Issue 2

Recovery

Ascending Series (2021)

Steve Loya | The Human | Artwork
No. 1-5 (acrylic on paper) No. 6-30 (iPad) Artist’s Note The Ascending Series began as a handful of paintings specifically made for the "Recovery" issue of Symposeum. The visuals in the series were a collaborative work influenced by the music of D.C.-based ambient guitarist Tristan Welch, who created instrumental tracks for me to interpret visually. In his songs, Tristan layers distorted guitar loops on top of smoldering, tempo-less bass lines to build what one reviewer called “a mini-soundtrack to a movie about fading memories.” In these pieces, I used color and composition to answer the questions posed by Tristan’s music. The first five (of thirty) paintings were made with acrylics on thick paper, applied by using a squeegee and palette knife. I created these in my home studio while working remotely as an art teacher. Once in-person classes resumed, I created the remaining pieces digitally, on an iPad.

Sidebar

| Treating Tinnitus

Christopher Norwood, Matt R. Phillips | The True | Interview
In this addendum to Clarity in G-Sharp, author Matt R. Phillips is in conversation with Christopher Norwood, an expert on the disease and an audiology extern at UCSF Medical Center. Matt R. Phillips: As I write about my own tinnitus, I’ve wondered whether my story is consistent with the experiences of others. Christopher Norwood: Tinnitus can be so personal and subjective, but at the same time, it is something that millions of people around the world have. And I think an interesting part of tinnitus is that it reveals how we don’t just hear with our ears but really with our brain. And different things like stress or psychological makeup make different experiences for different people. We don’t have right now any different medicines or pharmacological treatments for tinnitus. MP: What does counseling for tinnitus look like? CN: When you have a sound in your head, it can be very threatening. Treatment helps with the reduction of tinnitus, but it doesn’t make the problem go away. Still, the same way you wear your shoes and just don’t think about them after a while—just don’t see them as a threat—you can retrain the brain over time, treating the tinnitus just like other sounds that our ears are receiving all day long. MP: What are some of the recommendations you generally give to patients struggling to cope with this? CN: Most often treatment is broken down into something like stress management. Tinnitus patients suffer from a positive-feedback loop where the more you focus on the sound, the louder it gets, and the louder it gets, the more you focus on it. Trying to sort of break that loop is easier said than done. So people use different strategies, trying to keep the brain busy, for example, by avoiding quiet settings. But really our medical treatments are sometimes like band-aids. They’re a temporary fix. They’re not really going to get to the root cause, because this isn’t, in essence, another sound that we’re experiencing. We have to change the emotional c

View from the Old Manse

Lisa McCarty | The True | Photography
Location: Concord, MA Artist’s Note Transcendental Concord (2018, Radius Books) is a visual interpretation of transcendentalism—a literary, philosophical, and social movement that developed from a community in Concord, Massachusetts. Just prior to the Civil War, in the face of widespread industrialization, the transcendentalists pioneered models of civil disobedience, communal living, education reform, and environmental conservation. This ideology is relevant in the present moment. However, nineteenth-century vernacular and lack of visual interpretation often distance contemporary readers from the transcendentalists' prescient texts. Transcendental Concord combines photographs I made of Concord landscapes with excerpts of texts by the transcendentalists in order to make their ideals more accessible and visual. In order to complete this project, I read the books, journals, and letters of prominent transcendentalists. I also visited several archives in New England to study photographs of Concord landscapes from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This research allowed me to identify specific locations that were important to the transcendentalists to  photograph. The time I spent in the archives also allowed me to analyze how Concord was visually represented in the past, which ultimately inspired my experimental approach.

Ascending I, II, & III

Tristan Welch | The Human | Music
Ascending I Ascending II Your browser does not support the audio element. Ascending III Your browser does not support the audio element. Artist’s Note In 2010, I was an addict who had experienced homelessness, jails, and institutions. When I began my recovery process in May of that year, I learned I had to be "open, willing, and honest." I recorded three songs oriented around each of these three words. In music, we face the challenge of telling a story without words. By looping and layering effects over electric guitar tracks, I hope to provide a soundtrack to the experience of recovery, whatever that recovery is from. When making music, my focus is on creating soundscapes with the electric guitar that are then treated with electronics. I am fascinated by minimalism and repetition. Listeners will observe across my music a hypnotic layering of melodics that evolve and dissipate but maintain a steady tone center. I've been creating, releasing and regionally performing ambient centered, cinematic and atmospheric guitar-based music under my own name since 2015. I am a funeral director and embalmer by trade. I always gives tribute to this by maintaining a clean-cut appearance and dressing in a suit and tie, which I also view as a way to give art the respect it deserves. Frequently, my performances and recording sessions are scheduled directly after working at the funeral home. In my music, I've attempted to portray the emotion and the feelings of struggle without it being overtly dark. My past experience of overcoming a life of drug addiction helps me do this: find hope in despair.

Wake

Zoe Pehrson | The Human | Poetry
evolución inversa: volvemos al mar. —Raquel Salas Rivera Meanwhile, wondering what I can say back. We understand behind the lagoon are mangroves. Insisting tsunami never happens, whispers. Inaudibly, maybe the voice of several oceans. A storm petrel pokes at kelp along the sandbar. You feel the tide receding by its absence. God, I wanted to hold and be held here. Grind wet sand through a closed fist. How good it is to know, to be known. The susurrus reaching out like friendship. Without pretense or carapace. The fruit bats are nesting in a papaya tree. The papaya are underripe lately. One of them shrieks with delight. Poet’s Note This poem occurs between two people on a beach where a tsunami's floodwaters have struck. We dwell, however, in the realm of the surreal and the uncertain. It's not clear whether the text omits another speaker's dialogue or whether the text is even spoken at all. Still, a kind of communion emerges, even as the line depicts trauma that fragments thought, grief that stifles linguistic expression. Kills imagination. In my mind, the location is the Arop-Sissano lagoon on the coast of Papua New Guinea's Sandaun Province, where a tsunami killed thousands of people and displaced ten thousand more on July 17, 1998. As visceral as the scene is, though, it arrives detached and dislocated. They might as well be anywhere. Consuming geography, body, and mind, saltwater becomes the sole reminder of what has already transpired. Still, Frost wrote "It must be I want life to go on living," and here at least the trees show signs of living. I like to believe in a world where it's the papaya that shriek with delight. That they could.

