Issue 1 - Transition - Symposeum is a magazine by and for rational optimists

Vital Arrogant Fatal Dominant

| On Poems, Attention, and Relation

Emily Meffert | The Necessary | Essay

And where that language does not yet exist, it is our poetry which helps to fashion it. Poetry is not only dream or vision, it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. —Audre Lorde, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury” In recent conversations I’ve asked friends whether they read poems and why not. The question is generally why not; aside from a handful who read them often, I’ve found little enthusiasm. Among the replies have been several who preferred reading nonfiction, several who said they didn’t understand poems or found them inaccessible, several who claimed proclivities for linear thinking and aversions to ambiguity; “pretentious” and “esoteric” were thrown around. An execrable ex wanted to enjoy poetry but hadn’t found a writer whose poems resonated consistently. I asked him what anticipated reward moved him to engage with a piece of writing. “Learning something new,” he replied. “Whether a new fact, a new perspective, a new word, a new idea, or a new way to articulate an old idea.” Well. An Austin psychonaut refracted and dispersed my question into three. Noting that poems were slow in a fast world, she wondered why she might slow down to engage with them—whether she would get left behind. Observing that she had traditionally approached literature to receive, she asked how poems actually gave—whether they gave as much as they took. She questioned—finally—whether there were value in poetic meaning, which seemed to proffer few definitive answers. Well. I had no definitive answers. I should have defined poem when I asked the question. Before proceeding as though discussing something sole and whole, I should have pointed at the thing to confirm we didn’t have the same name for two different flocks of birds. American poet and essayist Adrienne Rich wrote that “in the wash of poetry the old, beaten, worn stones of language take on colors that disappear when you sieve them up out of the streambed and try to sort them out.” A thing reveals its identity through its relations to other things. Verse—be it rhymed, metrical, or free—may be identified by its divergence from prose, which is applied toward ends that are often distinct from the aims of a poem. The aims of poems are manifold and nonessential to my definition. The crucial thing is that successful verse makes sense. Successful prose, by contrast, adopts sense. We know it adopts sense because when we encounter effective prose we can usually read it quickly. It doesn’t demand sustained scrutiny to decide how words within the body of text relate to each other. They simply do. They aren’t tasked to create sense where none has been assumed; neither are we. When prose is well-written the result is that we construe language as a medium; it conveys some objective fact or situation or idea that is independent of language. Verse isn’t so sure. Poems hand us a down blanket burping feathers and call it shish kebab. Then, if we can agree that shish kebab signifies this thing that keeps us warm and ticklish, we can relate. This is not for the sake of confusion. This is to draw attention to language as a function of social agreements. Which is to underscore that words do not convey facts, situations, or ideas, but create these. Imagine yellow. What is it? Yellow isn’t a canary or the paunch of an egg, but it may describe these. Light with a dominant wavelength of 580 nanometers isn’t yellow, but it is a condition that makes yellow possible. You might spend hours pursuing the meaning of yellow without once mentioning candlelight on the kitchen ceiling, though your omission wouldn’t make it less yellow than that goldfinch with the scrap wing you tossed into traffic, as a kid, on a hunch it might fly. All this to say that yellow is the consensus reached when two individuals neglect the dishes and turn their attention upward, to the warm glaze leaping across beams, and point, and tongue their low incisors, then round their lips just so. Yellow, they agree. Yes. Which is to say that we are, in our daily lives, responsible for making decisions about the meaning of words, and for taking pains to understand each other. I once heard the rules of the road in America contrasted with the rules of the road in Nepal, where there are none. In Nashville, following established laws allows drivers to focus on their individual safety almost exclusively. They don’t need to be especially mindful of other drivers; they won’t be held accountable if others fail to heed those laws. In Kathmandu, with few enforced rules to structure traffic, everyone is responsible for everyone else. Pedestrians cross anywhere; drivers must pay attention. In their freedom, each motorist is inextricably bound to all others. This is to define poem analogously: an approach to verbal expression that is lawless and contextual, that demands careful attention, that stimulates relation. It is the thing that floods dry contrary stones until their colors bleed a fresh, athletic logic. ✵ I’ve been thinking of poems lately. There’s a sense, now, of contracted possibility on a grand scale. I don’t mean in theory. The reality of what is possible in our daily lives is more limited than it was in February of last year. I have been shut in small rooms, hushed by terrors biological and political. I have interpreted power and appeased those who flaunt it structurally. I’ve gone days speaking no words except the ones they made. We are suffering, now, in old and new ways. (This is not projection, but an observation.) An awareness of our ancient hurt grasps even those for whom it’s news. In America—this peculiar ecosystem, as the myth goes, where individual parts may act without disturbing everything else—we’re daily confronting the centuries of violence that we’ve rationalized, closeted, and rewritten for as long. We’re lying in the bed we’ve made and made. In their responses to my question about poems, my friends have led me to consider whether the possibility exists of conceiving new circumstances in a tired idiom, which seems ill-suited for engagement with disruptive ideas. The problem, to my mind, is evident. “My hunch is that this era—of scrutinizing collective priorities, of forging new arenas for solidarity—clamors for somethings poems are uniquely positioned to supply.” Austrian-born philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein famously declared that the limits of his language were the limits of his world. Illustrating this idea, English novelist George Orwell wrote that the aim of Newspeak—the language of the totalitarian superstate in his too-familiar dystopia—is “to narrow the range of thought.” Through reducing the vocabulary available to Newspeakers, the state would make free thought “literally impossible, because there [would] be no words in which to express it.” We hardly need an imagined politics to exemplify this danger; we have witnessed persons of enormous influence frame the world within a stiflingly meager set of terms. The enmity they’ve sewn has yielded intractable divisions. Has made us deaf to divergent camps. Has killed us in our homes and neighborhoods. Now we’re thousands innocent and dead. This isn’t metaphorical. This isn’t biological. This is the reign of words, the images they engender, the situations they originate. My hunch is that this era—of scrutinizing collective priorities, of forging new arenas for solidarity—clamors for somethings poems are uniquely positioned to supply. Those are: an exercise in paying attention, an idiosyncratic approach to relation, and an idiom to inaugurate the arriving world. ✵ American philosopher Richard Rorty has described the evolution of literal language as a result of “people who did happen to find words to fit their fantasies,” creating “metaphors which happened to answer to the vaguely felt needs of the rest of the society.” Sex and gender, for instance, caught on—were invented then associated by vocabularies that codified power by shortchanging biological nuance. Historically wielding metaphors to equate human beings and animals, architects of genocide haven’t needed to corrode whole populations’ capacities to instinctually recognize the value of human life; they have needed merely to combine words that stuck. By the same token, the progress of civilization may be told as the story of wild vocables being successfully (and often, as it were, unwittingly) translated into broad tongues. Rorty notes that the Romantic poets—like William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Percy Bysshe Shelley—contributed to the development of an ethical consciousness that would inform the culture of political liberalism. Adrienne Rich, whose poetry and essays have influenced feminist thought and sexual politics, observed that in radical exploration there is “a difficult and dangerous walking on the ice, as we try to find language and images for a consciousness we are just coming into, and with little in the past to support us.” On this point, I say to my friend the psychonaut that the best poems give much; among their gifts is a way to reconcile the vastness of experience with a mode of expression that has not previously accounted for certain kinds of experience. The evolution of Rich’s career reveals a poet who first assimilated the conventions of a male-dominated craft, then ceaselessly pursued new styles, structures, and vocabularies for centering and empowering the perspectives of women—a poet who reconstituted the world and encouraged us to tread as boldly. Rich and the Romantics answer to the apparent dearth of certitude in poems. Whatever they are, they emerge precariously, as saplings from the cracks of a rock face. If works of prose are written to convey known information coherently, then poems are penned to record the pulse of something that is not yet fully understood. The full scope of a poem’s meaning is recognizable only after it has, across decades, conversed with other poems and other arts, refracting lines of public discourse and informing common speech. Every poem extends a contribution to a much larger project, making both the writing and reading of poems a fundamentally collaborative endeavor. Rich renders this as a kind of continuous shared exertion in her poem, “Turning,” affirming that “Finally, we will make change.” She describes this process as leaving superstition behind— first our own, then other’s— that barrier, that stream where swimming against the current will become no metaphor: this is how you land, unpurified, winded, shivering, on the further shore where there are only new kinds of tasks, and old: writing with others that open letter or brief that might—if only—we know it happens: no sudden revelation but the slow turn of consciousness, while every day climbs on the back of the days before: no new day, only a list of days, no task you expect to see finished, but you can’t hold back from the task. In periods of societal transition, old modes of expression don’t just fail to address the unique needs of our historical moment; they maintain harmful attitudes that continue to instigate old forms of violence. Conventional vocabularies, comprising metaphors that have crystallized over time, evoke a more or less distant past. It isn’t the individual poem that provokes a “sudden revelation,” but the collective exercise of reading and writing poems that signifies our commitment to the diversification of language and to linguistic fluidity across time. “The subject is how to break a mold of discourse,” Rich writes, “how little by little minds change / but that they do change.” This “slow turn of consciousness” produces the potential for inclusive thought and institutions that are increasingly sensitive to historically marginalized perspectives. Gradually we discover ways to articulate—then nuance and validate—our traumas, joys, priorities, fears, and hopes. I reply to my friend the psychonaut that this task—finding modes of expression suited to address our unanticipated needs—is indispensable and, yes, necessarily slow. Our objective is to craft language that will, in Rorty’s words, “strike the next generation as inevitable.” Highlighting the evolution of language as the continuous creation and gradual literalization of metaphors, he acknowledges the centrality of the poet within efforts to redescribe ourselves. What matters—to our collective understanding of historical and contemporary narratives, and thereby to the values we share and the institutions we build to support those values—is how we choose to describe the things that populate our public and private lives. Thus emerges the poet’s work. The poet’s work varies with the age in which she writes. I’ve heard twenty-first century poetry critiqued for its failure to speak, as Walt Whitman did in the mid-nineteenth, for “the female equally with the male…[for] every hue and caste…[for] every rank and religion.” It avoids claiming that “these are really the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands” and that “if they are not yours as much as mine they are nothing.” Writing on the cusp of Civil War, Whitman’s emphasis on the commonalities that united members of a bitterly divided nation appealed to an audience that might have had limited terms for discussing solidarity, and that was receptive to an imagined national identity that could transcend political boundaries. “The full scope of a poem’s meaning is recognizable only after it has, across decades, conversed with other poems and other arts, refracting lines of public discourse and informing common speech.” The contemporary situation demands a different poetic orientation. “The universal is a fantasy,” writes Claudia Rankine in her introduction to The Racial Imaginary. “What we want to avoid at all costs,” she explains, “is an opposition between writing that accounts for race and writing that is ‘universal.’ If we continue to think of the ‘universal’ as the pinnacle, we will always discount writing that doesn’t look universal because it accounts for race.” Rankine’s observation, which could not have emerged from the chapter of American history that produced Whitman’s comprehensive attitude (there existed no frame of reference or body of works to make it sensible), may be contemplated even beyond the scope of race. Continuing to hold poems to an unattainable standard of universality diminishes writing that explores the perspectives of any except the most privileged identities in our society. Such a nonviable expectation hinders poems from affecting what Whitman sought to facilitate through the structural and subjective inclusiveness of his verse, but which must be attempted by contemporary poets through alternative means. That is, solidarity. Rather than sharing a common language or nature that might be adapted as a basis for unity, we are essentially alike, Rorty argues, just in our susceptibility to pain. “Human solidarity,” he writes, “is not a matter of sharing a common truth or a common goal but of sharing a common selfish hope, the hope that one’s world—the little things around which one has woven into one’s final vocabulary—will not be destroyed.” Words like kindness, decency, and dignity, he argues, are not reflections of human nature, but ultimately lead to “a heightened awareness of the possibility of suffering.” The role of readers and poets, now, is to create language that will help us to suffer less than we have suffered in the past. If their work aspires to solidarity, it must replace universal postures with sensitivity to the nuances of personal—and, in particular, traditionally devalued—experiences. On Whitman’s search for a poetic correlative to an idealized American political project, the poet and novelist Ben Lerner has noted the remoteness of its realization, speculating that “Whitman comes to stand for the contradictions of a democratic personhood that cannot become actual without becoming exclusive.” In this century, many poets are embracing both: actuality and exclusivity are central to their project, which is dedicated to recording suffering and validating its own amorphous vocabulary. In this sense, exclusivity is not opposed to inclusiveness; instead, it seeks to include individual members of a whole by first establishing their “irreducible otherness.” Justin E. H. Smith, a Professor of History and Philosophy at Paris Diderot University, has considered the term “relatable” in the context of esotericism and learnéd traditions, identifying it as a misnomer in its common use. Taken as synonymous with familiar, relatable forgets that the work of establishing meaningful relation requires serious contemplation, that is, a recognition of otherness. Relieved of the myth of universality, we can shed illusions of breadth to attend the depths of our singular, irreplicable experiences. Most astoundingly, we may peek into the depths of others. ✵ Outwardly, my childhood bears little resemblance to that of the poet Robert Hayden. I have to strain to imagine what it must have been like growing up as a black boy in an early twentieth century Detroit ghetto, ostracized by peers and subjected to parental abuse. Yet, for all the differences in circumstance between us, I note similar physiologic responses each time I read his poem, “Those Winter Sundays.” While Hayden recalls the mornings his father woke early to thanklessly heat their home, a bright wave washes my vertebrae, snakes along my collar and jaw bones, touches the base of my skull, wakes the spots behind my ears. It chills the backs of my legs and pricks the insides of my knees and I cry. I let it come. He yields insight for which there is no solace. “What did I know,” he writes, and again, “what did I know / of love’s austere and lonely offices?” “What matters—to our collective understanding of historical and contemporary narratives, and thereby to the values we share and the institutions we build to support those values—is how we choose to describe the things that populate our public and private lives.” His words are none too extraordinary; they are “labor,” “splintering,” “chronic,” “angers,” “indifferently.” I sieve them up; their colors slip. Together, though, they make a banked fire blaze in the blueblack cold. Before I’m able to consciously pair feelings I’ve experienced with feelings I intuit through the poem’s speaker, my central nervous system responds. Drawing me into relation with a perspective that varies widely from my own, his words elicit an emotion that is yet deeply familiar. I could have traced its contours in a cave. I could have placed it on a spectrum between terra cotta and turmeric but until I’d read “Those Winter Sundays” no words had so precisely touched it. Hayden’s enabled me to articulate a persistent internal conflict: that in a world of scarcity, love and pain are cyclically bound. In my ignorance, I’ve been responsible for both; beyond my ignorance, I’ll be responsible for both. In and beyond my ignorance I am and will be formed by each, round and around. I mention this because poems—which involve fewer kinds of sensory information than other mediums that exercise empathy in audiences, like movies and music—demand more imaginative work than perhaps any other art, giving readers space to more fully inhabit the perspective of an other. It is exceedingly difficult, in turn, to neglect the concerns of anyone who can feel what you have felt—particularly something as devastating as pain, which touches everyone. In an essay Rich explains that [S]omeone writing a poem believes in, depends on, a delicate, vibrating range of difference, that an “I” can become a “we” without extinguishing others, that a partly common language exists to which strangers can bring their own heartbeat, memories, images. A language that itself has learned from the heartbeat, memories, images of strangers. Among myriad forms of cruelty, incuriosity may be the most intolerable. Habitually reading poems teaches us to be attentive—not just to language, but to all things. Let us attend one another, then, we who are strange. Let us buzz in the space between two hopes, bizarrely vocalizing, listening, making sense. Now is the hour for walking on ice. We have interpreted the old masters all of our lives, have over-interpreted for fear of misinterpretation. Let us now be interpreted. Let us speak now, finally, in our own tongues. We will know who is committed to the arriving world by their courage to become disoriented in an unfamiliar idiom because it moves them closer to genuine relation. To my friend the psychonaut I reply that, no, there is no one way to think about any poem. There is no correct answer here; you cannot discover it. An approximation of the answer volleyed between a couple of neurons in the writer’s brain a long time ago; you’ll never inhabit the machinery that processed the information that produced it. So that’s that. As with poems, so with life: attention yields meaning. And meaning—arranged among the symbols of whatever name you like—offers a source of consolation while suffering persists among we who are finite (we who, inexplicably, can imagine infinite and yearn for it). You—I address you not generally, but reverentially—You have to create the poem’s meaning. Not for the sake of explaining it to someone, but because your pain may become penetrable insofar as you can describe it—can assign it a story, a justification, an origin, a name. Because your propensity for cruelty may be corroded to the extent that you can relate to the suffering of an Irreducible Other Precious Life. I assure my friend that these are not tools in any traditional sense. You pick up an axe until the task is done but this task will never be done. Take up these lines at your leisure. Here is your opportunity to visit the most private room a person has. This is the gift. Finally, I admonish the poet, do not surrender yourself easily. I am sacrificing my time and energy to meet you in your living room, this puzzling place, this house of mirrors. I’m yielding somethings precious—my comfort and my control—to be with you, to understand you. I arrange these affirmations like sweet rice and marigolds in the doorframe of this lyric and come, now, into your language, to know your inalienable light. ◘

And where that language does not yet exist, it is our poetry which helps to fashion it. Poetry is not only dream or vision, it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. —Audre Lorde, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury” In recent conversations I’ve asked friends whether they read poems and why not. The question is generally why not; aside from a handful who read them often, I’ve found little enthusiasm. Among the replies have been several who preferred reading nonfiction, several who said they didn’t understand poems or found them inaccessible, several who claimed proclivities for linear thinking and aversions to ambiguity; “pretentious” and “esoteric” were thrown around. An execrable ex wanted to enjoy poetry but hadn’t found a writer whose poems resonated consistently. I asked him what anticipated reward moved him to engage with a piece of writing. “Learning something new,” he replied. “Whether a new fact, a new perspective, a new word, a new idea, or a new way to articulate an old idea.” Well. An Austin psychonaut refracted and dispersed my question into three. Noting that poems were slow in a fast world, she wondered why she might slow down to engage with them—whether she would get left behind. Observing that she had traditionally approached literature to receive, she asked how poems actually gave—whether they gave as much as they took. She questioned—finally—whether there were value in poetic meaning, which seemed to proffer few definitive answers. Well. I had no definitive answers. I should have defined poem when I asked the question. Before proceeding as though discussing something sole and whole, I should have pointed at the thing to confirm we didn’t have the same name for two different flocks of birds. American poet and essayist Adrienne Rich wrote that “in the wash of poetry the old, beaten, worn stones of language take on colors that disappear when you sieve them up out of the streambed and try to sort them out.” A thing reveals its identity through its

