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.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.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 connection to that sound. And that’s where extra counseling for people
who need more support is often recommended, so they can come to terms with
managing the tinnitus.
MP: What was your first experience with tinnitus?
CN: I have tinnitus myself, and I feel like it’s almost like the more I’ve
learned about it, the more I can notice it. Like when I’m stressed. It’s wild.
It’s almost as if I’ve given it to myself the more I’ve learned about it. It’s
not very bothersome for me, but I started learning about it in school, even
taking a whole course focused on tinnitus. And during that time, the more I was
thinking about it, the more it started raging in my head.
MP: How would you describe tinnitus to someone who doesn’t know what it is?
CN: I would say that it’s just the sensation of sound that different people
experience in different ways. Sometimes it can be on one side, sometimes it can
be on both sides. Sometimes people don’t even know like where it is. It’s just
sort of the sound that they hear. From the time we’re born, the sensation of
sound is something that we can’t really turn off. Your ears are always open.
They’re always listening.
But then sometimes this tinnitus sensation starts. And most often it’s when
there may have been some damage along the auditory pathway, changing how sound
travels from the external world up to our brains. So a new sensation forms, and
for some people it can be really bothersome. It’s very subjective, something
that’s hard sometimes for other people to relate to and know about. It is in
your head, and we can’t just take some type of meter up to your head and say,
“Oh, we see it. It’s right there.” Tinnitus is something that’s invisible but
really powerful. And it affects a lot of people.
[edited for clarity and length]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 cLisa 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.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.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.
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.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.
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.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 Great
Plains go on forever and touch the edge of existence. Ultimately, the blurred
grass and softened edges allow our minds to wander into another realm where we
commune with our ancestors, bridging past with present and future. This
communion has built a stronger appreciation for not always being in control,
that beauty can come from chaos—a life lesson I take with me in all aspects.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 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
cicadas fly, mate, lay eggs in twigs, and die within several weeks. Together,
their long underground life, their nearly simultaneous emergence in vast
numbers, and their brief period of adulthood enable them to survive even massive
predation.
Theirs is, without doubt, a recovery: for a couple of weeks after the old
generation has become a snack to animals or driven mad with fungus or naturally
expired, and before the new generation has hatched, an entire population is
vanished. Besides their music—hypnotic and as loud as a lawnmower—the Brood
compels me because their recovery is collective and periodic. There is no
expectation that this time, at long last, the restoration will be complete.
Through observations and personal experience, I've found collaboration and
repetition to be essential to recovery, which demands a sustained commitment to
a state of health—of individual well-being, of social cohesion or, in the
cicadas' case, of survival and endurance of the species—that can never be set
down. The singular, climactic moment of healing turns a profit at the box
office; in reality, recovery requires nothing if not maintenance—constant,
careful attention and a robust network of support. In the context of collective
resilience, Steinbeck writes of the human being: "when theories change and
crash, when schools, philosophies, when narrow dark alleys of thought, national,
religious, economic, grow and disintegrate, man reaches, stumbles forward,
painfully, mistakenly sometimes. Having stepped forward, he may slip back, but
only half a step, never the full step back. This you may say and know it and
know it."
Defined differently, to recover is to regain consciousness. I explore this idea
through speculation about the cicadas' dreams, which, for seventeen years,
perhaps reinvent vestiges of conscious experience inherited from previous
generations and saved from the first few minutes after their birth. Ultimately,
those vestiges are replaced in their last weeks of life by first-hand encounters
with light: something that, for a long time, could only be imagined. Like
Plato's allegory of the cave, where emergence reveals the falsity of shadows. If
we can endure the initial (authentic, sometimes prolonged, often recurrent) pain
of exposure, we might perceive a world beyond the small dark place we'd taken to
be the world. This, too, is recovery, that Herculean task.
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
cicBrooke 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.
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.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 book resting in the
window.
The tapestry burns its brightest where it's most abraded,
and gold leaf, a debris of stars, shines, shaken, an invitation, all over the
wood-worn floor.
Remember upstairs in that antique shop,
those intricate old rugs we loved, that had been rolled, then lobbed,
a shelf's worth of dark spirals?
They're still there, awaiting the light.
Poet’s Note
This poem was born from a critical time of international and personal unrest.
Climate change, COVID, and political polarization begat a maelstrom in the early
days of 2020. At this same time, my son, just turning eighteen, was beginning
his recovery from a serious bout of depression. Not an easy time for the
healthiest of us to move one foot forward and then the other. On the threshold
of the first international coronavirus shutdown, I took my son on a day trip for
his birthday to visit the small town he was born in and spend time exploring an
antique shop, a pastime we both enjoy. I wanted to touch the fabric of his past
with him, to further the dialogue between us wherein—using history, love, and
art as evidence of a greater good—I might be able to show him the possibility of
a rich life.
From Auden's “Death's Echo,” September 1936,
Not to be born is the best for man;
The second-best is a formal order,
The dance's pattern…
We emerge now from the turmoil of the pandemic with those same problems that
plagued us at the outset, woven into the dark tapestry of things. But we need
not be hopeless. Our work is to construct a new pattern for our dance, through
art, policy, love.
—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 boClaire 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.
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.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
other birds at the cafe were loud and spirited. Linnies mostly slept and took
polite nibbles from pieces of dried fruit. They looked like inquisitive pears.
He loved them immediately. Linnies are rare, he discovered when he returned home
and began making calls. Most breeders had a waiting list. But just outside of
Dickson, Tennessee, we found one.
In the afternoon, we arrived at a yellow, concrete building next to a Dollar
General and a farm supply store, an hour outside of Nashville. The showroom was
busy: jumping cockatiels, screaming macaws, and wide-eyed purple finches. Sweet
canary-winged parakeets stared at us from baby button eyes, and a silent Amazon
parrot sat in a too-small cage. We smiled at them all, taking in the chatter.
●The breeder was a woman named Betty, who greeted us at the door. She was
trailed by an assistant with thick glasses and a vague air of confusion. In the
corner, a man sat on a white plastic chair. He did not acknowledge us. There was
a randomness to the scene I recognized from growing up in the country. It was
impossible to tell the role or relationship of anyone in the room; it was as if
we had all been thrown into a one-act play without our knowledge. Betty, her
assistant, and the man in the corner looked startled to see us, and even more
startled to hear we were interested in buying a linnie. Nico reminded Betty that
they’d spoken on the phone.
“I don’t think you want him,” Betty said. “Not a good bird. We have lots of
others.”
But we had driven all this way, Nico said.
He was a breeder bird, Betty explained. “He’s not a nice bird. I don’t think
you’d like him. Some birds just aren’t meant to be family pets,” she said. “Lord
knows we’ve tried,” she mumbled to herself.
But we were determined, we insisted. Betty’s assistant gave her a gentle push
into a door behind the register.
A few minutes later, she returned clutching a plastic butterfly net. At first, I
just heard the squeaking. But then I saw him. Inside the net, there was a green
feathered blur scratching, biting, screaming.
“He’s not a tame bird…” Betty began.
He hardly looked like a bird at all.
Betty explained that he had been sent to them by accident with a shipment of
other parrots they’d ordered. But he was fearful and shy, so they gave up taming
him. I looked around the room and saw the small, dirty cages with new eyes.
These were temporary set-ups, meant to get parrots in and out, not to
accommodate them long-term. But this bird had been there for at least two years.
In the two years he had lived with them, he had never known anything but the
stale air of Betty’s back room, where she kept the birds they deemed unsellable.
He had never flown, had probably never heard a kind word. He had been isolated,
stuck. Alone.
Betty flipped him belly-up and grabbed his wings, pinning them to the counter.
Before we could protest, Betty took the bird’s wings and cut them roughly with
blue kitchen scissors. We told her to stop. “We like our birds to be able to
fly,” Nico said. “You don’t need to do that, we’d actually prefer him to keep
his wings…” I began.
“It has to be done,” she said.
He struggled beneath her hand, but she held him fast.
“See? A mean bird.” I could feel Nico tense as the bird continued to scream.
Betty pointed to the two Canary-Winged parakeets in the other room. “Now they’re
sweet. Would you want to take them home instead?”
At that moment, the bird took a terrific, fleshy chomp of her hand, jumped off
the table, and ran underneath a heater.
Betty yelped. Nico knelt by the heater and spoke softly to the linnie. He cupped
his hands and gently picked the bird up. The linnie gave Nico a wide-eyed stare.
“Look at him,” Nico said quietly to me. I looked into his hands.
The bird was round and very small, with bright green feathers and black spots.
It hid under Nico’s fingers. When I looked closer, I saw something in its eyes.
Not trust, and not anger. Intelligence. “Hey little guy,” I said. “Nice to meet
you.”
●The next day, I rode in the passenger seat of our car on I-40 East, a new bird
cage in my lap with the parakeet inside. We didn’t know if he’d make it through
the night. We’d discovered that he had an infection, which Betty had left so
long untreated it took half of his nose, leaving a gaping hole in his beak. He
was quiet, watchful. We agreed that even if he only lived a week, we would make
it a good week: good food, toys, music for him to sing to. We named him Ghost.
GhostGhost did nothing for a few days. But slowly, things got better. He
climbed. He walked. He’d only had a single perch for the first two years of his
life, we figured. It would take him some time to learn even basic movements.
We were relearning too, as COVID hit Nashville in earnest that week. Dance
rehearsals became online classes. I went from a spacious rehearsal hall and
sixteen-foot aerial silks to a pull-up bar in the doorway.
At night, I read to Ghost from Wolf Hall, a long and beautiful historical novel.
We played him the soundtrack from The Lord of the Rings. He quietly sang along.
Sometimes after dark, we’d lie awake listening to him sing the sounds of Betty’s
store: the calls of caiques and senegals, of macaws and cockatiels. He sang the
soundscape of his past.
Ghost survived the first week, and soon we could coax him out of the cage with
treats. His progress provided the only momentum as our lives ground to a halt.