HOME

Shane Booth | The Plain | Photography
Chimney Rock (2017) represents said natural rock formation in Morrill County, Nebraska. Silo (2018) depicts a silo from a WWII encampment in Phelps County, Nebraska. Blowing Prairie (2018) shows the windswept plains of Nebraska in Franklin County. Cow Scratcher (2018) portrays a device used to keep flies off of cattle in Harlen County, Nebraska. Gravel Road: Franklin County Nebraska (2018) depicts the state’s countryside. Artist’s Note “Between that earth and that sky I felt erased, blotted out. I did not say my prayers that night: here, I felt, what would be would be.” —Willa Cather, My Ántonia (1918) On February 11th, 2009, I was diagnosed with HIV. Looking for a healthy way to process this flood of emotion, I took to my camera. What started out as self-portraits, soon morphed into landscapes. I saw myself in the Great Plains of Nebraska, anchored to the land, bending with the wind instead of against it—the winds of home. During this conversation between the landscape, the camera, the film, and myself, I realized that the doubt and negativity surrounding my diagnosis were carried away in the images. Now, each time I lift the homemade cap from the barrel lens something happens: the old landscape, ratified as a state in 1867, and the lens, made that same year, reunite. Now, these ancestral plains—five generations—evoke a sense of belonging, of completion. HOME is a body of work that celebrates who I am and where I come from. When photographing, I let my intuition guide the way. It usually leads me to an isolated subject sitting on the prairie, towering above the waving grass. Then, the real magic happens: the ten second exposure. The wind, which never stops blowing, moves and jostles the camera during the long exposure, creating ghost-like blurs and waves of undefined areas. Instead of traditional apertures found in modern cameras, I use water stops, the edges of which come into view and vignette the images. These aesthetic choices make it seem like those

Brood X

Emily Meffert | The True | Poetry
I. Rising periodic into tropic heat— to bleat, to touch, to die— scaling these oaks, whipping their drums til love, the first intelligence, comes to save them— they slip their aspiring offspring in the split bark and, before these quit the leaves for native dark, admit they’re not long for this world. Ben’s reading Wikipedia while their June drone drugs us in his courtyard and their brittle shells clutch the peonies. Nothing breathes that doesn’t turn on this; extinct is a dirty word in every language. Hollow as a snare, he mouths, their bodies—then, dizzied in the din, we spoil the insouciant grass and molt our casual wear and work at preservation while vultures loaf elliptically in air. II. Imagine their dreams: hallucinations of a hand-me-down scene from the late generation’s rendezvous— a scheme glimpsed before slipping into earth: pink, the immoderate flush; orange on a flame- blue swatch; greens flung in fecund gradients— how the loam-blind must ache to recall the lash of wind that clipped them from their origin and switched them on—like a light—the brief rhapsodic spell sealed in memory as though it were the mind’s invention. None envy their waking: startling to learn they can’t conceive the texture of a smoke tree or the timbre of a woman or the tune of a man. But they emerge—they do— bent on raising a population, bent on redeeming seventeen subterranean years. Theirs is, I’ve heard, a deafening debut. They spend their last weeks coupling, maddening the dead, rueing the evolutionary fact— then, sudden as they came      comes their vast, august, vital vanishing act. Poet’s Note Brood X is one of fifteen broods of periodical cicadas that appear regularly throughout the eastern United States. It has the greatest range and concentration of any of the seventeen-year cicadas. Every seventeen years, Brood X cicada nymphs tunnel upwards en masse to emerge from the earth, shedding their exoskeletons on trees and elsewhere. The mature cic

Cartoons on Recovery by Brooke Bourgeois

Brooke Bourgeois | The Plain | Cartoon
Artist’s Note Brooke is an illustrator and cartoonist who aims to create work at the intersection of comedy and current events. Her selection of cartoons on the theme of "Recovery" touches on the exhaustion of change and how very ill-equipped we are in coping with it: as we go back to "normal" socially, and also as we challenge the idea of institutionalized norms. She hopes to capture a comedic side of this shared experience. You can find more of her work in The New Yorker, The Drift, Private Eye, and Wired.

Gold

Erin Wilson | The Plain | Poetry
—after Leon Wyczółkowski's painting, “Spring in Gościeradz” i. We speak of art, as we make our trip. We speak against erasure. You thumb through a tattered volume of lesser-known painters as we pass one wide, flat field, after another. Even when only gently, the snow blows, wiping out the uniqueness of each farmstead, overcoming even the bulk of hibernating machinery, John Deere, Massey Ferguson, Kubota. At times we have to guess where the road is. You were born in this town and we've not been back since. How right it feels to make this trip as a birthday gift, after all your grief and turmoil. ii. History at the antique shop glows, the oil-rich wood of the egg crates, the matrix of cardboard inserts still intact—and this holds something off, doesn't it?— as do the red-handled rolling pins, the sturdy glass of the Fire King bowls, the green and gold to-be-sewn-on badges with emblems of moose and beavers, the time-softened postcards, their precise script, official stamps, the baker's hutches, enamelware teapots, rusted cow bells heavy as human heads. A primitive blue painted cabinet is jam-packed with rolled up carpets, four rugs spilling out onto the floor. We stop, altered by awe, tracing their elaborate patterns. We spend hours threading the three levels of furniture, ephemera, bric-a-brac, the smell of homemade macaroni soup stitching us to our own narratives, as the proprietress walks a bowl to her husband (who suffers from dementia) waiting for her at an oval oak gateleg drop-leaf table, in a private, cordoned-off area. I watch you thoughtfully touch things, being touched by things, being mended. Days after I drop you off at home, the first lock-down begins. Now, still in winter, wondering when we might be together again, I write you, revisiting Wyczółkowski's “Spring in Gościeradz.” That pear tree outside his window burns, a golden fire. The flowers in the vase are doused in flame, too, as are the curtains, the chair's upholstery, the open bo