Bridging the Gap

| Women in Engineering

Faith Bottum | The True | Essay

In the Black Hills of South Dakota there’s a highway interchange made of wood that might stand as a test for engineers. It might also tell us something about the way we educate girls in this country, and thus something about the puzzle of women in engineering. Called the Keystone Wye, the interchange stacks up three layers: a paved road on the ground level, a straight bridge through the middle, and a high bridge arching over the top. The whole construction blends into the surrounding trees; passing tourists might not even notice it. But to someone with an engineering interest, the mind and eye of an engineer, the Keystone Wye is cool. The bridges are made of lumber, after all. The heavy highway traffic is supported by nothing more than wooden beams, trusses, and arches. When it was built in 1968, the wooden construction was chosen so that the interchange would fit with its forested Black Hills setting. But the bridges were also made of wood because those 1960s designers wanted to build something special: something that differed from the ordinary concrete and steel-beam bridges that make up the nation’s highway overpasses. Three arches support the Keystone Wye’s upper bridge. Formed from laminated wood, each arch has two pieces, sixty-six feet long and curved to roughly 90 degrees of arc, with a steel hinge in the middle to absorb shock. The footings took 650 cubic yards of concrete and half a million pounds of steel, while the wooden arches began as stacks of two-inch-thick planks, scarfed to length before being curved and glued together.1 Certainly, there are numerous engineering feats that fascinate ordinary people who rarely think about construction projects. Take for instance the Falkirk Wheel in Scotland, a pair of giant Ss that rotate to lift canal boats. Or the Millau Viaduct, a delicate-looking cable-stayed bridge that crosses eight hundred feet above a valley in southern France. Or the Bailong Elevator in China, a glass elevator running up a thousand-foot cliff. The more modest Keystone Wye, in contrast, requires something more to pique interest: an engineering mindset in the observer. That unassuming highway interchange in the Black Hills can provide more than infrastructure. It can also serve as a test to identify people who have the natural ability and early education to see the world as an engineer sees it: not exactly as an artist and not exactly as a scientist, but as something in between—someone whose first impulse is to fix a problem in the most elegant, compelling way possible. And with something like the Keystone Wye test in hand, we can begin to work our way through the situation of women in engineering. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- There is a puzzling situation for women in engineering. In 2018 (according to the most recent full report by the American Society for Engineering Education), women received 21.9% of new bachelor’s degrees in engineering from US institutions. The graduate school numbers are slightly higher, with women earning 26.7% of master’s degrees and 23.6% of doctorates.2 Engineering ranks even worse than physics as the STEM field with the lowest participation rate for women.3 These figures are improvements over the 18% of undergraduate engineering degrees granted to women in 2006, and the 20% in 2016. Back in 2011, science education researchers Kacey Beddoes and Maura Borrego noted “Despite a thirty-year history of initiatives and interventions, . . . women remain a minority in engineering,” with “enrollments of female engineering students” declining.4 But the situation has improved somewhat since those observations. Women now make up 16% of the engineering workforce in America, compared to 12% in 1990. “Our problem is not so much in the discipline of engineering itself or how we teach engineering in college. It starts much earlier, with the way we introduce engineering to the very young.” Those numbers still remain far under women’s 50.8% of the American population5 and the more than 56% of college students who are women.6 Yet somehow, the numbers prove worse than the American Society for Engineering Education’s initial statistics might suggest. Generally speaking, women tend toward the disciplines with clear social purposes. Environmental engineering, with 50.6% women, is arguably one of the most important disciplines, as are biomedical (45.4%) and industrial engineering (32.3%). But some of the engineering specialties (and often the ones with the most promising career opportunities) show much lower numbers for women: petroleum engineering, for example, at 16.9% women. Fields like mechanical engineering (14.8%) electrical engineering (14.2%) show similarly abysmal figures. Aerospace (14.6%) and computer engineering (13.3%) are equally low. Participation rates are not the only troubling statistics for women in engineering. Women tend to leave the field at higher rates, too, although the actual numbers are challenging to interpret. As Anne E. Preston pointed out in 2004, engineers in general—men and women alike—quit their profession four times more often than doctors and over three times more often than lawyers.7 A 2008 study discovered that over 40% of all engineering undergraduates change to other majors.8 Still, a Google query for why women leave engineering produces over 250 million results, and the Harvard Business Review’s 2018 “The Subtle Stressors Making Women Want to Leave Engineering” is only one of dozens of articles with similar titles.9 In 2011, the Department of Energy issued a ten-chapter report titled “Stemming the Tide: Why Women Leave Engineering.”10 Women, the report concluded, “are the most underrepresented in the engineering disciplines.” And around 40% of the women engineers the report surveyed “have left the field of engineering.” One-third of those who left responded that they did so because of workplace climate or culture, while a quarter left to spend time with their families. Among those who did not enter the field after graduation, a third reported a perception of engineering as inflexible and not supportive of women. The problem with “Stemming the Tide” is that it lacks equally exact numbers for men who leave the field, which is needed to draw useful conclusions about women in engineering. This problem runs through the literature. In 2015, MIT issued a study called “Persistence Is Cultural,” which used diary entries from forty students over four years to describe the pressures and indignities young women felt.11 Although the MIT study is often cited as evidence of women’s departure from engineering, it directs most of its attention to self-reporting from new graduates who immediately leave or do not enter the profession. The lack of contrasting statistics for men makes it difficult to form an accurate, more complete picture of engineering as a whole. The 2007 “Retention Study” by the Society of Women Engineers remains a more useful source.12 According to that study, the gender gap is small in some instances. Men and women with engineering educations had equal unemployment rates (just 1%), for example. Other statistics, however, showed larger gaps. Fewer women at the time were going into the profession straight out of school, with 60% of women and around 70% of men reporting that “they were employed as engineers within the first three years of finishing college.” For those eighteen to twenty years out of college, “only about one-third of women but about half of men were still in engineering jobs.” Overall, 48% of women stayed in the profession their whole careers, as opposed to 58% of men. The study also found that 22% of women with engineering degrees were “not in the labor force or employed outside engineering,” but only 10% of men could say the same. The anecdotal evidence is even more convincing, pointing to low-level but persistent discrimination against women. It’s worth mentioning that oppression has not always been so low-level, even in the recent past. Any account of discrimination faced by women in engineering has to mention the massacre of fourteen female students in Montreal, which became a defining feature of an entire culture.13 Late on the rainy gray afternoon of December 6, 1989, a disturbed twenty-five-year-old Canadian man walked into the École Polytechnique with a rifle and a hunting knife. He opened fire, killing six of the women engineering students he targeted, then walked through the building, killing eight more women and injuring ten women and four men before shooting himself.14 Nothing of this magnitude has occurred in the thirty years since, which has tempted some to argue that a madman’s actions on a single occasion have been taken as the defining feature of an entire culture. To accept this line, however, would be to miss something important: the women who report ongoing discrimination in engineering now are not pointing back to the 1989 Montreal massacres as the model for what they encounter. They know they are not being killed, not suffering to the extent that women engineers have in the past. Nonetheless, they testify to something real in women’s experience. “I’ve always felt discriminated [against] because I was a female at an engineering school,” Mindy Ravnaas, one of my classmates at the School of Mines, told me recently. On several group design projects, she found it assumed that “since I was a female, I wasn’t intelligent enough to have an idea.” Mindy stormed out of a computer-coding class her freshman year after the male professor made her “feel degraded” for asking basic questions. “I ended up dropping out of this class in the middle of lab because I felt alone and stupid with no way to figure it out. I felt completely defeated.” The professor “ruined my interest for computer science, and I felt like I wouldn’t be able to become an engineer, which was my dream.” Mindy’s description is echoed by many in engineering. A Google engineer told Gizmodo reporter Melanie Ehrenkranz that she gets fewer questions at code reviews when she contributes under a genderless or masculine ghost name.15 In “The 5 Biases Pushing Women Out of STEM,” a 2015 study in the Harvard Business Review, Joan C. Williams reported that two-thirds of the professional women she surveyed felt they had “to prove themselves over and over” because they were women.16 A 2016 study by undergraduates found that women’s contributions to open-source coding sites are accepted more often than men’s, but only when their gender is not identified.17 It’s true that some women feel that these stories of oppression do not reflect their own experiences in engineering. A British chemical engineer calling herself “Po the Person” took to YouTube to echo concerns that the tales of woe she reads don’t ring true for her: “Maybe my parents are just much more egalitarian than I give them credit for, but nobody in my life tried to discourage me from studying engineering.” Every relative and teacher, “even the ones who are not progressive,” offered nothing but support in her pursuit of an engineering degree.18 When I asked Kayla Gagen, my classmate at School of Mines, how it feels to be a woman in engineering courses, she offered similar sentiments, replying laconically: “I usually don’t notice.” In July 2017, a Google engineer named James Damore generated weeks of controversy when he posted a memo claiming that while discrimination does exist, not all of it can be ascribed to oppression. Most commentators rebuked Damore, but economics columnist Megan McArdle took a contrarian line based on her experience at a tech job early in her career. “I liked the work,” McArdle wrote. “But I was never going to like it enough to blow a weekend doing more of it for free. Which meant that I was never going to be as good at that job as the guys around me.”19 Nonetheless, the fact remains that a majority of women in STEM fields report having experienced put-downs and harassments. Asked for examples, Caitlin Lardner, another of my engineering classmates, insisted that she had “nothing super serious or really worthy of writing about.” She had spent her summer internship in an engineering-design department of “primarily young women.” And yet, Caitlin also almost casually mentioned that “the one time I wore a dress in North Dakota, the superintendent of the subcontractor on our job site (who was staying in the same hotel) asked me what corner I was working that night.” Mindy Ravnaas added that during her early undergraduate years at the School of Mines, “I didn’t give my input very often” when in groups with male classmates. Now, “going into my senior year of college, I’ve learned . . . to keep speaking up and be somewhat persistent.” She has realized that “we as women have to work harder to be heard, but if we give up we will never change the industry. Thankfully I have been surrounded by many other women with the same mindset, and together we will slowly improve this discriminating culture.” Among the diary entries quoted in the “Persistence Is Cultural” study, several show women undergraduates experiencing a loss of confidence during their college years. A student named Ashley wrote: “The biggest problem I seem to be having [is] self-doubt. I would look at a problem, and think of a way to solve it, but then I would second-guess myself, and convince myself that my way of answering the question must be wrong. . . . I don’t understand why I keep doubting myself so much. . . . Lack of confidence has never ever been a problem for me, even when I was a little girl.”20 “The one time I wore a dress in North Dakota, the superintendent of the subcontractor on our job site asked me what corner I was working that night.” This sense of continuing mistreatment is supported by studies that collect self-reporting. According to a large-scale 2018 Pew survey, for example, 50% of women in STEM report having experienced discrimination. Of the women who work mostly with men, 48% said their gender has made it harder for them to succeed, while only 14% of women who are not surrounded by male colleagues reported anything similar. “The most common forms of gender discrimination,” the Pew study concludes, “include earning less than a man doing the same job (29%), having someone treat them as if they were not competent (29%), experiencing repeated, small slights in their workplace (20%), and receiving less support from senior leaders than a man who was doing the same job (18%).”21 In the 2018 Harvard Business Review article on women leaving engineering, M. Teresa Cardador and Brianna Barker Caza note that even apparent promotion can reinforce a sense of gender discrimination. Often with a good will, engineering firms move women upward into managerial roles. “If you have ten engineers in a room, from our company,” explained one male executive, “they’re all going to be smart, but it’s the one who can communicate well, the one that can get people behind them . . . they’re stereotypically female.” The result is that women have been promoted to engineering managers in recent years, but Cardador and Caza go on to suggest that managers are not actually much respected among engineers. “When women disproportionately occupy roles that are less valued or unwanted,” they conclude, “it can reinforce stereotypes about female engineers being less technically skilled, make them feel less respected, and create the illusion that they are not a ‘real engineer.’”22 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Among the many students I have met, there are some young women who possess, or are possessed by, the engineering mind. They spend their free time reading about new techniques for extracting 0.001 percent more gold from ore blends. They send me texts about the “dope” engineering that creates the harmonics of a grand piano. They get excited explaining the internal gear systems of the Falkirk Wheel. They love driving past the Keystone Wye. Generally speaking, these are also the young women who don’t seem to notice low-level sexism. The discrimination has to be major to intrude on their thoughts. In their not-quite-science, not-quite-art fascination with the physical world, they spend their time seeking the most efficient and elegant method to solve engineering problems. I am engineer enough to recognize that I am not an engineer in the way these women are—failing to work, for instance, on a captivating design for an ultralight airplane in my spare time, just for the fun of it. Maybe I should be doing such things, but I think of the work I want to do in terms of how engineering can alter and advance society and how it can change the world. I believe I have at least a little of the engineering mind, but I am still concerned about the social problems of American professions, and the condition of women in engineering fascinates me. Still, the literature on women in engineering tends to ignore or even diminish those whose primary interest is engineering itself. Kayla Gagen, for example, who emailed me about how cool it is to see the engineering “drone on the fly” to complete the Millau Viaduct in France. Or my friend Mariya Sachek, who recently urged me to study the 1980s construction techniques used to build the Lotus Temple in Delhi. How do these women fit into the picture of women in STEM? Something here needs to be protected: a simple love for the physical world and how it works, among women who care most of all about engineering and do not focus much on social politics. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The greatest puzzle in all of this may be that, over recent decades, American colleges and businesses have undertaken a major campaign to increase the number of women in engineering. Yet, percentages in the United States remain at a level that even the most optimistic among us would describe as miserably low. Our failure to develop a more inclusive workforce in engineering stands in contrast to many non-Western countries, where percentages recently surpassed those of more developed nations, despite starting with a much worse situation for women. In 2019, the World Bank reported that thirteen of the fifteen countries with the lowest rates of women in the workforce are in the Arab world, 23 and yet, according to a 2018 UNESCO report, eleven out of eighteen Arab states have women as the majority of their new STEM graduates, raising the participation of women to nearly 37% of working researchers.24 “Jordan, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates are the only countries where women test better and feel more comfortable in mathematics than men,” notes Saadia Zahidi in her 2018 book, Fifty Million Rising. According to the Economist, women make up 35% of internet entrepreneurs in the Arab world, compared to 10% worldwide.25 “If the narrative of American expansion was ‘Go West, young man,’” Zahidi writes, “the new narrative for up-and-coming women in the Arab World may well be ‘Go Digital, young woman.’” Meanwhile, Finland, Norway, and Sweden—the Scandinavian countries with the three highest measures of opportunities for women—have among the lowest rates of women STEM graduates in the world, according to a 2018 study in Psychological Science. 26 “The issue doesn’t appear to be girls’ aptitude for STEM professions,” Olga Khazan noted in the Atlantic. “In looking at test scores across sixty-seven countries and regions,” the authors of the study “found that girls performed about as well or better than boys did on science.”27 It seems odd to have Algeria and Tunisia lead the world in percentages of women in STEM fields while Scandinavia lags behind. The result may derive in part from the fact that technical fields provide one of the few ways for women to advance in male-dominated countries. But the Psychological Science report matches several older studies that show economically developed cultures can actually end up with larger gender imbalances in some fields, given the greater number of opportunities available to women. These statistics are unstable, conflicting, and divergent. The United States has tried to cover varying possibilities, attempting both to increase opportunities for women in general and to raise the number of women in STEM fields in particular. The cultural and financial investment has been enormous. “If the narrative of American expansion was Go West, young man,” Zahidi writes, “the new narrative for up-and-coming women in the Arab World may well be Go Digital, young woman.” In its 2019 college rankings, U.S. News & World Report named what it judged the nation’s 206 best engineering schools.28 Every single one of those 206 schools has a program exclusively for women in engineering, encouraging them to enroll, helping them graduate, and supporting them in their future careers. Take the Colorado School of Mines (43rd on the U.S. News & World Report list). In February 2019, it hosted a “Girls Lead the Way” conference to encourage high-school students to come to the university and choose STEM majors. The motto was “Boldly Go Where No Woman Has Gone Before.”29 Duke University (tied for 18th) names as a priority in its Academic Strategic Plan the need to “aggressively recruit and support women and underrepresented minorities in STEM fields.”30 And down toward the bottom of the list, the University of North Texas (ranked 205th) announced in February 2019 that it had received a $30,000 grant from the Texas Women’s Foundation for increasing the number of women in engineering and science.31 The field-wide assistance for women often continues into their careers. Take Cargill, an agricultural-engineering conglomerate and the largest privately held company in the United States, with revenues of $115 billion. In 2014, Cargill began collaborating with CARE in the Ivory Coast and Ghana to help poor cocoa-growing communities with a project called “Empowering Women,”32 and in 2015, it became a “Gold Sponsor” of an organization called “Million Women Mentors,” which praised the company for being “truly committed to developing female STEM talent.”33 In 2017, Cargill was a founding signatory of the Paradigm for Parity pledge to achieve gender equality in management by 2030. Similarly, General Electric, which built the power plants producing a third of the world’s electricity,34 supports a networking organization for its women employees, and in 2017 “set a goal of having 20,000 women fill STEM roles throughout the company by 2020.”35 Caterpillar, which manufactures construction machinery and ranks 264th on Fortune magazine’s list of the world’s largest companies,36 promotes WIN, its “supportive network” to help women “act as catalysts for global and local change.”37 One of its senior figures, Stacey DelVecchio, was president of the Society of Women Engineers, and in 2018 the company released a promotional video bragging that “Women in engineering at Caterpillar develop cutting-edge technologies, lead product groups, and make a difference in the world.”38 The projects for women at computer-tech firms are even more ambitious, perhaps in part because of such complaints as Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys’ Club of Silicon Valley, a 2018 book in which Emily Chang writes, “the environment in the tech industry has become toxic,” with women “systematically excluded from the greatest wealth creation in the history of the world and denied a voice in the rapid remolding of our global culture.”39 Loretta Lee, an ex-Google engineer suing her former employer for discrimination, adds, “The reason there are so few women in tech is because it sucks to be a woman in tech.”40 Despite these complaints, executives at Intel sponsor “Diversity at Intel,” having pledged to reach gender parity among its engineers by 2020.41 Microsoft has its “Global Diversity and Inclusion” program, promoting what it claims are “over twenty years of committed diversity and inclusion efforts.”42 IBM offers a “career re-entry program” for women two or more years out of work in technology. 43 Apple hosts a similar program,44 and the company “is committed to helping more women assume leadership roles across the tech sector,” claims CEO Tim Cook. 45 Extensive programs also exist for girls before college. Begun by the National Academy of Engineering, “The Engineer Girl” website names around forty national college scholarships only for girls.46 “Scholarships for Women” lists many more. 47 Meanwhile, in 2017, the Society of Women Engineers praised twenty-five of the nation’s best girls-only programs for K-12 students.48 Partnering with the Girl Scouts, AT&T sponsors “Imagine Your STEM Future,” which brings women scientists and engineers to school classrooms, acting as STEM mentors for girls. The National Science Foundation’s “Imagine Engineering” lets “girls from low-income and underserved communities” visit science labs. Motorola and Google are among the sponsors of girls’ “FIRST Robotics” teams, while Dell offers “Journey and Connect Through Technology,” helping girls explore robotics and other fields. The Girl Scouts who earn science and engineering badges are asked to pledge to help “add 2.5 million girls to the STEM pipeline by 2025.”49 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Who can deny that this huge cultural investment of money and time has had disappointing outcomes? We seem to have arrived at the point of harshly diminishing returns: every new dollar spent, every new appointment of a recruiter for women, yields smaller and smaller returns. Women made up just one percent of engineers in 1960,50 a figure which rose fairly quickly over the next decades. But in the years since, that growth has flattened. This lack of women, despite all our efforts, has led some thinkers to conclude that we need to change the whole discipline of engineering, especially the way we teach it. If gender parity cannot be achieved by pouring money into recruitment and reforming college culture, they argue, then there must be something sexist about the idea of engineering itself. Back in 2001, the historian of science Pamela E. Mack could observe that “promoters of women in engineering” have generally “steered away from the broader feminist critique.”51 In the years since, however, theorists have turned much of their attention to that feminist critique. Prominent among them is Donna Riley, who heads the School of Engineering Education at Purdue, a college program with the mission to “radically rethink the boundaries of engineering and the purpose of engineering education.”52 In 2017, Riley published “Rigor/Us,” a much-discussed essay that demands the complete reformation of engineering, taking aim at the idea of rigorous engineering education.53 Rigor, she writes, “has a historical lineage of being about hardness, stiffness, and erectness; its sexual connotations—and links to masculinity in particular—are undeniable.” As a result, the idea of rigor in engineering “accomplishes dirty deeds.” It primarily serves the purposes of “disciplining,” “demarcating boundaries,” and “demonstrating white male heterosexual privilege.” And thus, she argues, rigorous math and science must be eliminated from engineering. Against those who want merely to open existing engineering education to greater numbers of women, Riley insists that “this is not about reinventing rigor for everyone, it is about doing away with the concept altogether so we can welcome other ways of knowing. Other ways of being.” We need to move “from rigor to vigor,” replacing engineering colleges with “a community for inclusive and holistic engineering education.” “If we eliminate rigor from the education of engineers, we cannot expect rigor in what those engineers go on to do.” Others have traced out somewhat similar lines, responding to the unsatisfactory percentages of women in STEM fields by rejecting current ideas about science, math, and technology. “It is not unusual,” Kacey Beddoes and Maura Borrego write, for people unaware of recent feminist literature to join issues of “feminism in science” with issues of “women in science.” This older approach produced the increase-the-numbers “Women in Engineering” initiatives adopted by so many colleges and businesses. But, as Beddoes and Borrego note, such initiatives are often criticized by more recent feminists, who reject a focus “on attracting women to (and retaining them in) the current masculine culture.” Women in Engineering initiatives prove “problematic if they do not address the biases and limitations of that culture.”54 Math professor Bonnie Jean Shulman writes that “quantification, comparison, and measurement are in themselves cultural activities, whose assumed values are not universally shared.”55 In a 2013 essay, Linda Bergmann argues that we must cease to cater to the kind of engineering education that college men prefer “based on formulaic instructions, hierarchical classroom structures, and right/wrong answers.” The “feminist approaches to learning—which rely heavily on collaboration, the dissolution of hierarchies, and the encouragement of personal learning—defy both the institutional traditions of engineering schools and the personal inclinations of the students who dominate them.”56 The problem with such critiques is that rigorous math and science are integral to the discipline. Engineering failures are how bridges fall down and planes tumble from the sky. Whatever the merits of arguments against objectivity, we have an objective measure by which to judge an engineering project: Does it work? If we eliminate rigor from the education of engineers, we cannot expect rigor in what those engineers go on to do. When I asked her about the 1970s at the School of Mines, Joan Howard, a 1976 graduate, told me tales of the overwhelmingly “men’s world” that engineering used to be. Although much has changed in the four decades since, engineering programs remain a world of men in many ways. Any woman who has experienced an American engineering education can attest that further changes that need to be made. Expand the curriculum to require engineering ethics? Certainly. Include in that coursework a section on feminist ethics? Absolutely. As a feminist, I would welcome such changes. In fact, the balanced approach the philosopher Caroline Whitbeck uses in her 1998 Ethics in Engineering Practice and Research could serve as a model for teaching ethical theory. Asking engineers to think of ethical problems as subject to the same kind of multiple constraints that engineering-design problems have. She titles an important chapter in her textbook “Ethics as Design: Doing Justice to Ethical Problems.”57 But along the way, as we implement such changes, we cannot allow math and material science to be stripped of the rigor needed to seek meaningful techniques, the compelling methods, for solving engineering problems. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Maybe the best way to increase the number of women in engineering is to drive your fifth-grade niece up to see the Keystone Wye, explaining the features that make the overpass so cool. Or, perhaps, to demonstrate to a seventh-grader the harmonics of a grand piano. To walk her through the workings of the Falkirk Wheel. The problems solved in building the Millau Viaduct. The construction of the Lotus Temple. Our problem is not so much in the discipline of engineering itself or how we teach engineering in college. It starts much earlier, with the way we introduce engineering to the very young. In 2008, the National Academy of Engineering concluded, “Every year, hundreds of millions of dollars are spent in the United States to improve the public understanding of engineering.” And yet, “despite these efforts, educational research shows that K–12 teachers and students generally have a poor understanding of what engineers do.” The result is “a strong sense that engineering is not ‘for everyone,’ and perhaps especially not for girls.”58 The absence of long-term, longitudinal studies, following girls from elementary school to adulthood, makes definitive judgment impossible. But the available evidence points toward the necessity to promote engineering early in girls’ lives. A 2018 Pew study found that Americans with postgraduate STEM degrees complained most of all about pre-college schooling, with a majority thinking their own K–12 education was below average,59 failing to inspire them with the love for science that they only developed later. Such initiatives can be surprisingly simple. “Even a single-day event” about engineering “can be effective,” noted a 2014 study of short-term presentations to middle-school girls and their parents. “Reshaping attitudes,” “exposing young minds to the world of engineering,” and forming “a vision” of how young people might become engineers.60 Similarly, in 2008 researchers tested high-achieving girls who attended presentations about engineering. A follow-up two years later found eighty percent (of the girls available for response) still considering engineering as a career.61 And a 2009 report showed an increase in middle-school girls’ interest in engineering after only a “twenty-minute narrative” about “the lives of female engineers and the benefits of engineering careers.” The “inclusion of female role models at all levels (high school, college, and professional),” the report concluded, has genuine impact on middle-school girls’ ability to imagine “becoming an engineer.”62 Based on this suggestive evidence, the American Association of University Women concluded, “Exposure to women in science and engineering fields can provide a major impact on middle and high school girls’ perceptions.”63 The question, however, is what perceptions we are giving them. “I don’t want the number of female engineers to go up because it’s seen as a feminist choice to enter a field in which we are so poorly represented,” explained the biomechanics professor Michelle Oyen in 2013. “I want the number of female engineers to go up because more girls hear about engineering when they’re young and realize what a great career it would be for them.”64 There are limits, in other words, to telling girls they should enter engineering because it will make them representatives of women’s advancement. Down that path lies the strong potential for later disappointment in their careers. A feeling for women’s cultural progress is a good thing for a woman engineer to have, but the first and most important reason for entering the field is a love for the strange not-quite-science, not-quite-art fascination with the physical world that is engineering. And the answer to the puzzle of women in engineering requires awakening that fascination in girls. The Keystone Wye in the Black Hills is not just a test to discover which students have the engineering mind and eye. It is also a test for those who hope to inspire them. Can we explain what makes an engineering problem interesting to solve? Can we teach what makes it cool? ◘ REFERENCES 1. Keystone Wye documentary [https://sddigitalarchives.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/government/id/215/] 2. ASEE’s Engineering by the Numbers [https://www.asee.org/documents/papers-and-publications/publications/college-profiles/2018-Engineering-by-Numbers-Engineering-Statistics-UPDATED-15-July-2019.pdf] 3. Why So Few? AAUW study [https://www.aauw.org/research/why-so-few/] 4. Beddoes and Maura Borrego’s 2011 study [https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/j.2168-9830.2011.tb00014.x] 5. Census numbers [https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/LFE046217] 6. Why Men Are the New College Minority [https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/08/why-men-are-the-new-college-minority/536103/] 7. Preston’s Scientific Workforce [https://issues.org/preston/] 8. Persistence, Engagement, and Migration in Engineering Programs [https://www.researchgate.net/publication/253511257_Persistence_Engagement_and_Migration_in_Engineering_Programs] 9. HBR Subtle Stressors [https://hbr.org/2018/11/the-subtle-stressors-making-women-want-to-leave-engineering] 10. Stemming the Tide [https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/NSF_Stemming%20the%20Tide%20Why%20Women%20Leave%20Engineering.pdf] 11. Persistence Diary Study [https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/104002] 12. SWE Retention Study [https://www.researchgate.net/publication/298546057_SWE_retention_study_and_worklife_balance] 13. Smithsonian Magazine on Canadian Shootings [https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/mass-shooting-reshaped-canadian-debate-about-guns-and-political-identity-180962013/] 14. Montreal Coroners Report [http://www.diarmani.com/Montreal_Coroners_Report.pdf] 15. Undergrad Coding Study [https://peerj.com/preprints/1733/] 16. Joan C. Williams essay [https://hbr.org/2015/03/the-5-biases-pushing-women-out-of-stem] 17. Undergrad Coding Study [https://peerj.com/preprints/1733/] 18. Ehrenkranz’s Gizmodo article [https://www.mic.com/articles/181968/women-engineers-get-real-about-the-worst-sexism-theyve-experienced-at-work] 19. YouTube Engineering video [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oF1jW7I6hXQ&t=10s] 20. McArdle column [https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2017-08-09/as-a-woman-in-tech-i-realized-these-are-not-my-people] 21. 2018 Pew Study [https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2018/01/09/women-and-men-in-stem-often-at-odds-over-workplace-equity/] 22. HBR Subtle Stressors [https://hbr.org/2018/11/the-subtle-stressors-making-women-want-to-leave-engineering] 23. 2019 World Bank report [https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.CACT.FE.ZS] 24. 2018 Unesco report [https://www.researchgate.net/publication/323402194_Is_the_Gender_Gap_Narrowing_in_Science_and_Engineering] 25. Economist on Arab entrepreneurs [https://www.economist.com/business/2013/07/13/untraditional-choice] 26. Psychological Science study [https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797617741719?journalCode=pssa] 27. Khazan’s Atlantic piece [https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more-gender-equality-the-fewer-women-in-stem/553592/] 28. US News College rankings [https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges] 29. Colorado girls program [http://gscoblog.org/2018/11/girls-lead-the-way-conference-at-colorado-school-of-mines/] 30. Duke strategic plan [https://today.duke.edu/2019/04/women-stem-duke] 31. University of North Texas news [https://engineering.unt.edu/news/cultivating-women-stem] 32. Cargill’s Empowering Women [https://www.cargill.com/sustainability/cocoa/empowering-women] 33. Cargill’s Million Women Mentors [https://myemail.constantcontact.com/MWM-Bi-Weekly--Breaking-News-from-MWM---BP--Cargill--Johnson---Johnson--RSVP-Now-for-Upcoming-AAUW-TownHall-and-News-on-Women-in.html?soid=1107600698499&aid=NjorrZYqVt4] 34. GE’s share of world energy [https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ge-power-exclusive/exclusive-ges-push-to-fix-power-turbine-problem-goes-global-idUSKBN1O60F4] 35. GE’s STEM women [https://www.ge.com/reports/word-power-see-storytelling-inspires-women-pursue-stem-roles-careers/] 36. Fortune on Caterpillar [https://fortune.com/global500/2017/caterpillar/] 37. Caterpillar’s WIN network [https://www.forconstructionpros.com/latest-news/news/20859741/caterpillar-incs-womens-initiative-goes-global] 38. Caterpillar’s video [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJ7umgJDxKc] 39. Chang’s Brotopia passage [https://books.google.com/books?id=W8CGDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA14&lpg=PA14&dq=%E2%80%9Cthe+environment+in+the+tech+industry+has+become+toxic,%E2%80%9D&source=bl&ots=Dx9f_ZzxFa&sig=ACfU3U0U3fmtaE5TF7qrxrooWy21tXTIig&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwji3eay2c_jAhXQK80KHS61D_gQ6AEwAHoECAMQAQ#v=onepage&q=%E2%80%9Cthe%20environment%20in%20the%20tech%20industry%20has%20become%20toxic%2C%E2%80%9D&f=false] 40. Loretta Lee [https://gizmodo.com/former-engineer-suing-google-it-sucks-to-be-a-woman-in-1824184100] 41. Intel report [https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/diversity/diversity-inclusion-mid-year-report.html] 42. Microsoft report [https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/diversity/default.aspx] 43. IBM report [https://www.ibm.com/employment/inclusion/techreentry.html] 44. SF Chronicle on Apple [https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/networth/article/With-talent-scarce-some-firms-offer-13746195.php] 45. Tim Cook on women leadership [https://www.cnet.com/news/apple-starts-entrepreneur-camp-program-to-help-female-ios-app-developers/] 46. Engineering Girl on scholarships [https://www.engineergirl.org/9539/Scholarships] 47. Scholarships for women [https://www.scholarshipsforwomen.net/] 48. SWE on girls’ programs [https://alltogether.swe.org/2017/10/25-girls-steam-programs-love/] 49. Girl Scouts engineering report [https://www.girlscouts.org/en/about-girl-scouts/girl-scouts-and-stem.html] 50. Why So Few? AAUW study [https://www.aauw.org/research/why-so-few/] 51. Pamela E. Mack essay [https://books.google.com/books?id=vjafSiPZUP8C] 52. Purdue description [https://engineering.purdue.edu/ENE/AboutUs] 53. Rigor/Us [https://www.researchgate.net/publication/321457303_RigorUs_Building_Boundaries_and_Disciplining_Diversity_with_Standards_of_Merit] 54. Beddoes and Borrego, 2nd paper [https://www.academia.edu/676388/Feminist_Theory_in_Three_Engineering_Education_Journals_1995-_2008] 55. Bonnie Jean Shulman essay [https://books.google.com/books?id=9obFtmhcCNsC&pg=PA414&lpg=PA414&dq=%22comparison,+and+measurement+are+in+themselves+cultural+activities,+whose+assumed+values+are+not+universally+shared.%22&source=bl&ots=6cuhJkQJ-z&sig=ACfU3U1XVvANl0MexVRJsIvtK5oDJbbQFA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj6-YPc2M_jAhXVHM0KHW8jC6EQ6AEwAHoECAEQAQ#v=onepage&q=%22comparison%2C%20and%20measurement%20are%20in%20themselves%20cultural%20activities%2C%20whose%20assumed%20values%20are%20not%20universally%20shared.%22&f=false] 56. Linda Bergman essay [https://books.google.com/books?id=wDNQ4c-zYz8C&pg=PA17&lpg=PA17&dq=based+on+formulaic+instructions,+hierarchical+classroom+structures,+and+right/wrong+answers.&source=bl&ots=ECr86lGEq6&sig=ACfU3U1N4PUY7uyOxd_wvOiXcLk8Xj7adw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjtyLf72M_jAhWZGs0KHXzFDF4Q6AEwAHoECBUQAQ#v=onepage&q=based%20on%20formulaic%20instructions%2C%20hierarchical%20classroom%20structures%2C%20and%20right%2Fwrong%20answers.&f=false] 57. Caroline Whitbeck chapter [https://books.google.com/books?id=S0xi8OXuRn0C&pg=PA53&lpg=PA53&dq=%E2%80%9CEthics+as+Design:+Doing+Justice+to+Ethical+Problems.%E2%80%9D&source=bl&ots=howoGpSy9p&sig=ACfU3U38rPuWlj30XDGU60GdccoCcq9PNQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi7msyU2c_jAhWHZs0KHTvwBnYQ6AEwAHoECBYQAQ#v=onepage&q=%E2%80%9CEthics%20as%20Design%3A%20Doing%20Justice%20to%20Ethical%20Problems.%E2%80%9D&f=false] 58. NAE Changing the Conversation [https://www.nae.edu/24985/Changing-the-Conversation-Messages-for-Improving-Public-Understanding-of-Engineering] 59. 2018 Pew study [https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2018/01/09/women-and-men-in-stem-often-at-odds-over-workplace-equity/] 60. Short-Term STEM Intervention [https://www.asee.org/public/conferences/32/papers/9747/download] 61. Why So Few? AAUW study [https://www.aauw.org/research/why-so-few/] 62. Why So Few? AAUW study [https://www.aauw.org/research/why-so-few/] 63. Why So Few? AAUW study [https://www.aauw.org/research/why-so-few/] 64. Michelle Oyen column [https://reimaginingengineering.wordpress.com/2013/11/04/engineering-and-feminism/]

In the Black Hills of South Dakota there’s a highway interchange made of wood that might stand as a test for engineers. It might also tell us something about the way we educate girls in this country, and thus something about the puzzle of women in engineering. Called the Keystone Wye, the interchange stacks up three layers: a paved road on the ground level, a straight bridge through the middle, and a high bridge arching over the top. The whole construction blends into the surrounding trees; passing tourists might not even notice it. But to someone with an engineering interest, the mind and eye of an engineer, the Keystone Wye is cool. The bridges are made of lumber, after all. The heavy highway traffic is supported by nothing more than wooden beams, trusses, and arches. When it was built in 1968, the wooden construction was chosen so that the interchange would fit with its forested Black Hills setting. But the bridges were also made of wood because those 1960s designers wanted to build something special: something that differed from the ordinary concrete and steel-beam bridges that make up the nation’s highway overpasses. Three arches support the Keystone Wye’s upper bridge. Formed from laminated wood, each arch has two pieces, sixty-six feet long and curved to roughly 90 degrees of arc, with a steel hinge in the middle to absorb shock. The footings took 650 cubic yards of concrete and half a million pounds of steel, while the wooden arches began as stacks of two-inch-thick planks, scarfed to length before being curved and glued together.1 Certainly, there are numerous engineering feats that fascinate ordinary people who rarely think about construction projects. Take for instance the Falkirk Wheel in Scotland, a pair of giant Ss that rotate to lift canal boats. Or the Millau Viaduct, a delicate-looking cable-stayed bridge that crosses eight hundred feet above a valley in southern France. Or the Bailong Elevator in China, a glass elevator running up a thousand-fo