We tried not to focus on the news. I tried to take a walk every day. Nico
endured bite after bite.
The sight of human hands still sent Ghost into a frenzy. I didn’t blame him,
given what we’d seen on that glass countertop. A quick movement would send him
running underneath the dresser or make him freeze for minutes at a time. But we
kept trying. We took him out to our patio and watched him climb the Crape Myrtle
tree in our yard. We gave him lots of sunshine. We waited.
●Before I was swept up in the dream of becoming a dancer, I wanted to be an
ornithologist. I had three parakeets as a kid, and I told my mom that I wanted
to go to the rainforest and save military macaws from habitat threats. After
that, I said, I wanted to open a bird shelter in my house.
As I grew older, I still dreamed of having a rescue bird, but it was a private
dream, superseded by more urgent, outward-facing dreams. I lived a rich,
meaningful, busy life before COVID, full of expression and excitement. But I
also recognize now that I was lonely.
When Nico suggested we find a bird, I felt relieved. My days were full, but I
felt invisible long before the pandemic started. I felt useful to the people
around me, but not often seen. Nico was on the road a lot, and I came home most
nights to an empty apartment.
“We agreed that even if he only lived a week, we would make it a good week: good
food, toys, music for him to sing to.”
I could say that the absence of so much else—of commutes and get-togethers, of
public accomplishment and end-of-the-day return home—threw our progress with
Ghost into sharper, more dramatic relief. But the first time he climbed onto my
arm and fell asleep on my shoulder, it felt significant in a way I hadn’t
experienced before. It wasn’t just the lockdown, or the crushing boredom. It was
that I knew, unequivocally, that I had shown a living thing what love was.
In July, Nico went back to Korea, leaving me and Ghost alone in the apartment.
He had begun to trust me, but we were still near-strangers: roommates, thrown
together by circumstance.
Still, the lockdown wore on. The days were a gift, the days were a void. All
those hours. How did I ever fill them before?
I began to read parrot behavior training forums online, where I found a wealth
of videos. I taught Ghost to stand on my finger. To turn in a circle. To go to
where I tapped with my fingertip. To shake my hand with one of his little feet.
Like most intelligent animals, parrots want to know the rules. So the tricks
were more than tricks. They were teaching him that the world was full of actions
and measured consequences. That his life was understandable and regular.
Ghost held me to the rules of this strange new arrangement, too. In the morning,
I had to feed him, or he would bite me. Every afternoon, we trained. We were
locked in a desperate battle to create regularity from hours of nothingness.
The rest of my life continued to unravel. I mourned our lost performance. I
mourned the strength and capability of my body. I mourned so many things that I
took for granted: commuting, groceries, running into people in town.
I would sometimes feel acute moments of sadness, and sit on my bed staring at
the wall. When this happened, Ghost did not offer comfort like a dog or a cat
would. He simply looked up at me, inquisitive, from his brown eyes.
We kept training. As he learned tricks, I understood his body language more and
more: I could tell when he wanted to play and when he’d rather be left alone. In
May, he cautiously let me scratch his head. He became more adept at balancing on
my shoulder. I took him on the patio and he screamed greetings to our local
mockingbird and cardinals. It made me wonder if he needed another bird for
company.
But linnies, I’d learned, were in short supply. Ghost seemed to be the only one
in the state, and even he came here by mistake. Besides, I reasoned, how much
more companionship could he need? I was home nearly twenty-four hours a day.
●Life at our apartment complex had a new rhythm, one I had never noticed before.
Every day, I saw a woman walking her gentle, elderly dog across the parking lot.
On the way back, she always carried the dog in her arms. In the afternoons, two
black cats watched me from a patio overflowing with flowers.By the summer, Ghost
spent much of his time next to me as I worked, wrote, sat, watched TV. He nipped
at my feet when I did home workouts. He screamed along to the movies we watched.
“You’ll hardly recognize him,” I told Nico on the phone. And it was true: he no
longer feared my fingers. He sought out my company. He felt safe.
One morning, he climbed into bed and fell asleep on my chest, like a baby.
Things got easier that summer. Ghost could roam the apartment freely. I began
that new phase of reluctant acceptance alongside so much of the world.
My dance company began rehearsing outdoors. I saved up for an aerial rig and an
aerial hoop to practice on at home. When the hoop arrived, Ghost perched on it
as I set it on the floor. The first time I went back into the air and hung
upside down, tears in my eyes mingled with the outdoor sweat.
This new happiness felt like momentum in a new, unknown direction. And sure
enough, later that week, I saw a strange message on a Tennessee parrot forum.
There’s a yellow parrot on my fence, the post read. It’s been here for about a
week. Does it belong to anyone? I don’t know anything about birds or I’d catch
it myself. I studied the blurry photo of a bird. It was like a yellow beacon
against the dark fence. Lots of hawks around here. I’m worried it’ll be eaten if
someone doesn’t come catch it.
A few hours later, I was en route to Liz’s house, the woman who had posted the
bird. The summer air was mild. I could smell magnolia flowers through the open
windows. I felt a strange, giddy sense of anticipation.
When I arrived, Liz led me behind her house to a fenced-in chicken coop.
We peered inside. There he was, between two chickens: a pet-store budgie, just
as she’d described. It looked like one of those kids’ books where you spot the
missing object.
“Like most intelligent animals, parrots want to know the rules.”
The little bird stood there, doing his best chicken impression. As I studied him
more closely, he seemed less like an ordinary budgie. He was comical and
unearthly, with a too-long tail and two different-colored eyes. It seemed as if
he’d snuck through a crack in normal life from an alien dimension.
I had brought a bag stuffed with millet. “Hold on,” I said. “I have a recording
of other budgies on my phone.” Liz held the cage door to the coop, and the
yellow bird edged towards the chatter. He took a bit of millet from my
outstretched hand gingerly, suspiciously. I tried to stay absolutely still,
terrified he would fly away.
I moved the millet farther and farther, until he walked far enough into the cage
that I could shut the door.
Liz and I, perfect strangers just minutes ago, stared at each other with the new
intimacy of having shared an uncanny experience. We stared at the budgie. The
budgie stared at us. I remembered a line of Elizabeth Bishop:
> Why, why do we feel
(we all feel) this sweet
sensation of joy?
It was silly, ridiculous, heroic. I felt a strange bond to Liz, as I walked the
cage to my car. “Thank you for doing this,” she said. “You’ve done a real good
thing.”
I planned on giving the budgie to a shelter. But when I called Nico, he didn’t
mention any of the reasons we didn’t need another bird. Instead, he asked “is he
cute?”
InkoWe searched hard for the owners, but none materialized. All signs pointed to
an abandoned pet. Budgies are cheap, loud, and easy to come by. Every summer,
many people release them into the wild. Most don’t survive.
“Don’t name him!” my mom said. “Then you’ll never let him go.”
We didn’t expect the budgie and Ghost to get along. But that first night, I took
Ghost over to meet the new bird, who leapt toward us when we approached with
keen interest in his sharp little eyes. He faced Ghost, clinging to the side of
the cage, and made a perfect, inquisitive chicken cluck.
We named him Inko, a Japanese word for parrot.
Inko had brought the summertime indoors. He was wild, he was strange. One of his
eyes was deep purple, and he had an air of mystery and wisdom. He flew circles
around our living room and landed on my knee, my arm, my head.
Inko sang songs without meaning or pattern, all day long. He sang the
mockingbird’s call, the chickadee, the Carolina wren. He sang the microwave
beep, the iPad lock sound, and the harsh ch-ch-ch of his own kind.
Inko was glued to Ghost from the moment they met. And Ghost surprised us. He
loved Inko easily and quickly. Though I offered them separate spaces, they slept
huddled together in the dark.
Something had shifted with Inko’s introduction. Our home felt complete. And in
the dead of night, when Inko sleep-talked, we sometimes heard a muffled chicken
cluck alongside Ghost’s now-familiar songs.
●In the end, Ghost and Inko were not some metaphor for our lives during the
pandemic. They were not a lesson to be uncovered or learned, to neatly wrap up a
frustrating and confusing year. Instead, they were themselves: parrots.
Confusing, intelligent, surprising. They had as little choice over their strange
circumstances as we did. Before he goes to bed, Inko often sits on my pointer
finger, closes his eyes, and sings a soft song. He tamed quickly, grateful to be
in a safe home.
Ghost spends most of his days running through the apartment, stealing any
noodles and popcorn he can find, sleeping snuggled into my neck. He knows that
an outstretched hand means a ride to his favorite spot, or a satisfying head
scratch.
The birds offered something other than comfort to me, because comfort wasn’t
what I needed. I needed direction and momentum, and I needed company. I feel
immensely lucky. In a year of so much loss and uncertainty, something unexpected
happened to me, and it was actually good.
●It’s late December and the morning is warm and lazy. Nico and I sit in our
living room, sipping on our coffee. There’s Inko, on his usual flight from the
bedroom to the kitchen. It’s a short flight, one he does every day.
But behind him, there is a buzzing, determined green blur, trying, flapping with
all his might, three feet off the ground.
Ghost, out of nowhere, is flying. Flying across our dining room, skidding to a
stop in the kitchen. Running around the corner, whistling gleefully.
There he is, on our living room floor. Now, he turns his head. Now, he looks at
me knowingly, from his small brown eyes.
I see Ghost. He is there, in Nico’s cupped hands. He is there, as we watch hours
of TV together. He is there, as he learns to climb a ladder, as I unwrap my
aerial rig, as he meets the new yellow budgie. He is here, ours, something
unequivocally good. 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. TheMatthew 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 only a fraction as often as I told him so, and forty times
as deeply. But more than that, more than anything I’d written, I wanted to watch
his hands, pulled for once from their position in prayer as they grappled for
the back of my neck. I wanted to please him, to play whatever part he wanted in
the theater of his desires, until I could see his mouth, teeth white like the
dust of stars he told me had names (Arcturus, Orion), opening, telling me what
he wanted, why he came. He begged me to tell him the things he wanted to hear.
