells them. Some years ago, craving a clear view of the outdoors after sunset, I bought a pair. I stood on our deck, held the goggles to my face, and scanned the horizon. Deer in the field glowed an unnatural phosphor green. Nothing more. No portal opened to a secret world. No mysteries were revealed. In the years following my purchase, I rarely picked up the goggles when I set out in the dark. What I really wanted was something innate and unencumbered, a better version of what I was born with.
Scientists have researched ways of improving human night vision. A chlorophyll derivative called chlorin e6 has shown promise in mice. In 2015, Gabriel Licina and Jeffrey Tibbets, self-styled biohackers with a group called Science for the Masses, gained notoriety for trying the substance. A solution of chlorin e6 was dropped into Licina’s eyes. Two hours later, he and others, acting as controls, were taken to a place where “trees and brush were used for ‘blending’ ”—presumably, an attempt to create a uniform backdrop for all participants. Licina and the control subjects were asked to identify letters, numbers, and other symbols on signs. The experiment appeared to have been successful. Controls correctly identified the objects a third of the time, while Licina did so 100 percent of the time. Afterward, he acknowledged to a journalist that the experiment was “kind of crap science.” Without knowing the potentially harmful effects of chlorin e6, the biohacker had been willing to risk his everyday vision for the possibility of gaining night vision, if only for a few hours (the drops’ effects wore off by sunrise). But Science for the Masses lacked sufficient funding to conduct the sort of extensive, ethical trials that more esteemed researchers require.
In photographs from that night, Licina stares at the camera like some mad alien, his eyes watery and opaque with their larger-than-life black irises—a consequence not of the chlorin e6 but of the oversize light-dimming contact lenses he wore. His creepy appearance and the report’s description of him roving in a dark wood made me think that the young men had especially enjoyed the homemade horror-film aspect of their experiment. Maybe they lusted after superpowers that would allow them to recognize and slay the dark’s monsters. After all, night vision is one superhuman capability that’s nearly achievable. Unlike time travel or leaping tall buildings, it’s only just beyond our grasp.
“Darkness, pitch black and impenetrable, was the realm of the hobgoblin, the sprite, the will-o’-the-wisp, the boggle, the kelpie, the boggart and the troll. Witches, obviously, were ‘abroad,’ ” journalist Jon Henley wrote of life before artificial lighting in a 2009 article in The Guardian. Real monsters coexisted with the fantastical. In the London, Munich, and Paris of the early 19th century, thieves, rapists, and murderous gangs roamed freely. According to Roger Ekirch, author of At Day’s Close, humans were never more afraid of the night than in the era just before gaslights illuminated the cities’ streets. Murder rates then were five to 10 times higher than they are today. And yet, Erkich adds, “large numbers of people came up for air when the sun went down. It afforded them the privacy they did not have during the day. They could no longer be overseen by their superiors.”
Darkness made equals of poor and wealthy, servants and masters, women and men. Past sunset, oppressors needed artificial light to point out their symbols of country and religion, to run factories and enforce conforming behaviors. For the less powerful, darkness and the ability to navigate celestially meant freedom.
Jennie Harebo’s vigil attracted reporters and photographers from across the state, their cars lining the roads near her farm. The visitors, she said, treated her courteously. A deputy sheriff persuaded her to put down the shotgun. And the REA’s lawyer finally relented, having decided to circumvent the Harebo farm after neighbors agreed to accept the poles and lines on their properties. The utility paid Harebo $25 for her trouble and removed the eight poles that it had installed on her land. “With nothing left to fight for,” a newsman wrote, Harebo ended her vigil after about 96 hours. “Storing her formidable hoe in the woodshed, [she] claimed victory today.” She abandoned her coupe, “her husky frame sagging a little with weariness.” The crowd that had gathered to watch the three-day standoff dispersed. “Ultimately,” another reporter mocked, the family’s “need for kerosene lamps continued.”
In opposing electricity, Harebo was a rare exception. Some farmers didn’t even wait for the REA. Two decades before her blockade, men who once lived along the road between my home and the nature preserve were so eager to have electricity that they collected their own poles and wire. They used tractors, shovels, and muscle to run lines from the nearest village. Theirs was the nation’s first farmer-led electrical cooperative. It functioned independently for 20 years, disbanding only in the early 1930s, when the state butted in and began interfering in its operations.
Although she opposed lines on her own property, I imagined that Harebo would have admired the farmers’ refusal to comply with state regulations. As one farmer remarked on the public service commission’s successful attempt to set his cooperative’s prices, it “was a good example of the chair-bottom warmers’ insatiable desire to run everything.” In the years since I learned about Harebo’s vigil, she’d become a minor heroine in my eyes. Here was a tough woman who had fended off the establishment. She had battled for her rights—to the darkness and the freedoms it brought her, to the preservation of her night vision—even if she was weary and sagging.
Standing on the groomed snowmobile route, Liz and I watched the full moon fade to yellow and shrink behind clouds. Then we left for the narrow forest trail. We picked over rocks and logs and a trickling, perennial creek. Farther on, we listened to our breathing and footfalls, nothing more. We found the meadow next to the parking lot of the visitors center. Ahead, clustered around the telescope, stood the astronomer and part of the group we’d started with.
The clouds disappeared again. I looked up to watch the space station dash a diagonal across the sky. The astronomer invited me to view the moon in the telescope. “Lean into the eyepiece,” he told me. “Don’t touch anything.”
Singled out in close-up, the moon nearly blinded me. The penumbral eclipse, a subtle shading on the moon’s surface, was too faint for me to detect. I kept my eye to the telescope only long enough to assure the astronomer that I’d made an effort. I didn’t like the way the instrument isolated the moon. Without its complement of stars and planets, it was a flattened, vapid object. I felt as if I were ogling it but not really seeing it.
Liz took a brief turn at the eyepiece, too. Then we walked to our cars, agreeing to meet again for more nighttime hikes.
People soon will be able to choose better night vision like they can choose to eliminate forehead wrinkles. Professional scientists—not only biohackers—are working on it. In 2019, Gang Han and his fellow researchers at the University of Massachusetts Medical School announced that they had enabled mice to detect near-infrared light by injecting nanoparticles into their eyes. After the injection, the mice could see phosphor-green shapes in the dark, as if they were wearing night vision goggles.
Not surprisingly, safety and security, national or personal, are often cited as reasons for such research and its funding. What if soldiers, for example, could see enemies after dark without the hassle and weight of equipment? In one article, Han suggested testing the eye-injected nanoparticles on dogs next. “If we had a ‘super-dog’ that could see NIR [near-infrared] light,” he told a reporter, “we could project a pattern onto a lawbreaker’s body from a distance, and the dog could catch them without disturbing other people.” As if criminals wouldn’t dodge behind obstacles; as if police with their natural night vision could make out the perpetrators well enough to project shapes onto them; as if dogs wouldn’t be distracted by all the marvels their new night vision revealed and dash away from their handlers.
The delivery method—an injection into the eye—also makes this night vision technique impractical. Recently, though, when I spoke with Han, he told me that his lab might soon begin testing a wearable device, such as a patch or contact lens, on humans. He imagined an application in which a security agent wearing a night vision patch could see details in facial recognition software that others could not. But for this, more funding would be required. Of the lab’s many projects, night vision research has received the most attention in the media. But not from industry or government. People at the big granting agencies, such as the National Science Foundation or National Institutes of Health, Han told me, “can’t recognize its importance in daily life.”
Months after fixing Jennie Harebo’s image in my mind, I found an article about her that I hadn’t seen before. It included a photograph, likely taken after she ended her vigil. She looked nothing like the newsmen’s descriptions. Although the image was dim from age and poor scanning, I could tell that her hair was curled and styled. She wore a buttoned-up overcoat with a contrasting collar, maybe fur. She struck a movie star’s pose beside the coupe—jaw set, chin lifted, face turned slightly, gaze fixed on the middle distance. She was beautiful. Her frame was upright, not sagging. She showed no sign of weariness after 96 hours in the car. Shotgun held at her side, she looked ecstatic and carefree. Seeing the photograph chastened me. I had allowed the newsmen’s descriptions of Harebo to deceive me. I’d been willing to accept that she was crabby and exhausted from her ordeal. But the word vigil, after all, is rooted in “lively” and “strong.” Maybe she didn’t consider it an ordeal at all. Maybe she relished the standoff.
Harebo’s proud posture reminded me of when I lived in Lansing, Michigan, during college and joined friends to march down the middle of the street. We held posters or candles and shouted, “Women unite, take back the night!” We claimed our right to be safe from monsters in the dark—symbolically, of course. The real, human perpetrators were always about, day or night, visible or not. Who knows if our stand changed any policies. But it changed me. Marching to reclaim the dark brought me a sense of solidarity among women that school, work, and family had not. Even so, I thought as I studied Harebo’s photograph, my efforts hadn’t gone far enough. I hadn’t fully imagined what we would do with our freedom after we won the night.
During the summer after our first moonlit hike, Liz and I took more late-night excursions to the middle of nowhere. What I saw with my natural, flawed night vision: shooting stars, swooping bats, slumbering farm machinery, and the lift and dip of a rare, blue-glowing firefly. What I felt, as I listened and shared more stories with my friend: a keener attunement, an ease among shadows, and the assurance of being fully seen—so much of what daylight’s glare had been hiding.
The post Night Vision appeared first on The American Scholar.
Amanda Holmes reads Maxine Kumin’s poem “Morning Swim.” Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: [email protected]. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman.
This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.
The post “Morning Swim” by Maxine Kumin appeared first on The American Scholar.
The Sullivanians: Sex, Psychotherapy, and the Wild Life of an American Commune by Alexander Stille; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 432 pp., $30
It’s almost amazing that not once in his intensely readable new book does Alexander Stille quote Philip Larkin’s most (in)famous line of poetry: “They fuck you up, your mum and dad.” That sentiment was, essentially, the motivating principle of the communal Sullivan Institute, a rogue psychotherapy outfit on Manhattan’s Upper West Side that—over the course of its more than 30-year existence, from the late 1950s to the early 1990s—grew into a sex cult committed to abolishing within its midst the nuclear family, on the grounds that close romantic and familial bonds were psychologically harmful to adults and children alike.
But Stille has equally pungent material to work with. One Sullivanian is quoted saying of his own forebear, “It’s easy to be an anti-Semite when you grow up with a father like that.” Another’s mother is referred to as “that old womb with a built-in tomb.” The latter quotation comes from painter Jackson Pollock, who’s among a small parade of notables who wander like oddballs through this strange milieu. (Others include art critic Clement Greenberg, singer Judy Collins, and novelist Richard Price.)
Dishy as it is, however, Stille’s book is hardly an exercise in name dropping. The true heroes and villains in this story—most individuals, children excepted, take turns being both—are everyday people whose dramas are sometimes darkly amusing but more often heartbreaking. These are real members of nontheoretical families who found themselves at once the victims and willing enforcers of disastrous social theories that were explicitly, vilely antifamily. Through all phases of the story, from the kinky, free-love eccentricity of the early years to the insularity, paranoia, and criminality of the later years, Stille maintains an admirable, almost tenacious sympathy for his subjects—a sympathy some of those subjects, in retrospect, aren’t sure they deserve. But as the cognitive dissonance grows, so too does the tension, making the book an improbable thriller, propelling us from chapter to chapter to see how these unfortunates will extricate themselves (if they can) from a Gordian knot of their own creation. Will anyone make it out emotionally intact, reasonably functional? Will they be reunited with their own blood, whom they’ve been conditioned to regard with indifference if not hostility?
One cavil: Stille places the origin of his story in a typically caricatured version of 1950s America, an unsophisticated place marked by little more than stifling convention (Father Knows Best, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet), but with a hint of rebellion on the horizon (Rebel Without a Cause, On the Road ). The implication being that the Sullivan Institute was part of that incipient rebellion, a harbinger of the revolutions to come in the ensuing decade. This is misleading on two fronts.
First, 1950s America was not some sheltered national virgin whose inaugural orgasm awaited in the mind-blowing, consciousness-raising ’60s. The conventionality we associate with the ’50s was partly a return to normal after the 1940s, a decade that—owing to war-related domestic upheavals—saw myriad social and sexual pathologies rise, some drastically. (Jack Kerouac’s dionysian On the Road, it should be remembered, was a chronicle of journeys taken mostly in the late ’40s, though the book wasn’t published for another decade.) Given this recent anomie, the return to conventionality in the 1950s was akin to what Stille observed among former Sullivanians, who left behind the commune’s deliberate parental chaos and loveless promiscuity to find shelter in the old-fashioned romantic and family structures the commune had forbidden.
Second, the ideas that animated the Sullivan Institute weren’t born in reaction to 1950s American convention. They were a proactive (if kooky) extension of theories that had emerged partly from the Frankfurt School in the prewar years. One of the Sullivan Institute’s founders claimed to have learned at the feet of, among others, the social psychologist Erich Fromm, who himself had participated with a Frankfurt School colleague, philosopher Max Horkheimer, on Studies on Authority and the Family (1936). That publication is a heady mix of Freudianism and Marxism that placed the family—its dynamics, dysfunctions, sublimations, and pathologies—firmly within a web of larger social and historical forces that acted on it. Those forces chiefly related to capitalism, under which fathers were seen to enact a kind of small-scale ownership and exploitation of their own families. If the surrounding society could be made more just and egalitarian, it might, in Horkheimer’s words, “replace the individualistic motive as the dominant bond in relationships,” giving rise to “a new community of spouses and children,” in which children “will not be raised as future heirs and will therefore not be regarded, in the old way, as ‘one’s own.’ ”
That’s a pretty fair approximation of what the Sullivanians fancied themselves pursuing. How did it go? “There was a feeling of pressure,” said one cult member, “that was really unpleasant, of having to conform in a certain way to unconformity.” Women endeavoring to get pregnant were required to sleep with multiple men while ovulating, to obscure paternity, which—said one male Sullivanian remorsefully—made it “easier to dissociate from the possible offspring.” Maternal bonds were broken as well, as children were taken from their mothers and raised in other parts of the commune by groups of men or women, with biological mothers being granted ruthlessly limited interactions with their offspring—and those offspring ultimately being denied knowledge of their origins. Per Horkheimer, children were not, in the old way, one’s own. Many of the children themselves came to regard their parents as “insane,” “basically a bunch of zombies.” In the long aftermath, one remarked, “I’ve thought three different men were my father in the past three years. I’m exhausted by having to relive the mistakes of my parents.” Another felt that he had been treated like an “experimental subject”—his childhood and his tender, developing psyche deformed by others’ commitment to validating a theory.