Conception to Delivery of the COVID-19 Vaccine

Gregory D. Sepich-Poore | The Necessary | Essay

After nine months of clinical trials, the COVID-19 vaccine is finally being delivered. This breakthrough marks the end of a tragic era of unprecedented financial and logistical burdens. For many, the vaccine is an inoculation against both the virus and despair, a shot of hope for a new life outside the confines of home, a light at the end of this long and terrible tunnel. Yet, the time in which we now find ourselves—nearly but not yet delivered from our trial—is frightening and dangerous. Deeply entrenched in quarantine, Zoom, and mask fatigue, as well as misinformation about the vaccine, we face numerous threats that might prolong the pain we are hoping to escape. We cannot yet declare victory. Just as crucially, we cannot embrace defeatism. We are in desperate need of rational optimism to move from where we are to where we want to be. In a time where social unity has been strained to the brink of collapse, we must ask ourselves how we want to shape this forthcoming reality. How we proceed will shape future generations and form our generation’s legacy. Scientists began thinking about a COVID-19 vaccine as soon as the virus was identified. Although still controversial, early data suggested that the novel beta-coronavirus gained the ability to jump from animals to humans on or around December 1, 2019, at or near the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, China.1 This cross-species transmission was most likely due to mutations in the virus’s RNA that codes for its “spike” protein, which is the portion of the virus for which it is named (“corona” for its crown of spikes). These modified spikes enabled the virus to infect humans, generating the terrible pandemic that dominates our time.2 “In a time where social unity has been strained to the brink of collapse, we must ask ourselves how we want to shape this forthcoming reality.” The disease’s high degree of transmissibility from human to human caused an exponential rise in cases in China, leading to a nationwide epidemic of thousands of cases by mid-to-late January.2,3 During this time, the inciting pathogen perplexed scientists, remaining unidentified until genomic sequencing of the virus’s ribonucleic acid (RNA) by two Chinese laboratories revealed a genetic code similar to other coronaviruses in late January.2,3 The genomic studies garnered enough detail about the modified spike protein mentioned above that pharmaceutical companies now had a target around which to develop a vaccine.2 SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, is the seventh coronavirus known to cause human disease.3,4 The closest genetic relatives of the novel Wuhan-derived coronavirus are strains circulating in bats. The prevalence of this virus in wild animals suggests a zoonotic origin, and supports the idea it was first transmitted from animals to humans around a wholesale market.2,3 Even more importantly, publication of the virus’s entire genetic code proved to be the crucial step in the race to develop a vaccine. To understand why, we need to go back to 1796, when modern vaccinology began. While smallpox ravaged the Western world, English physician Edward Jenner observed that dairymaids who contracted cowpox (a similar but non-fatal virus) appeared resistant to smallpox.5 To test this idea, Jenner took fluid from a dairymaid’s cowpox pustule and scratched it into the skin of an eight-year-old boy, crudely but effectively inoculating him. He then later inoculated the same boy with smallpox. When the boy failed to develop smallpox, it demonstrated the first intentional vaccine (which derives its name from vaccinia, the Latin word for cowpox).5 Although it had been known for several centuries that prior inoculation with smallpox could protect against future smallpox infection, a technique known as variolation,6 Jenner had critically shown that people could develop immunity without ever having to suffer from the same virus. In other words, exposure to a similar but less deadly virus could train the host’s immune system to recognize and destroy the deadlier pathogen. This process was eventually modified by supplying non-pathogenic viral proteins to the host. For the next two centuries, conventional vaccinology used this basic paradigm to design vaccines that could prevent population-wide infectious diseases ranging from polio to measles to cervical cancer. Nearly two centuries later, in 1990, a seemingly unrelated study provided a theoretical foundation for the fourth major type of vaccine, after demonstrating successful injection of messenger RNA (mRNA) into the host and production of its encoded protein.7 Broadly speaking, mRNA is the intermediate molecule between DNA and proteins. It can be thought of as a recipe that provides a list of ingredients for protein production inside cells. The 1990 study marked the first time synthetic mRNA, a “recipe” from outside the body, produced a protein “dish” using the cell’s own machinery.7 Later studies showed that proteins produced by synthetic mRNA could induce a specific response in the host.8 Applied to vaccinology, this discovery could allow exogenous (from outside the body) mRNA to incite production of endogenous (from within the body) proteins, including non-pathogenic viral proteins within the host. Production of these harmless viral proteins could then allow the body to develop antibodies against the associated virus, thereby providing immunity without requiring an infection. This technology could also simplify vaccine design. Rather than laboriously creating a virus’s antigenic proteins in the laboratory, researchers could inject a small, non-pathogenic piece of the virus’s genetic code—a much easier feat. This development meant that vaccines could be designed in a matter of days, rather than years. Applied to a COVID-19 vaccine, this approach could enable vaccine development based solely on the virus’s genetic code. In practice, vaccine manufacturers selected a snippet of mRNA that encoded the coronavirus’s spike protein. Injecting this mRNA into the body created many little spike proteins, which could not cause disease but could teach the immune system how to recognize and quickly destroy the full coronavirus if later exposed. Unfortunately, despite the promise of this approach, mRNA is unstable and easily degraded. Furthermore, mRNA can activate the host’s immune system to a dangerous extent, dampening enthusiasm for this vaccine development technique.9,10 It would take another twenty to thirty years for genetic engineering to identify clever ways of controlling mRNA’s degree of immune activation,11 increase its molecular stability,12 and improve its absorption by the host.9,10 The hard work behind these innovations should not be taken for granted, as they provided a way to translate the genetic sequence of SARS-CoV-2 into a human vaccine.2,3 “Even more importantly, publication of the virus’s entire genetic code proved to be the crucial step in the race to develop a vaccine.” Two companies had been working on the development of mRNA treatments and vaccines prior to the pandemic: Moderna (USA) and BioNTech (Germany). Armed with the publicly released genetic code of the virus in January 2020, they rapidly designed potential mRNA vaccines based on the part that encoded the virus’s spike protein. BioNTech’s co-founder, Ugur Sahin, reportedly made ten mRNA vaccine candidates on his computer over “a few hours” in one weekend, one of which became the successful design (BNT162) given first emergency authorization by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) eleven months later.13 Moderna tells a similar story, designing their successful mRNA vaccine candidate (mRNA-1273) in just two days in January 2020, at a time when many in the United States were not even paying attention to the proliferating epidemic in China.14 The breakneck pace of vaccine development happened only because of a convergence of thirty years of mRNA technology research. There are over ninety COVID-19 vaccines in development.15 Notably, two of these vaccines—one by Johnson & Johnson, the other by Merck-IAVI—are based on the same technology as their Ebola vaccines. Undoubtedly, this pandemic has led to the greatest vaccination effort in the history of the world. Newfound success with the mRNA technology may usher in a golden era of vaccinology.9 Nonetheless, designing a successful mRNA vaccine was only one piece of a very large puzzle. Translating this computational design into an injectable vaccine took Moderna another 40 days (mid-March 2020), making theirs the first vaccine to reach Phase 1 clinical trials.16 The most grueling work, however, came during the nine months from mid-March through mid-December, when vaccine candidates from Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech were tested in three independent clinical trial phases. Under normal circumstances, clinical trials run sequentially. Preclinical animal testing comes first, followed by Phase 1 dose escalation safety trials involving a few dozen subjects. Phase 2 expands trials to a few hundred people. The last phase, Phase 3 efficacy trials, involve many thousands of people, and compare vaccinated people against those who are randomly selected to receive a placebo control. However, due to FDA emergency authorization, trials were allowed to partially proceed in parallel,17 meaning that the Phase 1 trial did not have to be fully complete before initiating the Phase 2 trial. For example, the FDA cleared Moderna to start their Phase 2 study on May 6, 2020, just before positive data from the Phase 1 study were announced on May 18, 2020. While this accelerated procedure saved time, it did not take shortcuts that compromised the end result. The clinical trial process still relied on efficacy and safety data from more than 67,000 subjects between Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna before the FDA delivered emergency use authorization on December 11 and 18, 2020, respectively.18–20 (For comparison, two Phase 3 studies for Gardasil, a vaccine against human papillomaviruses that cause cervical and anogenital cancers, collectively enrolled 17,622 patients,21,22 just over a quarter of the patients in the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech trials, to obtain FDA approval.) Additionally, both Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna are still tasked with continuing data collection and trials to gain full regulatory approval, a process that does not stop with emergency-use authorization. “Despite a resounding success for science, the distributional challenges remain, and the public’s willingness to take the vaccine is in constant flux.” Analysis of the efficacy and safety data from either vaccine revealed astounding results. Each vaccine demonstrated more than ninety-four percent efficacy in preventing infection with minimal adverse effects (pain at injection site, headache, fatigue, muscle aches).19,20,23,24 Subgroup analysis of the Moderna cohort further revealed that none of the eleven individuals in the vaccine group who contracted the virus developed severe disease, whereas thirty of the 185 placebo-group individuals who contracted the virus did develop severe disease, including one death.23 By all possible measures, these vaccines are miracles of science that shattered past records for vaccine development. The mumps vaccine, which previously held the speed record, took four years from viral sampling to approval.25 Although questions remain about the use of COVID-19 vaccines in several groups—children, pregnant women, the immunocompromised, and those with histories of severe allergic reactions26–29—the high overall degree of vaccine efficacy and safety suggest that herd immunity may indeed be possible by late summer 2021 if uptake is high enough. (The personal experiences of four family members of mine who have already received their vaccines have revealed no serious side effects except an abundance of hope that this dark and lonely season may soon be over.) Despite a resounding success for science, the distributional challenges remain, and the public’s willingness to take the vaccine is in constant flux. Some of these issues were anticipated and planned for, such as the requirement that the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines be refrigerated at negative eighty and negative twenty degrees Celsius, respectively, to maintain stability during transport.30 Other challenges have been surprising, including shocking numbers of American healthcare workers who are unwilling to take the vaccine (e.g. forty percent of healthcare workers at Chicago's Loretto Hospital said they would not get vaccinated), despite an abundance of peer-reviewed literature and multi-national regulatory body documentation on its safety and efficacy.31 The Wall Street Journal reported that despite more than thirty million doses distributed in the United States, only eleven million doses had been given as of January 14, 2021.32 These figures point to an unacceptable waste of material and financial resources, as the vaccine doses expire rapidly, especially after being thawed. They cannot be refrozen. Meanwhile, the pandemic raged on with ferocious intensity, surpassing more than 300,000 new daily cases in the US on January 8, 2021, just one day after a record-setting 4,000 national daily deaths (January 7, 2021).33 Simultaneously, Los Angeles alone had an average of ten patients testing positive for COVID-19 every minute. With a death every eight minutes, intensive care units were overloaded to the point that ambulances were circling for hours, waiting for hospitals to accept more patients.34 Failing to recognize that we, as a society, are not yet victorious threatens the outcome that we have worked so hard to achieve. Declaring victory requires reaching herd immunity, which is the point at which enough people are immune to the virus through either vaccination or infection that it cannot easily spread in communities.35 To calculate what fraction of people need to be immune to reach herd immunity, we need to understand a value called R0, also called the reproduction number. R0 represents the average number of people a COVID-positive individual infects.36,37 R0 can also be thought of as the “infectiousness” of the virus while accounting for human behavior. Strict quarantining and masking reduce R0 while partying and hanging out in large groups raise R0. Importantly, the herd immunity required to end the pandemic is largely determined by R0. A high R0, brought on by reckless behavior, might mean that 75-80% of people need to be immunized before herd immunity is reached. On the other hand, a low R0 brought about by strict distancing, masking, and stay-at-home measures might mean herd immunity is achieved at just 60% immunization rates. Responsible behavior does not just keep you and the people you care about from getting sick, it directly reduces the amount of time until the pandemic is over. Even two record-breaking, highly efficacious vaccines cannot fix human behavior that disregards public health guidelines. Those who suggest we can achieve herd immunity via mass infection are propagating a defeatist attitude and false hope that would result in one to two million unnecessary deaths in the US alone.37 Furthermore, this cold, passive approach may not even result in herd immunity, as viral mutations may eventually evade current immunity, effectively resetting the count of immunizations to zero and obliterating hope of herd immunity arriving any time soon.38 The situation really boils down to this: are we all willing to get vaccinated and support those trying to get vaccinated? Are we willing to endure stricter quarantine now to end the quarantine sooner? “Undoubtedly, this pandemic has led to the greatest vaccination effort in the history of the world.” The longer we wait, the higher the likelihood that new mutations will continue to appear within the viral genome, including those better able to evade host immunity. Take Manaus for example, the capital of the Amazonas state in Brazil, where the virus spread unmitigated, leading to an estimated seventy-six percent of the population getting infected of nearly two million people in October 2020. 39 At this rate of infection, Manaus should have reached the herd immunity level, which was estimated to require about sixty-eight percent of the population to be immune to the virus.40 They should have been done with COVID-19 for good. But hospitals started filling up again in December 2020. As scientists rushed to figure out why, they identified a mutated viral strain named P.1 among roughly forty-two percent of thirty-one new samples, suggesting that the new strain may be able to evade prior immunity.41 This means that viral mutations may prevent the end of this pandemic if we try to rely passively on enough people getting infected to reach herd immunity. It also means that we need to end the pandemic via vaccination as quickly as possible. Variant P.1 joins other worrying strains, including B.1.351 from South Africa and B.1.1.7 from Great Britain that mutated the spike protein. B.1.1.7 is suspected to be fifty to seventy percent more transmissible, thereby raising the threshold for herd immunity.42 B.1.351 is also suspected to be more transmissible and, problematically, may be able to escape the host immune response, similar to the P.1 variant.43,44 While Moderna has shown preliminary results that its mRNA vaccine still provides some degree of immunity against the B.1.1.7 and B.1.351 variants, the efficacy was reduced six-fold against the B.1.351 (South African) variant.45 Also, while Pfizer-BioNTech published results showing protection against the UK variant,46 preliminary data suggest up to an eight-fold reduction in efficacy against the South African variant.47 Unfortunately, data from Johnson & Johnson, Novovax, and Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccines reported severely diminished efficacy against the South African variant as well.48,49 South Africa even banned further testing and distribution of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine because it performed so poorly against the B.1.351 variant.49 Although new vaccines can be developed against one or more mutant strains, the time to do so will prolong the pain and death count of this pandemic. We do not have much time left to use vaccines that do show some efficacy against these variants. This is a dangerous game of cat and mouse that we do not have to play. We have all the tools needed to end the pandemic, but we need to use them now. Every decision to refuse a vaccine or appropriately quarantine rolls the dice with viral evolution, putting potentially thousands of lives at risk. While current mutated strains are addressable with existing vaccines, even with reduced efficacy, they may not be six months from now. We desperately need an all-hands-on-deck attitude to reduce vaccine stigma and get doses into the arms of patients. As a society, we have watched the most aggressive, most phenomenal vaccine development campaign in human history unfold before our eyes. Despite all the social disarray and pain experienced in 2020, the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna emergency-use vaccine authorizations provided justified and well-needed hope. Nonetheless, we are still in the midst of a difficult delivery and in need of a desperate, unified push to let the science do its work. For what lies ahead, let us consider the kind of world we want, a world that guards against the next pandemic and does not take for granted the social interactions we cherish. Our transition into a post-COVID world must be marked by courage and compassion, leaving a legacy for future generations to come. ◘ REFERENCES 1.C. Huang et al., Lancet. 395, 497–506 (2020). 2.P. Zhou et al., Nature. 579, 270–273 (2020). 3. N. Zhu et al., N. Engl. J. Med. 382, 727–733 (2020). 4.K. G. Andersen, A. Rambaut, W. I. Lipkin, E. C. Holmes, R. F. Garry, Nat. Med. 26, 450–452 (2020). 5. S. Riedel, Proc. . 18, 21–25 (2005). 6. A. Boylston, J. R. Soc. Med. 105, 309–313 (2012). 7. J. A. Wolff et al., Science. 247, 1465–1468 (1990). 8. G. F. Jirikowski, P. P. Sanna, D. Maciejewski-Lenoir, F. E. Bloom, Science. 255, 996–998 (1992). 9. N. Pardi, M. J. Hogan, F. W. Porter, D. 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After nine months of clinical trials, the COVID-19 vaccine is finally being delivered. This breakthrough marks the end of a tragic era of unprecedented financial and logistical burdens. For many, the vaccine is an inoculation against both the virus and despair, a shot of hope for a new life outside the confines of home, a light at the end of this long and terrible tunnel. Yet, the time in which we now find ourselves—nearly but not yet delivered from our trial—is frightening and dangerous. Deeply entrenched in quarantine, Zoom, and mask fatigue, as well as misinformation about the vaccine, we face numerous threats that might prolong the pain we are hoping to escape. We cannot yet declare victory. Just as crucially, we cannot embrace defeatism. We are in desperate need of rational optimism to move from where we are to where we want to be. In a time where social unity has been strained to the brink of collapse, we must ask ourselves how we want to shape this forthcoming reality. How we proceed will shape future generations and form our generation’s legacy. Scientists began thinking about a COVID-19 vaccine as soon as the virus was identified. Although still controversial, early data suggested that the novel beta-coronavirus gained the ability to jump from animals to humans on or around December 1, 2019, at or near the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, China.1 This cross-species transmission was most likely due to mutations in the virus’s RNA that codes for its “spike” protein, which is the portion of the virus for which it is named (“corona” for its crown of spikes). These modified spikes enabled the virus to infect humans, generating the terrible pandemic that dominates our time.2 “In a time where social unity has been strained to the brink of collapse, we must ask ourselves how we want to shape this forthcoming reality.” The disease’s high degree of transmissibility from human to human caused an exponential rise in cases in China, leading to a nationwid

Banjo Heritage

| The Unlikely Survival of a Southern Folkway

George Gibson, Clifton Hicks | The Human | Interview

What follows is a conversation between George Gibson, Clifton Hicks, and Symposeum editor Nissim Lebovits. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. George Gibson and Clifton Hicks are saving music. Both are traditional banjo players, two of only a handful of descendants of a particular musical heritage that dates back more than two centuries. As the last cultural institutions that birthed this music fade away, these men have been helping to preserve the story and the place of traditional banjo in American history. George, a now-retired business executive, has been working for more than fifty years to save the music of eastern Kentucky. In the process, he’s become a key figure in efforts to preserve the history of the banjo. George plays and collects antique banjos, which he uses to record traditional music. He has also published numerous articles on banjo history, and has designed exhibits in various non-profit museums dedicated to the conservation of American folk heritage. Clifton has taken up the same cause, after beginning to study banjo under George’s tutelage more than twenty years ago. Using digital media platforms like YouTube and Patreon, Clifton passes on George’s lessons, songs, and historical information to thousands of monthly viewers. Together, they form the backbone of a growing online community that is preserving banjo music into the twenty-first century. As the pandemic has made Spotify and live-streamed concerts even more important, and traditional in-person banjo gatherings nigh on impossible, I spoke with them about the banjo, its history, and its future. Nissim Lebovits (NL): You both grew up in very different times and places. How did you get into banjo playing? George Gibson (GG): I was born in 1938 in rural Knott County, Kentucky. By the late 1940s the advent of commercialization, radio, and out-migration accelerated by World War II led to the demise of traditional folk activities; community events like dances at school openings and closings, box suppers, quiltings, and bean stringings were no longer held. As traditional music vanished, the many locally composed banjo songs that reflected the area’s history also disappeared. My older sisters told me that our father, Mal Gibson (1900-1996), played banjo and sang for them in the 1930s. By the late 1940s, however, he had ceased playing banjo. This was true for the majority of the traditional musicians in Knott County that did not join the march north. The effects of cultural disintegration led to psychological problems in some, and also to an enormous cultural loss. An internalized awareness of this loss was one of the reasons that I eventually tried to save songs that reflected the history of the area, and although I managed to save some, many were lost. By the time I began playing banjo around 1950, most aspiring banjoists had switched to learning the style of three-finger picking pioneered by Earl Scruggs, who in the 1940s popularized what came to be called “bluegrass.” However, I had a neighbor, James Slone, who still played traditional banjo. There was no formal method of teaching banjo in the rural South, so I learned banjo as Southern musicians always had: by emulation. I listened to Slone’s playing, watched what he did, and tried to reproduce the sounds his banjo made. By doing this I ended up with my own style, which is not a copy of Slone’s playing. Most people today learn by imitation from teachers or tablature in books or magazines. This has led to the spread of the standardized style popular today, known as “round peak,” and to a loss of diversity in Southern playing styles, which were never homogenized in any way. After learning to play banjo I persuaded a few neighbors to play and sing for me. However, I noted they could rarely remember all the verses to their songs. This led me to search for lost verses, particularly for the songs that were local to the area, for they were a part of the history of the area. I pieced a few songs together with verses from different sources, one song of this type was “Old Smokey.” I got a few verses from my mother and some from John Hall, who sang a verse or two for me. I then selected a banjo tuning I thought fitted the melody and played and sang the song for them; both said the song I performed was close to what they had heard previously. After college I taught school locally before leaving Kentucky for better opportunities in the north. After leaving teaching I became an executive at a Fortune 500 company in Philadelphia, but resigned after thirteen years to pursue business interests in Florida. During this time, however, I spent as much time as I could in Knott County engaging with people who had knowledge of our vanishing folk culture. Clifton Hicks (CH): My earliest musical experience came from an old man who sold watermelons out of a wheelbarrow. He lived around the corner, near a full-service gas station where he bought ice. Every summer he paced up and down the streets and alleys connecting the neighborhoods, singing at the top of his lungs a simple song about his produce: Watermelon Ice cold watermelon Coldest watermelon In Georgia When I was thirteen, my father paid a hundred dollars for a second-hand banjo at Bill's Music Shop & Picking Parlor in West Columbia, South Carolina. He also bought three metal fingerpicks and a “bluegrass banjo” instruction manual. We both tried to play it, but after a few months we lost interest. At the end of the summer I carried the banjo to my mother’s new home in Florida, where I was enrolled in middle school. Later that year, I happened to meet a man named Ernie Williams, who was something of a local folk personality. Ernie taught me how to play the banjo using the ball of my thumb and the back of my forefinger—a style he’d learned from an older man in Sand Mountain, Alabama, who called it “rapping the banjo.” Ernie was the first person I ever saw who sang with the banjo, and he encouraged me to sing with mine. The next year, my mother came home with a cassette tape album titled Last Possum Up the Tree by George Gibson. I had never, and have never, heard anything like it. Like Ernie, George could sing and play the “rapping” style, but he also fingerpicked beautifully, sometimes with two fingers, sometimes with three. And sometimes, he made sounds so remarkable that my ears couldn’t comprehend how he’d made them. In those days, George had his mailing address printed on the back of the liner notes, so I wrote him a letter introducing myself and requesting an in-person meeting. He accepted. GG: Clifton was already a good banjo player when he began coming to see me in Florida, and is now a better banjo player than I am. I emphasized that he ought to learn the songs and techniques, but develop his own style. I believe he is now using this approach when teaching banjo. NL: So much of American folk music is a synecdoche for American history. The banjo in particular is wrapped up in this. Could you tell us a bit about its history? GG: The banjo was brought to North America by enslaved Africans who were carried across the Atlantic against their will. During the 1700s, it became a part of white folk culture in colonial east Virginia and Maryland where slaves and white indentured servants socialized together, resulting in unions between free Blacks and white female indentured servants. The descendants of these families moved south and west on the early frontier as racial hierarchies were increasingly codified and enforced by colonial governments. In the process, they spread their creolized culture—including the banjo—to their neighbors. Northern blackface minstrelsy, which began in the 1840s, is popularly believed to be responsible for planting the banjo in white southern folk culture. White minstrel entertainers blacked their faces and played the banjo on stage while stereotyping, parodying, and intentionally demeaning African Americans. These grotesque acts were the beginning of musical theater in America. It is assumed the banjo was brought south by soldiers returning from the Civil War, where they are presumed to have seen the instrument for the first time, or by northern blackface entertainers after the War. Those who support this argument do so by citing the well documented history of the banjo in minstrelsy and not by citing southern folklorists or historians, which would be inconvenient. In fact, as I proved in my essay in the book Banjo Roots and Branches, the banjo was widespread in white folk culture before the Civil War, from the Carolinas to Arkansas, and in Kentucky, from the western flatlands to the Appalachian mountains. Finally, it’s worth noting that the term “folk music” is confusing at best. I prefer using “traditional music” or “traditional banjo” to separate the older music in the South from the term “folk music.” Prior to the 1930s, folk music meant the in-home music of ordinary people, as opposed to commercial or art music. The early in-home banjo use in the South consisted of traditional music learned from various sources and played for family, friends, and neighbors. When the folk revival began in the 1930s, however, this definition became amorphous; it came to include the music of people in the 1940s and later who sang commercialized versions of folk songs. Today, “folk music” has grown even more imprecise—it now includes the music of people who write their own songs and perform commercially. The use of the term today is therefore typically ambiguous and often inaccurate. NL: How was it that popular perception of the banjo’s history came to be so different from the instrument’s actual social history? GG: The banjo remained nearly invisible, restricted to southern Black and white folk cultures, until the 1840s. During this time, white southern musicians Joel Walker Sweeney and Archibald Ferguson introduced the instrument to the burgeoning minstrelsy culture, which was concentrated in the north. Claims that minstrel entertainers learned their music directly from slaves was a marketing ploy meant to lend credence to their acts. However, these claims helped spread the false notion that the banjo was exclusively a slave instrument before the 1840s. The reason many embraced the minstrel origin is the lack of contemporaneous citations of the banjo in white southern folklife before 1840s minstrelsy. Folklorists know, however, that people do not comment contemporaneously regarding folk activities common in the home. A good example is the southern ballad tradition that was “discovered” by ladies at the Hindman Settlement School in Knott County, Kentucky, in 1902. Students boarding from outlying areas of the county brought their in-home banjo playing and ballad singing to the school. Although there are practically no contemporaneous citations of southern ballad singing in the home prior to the 1840s, no one doubts that this tradition was brought to Kentucky by pioneers from Virginia and Maryland. The origin of the traditional banjo, however, has been erased. Looming in the background is the hillbilly stereotype, which is so pervasive that most do not realize that it influences their thinking about southern mountaineers. A few urban revivalists, who fell in love with traditional banjo, decided that mountaineers could not have possibly created the music they liked. It was convenient to say that the mountaineers were taught not by African Americans, but by northern minstrels strutting in blackface while imitating African Americans. So certain were they of this that none did any extensive historical research into the social history of early America. “As traditional music vanished, the many locally composed banjo songs that reflected the area’s history also disappeared.” Those who lack Appalachian roots—and even some who don’t—fail to recognize the harm the hillbilly stereotype has inflicted, and continues to inflict, on Appalachia and its residents. Oil, gas, and coal companies have relied on the hillbilly stereotype, which is ubiquitous in American popular culture, to conceal the extent of their environmental destruction. This stereotype is responsible for many people believing that the people of Appalachia are themselves responsible for the many problems they face, including health issues, decreased longevity, and a blighted environment. To this day, people outside Appalachia are amazed when I tell them that gas well fracking and coal mining have destroyed over 80% of the water table in east Kentucky. How does one explain this? The best answer is the hillbilly stereotype, which is the band-aid that covers the sores of Appalachia, and lives on in media, in popular movies, plays, and books. Having grown up in a southern folk culture that included the banjo, I recognized that the minstrel origin of the southern folk banjo was both counterintuitive and improbable. I began researching the banjo’s history by consulting historians, folklorists, and oral history as well as original sources in journals, newspapers, and magazines. I found citations of the banjo in white southern folklife prior to the 1840s. However, most are not contemporaneous; they are from people nostalgically recalling their youth, or repeating what their grandparents recalled about their youth. CH: I’ll add that anyone who learns from me must come away with the understanding that the past two centuries of banjo history are characterized by a vast, indescribable, dazzling array of styles and customs. What exists today is only a remnant of a culture which has survived countless near-extinctions, each destructive event creating a narrow bottleneck through which only a fraction of the tradition has passed. NL: Speaking of popular banjo perceptions, where do associations with bluegrass and “hillbilly” stereotypes come from? GG: In the first half of the twentieth century, southern folk traditions underwent dramatic changes. Banjo playing by both Black and white musicians became increasingly professionalized in venues like minstrel shows and vaudeville. The use of the banjo for home entertainment declined as a result. Square dances, which featured the banjo prominently, lingered in the mountains but disappeared in areas where commercialization brought new instruments and dances. This fostered the idea that the banjo was a “mountain” instrument. Ultimately, it was radio that helped preserve the banjo in the south. Traditional music still existed in some areas of the south when radio stations found that string band music featuring the fiddle and banjo was popular with their listeners, Black and white. Shows like the Grand Ole Opry, a Nashville radio station formed in 1925, helped promote this style of music. At the same time, however, stereotypes promoted by writers like John Fox, Jr. helped cast the banjo as a “hillbilly” instrument. Then, in the 1940s, Earl Scruggs brought radical change to the southern banjo: he introduced a new style employing steel finger picks and a unique three-finger approach. This style became known as “bluegrass,” and by the 1970s was the dominant banjo technique, isolating the remaining southern banjoists who still played in traditional styles. Today, bluegrass music is the sound most associated with the banjo in popular culture. Meanwhile, in the north, an urban banjo revival had begun in two waves, first in the 1940s and then again in the 1960s. The first phase stemmed from a broader folk revival beginning in the 1930s, while the second coincided with the counterculture revolution of the Vietnam era. Like northern minstrels, however, urban revivalists adopted an instrument foreign to their culture. As a result, they created a homogenized banjo culture disconnected from the instrument’s southern roots. Their style became the dominant style taught through books and magazines, and now the internet. While remnants of older southern banjo traditions linger in some mountain areas of the south, most people who learn banjo today do so in the culture created by the urban banjo revival. NL: Folk music has long been tied up in American popular memory and protest, not just during Vietnam, but also in westward expansion, the Civil War, Jim Crow, and so on. Clifton, you’ve talked before about being a conscientious objector. Is that in any way connected to the music that you play? CH: Most people experience some kind of violence in their lives. My own life has, at times, been exceptionally violent. My youth was spent fighting, so when I became a “man,” it seemed practical to make violence my profession. With my family’s consent I enlisted at the age of seventeen in the U.S. Army. I carried my banjo, and George’s songs with it, through the battlefields around Baghdad where I served in an armored cavalry squadron during the early years of the Iraq War. It was here that I first played songs like “Darling Cora” and “Old German War” for strangers, and soon these songs (especially “German War”) became favorites of the men and boys I fought alongside. Every night, whenever the situation permitted, I would lay my rifle down and pick up the banjo, and a small group would assemble to hear the songs I’d inherited from George. I’ve been in the midst of battle I know its hardships well I’ve been across that great ocean and I’ve rode down the streets of Hell I’ve lived a life of misery and I’ve been where Death he roams I’ll tell you from experience boys, you had better stay at home. Although I was a member of an armored cavalry squadron, trained and equipped with high-tech weaponry, most of the violence that we inflicted was accomplished without firing a shot. We beat people with clubs, kicked and stomped on them, struck them with our rifle muzzles, and sometimes crushed their bodies with our vehicles. Many times I was shot at; many times I dove into the earth as mortar and rocket shells burst around me; but only once did I ever fire my rifle directly into someone. When I did, the man collapsed out of sight. I have no idea what became of him. On a U.S. Army base in Germany, between deployments and away from the battlefield, we found ourselves suddenly with ample opportunities to reflect on what we had experienced. It wasn't until I'd been in Germany for a few months that I realized the gravity of what had taken place, and of what I would be expected to do on the next deployment, which was imminent. I came to the realization that the pain and terror I’d inflicted during the course of my life had, in most cases, been unjust. That realization became the impetus behind my transition from the life of a professional killer to that of a conscientious objector. These events affected my relationship with music in ways that are not easily described. Whereas before, as a youth, I took great pleasure in singing violent murder ballads like “Frankie & Albert,” “Pretty Polly,” “Stagolee,” or “Wild Bill Jones”—reveling in the recitation of each bloody verse—I now find lyrics like these less attractive: “He stabbed her through the heart And the heart's blood did flow, And down in the grave Pretty Polly did go.” “Stagolee shot Billy He shot him with his forty-four, Billy fell back from the table Crying, ‘Stag, don’t shoot me no more.’” While these songs are still of great interest and value to me from a cultural and historical perspective, the act of singing them has become something of a burden, and I only do so when asked by a friend or a student of mine. It requires me to purposefully detach myself from some of the lyrics, no longer daring, as I did in my youth, to welcome the gruesome imagery into my mind. In that sense, I don't know many people who would be able to sing these songs with my level of conviction—where these images had once been artificially projected by my childish imagination, they are now conjured up from bitter memory. I survived the war, became a conscientious objector, and was honorably discharged from the U.S. Army on December 26th, 2005. A number of my friends did not survive. In November of 2018, George asked me to play “German War” for him. I did, and I have not played it since. GG: The “Old German War” is a song unique to Knott County, Kentucky, which had many volunteers in World War I. My father had a close friend, Jonah, who served overseas. After the War, my father’s friend became alcohol dependent; although he raised a large family, he was often drunk. He did not share his war experiences with his family or friends. However, I accidentally learned what haunted him when visiting his home. “[T]he digital, online medium—though deeply anachronistic in the context of traditional banjo—may, in the right hands, be used to create something approaching an authentic experience.” Jonah was drinking with a friend and both were inebriated. Jonah was holding his reading glasses in his hand when he became agitated. He beat his glasses on the arm of his chair and said to no one in particular: “He had his arms up, he said ‘comrade, comrade,’ he wanted to surrender, but I shot him, I shot him, he was just a boy.” The Germans had boys as young as fifteen serving before the war ended. Jonah had evidently shot one of these boys in the heat of battle; this haunted him for the rest of his life. At sixteen, Jonah entered the army, only a boy himself. Although he’d been a banjo player, he likely didn’t write the “Old German War” song. I believe it was his neighbor, Mel Amburgey, who also served in the First World War. I also knew veterans of World War Two who had demons; one was a banjo-playing cousin of mine who eventually died of his war wounds. For many people, war never ends. Unfortunately, we continue to elect leaders, with disastrous results, who are oblivious to this. NL: It seems a bit paradoxical to have a digital forum for folk music. It’s a genre that tends to be best experienced live and in-person, right? How have new technologies changed that, and what role have they played in disseminating folk music? GG: Musicians have always managed to take advantage of new technology. My father told me he played over the telephone with a fiddler for neighbors on Little Carr Creek in 1916. I initially doubted this because I didn’t think we could have had telephones in 1916, since I didn’t see a telephone in our home until the 1950s. I had seen remnants of old telephone lines in the area when I was a boy. However, these lines were abandoned sometime in the early 1930s as the Depression deepened. I once found a book of poetry by William Aspenwall Bradley, entitled Singing Carr, in which he described walking to Carr Creek in 1916 and seeing residents of a log home listening to hymns sung over the telephone. Bradley named his book “Singing” Carr because of the number of traditional singers he found there. CH: The idea of staged banjo performance—ascending the stage, peering down at a ticket-holding audience, and singing through a microphone—is counter to the banjo songster tradition. On the other hand, the digital, online medium—though deeply anachronistic in the context of traditional banjo—may, in the right hands, be used to create something approaching an authentic experience. As songsters, we can film our performances in a traditional setting (such as the outdoors, a barn, or the fireside), upload it, and plainly present it to the eyes and ears of the observer. More often than not, our audience is at home—the place where traditional music has always been performed—and more and more often, viewers are visiting digital platforms to learn the tradition, not merely to enjoy it as entertainment. Digital platforms also welcome a broader audience: like festival goers, my viewers often hail from urban centers (various cities in California, Texas, and Ohio currently top the list), and the majority are scattered across North America, Europe, and Australia. NL: Clifton, speaking of technology helping disseminate folk music, your banjo heritage project brings banjo history and technique to viewers online. Can you tell us more about how this project got started? CH: My long-term learning/teaching project, which doesn't really have a name but may be referred to as Banjo Heritage, began in the former Wehrmacht barracks I lived in as a twenty-year-old soldier outside of Büdingen, Germany in 2005. I purchased a refurbished laptop computer and a cheap microphone, and I began recording all of the songs I'd learned from George. My squadron was preparing to return to Iraq, and I was concerned that I might be killed without leaving any trace of this musical inheritance. By 2007, I was out of the army, and recording segued into filming. I began by filming other musicians, especially after 2008 when I moved to Boone, North Carolina, and immersed myself in the remnants of that area's “old-time” folk music scene. When my mother killed herself in 2012, a few months shy of my college graduation day, I entered into something of a musical hiatus. The morning I learned of her death I walked straight home from campus, took her old guitar off the wall, and played “Will the Circle Be Unbroken”: I told the undertaker Undertaker please drive slow, For that body you are hauling Lord I hate to see her go I hung the guitar back up in its place, and I didn't touch it, or a banjo, again for many months. In 2014 I met my wife, and with her encouragement began to play and sing more frequently. In 2018 I launched the Banjo Heritage project in earnest, and have been filming and sharing music, music lessons, and historical information relevant to banjo culture ever since, mostly through YouTube. The stated goal of this project is to spread the musical and cultural inheritance that I have received mostly from George, but also from Ernie Williams and others. I will continue to share this heritage with as many people as I can, until I am physically prevented from doing so. NL: George, it seems like Clifton’s approach to this musical heritage has mostly focused on its propagation online. Can you elaborate on your approach? GG: In an interview for the Winter 2017 issue of Western Folklore, I laid out the idea of “cultural strip-mining,” regarding the extraction of southern music for commercial purposes. Cultural strip-mining occurs when people from outside a culture distort its history and appropriate its music for commercial purposes without properly attributing that music to its source. A good example is a performance I heard on the stage at the Mountain Dance and Folk Festival in Asheville, North Carolina. A well-known academic, who moved south during the countercultural revolution of the Vietnam era, performed a banjo song on stage, word for word, that was unique to an extraordinary Kentucky banjo songster, Rufus Crisp. He did not mention Rufus Crisp or the source from which he acquired this song. A few in the audience may have known where this song originated, but most would not. I let him know that I thought this was inappropriate. Also inappropriate is claiming a connection to southern music by exploiting the hillbilly stereotype, such as naming your band “moonshine holler.” Some musicians, however, have used elements of traditional southern music to create their own music. I admire musicians, such as Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, who have done this. “Our tradition does not exist on paper, nor on the stage, nor in the classroom.” Back in the 1960s, which was the peak of the American folk revival based in Greenwich Village, one of my sister’s friends owned a publishing company in New York. When she learned I played banjo, she saw an opportunity to discover another folk star, or at least make some money from publishing new music. She insisted that I audition for her. I did not want to, but I had no easy way to escape. I felt protective of the little music I had, and thought it had limited relevance to the folksongs and folksingers of the day. When I auditioned, I sang in the worst possible manner and mangled the banjo accompaniment. After this, she never mentioned my banjo playing again. NL: What do you think of the work you see from other banjo players and musicians interested in banjo heritage? CH: Most other musicians have learned their craft from tablature books and university music courses. Those who’ve taught them (often in formal, paid settings) learned from the same inauthentic sources. Furthermore, these musicians tend to associate exclusively with others who regurgitate the same music, and the baseless dogma which accompanies it. Consequently, their music bears little resemblance to the actual tradition. For my own part, I rejected tablature and formal music lessons from an early age. Instead, I sought out flesh-and-blood tradition-bearers such as George Gibson. When I couldn’t find people like George, I found others who, like me, sought the tradition at its source, and I learned from them. This process follows the archaic tradition by which banjo songsters, for more than two hundred years, have passed their secrets between one-another. Our tradition does not exist on paper, nor on the stage, nor in the classroom. Of all the younger people who have learned George's music, none have attempted to copy his style. Although we’re all certainly influenced by him—and by many other traditional banjo players, too—none of us would ever try to imitate his playing note for note. This value is one that George has actively hammered into all of his students’ minds since we first encountered him, and it's a value that I think was harshly instilled in him from his earliest years. In all of my dealings, either privately with students or with the public, I have endeavored to make that value central to the experience. NL: After all these years of history, what is the future of traditional banjo music in the twenty-first century? GG: Traditional music, which is meant to be shared with friends and family, will change in the twenty-first century, as it always does. The traditional music I knew as a boy is now splintered. The culture that supported it collapsed long ago. Some of this music is lost forever, but some of it is being preserved and distributed digitally like what Clifton does. Furthermore, some community groups in the South have created organizations to teach young people to play traditional music. The success of these efforts leads me to believe that some portion of traditional music will survive well into the twenty-first century. CH: As of this writing, many of us are living under the burden of government- and socially-mandated lockdowns in response to COVID-19. Where I live, in rural Georgia, little has changed. Daily life for my family and most of my neighbors continues much as it did before the pandemic. I’m still free to express my culture by carrying the banjo and a few cans of beer to visit a neighbor. That being said, I am aware that many of my online banjo students live in densely-populated urban and suburban areas. People in these places are suffering in new ways, and many are seeking new ways to connect with culture. Of the thousands of people who view my banjo performances and instructional material, many hundreds live outside of the United States. This is proof not only of the banjo's internationalist character and its unlimited value as a human artifact, but also of our natural human desire to know and to belong. On the one hand, I feel no obligation as a conduit of this heritage. I see myself as one of the millions of banjoists who will live, die, and ultimately amount to very little. If during my brief life I have musically conveyed one genuine emotion, or passed on one endangered folkway, then I will have done more than was expected. On the other hand, it's easy to saddle oneself with weighty obligations to ideas of culture, family, ancestors, young people, the truth, and so on. The old music, and the old instruments themselves (especially the homemade examples) are a window into the essence of what it means to be human across time and space. Having inherited the knowledge and ability required to open such a window, I find myself deeply obligated to in some way maintain it, so that it may remain open after I am dead. ◘