He wanted and wanted until at last he had it, breath going slow and quiet until
we were left alone with the distant sounds of the orchard: crickets singing,
bull frogs loud and bellicose down in the branch.
But it was not yet finished, my letter. His early arrival disrupted my
intentions. Fearing he might read what I had written, I ripped apart the pages
at once, quick and secret, and shoved the pieces in my mouth, swallowing my sad
attempts at supplication before he drew near enough to see. My body
straightened, as was its habit, hoping to fashion itself into something he might
take pride in, someone of note, something he could want.
So when I told him I dreamed of a girl, a little girl dancing all alone in the
meadow across the back fence, I had hoped he would ask with a grin if I was
making it up, perhaps to impress him.
But instead he sat up, discarding me in the grass. The sleepy smile there just
before was now urgent and serious, almost afraid.
He said: When?
Two nights ago, I said: I went out of the house and saw her kneeling there, arms
moving as though kneading dough. And when she stood, I could see her holding
seven yellow flowers.
He asked: What color was the dress?
Blue like a robin’s egg.
He only nodded. I could see that if he had been a man disposed to it, he would
have gasped.
He stood up and said I should show him.
I laughed and asked him: Show you what? He looked around as though he might find
it himself. It was only a dream, I told him.
Come, he insisted. Show me the way.
I took him to the meadow, which looked to be covered in snow, so strong was the
moonlight coming down onto it.
Peter walked through it and past it, walking for a long time through the woods
beyond, and just when the thought first entered my head to ask about turning
around, Peter’s hand snared my wrist, snatched it up like that of a petulant
child in the fist of a father. His skin pressed warm into mine.
He said nothing but there was a familiar urgency in his eyes. Look, he mouthed.
Up ahead, set back in those shadowed woods, ground still speckled with glowing
patches of white, I could see: a small fire, around which were several small
buildings, simple but immaculate.
Two women walked between the houses, each holding a handle of a large bucket
that swung between them. After a while, another emerged from the building
nearest us with an ax and went toward the far side of the encampment.
I told him again it was nothing.
He shook his head and said there had been a mother. This morning, when first he
arrived in Calamity, a woman with a terrible cough told him that two hooded
devils, under the curtain of night, had carried her daughter right out the front
door, pale hands pressing against her screaming mouth. The girl had been wearing
a blue night skirt, ready for sleep.
Peter told me it must have been that same girl I had seen in my vision.
A dream, I corrected him. Not a vision.
We watched in silence until at last he decided we should leave.
His jaw was clenched, his mind churning. And when we drew close to home, I
reached out to touch his hand. He didn’t pull away but he didn’t look at me.
I pinched his side, which made him laugh. He pressed his palm to my chest to
push me away but I reached out to hold it there.
This heart, he said after a moment. He paused as though thinking what to say.
Is deceitful above all things? I joked. His favorite verse.
And desperately wicked, he said, smiling again in his restrained way.
He touched the back of his fingers to my ear to feel the coolness of my skin, as
he did when he was feeling tender. Goodnight Amos, he said at last.
I set to walking home, alone, wishing the whole way I could remember the end of
the verse.
CHAPTER 2
My stomach had soured overnight. The letter felt heavy in there, like a stone.
My mother saw me clutching my abdomen, bent over the table, and said: Stop
worrying so damn much. I already know! A mother always knows.
She was already drunk, giggling over by the front window. She said: You think I
don’t hear you, baby? Sneaking back in before sunrise most every night? Down in
the orchard with that boy from Auspicion, rutting like a pair of stags in
January?
I pretended not to hear.
Don’t worry, she said. I won’t tell. I’m good at keeping secrets. It’s the
Prices who should thank me for that.
I lacked the strength to argue. I was a fool regardless.
My father said nothing. He never said anything except to himself. What happened
to him was: He came from bourbon barons, but took to horses at a prodigious age.
His family spoke of his future with such beaming confidence one could almost see
him atop some chestnut yearling thundering toward the finish. So when word made
its way back to his family that their youngest son had dug the toe of his gun
into the sawdust of their stables and clenched the other end between his teeth,
the Casters found it easier to pretend he had succeeded than admit the awful
truth. They sent him way out, on the other side of Calamity, where he would live
in a house on a little plot of woods with two horses, a woman and their bastard
child.
But my mother wouldn’t marry him, would not even let him see me. This fact was
the sole source of his grief, according to the note they found tacked to the
stable wall the following morning. The bullet had entered his head but in some
terrible miracle failed to exit on the other side, so he remained suspended in a
state of semi-dumbness and semi-deafness, doomed to a twilit consciousness the
rest of his days.
He developed a habit—some might call it a symptom—of telling himself stories,
murmuring half-coherent to himself, making no effort to whisper. So when he
stood staring out the back window that cool spring morning, I thought nothing
when he started speaking of pigs in that half-lucid state of his, his eyes
fluttering as he said: That momma pig had a litter of three. Only three. A
miracle.
Each piece of the sentence was no longer than a breath, only loosely tied to the
pieces before and after.
He said: Nine, ten, eleven piglets you’d see. But it was just three. All three,
they were perfect.
But she didn’t take to them, he said. Didn’t take, a little rough. One of them
was dead by morning. They poured whiskey in the water trough. A jug of whiskey
to calm her down. Didn’t work. Another piglet, the second, dead as the first,
all that red.
There was a smack. I opened my eyes again and saw my mother on the other side of
the room, looking bewildered at a bee sitting against the window. She was
sitting with her legs folded beside her on the floor.
She laughed as she realized: Oh! It’s on the other side. Her red and tousled
hair fanned out from her head, illuminated by the steep slant of late morning
light. I wondered how much she had slept.
The brightness of the window caught in my eyes and set the room to spinning
again. My blood surged inside my head as though begging for my attention. I
closed my eyes as my father carried on.
He said: It was raining. They went out. Saving the last of them. Saving the
piglet. Gun was swinging at his feet. He shot her dead between the eyes. The
sow, right there in the mud. More red, all that red.
From where I lay, dizzy with my head against the table, I asked after the last
piglet, surprising even myself: was she ok?
My father stopped talking and turned to look at me. His eyes, a brown so dark
that in certain light they were often confused for black, were open wide with
surprise, his mouth a tight line. For a moment, we looked at each other like we
had not done in years. He wiped something from the hair on his face. He studied
his palm closely, then turned back to the window. I followed his gaze and could
see them grazing in the paddock, those twin blue geldings he once called Charm
and Consequence.
Years ago, before he tried to drain the memories of my mother from his head, he
would call them that. Or so I had heard. But now he stood in silent
incomprehension, as though trying hard to remember, to recover a dream that had
just escaped him after waking with a start from a very deep sleep.
CHAPTER 3
Ahooded figure stood before me speaking low and warbled. A faceless voice cool
and urgent as running water. I was leaning forward to listen. Face dipping into
the fog of his breath. Seeing suddenly he was gone.
Fast wind, low clouds opening. Blanched skies behind, tornado weather. A gold
birdcage dropping through it, swinging like a tassel. A young girl inside it, a
shadow, clutching the bars of the cage. Eyes full of a wild will to live. A girl
I almost recognized. A girl looking just like me.
I was walking toward the cage as it lowered. I came across a well. The popping
and hissing of fire from deep within.
Her frenzied face was lit from below, glowing red. Lowering further. Drawing
closer yet to oblivion.
The figure appeared again and pulled a copper goblet from his robe. Bidding her
to drink. Black contents spilling over the edge.
Her gasps winding down. Submitting to the calm.
The cage dropping. A hot splash. Streaks of fire arcing and torching houses.
Running home. My mother gathering as much as she could.
Smoke rolling up from the well. Wind stopping, trees going quiet. Distant,
enormous splashes coming from the lake. As though trying to cough up some
terrible illness. Like some great beast in the throes of death.
My father groaning outside. Saying, horses, my horses.
Bolting. Panicked eyes rolling in their head.
CHAPTER 4
Late the next morning, my mother sent me into Auspicion. I told her I would
head for sausage and whiskey straight away, but I planned first to visit the
druggist. Two nights of troubled sleep had done nothing to soothe my unrest. I
stopped twice to retch by the road, hoping to free myself at last from the paper
I had swallowed in my foolishness and shame. I produced nothing beyond wet,
desperate gasps.
By the time I made it to town, the day was warming, the air growing thick and
damp, which added to my nausea. I looked up and saw a river of blackbirds
streaming above. I continued and watched their shadows swirling around me on the
ground.
As I approached the alley that fed the market, I could hear the murmurs of a
growing crowd.
The Price mansion had burned. I knew it to be true as soon as I turned up the
next street where I could hear the voices echoing: Mrs. Price and her daughter
Elizabeth, burned alive with eleven unnamed servants.
Elizabeth had been the youngest, born twelve years after the rest—a miracle
(unexpected, like all miracles)—without the use of her legs. And perhaps because
of this fact, the eldest Price, Peter, took a special liking to her. While
Father Price occupied himself with affairs of the church, Peter taught her to
spell, to count, to name the colors. He listened to her nightmares when they
woke her. He carried her on his shoulders and walked through morning fog, down
by the lake, where Elizabeth shrieked whenever a raft of ducks would take off,
splashing into flight. She called it magic, over and over, magic, magic! Her joy
flew to the far bank and back despite her brother’s smiling corrections that
there was no magic in this world, only miracles like her.
Yet there in the street, the people paid no mind to the dead, so focused were
they on the culprit. Their vengeful minds in concurrence: there was no such
thing as an accident. Perhaps the child was conceived of another man, they
speculated—the girl’s condition being God’s judgement for her fornicative
pedigree—a man who had decided to silence the woman who had kept his daughter
from him all these years. Perhaps it was a servant boy who set the blaze, as
revenge on a cruel master. When one man suggested Father Price set the blaze,
another absolved the priest: Father Price could not even recognize cruelty, so
unfamiliar was it to him.