The Sullivan Institute insisted that every family—categorically—was a source of Larkinesque psychological damage. Then the institute became a scaled-up version of one and proved it.
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I got the call late on a summer afternoon. Yanai Segal, an artist I’ve known for years, asked me whether I’d heard of the Salvator Mundi—the painting attributed to Leonardo da Vinci that was lost for more than two centuries before resurfacing in New Orleans in 2005. I told him that I’d heard something of the story but that I didn’t remember the details. He had recently undertaken a project related to the painting, he said, and wanted to tell me about it. I was eager to hear more, but first I needed to remind myself of the basic facts. We agreed to speak again soon.
As I refreshed my memory in the following days, I learned that although there was considerable controversy about the history and legitimacy of the painting, there was some general consensus, too. The Salvator Mundi—“Savior of the World”—was most likely completed at the turn of the 16th century. An oil painting rendered on a walnut panel, it depicts Jesus offering a blessing with his right hand while holding an orb that represents Earth with his left. Studies made in preparation for the painting had been authenticated as genuine Leonardos, and at least 30 copies were believed to have been produced by Leonardo’s disciples directly from the original. Records show that the painting was in the collections of various British aristocrats and royals, including King Charles I, but sometime at the end of the 18th century, it effectively disappeared. When the work turned up at a New Orleans estate sale in 2005—heavily damaged, poorly restored, and painted over in several places—two veteran art dealers, Robert Simon and Alexander Parish, thought it might be significant and purchased it for around $10,000. They hired Dianne Modestini, a scholar and master art restorer, to clear away the restorations and repairs that the painting had undergone over the centuries to produce a definitive version. What emerged was an artwork that some experts believed to be the genuine Salvator Mundi. Others were not convinced.
Beginning in November 2011, the restored painting was displayed as part of a large exhibition of Leonardo’s works at London’s National Gallery, which had authenticated the painting. In 2013, it sold for about $80 million in a brokered deal that saw it resold the following day for $127.5 million. In 2017, it went up for auction again, this time selling for more than $450 million—the highest price ever paid for a work of art—to an unknown bidder who turned out to be a Saudi prince reportedly acting as a proxy for Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman. The work was supposed to be part of a landmark 2019 exhibition at the Louvre commemorating the 500th death anniversary of Leonardo, but the painting never went on display, the reasons for its exclusion never made public. And though scientific examinations done by the museum had confirmed that the painting was genuine (at least according to a secret book prepared, but never published, by the Louvre), questions about its authenticity have lingered. The entire saga of the painting’s travails through the contemporary worlds of art, wealth, and politics was traced in the 2021 documentary The Lost Leonardo, which portrayed how the superrich are able to hide their wealth in the form of high-end art.
I was surprised that so many discussions of the painting had focused more on these financial aspects, and the controversial nature of how it changed hands, than they did on aesthetics. To me, the bigger question was whether this artwork had the effect of a Leonardo. And when I looked at an image of the restored painting, I could not be sure. I saw a hint of the master before me, but something seemed to be missing.
I was curious about the kind of project Yanai had undertaken. His efforts lay mainly in the realm of contemporary art, which he usually exhibited in large-scale installations. He had studied academic drawing as a teenager and then visual art at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem. He was a founding member and curator of the Barbur Gallery, a collective art space that has hosted both local and international artists since 2005, and has worked as an illustrator and a designer, creating everything from animated videos to children’s books. His studio, which I’d visited regularly over the years, was full of large-scale abstract paintings and conceptual sculptures made of such materials as hand-mixed concrete and Styrofoam. But there were often small oil paintings, too, scattered around, many of them still lifes of flowers. For as long as I’ve known him, Yanai has investigated the tension between figurative and abstract art, combining 20th-century modernist patterns with a contemporary aesthetic language. I had never known him to take an interest in the work of the Old Masters.
When I asked Yanai about his project, he told me that he had come across two images of the Salvator Mundi—the restored version that the world had come to know and an earlier, damaged iteration, with many of the original artist’s brushstrokes still visible. Wondering if a digital restoration would yield a different result, he decided to draw on his many years of computer experience and attempt to restore the painting himself. He had accomplished a great deal, he said, and though he wasn’t yet done, he sensed that his work might provide a clearer view of the artist’s original vision.
When I saw a photo of the damaged Salvator Mundi, I had an immediate idea of what had inspired Yanai. Looking at the half-tattered canvas, with the figure of Jesus bearing a haunting expression, I experienced an emotional reaction that had been absent when I’d seen an image of the physically restored version. Although I was not sure whether a digital restoration could be called legitimate, I was curious whether the emotion of the original—which, to me, was missing in the physical restoration—could be better captured using digital means. If so, it would raise a whole new set of questions about the painting and its authorship. When Yanai invited me to his studio in Tel Aviv to see the work in progress, I told him that I’d be there in a couple of days.
The Salvator Mundi in its damaged state—cleaned but not yet restored (Wikimedia Commons)
I got on the train from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv on a hot July afternoon. When I arrived at Yanai’s studio, he made me a cup of strong black coffee, sat me down in a chair, and opened up a laptop, revealing an image of a half-restored Salvator Mundi. This was nothing like the painting that was famous the world over. This one had more gravitas, more power. It had the kind of arresting presence I associated with Leonardo.
Yanai began to explain to me how he had performed his restoration. With extremely close-up zooms into a photograph of the damaged original, he was able to pick up pixel-resolution pigment traces adjacent to the damaged areas. Whereas a typical art restorer would, at this point, add new pigments to the painting, Yanai used digital impressions of the surviving work to fill in the missing sections. He looked at images of every known copy of the Salvator Mundi to determine what might have been on the original walnut panel. He constantly zoomed in and out, looking at the overall image, then going back in to fill in the pixels, watching as, step by step, a new version of the painting emerged.
I thought Yanai had a powerful image on his hands, and I asked him to tell me more about how the project came into being. He shrugged and said it was sort of by accident. During the pandemic, he began listening to podcasts while working on illustrations and book covers. One of those podcasts was about the Salvator Mundi. Intrigued, he searched for the painting online and came upon the image of the damaged work. It moved him. It was totally ruined, he said, but really like gazing at a figure behind a beaded curtain. If he could just reach out and move the curtain, he said, he could see what lay behind. He’d never attempted anything like a digital restoration of a painting, but the idea stayed with him. It wouldn’t leave him alone.
Yanai did a preliminary test, and the result turned out better than he’d imagined. It didn’t look like an artwork yet, but slowly he could see a new version of the painting appearing on the screen. As I looked at the image he had created, something about it tapped into a deep emotional well in me. Sure, the physical restoration had been historically researched. It had material integrity, dutifully bringing back to an optimal state a painting that had been badly damaged and inexpertly conserved over the centuries. I also understood that the motivation of the restorer was different: to preserve a physical object that could later be sold at auction. But for me, that object lacked feeling. And no matter how many times it was—or wasn’t—attributed to Leonardo, it could never be a legitimate Leonardo if it didn’t also have emotional force. It could be a Leonardo painting, but not a Leonardo artwork.
Yanai was heartened by my response, but he was still concerned about the significance of his undertaking—in particular, how it related to the ongoing debate about the physically restored painting. He was also wary of the fine line between the project of re-creating an image by Leonardo and the possibility of its being seen as an artwork of his own. He was not invested, he said, in creating a Yanai original. He was pursuing a vision that squarely belonged to Leonardo. But he couldn’t totally take himself out of the equation, either. Which left him with a lot of questions.
Still, he said, the project had become a compulsion. He’d sit down to create an illustration or design a book cover, feel compelled to take a quick look at the Leonardo, and then end up working on the restoration for hours. His initial aim had been to fill in the missing sections using information gleaned from the damaged original. Once he took this as far as it would go, however, he saw that some areas lacked sufficient data for him to finish the painting using simple digital deduction. In those sections, he explained, he had to think like an artist and re-create the missing areas in accordance with what he believed Leonardo might have intended. He was no longer fixing a painting, he said, but working on an interpolation. It was hard to move into this space, and that was why he’d stopped. He was looking to get some perspective on the project as it stood.
Yanai asked what I thought about his restored version so far. I told him the truth. That I didn’t quite know yet what to make of it, and that I needed to think some more. Since he was only half done, it was hard to make any final judgment. All I could say was that his version felt closer to what might have been the original. We agreed that I’d return once he’d worked on it some more. And I repeated that the main issue, for me, was the emotional element—there was something uncanny about the damaged painting that was missing from the physical restoration, something that seemed better preserved in Yanai’s image.
The Salvator Mundi after the restoration performed by Dianne Modestini. Although experts at the Louvre authenticated the restoration as a genuine Leonardo, questions about its authenticity remain. (Wikimedia Commons)
On the train ride home, I began to reflect on some questions that had been on my mind since Yanai first told me about his project—for reasons that had nothing to do with him or the Salvator Mundi. A decade earlier, during a trip to Paris, I had met a retired-businessman-turned-philosopher named Hervé Le Baut. I had been seeking information on the life of the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, one of France’s foremost philosophers in the period after World War II. Merleau-Ponty had been a close friend and colleague of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, who all together founded Le Temps modernes, one of the best-known postwar journals. In the early 1950s, not long after Albert Camus’s falling-out with Sartre over their political differences, Merleau-Ponty also cut ties with Sartre. Researching any direct links between Camus and Merleau-Ponty, I had sought out Le Baut, who had written a book on the French philosopher. When we met at his home, Le Baut said he knew little of Merleau-Ponty’s connection with Camus, but he then revealed to me something that was common knowledge to people with an interest in Beauvoir but was mostly unknown to everyone else. It was a story of legitimacy.
The story appears in Beauvoir’s Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (1958), in which she describes the death, nearly 30 years before, of her beloved friend Zaza, who, she reports, died after being spurned by a man named in the book as Jean Pradelle. In reality, this man was Merleau-Ponty. What Beauvoir didn’t know—and what she learned from Zaza’s sister only after her memoir was published—was that Merleau-Ponty had turned Zaza away for the simple reason that her parents, who’d hired a detective to look into his family’s past, had discovered that he was an illegitimate child. They told him to either halt his pursuit of Zaza or be publicly exposed. And so he ended the relationship. Zaza died not long after the breakup. Zaza’s sister supposedly showed Beauvoir letters suggesting that Zaza herself knew of the whole debacle—that the tragedy had indeed been fatal to her, killing her first in spirit and then in body.
Merleau-Ponty would have been 21 when this took place and seemingly hadn’t known of his own illegitimacy before it was revealed to him by Zaza’s family. It’s chilling to think of how he learned of his provenance, from people who were hardly more than strangers, crushing not only his love for his fiancée and his plans for the future but also his entire understanding of his own past. The moment was powerful and deeply traumatic, and perhaps that’s why, years later, sitting down to write an essay on Paul Cézanne, Merleau-Ponty found himself veering into the personal history of Leonardo—one of the most famous illegitimate children of all time.
As soon as I got home, I reread “Cézanne’s Doubt.” Merleau-Ponty first raises the matter of Leonardo’s illegitimacy as part of an argument about the relationship between childhood and adulthood—between the powerful feeling that our lives are determined by our births and the similarly powerful feeling that we can determine our future by our actions. And though the argument is first built on Cézanne, Merleau-Ponty makes a sudden pivot, referencing Sigmund Freud’s book on Leonardo and refocusing his discussion on one of the only times Leonardo ever mentioned his childhood: when he described the memory of a vulture coming to him in the cradle and striking him on the mouth with its tail. With this sleight of hand, Merleau-Ponty turns an essay ostensibly about the role of doubt in creativity into a meditation on origins—in this case, the origins of arguably the greatest master of all time.
Continuing to lean on Freud, Merleau-Ponty reminds us that Leonardo “was the illegitimate son of a rich notary who married the noble Donna Albiera the very year Leonardo was born. Having no children by her, he took Leonardo into his home when the boy was five”—the same age when Merleau-Ponty experienced the death of the man he thought was his father. Merleau-Ponty then adds, in a tone that takes on a subtle lyricism, that Leonardo “was a child without a father” and that “he got to know the world in the sole company of that unhappy mother who seemed to have miraculously created him.”
Those lines changed how I read Merleau-Ponty’s essay. When he writes about Leonardo’s “basic attachment” to his mother, “which he had to give up when he was recalled to his father’s home, and into which he had poured all his resources of love and all his power of abandon,” I imagined Merleau-Ponty refracting his own attachment to his mother through the Renaissance artist. When he later writes that Leonardo’s “spirit of investigation was a way for him to escape from life, as if he had invested all his power of assent in the first years of his life and had remained true to his childhood right to the end,” Merleau-Ponty seems to be mirroring his own sense of curiosity and wonder as a thinker. Elsewhere, when he writes that Leonardo “paid no heed to authority and trusted only nature and his own judgment in matters of knowledge,” I couldn’t help but think of Merleau-Ponty reflecting on his own moment of truth—when he discovered his illegitimate origins and, still young and insecure, succumbed to the social pressures exerted on him. He is writing about Leonardo, but he could well be writing about himself.
I was curious about the source of Merleau-Ponty’s ideas on Leonardo, so I turned to Freud’s Leonardo da Vinci, A Memory of His Childhood. “In the first three or four years of life,” writes Freud, “impressions are fixed and modes of reactions are formed towards the outer world which can never be robbed of their importance by any later experiences.” The impression that Leonardo would have had of himself as a fatherless child would have likely haunted him throughout his life. And, it occurred to me all at once, his circumstances would also have helped him identify with the most famous of “fatherless” boys—Jesus.
And that’s when it all came together. What better way to create an everlasting emblem of your most consequential childhood impression than to paint yourself as the Salvator Mundi—the savior of the world? What could be more audacious than to turn your illegitimacy into one of the most powerful religious symbols ever created?