What follows is a conversation between George Gibson, Clifton Hicks, and Symposeum editor Nissim Lebovits. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. George Gibson and Clifton Hicks are saving music. Both are traditional banjo players, two of only a handful of descendants of a particular musical heritage that dates back more than two centuries. As the last cultural institutions that birthed this music fade away, these men have been helping to preserve the story and the place of traditional banjo in American history. George, a now-retired business executive, has been working for more than fifty years to save the music of eastern Kentucky. In the process, he’s become a key figure in efforts to preserve the history of the banjo. George plays and collects antique banjos, which he uses to record traditional music. He has also published numerous articles on banjo history, and has designed exhibits in various non-profit museums dedicated to the conservation of American folk heritage. Clifton has taken up the same cause, after beginning to study banjo under George’s tutelage more than twenty years ago. Using digital media platforms like YouTube and Patreon, Clifton passes on George’s lessons, songs, and historical information to thousands of monthly viewers. Together, they form the backbone of a growing online community that is preserving banjo music into the twenty-first century. As the pandemic has made Spotify and live-streamed concerts even more important, and traditional in-person banjo gatherings nigh on impossible, I spoke with them about the banjo, its history, and its future. Nissim Lebovits (NL): You both grew up in very different times and places. How did you get into banjo playing? George Gibson (GG): I was born in 1938 in rural Knott County, Kentucky. By the late 1940s the advent of commercialization, radio, and out-migration accelerated by World War II led to the demise of traditional folk activities; community events like dances at school o

Da 5 Bloods Movie Review

| Spike Lee Takes on Double Consciousness

Chidozie Alozie | The Necessary | Review

Spike Lee’s latest and critically acclaimed film, Da 5 Bloods, released direct-to-Netflix in June 2020—less than three weeks after the murder of George Floyd and only two months before the death of starring actor Chadwick Boseman. While Lee’s previous films like Blackkklansman and Malcom X portray American racism at home, Da 5 Bloods marks the director’s examination of how these oppressions are wrought on an international scale. It offers an alternative interpretation of U.S. colonialism, war, and occupation in Vietnam from the perspective of Black Americans fighting for a country that doesn’t love them back. True to Spike Lee’s directorial bent, Da 5 Bloods is packed with action, subplots, and political commentary. It bends traditional genres of American cinema by blurring the lines between comedy and tragedy, documentary and drama, love and war. But its most radical innovation is its reclaiming of the Vietnam War movie for Black Americans. Despite the fact that Black soldiers comprised thirty-two percent of American troops in Vietnam, they were virtually erased in Hollywood’s accounts of the war. Da 5 Bloods is therefore as much a story about identity exploration as it is an exploration of how we tell stories. Furthermore, this shift in focus allows Lee to focus on the multiplicity of Black experiences of the war. He does so masterfully, bringing the experience of double consciousness—how Black Americans navigate simultaneous Blackness and American identity—to the foreground in Da 5 Bloods The titular Bloods are Paul (Delroy Lindo), Otis (Clarke Peters), Melvin (Isiah Whitlock Jr), Eddie (Norm Lewis), four Black American vets who served together in Vietnam, and their erstwhile squad leader, “Stormin” Norman (Chadwick Boseman), who was killed in action. More than forty years after the war (the movie’s cultural references set it somewhere in the wake of Trump’s election), the four surviving Bloods return to Vietnam in search of their fallen squad leader’s remains and a buried treasure. The treasure, once property of the U.S. government, is a shipment of gold bullion that was intended as payment for a pro-American Vietnamese militia. It accidentally fell into the hands of the Bloods, who buried it just before the war ended. Now, the surviving Bloods intend to retrieve it, explicitly referring to the gold as reparations rightfully owed to them and to Black Americans as a whole. As the Bloods make their way to the gold’s hiding place, Norman is ever-present, embodied in flashbacks and the Bloods’ daily conversations. It is clear that they have romanticized him; while the other four Bloods appear even in flashbacks as their present, aged selves, Norman is always depicted as youthful, composed, and powerful—somewhere between Christ and Shaka Zulu. But it is also clear that Norman was genuinely the platoon’s moral compass, a Black revolutionary in the cut of Martin Luther King, Jr.. Despite the bitter irony of being sent to Vietnam to fight a war launched by white America, Norman believed it was an extension of his American duty to free people. Norman’s stance on the war sets him at odds with the headstrong Paul. If Norman represents the incrementalist approach in Black revolutionary ideology, Paul is a radical separatist revolutionary. He cannot see past the plain fact that the same American government that has sent him to fight its war refuses to give him and his fellow Black American soldiers their rights back home. In the juxtaposition of these two characters, Lee addresses the issue of double consciousness, advocating neither assimilation nor separatism, but a third path: fight for the country that doesn’t love you back, but resist the reasons it doesn’t love you. The mere arrival of a film like Da 5 Bloods reveals immense cultural change. Had it been made twenty years ago, it would have been a different movie. Paul’s signature MAGA hat might have featured an NRA logo instead. Norman might have been replaced by a white savior character. And perhaps most tellingly, Paul would have been used not to illustrate a reasonable reaction to the intolerable life situation of racial injustice, but rather as an “angry black man who wants to burn it all down.” The fact that these tropes were not employed speaks to the growing importance of the new Black cinema that Lee and others have pioneered, and to the revelatory possibilities of Black people telling their own stories on their own terms. ◘

Spike Lee’s latest and critically acclaimed film, Da 5 Bloods, released direct-to-Netflix in June 2020—less than three weeks after the murder of George Floyd and only two months before the death of starring actor Chadwick Boseman. While Lee’s previous films like Blackkklansman and Malcom X portray American racism at home, Da 5 Bloods marks the director’s examination of how these oppressions are wrought on an international scale. It offers an alternative interpretation of U.S. colonialism, war, and occupation in Vietnam from the perspective of Black Americans fighting for a country that doesn’t love them back. True to Spike Lee’s directorial bent, Da 5 Bloods is packed with action, subplots, and political commentary. It bends traditional genres of American cinema by blurring the lines between comedy and tragedy, documentary and drama, love and war. But its most radical innovation is its reclaiming of the Vietnam War movie for Black Americans. Despite the fact that Black soldiers comprised thirty-two percent of American troops in Vietnam, they were virtually erased in Hollywood’s accounts of the war. Da 5 Bloods is therefore as much a story about identity exploration as it is an exploration of how we tell stories. Furthermore, this shift in focus allows Lee to focus on the multiplicity of Black experiences of the war. He does so masterfully, bringing the experience of double consciousness—how Black Americans navigate simultaneous Blackness and American identity—to the foreground in Da 5 Bloods The titular Bloods are Paul (Delroy Lindo), Otis (Clarke Peters), Melvin (Isiah Whitlock Jr), Eddie (Norm Lewis), four Black American vets who served together in Vietnam, and their erstwhile squad leader, “Stormin” Norman (Chadwick Boseman), who was killed in action. More than forty years after the war (the movie’s cultural references set it somewhere in the wake of Trump’s election), the four surviving Bloods return to Vietnam in search of their fallen squad leader’s remain

Review of A Journey to the Underworld

| From Here to Eternity

Ali Kominsky | The True | Review

FROM HERE TO ETERNITY: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death By Caitlin Doughty Illustrated by Landis Blair. 248 pp. W.W. Norton & Company. Book Review by Alexandria Kominsky | Drawings by Courtney W. Brothers In From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death, Caitlin Doughty tackles death positivity: the idea that cultures of silence and shame around death do more harm than good to society. As a practicing mortician, podcast host, entrepreneur and now author, Doughty has devoted over a decade to encouraging audiences to adopt healthier end-of-life attitudes. She founded The Order of the Good Death in 2011, a self-described “group of funeral industry professionals, academics, and artists exploring ways to prepare a death-phobic culture for inevitable mortality.” Caitlin Doughty’s book is an anthropological expedition across the world, examining how different cultures treat their dead. She engages an otherwise serious, solemn subject with curiosity, awe, and humor. Observing unfamiliar funeral rites, Doughty offers new possibilities to reconcile with death. Death is hard to grapple with, and Western culture tends to value stoicism over mourning. With the goal of debunking stigmas towards death in her mind, Doughty sets sail around the globe on her search to "find the good death." We learn about myriad practices to prepare bodies for their final rest—like mummification, cremation, embalming, and natural decomposition. In South Sulawesi, a remote region in Indonesia, mummification is common. Unearthing a corpse years after its burial might seem spine-chilling, but reading about a mother’s elation upon unwrapping her mummified son who died at sixteen compels us to recognize that our sources of joy are framed by cultural context. Courtney Brothers, “Death Head”Travelling next to Mexico, Doughty acquaints us with the traditional festival commemorating deceased friends and family, Día de los Muertos, or “The Day of the Dead.” The multi-day holiday featuring marigolds, skulls, and bright colors is held annually in November and gathers whole communities to grieve collectively. It is a celebration. “Each year,” Doughty writes, “The border between the living and the dead thins and frays, allowing the spirits to transgress.” Families leave offerings to symbolize a promise that they’ll be there, year after year. If they show up, so will the spirit. In Spain, Snow White-esque corpses rest in glass box displays. In Bolivia, human skulls called ñatitas are thought to possess distinct personalities and powers to bless those that take care of them. In Japan, where almost all bodies are cremated, family members use chopsticks to transfer bones from ash into an urn. These customs give mourners a space for communal grieving. Turning her attention to marine mammals, Doughty takes us to depths to investigate whale falls—the descent of whale carcasses to their final resting place on the ocean floor. Their remains in the bathyal (midnight) zone of the ocean offer fertile grounds for an ecosystem that benefits from the rich nutrients for decades. Forensic researchers at Western Carolina University are interested in whether human cadavers might supply a similar kind of sustenance. Planting bodies in mounds of earth—“turning corpses into compost”—is a process of transformation they’ve named recomposition. Of course, the reader increasingly wonders how a death expert thinks about her own eventual death. Doughty is drawn to the Tibetan custom of sky burial. Practiced exclusively in the mountains of Tibet, sky burials are performed by a rogyapa who expertly slices a body’s skin and muscle and feeds it to Himalyan griffon vultures. “I spent the first thirty years of my life devouring animals,” Doughty observes. “So why, when I die, should they not have their turn with me? Am I not an animal?” I’m with her. Rather than rotting in an overpriced casket, I like the idea of returning to the natural world. COVID-19 has taken millions of lives. Though death has not stopped for us—to adapt the famous Dickinson line—we may at least stop for it. From Here to Eternity is an opportunity to reflect on the ageless reality of loss. Hospitals, mortuaries, morgues, and funeral homes are overwhelmed with the dead. Nightmarish images of bodies rotated in refrigerators, kept in “mobile morgues,” or in cardboard caskets push us to reckon with the fact that our current system for handling the dead is, at minimum, ill-equipped. Amidst this scale of global loss, Doughty’s work provides meaningful alternatives to care for the dead. To learn how cultures honor their dead is illuminating. It reminds us that the transition into whatever is next is important, as is celebrating life. From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death is an affirmation that death doesn’t signify the end of connection. ◘

FROM HERE TO ETERNITY: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death By Caitlin Doughty Illustrated by Landis Blair. 248 pp. W.W. Norton & Company. Book Review by Alexandria Kominsky | Drawings by Courtney W. Brothers In From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death, Caitlin Doughty tackles death positivity: the idea that cultures of silence and shame around death do more harm than good to society. As a practicing mortician, podcast host, entrepreneur and now author, Doughty has devoted over a decade to encouraging audiences to adopt healthier end-of-life attitudes. She founded The Order of the Good Death in 2011, a self-described “group of funeral industry professionals, academics, and artists exploring ways to prepare a death-phobic culture for inevitable mortality.” Caitlin Doughty’s book is an anthropological expedition across the world, examining how different cultures treat their dead. She engages an otherwise serious, solemn subject with curiosity, awe, and humor. Observing unfamiliar funeral rites, Doughty offers new possibilities to reconcile with death. Death is hard to grapple with, and Western culture tends to value stoicism over mourning. With the goal of debunking stigmas towards death in her mind, Doughty sets sail around the globe on her search to "find the good death." We learn about myriad practices to prepare bodies for their final rest—like mummification, cremation, embalming, and natural decomposition. In South Sulawesi, a remote region in Indonesia, mummification is common. Unearthing a corpse years after its burial might seem spine-chilling, but reading about a mother’s elation upon unwrapping her mummified son who died at sixteen compels us to recognize that our sources of joy are framed by cultural context. Courtney Brothers, “Death Head”Travelling next to Mexico, Doughty acquaints us with the traditional festival commemorating deceased friends and family, Día de los Muertos, or “The Day of the Dead.” The multi-da

I consider a chestnut

Nissim Lebovits, Isabella Bruzzese | The Plain | Poetry

There is a project for the sun. The sun Must bear no name, gold flourisher, but be In the difficulty of what it is to be. —Wallace Stevens, “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” I. Darkening and it grows late. The rain comes cold and slow. The wind is thick, the blackbirds lilting. All the wood is sound and motion. Then a chestnut: impressions of the thing, appearances, dark limbs against a grey Dutch sky. II. When ere I saw the chestnut first, I took From that botanic garden as my own The image of its form—for it had grown There at the taxis of the bridge and brook. Grey was its bark, and fissured; in the crook Of branchtips palmates sprawling outwards shone With greeny serrate leaves; therein were sown White panicles, pink-tongued, fair upon to look. As Adam out among the beasts, I assayed To name and take this object of étude And fix its roots in that syntax of clades. Aesculus it was by essence, or by name, For there it stands in the System construed By Carolus, which makes universal claim. III. They were in Acre, that frayed crusader stronghold, walking down the alleys of the market, the limestone slick with rain, past the seacatch and the blue tarps rattling in the wind. The city smelled of brine and smoke, and everything was grim, except the copper pans and bagatelles turning slowly in the rafters. The seagulls shrieked overhead, the air cold and grey as the water. She was hungry, so they ate chestnuts from a paper sack beside the Mandate-era prison. They were dry, crumbly, vaguely sweet; bits of shell caught stiffly in his teeth. “When we get to Haifa,” he said, “Let’s spend just a night.” IV. “High in air,” writes Melville, “the beautiful and bountiful horse-chestnuts, candelabra-wise, proffer the passer-by their tapering upright cones of congregated blossoms.” This is New Bedford, whence the Pequod sallies forth, bearing Ishmael & Ahab out to have that precious oil, and Ahab on his hunt for vengeance ‘gainst the whale who had so maimed & torn his leg asunder. And on the way seeks Ishmael to rectify old, gross delusions of the whale by mounting intimate account of it, correcting knowledge. He gives the hoary histories, the Bible and before. He tells the second hand accounts, and discourses on failings of sophistricated portraits. He penetrates the whale, expounding down its bones. He tells of how it came to be and of it what will come— sempiternal. And it is the killings, his too-pedantic lance, that stimulate these sermons! that manifest cetaceous nets, not wise but merely otherwisely flawed, for he himself is seeking for this whale now to wrest, to cast claim o’er & own what never can be held— in such Socratic struggle no gnosis will suffice and must the whale therefore go unfathomed. V. Often in that autumn, but before it was familiar, he’d trace the trails of the Haagse Bos in search of fallen chestnuts. Fall’s woods were still enfoliate, caught in the nearby thrum of traffic & peppered through with pale, broken trunks of birch. They went together once. He stumbled on a clutch of conkers and thought to gather them, but as she pointed out, they had no bag to carry them, so they went back to the pale yellow of the midday kitchen, where he swept coffee nubs & flour as they played etymologies. “Convergence,” he proposed. “A shared sense of vertigo” (which was false). She scrubbed a wooden spoon and set it down to dry beside the blue Delftware. “To distinguish is to separate by pricking” (which was true). Later he read the field guide and she scored the shells of chestnuts from the market. The book said Castanea and he was puzzled by the artifice of even nature. Though it fruits earlier, the horse-chestnut is not edible, unlike its sweet faux cousin the sativa— next time he’d seek shorter leaves and spines that would antagonize his fingers. VI. Having land- ed, Penn set out the corners of my home three hundred and sixteen years before I was born into that stretch of schist and green. The white -tailed deer that roamed his woods mingled with the mountain laurel and the upswept oaks. The soil was dark for all the planting he could do. He would have wandered as I did in those dense pockets, the maples in the understory young and lithe, and fattened, too, his hogs on chestnuts—those keystones whose ribs assured the split-rail fences and the houses rectitude, resisting any form of rot. I ate sassafras and did not stop to think of loss, nor sense my very casual unknowing (having not yet turned to verse to know of l’absence in Rilke’s grand & positive intent). Instead I tripped in nettle by the Schuylkill, its water coursing toward the city & the port like in farther north Manhattan where, amidst the bristling, sylvan smokestacks, a ship bore blight up to our shores and at the birth of the last century, hurled it over all the eastern seaboard, cleaving forty million chestnut trees down to some sparse dozens. VII. In the earth hour your myriad self, your myriad self present and unfolding, du bist. Your gothic arms, your multitudinous self, loosened “by the lees of both,” the currents of the air, the whole eye, bist du. In October the yellowing, the spined pods dropping to mulch with the orange beech leaves, du bist und bist, the lichen & moss climbing over the greengrey bark and the yellow-beaked blackbirds turning over leaves in the undergrowth, du bist, du bӓumst. Attend, woodnode—the upper sky is blue the light filtering the green lichen the blackbirds’ madrigal (du bӓumst, du bist), looking us into one, unthinking, du bist, du bist, du bist. Poet’s Note The theme of this poem is knowledge & its sundry forms. Specifically, I am concerned with the epistemic gaze, and with the impact of historical and contemporary discourses on knowledge of the natural world. On a literal level, these verses examine chestnuts of three different kinds—the horse chestnut ( Aesculus hippocastanum), the European chestnut (Castanea sativa), and the American chestnut (Castanea dentata). The central storyline at work is my own discovery of the natural world: until very recently, I not only had never seen a sweet chestnut tree, but did not know that there was a distinction between the mildly poisonous horse-chestnut (related to the lychee) and the American and European varieties of the sweet chestnut (cousins of the oak and beech). Layered over this unknowing were the historical and cultural problems that contributed to it; for me, like for most residents of “developed” countries, my relationship with nature had grown increasingly abstract, commodified, and, of late, screen-mediated. It took my gradual consideration of various chestnuts—and in particular my horror upon learning of the fungal blight that essentially obliterated the American chestnut in my home state of Pennsylvania—for me to fundamentally reconsider how I thought about, spoke about, and interacted with the natural world. Each section in the poem represents a different way of knowing, and thus adopts a different discourse, ranging from the most void and without form to far more domineering lexicons. I have tried to speak in various languages, borrowing from Wallace Stevens, Herman Melville, and other fonts of inspiration that seemed appropriate to the mode of thought that I was trying to represent. Finally, central to the resolution of the poem (and its ethic, too) is the German Jewish philosopher Martin Buber’s notion of I-It and I-Thou relationships (the poem’s title is a play on a quote from I and Thou, his most famous book). Buber explains that the I’s merely seeking knowledge objectifies the recipient of its gaze, the It. Only by an unbounded willingness to relate to the Other as Thou, a true coequal, can we step beyond this solipsistic and self-serving conception of the world. This, then, is a poem about hubris and humility, about blindness and sight. Artist’s Note As for the three illustrations, the first two are of Aesculus hippocastanum (image 1 is a horse chestnut seedling whereas image 2 is a seed pod). The third drawing is of Castanea sativa (sweet chestnut seed pod). I used black ink Micron pens on 140 lb. watercolor paper for all three illustrations. When illustrating “I consider a chestnut”, I chose to employ pointillism within the botanical line drawings. In this way there exists both certainty and uncertainty, both lines and impressions of lines, an image rising or a shadow falling in a tight collection of dots on the page. I invite you to consider the latter half of the first stanza: “Then a chestnut: / impressions of the thing, appearances, dark limbs / against a grey Dutch sky”. Here lies the stark contrast between inky darkness and negative space.