It was then I heard for the first time the word cult. A cult had lit the fire as
a distraction to kidnap the girl, some were saying.
I asked the man beside me: What cult?
He said as many names as there were people in the crowd: disciples of Bamphomet,
alchemistic women, a satanic cult. Haven’t you heard? Our town is presently
under siege by a concionem of the cursed who spike the heads of the innocent and
boil the bodies for their evening meal!
They increased the stakes, the certainty, with every remark, as though
auctioning with glee some secret, wicked truth.
They continued. They said the Price boy might have done it himself.
You liar! I shouted from the back of the crowd. Heads turned to meet me.
They told me: He hadn’t been seen since leaving for Calamity yesterday morning.
But he loved her, I said. More than himself. More than anyone, perhaps, but God.
I could see their eyes going angry. One man shoved me with such force that I
almost fell. I stumbled backwards, catching myself at last. He yelled that I
should leave. So I did, coward that I am.
I wondered how his people, these hateful gossips, might have begotten sweet
Peter, in all his goodness and his grief. I remembered how one day he had come
strolling up the wide paths of Calamity to listen to our troubles, believing but
not yet knowing how lonely sorrow could be.
Yet what little comfort his efforts afforded us never impressed my mother,
always drunk and vocal in her discontent, saying, Someone who can walk even a
mile through this twisted world and find himself smiling at the end of it has
not one word of advice I care to hear.
And I said to her: Perhaps he chooses to smile.
And my mother said: Well I don’t make a habit of entertaining theatrics. Who
does he hope will see him smile? What good does he think it will do?
I stood there in the plaza, alone in the raw anger of my thoughts, my rage a
different breed entirely than the blood-lusting men around me. For who can speak
ill of a man they do not know? A good man, I insisted in my thoughts, a good man
as entitled to his pride as anyone. Entitled to adoration. Entitled to peace.
I wanted to be near to him. This feeling clawed up my throat at once. I wanted
to be with him in his misery, to feel his heaves as he wept for his sister. I
wanted to write promises with my finger on his back.
I set myself to walking, thinking not of the food and drink for which I’d been
sent, nor even the remedy for the dizziness that was again starting to grip me.
I was thinking only that maybe he was right. Cult or not, perhaps those women in
the woods had taken a girl. Perhaps they had taken another.
CHAPTER 5
Iwalked all over, flitting from one corner of Auspicion to the next, following
the intuitions of men, whispered to me across gates and through shadowed
doorways: speculation as to where Peter might be. At last I went north, toward
the lake where Peter had told me he went to pray whenever the temple became too
crowded for the deep contemplation that brought him closest to God.
The shore of the lake dipped into the water such that it took on the appearance
of lips. The whole of it, if viewed from above, might resemble a mouth drawn
open in agony.
I found him hunched by the water, a shadow set against the glassy white of the
moon. Six tupelos fanned out above him. The moon came through them, too,
dappling white on the grass.
I stood in silence, savoring those last few moments in which my intentions and
desires were free to slosh about in my heart. When I opened my mouth, there
would be no turning back, those shapeless wants having frozen into truths.
Peter looked up. He whispered at length something I could not hear and bowed his
body again.
I stepped into the moonlight. All I said was: There you are.
He looked outward. His shadow relaxed. He was no longer praying, but he was
listening.
I asked after his memories. I asked which ones he found himself examining,
holding up to the light. I knew the way a grieving heart cannot tear its eyes
from the past.
He wept. I knelt beside him and tried to comfort him, but my touch did nothing
to soften the violent shudders that followed every sob. Every so often he would
look up through brimming eyes, up through blossoming branches, whispering words
I could not hear. I was grateful to be there. I did not say it.
We were looking out over the water. Youthful and ignorant, I decided to speak,
thinking my story useful: Did I ever tell you how I almost died? When I fell
into the branch and nearly drowned? My earliest memory: that dark blurry
hopelessness, a hand plucking me from the water, laying me down on the bright
and coughing banks. I opened my eyes and saw the grass standing straight up.
He said nothing. I could feel a distance between us widening as we knelt,
growing like a secret in those long and quiet minutes.
It was my father, I continued. My empty-headed father saved my life and held me,
carried me all the way home where I slept for two days. I didn’t know then that
he was dead. That remarkable salvation was the last and only time he led the
way. Imagine my disappointment once I was old enough to see him for what he was.
The night was cool. I had forgotten my coat.
And so I think I can understand how you feel, I said. Or how you will feel, as
time goes by. Having lost someone you hardly had a chance to miss. Walking blind
without them, unsure which way to turn.
I could see his attention slipping. So I said: But perhaps that’s my pride. My
pride telling me I can understand. There is an evil inside me, after all. I know
you have seen it. I have fought it all my life, moreso since loving you, but I
can feel it still, like a shadow dancing on the walls against the flame of my
will, trying but faltering in the dark, knowing not in which direction lay the
Good. I am a hopeless, unhappy person, Peter. You know this. That’s why I love
you. I stand small beside a holy man, a man who sees clearly which way to walk,
who is shaken not in his faith by such unfortunate—
Peter interrupted.
“All these nights I’ve watched you lying in the grass beside me, wondering why
He chose you.”
Unfortunate! He laughed and said: You think you’re the one who’s walking blind
in the dark? I couldn’t see it before, but my loving you killed her. I followed
my temptations into your orchard. I followed my curiosity. How many times have I
thought about that moment? That very first night in your orchard when I still
believed I was coming to help you, all sinning and squalid. God never showed me,
but I can see now I was lying to myself. I hid the truth from myself, that I was
worshiping at the altar of your false promises. I’ve been asking God why He
didn’t show me before. Why didn’t He warn me? I didn’t know! I wish I had known!
I was tempted! I was tempted by your visions. And I see now it wasn’t as holy as
I pretended. I was selfish and impure. I wanted to reach out and touch you as a
way of reaching through you. I wanted to feel the pulsing of whatever holy thing
God placed inside you. All these nights I’ve watched you lying in the grass
beside me, wondering why He chose you. Why would God choose you as His vessel
when all my life I have prayed for a gift like yours? A connection like yours.
And yet in the face of all my prayers for closeness, for signs, for reassurance,
God has kept silent. I’m afraid that speaking it aloud will make it true: I
can’t hear Him anymore.
He jammed his finger hard against his chest, tapping twice with fierce
desperation and said: The only Spirits left in me are jealousy and rage. I
resent myself for growing unfamiliar with the selfless person I have promised
God to be. My spirit is corrupted. Instead of praying for forgiveness, I can
only tell God how angry I am. You have been given a gift and never once in your
life have you uttered a word of gratitude. Have you? You're either stupid or a
liar when you call them dreams. These visions are a miracle, Amos. A miracle you
insist on being too dumb and delusional to see.
I was crying.
I said: Then why bother with me at all? Why concern yourself with the fate of my
soul, as you have claimed all this time? Of course in the beginning, but even
more as time went on. You cared what came of me. You wanted me to feel the joy
only known to those who draw near to divinity, who press their palms to the warm
pulsing gates of heaven. You wanted that for me, do you remember?
His silence was my answer.
Did you mean it, I said. Did you mean it, all those nights when you promised you
would pray for me always, pray for my soul so that neither one of us would spend
eternity anywhere else but in the arms of each other? Why concern yourself with
a nobody like myself? What promise do my hands hold for you that cannot be found
more easily and more abundantly from those men in the temple, people trying just
as furiously as you to press their ears to the windows of heaven, smudging its
panes, hoping to hear even a whisper of the voice of God inside? Why do you
care, say something, please, answer me, let loose those answers I can see
knocking like animals at the cage doors of your teeth!
You're just like your mother, he said at once, standing. Just the same as your
mother: too focused on how miserable and lonely she is. Thinking her sorrow is
so unique nobody can know it. She’s looking down into it even now. Weeping into
a wishing well.
He went on: So you say I’m a good person, and I would like to believe that’s
true. I keep my eyes turned upward. But I am blind as any sinner. My God is a
god of patience and of hope, so I will keep looking just as I’ve promised. But
it has always been darkness that meets my eyes. Do you know what that’s like?
Though there’s a plan, I don't see it. All I see are the pitiful facts of today.
That’s not true! I said: You see more than that, you used to. You believe—
I believe in Him, he said, with every ounce of my anguish, I promise you, but if
God had lit my path as bright as you say, if I had known the consequences of our
wants, I would have never, never, not even on my final day wandered out. I
never—
His words were crushing me. My vision was blinking out, my vertigo returning and
washing over me. I steadied myself and decided I would deceive him. It was the
only way out, at least as I saw it: They have her.
I said: We don’t have time. Those women in the woods, it is a cult, just as they
have said. They have Elizabeth. I saw her in a dream—a vision. I saw them in a
vision, just now, carrying her, tied up and screaming across their clearing. I
saw it, I promise.
His eyes went wide but his mouth stayed shut, him staring bewildered into the
grass beside me, into the shadow of the trees. I had hoped he would forgive me,
embrace me, give me a shard of hope, show me the way. For a moment I thought he
might kiss me. He looked at me and I hoped.
But all he did was stand. He did not pause before walking past me. He did not
even acknowledge me as he went, not the face nor the hands nor the body that had
loved him across so many nights.
I turned to watch him take the path toward the temple. Then I went to the grass
where Peter had been praying. I knelt, inhaled.
I knew not what to say, so I whispered: Thank you.
I looked up, my mouth tasting like blood, more so with every blink of my
unbelieving eyes.
CHAPTER 6
In the early afternoon of the following day, I heard my mother yell. My stomach
had been churning a few moments prior, so I had stopped hauling hay to rest
beneath a foster holly. It was late enough in the season that the robins had
already picked it clean. I closed my eyes and waited for my nausea to subside.
Lying motionless there on the long stone pew of the anteroom. Listening to the
vast quiet outside. Thin ribbons of lavender light through a crack near the
ceiling.