It wasn’t a totally wild idea. Lillian Schwartz, a visual artist working with digital media since the 1960s, had made a claim back in 1987 that the Mona Lisa was a self-portrait of Leonardo. But it was one thing to turn yourself into a woman, and quite another to paint Christ in your own image. It took Leonardo’s penchant for games and riddles into the realm of blasphemy. Yet on another level, it was also a simple and perfect way to expose something about yourself that was otherwise difficult to address—to get an emotion across without having to identify the emotion itself. Merleau-Ponty, writing about Leonardo, had done the same thing. He had told his personal story through a figure so grand that no one had ever guessed he might have been talking about himself. He had done to Leonardo what Leonardo had done to Jesus.
I was tempted to call up Yanai and tell him about my hypothesis. But I realized that he first had to complete his image without knowing of my thought experiment. Then, once it was done, I could put his Salvator Mundi next to other portraits of Leonardo—and compare.
Yanai Segal’s digital restoration of the painting believed to be Leonardo’s Salvator Mundi (Yanai Segal)
Six months passed. It was a busy time—a new coronavirus variant was rampant, and obligations ballooned. I seemed unable to catch up with anything. By the time I talked to Yanai about his project again, he told me that he had gone as far as he could with the image. Finally, in early winter, I found a moment to visit him again at his studio. As we settled into our chairs and he reached for his laptop, I sensed that I was sitting next to a changed person. He hadn’t just stopped work on the digital restoration. He’d come to some sort of understanding.
Yanai opened his laptop and revealed the image. I was struck by how final it looked. I still had the damaged painting in mind, with its haunting rips and scratches, and it was somewhat jarring to see the apparent magic trick that Yanai had performed—as if he’d resurrected the original image. The digital process he’d used had evolved during those months. At some point, he thought he had finished, but the image had looked too smooth, too new, lacking any of the mystique or allure of a 500-year-old painting. The damaged work, he said, gives you a mental image that’s difficult to unsee. It has a kind of fuzziness, a softness around the eyes and face, from all of the scratches and erasures. He realized that to restore the image properly, he also had to preserve the damage it had suffered over the centuries. So he removed the most recent layer altogether and started putting the painting back piece by piece. Many of the sections he thought he’d “fixed,” he said, had turned from interpolations into interpretations, so that, slowly, the painting had also become his, which had never been his intention. Having fully restored the image, he began scaling back his work—but this time with the knowledge and experience of having examined every single pixel and pigment. He stopped “fixing” the painting and started reclaiming the parts that were lost. And as he did, he discovered that the sections that looked “lost” were not lost at all. They just needed a little push to make them more clearly visible.
I asked Yanai what he made of his effort, and he said it was hard to say what it was all about. It wasn’t just about the methodology of digitally restoring the painting, though he had invested a great deal of time in that, and it wasn’t just about satisfying his curiosity about what such a restoration might look like, though that was also a part of the story. It also wasn’t about putting his own mark on a Leonardo, as Marcel Duchamp had done when he famously added a mustache to the Mona Lisa in a 1919 print. Whatever Yanai had done, its meaning was somewhere at the crossroads of these things, though it was also about the painting itself. The digital restoration, Yanai said, brings us closer to the original. In the middle of the process, as he became intimate with its every corner, its every color and texture, he couldn’t shake the feeling that the painting had also become his own. Now, at the end, he no longer saw himself in the process. When he looked at the painting, what he saw was a contemporary artwork—a representation of all humanity holding a fragile world in his hands. It’s a beautiful image, he said. People had been so busy talking about its authenticity that they had missed this essential aspect of the painting.
In the end, he said, had he known the road he’d need to take to arrive at this point, he wasn’t sure he would have started. He likened the whole process to standing at a chasm with only enough raw material to build a bridge halfway across. You start building and get to the middle, but then you have to take the bridge you’ve built, while suspended in midair, and use the same raw material to build the second half. Then, having reached the other side, you have to build the bridge again in the opposite direction to get as close as possible back to the original.
All other matters aside, I asked, had the experience given him any new insights about himself as an artist? He chuckled and said that it had actually reconnected him with his roots. He’d gone back to his old notebooks, to the drawings he’d done as a teenager when first starting to paint, and found copies he’d made of Leonardo’s drawings. He pulled a few of these out to show me, and I recognized one image at once—the head of an old man believed to be a self-portrait. It felt like a sign. I finally shared with him my own thoughts about Leonardo and the possibility that the Salvator Mundi was also a portrait of the artist.
I suggested we put his final image next to images that were believed to be portraits of Leonardo—including the drawing he had copied as a teenager. He opened some tabs up on his computer. It was hard not to be moved. The sharp nose. The penetrating eyes. The delicate eyebrows. The unique curve of the mouth. Even a split beard. It was uncanny. It was all there. It was, without a doubt, Leonardo.
I cannot overstate the power of the moment. The symbolism of the painting disappeared, and I saw before me a person all too aware of the fragility of the world in which he lived and from which, unlike the immortal figure in his painting, he would one day have to depart.
I looked over at Yanai, who had given years of his own life to resurrecting the dead, and had another thought. If Leonardo painting Jesus was really Leonardo painting himself, and Merleau-Ponty writing about Leonardo was in reality Merleau-Ponty writing about himself, was it possible that Yanai’s restoration of the Salvator Mundi was in reality Yanai’s restoration of himself? Perhaps. But Leonardo had also painted Jesus, and Merleau-Ponty had also written about Leonardo, and Yanai had, regardless of anything else, also restored the Salvator Mundi—endowing it once again with the most important element lost along the way, something that could never be reproduced by technical means alone. Emotion.
Learn more about Yanai Segal’s digital restoration project here.
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Amanda Holmes reads Stanley Kunitz’s poem “The Portrait.” Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: [email protected]. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman.
This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.
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Amanda Holmes reads Rabindranath Tagore’s poem “The Flower-School.” Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: [email protected]. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman.
This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.
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Amanda Holmes reads Wallace Stevens’s poem “Sunday Morning.” Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: [email protected]. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman.
This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.
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Amanda Holmes reads Grace Cavalieri’s poem “Three O’Clock 1942.” Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: [email protected]. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman.
This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.
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Amanda Holmes reads Audre Lorde’s poem “Black Mother Woman.” Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: [email protected]. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman.
This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.
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Amanda Holmes reads Hart Crane’s poem “My Grandmother’s Love Letters.” Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: [email protected]. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman.
This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad
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In January 2020, in a remote, arid corner of southwestern Rajasthan, I was squeezed in the back seat of a Toyota SUV with my five-year-old son and Prachi and Prince Ranawat, a sister and brother, ages 23 and 18, from a dot of a town called Parsad. On a motorcycle, their father, Gajeraj Ranawat, followed. The driver propelled us along a parched roadway overgrown with candelabra cactus and bougainvillea, its pink and white flowers covered with dust. Sprays of yellow oleander spilled onto our path, and the screeches of langur monkeys echoed in the distance.
The family was leading me to a temple complex that once sheltered the so-called Tanesar sculptures, a set of 12 or more stone figures dating to the sixth century. Naturalistic, slender, luminously jadelike, and around two feet high, most of the sculptures depict mother goddesses (matrikas), with some holding a small child. Attendant male deities were also part of the set. According to art historians, the Tanesar figures were sculpted by an itinerant artisan guild as a form of patronage to local rulers. The sculptures were associated with fertility, but they were also linked with terrifying aspects of the all-encompassing mother goddess Devi in her manifestations as Kali and others—dangerous, destructive yoginis whose power eclipsed that of all the male Hindu gods combined. Over time, fearful villagers buried the sculptures in a field, hoping to contain their energy. But later, when the sculptures were feared no more, they were dug up and dragged to a small shrine to Shiva. There they were given pride of place in an enclosure to the side of the structure. At some point in their history, the figures became focal points for tantric prayer, with worshippers seeking a disintegration of the physical self to meld into universal consciousness.
For many years, the Tanesar sculptures remained an integral part of local religious life—unknown to anyone else. But around 1957, a prominent archaeologist in Rajasthan discovered the figures and then published an article about them in an Indian art history journal, making an inner circle of Indian and Western art historians aware of their existence. What followed was a story all too familiar in the world of art and antiquities: sometime around 1961, most of the Tanesar sculptures were stolen. From what I’ve been able to piece together, they were smuggled across the countryside, down to what was then Bombay, across the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic—to Liverpool and then New York. The American art dealer Doris Wiener, who ran a gallery on Madison Avenue, had a hand in the export of several of them. Another landed at the British Museum through a separate channel.
Very soon, the mid-century art world became enchanted with the sculptures. Art dealers, collectors, and museum directors eyed their potential worth. In 1967 and after, Wiener sold six or more sculptures from the set, for the equivalent of $80,000 each in today’s dollars, to curators and collectors who had more than an inkling of the dubious circumstances of the objects’ traffic. She sold one to Blanchette and John D. Rockefeller III and another to the Cleveland Museum of Art. The others passed from hand to hand before arriving at the world’s most revered collections of South Asian art, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).
Mother Goddess (Matrika), previously on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was seized in August 2022 by the office of the Manhattan DA. (Courtesy of the author)
On August 30, 2022, the office of the Manhattan District Attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, issued a search warrant for one of the sculptures, called Mother Goddess (Matrika). At the time, it stood on a pedestal in the coolly lit gallery 236 of the Florence and Herbert Irving Asian Wing at the Met. The sculpture was seized, part of a sweeping sting targeting works acquired by Wiener as long as 60 years ago. Over the past decade, more than 4,500 allegedly trafficked antiquities have been confiscated by the office of the Manhattan DA. Instrumental in this work has been Assistant DA Matthew Bogdanos, a Marine colonel who led a government investigation into the looting of the Iraq Museum in 2003. Of those antiquities recovered by the Manhattan DA, nearly half have been returned to 24 countries of origin, with India receiving the largest share.
So many sculptures seized and sent home, each with its own story. It can be hard to see why any one of those stories matters in the particular. The repatriated artifacts are not as well known as the Benin Bronzes, for example, plundered from West Africa by British colonists, or the Parthenon marbles, removed by Lord Elgin in the early 1800s and now on display at the British Museum. They are not symbols of empire, nor are they the spoils of war. Rather, they are emblems of something more banal and arguably more pernicious—the practice of mid-century antiquities looting that took place on such a scale that it infected nearly every gallery of Asian art in the West.
The way forward is neither clear nor simple. In the fall of 2022, Mother Goddess (Matrika) lay in a crate in the Manhattan DA’s overstuffed storage facility while the search continued for each of the Tanesar sculptures sold through Wiener’s gallery in the late 1960s. Mother Goddess (Matrika) and at least four more deities from the set remain in legal limbo as lawyers for the Met and other American museums raise questions about who owned the sculptures at the time they were acquired by Wiener, and whether they really did belong to the temple at the time of their theft.
One of the Tanesar figures, the sculpture purchased by the Cleveland Museum of Art, is still on display there. Others remain, for the moment, in the custody of LACMA and the Allen Museum at Oberlin College. Beyond the purview of the U.S. legal apparatus, the Tanesar goddess at the British Museum currently resides among the dutifully cataloged collection of nearly eight million objects not on view because of space limitations.
The sculptures may languish in this liminal state—crated, underground, or imprisoned in storage—but then, the liminal is where the Tanesar goddesses have existed for many years.
In 2020, I was a Fulbright scholar living in the city of Ahmedabad. I’d been researching the story of the Tanesar sculptures, having chosen the case because it involved one of the few thefts where published photographs linked looted artifacts housed in Western museums to a specific origin site. I was drawn to the beatific, yet unfussy artworks—though it was only later, as I traveled across three continents to see seven of the sculptures in person, that I fell in love with them.
In art history texts, the village of Tanesar was said to lie in the steep hillsides between the cities of Dungarpur and Udaipur, along the border of southern Rajasthan and Gujarat state. No map showed a place called Tanesar or, as it sometimes appeared in museum catalogs, Tanesara Mahadeva. News articles were of little help. A few articles in the Indian press and a 2007 piece in The New Yorker mentioned Tanesar, but only as a footnote in a seemingly unrelated story—that of the smuggler Vaman Ghiya and his arrest. As far as I could tell, no journalist or academic researcher had visited the site since the middle of the last century.
The place to start was Dungarpur. On the taxi ride from Ahmedabad, my son and I encountered a landscape where algae-rich stripes of sedimentary stone—black, charcoal, green, and blue—shone in the roadcuts. The stone industry continues to thrive in this part of northwestern India, the source of building materials, sculptures, and architectural decorations. Quarry shops sold the blue-green schist known locally as pareva, and trucks rumbled by, carrying cubes of marblelike stone.
The next morning, at a hotel in Dungarpur, the concierge told me that his in-laws happened to worship at the temple I was looking for. He put me in touch with his brother-in-law Gajeraj Ranawat. Serendipitously, I received a text that same morning from my friend Abhi Sangani, an art historian in Ahmedabad, who’d gotten a tip from his cigarette vendor with the approximate location of the temple.
This is how we ended up in the back seat of that Toyota SUV. And it was during that journey with the Ranawat family that I finally understood why finding the temple site had been so difficult. As I traced the turns of the road on my phone’s maps app, the coordinates for a temple came into view. I zoomed in. Taneeshwar Madahav Tample, the map read in English, a clumsy transliteration of the Hindi phrase beneath it: Taneshwar Mahadev Mandir. The photograph linked to the map showed the temple entryway, with its name in Devanagari script visible in blue lettering—Taneshwar Mahadev. Having studied Sanskrit and yoga philosophy, I knew that Taneshwar (or, given the conventions of Hindi and Sanskrit, Tanesvar, Tanesvara, or Taneshwara) means “Shiva” and that the phrase Taneshwar Mahadev translates to “the lord Shiva, Shiva who is the greatest god.”
Therein lay the answer to the first mystery of this tale: Tanesar was a temple, not a village. Imagine if someone had named New York City “Beth El” because of the synagogue on East 86th Street. No wonder journalists never reported firsthand from the Taneshwar Mahadev temple. If they’d been looking, they would have been searching for a village that did not exist. It’s quite possible, of course, that no other outsider had ever tried to find “Tanesar” village. After all, asking exactly how a smuggled object reached an esteemed gallery in a Western museum was not common practice until recently.