There is a project for the sun. The sun Must bear no name, gold flourisher, but be In the difficulty of what it is to be. —Wallace Stevens, “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” I. Darkening and it grows late. The rain comes cold and slow. The wind is thick, the blackbirds lilting. All the wood is sound and motion. Then a chestnut: impressions of the thing, appearances, dark limbs against a grey Dutch sky. II. When ere I saw the chestnut first, I took From that botanic garden as my own The image of its form—for it had grown There at the taxis of the bridge and brook. Grey was its bark, and fissured; in the crook Of branchtips palmates sprawling outwards shone With greeny serrate leaves; therein were sown White panicles, pink-tongued, fair upon to look. As Adam out among the beasts, I assayed To name and take this object of étude And fix its roots in that syntax of clades. Aesculus it was by essence, or by name, For there it stands in the System construed By Carolus, which makes universal claim. III. They were in Acre, that frayed crusader stronghold, walking down the alleys of the market, the limestone slick with rain, past the seacatch and the blue tarps rattling in the wind. The city smelled of brine and smoke, and everything was grim, except the copper pans and bagatelles turning slowly in the rafters. The seagulls shrieked overhead, the air cold and grey as the water. She was hungry, so they ate chestnuts from a paper sack beside the Mandate-era prison. They were dry, crumbly, vaguely sweet; bits of shell caught stiffly in his teeth. “When we get to Haifa,” he said, “Let’s spend just a night.” IV. “High in air,” writes Melville, “the beautiful and bountiful horse-chestnuts, candelabra-wise, proffer the passer-by their tapering upright cones of congregated blossoms.” This is New Bedford, whence the Pequod sallies forth, bearing Ishmael & Ahab out to have that precious oil, and Ahab on his hunt for vengeance ‘gainst the whale

Drawing from the Music of Benjamin Britten

Amber Kempthorn | The Plain | Essay

I think in pictures. Like a single seed that eventually forms an arbor, this particular trait has determined the entire infrastructure of my practice as an artist and has continued to shape my life in many other ways. Hopeless with verbal directions, I am an excellent navigator with a map (in the shapeless expanse of my mind, without visual signposts it’s hard to see the way ahead). As a champion list-maker, my morning ritual of writing down the pile of tasks that accumulated in my sleeping brain becomes crucial visual evidence of my thoughts. The act of recording them, akin to the act of drawing, makes those thoughts more concrete to me. In both cases, the internal visual becomes something externally physical, a tangible thing that I can look upon again, reinforcing, confirming the existence of the other. "For nearly a decade I have been making still pictures of things as they pass through time, attempting to capture with drawing what is ephemeral. Now, rather than stopping time, I am activating it." When I read books or listen to music, the words appear to me in images. I see what they’re singing, what they’ve written. The words are vehicles that take me across the pictorial narrative of my own life. As an artist I pick my way across this landscape, using a combination of processes to create my work. I begin with the use of an airbrush to create an atmospheric base on paper, then the narrative objects and landscape are constructed in layers with graphite, ink, gouache, stencils, and collage. For over a decade I have used drawing to translate interior images for the outer world, creating densely layered, melancholic, and playful reflections of the mind’s life. The first time I heard English composer Benjamin Britten’s orchestral piece Moonlight was a powerful occasion because of what I saw. Unique, in a way, because I saw sounds, not lyrics. The haunting, crawling strings became an incandescent full moon dragged across a night sky. The flute became flickering fire flies and street lamps. An entire narrative began to unfold. For years I would listen to Britten’s “Four Sea Interludes,” eager to return to Moonlight, the third interlude, because my visual mind had begun to imagine more than still pictures. Moonlight had become a “place,” harboring a story that grew more elaborate with each visit. The same desire that compels me to make drawings now had a new dimension. Something else was required. The music had to be translated into moving pictures. Drawings for Animation (compilation) (2019/2020) | gouache & watercolor on paper Britten’s “Four Sea Interludes” was written as orchestral scene changes for his opera, Peter Grimes. Maybe his most famous opera, Peter Grimes was inspired by The Borough, a poem by George Crabbe, which details several narratives in a small seaside village inspired by the coastal landscape of Suffolk, England. The “Four Sea Interludes” reflects Britten’s ardent attachment to the sea and Suffolk, his childhood home. Sonorous and compelling, the interludes are often performed on their own. Peter Grimes is a powerful example of Britten’s own affinity for interpretation, spending much of his career translating the written word into music. He composed scores for theatre and cinema, as well as orchestral pieces based on the works of W.H. Auden, Emily Bronte, and Thomas Mann. "To draw is to record. In its most poetic sense, drawing is evidence of the presence of life: the first footprints in fresh snow, the arc of white cloud behind an airplane, a signature, a fossilized fern in bedrock." Britten is also known for his contribution to children’s music education with the beloved The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra from 1945. Broken into sections, beginning with a full orchestra, the composition goes on to isolate families of instruments into themes and variations, audibly demonstrating the unique job of each of the parts that make up the whole. It is in this spirit that another famous orchestral piece written for children was structured. In Peter and the Wolf, a childhood favorite, Prokofiev’s narrator begins, “Each character in this story is represented by a different instrument.” After years of contemplation, I began to nurture my desire to translate Moonlight into an animation. This formula, of assigning characters to musical instruments, became a formative idea. As I turned my thoughts to making the animation, I was surprised at how, seemingly undetected, the interludes had become four fully formed narratives in my mind. The process of translating instruments/sounds into unique visual elements would anchor my approach as I wrote each of the scripts. In the first interlude, Dawn, I began to see a predawn conversation taking place between a lone lightbulb hanging from a kitchen ceiling and the distant sun hidden beneath the horizon. The lightbulb, embodying the violins, appeared to “call” to its counterpart; the horns and timpani became the sun’s response, its eventual rise. An intermittent clarinet turned into a Luna moth making its way across the landscape, drawn to the glow of the light. Over time, another wish took shape. I dreamt not only of creating the animation, but also that its completion would culminate in a performance, a screening with live accompaniment by an orchestra. Drawings for Animation (compilation) (2020) | acrylic, gouache & graphite on paperThe John S. and James L. Knight Foundation makes funding available bi-annually for art projects in my hometown of Akron, Ohio and other major US cities as part of their Knight Arts Challenge (KAC). The process is tiered and opens with a community-wide call for people’s “best idea for the arts.” The starting prompt was simple enough: describe your “best idea” in 150 words or less. The process led me from that succinct description to a final application that ultimately included partnerships with a local orchestra and digital production studio, the creation of an administrative support team, a $150,000 project budget, and a feasible plan to raise the $50,000 that the KAC would hopefully match. In September 2019, I was awarded a $54,000 matching grant from the Knight Foundation for the creation of my project, “Ordinary Magic: A Sunday in the Cuyahoga Valley.” In collaboration with a production studio, I am creating a fifteen-minute animation that visually interprets Britten’s “Four Sea Interludes” which will be screened with live accompaniment by the Akron Symphony Orchestra in the autumn of 2022. When I received the congratulatory call from the Knight Foundation I was stunned. In a flash, each of the thoughts that led to that moment synthesized into a sudden realization of the daunting task ahead. I would have to move forward without a map into a field for which I have deep affection but no expertise. Drawings for Animation (compilation) (2020) | gouache & watercolor on paperAs I reflect on the past year of work on my first animations, the nature of my relationship with time is changing, causing my practice to undergo a visually subtle but perceptively radical transition. For nearly a decade I have been making still pictures of things as they pass through time, attempting to capture with drawing what is ephemeral. Now, rather than stopping time, I am activating it. To draw is to record. In its most poetic sense, drawing is evidence of the presence of life: the first footprints in fresh snow, the arc of white cloud behind an airplane, a signature, a fossilized fern in bedrock. In novelist and playwright Christopher Isherwood’s “A Berlin Diary” he wrote: > I am a camera with a shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed. As Isherwood mentally recorded pictures to develop later, with each drawing I set out to record or fix what is fleeting. When I begin a drawing, what I hope or intend to communicate is planned, sketched in advance. As I work, I treat each drawing’s rectangular borders like an aperture that opens when I make the first mark and closes when I complete the last. Each drawing is an accumulation of images, culled from mental scraps and observations, interwoven with visual evidence of the time in which it was made. An artifact of that time might be represented by a pine cone I collected on a walk, or a particular bird I spotted at the feeder. Like a glass jar full of ocean water and sand marked with the date of collection, the artwork is simultaneously a time capsule and a story. Finally, aperture closed, the drawing is a winding, layered, nonsensical narrative that both reflects and captures something of the world. No Ordinary Blue (after Guston) (2019) | acrylic, gouache, watercolor & graphite on paper | 44 x 30 inchesAs I’ve transitioned from making still drawings to moving images, what has been most remarkable is learning the mechanisms it takes to create the perception of movement. Drawn elements are no longer singular; they are “frames” strung together to create action. Human vision processes roughly twelve frames per second, turning them into motion. The more frames, the more fluid the movement. Individually, these frames are almost invisible to the eye; ultimately, they are understood by the viewer through accumulation rather than contemplation. For over a decade I’ve used drawing to capture thoughts and moments, to concretize them, to immobilize them for examination. Now my efforts, my drawings, succeed in a way, when they can’t be individually perceived. "the artwork is simultaneously a time capsule and a story. Finally, aperture closed, the drawing is a winding, layered, nonsensical narrative that both reflects and captures something of the world." In animation, the term “onion skinning” refers to the transparent layering of image onto image to visualize movement by seeing several frames at once. Each drawing is like an apparition that the mind registers as it disappears into another drawing. This conjures something Britten is supposed to have said: “Composing is like driving down a foggy road toward a house. Slowly you see more details of the house—the color of the slates and bricks, the shape of the windows. The notes are the bricks and mortar of the house.” This quote leads me to think of the moment Britten’s music first passed through my ears, entering my mind, which formed it into pictures, becoming the foundation for this new experience. A seemingly unremarkable event that I will now spend years carefully working to capture, grateful for the moonlight on the foggy road ahead. ◘

I think in pictures. Like a single seed that eventually forms an arbor, this particular trait has determined the entire infrastructure of my practice as an artist and has continued to shape my life in many other ways. Hopeless with verbal directions, I am an excellent navigator with a map (in the shapeless expanse of my mind, without visual signposts it’s hard to see the way ahead). As a champion list-maker, my morning ritual of writing down the pile of tasks that accumulated in my sleeping brain becomes crucial visual evidence of my thoughts. The act of recording them, akin to the act of drawing, makes those thoughts more concrete to me. In both cases, the internal visual becomes something externally physical, a tangible thing that I can look upon again, reinforcing, confirming the existence of the other. "For nearly a decade I have been making still pictures of things as they pass through time, attempting to capture with drawing what is ephemeral. Now, rather than stopping time, I am activating it." When I read books or listen to music, the words appear to me in images. I see what they’re singing, what they’ve written. The words are vehicles that take me across the pictorial narrative of my own life. As an artist I pick my way across this landscape, using a combination of processes to create my work. I begin with the use of an airbrush to create an atmospheric base on paper, then the narrative objects and landscape are constructed in layers with graphite, ink, gouache, stencils, and collage. For over a decade I have used drawing to translate interior images for the outer world, creating densely layered, melancholic, and playful reflections of the mind’s life. The first time I heard English composer Benjamin Britten’s orchestral piece Moonlight was a powerful occasion because of what I saw. Unique, in a way, because I saw sounds, not lyrics. The haunting, crawling strings became an incandescent full moon dragged across a night sky. The flute became flickerin

another kind of maiden voyage

Rachel Brooke | The Human | Poetry

it might have been a menacing sky that greeted him in new york in 1938. if it spoke in english he did not understand. his tongue was polish polish polish. he didn’t stop at go but high-tailed it to chicago. his brother had just moved there. on the train the other passengers might have remarked on his thick, dark hair & his poet’s eyes. they might have talked about his leaving, about the war. it was rumbling and thundering. they overtook cities as the fields passed by in the new country. they might have said that he’d have been dead if he had stayed— a rush of smoke as the train creaked to a stop, the conductor yelling “maintenance.” later he would decide to americanize his name. dangerous to keep the polish surname, with a j in the middle. nie tutaj, no hebrew, no polish spoken here— lo po. to live in america one ought to act like it. and was the statue of liberty his own to claim— the words that lazarus wrote? is this a world where jewish words can breathe? the train started moving slowly slowly slowly. he saw the city by the distant lake, the tall buildings so unlike the shtetl. here, he thought, away from foreign boots and anxious neighbors and preludes of war, the sky is blue. Poet's Note I hesitate to say that I have a style because I think that it is constantly evolving. However, in a narrative poem like this, I wanted to make it sound like the speaker’s inner thoughts. We don’t have a filter on our thoughts. They often race by, as fast as it must feel when you're literally running for your life. I chose lowercase because I imagined a lump in the speaker’s throat with a tentativeness reserved for the unsure and the scared. This poem was a matter close to my heart because over the COVID-19 period, I have been doing a great deal of family research. For this family member’s story, as he barely escaped to the United States, I imagined what he was thinking, and I knew I had to put pen to paper. Or rather, key to computer.

Winter Garden After Rain (2020)

Courtney W. Brothers | The Plain | Artwork

Ink on paper | 18 x 12 inches Artist’s Note This painting depicts the change of season in a cold room after a cold winter. I painted it at a time when I did not know what was next, just that I would be going soon. I completed it over a year later when my life was warm, full, and exciting. It’s nice to not always finish things. The color palette was a reflection of the rainy day the painting was started. The bare trees and dead hydrangeas in the garden stood out brilliantly against a gray misty sky. I find that almost half of what I make will stay in the in-between because I often start the piece by asking a question. I love the layer of depth that comes from finishing the piece when you might know some of the answer.

Two Maidens (2020)

Courtney W. Brothers | The Plain | Artwork

Mixed media collage on canvas | 36 x 24 inches Artist’s Note In my final year of college, a professor prompted me to re-imagine an image from the school’s archives. I was enthralled by the idea of translating a piece of art into a new form. The women depicted in the original print looked exposed, vulnerable, Ophelia-esque; I wanted to give them cover. So I adorned them with leaves and flowers, imagining them as nymphs tucked quietly away from the world. I chose bright contrasting colors of blues, greens, and pinks in sharp texture to place the maidens in a dreamscape rather than what had before looked to me like a quiet state of death.

Thermodynamics of Cybersecurity

Robert Terrin | The Necessary | Essay

Outside my apartment window, piles of snow lay coated with an icy sheen formed overnight. Inside, the warm air condenses on the windows. Droplets form and break free, running down the foggy glass in the morning light. I am fortunate to have a job that I can do from home but, like many, the long year of social distancing and working from home has taken its toll on my ability to focus. So I stare off into the distance, half gazing at the rivulets forming on my window. Distraction might not be such a problem, but I work in cybersecurity. While the world grapples with one kind of public health crisis in a physical space, another is taking place online. The internet is over fifty years old and the World Wide Web is in its late thirties, yet 2020 was the worst year yet for cybersecurity. The painful transition to a digital economy has been accelerated by remote work, robotic process automation, and other no-touch solutions, all of which are compounded by the precarious political state of the world. Moving toward this new economy has dramatically increased the impact of criminal and nation state cyber incidents. For example, up to eighteen thousand customers were affected by last year’s SolarWinds breach. The incident was one where adversaries hijacked customers’ systems, including multiple U.S. federal agencies, by infiltrating SolarWinds, a software company that sells security monitoring products. Another example of the difficult transition is the pronounced uptick in ransomware, which is a kind of attack that encrypts critical data and holds it hostage for payment. This all occurs in a milieu of misinformation and rampant social media misinformation campaigns. Previously uninterested friends are beginning to ask, “How can we fix cybersecurity?” Instead we should be asking, “Where can we improve cybersecurity?” It is difficult to know where to start. On a practical level, most organizations don’t even know all the devices (phones, laptops, web servers, email servers, TVs, door sensors, refrigerators, wearables, etc.) on their networks (home networks, office networks, intranets, etc.). What’s more, the high cost and low (no) revenue generated by security activities make solving many basic tasks a nonstarter. More philosophically, security can’t be fixed any more than temperature can be fixed. Temperature, like security, is a property of a system, by which scientists mean it is a description of a system at a point in time. It is a difficult idea to conceptualize, which gives us something in common with the scientists who studied thermodynamics two hundred years ago. Sadi Carnot, the “father of thermodynamics,” led a brief but incendiary life. Born in Paris during the tumultuous French Revolution, Carnot graduated from the prestigious École Polytechnique and became an army officer in the last days of the Napoleonic Empire. He was not well suited for military life, however, and began dedicating more time to the study of scientific pursuits, particularly the steam engine. At the age of twenty-seven he published Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire, the founding text of thermodynamics. Just eight years later, he was interned in an asylum for “mania,” caught cholera, and died, leaving behind him a legacy far greater than he could have imagined. Not only did Carnot’s work explain and improve upon the steam engine, but his theory of heat introduced the concept of dynamic systems. He published two breakthrough insights that would be elaborated on by Lord Kelvin and Rudolph Clausius to become the first two laws of thermodynamics. The first insight was to consider the heat engine as a closed system. This system could be described as a series of transitions from one state to another. The second was the observation that heat moving from high temperature to low produces work. By measuring changes in heat and work, scientists could measure the internal energy of a system. These facts about heat engines had profound implications for science and engineering that led to the second industrial revolution. Today, they remain the intellectual bedrock for what we know about systems thinking. Information systems, like thermodynamic systems, are in a constant state of flux. They are created to accept, transform, and emit information under certain conditions. The Second Law of Thermodynamics, which Carnot discovered in 1824 and Clausius expanded upon in the 1850s, states that “heat can never pass from a colder to a warmer body without some other change, connected therewith, occurring at the same time.” He named this dissipation of energy “entropy,” from the Greek ἐν (pronounced “in” and meaning “content”) and τροπή (pronounced tropē and meaning “transformation”). This “transformation content,” or energy leakage, creates some loss of energy in a thermodynamic cycle. Engineer and cryptographer Claude Shannon, often called the father of information theory, proposed a similar relationship for information. Just as the thermodynamic systems leak energy through entropy, information systems leak information through information entropy. “It is incumbent upon good people doing hard work to stay at the frontier of technology.” Knowing that an information system in use inevitably leaks information and that security is a property of a system, should we simply expect cybersecurity—not to mention all of the information age institutions we have constructed on top of it—to get worse? It is tempting to take a nihilistic view, but the transition from “how can we fix cybersecurity?” to “where can we improve cybersecurity?” is reason for hope, not despair. It’s easy to take systems for granted. Computer scientists and programmers are routinely impressed that anything in technology works at all. When you think about the level of undirected coordination necessary for the internet to work, much less the hardware and software required to build the internet, it is a technological miracle. Milton Friedman has used the simple example of a pencil to describe the complex system of cooperation for the creation, distribution, and maintenance of consumer products and services: “Look at this lead pencil. There’s not a single person in the world who could make this pencil. Remarkable statement? Not at all.” That systems so routinely fail or fall victim to attack and that resilience, redundancy, and resolve keep our institutions afloat, is cause for optimism. So far, while we have managed to avoid a cyber Pearl Harbor, we will not be so lucky in the future unless we reframe our perspective on cybersecurity. To improve security without naively hoping to “fix it,” we will have to reinforce weak points in the system. These weak points are often points of transition, such as software development, patching systems in production, and software end-of-life. Software development is the process of gathering requirements, designing, implementing, testing and documenting software. Few risks manifest at the design stage because the system is not yet in use. Security, however, is a property of a system, not simply a feature that can be added on later. Therefore, development is the most critical stage to determine a system’s security. Other properties of systems like convenience, scalability, safety, quality, usability, and reliability have to be designed in as well. Similar to launching a ship or flying an airplane, it is when systems are put into production that shortcomings in any of these properties may become apparent, as unexpected problems may occur due to an inhospitable environment. Production software is where most cybersecurity effort is spent. Like healthcare, ninety percent of cybersecurity costs are incurred after people are “sick” despite preventative care being a more affordable and more effective first line of defense. Fixing design flaws in production is expensive, but many flaws are only discovered during the transition. Furthermore, software developers may have higher priorities such as convenience and usability. As computer security expert Dan Geer wrote, “Installing the patch in a production machine can be like changing the tires on a moving car. In the best case, it is a delicate operation—and only possible if you plan ahead.” Systems that survive deployment, avoid significant changes in use, and depend on relatively few other systems can remain secure in production for a long time. This is both a blessing and a curse; a blessing, because they appear robust and a curse in the sense that many systems may come to depend on these long-lived systems, creating potential failure cascades. While systems that make it through the treacherous transition from design to production may operate securely for years or even decades, developers often take these legacy systems for granted. For example, Internet Protocol version 4 (IPV4), the system of assigning every website a numerical address (e.g. http://172.217.11.14 is equivalent to http://google.com, just try it in your browser!), is currently being replaced with IPV6, a much larger set of internet addresses, to confront the issue of a limited number of IPV4 addresses. Although intended to expand the number of available addresses, this transition (like all transitions) comes with unintended consequences. IT professionals transition to the new protocol, opening up the system to all sorts of attacks and brand new security flaws. Another type of transition, when systems move from production to end-of-life, is even more dangerous than the transition from design to production. Deploying a flawed system may leave that system open to attack, but deprecating software may affect many systems built on top of it. Most ATMs still run Windows XP, even though official support for the operating system ended in 2014. As our society becomes even more dependent on computer networks and as systems complexity increases, the risks associated with end-of-life software grow exponentially. The improvements needed to address transitional weak points in systems are going to require massive investment of resources, time, and intellect. Most of the focus has been on mitigating risk, which is an understandable focus just to maintain workable systems. Software engineering curricula increasingly requires engineers to learn security best practices. Advances in machine learning, cloud computing, and cryptography will provide defenders with ever improving tools to prevent, detect, and correct vulnerabilities. To simply believe we can innovate our way out of this problem would, however, be naïve techno-utopianism. There will be new tools that use advances in machine learning, cloud computing, and cryptography, available for developers and attackers as well. It is incumbent upon good people doing hard work to stay at the frontier of technology. So far, that arrangement has been possible, and it is my great hope that it continues. Yet, a technological solution poses one further and more insidious risk. To quote science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke, “Any sufficiently advanced [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology][antivirus] is indistinguishable from [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_(supernatural)][malware].” It is a cliche that security software is both a shield and a weapon. As the SolarWinds breach showed, surreptitiously gaining access to administrative tools is as good as (if not better than) being able to exploit a vulnerability. Although a greater dose of technology has proven the medicine to its own sickness thus far, we cannot count on that holding true in the future. So where does my tentative optimism come from, if not technological risk mitigation? It comes from the fact we have hardly begun to apply the three other approaches to risk management: avoidance, transfer, and acceptance. The first of these will be the easiest for society to implement. The second will be an evolution, not a revolution. The third will require a fundamental reconceptualization of norms and privacy. Risk avoidance means eliminating hazards by not engaging in risky activities. This can be encouraged by imposing costs on organizations that do not fully bear the burden of the risks they take. Regulations are already beginning to have an effect. For example, Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation, demands organizations state the explicit purpose for data gathering. The California Consumer Protection Act requires disclosure of consumer data collection. Governments can then begin to price the costs of negligence or willful data mismanagement to citizens. Even more promising than regulation is consumer pressure. For example, products like Apple’s facial recognition or Signal’s encrypted messaging app do not even send sensitive data to a central location. Providing open code review and guarantees about the minimum necessary data collection obviates the information asymmetry between developer and user. This asymmetry is usually the sticking point that prevents any consumer-led reform. Comparing the pay-for-use business model with advertising and other data collection business models is a helpful juxtaposition that can punish data collectors. However, some sectors, such as finance and healthcare, are legally obligated to collect and store sensitive data. For these industries, there are still two more approaches: transfer and accept. Risk transfer is a powerful tool for aligning incentives. It shifts risk from one party to another, thereby creating an advocate that has a clear incentive to minimize risk. For many organizations, missing out on an opportunity may be more painful than the potential risk incurred. To return to our comparison with thermodynamic systems, consider the steam boiler. In the early hours of April 27, 1865, three of the four massive coal-fired boilers on the steamboat Sultana exploded. The Mississippi paddle steamer burned to the waterline, just north of Memphis, Tennessee, killing over eleven hundred passengers and crew members. It was forty-one years after Carnot published his Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire; the steam engine, no longer a novelty, was not yet a mature technology. The Hartford Steam Boiler Inspection and Insurance Company was founded one year later, during a period in which one steam boiler exploded every four days. Over the next fifty-five years, insurers inspected, standardized, and supported the engineering of steam boilers to ensure their safety. Where risk cannot be avoided and where it has not successfully been mitigated, it can be useful to provide an incentive for oversight, research, and development. Yet, risk avoidance and transfer will not work for organizations that must collect sensitive information but are not responsive to market forces. Risk acceptance is the last sanctuary of these organizations. Governments and NGOs face particularly vexing cybersecurity problems. Their adversaries are the most sophisticated, their goals are the least clear, and their organizational challenges are the greatest. For them, there are only two choices: mitigate risk or accept it. Risk acceptance does not indicate defeatism. Acceptance, rather, means a sober analysis of the consequences with a plan for responding to an event. The result may be releasing information voluntarily or operating in public to meet the potential consequences head on, rather than being surprised in the future. The necessity of secrets will always be a feature of some institutions but minimizing the need to dissemble can be far more powerful than imperfect mitigation. In my apartment, my attention has turned from window-mediated heat transfer back to Zoom meetings, terminal windows, and emails on a tiny laptop screen. It is afternoon now, and the sun has heated the air outside to a temperature that does not cause condensation. Some heat still escapes through the glass, but so much less now that the temperature inside verges on stifling. Rising from my chair to turn off the heat, I pause to reflect on what kind of world I hope to see in five, ten, or fifty years. Will the extreme of tech idealism lead to immolation, or will the icy chill of cyber nihilism freeze all progress? How do we tread the moderate path and launch the second information revolution? In any case, cybersecurity won’t be “fixed,” but we can build a world in which it won’t need to be. Returning to information theory founder Claude Shannon, he once wrote that “We may have knowledge of the past but cannot control it; we may control the future but have no knowledge of it.” Fewer secrets better protected is a way to control the future, even though we won’t know what that future will look like until the transition has already happened. ◘

Outside my apartment window, piles of snow lay coated with an icy sheen formed overnight. Inside, the warm air condenses on the windows. Droplets form and break free, running down the foggy glass in the morning light. I am fortunate to have a job that I can do from home but, like many, the long year of social distancing and working from home has taken its toll on my ability to focus. So I stare off into the distance, half gazing at the rivulets forming on my window. Distraction might not be such a problem, but I work in cybersecurity. While the world grapples with one kind of public health crisis in a physical space, another is taking place online. The internet is over fifty years old and the World Wide Web is in its late thirties, yet 2020 was the worst year yet for cybersecurity. The painful transition to a digital economy has been accelerated by remote work, robotic process automation, and other no-touch solutions, all of which are compounded by the precarious political state of the world. Moving toward this new economy has dramatically increased the impact of criminal and nation state cyber incidents. For example, up to eighteen thousand customers were affected by last year’s SolarWinds breach. The incident was one where adversaries hijacked customers’ systems, including multiple U.S. federal agencies, by infiltrating SolarWinds, a software company that sells security monitoring products. Another example of the difficult transition is the pronounced uptick in ransomware, which is a kind of attack that encrypts critical data and holds it hostage for payment. This all occurs in a milieu of misinformation and rampant social media misinformation campaigns. Previously uninterested friends are beginning to ask, “How can we fix cybersecurity?” Instead we should be asking, “Where can we improve cybersecurity?” It is difficult to know where to start. On a practical level, most organizations don’t even know all the devices (phones, laptops, web servers, email servers,

Cartoons on Transition by Brooke Bourgeois

Brooke Bourgeois | The Plain | Cartoon

Artist’s Note When the tropes of time before COVID-19 went into hibernation, Brooke shifted to mining the strangeness of the now-hackneyed ‘new normal’ for cartoon inspiration. She looks to draw connections between common experience and stories in the cultural cannon, ranging from the Bible to Winnie the Pooh. Single-panel cartoons have become an important form of comedic expression in the era of sharing over Instagram and online publication, especially as humor has drifted almost exclusively online. Brooke is looking forward to the days when she will be able to exploit the transition period into a post-COVID society.

Mondays at One o'Clock

Ana Laffoon | The Human | Essay

Iwas seven years old when I began visiting Lenore. Having recently relocated to Spokane, Washington from Charlottesville, Virginia, I finally had an opportunity to meet some of my dad’s family. Lenore was my eighty-nine-year-old fourth cousin. She had no children and had been widowed decades earlier. When my parents phoned her asking if she’d be interested in spending some time with me, she was delighted. I was homeschooled, and my schedule was flexible. So it was decided: Monday at one o'clock. Originally, the idea of making friends with an elderly woman excited me. I never had the opportunity to know either of my grandmothers well. And, as the first of four children all born within five years, I craved attention. I wanted to know and be known. When Monday arrived, I felt slightly unsettled about visiting a stranger by myself. I began to doubt if I was up for such an adventure. What’s a fourth cousin really mean, anyway? Will she even like me? But I kept my uncertainties to myself and climbed into our wood-paneled Jeep Wagoneer for the drive across town. “This is it,” Mom chimed twenty minutes later. I looked up and took a deep breath, surveying the scene from the backseat. Perfectly perched on a large corner lot stood a buttercup-yellow cottage. Red roses danced over and through a white picket fence that, with the help of a few apple trees and a handful of towering pines, trimmed in the rest of the manicured yard. Billowing bunches of lavender and tidy groupings of pansies, marigolds, and petunias lined the stone walkway to the carved oak door. Hugging all four sides of the house were countless overgrown lilac bushes: vibrant, fist-sized bursts of pink, white, and purple. Stepping out of the car and accepting my mom’s extended hand, the swirling in my tummy slowed. Lenore had already made a good first impression. My fourth cousin proved to be as becoming and welcoming as her blooms, and our connection developed quickly. For several years, I visited Lenore every Monday at one o’clock. She adorned her neck with silk scarves and large statement necklaces, and I wore my “dress shoes”—faux patent leather slip-ons with big black bows affixed to the front. We drank tea from delicate, floral porcelain and sat in emerald green wingback chairs, playing double solitaire. We rummaged through treasure-filled drawers and cabinets. We coated ourselves in various hues of lipstick and pumped thick, musky scents from ornate bottles. By the time I was eleven and Lenore ninety-three, we had established quite the bond. Both our journals from those years tell tales of bus rides around Spokane, hunts for the city’s most delicious slice of cherry pie, and names of all the boys that had made our hearts flutter throughout my limited—and her ample—years. Several years into our friendship, Lenore gave me a precious gift: a transplant from one of her lilac bushes. She knew how much I loved her garden and she wanted me to enjoy it more than once a week. I stood next to my dad as he carefully shoveled deep and wide around the plant’s roots, lifted the shoot from its known soil on Glass Avenue, and replanted it in its new home on Rebecca Street. In the coming months, that gangly shoot dug in deep and grew strong. Sitting on the edge of our property, I passed it often as I trekked across the yard to my piano lesson or to play with friends. And each time I walked by I gently patted it on the leaves. “Hey, Lenore,” I whispered. The evening my parents entered my bedroom with watery eyes and told me Lenore had transitioned from this world to the next was the first time my heart experienced something deeper than surface-level sadness. I had never lost anyone I really loved before. It was disorienting. I reached for the heart-shaped pillow decorating my bed, a gift Lenore had given me years before when I commented how pretty it looked on her couch. Clinging to that lace-trimmed cushion night after night, I mourned the loss of my sweet friend, my first truly-known relative, my first relational tether to a city that was once so foreign. I felt like I’d been pruned. Like a part of my childhood, my family, and my identity had been cut away. "Tears of grief watered our growing roots, bouts of joy snipped off and bundled up in life’s most glorious bouquets." For several months after Lenore died, I regularly slipped out the front door to visit my lilac bush. I needed to touch it, smell it, and feel close to it. Rubbing the velvety green leaves between my fingers, I thought of wingback chairs and double solitaire. The fragrance of the blossoms transported me to puffs of perfume and toiletry treasure hunts. The soft purple blooms reminded me of the lilac tint of my friend’s wispy, gray curls. That bush acted like a bridge, allowing me to travel back to my beloved past and helping me stretch forward into a new reality of no more Mondays at one o’clock. Over time, my need for the little purple bush waned. Pulling up to the house after a day of high school, I often looked over at it and smiled, thankful for memories of my dear friend and the grounding she brought to my early years. But I no longer sat in front of it just to gaze at the blooms. And then I went to college. And then I got married. And then I moved across the world. New people and memories and meanings filled my life and heart, lessening my need for the lilacs and softening the once-sharp longing for my friend. A couple summers ago, my mom mentioned the lilac bush had died several years back. A wave of emotion surfaced, and I felt a jolt of shame that I’d never realized my lilacs were gone. More than a decade after Lenore’s death, I moved, once again, to a foreign city. This time, quite literally, to Amman, Jordan. I was one month into marriage and excited to join my husband, Peter, in his NGO work with refugees. From the backseat of dingy, smoke-filled taxis, Peter and I explored Jordan’s rocky hills, covered in white, limestone apartment buildings and dotted with dusty palms and weathered pines. Compared to the greenery of the Pacific Northwest, Amman was a world of dull sepia tones and monotonous neutrals. But something in my heart cut through all the brown, and I predicted the coming of colorful desert blooms. "Jordan taught me to build friendships outside of similar upbringings. She forced me to extend myself further than I thought I could go, to push forward just a little more." After three days in the country, I pulled up to a beige four-story building for my first Arabic lesson. Apprehension seized my gut. I’d never been good at learning languages; maybe I wasn’t cut out for this. But I wanted to show myself strong. Matching footsteps to the cadence of my thudding chest, I wound up and around the dusty, trash-littered steps to the third floor. Reaching the center, I pushed the door open. Light and laughter flooded the landing. Rich, full-bodied laughter. Involuntarily, my shoulders relaxed. Entering, I saw the source of the mirth standing straight ahead of me at a large wooden table. It was a young woman adorned in bright clothes and a floral-print head scarf. She turned to me and smiled. “Ahalan, ahalaaaaan,” she welcomed. “Ismi Ruba. I am a teacher here.” And, as if she sensed my nerves, she reached for my arm. “Come. Make tea.” She led me to the small kitchenette in the corner, where she poured boiling water over a bag of Lipton Yellow Label and two heaping spoonfuls of sugar. Her magenta-painted lips smiled as she stirred the cyclone of sugar crystals. My apprehension dissolved. In the coming years, Ruba morphed from Arabic teacher to friend and from friend to sister. She got married. I learned Arabic. She birthed a beautiful baby boy. I had a string of miscarriages. The ups and downs of our lives seeded the soil of both our hearts. Tears of grief watered our growing roots, bouts of joy snipped off and bundled up in life’s most glorious bouquets. Our friendship flourished through each season. As was the case with Khitam. And Ilham. And Ghada. And Dua. Women of Jordan, Palestine, and Syria, who tilled and worked the ground of friendship with me for over a decade. Last spring, I sat working in the bedroom of my Amman apartment. I listened to my five children—five under five, including one set of triplets—through the window driving toy dump trucks through our dusty garden and picking apricots from one of our trees. Amidst that sweet calm, Peter burst into our room. “Guess what?” His eyes widened as his teeth shone through a big grin. I studied him intently. “Wait. No!” “Yup!” “What? Really?” Excited tears pooled in my eyes as I leapt off the bed and flung my arms around my husband. “You got the email?!” “Got it!” After thirteen years working in humanitarian aid and relief in Jordan and Palestine, Peter was leaving the NGO world to join the State Department and serve as an American diplomat. It’s a transition he’d been growing towards for years, one our entire family anticipated with glee. And today was the day he got the message beckoning him to Washington, D.C. My cheek against his shoulder, I glanced toward the garden and thought of the tiny, dirty feet of those who called this place home. “How long do we have?” I whispered. “Three weeks.” Squeezing my eyes closed, tears of joy now mingled with those of loss. Three weeks felt like an impossibly short window of time to uproot from the people and land who had been our home for so long. To break and pull away from this familiar soil. "As a plant finds new soil and nourishment to thrive, the human heart extends its roots in search of fresh sustenance. We push on, adapt, relearn how to flourish." Jordan grew me into the woman I am. She was the earth where I laid my barely-adult roots. My marriage sprouted in her dusty plains. My children were born into her hospitable arms. Her language, her culture, her people colored the way I view the world, expanding my capacity to love and be loved. Jordan taught me how to engage in and build friendships outside of shared interests and similar upbringings. She forced me to extend myself further than I thought I could go and, when I reached my perceived limit, to push forward just a little more. To say such a quick goodbye was inadequate and painful. Precious relics from Jordan, Palestine, and Syria bridge my way into the new. Proofs of a past season well-lived and people well-loved: a small, wooden maamoul press for making traditional Eid cookies; a hand-embroidered table runner evoking flashes of my neighbors’ radiant dresses; dozens of Polaroids of families who filled a decade’s worth of my days. It has been over twenty years since I lost Lenore. And an unknown amount of time since I last patted the leaves of my lilac bush. It’s been more than six months since I watched Jordan disappear from my airplane window. And only ten minutes since studying the faces in my beloved Polaroids. It feels heavy to walk into the future without these dear ones at my side. And I am scared of the day when, like the lilac bush, I realize my Jordan relics are no longer necessary for my heart to feel at home. But hope pulls the weighted soul forward. Hope that the impressions made by the people and places my family and I love will always be with us. Hope that life follows transplant. As a plant finds new soil and nourishment from which to thrive, so the human heart extends its roots in search of fresh sustenance. We push on, we adapt, we relearn how to flourish. And somehow, we manage to do it without losing our tenderness toward who and what came before. Today, in the midst of transplant, my youngest daughter bridges me from what was to what will be. Her first name, Nove, is an Arabic Bedouin name meaning “mountaintop” or “pinnacle.” It is fitting, as Jordan was such a perspective shifting force in my life. And her middle name, Lenore, is a daily reminder of friendship, lilacs, and Mondays at one o’clock. Root deep, root wide, root anew. Bloom onward, dear one. ◘