Selected Prints by Claire Lehnen

Claire Lehnen | The Plain | Artwork
Water Truck in Chennai (2020) | Oil on paper | 12 x 18 inches“Water Truck in Chennai (2020)” captures the intimacy of women—draped in colorful sarees—joyfully chatting, laughing, and splashing in the water in the hot and humid July air. The scene takes place in front of a public water truck in a banyan-lined alley. It depicts a moment when society was just daring to peer out of their COVID-19 lockdown abodes, slowly coming back to life. Mylapore (2020) | Oil on paper | 6 x 8 inchesIn “Mylapore (2020),” I recreate the feeling of a time when India was recovering from the tension of an intense COVID-19 lockdown. The scene is of a street in the cultural and spiritual epicenter of Chennai, in which a man leisurely rides his motorcycle while wearing a face mask. In the middle of this lively district emerges the sight of Kapaleeshwarar Temple, a focal point for devout Hindu worshippers. Around the temple wind streets and alleyways filled with men and women selling religious items like oil lamps, red and yellow flower garlands, and edible offerings. Artist’s Note Throughout 2020, I found myself perched between a fear of the unknown and a craving to connect with people in my community. Through the prism of art, I witnessed the beauty and inner strength of the people of India. I saw the ability of humanity to recover from heart-wrenching adversity in the face of the pandemic. I took this feeling to my workbench and translated it into my art. I made these prints by carving images into a linoleum block, which I then transferred with ink to paper. The firmness of the medium is juxtaposed with the whimsicality of my subjects, and the fragility of life and ephemerality of the moment is made permanent through my linocut.

Hope Is

Lena Mazel | The Human | Essay
In April, we run bloody fingers under sink-water, and tape over our broken skin. We hold him in oven mitts, in mittens, in anything we can find. We hide our hands and feet under sweatshirts and socks. So he bites our necks instead. He latches onto my lip, my nose. He draws blood from my earlobe. Ghost looks up at us. The floor is his domain, and we fear him. He’s only a few inches tall. He has a short, soft body and brown, lambent eyes. In this moment, he looks like a small, green leaf. He is only a parakeet. But for two weeks, he has kept us under his control in a terrible, fearsome, bloody reign. ●Nico and I met in England, but we live in Nashville now. We had three parakeets in the UK, and before COVID hit, we were in the process of shipping them to the US. But in March, international air travel shut down. The parakeets were stuck with his parents, and we began talking about what would happen in the meantime. They were self-sufficient, our English budgies, and wouldn’t miss us. They had a good life in the UK. But Nico thought of another bird here: one we could raise to be a companion. Nico was often on the road for work, and I was in the process of rehearsing for a major show with an aerial dance company. The show felt like the culmination of years of hard work: debuting my own piece, and a solo on aerial silks. I was busy, and I was strong. I spent most days flying in the air. He spent two-thirds of his time traveling. We both knew being stuck at home wouldn’t be easy. With lockdown approaching, we also knew there would never again be a time when we could spend so much time at our apartment, with little else to do. So we agreed: we would start looking for a new bird. And he was set on finding a lineolated parakeet: a slow, quiet bird from South America, with a croaking song and a love for apples. Nico’s last work trip had sent him to an island in South Korea for a few weeks, where he first saw lineolated parakeets at a bird cafe called LIP Parrot. The

The Book of Amos

Matthew Everett Miller | The Human | Short Story
An unbelieving prophet named Amos Caster faces apocalypse after a string of apparent child murders leaves the twin cities of Auspicion and Calamity thirsting for blood. Through dreams, visions and memories, Amos searches for hope in the face of pain and desperation. CHAPTER 1 God Almighty, how could You forgive me? Despite myself, I have tried and tried again to see it, hundreds of times since I left Calamity in the spring of my youth. I have passed many nights praying that You might open wide as the horizon the eyes of my idolatrous heart. Exhale! Send the faint lights of these memories to me, push them back against the current, please God, closer to me, across the slick black waters of time until at last I can see him, more clearly now than I could even then: Peter Price come riding through the mulberry trees, floating through the dark like an apparition, all proud and handsome atop that white horse he called Self-Reliance. He would dismount, patting the shoulder of that gelding, showing no signs of having tired during his long day of ministry. He would look at the horse and then at me, smiling as wide as he ever allowed himself, as if our beauty were shared, proof in his mind of some fundamental rightness with the world. The possibility of justice. On this particular night, I had been writing a letter by the light of the moon when first I heard him approach. In those days, I wrote him letters that often read like a list of wants, prayerless petitions to which he only ever responded in person. I would tell him: I want to love you in the daylight, I want to run away, with you, far from the squalor of it all, from the place they call my home. I want with all desperation to believe the way you do: that God is as plain as the sun. I want your eyes on me the way you look at leaves on autumn mornings, taking them in, remembering. I want my head on your chest, my ear to your heart. Every afternoon and every night until death calls my name. I wanted these things onl