Now, after parking off the jagged road, we passed a row of stalls selling items for worship—coconuts, incense, matches, squares of metal foil, rectangles of red nylon mesh trimmed with gold thread—and followed a grand stairway up to a temple plaza. Revelers in brightly colored saris danced in a circle while men played drums and long-necked, stringed gourds. Incense and oils released a sticky, noisome odor. Smoke filled the air, and langur monkeys leapt between temple structures, with the Shisha mountain rising behind them. A priest in a white tunic and flowing dhoti pants chanted in Sanskrit and led the worshippers in a fire ceremony meant to bring auspicious energies from the planets.
Ratna Chandra Agrawala devoted his life to the study of Indian art and artifacts. In the 1950s, he came across the Tanesar matrikas during an exploration of southwestern Rajasthan. (From Ratna-Chandrika: Panorama of Oriental Studies)
As several villagers gathered around us, my son went off to play, jumping from the retaining walls separating the plaza and the stalls and poking a stick into a warm spring that trickled down from the mountainside to the plaza. Then, with Prachi Ranawat translating, the villagers began telling me about the statues’ theft. Everyone, it seemed, knew a version of the story, which had been passed down from parents and grandparents. According to one account, a temple guard awoke one morning to discover that most of the sculptures had been spirited away in the deep of night. Alternatively, a white car arrived in the dark and took the sculptures away. Or a madman came and stole the sculptures. Or a man known to villagers by the nickname Kadva Baba came and spoke to the priest in private; money was exchanged, and shortly afterward, the sculptures were taken away. The oral history of the temple may have recorded many possible scenarios, but certain facts remained constant. Temple lootings were common in the area at the time. And although villagers often reported the thefts, police rarely recovered the loot.
I heard a great deal that day about how important the sculptures were to local life. “If someone didn’t have a child,” one person said, “they worshipped the goddesses so they could have one. If someone was suffering from a disease, they also worshipped the goddesses.” Another offered that worshipping the goddesses could bring a male child. The temple itself had been the site of a famous miracle, others said, a legend I heard about in greater detail on one of my later visits. A priest would tell me a version of the famous story of Surabhi, a cow that would wander off from its home every day and come home dry. Surabhi’s owner, angry that someone was apparently stealing his milk, secretly followed the cow to the temple, where he watched as its teats released a flood of milk onto the ground. This it had been doing every day, he learned. Later, a statue materialized on that very spot, an emanation of Lord Shiva. “That was how everyone knew that the temple was magical,” the priest explained. And in the same storytelling voice, he said, “Thirty-five years ago, a goddess statue was stolen from here. Now, the government is going to send her back.”
One thing was certain: the temple community would settle for no compensation, monetary or otherwise, in lieu of the sculptures’ return.
In the middle of the 20th century, Ratna Chandra Agrawala was the foremost archaeologist in the state of Rajasthan. He was the author of more than 400 essays and articles, many punctilious in their detail. His life’s work as a scholar and as director of museums and archaeology for the state led him to register art objects, preserve many of them in two regional government museums that he founded and managed, and argue for their importance in Indian and international arts journals. There was nothing shoddy about his work.
Born in 1926, Agrawala trained as an archaeologist in pre-independence India. In 1946, he worked on the dig that uncovered parts of the Indus Valley site of Harappa, in what is now Pakistan. Art historians who knew Agrawala during the following decades remember his utter devotion to Indian art history and his palpable joy when asked to discuss this subject, still underappreciated in the 1960s and ’70s. In one photograph, Agrawala appears in the garb of India’s educated elite of the era, wearing a Nehru jacket and thick-framed glasses and sporting a trim, narrow mustache. His thinness accentuates an intent expression in his eyes, in which I imagine—perhaps because I’ve researched his background—a hint of both pain and triumph.
Around 1957, during what Agrawala described as “exploratory tours in the regions of Udaipur and Dungarpur,” he encountered the Tanesar sculptures. For Agrawala, the artworks possessed a pleasing dissonance, with their classical proportions, indigenous features, and the sparest of religious accoutrements. They immediately won his adoration. In 1959, he described what he had found in the Indian journal Lalit Kala. In 1961, Agrawala published a second article in Lalit Kala discussing the sculptures’ art historical importance. Included were photographs of 10 of the sculptures snapped outdoors near the temple. Leaning on rocks, the gods and goddesses resemble crime victims. They are encrusted with dirt and an unguent mix of substances related to worship, which likely included milk, ghee, vermilion, and ash. Agrawala stated that the sculptures were currently being used for worship (“under worship” was the phrase he used). He went on to lament that the sculptures “remain completely besmeared with red lead and oil. It is therefore not possible to clean them for study.”
A third article appeared in the French journal Arts Asiatiques in 1965. Here, Agrawala published photos of an additional sculpture and more fully described the artworks and their material, the luminous blue-green schist. One of the pieces, he wrote, “presents a lady with her head bent in a graceful pose. This is unique in Indian Art. She puts on the typical sārī and the scarf is appearing on her right arm. The facial expression here is extremely elegant and so also is the case with round ear-lobes, single beaded necklace, broad face, robust breasts, etc.” He declared the sculpture to be “a piece of superb workmanship,” adding, as an aside, “the hair decoration is equally charming therein.”
The 1959 article identified the temple as Tanesara-Mahādeva and its location as being near the village of “Parsada,” a Sanskritized version of Parsad. Agrawala didn’t mention Parsada in his 1961 article, though he did cite his first article in the footnotes. But by the time the sculptures had arrived in the West, it was the 1961 article, not the original publication, that was the standard source on the subject, the primary bibliographic reference for authors of museum catalogs. This is how Parsada got dropped from the record, replaced by the fictional Tanesar.
But why didn’t Western museums track down Agrawala’s primary source material? One day, I arrayed before myself, in chronological order, each bibliographic reference to the Tanesar artworks from 1959 through the 1980s, hoping to understand how this scholarly laziness had occurred. The first mention of the sculptures in an American publication appeared in a 1971 issue of the Allen Memorial Art Museum Bulletin of Oberlin College. That issue was devoted to an exhibition of works belonging to a prominent collector and Oberlin alum, Paul F. Walter. Among the artworks that Walter had recently donated to the Allen Museum was Deva, a Tanesar sculpture featuring a lithe young man with a serene, transported expression, carved from the blue schist.
One of the essays in the Bulletin, written by the art historian Pratapaditya Pal, curator of Indian art at LACMA, described five sculptures from the Tanesar set that Wiener had acquired and then sold to prominent American curators and collectors. This included images of an additional sculpture, bringing the total number documented in photographs to 12. The essay, a tour de force in interpretive writing, marked the sculptures’ entrée, like debutantes, into a larger art historical conversation beyond the limited audience of India’s rarefied Lalit Kala.
Pal’s elegiac descriptions explored theories regarding the identities of the gods and goddesses, their art historical connection to other artworks from nearby sites and distant centers of artmaking during the fourth- to-sixth-century Gupta Empire, and the trope of the mother in South Asian art. “Each of the pieces magically seems to have captured, as in a candid snapshot, a fleeting moment of joy and playfulness,” he wrote. The matrika in the Cleveland Museum of Art “appears to be smiling as she tries to restrain her child. This sense of radiant motherhood is more explicitly expressed in these matrikas from Tanesara than in any other Indian sculptures.” Deva had “the physical properties of a human being,” and its face evoked “supra-human serenity and compassion.”
The Taneshwar Mahadev temple complex, where the sculptures had been housed. Local residents tell several versions of the story of how the figures were stolen. (Courtesy of the author)
The problem was, for all the flourishes of Pal’s lushly detailed and celebratory narrative style, the essay was also riddled with mistakes. It incorrectly identified the “Tanesara-Mahadeva” temple as a village (with a footnote erroneously ascribing that detail to Agrawala’s 1961 article). The name of the famous regional rock was changed from pareva to pavena. And the name of a sister site that Agrawala had also explored morphed within the article from Kalyanpura to Kotyarka. These mistakes and others subsequently appeared in later works of scholarship.
It seemed odd that the editors didn’t catch these lapses. But when I read the introduction to that issue of the Bulletin, I realized that a general romantic sensibility had prevailed over the mundane requirements of scholarly fidelity. “To Western ears,” wrote Richard Spear, the Allen Museum director, “Bhagavata Purana, Ramayana and Ragamala are strange sounds, as remote as Malwa, Hyderabad and Jaipur.” “Tanesar” was not a place where people lived and worshipped but a fanciful, fairy-tale locale. Further embroidering this theme of exotic-domestic interplay, Spear described Walter, the collector and donor, as someone who was “as likely to be met in the studio of a young artist in lower Manhattan or a London auction of Whistler etchings as in the Doris Wiener Gallery of Indian Art.” The relationships between dealer, collector, and museum curator were cozy enough to completely subsume any question of how the artworks were attained.
The fairy-tale atmosphere also created an illusion of buyer innocence. It was all too common in mid-century America to deflect blame from those who acquired artworks that had been purloined by shady dealers. A charade of not knowing the specifics of any origin site insulated those at the top of the antiquities trafficking chain—the Rockefellers, respected collectors, and museum curators who had purchased or accepted the sculptures as donations. Even today, this false ignorance prevails, in spite of its illogic. “If you didn’t legitimately acquire the property in the first place, you can’t pass on title,” Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Bogdanos told me. “A stolen object never reacquires goodness. Once stolen, always stolen.”
Clockwise from top left: Tanesar matrikas in the collections of Oberlin College,the National Museum in New Delhi, the British Museum, and the Cleveland Museum of Art (Courtesy of the author)
By drawing attention to the Tanesar artworks, Ratna Chandra Agrawala—no matter how noble his motives—ended up contributing to their theft. He was part of a nationalistic movement, just a decade after Indian independence, to increase global recognition for indigenous statuary. This mission was shared by the editors of the Bombay-based journal Marg, which in 1959 cited Agrawala among the Western and Indian art historians and archaeologists who inspired the “intelligentsia” and “men and women of culture” to appreciate “the remarkable tradition of carving which has miraculously survived in Rajasthan.” The editors also “earnestly appeal[ed] to the archaeologists” to “accord proper display” and facilitate “direct contact with the unknown masterpieces.” Agrawala did this, in part, by relocating two of the Tanesar sculptures to his government museum in Udaipur.
Today, these remain in the Indian government’s custody, displayed in underwhelming circumstances that would surely rankle Agrawala’s ghost. One is easy to miss, in a busy section of hallway at the National Museum in New Delhi, crowded between a potted plant and an exit sign. The day I visited, crowds of chattering secondary students in government school uniforms raced past, oblivious of the goddess. The other matrika, more dispiritingly, resides at an Udaipur government gallery, in a desolate room that is often closed to the public. When I finally managed to get in, the lights didn’t work, and chipmunks were scampering along the rafters. The matrika stood behind a case so rarely dusted that I could barely read the identifying label through the glass. But when I was able to make it out, I saw that the label had been swapped with that of a nearby sculpture from a different site. If Agrawala might have frowned at this sad scene, he also may have worn a small smile, knowing that the sculptures had been kept safe from looters all these years. Here the matrikas rested, ready for future generations—perhaps even those scores of secondary students in New Delhi—to embrace the appreciation of Indian art that he and his cohort had worked so hard to instill during the 1950s and ’60s.
Agrawala, at the time, surely knew that the nationalist push for art appreciation was indirectly encouraging the activities of looters, and the 1960s would indeed witness a frenzied black market targeting the newly recognized statuary. “There was a sense that if you got it into a museum, at least you were protecting it from some of the thieves,” said Padma Kaimal, Batza Family Chair in Art History at Colgate University and author of Scattered Goddesses: Travels with the Yoginis, about a set of sculptures exported from southern India in the late 1920s. “The atmosphere was Wild West, help yourself. It was really difficult to protect the art.” Agrawala, she speculated, probably “saw these amazing pieces, really admired them, and knew how vulnerable they were.”
By the time my son and I were traveling in India in 2020, evidence of that rapacious mid-century market, of pillage, was everywhere. Whether touring little-known ruins or UNESCO World Heritage sites, my son got in the habit of playing a fun scavenger hunt game. He ran from niche to niche pointing out places where sublime figures of gods and goddesses were no longer extant. “Missing!” he declared to the local day-trippers. They were nonplussed. It had been decades, after all, since India had suffered a wholesale theft of its heritage.
Starting in the late 1950s, police began to find dust-covered, sumptuous artworks on the dirt floors of godowns. This Indo-Portuguese borrowing from the 16th-century spice trade refers to warehouses and the objects bound for export within. The objects discovered in a Gujarati cache in 1959 lay “in pitiable disarray,” one art historian reported. In 1968, police confiscated seven museum-quality stone sculptures from a godown in Bombay. Officials were able to arrest a driver and his accomplice, but the vandals jumped bail. After spending several months trying to locate the sculptures’ origins, authorities gave up and released them to the Prince of Wales Museum in Bombay. The museum’s announcement of the acquisition reported on a larger scene in which certain areas of the country were “dacoit-infested” ( dacoits are armed bandits), with outlaws “acting in cooperation with some art dealers.”
In December 1969, Robert McCormick Adams Jr., an archaeologist who went on to become Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, published a letter to the editor in The New York Times. The letter responded to an early draft of UNESCO’s 1970 Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property. Signed by an additional six archaeologists, the letter noted a lack of “effective measures to curb the trade … by the museums and art galleries that are among its principal beneficiaries.” The letter also pointed out that federal laws (which provide tax exemptions for museums) “in fact sanction looting.”
Those museums began to receive sleeves in the mail from museum directors in India containing photos of hot artworks and requests to keep an eye out. One arrived at the Cleveland Museum of Art from the archaeological curator of the Prince of Wales Museum in Bombay, by certified air mail. The curator, B. V. Shetti, wrote, “I am enclosing herewith 14 black and white photographs out of the 23 [Indus Valley] seals which were stolen from our Museum on 27th February, 1970. … Kindly keep us informed if you happen to know anything in this matter.”