Iwas seven years old when I began visiting Lenore. Having recently relocated to Spokane, Washington from Charlottesville, Virginia, I finally had an opportunity to meet some of my dad’s family. Lenore was my eighty-nine-year-old fourth cousin. She had no children and had been widowed decades earlier. When my parents phoned her asking if she’d be interested in spending some time with me, she was delighted. I was homeschooled, and my schedule was flexible. So it was decided: Monday at one o'clock. Originally, the idea of making friends with an elderly woman excited me. I never had the opportunity to know either of my grandmothers well. And, as the first of four children all born within five years, I craved attention. I wanted to know and be known. When Monday arrived, I felt slightly unsettled about visiting a stranger by myself. I began to doubt if I was up for such an adventure. What’s a fourth cousin really mean, anyway? Will she even like me? But I kept my uncertainties to myself and climbed into our wood-paneled Jeep Wagoneer for the drive across town. “This is it,” Mom chimed twenty minutes later. I looked up and took a deep breath, surveying the scene from the backseat. Perfectly perched on a large corner lot stood a buttercup-yellow cottage. Red roses danced over and through a white picket fence that, with the help of a few apple trees and a handful of towering pines, trimmed in the rest of the manicured yard. Billowing bunches of lavender and tidy groupings of pansies, marigolds, and petunias lined the stone walkway to the carved oak door. Hugging all four sides of the house were countless overgrown lilac bushes: vibrant, fist-sized bursts of pink, white, and purple. Stepping out of the car and accepting my mom’s extended hand, the swirling in my tummy slowed. Lenore had already made a good first impression. My fourth cousin proved to be as becoming and welcoming as her blooms, and our connection developed quickly. For several years, I visited Lenore eve

Silicon Prairie

Libby Ediger | The True | Essay

Holberton School Tulsa Executive Director, Libby Ediger Sometime between 1828 and 1836, after being driven out of Alabama, Muscogee tribe members settled under a large burr tree along the Arkansas River in Oklahoma. They called their territory “Tulasi,” meaning “old town” in the Creek language. Years of mispronunciations by white settlers eventually gave the city the name for which it is known today: Tulsa. For some, “Tulsa” conjures images of these early Indian settlers. For others, images of cowboys, outlaws, tractors, or the Great Plains on the horizon. But for most, I’d wager that “Tulsa” brings to mind its prevailing industries: oil and gas. Born and raised in Oklahoma, I can understand the common misperceptions about Tulsa’s evolving identity. The city was, after all, firmly established as the Oil Capital of the World after its second surge of oil discoveries between 1915 and 1930. Until just a few years ago, I would have described my city’s economy in terms of oil, too. Tulsa may have looked a lot like an “old town” in its early days, but today the town boasts of newness in almost all directions. Over the past decade, Tulsa’s economy has been shifting in significant ways. These shifts are largely the result of a group of passionate people executing their vision to set the city on a new course. With the goal of reducing Tulsa’s exclusive dependence on the energy sector, their vision seizes the promise of a new industry: technology. The seismic shifts happening in my community are significant not just for Okies (a title proudly reclaimed from derogatory Dust Bowl origins) but also for Americans across the United States. "Hindsight has only affirmed a belief I’ve held all my life: the coasts don’t have a monopoly on opportunity." The city’s rapid evolution coincided with a transition of my own, one which I never expected. I was given an opportunity to participate in and to bear witness to the city's transformation by serving as Executive Director of Holberton Tulsa, an innovative school for computer science and software development. After spending over five years at a political technology startup in Washington, D.C., I had moved back home to Oklahoma. I had planned to take a position at another startup or to seek a role in traditional startup ecosystem-building (venture capital, incubator, etc.), but instead, I found myself connected to the George Kaiser Family Foundation (GKFF). The Foundation’s sole beneficiary and longtime Tulsa native, George Kaiser, made his wealth in the oil and gas industry through his management of the Kaiser-Francis Oil Company, and in the banking sector through his ownership and expansion of the Bank of Oklahoma. For the last two decades, the Kaiser family has invested much of their wealth in the Tulsa community. George Kaiser alone has donated more than $4 billion to his charitable foundations. Much of his philanthropy has focused on early childhood education because, as he puts it, “no child is responsible for the circumstances of his or her birth.” The Foundation is tackling institutional challenges as well: Oklahoma’s highest-in-the-nation incarceration rates, and its forty-seventh-ranked education quality, for example. An organization called Women In Recovery (WIR) is using funds from the Foundation to reduce Oklahoma’s highest female incarceration rate in the country. As a result, WIR has contributed to a 54% drop in imprisonment among Tulsa County women between the 2010 and 2019 fiscal years. After decades of building opportunities for Tulsa children and families, the Foundation turned to a new challenge: building up the city itself. By making Tulsa a better place to live and work, they hypothesized, they could attract new business and talent, creating jobs and stimulating economic growth. They wanted to transform Tulsa into an alluring place that would entice people to stay here. And it’s working. From the largest U.S. park ever built with private funds, to countless entrepreneurial resources and economic incentive, the city of Tulsa is a more vibrant place to live than it was a decade ago. So in late 2018, when partners at GKFF met with a new coding school headquartered in Silicon Valley, the stars seemed to align. Enter Holberton, a software engineering school helping motivated and talented people to succeed in their dream career as software engineers, regardless of their background. In 2019, Holberton was looking to further expand its bicoastal presence, and GKFF convinced them that Tulsa was the perfect fit. After just a few cups of coffee with people from GKFF and Holberton School, I was sold on their vision. I jumped in, head first, launching Holberton Tulsa later that year. "100 Days of Code" challenge at Holberton TulsaLeaving the startup world for my role as a school administrator was not something I planned. In fact, I didn’t enjoy most of the academic aspects of my own post-secondary experience. I started working at a public affairs software startup, Quorum, only a few months into my sophomore year of college. Back then, you could hardly even call Quorum a company. I was one of a handful of kids interested in a specific, difficult problem and was excited by the prospect of winning funding from pitch competitions to tackle it head-on. By the time I graduated, I had managed to maintain my grades enough to keep my scholarship and my job at Quorum, which was just starting to take off. Decisions often make the most sense in hindsight. Leaving a growing company in bustling D.C. to go open a coding school an hour from my hometown in Stillwater may not have seemed a sensible career move. And yet, hindsight has only affirmed a belief I’ve held all my life: the coasts don’t have a monopoly on opportunity. In January of 2020, I launched our first cohort with a few dozen students. At Holberton, we scrap traditional lecture halls in favor of hands-on experience. We throw students off the deep-end into projects, offering them a learning framework that enables them to master problem solving. Not only are my students exposed to the fundamentals of software engineering, but they also have access to content on topics like augmented reality and machine learning: something not previously available in Oklahoma. Through Holberton's Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality program, students create 3D games and animations, handle asset management, utilize textures and materials, and publish applications for a variety of platforms and devices.To ensure our programs build pathways for students who wouldn’t otherwise be able to learn to code, we offer a deferred tuition model, allowing students to pay tuition upon gaining employment rather than requiring them to shoulder the financial burden upfront. This model has generated a unique student body, the vast majority of which would not have been able to afford a traditional four-year degree. Most of our students, who average 29 years of age, chose to enroll at Holberton Tulsa to pivot their careers, build skills, and seize opportunities in the technology sector that are only just starting to emerge. A vast majority would not be able to afford a traditional four-year degree in computer science. "By starting locally, Tulsa will improve life for its own residents while serving as a model for others across the country." Tulsa’s budding technology ecosystem extends far beyond Holberton. The city already has many startup incubators and public-private partnerships. Talent relocation incentives are also underway to stimulate its emerging technology economy, including the Tulsa Remote program, which pays remote workers $10,000 to live here for a year. But it would be a grave oversight to create these substantial investments for new arrivals only. Life-long Tulsans want in on that action, too. As our city continues to innovate and grow, it’s critical that we cultivate our own startups and ensure that Tulsans of diverse backgrounds may benefit from the technology sector’s economic advantages. By starting locally, Tulsa will improve life for its own residents while serving as a model for others across the country. Other cities seeking to promote technology-enabled economies will benefit both from developing talent in their own communities and from providing resources to build companies of scale. One is hard to do without the other. How do you bring in capital or recruit startups without a talent pool? Conversely, it’s difficult to justify investing in a large technical talent pool if most people need to leave your city to find a job. Holberton students rapidly adopt new skills and methodologies to prepare them for success in the ever-evolving tech industry.Tulsa’s response is to place a big bet on engaging these strategies simultaneously. Tulsa Remote, for example, has attracted over 500 remote workers just in the last two years. Black Tech Street is building a coalition of Black talent and businesses. Tulsa Innovation Labs is growing economic development programs aimed at establishing Tulsa as the nation’s most inclusive tech community. And, of course, Holberton now joins the mix as an example focused on producing the next generation of software engineers. I’d tell any city looking to replicate Tulsa to focus on a simple, twin set of goals: build and recruit both talent and businesses. "We must meet not only the demands of the moment, but also the demands that lie ahead." Amidst this fourth industrial revolution, automation is eliminating the need for human intervention. Artificial intelligence and augmented reality technologies are rapidly evolving, becoming even more accessible to consumers. The need for software development talent is pressing on our current economy, and we face the potential for a real shortage in the next decade if the United States neglects workforce development in this sector. We must meet not only the demands of the moment, but also the demands that lie ahead. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects eight percent job growth for software engineers in the next decade, which would require 130,000 people or more to fill these roles. A challenge of this magnitude requires a talent pool that exceeds the outputs of Ivy League universities and established technology hubs like Silicon Valley. Tulsa is a city to watch. Undeniably, it is a city in transition, something anyone who has been here over the past decade can tell you. Once the Oil Capital of the World, today it may be described as a place where people flock, collaborate, innovate, build, and dream as big as its skies. Students at Holberton are some of the first taking the plunge. ◘

Holberton School Tulsa Executive Director, Libby Ediger Sometime between 1828 and 1836, after being driven out of Alabama, Muscogee tribe members settled under a large burr tree along the Arkansas River in Oklahoma. They called their territory “Tulasi,” meaning “old town” in the Creek language. Years of mispronunciations by white settlers eventually gave the city the name for which it is known today: Tulsa. For some, “Tulsa” conjures images of these early Indian settlers. For others, images of cowboys, outlaws, tractors, or the Great Plains on the horizon. But for most, I’d wager that “Tulsa” brings to mind its prevailing industries: oil and gas. Born and raised in Oklahoma, I can understand the common misperceptions about Tulsa’s evolving identity. The city was, after all, firmly established as the Oil Capital of the World after its second surge of oil discoveries between 1915 and 1930. Until just a few years ago, I would have described my city’s economy in terms of oil, too. Tulsa may have looked a lot like an “old town” in its early days, but today the town boasts of newness in almost all directions. Over the past decade, Tulsa’s economy has been shifting in significant ways. These shifts are largely the result of a group of passionate people executing their vision to set the city on a new course. With the goal of reducing Tulsa’s exclusive dependence on the energy sector, their vision seizes the promise of a new industry: technology. The seismic shifts happening in my community are significant not just for Okies (a title proudly reclaimed from derogatory Dust Bowl origins) but also for Americans across the United States. "Hindsight has only affirmed a belief I’ve held all my life: the coasts don’t have a monopoly on opportunity." The city’s rapid evolution coincided with a transition of my own, one which I never expected. I was given an opportunity to participate in and to bear witness to the city's transformation by serving as Executive Director of Holbert

Empire Twilight

| The End of the Day (2020)

Rosemarie Forsythe | The Human | Artwork

Mixed media collage and acrylic paint on canvas | 24 x 36 inches Artist’s Note In keeping with this issue’s theme of transitions, my painting, “Empire Twilight: The End of the Day,” is part of an ongoing painting series using my officially declassified diplomatic reporting cables. These “cables"—State Department parlance for official diplomatic correspondence—covered historic transitions such as the end of the Soviet Union and the birth of fifteen new countries. When I got these cables declassified through the Freedom of Information Act many years ago, I spent a long time thinking about how to share these eyewitness accounts of some of the most significant global transitions of the twentieth century. I was certain no one wanted to read another memoir of that period, so I was inspired to create a memoir in art. After the fall of the USSR, I participated in major events: from the 1994 ceasefire in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan to denuclearization in Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and Belarus. I used memorabilia from that time to add other elements to my works in the series. On the surface, this painting appears to be a landscape. On closer inspection, however, the backdrop is text from declassified cables capturing my observations and interviews with government officials, dissidents, youth, religious leaders, and opposition figures. Today, America and the world face another era of transition. Though my painting is subtitled "The End of the Day," it seems fitting for an issue born at the beginning of a new one.

The Rhythms of Time

Adam Syty | The Human | Essay

Afew weeks ago, amidst a global pandemic, I subjected my ninth-graders to the classic nostalgia-fueled E.B. White essay “Once More to the Lake.” No one had done the assigned reading, and then a fire drill took up the first fifteen minutes of class. When we finally returned, I had the students skim the text before we talked about White’s intentions. Every year that I teach the essay, I tell the kids that I experience a bit of White’s duality because I still remember reading it for the first time in Mr. Starr’s AP Language course in eleventh grade. I don’t remember much else from that class, but the essay always lingered in the back of my mind, and White’s final, sardonically foreboding interjection on his son’s independence—“my groin felt the chill of death”—returns to haunt me anatomically and metaphysically every new school year. When I was in high school, I never understood and possibly refused to accept the finality of White’s last line. Young and naïve, I simply saw the essay as a work of grand outdoorsy imagery. It’s a bit unnatural to consider the mortality of our parents while we’re still young, and I’m sure the younger White never imagined that his solitary excursion into the water represented some larger metaphor of parental disassociation for his father. Throughout the essay, the elder White struggles to separate himself from his son. He repeatedly wonders if it’s him or his son holding the fishing pole and experiencing the sights and smells of the lake they’ve retreated to. So when I was teaching the essay again this fall, I began to reckon with my own legacy of denial. I began to wonder if I, like White, was denying my own forward momentum. I now have three younger daughters, and, like White, I have begun to struggle with the duality of the past colliding with the present. As I sat at my work desk pondering this struggle, I twirled my pen between my fingers while staring ahead at the blue glow of the laptop. I wondered, what stories could I share with my daughters? What shared experiences could I pass on? As I sat fidgeting with the little red button on my laptop, I realized I was holding the answer in my right hand. Six years ago, during a fit of basement reorganization, I decided to search through the plastic drawers of an old college-era bin. I mostly found a few elementary school armaments, including a metal protractor with that sharp point and a ruler that swung out like a switchblade. But under these academic arms was a worn-down and empty blue pen I hadn’t seen since college. I momentarily gazed at the pen, picked it up, twirled it between my fingers, and let the sensation of its raised lettering bring back memories like a long-lost picture of a first girlfriend. "There’s even a little magic and vulnerability to rediscovering writing from the past—especially writing from those formative years of emotional discovery and limitless potential.” The pen was a blue Pilot BP-S Medium. Between fourth grade and college, I exclusively used this pen to compose, create, and annotate my way through my academic journey. After college, I somehow lost contact with the pen and eventually forgot its name. I occasionally looked longingly and wistfully in the pen aisle of Staples for that exact model, but I never stumbled serendipitously on it. I tried to have an open mind and experimented with other varieties, but something about the sheen, weight, and plastic of the others never quite recreated the tactile sensations of the BP-S Medium. Eventually, most of my work migrated to the computer and I gave up hope of ever reuniting with my old fling. Now, as I held my rediscovered weapon of mass annotation, the memories of the past poured back in. These memories grew so strong that I excitedly carried the pen upstairs and commenced an internet search for the precise name of the pen. Presto! The pens, buried somewhere in the long-forgotten ether of Amazonian databases, appeared again, phoenix-like, in my mailbox two days later. The reunion was as satisfying as I imagined. A piece of me had been missing and now it had returned. My academic life, and maybe my whole identity, had been intertwined with this pen. Now, that life could resume. Coincidentally, my first daughter, Sarah, arrived at roughly the same time my pens had returned to my life, strangely uniting and interweaving this tool of my past with this DNA-driven form of me in the present. For the first few years of her life, I felt it best to not pass on a pen with a detachable cap to a toddler, but on her fifth birthday—overcome with mounting English-teacher visions of symbolically uniting the past with the present—I finally gave one of these cherished pens to her. I even wrote a card for her with the pen and explained its significance. She now keeps the pen in her room and uses it to draw pictures that she’s always trying to give away to her Zoom classmates. When I was younger, I used to draw elaborate, action-packed stories and offer them to my neighbor. Years later, after he passed away, his wife handed me an envelope with all my drawings he kept. “He loved the stories,” she said. “He thought you’d become a builder or an engineer like your father.” Dazed and a bit surprised, I accepted the envelope. What else had he seen in my stories, and what other fragments of my past would be uncovered as if they were embers of old stories, covertly waiting to reignite the next fire? The pen’s return seemed to spark that fire. Each time I picked it up, memories tried to bleed from my past to the page, but the problem was that I hadn’t written much by hand in years because, let’s be honest, it’s hard not to be a computer man these days. Typically I take impersonal notes on my phone, but every so often I find myself buying a sturdy notebook and writing down a few story ideas before letting it gather dust under my nightstand. There’s a tranquility, a permanence, and a personalization to handwriting that the sterile text of a computer can never replace. There’s even a little magic and vulnerability to rediscovering writing from the past—especially writing from those formative years of emotional discovery and limitless potential. When I was younger, I used to write poems on roughly coded Geocities websites. Later, I anonymously blogged emo-like LiveJournal entries for no one in particular. But at one point, in a frantic realization of the infinite nature of the internet, I hastily deleted it all. I’m sure they exist in some Russian data locker, but otherwise they’re gone and will never return. Life is fleeting, and writing, which captures life, should slowly evaporate like an Andy Goldsworthy sculpture giving itself back to the world that created it. Writing is a letting go with no promise of return. It can be like death, but it can also be like life, growing the way a seed scattered by the wind sprouts at an unbeknown location. So with this whimsically romantic ideal in mind, I was helping my students improve their writing recently when a brain-burst suddenly came over me, and I felt the pull of blue pen to notebook paper. I wrote a few neat sentences of resilience, ending: “Our past does not dictate our future!” "Writing is a letting go with no promise of return. It can be like death, but it can also be like life, growing the way a seed scattered by the wind sprouts at an unbeknown location.” I had planned to convey this to the cross-country team that I coach before their next race, but I forgot the notebook at school. We eventually finished in sixth place, and now that I think about it, maybe our past does dictate our future. In class, I ask my students to reflect on Gatsby's failure to climb a metaphysical and social ladder he did not create. We can try to deny the past, but none of us can remove ourselves from it. My runners will need to embrace who they are now to race up the ski hill of death they’ll face twice at our final meet, and later, metaphorically, in life. Walt Whitman, who once admired a long-distance runner from afar, would revel in the idea of sinewy boys channeling his calls to focus on the now as they climbed, clinging to the present. As a young runner and a Whitman neophyte, I started to log my running exploits. I still have the fluorescent-green spiral notebook with daily entries written in blue ink. Today, no one keeps that kind of log because their watches and phones automatically do it for them. I often worry about my runners’ ability to look back and measure these times, so I encourage them to use the app Strava to socially document their runs. At least once a week the orange GPS line indicates they’ve spent less time running and more time jumping into the local creek. Sometimes they post pictures of themselves during a photogenic moment of the run. I can see my friends doing the same goofy pose, except we didn’t have phones back then so those moments only exist in my mind, but really they are the same moments relived time and time again, ever repeating and circling back, ceaselessly, like the tides. The first time I took Sarah for a run she sprinted the first fifty meters and then made it another hundred feet before we had to walk. I attempted to explain the concept of pacing to her and eventually we got going again until she gleefully sprinted down the final hill back to our house. Someday she’ll find my now-digital running log and come across this first moment of breathless exhilaration and remember that this was really her first entry as well. Maybe she will remember that everyone we passed on that summer run gave a cheerful wave or made a wry comment about me having to keep up. But will she remember the recognition in their eyes? I’ve come to recognize this expression when I walk past people in our neighborhood. When I was younger, I was oblivious to this coded nod, but now I see the look everywhere. It’s one of remembrance and nostalgia for a shared and fleeting experience that time carries away. “It goes by so fast,” I’ve heard hundreds of times. How soon until I give my first nod of recognition to the next father and daughter that will pass me? When Sarah was younger, she struggled with the abstract concept of time. Clocks were meaningless to her, and she often appeared, like an illusionist, in front of me and my wife in the early hours of the morning. I’ve learned that time is inconsequential for kids. They’re young and life probably seems infinite, so why bother measuring? Yet as we age, time is constantly moving us forward while we reverently look back toward the past and try to recapture those fleeting hours and minutes. Sometimes, when I stand peacefully post-run on my driveway, the surrounding silence and open farmland facing my front yard brings me suddenly back to my past. I fondly remember fleeing my house during the summer and exploring the ever-eroding countryside. If I rode my bike far enough, I could escape the suburban monster gobbling up the surrounding forest and farms and the wood-framed carcasses it was leaving behind. Free of parental concern and cell phone triangulation, my friends and I would build dams and play in the water beneath an old railroad bridge. Summer after summer we stood in that water, unaware of the changes happening around us and to us. We even wrote our names on the bridge’s stone wall and boldly declared this Eden to be our own forever. But as time ebbed forward, our escapes were paved over, and the playful reverie of youth was replaced by the more settled adult dreams of scenic mountain cabins and urban cityscapes. Sarah has recently started to express her dreams. She wants a house in the country and a barn with horses and more horses. Occasionally she draws pictures of these dreams with the BP-S Medium, and sometimes hands me the pen and asks me to spell important words for her. It’s exhausting at times as she recounts her plans in rapid-fire fashion at the dinner table, but it’s also exhilarating to hear her dream such intricate visions for her future. Did I have these dreams when I was younger? Has she surreptitiously watched me and absorbed that sense of mysticism through quiet observation? Maybe she’s discovered my old musings buried like treasure on page fifty-seven of a Google search for my name. Or maybe these dreams are etched into our DNA somewhere and they simply replicate over time. How deep does our connection to the past run? Maybe all our dreams are connected to the molecules of that first splitting atom. This past fall we made the pilgrimage to a cabin in the Catskills in upstate New York. While my wife, Susan, set up the bedrooms and opened all the windows to disperse any remnants of the plague, I took my kids outside to explore the expansive yard that overlooked the lower valley. We circumnavigated the house as I took in the silence and solitude of the place, but no one else was too impressed until we found a large boulder planted firmly near the edge of the property. With Susan distracted, I told my kids they could jump off the rock if they didn’t tell their mom. They spent about a half hour climbing, jumping, and learning how to land. There’s nothing better than a good jumping rock when you’re young, and they promptly told Susan about it when we went inside. How many others had jumped off that sturdy reminder of the past, itself made from those same ancient elements that make up our dreams, our bodies, and the fabric that weaves the universe together? Whitman opens “Song of Myself” with similar wonder and affirmation. He seems to understand this unity when he proclaims, “For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.” It’s a fitting line; I gave my copy of Leaves of Grass to a student who has failed to return it. I like to imagine she is studying it quietly in her room, hand on cheek, occasionally adding to my annotations with her own pen. Every so often, she might take a picture of an inspiring section that will then travel across the electric pulses of internet packets of data and maybe coalesce with my own lost webpages of poetry and quotes that are drifting endlessly on the tides of digital ocean foam. I like to imagine Sarah finding my old books someday and adding her own annotations to them. Will hers match my own private introspections or will they grow to be independent and unique to her? Am I holding the pen or is she? Moments like these remind me that the transposition that White experiences in “Once More to the Lake” has increasingly grown in my own life, too. I wasn’t a father when I started teaching, so each year I’ve taught the essay is a demarcation of growth in my life; my blue annotations have become like markings on the wall of an old house. I tell my attentive freshman honor students that I feel a bit confused, like the way White does in his essay. I try to explain that I feel young inside, and that I think everyone else who gets old must feel the same. We’ve spent the majority of our lives experiencing the world through a younger version of ourselves, so our only understanding of the world is through that younger self. It’s hard to see the change that has occurred. We don’t typically interpret the world in the moment, so I explain to my now half-following-me-still students that they only see me at age thirty-five, so they, like White’s son (and now my daughters), only know me in the moment. Am I the student still trying to decode the essay, or am I the teacher unraveling its coded imagery? A few students type this observation down in their notes. Using White’s essay as a guide, I even took my family camping this summer. Like most of my grand ideas, I planned this excursion at the last moment, and my wife, trusting my camping judgement, allowed me to book a site. I promptly booked the last, tiniest, and closest site to the bathhouse, and assured my wife we’d all fit comfortably into our old tent. A year earlier I had taken Sarah camping in the fall. We booked a site at the local KOA and spent some quality father-daughter time together. We wandered the grounds, played on the playground, took a hay ride, and ended the night with some ice cream and a bottle of Yoohoo chocolate milk that proved ill-advised a few hours later. I had to give her my sleeping bag, hang hers to dry by the fire, and locate my thin ground sheet from my car. I figured I would be warm enough if I wore my sweatshirt. It went down to thirty degrees that night and I shivered on my slowly deflating air mattress while she slept soundly beside me. Now she always asks about going camping again. So this time, I came prepared with extra sleeping bags and apparatuses. When we arrived at our tiny parking space of a site, I promptly unpacked the screaming children, food, and eventually the tent. While bending one of the two support poles to the tent’s contours, it promptly snapped in half and I figured that the broken pole meant we were doomed to head home, but we resolutely jerry-rigged the pole. I unfolded my newly purchased cot, filled up some air mattresses, stuffed them all into the tent, and tried to find room for my children and wife. "But as time ebbed forward, our escapes were paved over, and the playful reverie of youth was replaced by the more settled adult dreams of scenic mountain cabins and urban cityscapes.” No one slept that night, nor the next. The only redeeming moment of the trip was our time at the camp lake. My kids swam happily in the same blue water I often stood in as a college student after my long runs in the park. My teammates and I would try to numb our legs post-run in the water, hoping for a rush of healing blood upon exit. But this time the water wasn’t quite as cold, and, thankfully, there was no riotous thunderstorm like the one in White’s essay. I also didn’t experience any “chill of death” like White had. (Maybe if we had come in October, I would have felt it.) My daughters did love splashing and being dragged through the water as they pretended to swim. My wife and I stood close by, hip deep, and helped them turn and stay afloat as they doggy-paddled around, occasionally accidentally submerging their heads before we pulled them back up, now forever transformed by their baptism in the waters of my past. While watching his recently finished sculpture getting covered by the tide, Andy Goldsworthy once opined that the ocean was changing his sculpture in a way he never could’ve imagined. Yet he still felt close to the structure as if his hands were still warm with the connection to the stones he built it with. Was the lake having the same impact on my daughters? Was this submersion a baptism? A welcoming into the kingdom of nature and the memories of my past? These thoughts swirled in my head later as I tried not to burn the sole pack of hotdogs I was cooking for dinner over the fire. By the final night, I felt discouraged. My own younger memories of camping were clouded by the actual adult experience of sleep-deprived children, and someone’s wife yelling to her husband at 3:30 AM to remember to take his towel to the bathhouse. I remember those younger days so fondly. The lambent stars, the chill at night, the warm fires, and the pleasant smell of woody smoke in the distance. Those were holy and magical nights, and they still burn romantically in my mind. Now, as I pondered my decision to take my wife and three kids under five tent-camping in the middle of a global pandemic, I feel mostly as though the trip was a disaster, and I went home more tired than when I left. It had been silly of me to try to recreate the past, I thought. A month later, I was teaching class on the first day of school when my wife sent me a text message. Sarah, attending virtual kindergarten on her iPad, had been asked by her teacher to fill out a worksheet that asked what her favorite moment of the summer was. As I glanced at the picture, I figured it would be our earlier and much more successful trip to Cape Cod with its beautiful beaches that reached longingly out toward the ocean. But no, it was our camping trip she wrote in blue ink with her Pilot BP-S Medium on a piece of paper she then submitted as a picture, via her iPad, to the ether and infiniteness of the digital universe. It was then I felt the icy chill of space and time colliding. ◘