The Transformative Potential of Trauma Recovery

Michael Zuch | The Necessary | Essay
This piece explores the interrelationship between trauma and recovery in psychotherapy. While it does not discuss any specific details of traumatic events, it is important to acknowledge that the topic itself may bring up unwanted memories or reflection. In my office, I have a framed quote by the poet Morgan Harper Nichols hanging on the wall: “I am remembering to breathe right here in the chaos of things.” While it escapes the gaze of most of my clients, I like to highlight it when we begin to discuss coping skills. “It may feel silly to do this,” I tell them, “but let’s take a couple of moments and sit with these words.” We both, then, take a deep breath. I am a new psychotherapist. After seven years working in other parts of social work, I decided to make the professional leap to trauma-focused therapy last year. I am still figuring out if I had the courage to make this shift in spite of the COVID-19 pandemic or because of it. On the one hand, I’ve been drawn to work as a therapist since my own healing experiences in therapy as a survivor of trauma. This recognition, in concert with my skill set in clinical work, made the career move to psychotherapy seem like an inevitability. On the other hand, the pandemic shed light on the magnitude of mental health needs and how urgently people needed support. I knew I had the capacity to help. Either way, I entered into the world of my clients at a time when crises of all sorts were coming to a head. The past year left many of us feeling whiplashed, our nervous systems vacillating for months between anxiety and dissociation. Furthermore, physical distancing stripped us of typical coping strategies, especially our in-person social interactions. In my work, I find that one of the most detrimental, but often overlooked, effects of this pandemic is how it forces us to view other people not as sources of comfort and community, but as potential threats to our wellbeing. The polyvagal theory of psychiatrist and neuroscienti

A Conversation with Steve Loya and Tristan Welch

Steve Loya, Tristan Welch | The Necessary | Interview
Symposeum cover artist Steve Loya and cover musician Tristan Welch in conversation with editor Matt Miller. This interview was edited for length and clarity. It is a special feature for the digital edition of Issue 2. _________________________________________________________ Matt Miller: How did you two meet? How long have you known each other? Steve Loya: I saw some footage on Instagram posted by a local record collector of Tristan playing the guitar with a saxophone player. They were playing at a record store in D.C. and I thought, “Wow…this is pretty cool.” So, I looked Tristan up and I saw he was playing nearby. I contacted him beforehand, introduced myself and explained that I’d been working on a project where I make abstract paintings influenced by music. I asked if he’d be willing to collaborate on a similar project. So, we met up in person online. He was all for it. It happened organically as a low-pressure project that resulted in a beautiful set of music and paintings. MM: What did that look like at the beginning? Were you trying to advertise it, put it out there, get some engagement? SL: There wasn't anything too concrete at first. We thought, let's just see what happens. I'll send you some images, you make some music and vice versa. Eventually, it started to take shape. Halfway through the collaboration, we thought maybe we could make this into some kind of album, maybe a compact disc or a digital format. Something that could be consumed by the public. Some record of our audio-visual, artistic collaboration. MM: This project explicitly references chromesthesia, which is a condition in which sounds evoke color and other visual sensations. Do either of you actually experience chromesthesia? Or is something you were interested in thinking about through this project? Tristan Welch: I hadn't really thought too much about it. But, I should say that a friend of mine was actually working on a similar, synesthesia-based project. I was familiar with the id

Lost and Found

Leah Field | The Human | Essay
For more than seventy years, my grandmother Lilly’s diary sat untouched at the bottom of a cardboard box stuffed into a tiny closet in my family’s home. The dark green leather notebook gathered dust, the pages—beginning to yellow around the edges—unread. Although I knew much of my grandmother’s life, the years between 1933 and 1945 were a void. I understood the general shape of things—how she had arrived in America in 1939, fleeing the Nazi death machine—but knew little of the details. Her mind and memories had already vanished by the time she died. I was eleven years old. The pieces of her life seemed to me like rocks stacked one atop the next: spare and certain. She grew up in Vienna. She escaped to England. She came to America, had her children, and died. Details beyond these basic facts were muddled, recounted to me second- and third-hand over the years. Her feelings and thoughts about these events in her life were now unknown, forgotten. After my grandmother’s death, her diary was packed away with a lifetime of papers, photographs, letters, and other belongings. Though I was curious about the diary as a child, I had always been rebuffed by my grandmother’s prose, written in her native Viennese dialect of German and utterly inaccessible to everyone in my immediate family. I was eighteen when a German-speaking aunt visited us. With her help, parents, siblings, and cousins crowded into our small kitchen to translate my grandmother’s diary, to hear her story in her words. To recover those lost years of her life. ●As a little girl, my grandmother led a happy life in Vienna. She was her parent’s only child, a rarity in those days. In the summers, her parents rented a cabin in Hungary for vacation. Lilly spent her days talking to Hungarian boys by the pool, returning home with delicious gossip for her friends. In 1936, when she was twelve years old, Lilly’s parents went out for a game of cards. Only her mother came home. Her father had fallen across the card ta

A Purple Heart Buried on the Rhine

Mara Truslow | The True | Essay
Under a clear blue sky in Wesel, the sun’s beams hit the Rhine River on Good Friday. A cargo vessel lumbered by. The soft chatter of adults and contagious laughter of children’s play filled the air with calm. There’s virtually no trace of WWII in Wesel today. It was leveled by the war’s end: ninety-seven percent of its buildings were destroyed by Allied bombing. Wesel’s train station was one such casualty, where bombs left the train tracks a tangle of deformed steel. Undisturbed, though, was Hitler’s portrait, hanging defiantly below the Wesel station sign. It was Hitler’s seemingly indefatigable Third Reich that brought the largest Allied airborne invasion to Wesel in the war’s final act. I arrived at the train station in Wesel a lifetime after it was destroyed. I’d traversed the width of Germany earlier in the day—from Berlin west to the Rhine. Families filled the train, escaping from the city for a long holiday weekend. Crossing the country, I perked up at the many stops I knew too well for never having visited: Hanover, Hamm, Dortmund, Essen. I’d first seen these names scribbled on the back of an American Savings and Loan notepad. These were the places that haunted my grandfather for a lifetime, even though he never stepped foot in any of them. Wesel, a tiny town abutting the Rhine an hour north of Cologne, was forty-first on that list. At golden hour, I sat on the east bank of the Rhine in Wesel at a buzzing beer garden, sipping a glass of crisp wine, appreciating the two years it took to get here. Across the river, I focused on the remnants of a brick bridge, one of the few traces of what happened here a lifetime ago. ●Seventy-four years before I arrived, my grandfather Wallace Truslow, whom everyone called Wally for short, passed above the smoldering remains of this bridge in his B-24 bomber, its freshly twisted iron protruding from the water. Smoke and haze blanketed Wesel that afternoon at the tail-end of WWII. Just east of Wesel, seven-year-old