Sherman E. Lee, chief curator of Oriental art and director at the Cleveland Museum of Art at the time, had just then acquired two nearly identical, unprovenanced seals from William H. Wolff, who once discussed with The New York Times his “clandestine” and “illegal” export of antiquities from Asia. After determining that the Cleveland seals were not from Bombay, Lee wrote a letter to Shetti:
We have examined the photographs and lists and hasten to report that we are not aware of any of these objects being on the market at the present time. You may rest assured that if they do appear in any way, we will immediately inform you.
May I add that it would be most helpful for museums with significant Oriental collections in this country if you and the other professionals in India would keep us informed of thefts of works of art. We are as anxious as you are to prevent this activity and to restore the works to the proper owners. The more information we get, the better we can cooperate.
By the time he sent this letter, Lee had already purchased one Tanesar mother from Wiener, knowing full well the likelihood it had been “stolen” or “illegally acquired.” I learned this by studying correspondence, located in the archives of the Cleveland Museum of Art, between Lee, Wiener, and others.
This museum has taken a leadership role in investigating questionable acquisitions in its collection and exploring how present-day curators can right the transgressions committed by those who came before. The museum’s curator of Indian and Southeast Asian art, Sonya Rhie Mace, devoted two years to research into the provenance of a 10th-century stone sculpture of the god Hanuman that resulted in its transfer to the Kingdom of Cambodia in 2015. More recently, Mace worked closely with the National Museum of Cambodia to curate a multimedia presentation featuring a larger-than-life stone sculpture of Krishna that had survived only in fragments.
“There needs to be a well-considered conversation about what can happen in the future, because so much happened in the past that cannot be changed,” Mace told me. “How do we understand a troubled past so it doesn’t happen again? I tried to do this with the Krishna exhibition, to show how complex and ambivalent the history of a single object can be. For the works that are in our care, let’s look at them one by one, tell their stories, and try to reach out to countries of origin. We need an open approach to talking about what’s best for the sculptures.”
In the months before the Manhattan DA’s office began its investigation, Oberlin College’s Asian art curator, Kevin Greenwood, and museum director, Andria Derstine, consented to meet with me concerning my research into the Tanesar sculptures. (Derstine later declined to speak, once the investigation commenced.) Other institutions have been less forthcoming. Officials at LACMA and the Met ignored or rejected my multiple attempts to discuss the Tanesar sculptures in their collections. The Met, moreover, left up erroneous website content concerning the sculptures even after I brought up published sources that could have helped correct the mistakes.
By 1967, at least six of the original Tanesar artworks had traveled across two oceans and reached Wiener’s New York gallery. Wiener sometimes called them “black stone matrikas.” In March 1968, she wrote to Lee, “Mr. & Mrs. Rockefeller came to see the Matrika stones, and will be in touch with me or you, regarding their choice. At that time, as per our conversation, we will send the other to you.”
Doris Wiener died in 2011. In 2016, she was posthumously named in a Manhattan criminal court complaint for conspiracy to “buy, smuggle, launder, and sell millions of dollars’ worth of antiquities stolen from Afghanistan, Cambodia, China, India, Pakistan, and Thailand.” The complaint stated that she and her daughter, Nancy Wiener, along with others, had “trafficked in illegal antiquities for decades.” In 2021, Nancy Wiener accepted a plea bargain in exchange for providing information about smuggling networks engaged by herself and her mother. This information, in turn, contributed to the DA’s investigation of the Tanesar sculptures that led to the seizure of Mother Goddess (Matrika) at the Met in the fall of 2022.
The complaint and plea bargain named two smuggling rings operating in India supported by the Wiener family business and run by dealers named Om Sharma and Sharod Singh. And although the DA’s office would not confirm the name, a known middleman had to have connected the dacoits who looted the Tanesar temple in the early 1960s to Doris Wiener.
Less a focus of the DA’s complaint were the fluid social ties connecting the Wiener family with the world of museum directors and benefactors. “I have recently returned from an extended trip to India,” Wiener wrote chummily to Lee in May 1967. “My activities there, besides listening to tremendous amounts of gossip and shop-talk, was to acquire a fine collection of Indian miniature paintings and a very fine Persian manuscript which just arrived. I would be pleased to see you again when you come to New York.”
Over time, Wiener’s gallery moved to Fifth Avenue, in a building facing the steps of the Met. A business-meets-pleasure lack of boundaries characterized the industry. “As usual, the dealer knows more than the curator,” Lee wrote to the collector Robert H. Ellsworth in 1966.
Lee had become aware of the Tanesar sculptures’ existence as early as November 1961. That’s when Ratna Chandra Agrawala mailed Lee a dossier containing a dozen of his own recent articles that more than likely included the two in Lalit Kala discussing the sculptures. “It is hoped,” Agrawala wrote, “that [the papers] will be of some interest to you. … I shall also look forward to your visit to Rajasthan in the near future.” Whether or not the 1959 and 1961 articles were included in the batch, Lee had the 1961 article in his possession while discussing with Wiener the sale of one or more of the sculptures.
In September 1967, Lee wrote to a consultant, Vinod P. Dwivedi, at the National Museum of Delhi about a conflict. He was seriously considering the purchase of a Tanesar matrika on offer from Wiener:
One thing in particular has come up which I must ask you about and rely upon your confidence and discretion. I do not wish to be involved in any way in the acquisition of any material which has been ‘illegally acquired.’ Please note, I don’t say ‘illegally exported,’ but ‘illegally acquired.’
In the No. 10 issue of Lalite Kala, October, 1961, pages 31-33, there is an article by R. C. Agrawala which includes illustrations of nine sculptures from Tavesara, described as ‘Under Worship.’
I am informed that these pieces are now in the United States, in the hands of a dealer. Has there been any report or information about these pieces being stolen or in any other way illegally acquired? Did the village sell the pieces?
Dwivedi, after speaking to Agrawala, responded that there was no report of a theft from “Tavesara” but that “the villagers never sell any image under worship.”
In May 1968, when the sale was close to final, Lee finally asked Wiener about the matter directly: The “only question is whether the piece was originally sold from the village or whether it was stolen. What kind of guarantee of title can you provide … ?”
By 1970, Lee had acquired the Tanesar sculpture for his museum’s collection, paying $10,500. (It’s possible that more sculptures were offered and considered.) Soon after, the Cleveland museum mailed an 8-by-10 glossy of the acquisition to Oberlin College for publication in its Bulletin. That Lee knew the sculpture’s origin story is evident from the photo, which bears the label “from Tamesara-Mahdeva, (ca. 30 miles from Vdaipur).”
How did Wiener succeed in placing the sculptures with curators and collectors at the highest echelon of American society? Most of the collectors had close connections to Pratapaditya Pal, author of the 1971 article in the Allen Museum Bulletin. Born in East Bengal and raised in Calcutta, Pal is now 87. His scholarly works are extensive, and he has served as curator of South Asian art at some of the finest museums in America—in Chicago and Boston, as well as Los Angeles. He also knew everyone in the art world, and he did much of his work in an age of schmoozing and long lunches at French restaurants.
The matrika at the British Museum was retrieved from storage, allowing the author to feel its “extraordinary leadlike heft.” (Courtesy of the author)
In his writings, Pal mentions his friendships with not only Wiener but also Paul Walter and Nasli Heeramaneck, then a respected collector in New York. Heeramaneck owned three Tanesar sculptures at one time or another. Another close friend, and one of Pal’s advisees, was Christian Humann, a prolific collector who passed away in 1981. The first blockbuster touring exhibit of Asian statuary—“Sensuous Immortals,” curated by Pal—was made up of Humann’s bronze and stone artworks. Among the treasures of the show was Mother Goddess (Matrika)—the Tanesar goddess seized from the Met last year. “Sensuous Immortals” traveled to five North American cities between 1977 and 1979, often crossing paths with another blockbuster touring museum exhibition, one that defied all previous expectations for art world profitability and bore the taint of theft—the “Treasures of Tutankhamun.” The American museum as an institution had entered a new era of commercialism. If precisely naming the origin site of a set of highly valued artworks would have cast doubt on good title, and therefore undercut profitability, it’s no wonder that such a detail would have been left off, that certain errors in a journal article would go uncorrected. In art world circles, the imprimatur of having once been displayed in “Sensuous Immortals” often stands in for an object’s respectability. And yet, Mother Goddess (Matrika) is not the only sculpture from the show, or from Humann’s “Pan-Asian collection,” to have been tainted by questions of provenance. Another is the 10th-century stone Hanuman transferred to Cambodia from the Cleveland Museum of Art in 2015. Yet a third is the 11th-century Celestial Woman Beneath a Mango Tree, which was on view at the Denver Art Museum from 1965 until 2019. This figure was matched to photos taken at a temple in central Rajasthan in 1960 and published on the website Plundered Past. After being confronted with the information, the Denver museum quietly returned the sculpture to India—without any public mention of the transfer. A fourth is the bronze Hanuman Conversing from the 11th century, currently on view at the Met. Just this past December, researchers in Puducherry, India, linked it to a theft sometime around 1960, using photographs archived at the city’s French Institute.
Connecting an object to its original site is important for two reasons. Doing so preserves the integrity of its art historical record, and illuminates and evaluates the legality and morality of its removal. Neither of these concerns seems to have preoccupied Pal. “Fortunately,” Pal wrote in 2021 in a fond reminiscence of “Sensuous Immortals,” “in the 1970s, there were no ‘provenance issues’ that would become such a headache for museum professionals and collectors by the last decade of the century.”
This, however, is another fairy tale. “Sensuous Immortals,” after all, concluded just one year before the publication of Foreign Devils on the Silk Road, the British journalist and historian Peter Hopkirk’s exposé on the pillaging of Central Asian Buddhist art by explorers working for colonial powers at the turn of the 20th century. He describes a case in which the British-Hungarian archaeologist Aurel Stein, exploring Buddhist sites in the Taklamakan Desert in the early 1900s, “used a saw, carefully inserted behind the frescoes,” and had paintings “cut into pieces, later to be carefully reunited after their long and arduous journey home by camel, pony, yak or other means.” The bulk of this cache is now in storage at the British Museum. Hopkirk asked his readers to judge for themselves “the morality of depriving a people permanently of their heritage.”
Two years after the publication of Hopkirk’s book, in 1982, the art historian Joanna Gottfried Williams declined to include Indian sculptures held in American museums or collections for her landmark history The Art of Gupta India: Empire and Province. Although her argument centered on the need for art historical context, her comments bore the whiff of condemnation. She fingered a text by Pal specifically for its “deliberate inclusion of works without the unimpeachable credentials of those recorded in situ in India.”
This hybrid figure currently resides at the Taneshwar temple—the sculpture’s torso is ancient, but its head dates to a later period. (Courtesy of the author)
Not long ago, I reached Pal on the phone, though he did not have much to say about the Tanesar artworks beyond what he has previously written. “If this is another question of repatriation and all this, I don’t have time to discuss it right now,” he said, suggesting that I write to him about the matter. He did, however, say that in his view, the sales of the artworks should be considered in the context of the ratification date of the UNESCO convention to curtail international black marketeering in antiquities. “If works were acquired before 1970,” he told me, “as far as I’m concerned, those sales are perfectly kosher.” He didn’t want to speak about the larger subject of the Tanesar sculptures’ export, which is a shame, because the story he could tell about the world of 20th-century collecting and museums would be illuminating, to say the least.
Today, the shortsightedness of the past is often invoked to contextualize the open secret of museum-bound loot in the 1960s and ’70s. Nancy Wiener, in her 2021 plea bargain, described “a market where buying and selling antiquities with vague or even no provenance was the norm. Obfuscation and silence were accepted responses to questions concerning the source from which an object had been obtained. In short, it was a conspiracy of the willing.” Wiener’s passive language nicely insulates museum directors from participation in that conspiracy.
This world of make-believe and false facts, where the notion that no one would notice or care if the name of a town was wrong, reminded me of the condescending practice of sculpture replacement. This is a trick used by temple looters. They steal a valuable devotional sculpture and then deposit a cheap fake or a newer, less valuable object in its place. Then, worshippers have something to propitiate, and the looters—and others—get rich.
At the Taneshwar temple on my first visit, villagers showed me a statue that some worshippers believed to be a replacement. Its body was covered in red mesh fabric bordered with gold. Foil, ash, and vermilion stained its exposed limbs and face. Only the head was visible. On a later visit, though, I saw that the sculpture’s torso was indeed ancient. The newer head had been balanced, off kilter, on top of the body. This goddess was a beautiful Frankenstein. Embodying old and new, the figure had become an object of worship on its own terms.
There was a strange, raw power in this indigenous, living artwork. I’d felt something similar in my pilgrimage across three continents—North America, Europe, and Asia—to lay eyes on or even touch as many sculptures from the set as possible. I was able to feel the extraordinary leadlike heft of the goddess at the British Museum. After I submitted a research request, an attendant retrieved this matrika from storage, bringing her to me in a wooden cart labeled oriental. At the Allen Museum at Oberlin, after a similar research request, the curator brought Deva out of storage and rotated him on a lazy Susan–style pedestal. We watched, enraptured, as the beautiful blue-green stone caught the light in different ways while the figure spun. And at the Met and in Cleveland, I saw the sculptures under precisely arranged decorator’s bulbs, which showed off their sublime, otherworldly features, but also their maternal air of knowledge and contentment.
The day I saw the old-new goddess, I was similarly moved. I stood in the alcove and imagined how this place might vibrate should the spirits of the original Taneshwar goddesses join this modern, vernacular goddess. Sublime art celebrates and simulates the richness and density of life, and all of these goddesses have done just that. The past was unrecoverable, but perhaps something more powerful would soon come to be. I wondered what it would be like to feel the energies of the goddesses coalesce in one place as they hadn’t in more than 60 years. I envisioned a land where gods and goddesses were returned home in spite of the mammoth forces of commerce, prestige, and power. I wondered if my fantasy might one day become real.
The post The Goddess Complex appeared first on The American Scholar.