Afew weeks ago, amidst a global pandemic, I subjected my ninth-graders to the classic nostalgia-fueled E.B. White essay “Once More to the Lake.” No one had done the assigned reading, and then a fire drill took up the first fifteen minutes of class. When we finally returned, I had the students skim the text before we talked about White’s intentions. Every year that I teach the essay, I tell the kids that I experience a bit of White’s duality because I still remember reading it for the first time in Mr. Starr’s AP Language course in eleventh grade. I don’t remember much else from that class, but the essay always lingered in the back of my mind, and White’s final, sardonically foreboding interjection on his son’s independence—“my groin felt the chill of death”—returns to haunt me anatomically and metaphysically every new school year. When I was in high school, I never understood and possibly refused to accept the finality of White’s last line. Young and naïve, I simply saw the essay as a work of grand outdoorsy imagery. It’s a bit unnatural to consider the mortality of our parents while we’re still young, and I’m sure the younger White never imagined that his solitary excursion into the water represented some larger metaphor of parental disassociation for his father. Throughout the essay, the elder White struggles to separate himself from his son. He repeatedly wonders if it’s him or his son holding the fishing pole and experiencing the sights and smells of the lake they’ve retreated to. So when I was teaching the essay again this fall, I began to reckon with my own legacy of denial. I began to wonder if I, like White, was denying my own forward momentum. I now have three younger daughters, and, like White, I have begun to struggle with the duality of the past colliding with the present. As I sat at my work desk pondering this struggle, I twirled my pen between my fingers while staring ahead at the blue glow of the laptop. I wondered, what stories could I share with

The Perfect Plan

Alex Chapple | The Human | Essay

Today I planted seven hundred daffodils. They have names like Can Can Girl, Yellow Cheerfulness, Replete, and my favorite, British Gamble. I planted them along a stone wall my dad recently discovered behind the manor house, which dates to the 1850s. My parents bought the house and the land it sits on five years ago, naming it Hope Flower Farm. Although that sounds like a call for optimism, the place is actually named after Mr. Hope, the tenant farmer who cared for the property for forty years before my parents bought it. He was an excellent steward, but twenty-five acres was too much for him to maintain alone, so parts of the property grew over with weeds and brambles. My dad found this wall under one such bramble patch. Dahlias at Hope Flower Farm in northern VirginiaI shouldn’t feel this sore from planting so few bulbs, but I’m still new to this, so I was overly cautious—my feet and legs throb from hovering over holes for hours. Daffodils should be five inches deep, so I had carried a stick I broke to be that length and checked every bulb’s depth before covering it. The precision made the work slow, but it calmed my worry that they would be planted too close to the surface. Our winters, like everyone else’s, are increasingly mild. While I was working, I had silently prayed our bulbs wouldn’t be “too excitable,” as Sylvia Plath once described her tulips that arrived before winter was truly gone. These daffodils, like all the flowers we grow, will be used in the floral designs we create for weddings and events on our farm, or sold retail, directly to our northern Virginia community. My mother has been a florist for almost thirty years. Ten years ago, my father quit his job in telecommunications to work with her. Upon purchase, the farm was a fun side venture, a place for my mom to teach floral design and to dabble with growing her own more expensive stems she would typically have to buy from wholesalers, like peonies and dahlias. But the primary source of their revenue—weddings and events, often at big venues in Washington, D.C.—evaporated as COVID-19 halted the entire hospitality industry. So they leaned into the last stable part of their reality: the land. My parents’ plan? Grow more flowers than ever, then figure out what to do with them. The sun is already setting in the December sky, so the work day is done. I move my stiff legs and walk past the old, red dairy barns on the property toward the tenant house. It is pleasantly warm for the week of Christmas, but the warmth only lasts a few hours, when the sun briefly falls on your back. Our daily labor is not easy in the winter months, but it is short. In the summer, I work twelve-hour days to make the most of every moment of sunlight. Sometimes it makes me miss my old nine-to-five job. When I enter the small house where Mr. Hope and his wife used to live, I kick off my boots and wash up. After inspecting the dirt under my fingernails, I notice a hole in my jeans. It’s a friendly reminder that I’m not in a suit. That’s something I’ve never missed. "Our daily labor is not easy in the winter months, but it is short. In the summer, I work twelve-hour days to make the most of every moment of sunlight. Sometimes it makes me miss my old nine-to-five job.” A year ago I spent my days in business attire, at a desk, reading several hundred intelligence reports a week. I did this while working as an analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency. In contrast to our farm’s manor house, the centerpiece of the CIA campus is the cold, concrete Old Headquarters Building. (I used to laugh with colleagues about how ironically Soviet it looked from the outside.) The campus was beautiful in its own way, though—meticulously landscaped; green from the surrounding Virginia old-growth forest; and often foggy because of its proximity to the Potomac River, which added to the mystique of the place. The only problem was that I rarely got to enjoy it. I was usually in a suit, in a gray cubicle, inside an office with no windows. I worked at the Agency for seven years. During that time, I developed incredible friendships and had many unique experiences, including traveling internationally, writing for the President, and even briefly running the Agency’s Twitter account. But I knew deep down after my first few months that I didn’t fit there. The bureaucratic environment made me feel like a caged dog. I also found the best parts of the job—those portrayed in Hollywood films (inaccurately, it turns out)—surprisingly boring. It took me years to acknowledge this malaise, and then years more to find the courage to leave. The admission came in an easy, unexpected moment at a party, when someone I had just met was peppering me with questions about my CIA career. I told them I didn’t want to talk about it. They said they understood; I couldn’t talk about classified work. “No,” I replied, “it’s just that it’s boring.” I can still remember the person laughing, thinking I was being cagey. But I wasn’t being wry. In a lucid moment, I had realized how bored I’d become at a job most thought was cool. The courage that I would need to leave the Agency did not come as easily as my moment of lucidity. Ultimately, I would leave to join my parents, to support their thriving florist and floral education business, and to help on their farm. But before I did so, I spent years resisting their offers to join them because I was afraid to give up the two primary benefits of my Agency life: financial security and a sense of mission. "I realized that I was well-off as far as money was concerned, but when it came to living—really living—I was impoverished.” The federal government truly is one of the last US employers that promises a career—a forty-year plan—not just a job. The benefits are excellent, the salary growth is practically automatic (albeit slow), and everyone there is happy to see you age within the safety of bureaucratic structures until retirement. Could I really give up a secure government salary for one that could change, quite literally, as quickly as the weather? My mom and dad couldn’t even give me a clear answer on how much money they made because it fluctuated drastically year to year. In a traditional sense, I had “made it” by getting the analyst job. My family is mostly composed of small business owners who didn’t graduate college. They didn’t understand my desk job at all, but they understood that I had successfully broken into a white-collar world that would have excluded them, had they cared to join it. They used to remind me, too, how lucky I was for the security, especially as my wife and I contemplated having children. But as my boredom and sense of being caged grew worse, I began developing a broader sense of what financial security meant. I started to include new variables in my cost-benefit calculations, big things such as “health” and “freedom,” alongside small things like “better tomatoes.” I realized that I was well-off as far as money was concerned, but when it came to living—really living—I was impoverished. Sitting between cubicle walls under fluorescent lights, I was miserable. My friends and my wife worried about my health. I missed the feeling of working with my hands and earning tangible rewards. Having grown up working for my grandfather on his farm, I wistfully recalled how every day, week, and season yielded a palpable bounty—fresh produce, in our case. In contrast, my intelligence work was mostly an abstraction: I wrote verbose analyses of low-probability, hypothetical threats. My output—written analysis—rarely reached an end customer, and if it did, there was no guarantee I’d receive feedback. I rarely felt like my labor was making anything. As I mulled over this broader definition of wealth, I had a poignant conversation with my dad. I had been working with him on the farm one afternoon, lamenting that I hadn’t found the perfect exit strategy from the Agency yet. “Alex,” my father said, with a tone he reserved for when my babbling interrupted the quiet only farmers know, “if you’re waiting until you have the perfect plan to leave, you aren’t ready to leave.” He wiped his hands on his jeans, leaving streaks of red, clay-heavy mud on the denim. I looked down at the big box in front of him and realized we were done. We had just planted thousands of tulip bulbs. My back was sore, but in a way that felt healthier than the soreness I used to feel as I atrophied in my cubicle. “Because the perfect plan doesn’t exist?” "Well, that’s probably true, yes. But that’s not what I meant." He sighed and looked at the sky, choosing his words carefully. "I mean your wanting a perfect plan sounds, well, governmental. Maybe perfect plans do exist. I don't know. But it's just not the right thing to want." The whole reason my dad left the corporate world himself was to stop planning so much, to enter a world that is fluid and ever-changing. His work day is riskier as a farmer, but also more exciting, full of more potential. To him, the imperfection of farming, and of small business, is the best part. When he said this to me, my dad didn’t know it was exactly what I needed to hear. If I’m told I can’t do something, I fight to prove that person wrong. When my dad accidentally challenged my courage and said I wasn’t ready to leave, I suddenly was. I immediately knew he was right. I’d been waiting for the perfect plan to leave for years, but the truth was, I wouldn’t have known the perfect plan if it had slapped me in the face. What I had really been waiting for was the courage to leave with no plan at all. There was, however, one last hitch: the CIA’s mission still had a hold on my heart. Could I really trade in the pride I felt working to protect America for growing flowers? It felt more important to help the Pentagon understand the dangers of foreign weapon developments than it did to successfully grow zinnias from seed. I’ve always hated quitting anything, and quitting the Agency was especially difficult. I had made an oath to defend the Constitution against all enemies, and I meant the words of the oath when I said them. I believed in their importance. Maybe I was deluding myself then (and continue to delude myself to justify the time I spent there) but I saw helping protect America as an inherently worthwhile job. A part of me considered that my boredom and diminishing health might simply be the cost of working for something bigger than myself. I thought my efforts were vital to America’s health, even if the results were less tangible than tomatoes on the vine. Maybe being a civil servant required sacrifice in this way. With these thoughts swirling in my head, I couldn’t leave the Agency unless I felt like, in doing so, I could uphold my oath in some way. "Could I really give up a secure government salary for one that could change, quite literally, as quickly as the weather?” A couple of years into Donald Trump’s presidency, I was reading an article by Timothy P. Carney, a writer for Politico, who was trying to explain the roots of Trump’s electoral victory. In his analysis, Carney explains that conservative regions of the country that had voted against Trump during the Republican primaries had a major common denominator: close-knit community institutions and civil society. By comparison, Carney observes, such social cohesion has been disintegrating across much of the US over the past several decades. The places with active community centers, churches, and high rates of local civic engagement weren’t wooed by Trump’s promise to bring back the American dream. They, unlike much of conservative America, were still living the dream because they had community support structures to lean on. This explanation immediately hit home for me. I knew all about crumbling communities and the risks they posed to individuals and to the country at large because I had seen it happening in northern Virginia, where my family had been for generations. Ultra-fast growth in recent decades resulted in clumsy urban and suburban development. One crucial aspect of this has been developing almost every piece of land into housing. As farmland and open spaces turned into suburbia, some in my community had begun to fight to protect it—to demonstrate to local governments that non-residential uses of this land provided value, that horse country and trails and wineries were vital gathering spaces for a community and essential to individuals’ health. I've long been aware and even supportive of these efforts, but it was only after reading Carney’s article that, for the first time, I saw them as vital to the longevity of our country. And I realized that working for these causes, and helping my parents develop their farm into a safe space for the public to visit and gather, would be a way to uphold my oath. After all, my oath was to protect against all enemies “foreign and domestic.” There I was studying military developments or political maneuvering in foreign countries while ignoring the crumbling of my own home. It started to feel absurd to me. As Wendell Berry wrote, “A community is the mental and spiritual condition of knowing that the place is shared… It is the knowledge that people have of each other, their concern for each other, their trust in each other, the freedom with which they come and go among themselves.” Where I lived, there wasn’t much of a community as Berry defined it. Work needed to be done to build such a community, to create shared places where a community could flourish. And I could do that work. As an Agency officer, I realized that it would become impossible to uphold an oath to defend a homeland if that homeland ceased to exist. Suddenly, my oath to defend the Constitution not only seemed to permit me to focus more on my local world, it demanded it. With this clarity of purpose, I told my parents I was ready to come work for them, and I put in my two weeks’ notice at the Agency. The bureaucracy met the decision with a shrug. I’ll never forget how hard I laughed when I submitted my formal resignation letter to HR via email, and the reply was simply: “Okay.” I tortured myself for years over a decision that, once finally made, seemed so anticlimactic. “Okay,” if weirdly succinct, was actually the appropriate response. With the decision made and documented, I was shocked by how calm I felt. My new reality had arrived, and my mind and body were ready to get on with it. I couldn’t remember why it had taken me so long to do this. "Could I really trade in the pride I felt working to protect America for growing flowers?” My leaving was met with sadness from friends, but also many comments like “I knew this was coming.” I had never been quiet about my dissatisfaction with the job, but I was still surprised that most of my friends knew I’d “get out.” Because, until shortly before I made the decision, I hadn’t known that about myself. I was also surprised by how many people asked me how I found the courage to leave—or asked me if I judged them for staying. I told them what I learned from my dad: waiting for the perfect plan to leave was a Catch-22 that would have trapped me forever. And I told them I didn’t judge them for staying if they were happy, as most of them were. Although I concluded that the job didn’t fit me, it was a great fit for others. Many of my friends felt that their Agency career was their dream job, and I think they were right. They succeeded and did great work within the Agency’s bureaucratic structures and bizarre culture, and without feeling caged. I have enough humility to know that my departure was about what was right for me, not anyone else. And, personally, I’m glad to know good people continue to work for the Agency’s mission, while I’ve moved on to a more localized one. A year after leaving government service, I can say that my decision has held up. I could give up the financial security for a different sense of mission. Even in the face of the pandemic, which struck about a month after I left government service. Maybe particularly because of the pandemic. One silver lining of the chaos caused by COVID-19 is that it was the ultimate test of my dad’s perspective that perfect plans aren’t worth stressing over. Not only were our plans for 2020 imperfect, they were blown to smithereens. The educational conferences for floral designers in New York City and Ireland we were to host and the dozens of weddings we were supposed to provide flowers for were all canceled. But with my dad’s perspective driving everything, we just shrugged and did the only thing we could: grow more flowers. This strategy didn’t make up for all of the lost revenue, but it provided more than enough, proving even in the worst of circumstances that the financial security I had given up wasn’t as special as it had always seemed. And these extra flowers, in turn, helped me achieve my new mission faster than I thought I would. The focus on our land gave us an opportunity to open our farm to our community, which was desperate for ways to be outside safely. Instead of bringing wedding flowers to big venues in Washington, D.C., we started hosting smaller, intimate weddings at our farm. Instead of using everything we grow for wedding work, we offered these blooms to the public. We hosted a Mother’s Day event, so local moms could get a photograph with their family among our peonies and leave with a bouquet. We hosted a fall celebration of our dahlias, and the local community flocked to see the rare flower in bloom. I felt like I was honoring my oath with each event. As year two of the pandemic begins, I begin the long waiting game on those daffodils and everything else we’ve planted to see if they and our imperfect plan bloom. Even if they don’t, I am calmly confident our farm will provide. Although the farm is not large, it is too much for my dad and I to maintain by ourselves, just as it was for Mr. Hope. As a consequence, we let swaths of the land go to hay. When you approach the property and see these patches, you may even wonder if someone is here. I’m proud of our carefully landscaped flower beds, but these grown-over parts are my favorite. They are beautiful for their mystery. The whites and golds of wild flowers make home to a menagerie of small mammals and birds I didn’t even know existed before I started working on the land. These patches are full of the optimism we didn’t initially intend in our farm’s name. These patches have an aura best described as the exact opposite of my old, gray cubicle. They remind me of the boring certainty I traded in for unlimited potential, both negative and positive. They are proof that having no plan—let alone a perfect plan—can still result in thriving beauty and life. ◘

Today I planted seven hundred daffodils. They have names like Can Can Girl, Yellow Cheerfulness, Replete, and my favorite, British Gamble. I planted them along a stone wall my dad recently discovered behind the manor house, which dates to the 1850s. My parents bought the house and the land it sits on five years ago, naming it Hope Flower Farm. Although that sounds like a call for optimism, the place is actually named after Mr. Hope, the tenant farmer who cared for the property for forty years before my parents bought it. He was an excellent steward, but twenty-five acres was too much for him to maintain alone, so parts of the property grew over with weeds and brambles. My dad found this wall under one such bramble patch. Dahlias at Hope Flower Farm in northern VirginiaI shouldn’t feel this sore from planting so few bulbs, but I’m still new to this, so I was overly cautious—my feet and legs throb from hovering over holes for hours. Daffodils should be five inches deep, so I had carried a stick I broke to be that length and checked every bulb’s depth before covering it. The precision made the work slow, but it calmed my worry that they would be planted too close to the surface. Our winters, like everyone else’s, are increasingly mild. While I was working, I had silently prayed our bulbs wouldn’t be “too excitable,” as Sylvia Plath once described her tulips that arrived before winter was truly gone. These daffodils, like all the flowers we grow, will be used in the floral designs we create for weddings and events on our farm, or sold retail, directly to our northern Virginia community. My mother has been a florist for almost thirty years. Ten years ago, my father quit his job in telecommunications to work with her. Upon purchase, the farm was a fun side venture, a place for my mom to teach floral design and to dabble with growing her own more expensive stems she would typically have to buy from wholesalers, like peonies and dahlias. But the primary source of their

An Old War in a New World

Machmud Makhmudov | The Necessary | Essay

The following strictly reflects the personal views of solely the author and not any other organization or individual. The story of contemporary America is one of transition, and it is best observed from Stone Mountain: a deceptively named quartz monadnock on the periphery of the Atlanta suburbs that isn’t quite large enough to technically qualify as a mountain. Unique among landmarks, Stone Mountain has borne witness to the most significant developments in American race relations for hundreds of years. This is literally true, in the case of the three Confederate leaders—Jefferson Davis, Stonewall Jackson, and Robert E. Lee—who are etched prominently into its side. It is also figuratively true, as the metro Atlanta area surrounding Stone Mountain cemented its legacy over time as both a Civil War battleground and the heart of the 1960s Civil Rights movement. Today, the region is once again a harbinger of the fate awaiting the rest of the nation, as rapidly growing Hispanic and Asian immigrant communities complicate and add color to a fraught racial history that has, up until now, been written in black and white. In 2020 and in what has already passed of 2021, we saw America undergo a series of political, social, and existential convulsions as it transitions from a majority white nation to one that is expected to become majority-minority in roughly 2045. From the Black Lives Matter protests that erupted across the country following numerous accounts of police brutality against Black Americans, to the January 6 insurrection that saw Confederate flags make their way farther into the nation’s Capitol than they did even during the Civil War, the echoes of battles that were thought to have ended over a century ago have reemerged violently. And yet, as demons of the past rise again, they have taken on new shades in a country that would be unrecognizable to those who took up arms in the Civil War. To historians, Stone Mountain is where the Ku Klux Klan had its second national resurgence in 1915 after being largely stamped out in the post-Civil War Reconstruction period. To contemporary Georgians, Stone Mountain is where you go with your family every Fourth of July to watch a laser show that transforms the quartz likeness of Stonewall Jackson into the fiddle-playing, backwards cap-wearing protagonist of the hit Charlie Daniels Band song, “The Devil Went Down to Georgia.” The history and reality of systemic racism takes on different meanings in the eyes of new immigrants. As each year passes, both are further complicated by an expanding group of new Americans who are increasingly distant from the sins and demons of the past. “It is this battle over identity, meaning, and history that will continue to define America as it transitions from one era to the next.” The tension apparent in that transition manifested itself in the 2020 presidential election, which I was fortunate to have a front-row view to as a policy staffer on Joe Biden’s campaign. In the end, after a tumultuous summer that saw a racial reawakening in the middle of a pandemic, we succeeded in defeating Donald Trump and, at least symbolically, the coarse grievance politics that he wholly embraced and led. However, I couldn’t help but shake the feeling that the moral and political significance of the victory obscured another version of reality, which saw Asian and Hispanic Americans—who are the fastest-growing demographic group and the largest minority demographic group in America, respectively—turn out in decisive margins in key swing states and, in some cases, vote in unexpected ways. While both groups cast a majority of their votes for Democrats, and have made it clear that their votes are up for grabs by either party, they did not do so at nearly the rate of Black Americans. And as the country is continuously reborn through waves of immigration it is clear that its identity is up for grabs as well. Much of the American experience can be distilled down to a single question: “Are you white or are you Black?” What will it mean to be an American when the most common answer is “neither”? 2020 saw the beginning of a demographic tide that promises to realign America’s political and social landscape. And there is no place that better encapsulates this transition than Stone Mountain, where the largest Confederate monument on the planet looms over the past and future of one of the most racially diverse communities in the American South. ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ I grew up in the shadow of Stone Mountain in Gwinnett County, a suburban community roughly twenty-five miles northeast of Atlanta. My parents and I immigrated from Uzbekistan when I was roughly a year old as part of the first class of immigrants to arrive via the Diversity Immigrant Visa Program. Gwinnett has earned recent news coverage for its diversity, and the most recent Census Bureau estimates from 2019 peg the county’s population at 35% white, 30% Black, 22% Latino, and 13% Asian. My childhood, like many of my peers, was a blur of country music and hip-hop playing in the background of large family picnics and kids’ birthday parties where you’d alternatingly be served hot dogs, Indian biryani, or tacos, depending on whose house you were at. By 2050, according to Woods & Poole Economics, Gwinnett’s population is projected to be 38% Black, 27% Latino, 21% Asian, and just 14% white: an astonishing transformation in a community that until 2016 had an all-white county commission. These swift and significant demographic changes are occurring throughout the metro Atlanta area, and give an outsized spotlight to local political disputes that take on the weight of a changing nation. One such debate occurred recently, as the propriety of Stone Mountain’s Confederate visages took on new meaning in the face of deadly violence. Several years ago, the city of Charleston, South Carolina saw tragedy at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church as a white supremacist murdered a group of mostly elderly Black churchgoers. Investigations found that the shooter was inspired by neo-Confederate ideology and took several photos with “Stars and Bars” Confederate regalia. As part of a national response, civil rights groups and organizers in Georgia demanded that Stone Mountain remove its Confederate carvings and, at the very least, relegate them to a museum. I asked my dad what he thought about the entire ordeal. A loyal Democratic voter ever since we became citizens, my dad is the kind of person who I suspect came to his party less out of ideological conviction and more out of emotional backlash. Though we are proud Americans, we are also plainly Muslim immigrants. The Islamophobia of the Tea Party movement of 2009 and 2010, which saw President Obama viciously and perplexingly denigrated as a Muslim-Atheist-Socialist-Terrorist, made it clear that we were to be Democrats as well. Thus, I expected a somewhat progressive response from him when I asked whether he thought the monuments should be removed. He looked ahead and said, in broken English and with solemn but defiant certainty, “We can’t forget our history.” This struck me as an odd thing to say, given that we were immigrants from Uzbekistan and that our ancestors were likely nomads in the western slopes of contemporary China when the Civil War raged on. Furthermore, the response was certainly not what I expected from an immigrant who came to nearly all of his political views through his experiences with discrimination. He shrugged his shoulders. “Is not good to take down. They do bad, but the liberals take too much,” he said. Consistency has never been my dad’s strongest suit. Perhaps that could be said of America as well. As seemingly contradictory as my father’s views are, they gave me early insight into the convoluted political views of predominantly immigrant groups that ultimately played a decisive role in the 2020 election. Given Trump’s early characterization of Mexican immigrants as “drug dealers, criminals, and rapists” and overt anti-immigrant sentiments, most political prognosticators believed that the Republican share of the Hispanic vote would collapse in 2016. According to exit polling, Trump ended up improving on Mitt Romney’s 27% share of the Hispanic vote in 2012 by winning 29% in 2016. And after a presidency marked with tangible hostilities towards immigrants of all stripes, Trump further improved in 2020 with 31% of the Hispanic vote. The story is similar with Asian-American voters. Exit polling data indicates that in 2020, President Trump earned roughly 34% of the Asian-American vote, an increase from the 27% he earned in 2016. While the net increases in support are relatively modest, it is important for Democrats to ask the question of how a President that they universally deem to be deeply racist managed to improve his standing with the largest and fastest-growing minority groups in the country over the span of four years of governance. "[I]t is difficult to convince a group of people who gave up everything in hopes of building a new life in a new world that their new home is only worthy of eternal scorn.” Some have suggested that the branding of the Republican Party as a refuge for hard workers, free enterprise, and opportunity are a natural fit for a self-selecting group of immigrants who are inclined to be entrepreneurially-focused. Others have argued that the Democratic Party’s embrace of the Black Lives Matter movement, morally correct as it may be, has the corollary effect of repelling non-Black voters. Similar to this point, others have written that anti-Blackness in some Hispanic and Asian-Americans is triggered by Trumpism in much the same way that it is for white voters. The truth is that all of these suggestions are likely true to an extent, and that the difficulty of electoral politics is in determining what a winning strategy is when no one variable is decisive and increasingly diverse racial groups do not vote monolithically. If a campaign wins with 50.1% of the vote, its strategic choices are regarded as broadly correct and as having an intimate understanding of the minds and hearts of voters. If a campaign loses with 49.9% of the vote, it is written into history books as a plodding, unorganized, and deeply flawed affair with a severe misunderstanding of the electorate. As the saying goes, success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan. Plainly, the 2020 election demonstrated that demographics are not destiny. Military tacticians often say that those who predicate too much of their strategy on the narrow contours of prior conflicts are setting themselves up to fail by fighting the previous war. After several decades of loyalty from voters of color, Democrats have to a large extent fallen into the assumption that as the country becomes more diverse, their electoral prospects will continuously improve. Donald Trump and the political currents that he fomented have made clear that the country is fracturing along many fault lines other than race, further complicating the path forward for a nation that finds itself transitioning into uncharted demographic and political territory. From the perch of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, I saw some of these cracks firsthand. Though race was a constant refrain in every debate and strategic analysis, an intersectional perspective was necessary to understand the nuances of what was really going on on the ground. In the run-up to primary voting, our campaign was widely heralded as being the strongest with Black voters, which did indeed prove to be the case until the nomination was clinched. However, a closer look found that younger Black voters, particularly those under the age of thirty-five, were much more inclined than their elders to be supporters of Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) or Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), whom many pundits perceived to be the most progressive candidates running. This age split was present with both Hispanic and Asian voters as well. The progressive and activist sheen that younger and more diverse voters are imparting to the Democratic Party has important consequences for both current and future elections. While a more populist and progressive party is critical for tapping into expanding universes of new voters, it also butts into caricatured critiques crafted by the Republican party that have particular salience with minority voters. The term “socialism,” for example, plays a complicated role in contemporary American politics, representing for many younger voters a more equitable and humane economic system that seeks to curb the tragedies of mismatched scarcities and excesses that have come to represent the last four decades of American life. For some older immigrant voters, particularly those from Vietnam, Cuba, and Venezuela, socialism evokes memories of totalitarianism, poverty, and hunger. This fissure has already begun to affect voting patterns and will only become more prominent as younger, more progressive leaders come to define what the Democratic Party will look like in the future. I suspect based on the contradictions of my father that there is also something more going on here, something more visceral that comes down to what it fundamentally meant to be an American. There is an undercurrent to contemporary progressivism that deems America too broken, too racist, and too flawed from conception to be capable of true multicultural democracy. Proponents of this idea cite abundant evidence, from an increasingly vitriolic and openly racist politics to the physical manifestation of past sins such as Stone Mountain. Through the eyes of many immigrants, however, America always stands anew, beckoning all those who seek freedom and opportunity to its shores. The Republican Party has made focused and successful efforts to brand itself as the more overtly nationalist party, one that defends America’s past and present zealously against progressive critique. This approach aligns with the perspectives of many immigrants, for whom the past exists less as a continuous point of condemnation and more as a marker of continuous progress. Put more plainly, it is difficult to convince a group of people who gave up everything in hopes of building a new life in a new world that their new home is only worthy of eternal scorn. ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ On January 5, the state of Georgia saw two run-off elections for U.S. Senate seats that would determine control of the chamber and, in turn, the fate of the Biden presidency. They faced an uphill battle; apart from Biden’s slim victory in November, Democrats had not won statewide office in Georgia since 2006. Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, the Democratic candidates, are Jewish and Black, respectively. Nonetheless, they and outside organizing groups focused meticulously on finding creative ways to engage Asian and Hispanic voters, the cornerstone of a new Georgia and a new America that now make up a significant portion of the population and cannot be ignored. I spent a weekend at one of dozens of canvassing events targeted at Asian-American voters. There, I found myself greeted at the campaign office with free bubble tea boba drinks (a Taiwanese staple) and placard signs that read “Asian Votes Matter.” Half of the attendees were elderly white liberals. The other half, adolescent Asian-Americans. It was a vivid display of multicultural, intergenerational democracy in action. As we knocked on doors, not every person answered but those who did were enthusiastic about voting. Hispanics were also heavily engaged. A non-profit group called Con Mijente—a reference to the terms gente (people) and justicia (justice)—reported on January 4 that it had contacted every Hispanic voter in Georgia in the span of eight weeks. Celebrities ranging from Eva Longoria to America Ferrera flocked to the state to implore voters to support Ossoff and Warnock. Both Democratic candidates were optimistic and focused on the broad array of issues plaguing voters of all races, including the COVID-19 pandemic and economic downturn. At the same time, they did not shy away from highlighting issues that had particular salience to the state’s significant Black community, including a new Civil Rights Act. In the end, Ossoff and Warnock won by narrow margins, succeeding in no small part due to high Democratic turnout in the ring of suburban counties surrounding Stone Mountain. Both earned more than two hundred thousand votes in Gwinnett County, whereas the 2014 Democratic U.S. Senate candidate received merely eighty-six thousand in the general election, despite the fact that run-off elections typically see lower turnout than their general election counterparts. Importantly, the vast majority of those new voters were voters of color. By embracing a strategic partnership that harkened back to the Jewish-Black alliances that were an integral part of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, Ossoff and Warnock showed that multicultural democracy has a place in the emerging America. Though the Confederate generals still sit high on Stone Mountain, the world that they look over is being reborn. ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ The day after the election, my elation quickly dissipated as a nearly all-white group of insurrectionists and white supremacists stormed the nation’s capitol. The attack was a vivid illustration of the fact that though a coalition of Black, white, Asian and Hispanic voters in the Deep South has just elected its state’s first Black and Jewish Senators a mere twelve hours before, there was still much work to be done to repair the deep divisions that remain woven into the nation’s fabric. The political currents of 2020 showed that while the emerging America stands to play a pivotal role in electing new leaders and charting new courses, that direction was very much still up for grabs. It is a battle, however, that cannot be fully won without grappling with America’s history. The subjugation of Black Americans is deeply embedded in American institutions and life. Our Constitutional design empowers smaller, predominantly rural (and white) states over those with exponentially larger, more diverse populations. Staggering levels of racial wealth inequality took root during the original sin of slavery and blossomed through generations of systemic Jim Crow discrimination. These are reasons to be skeptical of a whitewashed version of American history that generalizes the past into an idealized caricature that absolves our predecessors of any wrongdoing and plainly ignores how prior sins have developed into contemporary tragedies. This awareness must exist, however, alongside a recognition that, for the Asian and Hispanic immigrants who leave everything behind to begin a new life in the United States, there is a pride that develops in the process of seeking, striving, and dreaming to succeed in a new land. Such awareness does not mean that Democrats should not be forthright in condemning and addressing racism in all its forms; indeed, we must. But one must love something to see it as worthy of repair. Many immigrants came to America because they loved the possibility of it, and still see it as they first did when arriving at its shores. It is this battle over identity, meaning, and history that will continue to define America as it transitions from one era to the next. Indeed, the past three months have arduously demonstrated that a path towards multicultural democracy is available for our nation, if only we love it enough to try. ◘