Following Peter, not finding him, falling asleep there. Pipe organ weeping up
and down the same melody. Highest notes reaching straight up to heaven.
It was cold. I was combing through hanging garments. Lifting a frock coat around
my shoulders. The organist persisting.
Between these peaceful memories, as I lay resting, I could feel my pulse in the
twine burns on my palms.
Hungry, cold, tired beyond belief. Heading home, empty-handed, braced for
reprobation. A man in the plaza, those fiendish gossips surrounding on all
sides. Jeering. His brown cloak. Passing through, until pushed and wrangled and
chained to the gate. The men saying you kidnapper, you murderer. Beating him
red. You child-loving demon. His screams, his mouth, looking up and pleading. A
scream that looked like a smile. Cutting his ear off. Holding it like a trophy.
It was then I heard my mother gasping loud across the woods. I shot up and set
to running, discarding the bales in the grass behind me.
At the bottom of the hill that sloped down from our house, I drew near enough to
see that her scream had been a sharp laugh. My mother and father were there in
the paddock. My father holding the lead, Consequence cantering at the other end,
my mother holding on as best as her drunk hands could manage.
I realized I had never seen her ride a horse, not in all these years. From a
distance, it seemed in miniature, that lovely scene: a panorama of them both,
her whooping wild, him spinning in place as she rode, content in their own ways,
together, finally, in the reliquary of our woods.
For years I had heard my mother crying at night, more so on warmer nights when
my father took to sleeping in the stable. And when I would toe the door open to
ask what was wrong she would smile, face wet in the dark.
Her answer came a piece at a time, over so many years: Your father came down
from Lexington to party, in between things to do, was always shooting liquor
down in the front room of that boarding house tucked away in the hills. I was
breezing past one night, down the stairs, past the ruffled dress of Madame
Carnation, hoping to step out into the autumn night for some air, to smoke a
cigaret, to clear the lonesome scent of sweaty men from my nose when he spotted
me. He looked around for some proof it was a dream, that I was a figment. There
was a drunken sheen to his eyes. I had seen it often, that lusty look of men,
just as suited for the butcher as the brothel. But there was something else in
the face of your father, something set, predestiny glistening on his brow.
She said: he came back later in the week, when it was quiet, when his friends
weren’t around, and confessed to it all, a story he thought was true and
complete, that of his love. He wasn’t sleeping, he said. The past three nights,
he’d lain awake, needing to believe that someday he might know me. He was in
love! He deluded himself into thinking he loved me, a nobody, way out here on
the edge of nowhere. He didn’t know my godforsaken name, yet still made promise
after promise I never asked for him to keep. He told me he would rescue me, but
never could say what from.
She said: Amos, I have never seen God, but I’ve sure as shit seen the devil,
right there in his coffee-brown eyes, so dark they were almost black, staring at
me through the pipe smoke of the bar, hungry with thoughts of things yet to
pass. And so when the doctor said I’d conceived, I left the boarding house. I
took nothing. I went into hiding. Your father was obsessed. He told everyone of
his misery, making himself out to be a father, a good one, in search of his
missing child. The thought that he would take you from me, yank you back into
his money, high society, I would have sooner died. So I stole away to protect
you, hiding in the backroom of the tanner’s until you were born. Your father
blew down just about every door in Calamity looking for you.
She said: After that, his family was so ashamed of his theatric attempt to die
for that whore Penny Calloway that they offered security in exchange for my
silence: a nice plot of land down in their woods, some livestock, two horses, a
house. What else could I say? What more could I ever need?
Right then, in the paddock, my mother reached both arms toward the sky in
drunken ecstasy, which caused her to fall straight backwards into the dirt. It
was as though a rope had been tied across her chest the entire time, fixed at
one end, drawn taut in a moment. The horse carried on as before as she jerked
back and down, the ground knocking breath from her chest. A shock of red hair
fell from under her hat.
At once, my father led the horse to a post in the fence where he tied him up. He
walked back toward the house. My mother was still rubbing her legs and back in
search of the locus of the pain when my father came back, the muzzle of his
carbine swinging at his side.
Then it really was a scream. My mother shouting: No.
My father paused with the short metal barrel pressed already to the skull of the
horse, right above the eyes. That same dawning realization as before. As though
having just awoken from a dream.
CHAPTER 7
The branches of the trees parted like some magnificent curtain, bent against
their nature. Twenty-four figures standing in the meadow. Women as tall as
cedars. Pale as birches. Cloaked in churning black vestments under midday sun
that glinted with streaks of lilac, saffron, copper. Sparkling and hammering
lumber into place. A looming tower growing.
It was almost too tall to see the top. Taller than any kite or spire in
Auspicion. One figure standing atop it all. A distant dot. A blot of ink.
Reaching up between the sun and me like a thumb at the end of an arm
outstretched. The meadow and woods around us drowned in instant dusk.
Something shone silver in her hand. She dropped it. I watched it plummeting
toward me. Catching against the tension of the line. Swinging, off-balance.
Coming to rest, dead center of the structure’s base. Darker than silver. Pewter.
Lead, perhaps.
A figure suddenly stood beside me. Tall, but with a voice small and gentle, like
that of a boy. Saying over my shoulder: “the day of the Lord is darkness, and
not light.”
The figure on the tower looking almost black as the sky. Nearly invisible inside
it.
The boyish voice saying again, quiet, urgent, insistent, closer. “Shall not the
day of the Lord be darkness and not light: and obscurity, with no brightness in
it?”
CHAPTER 8
Iwoke in the sun. My stomach turned as soon as the morning light hit my open
eyes.
We were in the house. It wasn’t right, but we couldn’t say how. My mother
saying: The shadows are changing. Curling into crescents of shrinking light.
The elm tree outside. The window pane between. My finger on the table. The
shadows wilting. Everything going dark.
Peter was praying. I wasn’t there but I could see it: Peter praying for God to
grant him a blessing for his murderous hopes. Wanting absolution for his sinful
vision. The sun disappearing. Peter taking it as a sign. Sprinting as he
finished his prayers. Thanking and thanking in sharp bursts. Breath increasingly
escaping him. Peter Price come tearing again through the streets of Auspicion.
Pursuing with fury whatever demons might dwell in those woods. Flying toward his
revenge. Having prayed with such rage that his knuckles shook against each
other. Exhaling when he knew his time had come. Standing. Crossing himself.
Sprinting to the stable.
My nausea worsened in a moment. I rolled over and emptied my stomach onto the
grass at last, pale bits there among so much green. It emptied twice more,
nothing in the first, but the second found something catching in my throat.
I reached into my mouth between the retches and pulled from it a damp paper: a
corner of the letter I was writing to Peter all those days ago. All I could see
were the faint traces of what I had written at the end, my memory seeing it more
than my eyes. Not my wants, but my name: All my love, Amos Caster.
I could see it again, I remembered: I had dreamed of the darkness and then the
darkness had come. The very next morning, it had come. I knew it had been shown
to me.
And now, lying in the road, it was flashing before my eyes, a memory with the
weight and sheen of a vision.
I went out of the house and found him by the meadow. Self-Reliance tied to a
post in the fence. Peter jumping over it. Throwing his legs like a crusader.
Peter, my lover, my life, going across the meadow. Not knowing I was watching.
Watching and wanting to cry out to him.
But I kept quiet. I stalked up behind him through the brush. He was looking up,
searching for the clearing. I looked up, too, remembering but not quite seeing
the brown thickets of hair. The back of his head. The warm pulsing veins on the
back of his hands.
We were peeking through the trees. Those silent women still chopping wood. Peter
following the path paved with the dust of my lie.
I wanted to stop him. Wanted to sprint after him. Grab him by the wrist. Touch
the warmth of his skin and look into eyes that had been averted long enough.
But I was bound by fear. That he might see me for what I was: an idolator. A
chain. A sickness. A liar.
Peter found it at last. Straightening his back. Strolling into the clearing. The
hooded heads of two or three shadowed figures turning. Examining. Turning back
to their work, indifferent. A saw on a plank. Grit against the grain. Nails
fighting hammers in the dark. Those shadowed carpenters toiling on as Peter, my
pride and my savior, marched stolid past the neat small rows of building we had
spied before. Going straight for the tallest building, twice as tall as the
rest. A straw spire thatching up from the wide flat earth-colored building
underneath.
I watched him. My stomach filling with dread. I decided to take a chance. To
make a choice. To hope for once that I might do the saving. Might make up for
the sin. The consequences of my false words just now bearing down upon me.
I rushed toward the building, that central humble thing. Saw Peter nosing open
the door with the muzzle of his gun. Stepping inside.
I could see through the window a figure with her hood down. The back of her head
smooth and pale. Moon-white hands flickering against the fireplace. Feeding more
logs into its mouth. A frameless mirror hanging tilted on the mantle. Peter’s
reflection hanging above him. Neither aware of the other.
My mother woke just then, sun behind gleaming red through her hair. I had
expected she might burst into sobs, blinking perhaps once or twice before it
bore down on her, the weight of all that had happened. I went to her and knelt,
running my hand across her back, waiting for the sharp inhales: a gasp for our
home, a gasp for my father.
But nothing came. She looked at me. She did not cry. All she did was smile and
say: Good morning, my baby.
Nearer to me by the window, a second figure slept on a low flat cot. Peter
noticed her too. A moment of trepidation, eyes closing, a deep breath of prayer.
Pulling the long barrel of his weapon from its position at his side. Wheeling
around to face the figure lying in the cot, pointing it with mighty vengeance.
Peter shouted: Wake up, O sleeper! Rise from the dead.
I backed away from the window, startled, almost without knowing it. Fearing what
should follow.
Both figures stood, facing him, unmoving.
My legs nearly gave out. The world went silent when I saw their eyes: thousands
upon thousands of eyes, opening in unison, steely gray all over their heads,
their hands, their feet and their faces.