Before arriving in Pamplona, in the Basque region of northern Spain, I had imagined the San Fermín festival as Ernest Hemingway describes it in The Sun Also Rises—as a picturesque Spanish town’s quaint celebration of its annual bullfight. In the novel, Jake Barnes introduces us to tavern keepers, local aficionados, and bullfighters, taking endless pleasure in revealing the intimate details of what was, in the 1920s, a little-known regional tradition. I understood, of course, that in the decades since, the festival has evolved into a wildly popular tourist attraction, but I wasn’t quite prepared for what I saw this past summer, when more than a million people from all over the world descended on Pamplona for the fiesta, the running of the bulls, and the corrida (the bullfight). The narrow cobblestone streets were packed. Almost everyone was dressed in the traditional garb of San Fermín festivalgoers: white shirt and red bandana. Moving with the crowd on the third afternoon of the fiesta, I felt like I was inside an unhinged version of Where’s Waldo. A marching band plowed its way past me, the tuba player spinning with his unwieldy instrument. The restaurants sold overpriced pintxos (the Basque version of tapas), and the storefronts hawked T-shirts and plush bull toys, some of them stuck with miniature spears. In the Plaza de Toros, somebody had placed a red fedora and a string of Mardi Gras beads on the statue of Hemingway.
When I bought my ticket to the corrida from a round-faced Basque scalper, I had my hesitations. For the first 22 years of my life, I had been a staunch vegetarian. When I was 12, my father (who was not a vegetarian) gave me a copy of Animal Liberation, the seminal work by the Australian moral philosopher Peter Singer, and for a time, the book was my bible. More recently, I’ve started eating meat occasionally, opting for cuts that are, I make sure to learn, “responsibly raised” by local farmers. I told myself that I was attending the bullfight as a journalist—I’d chosen not to wear the white shirt and red bandana—but I was far from sure I’d be able to stomach sitting in a cheering crowd while a bull was tortured to death.
The corrida began with the matadors and their teams paying their respects to the crowd and the presiding dignitaries. The fighters dressed in colorful traditional costumes, looking a bit like rhinestone cowboys, in their slim-fitting suits that sparkled glamorously in the afternoon sun. The head matador, or torero, was the most extravagantly dressed, his green suit laced with gold. My seat was about halfway down the stands, in the shady half of the arena, where the serious aficionados tend to sit. On the other side, in the unrelenting sun, the peñas—local social clubs—were already going wild, singing, waving flags, sharing wine, and now and then whipping pastries at one another.
Without more fanfare, the first bull charged out through a trap door. He was much larger and stronger than any bull you’ve seen in a roadside pasture. I had expected him to behave aggressively from the moment of his entrance, but this was not the case. At first, he seemed mostly confused, running from one side of the arena to the other, testing the boundaries of the enclosure. I would later learn that before they are brought to the corrida, the animals are kept together in large pastures away from human beings. Until this moment, the bull had probably never seen more than a few people. Now, here were 20,000. The noise was deafening.
After a few moments, four mounted men—the picadors—cantered into the arena. The bull started toward one of the horses at a jog. He lowered his head as he neared the horse, its rider using a long spear to stab him in his prominent neck muscles. The bull still managed to make contact with the horse’s flank, which was protected with quilted armor. The crowd booed the picador ferociously, apparently for his failure to keep the bull away from his mount. In the early 20th century, before armor was required, more horses than bulls died in the arena. Today, they often suffer broken ribs, bruised organs, and internal bleeding, injuries that sometimes prove fatal.
By this point, less than two minutes into the fight, I found myself in a strange state, both disgusted and transfixed. Blood covered both of the bull’s flanks. The picadors were soon replaced by banderilleros, men holding the short, colorfully decorated lances known as banderillas. They ran straight and fast at the bull, who also began to charge, and with acrobatic flourish sank the barbed tips of the lances beneath the animal’s skin, so that the lances hung against his flank and neck. After these wounds were inflicted, the bull held his head much lower than he had when he first entered the arena. This is the object of a corrida. In order for the torero to kill the bull without running too great a risk of being gored, the animal must not be holding his head high.
I now found myself unpleasantly jittery—probably due to an overload of adrenaline as well as concern for both the bull and the men. Still, I couldn’t look away. The banderilleros retreated, and the torero entered the arena. He unfurled a red cape, behind which he held a long, thin blade. For a few moments, the bull watched the cloth and the man, seeming at once furious and perplexed. The crowd went quiet, and you could hear the heaviness of the bull’s breathing, made loud by the saliva and blood in his mouth and nose. Then, he charged, lowering his horns at the cape and the man hidden behind it, the decorated lances thwacking against his ribs. At the last possible moment, the torero stood tall and spun, allowing the tips of the horns to pass just under his arm as he swept the cape over the animal’s head.
In 1975, Peter Singer predicted that a new push for animal rights was on its way. The civil rights movement had fought for basic rights for Black people in the United States. More recently, women and LGBT people had begun to fight for equal treatment under the law. Singer thought that the energy of these movements might soon grow to include other oppressed beings—namely, exploited animals.
In Animal Liberation, Singer argues that racism and sexism and what he calls “speciesism” all rely on arbitrary distinctions. In most Western nations, a person who raises dogs mouth-to-tail in small enclosures would be quickly condemned and would probably face prosecution. And yet, Singer points out, industrial pig farmers do exactly this with equally intelligent, sensitive animals, and they often receive government subsidies for their trouble. Similarly arbitrary distinctions were essential to a slaveholding society, he goes on, and remain so in a society with entrenched systemic racism. It’s important to note that Singer doesn’t assert that slavery and animal captivity are moral equivalents. Instead, he argues that one can help us understand the other. We are biased against certain animals because it is convenient, profitable, or pleasurable for us to exploit them, just as it was convenient, profitable, and pleasurable for plantation owners to exploit the human beings they held in bondage. He contends that in a few short decades, when the next generation (or the next) looks back on our treatment of animals, the practice may well be viewed in much the same way that we now view slavery—as despicable and inexcusable, an expression of extreme cruelty and selfishness.
Singer was wrong about at least one thing. No broad shift in our understanding of animal rights has taken place since the publication of Animal Liberation. There have been some small-scale developments. Vegetarianism and veganism are more common and more socially acceptable than ever before. More people are speaking out in support of at-risk “charismatic megafauna”— creatures like elephants and manatees. There is a growing awareness of the beef industry’s contribution to climate change. But in most ways, things are worse than ever for captive animals. Worldwide, we kill about three times more pigs in industrial slaughterhouses than we did in the 1970s. In the United States, animal welfare laws lag behind those of European countries, including Spain. Species everywhere are suffering from habitat destruction.
If Singer’s arguments held any sway in the culture at large, the recent outcries against entrenched racism, sexual harassment, and homophobia might well have led to another outcry—one against the abysmal treatment of industrially raised farm animals. Instead, fast-food chains that profit enormously from the suffering of animals make shows of embracing social justice, filling their TV ads with diverse casts, pledges of support to various causes, and rainbow banners—all in hopes of turning a bigger profit. Organizations such as PETA are disparaged by members of all political stripes. The “radical actions” of animal rights protesters are rarely covered or even acknowledged by the mainstream media. In academia, the arguments and papers of “animal studies” scholars are so extreme and filled with jargon that they seem to be begging for irrelevance.
How did things end up this way? During a time when so many people seem willing to speak out against injustice, why has the cause of animals remained so decidedly on the fringes?
There are a few obvious answers to this question. For one thing, an ever-growing number of problems today make claims on our attention. Can one be faulted for using one’s limited time and energy to speak out against racial injustice or climate change instead of animal rights? And then there’s the intractable difficulty of habit and convenience. In his essay “Consider the Lobster,” David Foster Wallace admits defeat in “working out any sort of personal ethical system in which [eating animals] is truly defensible instead of just selfishly convenient.” And yet, he eats them anyway. Most of us do things every day without moral justification. Sure, Animal Liberation contains a well-reasoned moral argument. When has that ever changed anyone’s mind?
And yet, the day before the bullfight, I’d been to an event that suggested that the “movement” is suffering from deeper problems.
In the center of Pamplona’s Plaza Consistorial, journalists crowded around Yasmina Martín, one of the organizers of the annual protest against the San Fermín bullfights. In answer to the salvo of questions about her organization, AnimaNaturalis, Martín calmly delivered just what you’d expect. She said that the corrida is a form of torture. That bulls have a developed central nervous system. That they feel pain as intensely as any human. That traditions don’t have to be violent in order to be meaningful.
In short order, a few hundred curious onlookers had joined the journalists. Pamplona’s city hall made for a stately background, adorned with Baroque columns and steel railings and statues of Heracles and Themis, the Greek goddess of justice. A man in a dark button-up stepped past the microphones and started arguing a point with Martín. I caught the word tradicion, just as several dozen people in extravagant dinosaur costumes appeared from behind the building, singing and chanting and waving signs, many of which read, “Bullfights are prehistoric.”
The protesters swarmed through the narrow streets toward the Plaza de Toros and the bullfighting arena. They continued chanting, moving clumsily in their bulky costumes. Diners sitting in front of pintxos restaurants turned to see what the commotion was about, and then went back to their meals. The dinosaurs swarmed onward. La tauromaquia es prehistórica, they chanted.
The protest disbanded about half an hour later, and I found myself disheartened. It wasn’t just the few people in attendance relative to the crowd that had arrived in Pamplona for the festivities. After all, the “Sin Tauromaquia” march is one of the most covered animal rights protests in the world, and dozens of news outlets were there. But I couldn’t help feeling that the T. rex suits were silly, that the protesters had taken a serious issue and unintentionally made it ridiculous. Their slogans were hackneyed, their arguments predictable and uninspiring. The afternoon seemed to me emblematic of the absolute staleness of animal rights activism. And so, my question remained: Where did things go wrong?
When the bull finally fell into a slick of his own blood, the hilt of the torero’s blade buried between his shoulders, the crowd began swaying back and forth and belting out the mariachi number “El Rey”: Llorar y llorar, llorar y llorar (cry and cry, cry and cry).
Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon returns over and over to the idea of emotion in bullfighting. Bullfighting isn’t a sport, Hemingway insists. It’s a tragedy reminiscent of Greek theater. The point of it all is to stir up emotion—sometimes intense emotion—in the audience through, above all, an honest performance. That is, a performance in which the torero takes real risks with the bull, and does so with skill rather than cheap tricks or false bravado. Without having seen the real thing, I’d never have believed that bullfighting might meaningfully be compared to sculpture or theater, as Hemingway does. Now, I almost do.
Even so, I remain certain that the corrida is a form of animal torture. Despite arguments to the contrary, recent studies have shown that bulls suffer extreme physiological and psychological pain during the course of a fight—Yasmina Martín was right, of course. This confirms what must have always been apparent to anyone who knows anything about animals or the signs they give under duress. You can see the bull’s pain in the way he breathes heavily when he stands still after the banderillas are stuck under his skin, and by the way he hesitates slightly after slipping to his knees as he follows the torero’s cape in too sharp a turn. By the end of the fight, the bull is so exhausted and punctured that the matador has to goad him into even a cursory charge, jerking the cape almost under his nose. If adrenaline took the bull through the first minutes of the fight, it is now gone, and he is no doubt feeling his every wound.
And so, it’s difficult for me to admit the truth: when the crowd began singing, I felt intensely alive. I’m still at a loss to say where exactly that feeling came from, but the sensation somewhat resembled that morbid fascination inspired by a particularly gripping horror movie. Spaniards who enjoy the bullfights are fond of pointing out that Americans like to keep their violence toward animals hidden safely away, behind the bland walls of industrial slaughterhouses. They’re not wrong. The corrida was also an electrifying blow to my cultural sensibilities. I was disgusted and enthralled both by the violence and by the audience’s willingness to celebrate it with such gusto. And in the midst of my disgust, I wondered if there might be something worthy and hearty about the Spaniards’ comfort with death. Perhaps, I felt, they knew a thing or two about mortality that I’d missed during the course of my relatively sheltered life.
There was something else, too. As the bull stumbled, still upright but with his aorta punctured by the tip of the sword, the torero held his right hand out to the animal, as if ushering him from life to death. He seemed to be saying, We are all waiting for the end. Throughout the fight, I’d felt (alongside all those other feelings) a loitering sense of my own health and wholeness—the fact of being free from excruciating pain. When the torero made that gesture to the bull, this feeling intensified until it was almost pleasurable. That’s the only way I can describe it. My awareness of my own aliveness was sharpened by my proximity to the opposite—pain and death.
The Festival of San Fermín in Pamplona is no longer the quaint local spectacle that it was in Hemingway’s time. (Eric Nathan/Alamy)
When Martín spoke to the reporters about a bull’s nervous system and the bovine capacity for both mental suffering and physical pain, she was drawing on the work of my childhood hero, Singer, who puts these neurological functions at the center of his philosophy. Rather than erecting arbitrary lines between those species we feel comfortable exploiting and those we do not, Singer wants us to remember our own vested interest in avoiding sensations of pain, and to extend that consideration to members of other species.
This argument is part of a long tradition of animal rights activism. In ancient Greece, the philosopher and scientist Theophrastus railed against his teacher Aristotle’s callousness toward animals. Men and animals, he wrote, “do not differ, above all in sensations.” In 19th-century Britain, an Irish lawyer named Colonel Richard Martin prosecuted a street salesman for beating his donkey by bringing the animal to court as the sole witness, showing the judges her injuries and asking them to imagine sustaining similar ones. A few decades prior, the utilitarian thinker Jeremy Bentham had written, “The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?” In the late 19th century, the feminist and doctor Anna Kingford argued vehemently against the practice of vivisection. “Pain is pain,” she wrote, “and injustice is injustice, whoever the victim.” Today, academics interested in “animal studies” tend to have complicated feelings about Singer. They critique his unbending allegiance to utilitarianism and his failure, in their view, to properly interrogate his own biases as a white man. But, as far as I know, nobody has meaningfully questioned his argument that the shared capacity for suffering is the best basis for changing the way we relate to animals.
The pain argument has long defined the animal rights movement, and continues to do so. And yet, during the bullfight, witnessing an animal in obvious pain, I felt something much more complicated than revulsion. Why didn’t the corrida inspire straightforward outrage at the suffering on show, even in somebody like myself, who (like many others) is disposed toward sympathy—if not always perfect compassion—for the plight of captive animals? This question, it seems to me, is closely related to the question of why the animal rights movement has not yet lived up to its potential.