A Natural Recovery

| A Book Review of Amy Liptrot’s The Outrun

Ali Kominsky, Courtney W. Brothers | The True | Review
The Outrun: A Memoir by Amy Liptrot 304 pages, W.W. Norton & Company, 2017 Book review by Ali Kominsky Drawing by Courtney W. Brothers “There is one consolation in being sick; and that is the possibility that you may recover to a better state than you were ever in before.” —Henry David Thoreau Energy never expires. It is carried through water and land and passed on through generations. The energy of water is carried by waves across the ocean; when a wave encounters shallow water its height changes and its energy is transferred to the land. This is known as the shoaling process. Amy Liptrot’s alcohol addiction drove her into the cliffs, causing lasting physical damage. Her nervous system crumbled. But energy is renewable, and after years of crashing on the rocks, she found a way to direct her force. She uncovered a tonic that would sustain her: the natural world. Winner of the PEN Ackerley prize for memoir and the 2016 Wainwright prize for best nature, travel, and outdoor writing in Britain, Amy Liptrot recounts a powerful story of recovery in her ecological memoir, The Outrun. Exploring her native Orkney and the Scottish Isles, Liptrot emerges from a long struggle with alcoholism to discover healing in the rich landscape of her homeland. “Liptrot joins women and men whose writings have turned our attention to the environment—emphasizing its wisdom, and reminding us of our responsibility to protect what is valuable and irreplaceable.” Nature’s restorative power has long occupied the attention of writers across the world, whose works have established an enduring literary tradition. From Biblical narratives of wilderness to the seventeenth century master of haiku, Bashō—from the German and English Romantics to the American Transcendentalists, from Mary Oliver to Cheryl Strayed—the tradition of seeking meaning in the natural world is an undying staple in literature. Liptrot joins women and men whose writings have turned our attention to the environment—emphasizi

On Time

Lyle McKeany | The Plain | Essay
It’s June 6, 2018, and I’m trying to sleep, but the heart rate monitor is beeping and the CPAP machine is hissing ceaselessly. My daughter, Em, is sleeping in her isolette. A well-deserved rest. She’s been alive for sixty-eight hours, but it feels like weeks. Every second is magnified when life hangs in the balance. ●This evening, Em’s oxygen saturation levels plummeted and she stopped breathing for a short while. Within minutes, a dozen nurses and doctors were in her room to help. The neonatologist intubated her immediately, elevating her saturation. It was almost like reliving her birth. Unbreathing, she had been intubated for the first time, a perilously long moment. Even this time, despite the speed and skill of the hospital staff, my wife Allison and I could only watch, incapable of helping her ourselves. Besides the chatter of the hospital machines, it is calm now. My body, though, hasn’t settled. My pulse is quick, my breath unsteady. My anxiousness is feeding itself. I announce I’m going for a walk. “If anything happens,” I instruct Em’s nurse, “please call me.” The hospital doors shut behind me, sealing off the trauma I’m leaving inside. I’m consumed by a strange feeling. This moment, so devastating for my little family, is unremarkable to the rest of the world. Forgettable. Now that I’m outside, breathing in the cool dark summer air, time settles into a steady, familiar gait. I leave the asphalt and turn left, following the well-lit sidewalk past the hospital’s institutional landscaping: a monotonous row of over-mulched, drought-resistant shrubs. A hundred yards away, a few cars and overnight tractor trailers speed down Highway 101, drowning out the crickets. Rounding the west corner of the building, I’m stopped in my path. Ahead of me stands a fence hung with an orange and white sign. WARNING: HELICOPTER LANDING AREA. STAY BACK TWO HUNDRED FEET. I’m struck by the private terror of the last forty-eight hours. This is the spot where, just five hours

Four-Letter Prayers

Ana Laffoon | The True | Essay
“What the fuck?!” Pulled over on the side of the road, I dug my fingernails into the steering wheel and curled my torso around it. “What the fuck?!” If memory serves me right, these were the third and fourth times I had ever used the f-word. My Christian upbringing  taught me to express myself in more refined ways than casually slinging expletives. But this was not a casual moment; this was a moment of desperate prayer. As I sat on the asphalt shoulder of a Jordanian highway, my baby was lying in a hospital bed, her brain infected and swelling from an illness no one could diagnose. Nove—which rhymes with “clove,” and is an Arabic name that means “pinnacle” or “mountaintop”—started presenting symptoms a week before. While meandering through a Christmas bazaar with all five of my small children, I noticed Nove was more wobbly than usual. She was only fourteen months old, but she started walking before she turned one, and was prone to climbing onto tables and scaling bunk-beds in attempts to keep up with her siblings. As I watched her slump to the ground after a few unsure steps, I took note. The next day, our family ventured to the mall to see Santa Claus. While waiting in line, a woman next to us screamed. “Hey! Hey! Something’s wrong with her!” I followed her pointed finger and looked down at Nove, who was strapped to my chest in a baby carrier. Her eyes were rolled back into her now stiff-but-twitching head. One of her arms made abrupt movements away from her body. “But this was not a casual moment; this was a moment of desperate prayer.” “Oh, Jesus. It’s okay,” I reassured myself and the others who were gathering around me. “She’s having a seizure.” The only reason I kept any sense of calm as my baby’s body simultaneously grew rigid and shook is because my son, Abe, had already experienced two febrile, or fever-induced, seizures at this point, both of which were long-lasting and dramatic. Doctors warned me my other children had a heightened likelihood of s

No Justice, No Peace?