Peter did not move, standing as the two figures moved forward. I noticed the
others from the corner of my eyes. They had been indifferent, completing their
tasks across the clearing. But now, standing in unison, they turned toward the
central building and set to walking. A quick and smooth and gliding gait.
Seeming to levitate. Floating steadily. Accelerating in a moment. Like leaves on
water, going over the lip of a fall.
Figures streaming past me, paying me no mind as I fled. I could hear the beating
of wings, the crunching of wood. Other sounds that faded with distance into my
agonal breaths.
Crying as I ran. Gasping and choking. Tears blinding me in the dark woods. My
feet carrying me by memory and mercy to the house. My mother standing outside.
Looking up at the sky. Hopeless. Desperate. Screaming when she laid eyes on me.
Running toward me. Us colliding with a force double what either expected.
Lifting us up. Our bodies peeling up from the ground.
My mother embraced me for a time so long I thought she might have fallen asleep
on my shoulder. When she pulled away, I could see she remembered nothing. It was
new to her, all of it: the road where the night before we had collapsed with
exhaustion, the thick row of trees pressing in on us, the horses tied up nearby.
I could see them then: more figures than I had counted in the clearing and in
all my dreams combined, flowing over each other like birds or like water. Come
charging through the woods, descending on us from their hill. A furious cavalry.
A swarm of retribution.
She did not even think to ask how we had gotten there. She looked younger, all
traces of pain, regret, self-conceit somehow wiped from her face in the gold
wash of morning light.
My father. Sprinting out, away, toward the stable. Galloping back on the one
horse, lead of the other in hand. Stopping. Leaping off. Grabbing our hands to
help us up. Looking at us both with black eyes peeled so wide he did not even
have to say that he loved us.
I was trying not to cry. With what little remained of my might, I fought it: I
wanted to press my face to her neck, my hand to her ear. I wanted her to tell me
it meant something. With all desperation, I wanted her to tell me we could get
it back, could somehow recover the things we had lost.
But instead I chose to smile back, however weak and unconvincing. I said: Good
morning, momma.
My mother onto Charm. Myself atop Consequence. Thundering away, down the path
and up the road. Away from Auspicion, over the ridge of the valley. Knowing not
where we would go. Stealing away into the darkness. Led by blind hope and horses
alone.
She knew not what I meant but she nodded all the same when I held her by the
wrist and pulled her up from a clump of dandelions she had crushed in sleep
beneath the weight of her hip and said: Are you ready to go?
Disappearing into the night. Away from those endless rows of mulberry trees
where I used to love him more than I could bear to speak.
CHAPTER 9
After that morning I first believed in You, right there in the road with my
mother and the sun, we came to a town called Kindling where all the buildings
had rabbits painted white over the doors. A kind man with a round shining head
gave us a room and asked nothing in return.
And here we have stayed, all these years later. My mother is nearly finished
with a painting she began some months ago, a scene I recognize more than she:
two figures, both cloaked in black. One has a hood drawn over her head, stars
and night behind her, looking up at the other who is blank-faced, basking in
light.
As she works, I hope with such fervor that Peter would insist I am praying: that
our future here might be filled with slowness, time going by with less force and
less fury than before. That I might have the strength to choose what I see,
regardless of that which stands around me, in spite of the things I have lost.
I say: God Almighty, would You tell me what it means? All of that which brought
me here? Or am I sinning by the very act of asking? Even now, all these years
later, as I lie awake, trying with all my might not to curse Your name for
showing me things yet to come, I pray with force just as full that You might
show me more even still, those holy things I know now grow best in the shadows,
my eyes not yet adjusted from the lights of my memory.
I indulge even still in that thrill of believing my life to be happening not in
the present but the past, my whole life hurtling by me in reverse. Will ever
again I look into a mirror and see myself as anything more than the things I
have done? Will ever again I see a horse and not think of all that I have lost?
At the end of it all, when I see a white horse come riding down from Calvary,
will I think of him or of You?
I find myself looking back, in spite of it all, in spite of myself. A memory
shining on the other side of the water. A candle, the sun. The moon behind the
trees. I remember it in sin: flocks of birds stippling the trees of the
orchards. His breath on my neck. Thinking never again would I be so happy.
Thinking: what did I do to deserve so much?
What was I meant to see, God, when as a sleepless child I crept out to find my
parents dancing close and slow by the window? I could see them: my father
staring out at the yard, dark beneath a new moon. My mother pressing her face
into his shoulder, nose wet with tears, smiling like she had not in years. Was
it You who caused me not to sleep?
And who was it that plucked me from the branch that very same morning, all those
years ago?
I have searched for the Truth in the shadows and the sun, both before me and
behind, but tell me God, in my heart and in all these things: who but You can
know it?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 onlMichael 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 neuroscientist Dr. Stephen Porges
posits, among many other claims, that safe relationships are a necessary part of
our ability to regulate emotions and stay calm. In isolation, we lose these
regulatory abilities. Hypervisibility of systemic injustices paired with
additional hardships brought on by the pandemic, like economic uncertainty and
shifting relational dynamics due to increased time at home, exacerbated
underlying wounds and insecurities. My clients, recognizing the weight of this
awareness, sought out my help and invited me into their lives.
When faced with tragedy, initial responses are often: How do we recover from
this? How do we get back to the way things used to be? What I have found in
trauma work, however, is that these questions fall short. A return to “how
things used to be” would fail to address the gravity of the harm committed and
does nothing to center the experiences of those most impacted. In the
therapeutic process, we push beyond these initial questions to gently explore
the transformative potential of trauma recovery.
“Trauma, at its core, is about feeling powerless. Reclaiming power is at the
core of the healing process.”
This exploration requires an understanding of the nature of trauma. The
Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) in the US
defines trauma as "an event, series of events, or set of circumstances” that
overwhelms an individual’s ability to cope. There is no threshold for how “bad”
something needs to be for it to be considered traumatic. A trauma response is
completely individualized: two people can go through the same exact event and
one can go on to experience it as traumatic while the other does not. Trauma, at
its core, is about feeling powerless. Reclaiming power is at the core of the
healing process.
In 1992, American psychiatrist Dr. Judith Herman, whose work wrestles with
questions of trauma, published Trauma and Recovery. It was one of the first
books to comprehensively conceptualize and explore the process of trauma
recovery. Among those working in psychiatry, Dr. Herman is best known as the
developer of the complex post-traumatic stress disorder diagnosis (C-PTSD) and
for laying the groundwork for the practical application of trauma theory.
Her aforementioned book introduces the three stages of trauma recovery:
establishing safety; remembrance and mourning; and integration and reconnection.
These stages are not meant as checkpoints in a linear process. Rather, by
categorizing the type of healing work happening in each phase, we come to
understand recovery as a process of transformation, rather than one of trying to
return to a pre-traumatic state.
In order to embody this exploration of trauma recovery, let’s use a case
example.
Establishing Safety
Meet Rita. She’s in her mid-30s, lives in the suburbs, works for city
government, and is a single mother to two school-aged children. Like many of my
clients, she reached out to me because she felt overwhelmed, exhausted, and
disconnected in her relationships. As with many people, Rita had managed these
problems for some time before the pandemic brought them to a head. I asked if
she sometimes felt powerless over her emotions, as if we were stuck on
“autopilot.”
She nodded. When faced with a problem, she told me, she rarely knew whether she
would fight back or completely shut down. Ten minutes later, she was holding
back tears. She stumbled through her responses. She kept apologizing.
I explained that this space could be whatever she needed it to be.
She sobbed.
I nodded and reaffirmed her choice to spend our time together however she
needed. In that moment, my work as a therapist entailed validating her emotional
response and creating containment. Therapeutic containment is not about ignoring
or limiting emotions, but creating a space where the client knows their pain
will be held safely with another person in a certain context. I pointed to the
quote on my wall and discussed how our breath can help us regulate our emotions
when we feel overwhelmed. We started breathing together until she felt calm
enough to speak again.
At our next session, I circled back to this interaction. She shared how she
spent her whole life repressing her feelings because, as she said, “showing my
emotions never got me anywhere.” Rita explained she experienced abuse and
violence throughout her life. The people around her often minimized, dismissed,
or exploited her. Rita also named her frustration with feeling stuck on
“autopilot.”
I validated these feelings, sharing that they were common for people who have
experienced trauma. Although our nervous system is designed to help keep us safe
from harm, I explained, after a traumatic experience, the nervous system can
activate survival mode even in non-threatening situations. In Dr. Herman’s
words, “the human system of self-preservation seems to go onto permanent alert,
as if the danger might return at any moment.”
Is this phenomenon always helpful to us? No. But it is understandable.
It’s important for Rita to feel safe in our relationship before we can really
process her story together. For some clients, this may take a couple of
sessions, whereas for others, this can take months, even years. As the
therapist, I support her by staying consistent, by giving her decision-making
power as often as I can. I also pay attention to her nonverbal cues, being
careful not to recreate a dynamic in which she feels powerless. Outside of
therapy, we continue to build her sense of safety by working on asserting
boundaries with people who often take advantage of her.
This stage of recovery—establishing safety—also necessitates that I, as the
therapist, recognize how systemic inequities create obstacles to our goals. It
is my responsibility to engage in critical self-work to create safe containment
for my clients, including attending to my own trauma story and engaging with my
identity and privilege.
Remembrance & Mourning
As our sessions progressed, I checked in with Rita occasionally to see how she
felt about moving into the next phase of processing her story. For about four
months, she said she felt unsure. But a short time later, she felt ready to move
into the next stage of our work together. She shared that the consistency of our
relationship made her feel confident enough to trust me with the most painful
aspects of her trauma. It was a small but pivotal moment in Rita’s therapeutic
journey. She found the courage to reclaim her story. I was honored that she felt
safe enough to share.
There are many different evidence-based ways that trauma therapists work in this
stage. Key to most of them is reconstructing the trauma story. This entails
processing the emotional and physical sensations related to the trauma while
staying connected to the safety of the present moment. Trauma’s impact on memory
makes this particularly challenging.