The philosopher Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain puts forward an alternative understanding of pain, one that helps explain why sympathy and revulsion weren’t the only emotions I felt at the bullfight. The book isn’t all that well known outside academia, but it has helped reshape the way many scholars and historians understand torture—not only how torture affects victims, but also how it changes perpetrators and witnesses. It’s an impressionistic work, far from scientific, and at times frustratingly opaque. It mixes history and literature and philosophy, along with a healthy dash of Scarry’s boisterous imagination. And yet for all that, it is perhaps richer and more evocative than anything else written on the subject of suffering.
In 1986, Singer reviewed The Body in Pain in The New York Review of Books. “The book is cavalier in its disregard for the hard work of providing either factual evidence or serious philosophical argument for what it says,” he wrote. He objected to Scarry’s application of terms such as materialism and her freewheeling account of the history of torture. One senses in Singer’s quibbles and dismissals that his disagreement with Scarry ran deeper than he was admitting. If this was innovative work, he concluded, with uncharacteristic harshness, “I will do without innovation every time.”
I think Singer must have felt Scarry prodding at one of the central assumptions of Animal Liberation: that the shared capacity for pain might be the basis for a revised relationship between humans and animals. Among other things, she contends that pain tends to separate—rather than unite—those who experience it from those who don’t. “For the person whose pain it is,” she writes, “it is ‘effortlessly’ grasped (that is, even with the most heroic effort it cannot not be grasped); while for the person outside the sufferer’s body, what is ‘effortless’ is not grasping it.” Said somewhat more plainly: a bystander never actually feels a sufferer’s pain, no matter how earnest the attempt to do so. If you have been in proximity to someone in extreme pain, you know how disconcerting the experience can be—the pain, all-consuming within the sufferer’s body, is nothing within your own. You might begin to feel hopelessly alienated from the sufferer, despite any physical closeness. Scarry says that torture exaggerates this dynamic. Cries for help, she writes, which ought to occasion attention and assistance, can almost serve to discredit the pain.
This line of argument helps explain why undercover videos of animal abuse in feedlots and slaughterhouses—released by organizations such as PETA—haven’t exactly proved to be effective propaganda. The feelings these sights inspire in their audiences are complex. As I walked out of the bullring, the guard at the gate expressed surprise that I was leaving so soon. “It’s not for me,” I told him. But that wasn’t quite true. I wanted my feelings about the fight to be straightforward, and I felt a bit guilty that they weren’t—guilty that part of me had even enjoyed the experience. It would have been easier to forget the whole thing, just as I find it easier not to think too hard about a PETA-produced video of an industrial hog slaughterhouse that I saw years ago.
Scarry has more to say on these fronts. Pain not only distances sufferers from those around them, it also distances sufferers from themselves. That is, when people are in extreme pain, they become less like themselves. Our preferences and peculiarities, habits of speech and gesture, even our most deeply held beliefs are likely to be forgotten, or even permanently obliterated, in the face of torture. That’s part of why torture is used by authoritarian regimes (and a few democratic ones, too). It’s not first and foremost a means of collecting information that would otherwise remain inaccessible. More important is its power to break the strength and idealism necessary for resistance.
Since animals feel pain, we might consider the probability that they also suffer some version of the process that Scarry describes. For example, wouldn’t the preferences that make a pig a pig (the desire to root or the ability to use more than 20 distinct vocalizations to communicate with members of its species) be degraded by suffering? The bull I saw that afternoon in the arena, ready to charge anything that moved, was not quite representative of its species. Bullfight aficionados talk about the picadors’ lances “focusing” the animal. Before this first pain is inflicted, the bull is often more intent on finding a way to escape the arena than on charging the toreros. As the fight goes on, the increasing damage to the bull’s body seems to resign him to his fate. Thinking back to the first corrida he attended, Hemingway writes that the bull became “an altogether different animal when the banderillas went in, and I resented the loss of the free wild quality he brought with him into the ring.”
The bull behaves as many cornered, Injured animals (IIing human beings) will behave, albeit with significantly more strength and gusto. He attacks his tormentors relentlessly. His apparent willingness to participate in the fight then becomes a means by which the audience justifies his torture. Look, he wants to fight. This process resembles one of the insidious mechanisms of institutions such as slavery. The more certain people are made to suffer, the easier it is to dehumanize them, to view them as stupid, unworthy of serious moral consideration, even deserving of exploitative treatment—as willing participants in their own subjugation.
The very thing that Singer believes will bring the masses over to his side can therefore have the opposite effect. When people read about or watch animals in pain, they witness these beings in a reduced state, a state that does not accurately represent the creatures’ normal habits and abilities. Most people who see a PETA-sponsored video will feel guilt of some kind. But they may also be left with a lingering sense that the animals they have seen aren’t worthy of much more than cursory moral consideration.
None of this is to say that it is impossible (or even all that rare) for humans to meaningfully identify with nonhuman creatures. Rather, it means that we don’t do it readily when we encounter them incapacitated by suffering. In this sense, the animal rights movement took a wrong turn with Theophrastus, the first to articulate the pain theory. Singer writes powerfully of the parallels among racism and sexism and “speciesism.” But—fixated on pain as the basis of his call to action—he fails to remember that the civil rights movement did not gain momentum because white people pitied the suffering of Black people. Rather, the voices of Black artists, musicians, thinkers, and protesters became too powerful to ignore. The same was true of the gay pride and the women’s liberation movements. History suggests that human beings are likelier to treat other humans with dignity when forced to consider their potential, rather than simply their suffering.
A few years ago, my wife and I were in the kitchen of our farmhouse in rural Virginia when an interview with the naturalist E. O. Wilson came on the radio show Science Friday. Every summer, we’d battled ants that lived under the stove and in the coping behind the counter, mostly by wiping them away with a sponge whenever they crossed the counter too boldly. So we both perked up when Wilson said that people often ask him what they should do about ants in their house. His practiced response? Watch your step, he says, give the ants a dab of whipped cream, and try to look at them as creatures from another planet. By the time Wilson was done talking, I was pretty sure that I’d be letting the ants make their forays without reaching for the sponge (though I’ve yet to go the whipped cream route). And yet, all he’d done was offer a series of observations about ants: that they communicate and coordinate with one another through chemical secretions; that some species of ants domesticate aphids to harvest their sugary secretions; that the total weight of all ants on Earth probably equals the weight of all human beings.
Of course, not everyone is going to put away the boric acid traps after learning something new about an insect often considered a pest. But what about Craig Foster’s documentary film My Octopus Teacher ? If you have friends who have seen it, ask them if they still eat octopus, and you might be surprised by how many couldn’t anymore, or didn’t want to. I’m in this camp. The movie produced in me an unexpectedly—to borrow a phrase from Hemingway—intense degree of emotion. When the octopus emerges from her lair after the long labor of regrowing her arm, and when she wrangles with and then escapes the tiger shark, I experienced a sense of victory that rivaled the momentary aliveness I felt at the bullfight. And when she passed away at the end of the film, I felt I’d learned more about mortality than I had from reading Death in the Afternoon. For the first time in many years, I found myself tearing up in front of a screen.
The animal rights movement could be a movement founded on animal potential, and the powerful emotion that stories and facts about animals can inspire in human beings. The difficult work is already being done by scientists, videographers, and naturalists, who every day are discovering and documenting new ways that animals process and interact with the world. Increasingly, philosophers and journalists are also part of this puzzle. David M. Peña-Guzmán’s recent book on animal dreaming is exemplary, linking the philosophic puzzle of consciousness—and the question of whether animals have it—with new evidence of their capacity to dream. For example, he reexamines data from a 2000 study, published in the journal Science, that analyzed the neural activity of sleeping zebra finches. Research on birdsong, Peña-Guzmán writes,
has historically focused on what these animals do while awake to imitate and memorize their song, but [biologists Amish] Dave and [Daniel] Margoliash wondered whether sleep might also play a role in song acquisition. Could sleep help juvenile finches internalize the acoustic patterns they hear from their family members and commit them to long-term memory? Could these birds learn their song at least in part by rehearsing it in their minds while asleep?
Dave and Margoliash concluded that although zebra finches do rehearse songs while dreaming, they do so without effectively experiencing the sounds. Peña-Guzmán argues that this conclusion says more about the scientists’ implicit biases than about the actual behavior of the birds. He points to evidence that the researchers overlooked, suggesting that the finches could well “hear” songs that exist only in their sleeping minds. “They [hear] it silently,” he writes, “much like we hear the clamoring soundscapes of our own dreams—the voice of a lover, the rustling in the trees, the sound of a church bell in the distance.” For Peña-Guzmán, dreaming becomes a point of connection between humans and animals, a shared potential that closes the gap between species.
It’s important that the abysmal conditions in industrial farms and slaughterhouses continue to be well publicized. We can’t simply wish away the pain that is the day-to-day reality of too many animals. But because of human beings’ complex relationship with suffering, this information should be generously balanced by concrete evidence of animal potential. Rather than parading around in dinosaur costumes or harassing customers at neighborhood butcher shops, organizations such as PETA and AnimaNaturalis might devote a hefty portion of their resources to broadcasting and promoting the newest research on the behavioral and mental capabilities of animals. They also might work to encourage people to form relationships with a greater variety of animal species in sanctuaries and other places where humans can safely view wild animals. Every year, hundreds of thousands of people go to Florida’s springs to interact with the manatees. They come away with a sense of the animals’ calm majesty. Some rank the experience as one of the most memorable of their lives. As a consequence, there has been, to date, overwhelming public support for projects aimed at rehabilitating the state’s coastal seagrass, the disappearance of which due to water pollution is causing an unprecedented decline in manatee populations. This kind of collective energy (though it may ultimately prove no match for human-caused ecological degradation) is at least a start, and it might serve as a model for other at-risk species. Rights organizations could also connect people with farms where animals that provide humans with nonmeat products are treated with dignity and lead fulfilling lives. People need to see animals at their best before they will care about saving them from the worst.
Instead of treating animals as things to be pitied, we should follow E. O. Wilson’s lead and try to think of them as if they came from another planet. Animals can show us new and radical ways of understanding and interacting with the world, if we give them the space to do so. When we advocate for their dignity and well-being, the question should not be, “Are they ever subject to pain?” but rather, “Do they have the space and habitat and social contact necessary to live up to their potential?”
Something I noticed during the corrida: few people brought their children to the fight. But the day before the festival, an enormous line had formed outside a lot where several local breeders were displaying their prized bulls. Parents pushed strollers and held their kids’ hands as they waited to see the animals. Inside a corral, many of the bulls stood with steers. I heard a boy ask his father about them, and the man explained that the steers were there to keep the bulls calm during transport to an unfamiliar place. It occurred to me then that the relationship between humans and other species isn’t going to change overnight. After all, we were gawking at a bull that would soon be killed in the arena. And yet, there also seemed something hopeful in the moment—emissaries of the next generation admiring the calm of an immensely strong and sensitive animal. l
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Some years ago, I found myself standing beside the famed luthier Dana Bourgeois while he prepared the top of a Brazilian rosewood dreadnought guitar that he was building in his Lewiston, Maine, shop. Bourgeois is one of the most respected contemporary acoustic guitar builders, with dealers all over the world, and the list of musicians who have played his instruments includes the likes of Doc Watson, Bryan Sutton, Luke Bryan, and Natalie Maines. I had read a good bit about Bourgeois before I met him, and I already owned and loved one of his guitars and wanted to learn what made them sound so special.
One of the things he’s known for is personally voicing the top of each instrument before it is joined to the back and the sides. To accomplish this task, he uses a method called tap tuning. To the underside of an acoustic guitar’s top he glues several narrow strips of wood called braces. The “luthier’s dilemma,” as Bourgeois puts it, is that if the top, which acts as a soundboard, is too thick or the braces are too strong, the instrument will not vibrate properly, and the guitar will lack resonance and sound dead. If, however, the top is too thin or the braces are too weak, the guitar, which is subjected to as much as 200 pounds of string tension, will literally pull itself to pieces.
While I watched, he held the braced side of the top—two joined pieces of Adirondack spruce—near his left ear. With his free hand, he started thumping the other side, his fingers moving from one spot to another, tapping it some 15 or 20 times. He stepped back over to his workbench, laid the top down, and began to shave minuscule curls of wood off the braces. Then he lifted it beside his ear and repeated the tuning process, after which he returned to the bench and shaved a bit more off the braces, then took a small sheet of sandpaper and sanded a bit of wood off the treble side of the top. Once again, he repeated the tapping process. Finally, he smiled and laid the top down on his workbench. “I think our friend here,” he said, pointing at the top, “is pretty much done.”
I started playing guitar in early September 1965—I can date this beginning so precisely because the lessons were a present from my father when I turned nine at the end of August. The man who taught me was named Harry Trammell, and he worked for the Department of Agriculture’s Soil Conservation Service in my hometown of Indianola, Mississippi. If the name of the town sounds familiar, it is most likely because Indianola is also the hometown of the great blues guitarist B. B. King. In addition, countless other great bluesmen were born close by, among them Robert Johnson, Charley Patton, Skip James, and John Lee Hooker. Though I had grown up being exposed to country music and bluegrass, I had not been impervious to “the British invasion,” which I knew had its roots in the Delta blues, and I was motivated to learn to play by my desire to start a rock band. I eventually did that, but only after playing between the ages of 10 and 12 in a country combo with Mr. Trammell himself and a local football coach.
Though it seems preposterous today, I’d wanted to play guitar in those days not just because I loved the sounds emanating from it but also because I’d bought into the notion that it might do for me what it had done for the great bluesmen: deliver me from a life in the cotton field. I had watched my tenant-farmer parents and grandparents work from dawn till dusk for very little, and I knew I did not want their lives. I first looked to the guitar as a means of escape, but fortunately I had enough sense to figure out by high school that true musicians had some skill that I lacked, so I turned to my other love—literature, specifically the novel—and found a voice and a life in words. Ironically, that life has afforded me enough income and enough leisure time to take music lessons from some first-rate guitarists and to own and play some first-rate instruments, including quite a few vintage Martins and Gibsons and a number of guitars built by Dana Bourgeois. Every one of them is different from all the others.
The first thing I do each day is pull one of the seven guitars I currently own out of its case. I place it on a stand in my study and play it off and on all day. My study is next to our bedroom, and I nearly always go to bed a couple of hours after my wife. I can’t play late at night without waking her, so I’m usually just sitting there reading. Even so, I leave the instrument out until the last moment. My wife once asked me why I don’t put it away sooner, and without having to think, I said, “I like its company.”