Hadar Aviram, Joel Harrington, Mohammed Allehbi | The Necessary | Interview
On Law Enforcement And Criminal Justice Throughout History Professor Hadar Aviram interviews Professor Joel Harrington and PhD candidate Mohammed Allehbi, with an introduction by Symposeum editor, Nissim Lebovits. Nissim Lebovits: Last year, the murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd (and countless others before them) precipitated mass protests—first in Minnesota, then nationally, then across the globe—against police brutality and systemic racism. Facing graphic, incontrovertible evidence of a broken system, Americans began to have unprecedented conversations; after decades of work by activists, debates about defunding or even abolishing the police entered the mainstream, with 39% of Americans in June 2020 in favor [https://www.reuters.com/article/us-minneapolis-police-poll-exclusive-idUSKBN23I380] of “completely dismantling police departments and giving more financial support to address homelessness, mental health, and domestic violence.” A year later, a large majority of Americans still support at least piecemeal reform [https://www.vox.com/22372342/police-reform-derek-chauvin] of the police, including reallocating funds to social and mental health services. Yet even as Americans scrutinize the complex entanglements of justice and power, we are too often restricted to a twofold conversation in which law enforcement is depicted by one side as an unqualified force for good and by the other as intrinsically, inevitably oppressive. As Jonathon Booth has written for The Drift [https://www.thedriftmag.com/new-sheriff-in-town/], when “deciding which elements of our country’s law enforcement apparatus are necessary, what histories can be unwritten, and what powers must be curtailed or eliminated … we must not simply attack the right-wing ‘thin blue line’ narrative; we must confront our own myths as well.” We can, in other words, advance a reasoned and self-critical vision of better law enforcement and criminal justice without succumbing to reaction

‘Voy a hablar de la esperanza’

Nissim Lebovits | The Necessary | Poetry
Ruth, you are angry at the world for its miscarriages. It is early November and we are walking again in the Haagse Bos, wondering at the rusty-headed ducks, the yellowing of the common beech, the noon light on the pond. For three days you have spoken only of Loujain, waterchoked & raped in a Saudi prison, pummeled into vanishing. The hawthorn trees are bare now, except for their fruit: bright red, closer to wine after rain. Bob Hass says it is a gift, this human incapacity to sustain wonder. ‘We’d never have gotten up from our knees if we could.’ And as for the sustenance of despair— In the underbrush by the path home the wood piegeons mottle the leaves. Silent, I picture Gramsci, beating his head bloody against the walls of Mussolini's jails. 'I am a pessimist by intelligence,' he wrote, 'but an optimist by will.' Above us, on a dead limb, a woodpecker goes back to feeding: tok-tok-tok-tok. Poet’s Note One of the first poems I ever felt attached to was Wendell Berry’s “The Peace of Wild Things”, which begins: When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be In the lines that follow, Berry describes finding temporary salve in the natural world—but not, crucially, lasting reprieve. Lately his poem has been on my mind, despair being a familiar emotion to me over the last year and a half (from the French désespoir, meaning a lack of hope). My own poem arrived at one such moment, when I was wrestling—not for the last time, I am certain—with the question of what we may do when our narratives of progress are incontrovertibly dashed. Some references, explained: “Voy a hablar de la esperanza” is the title of a poem by César Vallejo. It translates to “I am going to speak of hope.” Loujain al-Hathloul is a prominent Saudi women’s rights activist. In 2018, the government of Saudi Arabia arrested her, imprisoning and torturing her for nearly two years before sentencing

Two Poems by Nina Murray

Nina Murray | The Plain | Poetry
In my great-grandmother's time there was a tool for everything and for every tool—a toolbox hers was not an ill-fit universe—worn yes but orderly in her room I played with progressively smaller things: an hourglass a hand-held balance with its weights of ten and twenty grams the five and one that could make all the difference i think of the smooth hollowed piece of flotsam shown by a museum man it is a tool he said to channel holy water when a healer casts a spell my great-grandmother held equal faith in St. John's wort and codeine could hit the vein when she could no longer thread a needle dream sequence white lace sentry cyclamen in window boxes like Lilliputian cyclops kiss catacombs the corner pharmacy a step inside my childhood self a curio held cool inside its dark rectangle of curved glass things that swim Poet’s Note "In my great-grandmother's time" began as a response to Charles Simic's poem "Autumn Sky": In my great grandmother's time, All one needed was a broom To get to see places And give the geese a chase in the sky. We think of our ancestors' time as a mythical era, but what if it's a different relationship they had with time itself that made fantastic things possible? The poem began as a recovery of a childhood memory: My great-grandmother and I are playing badminton. She is seated in a chair in her room that was always just a little too dark. Here, the time she inhabits also warps the space—it is the fact that we are in her room, her time that makes the birdie fall short or fly long. My great-grandmother was born in 1900. She would eventually die in that room, in the cavernous, tile-stove-heated apartment in Lviv. She was trained as a pharmacist's assistant which, in the wars that followed, was as good as a pharmacist. Her room was a fascinating place. Things there smelled funny, had funny names (aside from medicines in amber-glass bottles there were her small stiff purses which she referred to exclusively as ridicules), o