Traumatic experiences are stored as fragmented memories and re-experienced as
overwhelming emotions or physiological sensations like chronic pain,
inflammation, insomnia, nightmares, and even physical distress. Thus, it is
often easier to avoid the memories of trauma altogether. Dr. Herman explains
this phenomenon when she writes “the conflict between the will to deny horrible
events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of
psychological trauma.” People often feel stuck between their desire to share
what happened to them and their avoidance of the pain, both psychological and
physical, that results from doing so. The survivor is torn between their desire
to engage with the story and to escape it.
“Grief always hangs out longer than one would like, but does eventually lose its
potency.”
Rita mentioned she was tempted to skip sessions and avoid therapy. She came
anyway, because she felt strongly that our time in therapy would help her
reclaim the power that was taken from her. Hand in hand with the reclamation of
one’s story is also the grief that accompanies the realization of what was lost.
I describe to my clients this “crockpot of grief.” Its ingredients often include
sadness, anger, frustration, guilt, but also self-compassion, relief, joy, and
love. The complexity of these emotions can be confusing as they continue to
simmer together over time. It is natural to avoid or rush through these
confusing feelings. Grief always hangs out longer than one would like, but does
eventually lose its potency. While the process of recovery looks different for
everyone, there are commonalities. These include validating and accepting the
reality of our loss, allowing ourselves to feel the emotions associated with it,
adjusting to present challenges, and reimagining our future.
Rita and I started by creating a timeline of her major life events. This helped
us organize, contain, and contextualize the traumatic experiences with what was
happening at the time they occurred.
We then dug into the sensory and somatic information she remembered from the
incidents, the body’s memory, and constructed a narrative. Rita engaged with the
most frightening pieces of these memories and regained more control of them.
This eventually took some of their emotional sting away. Rita was eventually
able to acknowledge and regulate her feelings surrounding the event.
In retelling the story and reconnecting to the safety of the present moment, she
was able to differentiate who she is now from what happened to her in the past.
Through differentiation, Rita could remember what happened to her without
re-experiencing it fully. She was able to remind herself that she is more than
what she experienced and that she has the power to author her own story.
“Paradoxically,” Dr. Herman writes, “acceptance of this apparent injustice is
the beginning of empowerment.”
Instead of being bogged down by survival mode and its accompanying emotions,
Rita felt an increased capacity to engage in her relationships and take
ownership of her future. While the remembrance stage was exhausting, Rita shared
that it was also energizing to be validated in this way for the first time.
As Rita confronts new challenges in her life, parts of her trauma story will
undoubtedly reactivate. Remembering and mourning the harm are not a one-time
event. However, Rita will be able to navigate those recurrences while staying
grounded in the present moment.
She has successfully gone through the stages of recovery before. She can find
peace in knowing she can do it again.
Eventually, Rita reached a place in our work which Dr. Herman described as the
endpoint of this stage of recovery: when the individual “reclaims her own
history and feels renewed hope and energy for engagement with life.” It was a
major breakthrough, a cause for celebration. I brought her favorite snack to our
session. Playing “Pomp and Circumstance” on my computer, we both laughed when I
described it as her graduation ceremony.
We both knew the process was not over. Nevertheless, I wanted to recognize her
efforts, all those months of painful and intense work.
Integration & Reconnection
In the integration and reconnection stage, we focused on replacing her old
beliefs that stemmed from trauma with new beliefs that she proactively explored.
Primarily, Rita challenged her belief that her emotions and voice do not matter
in relationships. This component of her therapeutic recovery was particularly
important, as disconnection from other people is core to the experience of
traumatization.
“Recovery can only take place in the context of relationships” wrote Dr. Herman.
“It cannot occur in isolation.”
As always, the pandemic complicated things; Rita was not able to forge and
deepen relationships as easily as she might have in the age before physical
distancing. Despite that obstacle, Rita was intentional about reaching out and
communicating with her social supports on a routine basis. This routine led to
confidence. She asserted herself in conversations. She practiced coping skills
in preparation for overwhelming emotions that still lay ahead. She even shared
parts of her trauma story with a friend.
With time, Rita deepened her capacity for connection. She no longer feels
overwhelmed by all close relationships. Instead, she sees them as a source of
hope, something they weren’t before.
Throughout recovery, but especially in the reconnection stage, people often
explore the ethical questions of harm, as well as questions of justice: do I
want to hold accountable the people who harmed me? How do I want to hold them
accountable? How should they be held accountable?
For some people, accountability is achieved through formal or legal routes.
Others prefer to engage in social action with others. Some simply want to speak
their truth.
For Rita, such questions are pressing and ongoing. To fully explore these
questions, Rita must feel in control so she can be empowered to do what she
believes is right. No matter what Rita decides, she is reclaiming her story and
power.
The Power of Transformation
Recovery is complicated. When taken out of context, the idea of trauma recovery
can imply a return to how life was before. However, as Rita’s case has shown,
recovery from trauma implies transformation, not return. Transformation does not
justify traumatization but it does point to resilience and hope in the face of
tragedy and suffering.
Dr. Herman understood that the work of a survivor’s trauma recovery has the
potential to transform not only them, but also the therapist and even society.
Individual and collective healing are symbiotic and relational.
“Individual and collective healing are symbiotic and relational.”
While I admit I sometimes struggle to see the transformative potential of
trauma, especially as I continue to witness the ongoing perpetration of systemic
harm, my own humanity deepens when I bear witness to the trauma and stories of
my clients. It begs me to ask myself moral questions and forces me to confront
my own fragility, privilege, and experiences of trauma. It deepens my awareness
of systemic harm and gives me the courage to work towards the disruption of
these systems.
And when I feel overwhelmed by the magnitude of the work ahead, I start by
remembering to breathe, right here, in the chaos of things.
●Note: Case examples used are not based on any individual person, but multiple
interactions and stories in my clinical work. This piece is by no means a
comprehensive example or representative of what all trauma work can look like.
Each person is different and will need a different approach in therapy. Any
resemblance to actual people and events is coincidental.
Resources for Support
National Suicide Prevention Hotline: 800-273-8255
For additional resources, go to www.michaelzuch.com/resourcesThis 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 neuroscientiSteve 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 idea when Steve brought it up: synesthesia is when one
sense triggers another sense. Numbers or letters may have specific colors to
them, you know. Or sounds feel like touch. So chromesthesia is just a specific
form of that.
Anyway, about twelve years ago, I started to play music with people and I wasn’t
as rehearsed as a lot of the people I was playing with. One of the guys who was
helping me, teaching me some riffs, said, “I think you should think of your
guitar as a paintbrush. Think of every note you're playing as a different
color.” I've never been interested in playing covers of The Rolling Stones. The
idea of my guitar being a paintbrush, creating art, color, vision, was
attractive to me. So when Steve mentioned the idea, this memory instantly came
to mind. I wanted to jump right in. This is exactly how I approach music: that
is, it’s not necessarily about creating a pop tune or something catchy.
SL: I remember thinking it was a cool coincidence that your guitar instructor
said that about the guitar as a paintbrush. I never really pictured you as
someone trying to get in touch with their inner Eddie Van Halen, anyway.
I have never personally experienced chromesthesia myself. At least, I don't
think I have. At one point, Tristan and I were talking about how it could be a
learned thing. Sometimes I'd sit down in my basement studio in the dark and I
would see things like colors. But, it was never anything explicit or vivid. I
have always been fascinated by films like Disney's Fantasia, where they try to
illustrate music visually. You see bands and artists do this a lot, trying to
put pictures to the music. Tiko, for example, is this musician with very strong
visual elements in his live shows and even in his album covers. He's a graphic
designer himself. And of course quite a few musicians and artists have
collaborated in the past.
MM: That's a really organic way to approach it. So, I have to ask: What are your
favorite colors? Are there certain sounds that make you think of those colors?
TW: Steve works with a lot of colors, but the truth is: I'm a black-and-white
kind of guy. If I'm ever doing any graphics on my own, I stick with what's
visually appealing to me. But, when it comes to Steve's art, my wife and I have
a bluish-green painting of his in our home. What I like most about it is the
mesh of color, the combination.
SL: I'm really attracted to a teal or turquoise kind of bluish-green. It has an
aquatic element to it. I like that in music too: fluid, flowing, aquatic.
MM: I sense a lot of that movement that you mentioned, Steve, when I listen to
the three tracks that Tristan made for this collaboration. More specifically,
I’d like to touch on the titles of the songs: “Open,” “Willing,” and “Honest.”
They seemed familiar in a way. And then I remembered these words are also part
of the language used in addiction recovery circles. So, I wanted to talk about
the idea of recovery, in general, and also how it relates to you. How do you see
this idea reflected in your work, technically or emotionally?
TW: Originally, I started with the title of Steve’s series of paintings:
Ascending. I liked the word itself and thought it portrayed an experience of
recovery. After I recorded the songs, however, I realized that our understanding
of recovery was different. So, I ended up with the titles that you mentioned:
“Open,” “Willing,” and “Honest.” To put it bluntly, I was an addict and I needed
help. In order for me to overcome my drug addiction, I had to be open to the
idea of recovery before I was willing to do it. Then, I felt that I had to be
honest with myself and decide that recovery was something that I needed. That's
why I titled them the way I did and in that order. My path towards recovery goes
along with Ascending—rising above.
SL: I find art to be a healing practice. At times, I suffer from some minor
depression or anxiety. When the pandemic hit, it really hit me hard. The first
month I was in a full on panic. Everything that could go wrong went through my
mind. I was trying to sort out: How can we get through this? What's going to
happen? The unknown is very scary. I was paralyzed for a bit there, but I kept
painting. I have been painting a lot actually. I’ve taken up painting again over
the past few years. But I'm going to keep it small, and I mean that literally.
Small canvases are simpler to manage. It's a gradual process, getting down into
my studio, not thinking of anything else, just focusing solely on the painting.