Personality attaches itself to acoustic guitars just as easily as it resists attachment to, say, coffee tables. Nearly all examples of both are made of wood. There the similarities cease. The coffee table, no matter how attractive or valuable, is in the end merely functional. You set your coffee cup on it, you stand your wine glass there, you lay the morning paper there. About the only time it might seem endowed with personality is when you bang your shin on it in the dark and call it a name casting doubt on its lineage. The guitar, meanwhile, has a voice and a personality of its own, which are the result of numerous factors, chief among them the woods out of which it was built and the craftmanship put into constructing it. The voice and temperament of the guitar are subject to radical changes depending on the environment in which it finds itself. If its surroundings are too humid, the top will swell, throwing it out of tune. If they are too arid, the top will shrink, which lowers the action and causes fret buzz and other problems, including cracks. An acoustic guitar will punish you for neglect. You have to respect it in order for it to respect you and grant you the use of its voice.
“Storied Strings: The Guitar in American Art”—an exhibition, currently at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, that’s moving in late May to the Frist Art Museum in Nashville—frequently depicts the symbiotic relationship between the guitar and the player. Working musicians display a wide array of attitudes toward their instruments. Some think of them in the most personal terms, as they might a loved one. No other guitar but that guitar will do. The iconic folksinger Odetta might fall into this camp. Trained as an opera singer but convinced that her race would prove a constant stumbling block, she taught herself to play guitar and became one of the most prominent figures of the ’50s and ’60s folk revival. Bob Dylan, after hearing her for the first time, got rid of his electric guitar and bought a Gibson acoustic like hers. In Otto Hagel’s 1958 portrait, included in the show, she appears to regard the instrument with nothing less than reverence, clutching it to her heart and holding it close to her face while she plays, her gaze trained on the fingers of her left hand as they fret the strings. Odetta was a large, powerfully built woman, and looking at Hagel’s photograph, one gets the feeling that prying the guitar away from her would not be an easy task.
At the opposite extreme are musicians like Woody Guthrie, photographed in 1943 by Al Aumuller, shown wearing a flannel shirt and mariner’s cap, in his hands a Gibson L-00 with a message taped to the top: this machine kills fascists. It’s open to question whether Guthrie would have been able to tell you what specific model Gibson he was playing. He owned and played hundreds of guitars over the course of his career. Most of them were Martins, typically small bodied like Guthrie himself. Some he lost; others he reportedly gave away. Many fine musicians whom I’ve known are thoroughly unsentimental about the instruments they play, regarding them as tools, much as I might regard the keyboard on which I’m typing these words. Guthrie took things a step further, viewing the guitar in mechanistic terms, seeing it as a political weapon.
Two of the oil paintings in this immensely rewarding exhibition speak to me in an almost haunting manner: Charles White’s 1952 work Goodnight Irene and Robert Gwathmey’s Girl with Guitar from 1965. White, associated with the Harlem Renaissance, was born in Chicago, but his mother was born in Mississippi. The painting depicts a barefoot Black man playing acoustic guitar in what appears to be a cabin while a woman stands behind him, eyes closed, head resting on his broad shoulders. The song “Goodnight Irene,” originally recorded by the bluesman Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter in 1933, is likely to be recognized by almost everyone, and that familiarity, coupled with the images in the painting, will surely suggest the Delta blues to anyone acquainted with the blues tradition. But it’s worth noting that Lead Belly was from Louisiana and a very eclectic musician who played not only guitar but also violin, mandolin, and accordion, drawing from a variety of musical genres. In Gwathmey’s Girl with Guitar, we see a young Black woman alone on her porch with a guitar, her eyes shut tight, the long, slim fingers of her left hand forming a chord on the fretboard while her right hand is draped across the guitar body, dangling uselessly. She can put it to no good use because the guitar lacks both strings and a bridge. I was previously unfamiliar with Gwathmey’s work, but I have learned that he was considered a social realist, and it’s hard not to see a message in the painting: the woman has an instrument, she has the long fingers of Robert Johnson (and appears to be forming the same chord we see in the ubiquitous 1936 studio portrait of Johnson that has adorned so many records and CDs), but until she can afford to get the guitar outfitted with a bridge and strings, she has no voice.
These two images together took me back to a day in the spring of 1971 when I stood on the porch at my grandmother’s house, my shiny new Fender Coronado II suspended from my shoulders. The guitar was plugged into the small Sears amp I’d received the previous Christmas. By then I was leading my own rock band, and I was working on some blues riffs when a pickup truck pulled into the yard, turned around, and backed up to the porch. In the truck bed was a couch that my grandmother had just purchased from a furniture store in nearby Leland. Two Black men got out of the truck, the driver in his mid-40s, I would have guessed, the other man considerably younger. While I kept right on playing, my grandmother came out and held the door open, and the two men let down the tailgate, lifted the couch out, carried it up the steps and into the house. I noticed the older man glance at me as he went by.
When they came back out, he started toward the steps, then stopped and turned around. “Excuse me,” he said. “Sounds like you must’ve been listening to B. B.”
In 1971, racial passions were running high in the Mississippi Delta. Though the U.S. Supreme Court had determined in Brown v. Board of Education, back in 1954, that the “separate but equal” approach to public schooling was unconstitutional, Delta whites had by and large ignored the ruling until the federal courts finally forced the integration of the public schools, prompting a mass exodus of whites to segregation academies. I only mention this to explain why I was surprised that the delivery man had spoken to a white teenager who was a complete stranger. I was even more surprised when I heard myself say, “Yes, sir,” which I had been trained since the cradle not to do when speaking to a Black man.
“You know where B. B. got that lick you just played?” he asked.
I hoped my grandmother would remain inside, fussing with her new couch. “No, sir,” I said.
“Got it from T-Bone Walker. You ever listened to him?”
I hadn’t listened to him, though I’d read about him in the liner notes on rock albums where he was cited as an important influence. “No, sir,” I said.
“B. B.’s got a little different touch, plays it a little smoother. Want me to show you how T-Bone played it?”
I don’t know if I spoke at all. I just know I lifted the strap over my head and handed him the guitar. I tried to hand him my pick, too, but he said he didn’t need it. Rather than strap on the instrument, he knelt on one knee and balanced my Fender on the other. “B. B. plays it like this,” he said. Using his thumbnail, he ripped off the passage that for the past week or so I’d been mangling. It sounded just like it did when B. B. played it on his album Indianola Mississippi Seeds. “And then T-Bone,” he said, “he played it like this.” Nothing like the sound that burst from my little Sears amp had ever come out of it before or ever would again. It was raw, ghostly, unforgettable. I still hear it more than half a century later. “Without listening to T-Bone,” he said, rising and handing me back my guitar, “B. B. wouldn’t be B. B.” He smiled, revealing a couple of gaps between his teeth. “Maybe one day folks’ll say you’re you because you listened to B. B. That’s kinda how things work.”
As he turned to leave, I asked his name.
Again that smile. “I’m James Thomas,” he said, “but most folks just call me Son.”
During the next quarter of a century, until his death from a stroke in 1993, James “Son” Thomas, who made a living digging graves, would become famous for appearing in several films about the blues. He would perform and record all over the world. He was also a sculptor who used unfired clay that he’d dug out of the Yazoo River, and he saw his work displayed at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. While there, he was introduced to an admirer named Nancy Reagan. According to his New York Times obituary, Son Thomas was fond of saying, “Black and white people have to stick together, because we’re all going to the same place: down in the clay.”
I have little doubt that Son Thomas, were he alive today, would find much to admire in “The Guitar in American Art,” in which one work after another so aptly conveys the charm, the mystery, and the transformative power of these instruments fashioned from the most ordinary materials. Until someone plays them, they’re nothing but wires and wood.
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Poverty, by America by Matthew Desmond; Crown, 304 pp., $28
Americans have never been particularly good at seeing the poor. Whether your cable news channel is MSNBC or Fox, you will hear very little about poor people. The middle class tends to imagine poverty as a problem of developing nations, its worst forms in the distant past and reminiscent of a Dickens novel. The cultural impulse to make the poor “invisible” is undeniable, but the so-called invisible hand of the market, writes Princeton sociologist Matthew Desmond, does more than notice the poor; it preys on them. Despite common assumptions about opportunity, Desmond shows how Americans of means support a government that thwarts real solutions and perpetuates inequality while never really trying to eliminate poverty.
Desmond’s book is a jeremiad, a wake-up call about one sad, simple truth: the rich, and even the middle class, actually benefit by keeping a sizable part of the population (larger than Australia’s total, in fact) below the poverty line. To illustrate, he refers to a poignant scene from John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939), in which a tractor driver is hired to tear down a tenant farmer’s home. As the farmer threatens to shoot him, the driver protests that he’s not to blame, that someone else would invariably take his place. “[O]ne man’s poverty,” writes Desmond, “was another man’s profit.” In this dog-eat-dog existence, Desmond implies, the poor are pitted against each other.
Desmond’s argument is familiar, that educated elites are out of touch, wallowing in abstractions and making excuses in an effort to avoid accountability. When Americans categorize the poor as charity cases, as the “other,” they miss the crucial fact that poverty is about the unequal distribution of privileges, not simply wealth. In the 19th century, Americans recognized that the enormous fortunes of robber barons rested on the backs of grossly underpaid workers. The gig economy is nothing new. After the Civil War, industrial workers were independent contractors, held liable for their own injuries. The poverty trap that Desmond writes about has a long history that he does not incorporate into his argument as much as he might.
Desmond writes that his father was a minister, suggesting that a jeremiad suits him––even in a book that contains a treasure trove of facts. Many of the points he makes have been made before: poverty is increased by the loss of unions, corporate lobbyists undercut real reform of tax or wage laws, banks exploit the poor with overdraft fees, landlords gouge renters, and predatory companies bilk the poor for profits. Consumers reap advantages from cheap goods and services, too. While the rich get massive tax breaks, the middle class gets government assistance in the form of subsidized health and retirement benefits. Desmond tactfully reminds us that we “are all on the dole.”
Some forms of inequality could be easily fixed. As Desmond notes, in many countries citizens don’t file taxes: the government does it. It’s quick, it’s fair, and high-priced accountants aren’t there looking for loopholes. As we have learned from the release of Donald Trump’s tax returns, lying about one’s taxes is often cost-effective. The IRS, Desmond writes, loses a “trillion a year in unpaid taxes.”
Desmond contends that the privatization of wealth explains why U.S. infrastructure is crumbling. Russia isn’t the only nation with oligarchs. As our American oligarchs “accumulate more money, they become less dependent on public goods” and, Desmond says, “less interested in supporting them.” Private schools, private hospitals, private jets, private islands, offshore accounts, and gated communities have created an exclusive parallel society where those with growing personal fortunes have no need for public institutions. The principal goal of oligarchs, we’re told, is to use all of their power to hoard wealth and privileges.
What are Desmond’s solutions? Drawing a comparison between antebellum antislavery agitation and today’s poverty, he calls for every American to become a “poverty abolitionist.” It is not enough to rely on Great Society programs, he maintains; these made poverty “less lethal” but did not make it “disappear.” Class desegregation—integrating affordable housing into every neighborhood—is one of the reforms he advocates.
The larger dilemma Desmond points to is something he calls “scarcity diversion,” by which elites stash away their money and land. By treating the practice as natural, they allot what little is left over to the poor. In the end, Americans on opposite ends of the political spectrum agree that the economy benefits the rich and harms the poor. The new millionaires club in Congress does the bidding of the rich, which means that worthwhile reform is highly unlikely to be realized anytime soon.
Desmond skirts a crucial part of the story: class isn’t merely about wealth and privilege, but class identity is reproduced in families. A most radical proposition for exposing class privilege was put forward by New Deal–era Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace, who contended that if 100,000 children were taken from poor families and another 100,000 from rich families, and they were given the same education, food, and housing, it would be impossible to tell the difference between them when they reached adulthood. His theoretical point was obvious: the family, more than any other institution, reproduces class identity. (The 21st-century equivalent would be a reality TV show in which the incoming class at Princeton finds itself living for four years on a Native American reservation.) Such a redistribution of wealth and privilege is something no American would ever tolerate, of course. And that’s the crux of the problem: privilege and a sense of entitlement begin at birth; parents are deeply invested in protecting their own.
If only laying out the facts as Desmond does would change the average reader’s mind. But it won’t. In the United States, poverty has generally been treated as a taboo, an inherited curse. The duty of caring for the poor is consigned to social workers, police, and religious institutions. Families are expected to help their own. Americans are tribal in more ways than partisan politics exposes: walls of rationalization are erected in our heads. It’s not privatization of wealth alone that is the barrier to reform; it’s a painfully long history in which people of promise, the “worthy,” are cleaved from the unworthy poor. By rhetorical means, the working poor are pitted against the unemployed; it turns out that those who do escape poverty are often less charitable to those stuck in the poverty ditch. Moving up the ladder can mean forgetting where one came from. The social dynamic is not just “bifurcated” into rich and poor but fractured along a series of class lines and often manipulated by pernicious and powerful ideologies.
That complexity is not effectively addressed in Desmond’s book. Rather, he sees “complexity” itself as a ruse used by elites to do nothing. And yes, he is partly correct. But getting at the root of the crisis of poverty means cutting through class fictions that persist at the community level as well as at the national level. Class is a material and a mental condition. For the rich, the educated, the professionals, and the rest of the “winners” in American society, class is so woven into identity that all are loath to part with it.
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Amanda Holmes reads Lisel Mueller’s poem “Not Only the Eskimos.” Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: [email protected]. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman.
This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.
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Amanda Holmes reads Agha Shahid Ali’s poem “The Dacca Gauzes.” Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: [email protected]. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman.
This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.
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Amanda Holmes reads T. S. Eliot’s poem “The Hollow Men.” Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: [email protected]. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman.
This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.
The post “The Hollow Men” by T. S. Eliot appeared first on The American Scholar.
Amanda Holmes reads Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poem “Recuerdo.” Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: [email protected]. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman.
This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.
The post “Recuerdo” by Edna St. Vincent Millay appeared first on The American Scholar.
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