Clarity in G-Sharp

Matt R. Phillips | The True | Essay
Ioften sit on a stool at the long bar-top counter in my favorite coffee shop. From here, I can see everyone. Theoretically, I could speak with them, too, although these days only a few will leave the glow of their screens or the beat in their earbuds. Few enough, anyway, that we tend to shy away from those who do talk, as though we suspect there must be something a little wrong with them. What kind of sociopath speaks to strangers? Me, apparently. My tinnitus, the slight but constant ringing I hear, prevents me from wearing headphones comfortably. And that leaves me vulnerable to the chatty and the lonely, the people who just want to talk. I’ve conversed several mornings with a local Raleigh man. He’s a little nutty, prone to conspiracy theories and deep suspicions. Climate change is probably a hoax, he told me during our first chat. QAnon is going about it the wrong way, he added, but they may be on to something. These are not the kind of discussions I have in graduate school, or anywhere else for that matter. It was just a surprisingly enjoyable conversation with a smart, peculiar, and misinformed man—with a human being of a kind I don’t meet often. Our conversations have continued. They’ve ranged from the weakness of the dollar to his difficulty dating as a forty-year-old. And I would never have spoken to him if my ears didn’t ring. My damaged hearing has helped me listen to strangers. The need to shift my focus away from the persistent high-pitched ringing, the need to be intentional with my attention, has had the curiously reverse effect of expanding my awareness of the surrounding world. I notice more by forcing myself not to notice my tinnitus. About forty-five million Americans have tinnitus, according to the American Tinnitus Association. Some sufferers hear a pulse, their heartbeat sounding in their ear. Others, the most common type, hear a constant high-frequency tone. In its most severe forms, the perception of sound is interpreted by the brain as mu

Bill's Lorica

Erin Robertson, Margaret Sloan | The Human | Poetry
Let Go the Burden of Being Upright (The Purple Quilt) (2021) by Margaret Sloan | Watercolor on paper | 11.5 x 11.5 inchesin the sparkling northwoods blue-green today we gather warmth of the longtime sun to make a blanket for your bones thick purple-brown twining grapevines to knit a secret room of shade a closed space without fear to lie a long body down to let go the burden of being upright here in the crushed green of fiddlehead and jewelweed trilliums silently go crimson binding our carmine blood and this bit of wood in the still pulpit, jack sits, a silent preacher with nothing left to judge only to witness you rest welcoming hard scars that will turn to moss your angular bones to be rounded with time we bring the pull of purple magnetite the charged ions/counterbalance positive/negative canceled/reconciled all accounts settled we gather the echo in the steep shale walls leaves written with pressure in time’s patient book shut now nothing more to be illuminated we call on the grosbeak’s brilliant rose-petal stained breast his love sung not said his flashy plumes and sure song a fine cover for his deep abiding shyness we call upon the restless waves: smooth the jagged past like beach glass ready the sunset canvas curving to calm in a still quiet bay today we weave these ragged fragments together a last quilt of protection you pull to your chin then you split down the middle and turn to deer as the jester’s gavel drops on the hours of needing to be more Poet’s Note A lorica (Latin for armor) is a prayer of protection. I first learned the term through St. Patrick’s Lorica, which also goes by St. Patrick’s Breastplate or The Deer’s Cry (Fáed Fíada in Irish, which can also be translated as “mist of concealment”). The legend goes that St. Patrick had a dream warning that Druids lay in wait for his traveling party. He woke and told his followers to chant this lorica, and as they passed by, the Druids saw only a doe and twenty fawns. You may already

Put the girl on the shore

Ness Owen | The Plain | Poetry
Let her alone with the currents to the eager tide’s, pull of ebb and gift of flow to prayers of driftwood and seaweed notes. Leave her to the lash of marram, sting of salt to the wind-whipped waves where the drowned return and skyline’s rise and fall. Leave her side-stroke out of rip currents, feel the cold gasp of water the soft tread of sand. Let her fall, deep from dislocation into the subtle art of breathing out. Poet’s Note After many years of working without a sick day, I fell to a mystery illness where for a long time I could only manage a short walk up my driveway. I began to avoid many things and over-protection became a habit. I live on a small island, which means that you are never far from the shore. Visiting the sea daily, whatever the weather, would put me back on the way to recovery and teach me a little about facing whatever the day would bring. Some days I would simply dip my hands and feet in the water. Other times I would swim when I could tolerate the cold. The title of the poem is taken from a rumoured quote by Dylan Thomas about his writing process. That is, sometimes we should just “put the girl on the shore” and let the story happen. I wanted to make it a simple poem of couplets that mimics the ebb and flow of the tide.

Dawn in a Grove

Abi Harrelson | The Plain | Poetry
As light reenters the forest space: a slow, steady rousing to consciousness. The thin liquid of night stirs, lifting. Silence, the stately forms of trees. The low ferns flutter slightly, wafting skyward, towards morning, on a low cloud transuding from the damp earth. Wider and ever more palpable grows the gray air: the low shroud rising to hang upon itself, suspended until the evocation strengthens. A fine mist on the petals of a white wild rose. A soft wisdom awakening. And then, with obscurity lifted, the ground sings. Poet’s Note Since the beginning of the pandemic in America, I have been writing with the hope that I can capture peace on the page and leave it there, within four corners from where it could never escape. Though this is ultimately untenable, this is the poem in which I came the closest. I grew up in a rural area and because of that, have always felt deeply connected to and in awe of nature. This poem describes those precious moments when, as the sun rises, the previous night’s condensation has just begun to evaporate from the foliage. Every morning, there’s a span of a few minutes where the rising mist appears to stop itself from continuing its ascent, asif wondering whether to return earthward again—but it rises.