The following strictly reflects the personal views of solely the author and not any other organization or individual. The story of contemporary America is one of transition, and it is best observed from Stone Mountain: a deceptively named quartz monadnock on the periphery of the Atlanta suburbs that isn’t quite large enough to technically qualify as a mountain. Unique among landmarks, Stone Mountain has borne witness to the most significant developments in American race relations for hundreds of years. This is literally true, in the case of the three Confederate leaders—Jefferson Davis, Stonewall Jackson, and Robert E. Lee—who are etched prominently into its side. It is also figuratively true, as the metro Atlanta area surrounding Stone Mountain cemented its legacy over time as both a Civil War battleground and the heart of the 1960s Civil Rights movement. Today, the region is once again a harbinger of the fate awaiting the rest of the nation, as rapidly growing Hispanic and Asian immigrant communities complicate and add color to a fraught racial history that has, up until now, been written in black and white. In 2020 and in what has already passed of 2021, we saw America undergo a series of political, social, and existential convulsions as it transitions from a majority white nation to one that is expected to become majority-minority in roughly 2045. From the Black Lives Matter protests that erupted across the country following numerous accounts of police brutality against Black Americans, to the January 6 insurrection that saw Confederate flags make their way farther into the nation’s Capitol than they did even during the Civil War, the echoes of battles that were thought to have ended over a century ago have reemerged violently. And yet, as demons of the past rise again, they have taken on new shades in a country that would be unrecognizable to those who took up arms in the Civil War. To historians, Stone Mountain is where the Ku Klux Klan had its second na

Letter To Readers

The Editors

Our inaugural Issue 0 of Symposeum, which published last November, explored a theme of liminal space. It released in the midst of a presidential election, a racial reckoning, and a global pandemic still raging. But the nature of in-between times is that they are, well, in between times. At long last, there is a threshold: a crossing-over from life as we know it into life as we renew it. If liminal times embrace the quality of ambiguity, then times of transition manifest directionality. That's why we chose transition as the theme of Issue One. The slowest year on record has finally lapsed, as has the thirteenth month of 2020. A Biden administration is settling into the White House and getting to work. Despite its difficulties, last year brought “remarkable progress” in the fight for racial equality, observes Black Voters Matter Fund co-founder Cliff Albright. Multiple vaccines have been approved and are being produced en masse. Still, these are distressing times. Even so, we remain rationally optimistic about the days ahead and doggedly determined to forge something good out of our situation. We believe that such an attitude of hope has more than helped human progress; we believe that humanity is fundamentally lost without it. Our theme of transition therefore highlights the possibility inherent in our moment—not a mollified return to the status quo or an amnesia to the past but an opportunity to grow. Ralph Waldo Emerson once said: “Not in his goals but in his transitions, man is great.” Why? Because “everything teaches transition, transference, metamorphosis, [and] therein is human power.” As Emerson saw it and as we see it, too, power comes from motion, never stasis. We move forward. In 1840, a group of transcendentalists led by Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Henry David Thoreau launched The Dial, a journal dedicated to furnishing a “cheerful rational voice amidst the din of mourners and polemics.” From these visionaries—the self-styled “Symposeum”—we take our name. Symposeum is a publication of The Dial project: a twenty-first century creative, collaborative community dedicated to elevating rational optimism in public discourse. It draws on its predecessor’s commitment to exploring works of “the Necessary, the Plain, the True, and the Human.” By Necessary, we mean works of critical inquiry. By Plain, we mean works of novel insight into ordinary occurrences. By True, we mean works of empirical investigation. By Human, we mean works of intimate experience. Just like an authentic symposium, our quarterly issues examine single topics through a variety of perspectives. Issue 1 curates twenty-plus original works about transition from essays to art to poetry and more. In terms of content, we take a broad and creative approach. You'll find pieces with a clear connection to the theme: Machmud Makhmudov, a member of the Biden administration and campaign team, weighs the Democratic party's evolving identity, audience, and message. George Gibson and Clifton Hicks, two banjo players born in different decades, discuss the evolution of folk music in a digital age. Gregory Sepich-Poore, a dual M.D./Ph.D. doctoral candidate, historicizes vaccine development in an emerging post-COVID world. You'll also find pieces with a derived connection to the theme: Zoe Pehrson, a transgender woman raised in Papua New Guinea to missionary parents, explores memory through poetry. Alex Chapple, a former CIA civil agent, reflects on leaving the Agency for life on the farm and fatherhood. Brooke Bourgeois, a cartoonist, captures humor—and hope—in drawings. We trust you’ll find a home in at least a few. The editorial team is grateful for our Issue One contributors who believed in this project enough to produce something for it. We’re also indebted to countless others who freely lent their time, talent, and advice to the process of building what will be a cultural touchstone. As The Dial community grows, it is a joy to labor alongside so many thoughtful optimists. Symposeum aims to impart our conviction that human goodness and ingenuity are most keen where they are most threatened. It is an ambitious aim, but the present challenges demand an ambitious response. This season is ours: to register and wrestle, to interrogate and inspirit, to cultivate, to build, and to own. In hope, The Editors

Our inaugural Issue 0 of Symposeum, which published last November, explored a theme of liminal space. It released in the midst of a presidential election, a racial reckoning, and a global pandemic still raging. But the nature of in-between times is that they are, well, in between times. At long last, there is a threshold: a crossing-over from life as we know it into life as we renew it. If liminal times embrace the quality of ambiguity, then times of transition manifest directionality. That's why we chose transition as the theme of Issue One. The slowest year on record has finally lapsed, as has the thirteenth month of 2020. A Biden administration is settling into the White House and getting to work. Despite its difficulties, last year brought “remarkable progress” in the fight for racial equality, observes Black Voters Matter Fund co-founder Cliff Albright. Multiple vaccines have been approved and are being produced en masse. Still, these are distressing times. Even so, we remain rationally optimistic about the days ahead and doggedly determined to forge something good out of our situation. We believe that such an attitude of hope has more than helped human progress; we believe that humanity is fundamentally lost without it. Our theme of transition therefore highlights the possibility inherent in our moment—not a mollified return to the status quo or an amnesia to the past but an opportunity to grow. Ralph Waldo Emerson once said: “Not in his goals but in his transitions, man is great.” Why? Because “everything teaches transition, transference, metamorphosis, [and] therein is human power.” As Emerson saw it and as we see it, too, power comes from motion, never stasis. We move forward. In 1840, a group of transcendentalists led by Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Henry David Thoreau launched The Dial, a journal dedicated to furnishing a “cheerful rational voice amidst the din of mourners and polemics.” From these visionaries—the self-styled “Symposeum”—we take our

Rounding Error

K.T. Abram | The Plain | Poetry

There's a quiet power to those I saw Jesus in my toast stories. Stunned devotees posing alongside burnt bread all holy and humorless. To think, one morning they awoke and willed their way into a miracle, Buttered the toast just right to coax the savior's silhouette. Nevermind the incongruous lump On his arm, The strange bulge near his ear. Every miracle is a rounding error— Need approximated To the nearest whole number. A few hundredths off, and you’re left With hard seltzer, A surplus of sardines, Burnt toast— A choice between waste and resolve. Everything leads back to this: Black bits scraped with certitude akin to survival. Taste, a learned preference. Poet's Note I’ve always been fascinated by the folklore of divine encounters, especially ones that occur in decidedly unremarkable contexts. This transition, or more aptly, transfiguration, from the mundane to meaningful requires some level of intention. Even the devout must choose to live by faith—lean into the comforts of conviction or tread the path of skepticism. Ultimately, “Rounding Error” aims to capture the tension of this binary: the familiar crossroads of waste and resolve.

Un coup de pouce (2020)

Meghan K. McGinley | The Plain | Artwork

Paper, adhesive | 8 x 12 inches Artist’s Note The French expression un coup de pouce conjures a tender force: the shock of a blow, un coup, in concert with the inner digit of a human hand, un pouce. Its uncanny charm brims with positive intent. While translations differ in context and across cultures, I find that the English turn of phrase "a nudge in the right direction" captures the spirit of the original. This gentle call to arms from our better angels lends comfort to the strange. In moments of transition, we often yearn for such nudges; do they come from ourselves, our companions, or something beyond us? In a play of the sacred and profane, this collage offers a response in between. Fragments from El Greco’s “The Assumption of the Virgin” sourced from the vinyl insert of Sir Thomas Beecham’s reading of Handel’s Messiah; a secondhand astronomy textbook’s reproduction of NASA’s “Hubble Ultra Deep Field”; and nondescript advertisements from a decade-old issue of Money Magazine come together not to suggest the passage from one state to another, but instead to propose a moment of contemplation within them. Suspended in space, reaching upwards and out, may we reap the bounty of hope and bask in our abundance.

More Voices Still

Edvards Kuks | The Human | Essay

It is a well-worn truth that translation—especially translation of poetry—is a process of interpretation. The reader needs a pathway to navigate new text, and the translator is tasked with forging this path through landscapes of meaning both plain and obscure. Caught between the weight of preserving the author’s intent and the reshaping pull of new language, this path is that of the efforts, doubts, and decisions of translators. As a young poet writing and translating in Latvian—a language of roughly two million speakers—I feel the special weight of translation in smaller languages, and of particular translators’ roles in shaping the Latvian poetic tradition and linguistic landscape. (Latvian even denotes poetry translation, atdzeja, with the Latvian word for poetry, dzeja, rather than the word for translation, tulkojums.) As a reader, I could admire Ingmāra Balode’s translation of the Polish poet Adam Zagajewski, or Amanda Aizpuriete’s treatment of Russian poets, not to mention the seemingly endless efforts of Uldis Bērziņš toward both contemporary and ancient texts. To treat these poets’ translations as mere mirrors of their sources would be a diminution of the authorial role of their efforts. And yet, I only began to understand what drove such efforts once I embarked on a translation of my own. "As a young poet writing and translating in Latvian—a language of roughly two million speakers—I feel the special weight of translation in smaller languages, and of particular translators’ roles in shaping the Latvian poetic tradition and linguistic landscape.” It was not long after I moved to London for university when the book found me. It happened in a used bookstore near Bloomsbury that held all the familiar fittings: a welcoming ding at the door, the shop table overcrowded by incoming packages and outgoing pulp, and shelves upon shelves of mostly aging classics and the comforting caramel smell of old cellulose. I was hoping to find a poet of my own to force me outside my comfort zone, and to mask my lax knowledge of the classics. The masses of cheap Shakespeare reprints and thick anthologies of English verse simply would not do for me. I only knew that I needed something contemporary, and fortune led me to Eduardo C. Corral’s debut collection Slow Lightning. An American poet and professor, Corral was the first Latino recipient of the Yale Younger Series Poet award—the longest running annual literary award in the United States—joining the likes of Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery, and Robert Hass. The book’s cover drew me in: black, winding snakes. Its first lines drew me in further: “Before nourishment there must be obedience. / In his hands I was a cup overflowing with thirst.” The collection that followed was a maze of dense imagery, deft English-Spanish code-switching, and careful craft indebted to the American tradition then unfamiliar to me. ✵ Like many others in Soviet Bloc, the Latvian poetic tradition post-World War II has been greatly influenced by the censorship regime enacted by the occupying Soviet Union between 1940 and the restoration of Latvian independence in 1990. Until the late 1950s, Soviet Latvian poetry was often constrained to socialist realism with a propagandist, didactic tone. Following a thematic break in the 1960s, it became more associative, aphoristic, and lyrically oriented. Though it would be overly simple to attribute these developments solely to the Soviet occupation, it was sometimes a deciding factor; that is, censorship constrained not only free expression of poets’ own work but also readers’ limited access to texts not approved by the censorship apparatus. At the same time, poetry was popular because of the apparent freedom of coded speech. This once-central political image of poetry is still evoked by readers and critics lamenting poetry’s decreased presence in popular culture, sometimes attributing it to the less accessible artistic directions taken by contemporary poets. American poetry was published sporadically in Soviet Latvia, appearing in anthologies such as Pasaules tautu lirika (The Lyric of the World) in 1959 as well as individual collections like the Langston Hughes compilation Skumjie blūzi (The Sad Blues) in 1968. Until the 1980 anthology Visiem, visiem jums Amerikas vārdā (To All, All of You in the Name of America), few contemporary American poets were officially available to Soviet Latvian readers. Though recent years have seen book-length translations of several canonical American poets (such as Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, e e cummings, and Charles Bukowski), there is something paradoxical in presenting established authors as novelties. These translations might be interpreted as affirmations of the breadth of poetic expression in Latvian, as if we were catching up to the developments in nineteenth- and twentieth-century poetry we were once cut off from. My efforts to translate contemporary American poets, starting with Corral, extend this drive to incorporate voices beyond our own. ✵ I was unsure of my abilities to translate Corral’s poetry into Latvian and to preserve what made his poems unique. These twin problems of craft and identity drove many of my early decisions in translating Corral and have shaped my outlook on the authors I have translated since. First came the text itself, with its special twists and alignments. As a reader, I was excited by Corral’s evocative, often tension-building line breaks, such as in “Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome”: > A deer leaps out of the brush and follows me in the rain, a scarlet snake wound in its dark antlers. My fingers curled around a shard of glass— it’s like holding the hand of a child. I was taken not just by the imagery itself, but by the balance struck in Corral’s pacing. Each line was an entirety that built on the last, still leaving the next free to go elsewhere. I sensed that translating Corral meant replicating his approach to such symbolic alignments. While I had little trouble with the words themselves, and dictionaries were always available if I were ever in doubt, the finer issues of reconfiguring enjambment—line breaks not fitting ends of phrases—were a different matter. My failures and successes in translating these alignments taught me a first lesson: the spirit of a language lives in its syntax. It allows text to unfold in logical succession and it can be turned around to undo such logic. Missing the syntactic flow of a sentence or sequence of images renders it lesser and disrupts how phrases support one another, making them feel disjointed and cluttered. At worst, this makes the translator a tourist in their own language, aware of all the signposts but in touch with neither meaning nor context. At best, transferring Corral’s phrasing one-to-one would still reveal a disregard for the different musics and logics of English and Latvian, missing some of what makes translation so worthwhile. I was helped by the guidance of Kārlis Vērdiņš, a more experienced Latvian poet-translator and teacher at several writers’ camps who helped notice and smooth out the troubles of phrasing. I have been helped by many others since, mending serrations and indignities I’ve risked inflicting upon other texts. Recognising the music of syntax was the first step. Other considerations—like how Latvian grammatical inflections come into play—were similarly ones of grammar, not of vocabulary. Every line that broke differently in Latvian was mine to break, and every alignment was mine to fit. I tried my best to mimic what drew my eye at my first reading. Though it may not amount to much difference in the end, every move made on another’s behalf is one best made with care, especially in the uncertainty of early efforts. At the very least, this awareness has stuck with me as a reader and guided me as an author; this recollection reminds me that much of the sense for line-breaks and spacing in my own poetry draws from my reading of Corral. I am aware of how much of Corral’s poetry remains inaccessible to me. He often writes from his family’s Mexican-immigrant heritage (“Illegal-American” as he calls it in “In Colorado My Father Scoured and Stacked Dishes”), freely incorporating passages in Spanish. On some level, I lament that I do not speak Spanish, and that these passages have remained essentially inaccessible to me save for basic meaning gleaned from translation software. Given the love translation builds for the text, having part of it beyond my reach feels like a personal failing as a reader. On another level, I recognise the code-switching as part of Corral’s American context that I am bringing to the Latvian readership. The translation recognizes America as both Anglophone and Hispanophone, albeit in different framing; whereas the original presents Spanish as the Other against the Anglo normative, both become Other in the Latvian context: Other White America, Other Hispanic America. ✵ Amid my efforts, I emailed Corral to offer thanks and ask for advice. I am grateful that he was receptive to my efforts and introduced me to a range of other authors. With his encouragement, the generous blessing of the authors, the editorship of fellow young poet Raimonds Ķirķis, and the advice of many others, I managed eight more translations of contemporary American poets in the Latvian literature and philosophy portal Punctum Magazine, titling the series “Nowhere to Arrive,” after a poem by Jenny Xie. The series has been my greatest challenge and adventure in literature thus far. Many of my initial anxieties followed me throughout the series. At points, I worried whether selecting poems that emphasized the authors’ identities risked fetishizing them. In other moments, I wondered whether I did enough to show their different strengths and angles. On either end, this was more a consideration of voice than of content and a lesson in the importance of that distinction. I am glad to have offered nine contemporary American poets’ voices to a readership that may not have found them otherwise. I am heartened by the kind words I’ve received from other poets and translators, some of whom have borrowed the authors’ books from me. I still don’t know where some of those books are. Since translating the American series, I have a different appreciation for the Latvian poetic tradition as well. Though Latvian poetry sometimes lacks the craft I admire in contemporary American poets, I recently found myself describing Latvian poetry as “much less academic, far more lyrical and introspective, more off-the-cuff.” I feel something staid and unaffecting in American poems by learned authors whose dense clusters of imagery don’t appeal to me. When I am disappointed by Latvian poets (myself included), the blunders feel closer to home. Perhaps these are the workings of language and culture, the scopes of which envelope every speaker. The series also served as a reminder that neither tradition is unchanging, and that the broad banner of a canonical American poetry might obscure different American poetries outside or at odds with the canon. A few winters ago, I had the honor of taking part in an American poetry reading in the culture bar “Hāgenskalna komūna” alongside renowned Latvian translators Ieva Lešinska and Jānis Elsbergs. The place was full of people I knew, admired, or both. We listened with admiration as Lešinska read her favorites of Eliot and Pound, and as Elsbergs animated the texts of Robert Creeley and Robert Kelly—late-twentieth-century wonders still new to our ears. When it was my turn to read, I couldn’t help but also think about how many of those listening carried several such voices with them, and that there was space for more voices still. ◘

It is a well-worn truth that translation—especially translation of poetry—is a process of interpretation. The reader needs a pathway to navigate new text, and the translator is tasked with forging this path through landscapes of meaning both plain and obscure. Caught between the weight of preserving the author’s intent and the reshaping pull of new language, this path is that of the efforts, doubts, and decisions of translators. As a young poet writing and translating in Latvian—a language of roughly two million speakers—I feel the special weight of translation in smaller languages, and of particular translators’ roles in shaping the Latvian poetic tradition and linguistic landscape. (Latvian even denotes poetry translation, atdzeja, with the Latvian word for poetry, dzeja, rather than the word for translation, tulkojums.) As a reader, I could admire Ingmāra Balode’s translation of the Polish poet Adam Zagajewski, or Amanda Aizpuriete’s treatment of Russian poets, not to mention the seemingly endless efforts of Uldis Bērziņš toward both contemporary and ancient texts. To treat these poets’ translations as mere mirrors of their sources would be a diminution of the authorial role of their efforts. And yet, I only began to understand what drove such efforts once I embarked on a translation of my own. "As a young poet writing and translating in Latvian—a language of roughly two million speakers—I feel the special weight of translation in smaller languages, and of particular translators’ roles in shaping the Latvian poetic tradition and linguistic landscape.” It was not long after I moved to London for university when the book found me. It happened in a used bookstore near Bloomsbury that held all the familiar fittings: a welcoming ding at the door, the shop table overcrowded by incoming packages and outgoing pulp, and shelves upon shelves of mostly aging classics and the comforting caramel smell of old cellulose. I was hoping to find a poet of my own to force me

Ukarumpa

Zoe Pehrson | The Human | Poetry

I am the red, red stain. – Michael Dom No matter what I make and unmake here With these hands, there will always be that snake And that tree where those four rivers water The land where gold is found– fertility Is earth and sky and every clay ribbon That writhes like a ray of sunshine I saw once. My mountainside is rain and smells like home, Like kambang, coffee, marijuana buds By marshy swampland, clay banks break against The river Ba’e’s neck where I was naked On top and down there when we ran the slope And danced inside the water’s wriggling curve. ✻ Assume for a second that there is a cult, And the compound is marked by the fence Marked by the river. Toyota Hilux Public Motor Vehicle Ferries down the main road. There were robberies in the 90s, Violent break-ins and assaults, And an increased vigilance. If I was a man From Onamuna, twenty-five years And you had everything, I’d steal too. God of settlers On his mountain of gold Fuming at the lips. And you are there you are too small to grasp The threat of banishment And your friends scattered At the edges of the world, You do not understand The mandate. The river churns with broken glass, The town an invective against its own earth, You one against it. ✻ The meandering chisel lifting away splinters Of clay from the water’s crumbling edge almost Hungers to be cut apart and lodged At the end of the world where Time, politely laughing, Gathers silt to leave in someone’s pockets. You can see the vestigial town slowly erupt With held wrath– but for smoke in wake of mountain Gardens, we might have approached unnoticed– What can I say that hasn’t already been Except that you should crawl the ditch yourself, Feel the scrape of concrete on your hands, See the earth suffocated of rain? ✻ Soon and the bones of another place are here And I am here and the river not too far off. ✻ Turning the rot They bundle their arms in a warm cave Singing old songs Well it is singing I remember the garamut The syncretic hills And bones bones small and bearing The kaukau still nascent In the garden ✻ We circled inside the fence’s grasp like prayer, The hills all mostly clay so when it rained The gravel would wash out the road and you Could barely make it up. Morning, evening, We made prints on the webbing inside it. The stars out, we would see the southern cross If the clouds weren’t out as well, the razor fence Tall and menacing the kunai grass behind That rolled up into the valley, the jaillights Like stars and we wanted to fly there so bad. ✻ My hands tire I have lost the book Where the words were written A tree falls to the south, prostrate From immolation Smoke trails to the north The tree returns and returns And its roots gnarl, wither And remains I am the larvae in the sago palm The rat fur matted with glue The mouth cancer Processional banana leaf The blank page The ink stain Across ocean waters Winds, branches I am the voice in wilder nests Tornado coalescing Over Aiyura, the funnel A valley in a valley Sun rays leaking Behind Ramu river Through Kassam Pass I am the intersection The road to Kainantu The burning town Light obscuring stars Kunai grass obscuring Security lights outside Shoes on the power lines Running from Yonki Dam Villagers sold their land rights A projector shows the Jisas Film at the 5-mile hamlet Powered by free electricity Some older boys lainim mi Tairora I scribble furiously, making up For a tear I do not know yet I am at the edge of town Am quiet, waiting For the sound of water I am near the river I am an unsewn gash I am the cut in the fence ✻ Lain as in people As in tribe, village, family Community, identity As in same or sameness Without shame Collectively, home Lain in the borrowed sense A direction, an attention A string of instants The difference between What is moving And what isn’t Lainim as in learn As in grow As in follow Lainim as in teach As in gift As in share ✻ Look, we’ve poured a little river, isn’t The loveliest and best you’ve ever known Lost– isn’t it wonderful to be lost? ✻ In wet months, garden fabric quilts the hills Around Aiyura valley, where my fence Gouged eyeholes in syncretic soil like grants Made to appease the wealthy foreign churched. In drought, not suffocating from the taro Smoke, I climb the mountain and pray for rain On our missionary complex where the ash Carries from the patchwork to stain our clothes. A scorched garden is a prayer of equilibrium, That atmosphere would fasten to the dust And shower us with blessings in response– After ritual crop fires, the sky would clear, And the fence’s hatching framed Kainantu’s jail Where it burned on the opposite ridge, quietly. ✻ Isn’t wonderful– isn’t lost when the guilt Of circumstance begins to owe its debts? ✻ Forget the crumbling town, it’s wearing thin As the guardlights on the fence will soon attest– And the drainage bars are no match for erosion. (The way the rock is keeping secrets for you It might be a friend, but still– why there a fence At all? Surely the steel holds no invective Against passage, yet looms between the waters And we will be hard pressed to crawl the sewage Trench, but pressed hard under the bars, we go) ✻ Write your name whatever way you know, Here in the grass a whisper is enough To find the clearing– whether a rotting stump Remains, you’ll know it by the undergrowth. ✻ Strain, the river’s low applause will sound Like drums of vengeance, hum of an earthquake, Hooves stamping out a valley in a valley, Rapture cresting in with eastward storm. ✻ How close you are depends how soon rain comes, How foliage is catching the evening roar And what passes, it’s not entirely clear ✻ How fast the banks recede, but clear they do Want closer– want to carry you away To wherever waters go when they recede. ✻ Soon, the river will cut horseshoe troughs In the slope and make rapids from fence razors. Where it gets loudest, listen for the silence– See through the kunai barbs kids at the cliff Diving again, again, never headfirst But never scared of the stream’s restoring force. (They were there and their footsteps will be there Long after worn back down into the clay) What I’ve inscribed here might be overgrown With moss now and secretly isn’t much Important, but I was listening very hardly, And the spray paint was the color of kambang spit. You’re welcome to go and leave a similar altar– If only just for knowing similar place. ✻ (I’ve gone out jumping with my clothes still on– I expect you to be drenched, be like the river– Carve out another puddle for no reason – Poet's Note This poem is a kind of scripture for me. It grows out of a body of experience and an obsession with place. It transitions between and across modes of being and location, between and across its own forms and structures. Beyond this, it’s a testament to growing up in the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea incidentally narrated by a closeted transfemme. What does it mean to witness multiple kinds of violence, to criticize them, to be party to them? Is there any solace under the tyranny of a fence? For my own part, I lived in the eponymous town of Ukarumpa for the better part of fifteen years, from 2002 when I was three years old until I graduated high school. I spent months away in the Sepik due to my parents’ Bible translation work, and every fourth or fifth year in Illinois wooing church financial support. I was not out as queer, and had I realized this for myself while I lived there, I would likely have been expelled from the town’s autonomously governed community. But “Ukarumpa” is not for the town, it is for you, reader, who have possibly never walked its roads, swam the river Ba’e, or climbed its neighbouring mountain, seen the valley from both sides of the ridge. This is a landscape of exile, and we are momentarily here together. It’s not necessary to understand every geographic facet of the Eastern Highlands, but kunai grass is a tall, sharp grass (Imperata cylindrica) endemic to those highlands. It will cut you after a long day on the mountain. Additionally, kambang translates literally to lime, but refers here to the practice of mixing lime with buai, also known as betelnut, and chewing the substance for a mild narcotic effect. Consuming buai in this manner will stain your teeth and spit blood red. It’s common in populated areas to see red kambang splatters on the ground or in the streets. While the blank verse is largely structured after Robert Frost’s “Directive” and attempts to ask some of the same questions albeit from a different lifetime and geography, the section “Turning the rot” pays homage to W.S. Merwin’s “Bread at Midnight”.

I am the red, red stain. – Michael Dom No matter what I make and unmake here With these hands, there will always be that snake And that tree where those four rivers water The land where gold is found– fertility Is earth and sky and every clay ribbon That writhes like a ray of sunshine I saw once. My mountainside is rain and smells like home, Like kambang, coffee, marijuana buds By marshy swampland, clay banks break against The river Ba’e’s neck where I was naked On top and down there when we ran the slope And danced inside the water’s wriggling curve. ✻ Assume for a second that there is a cult, And the compound is marked by the fence Marked by the river. Toyota Hilux Public Motor Vehicle Ferries down the main road. There were robberies in the 90s, Violent break-ins and assaults, And an increased vigilance. If I was a man From Onamuna, twenty-five years And you had everything, I’d steal too. God of settlers On his mountain of gold Fuming at the lips. And you are there you are too small to grasp The threat of banishment And your friends scattered At the edges of the world, You do not understand The mandate. The river churns with broken glass, The town an invective against its own earth, You one against it. ✻ The meandering chisel lifting away splinters Of clay from the water’s crumbling edge almost Hungers to be cut apart and lodged At the end of the world where Time, politely laughing, Gathers silt to leave in someone’s pockets. You can see the vestigial town slowly erupt With held wrath– but for smoke in wake of mountain Gardens, we might have approached unnoticed– What can I say that hasn’t already been Except that you should crawl the ditch yourself, Feel the scrape of concrete on your hands, See the earth suffocated of rain? ✻ Soon and the bones of another place are here And I am here and the river not too far off. ✻ Turning the rot They bundle their arms in a warm cave Singing old songs Well it is singing I remember the garamut The syn