Digression

Marissa Davis | The Human | Poetry
The temple’s mystery is this: somehow, I remembered the same music for ten years. Not its notes— I could only play the right keys if playing fast enough; if giving up to the flesh, which knew with no telling. Meaning: I might be an ecosystem— a collection of dependent instincts, echoes. If I am mostly an unbidden translation; If these elements tumult too close to their own asymptote; I owe myself to strip down to the line of me: girl-river, wolf-gaze, incendiary season, wild-eyed harvest, land’s black heart. Look too closely & it’s half a death. Look too closely & it’s clover honey. or psychopomp vein ferrying my blue life back to provenance. I call the blood to travel in its proper direction, defiant of the cardinal, red as it, as plume & pomegranate, homeland sunset cymbaling winter ice until the necessary fracture. Revival under sun blaze, little springtime or inferno mine, little Pentecost, the tongue in my mouth a fresh & native muscle, roused rightly wicked, anarchic as the origins of song: a spell. a bond. a wailing. an imitation of the sparrows. The root of organic, being: serving as an instrument. (I listen for the organ—figuration for something I can’t quite hold. But the flesh of me is surely the cathedral it shouts in.) I remembered the song through my hands, only: a knowledge outpacing my mind, that had to outrun the mind to save itself, otherwise descent, otherwise murderous undertow, & gone that vital beating like a bat’s black wing, like the maelstrom of an orgasm, which carried the melody in it, tucked away until quickened, until lifted straight out—a minor comet coal-lit with the body’s fire—straight out those rare hours when I was able to surrender, meet myself at the bellowing border, there— do you understand?—there at my most animal— Poet’s Note Superficially, this piece was inspired by my pandemic-panic-impulse decision to buy a used piano keyboard, even though I have next to no kn

Wake

Kirsten Robinson | The True | Poetry
I. My living room smells of the marsh at low tide, seaweed arid in the sun. Hermit crabs recede in the silt as the salt water runs back to its home, leaving a layer of detritus and sludge on my mom’s favorite rug. I mop the kitchen linoleum, absorbing as much of Long Island Sound as I can, wringing the soaked ropes into the yellow bucket we used to clean our toys in when I was young. (push mop - soak water - wring dry - repeat) No end to the water pouring from the cabinets. The bucket overflows with brackish water or sewage muck—no telling them apart. The sea has turned on me. Outside my parents and neighbors pile an endless graveyard: couches, coffee tables, lamps, books, photo albums, hand-knit blankets. Tomorrow, the trash trucks will haul them off. II. Our beach town had been warned, but no weatherman can forecast the loss Nature leaves behind. Came hurtling in, screaming, the rain. In droves. Drowning: trees, gardens, drains, homes. Everything was loud and then it was not; the quiet eye, waiting. Destruction when the waves came. They did not stop did not stop did not stop until they reached four feet above my living room floor. Four days later my father kayaked the river road to get to our front door. III. My childhood floor is gone. All the rotten wood has been stripped, just the bones to breathe, to wait. My parents are living with my grandmother until the house is fixed, until their hearts are fixed. They tell me there will be no Thanksgiving this year. My family needs me to help while new foundations are poured. I drive to the empty beach parking lot, stare at the ocean and scream. I beat my fists against the wheel like tumbled glass against rocks until I can’t feel my fingers. I hate the sea, the body that betrayed me. I hate that I love it still and always—salt in the heart. IV. In Manhattan my living room blooms, a gifted bouquet of roses. Next to the flowers are shells from home, arranged: respite from living in solitude a

Letter to Readers

The Editors | Letter
Dear Reader, One hundred and eighty-one years ago this summer season, in his inaugural Editorial Introduction to The Dial, Ralph Waldo Emerson outlined the publication's aims (which have inspired ours) “to draw thoughts and feelings which, being alive, can impart life.” It was a radical goal for a magazine born in a mercurial decade: engaging readers in a collective act of recovery. The etymology of the word recovery suggests a renewal of life, as Emerson likely meant, both metaphorically and physically. On the surface, the word evokes an orientation toward the past, coming as it does from the Medieval Latin recuperare, meaning “to regain.” Yet foresight and imagination are equally inherent in recovery; what is re-gained is rarely identical with what was had. More than a century and a half later, and a year and a half since we conceived of our own Dial project, our world is entering into a period of recovery: the beginning of the end of a once-in-a-century pandemic. In the United States, forty-four percent of the country has been vaccinated. Business are reopening, faces are being unmasked, and there is talk of resuming travel as the world emerges from muffled retreat. This is not to downplay the very real incompleteness of our recovery. We remain confronted with global economic disruption, exacerbated racial and geographic disparities in well-being and wealth, concern that herd immunity will remain out of reach, the threat of a more deadly COVID variant, ongoing political polarization, atomization of individuals and communities, and trauma brought on by death, dying, and denial of the same. But recovery begins, unsurprisingly, with beginning. And all beginnings entail juxtaposition, being at once a commencement and culmination. The word recovery is itself a paradox, just as delight or awful. Deconstructed, recovery (re-gaining) literally suggests its opposite—a re-covering, or concealment—whereas figuratively we understand recovery as exposing, rescuing, eve

Ça va me changer (This is going to change me) (2018)

Meghan K. McGinley | The Plain | Artwork
Acrylic on canvas | 36 x 48 inches Artist’s Note "Ça va me changer" is the second painting in a string of three that, together, form the Ça Series. The French utterance “ça” is multifaceted in its use: a pronoun, an interjection, and a noun at once. The substantive form, always capitalized, has a psychoanalytic root. It is the French derivation of Sigmund Freud’s concept of the id, which governs our unconscious, instinctual impulses. As follows, each one of these works taps into an artistic well that champions intuition over reason. Color acts as a language of the senses, one that is felt before it is studied—a language recovered. These pigmented fields are the product of a single brush, a rhythmic kaleidoscope achieved with only red, yellow, blue, and white. I seldom clean my instrument when I shift between hues, preferring to exhaust the colors against the canvas and inside each other. This language is one of guts, desire, fury, and future. It is one that drove an aching future, an imagined future, a failed future that changed me. A dialogue between the “recovered” and the act of recovery—getting better—now informs my waking life. This dream-in-being shapes me, colors my perception, and, most of all, urges me forward.