MM: Tristan, I have two questions specifically about the quote from Bandcamp
Daily in which contributor Marc Masters called your collaboration with Steve "a
mini-soundtrack to a movie about fading memory." Do you think much about
memories? How do you think music helps us recover memories?
TW: My music is instrumental, so there are no words to give context. But I do
try to give themes or at least reference points. For example, I had a record
called “40 hours” which was dictated around workers’ rights. That idea came from
a direct experience. I was remembering something. Do I think much about
memories? Yes, I do. Not in a nostalgia kind of way, though. Our experiences
inform who we are, and I think about that a lot. It was a good description or a
good analogy—"a soundtrack to memories”—which are experiences that may be
fading. Music could be a way to hold on to them or could be a way to cope with
them. The latter is more accurate for me, personally.
MM: I think a collaboration between you two on memory would be really
interesting. Steve, the Bandcamp piece says your work is bold and expressive.
What kind of adjectives would you use to describe your work?
SL: If I had to choose just one, I would say intuitive. I did have some art
training insofar as I went to school, so, it is informed by experience. It’s
interesting, my schooling, because half of it included very formal art classes
and the other half was about how to be a teacher. (I’ve been an art teacher to
small kids for twenty years. I myself have been making art since I was a kid.)
These abstract works have been very intuitive, maybe even expressionistic as far
as color. I worked on a series a while back that featured endangered animals and
wildlife. After a few years, all the fine detail was taking its toll on my eyes
and my hand. I knew I had to do something different. That’s when I first dove
into abstract work.
MM: Do you listen to the music as you're creating your visuals or do you consume
the music, digest it, think about it, and then circle back to make the visuals?
SL: It's a little bit of both. I don't have any musical training or formal
understanding of music, but I am an avid listener. It's really the gut feeling I
have when I hear Tristan's tracks. They're clearly not party tunes. It’s a more
contemplative, more reflective experience. His music has a mixture of emotions:
some melancholy, some hope, some optimism, some light. It’s almost like a light
beaming through the fog. I found that the music I was listening to was
determining, in some ways, the direction of my squeegee, pallet knife, and which
colors I was using. The process itself can get pretty messy. You have to use a
lot of paint, arrange your set up, and there’s always a lot of cleanup
afterwards. I eventually moved towards creating pieces on an iPad, mostly out of
convenience. I wanted to try out some different apps, including one called
Procreate. It's an amazing, touch-sensitive program. You can control just about
anything: opacity, transparency, texture. My paintings for the Ascending series
became more and more minimalist as I went along.
MM: Tristan, I have a similar question for you. What was the recording process
like?
TW: For these recordings specifically, I started with deeper sounds and used
them as a bassline. Then, I let it grow from there. I also have a guitar effects
pedal that, in essence, makes my guitar sound like a synthesizer. As I said
before, I’m not a great technical guitar player, but I have a decent ear. I know
what works for what I’m trying to portray. It's a lot of layering of different
notes in a certain key or a lot of repetition. I wanted it to be ambient in
nature, more of an experience.
MM: When I listen to the music and click through Steve’s pieces, what I notice
most is a move towards resolution. Initially, things are drifting away from each
other, past each other, in tension. Then, things gradually thin out, line up,
come to a resolution. Steve, you mentioned earlier that Tristan’s music evoked
emotions for you, including optimism and hope. What colors or shapes evoke hope
in your mind?
SL: I'd say a lighter shade of blue. As far as shapes, jeez, I’d have to say
circles.
MM: Tristan, are there any sounds that you especially love hearing? What do they
evoke for you?
TW: Somebody once asked me: how do you make your guitar sound like angels? I
think he was referring to an arpeggio. When the notes go up into higher octaves,
it's very high pitched. I absolutely love that sound in particular. It gives me
a sense of, like you were asking Steve, hope. It's a very hopeful, pleasant
sound to me. You can add it into the darkest atmosphere imaginable and it brings
this slight lift of pleasure.
MM: You both added some great color here, as they say. Thanks for sharing.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 idLeah 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 table,
clutching a hand to his chest as he died.
Things changed after that. Lilly and her mother moved out of their apartment and
into an unpleasant little place with her father’s three sisters. The three old
women nagged and scolded her for even the slightest infraction. She hated it,
but there was nowhere else to go.
At the same time, the Vienna of her childhood faded into a nightmare. She was
fourteen when Nazi Germany annexed Austria. Police officers banged on doors and
demanded Jews come outside to scrub the streets. They shuttered her uncle’s
cabaret club, along with all the other clubs that were once considered the soul
of art and culture in Vienna. People disappeared, committed suicide. Her mother
at last secured her passage on a train that would take her to Amsterdam and from
there to England by boat. Only children were permitted. Her mother would stay
behind. Lilly had only a few weeks in her beloved Vienna before she would be
sent away.
●Vienna, 20 October 1938
My mother said she put my name on a visa list. If I’m lucky, she says, I’ll be
able to go to England. I don’t feel lucky about it. I don’t want to go.
Yesterday, I walked down the Alten Donau with Lazlo. He was saying that he wants
to go to Palestine. I didn’t say anything, but secretly I don’t want him to go.
Of course, I want him to leave and go somewhere safe. But if he goes, I’ll
probably never see him again. I want him to stay here with me. But maybe that’s
too selfish.
I’ve been walking with Lazlo almost every day recently. He’s very cute, of
course, but also clever. He laughs at my jokes, and he never tells me I should
be more friendly and sweet. I’m really worried for him. Right now, he’s working
downtown, posing as an Aryan to make a good salary. I know he’s very smart, and
he tells me he’s being careful. But what if they find him out? I don’t know what
I would do.
●I was not close with my grandmother. When she was alive, my family would visit
her. I rarely said more than “hello” or “how are you” before running off to play
games with my siblings. I never cared to talk to her for long or listen to her
stories, which were fragmented by dementia. But looking back, I regretted not
taking advantage of the time I had with her. I felt guilty for not knowing more
about her life. She was almost a stranger to me.
So when we discovered the diary, it seemed like a miracle.
I went in with hopes of redemption, but found that the diary was a much more
entertaining experience than I had expected. Hilarious, even. Like many young
teenage girls finding their way in the world, my grandmother was full of wit,
drama, and flirtation.
“What in the world is a fratz?” my cousin wondered aloud as we scoured the
internet for a good translation.
“Whatever it is, I doubt it’s anything good,” my aunt replied. “She wrote
‘Martha called me a stupid fratz.’”
“Hussy!” I announced, barely containing my laughter. I turned the screen around
to show everyone the translation I had found. It took a long time before any of
us could find the will to stop shrieking.
In the beginning, almost every entry commented on the boys my grandmother
fancied.
“There are lots of cute boys at the beach,” my aunt read aloud from an entry
when my grandmother was on vacation with her family. “I’d like to start
something with one of them.”
My aunt closed the diary, amused and slightly embarrassed by these revelations
about her mother. “Oh my god. They really don’t need to keep this at the
Holocaust Museum.”
The diary contained lots of entries like that—scandalous and endearing.
In some ways, what we were doing was tough work; translating words from a
foreign dialect written by a child nearly three-quarters of a century ago is no
easy task. But for the most part, it brought us joy. We filled in the blanks
with speculation. We traded jokes across the kitchen table, looking over our
shoulders and imagining what she might say if she caught us laughing.
As we read further, we came to care about the characters like we knew them
ourselves. We found ourselves enamored with this boy named Lazlo (or Laci, as
she often called him). Over dozens of entries, we watched her fall in love with
him. She wrote passionately of her crush and her secret hopes that their
friendship would become something more.
By the time we reached the midpoint of the diary, we were all rooting for Lazlo
(ignoring, of course, the fact that she married another man in the end, my
grandfather). We cheered when my grandmother wrote joyfully of their first kiss.
She described her growing feelings for him, how she felt overwhelmed. How she
could not stop thinking about him. It all seemed so romantic.
●Vienna, 1 November 1938
Yesterday, Lazlo and I kissed. He’s really a good kisser. I want to be with him
so much. He said he wants to be with me too, but I’m not sure if I believe him.
What if he doesn’t really mean it? Today, I asked his sister to see if she can
find out his real feelings for me. I like Iren and I think I can count on her to
help me.
One thing I know for sure: those kisses I got from Lazlo were not the last. I
love him so much. Sunday he gave me a photo and wrote on it: “with lots of love
so you won’t forget me. Signed, your Lazlo who will not forget you.”
If only he were serious.
●When we arrived at the entry on November 11, 1938, my aunt read the first
sentence aloud. “Lazlo is …” She stuttered and stopped. Her smile evaporated.
“Fuck. He’s in Dachau.”
The romantic mood transformed in an instant. We all had heard of the Dachau
concentration camp; it was a place where my grandfather had spent many months.
With heartbreak, my grandmother wrote of how Lazlo was taken during
Kristallnacht, arrested with thousands of others that night.
●Vienna, 11 November 1938
Lazlo is in Dachau. I was wrong. Those kisses may have been our last. Lazlo was
arrested that horrible night, and no one knows how he is. That Sunday was the
last time I saw him. I’m desperate to talk to Iren and ask if she has any more
information, but mother and the aunts said it’s too dangerous right now to go
visit her. I hate that they’re right. Most Jews had their homes and businesses
taken away that night. People are being forced to scrub the streets. I miss my
friends. Greta and Erna still come by to visit, but the others are afraid to be
seen with me.
Mr. Zweik confirmed that I will leave for London in two to four weeks. I wish I
was gone already. Everything I love here seems to be disappearing. Maybe a new
place will be good for me.
Mr. Zweik said mother might be able to come to England too- he found her a
position as a “kosher cook.” As if she knows the first thing about keeping
kosher or cooking! Hopefully everything will work out. Hopefully Lazlo is safe.
I pray that the first kisses we shared won’t be our last.
●My grandmother wrote of Lazlo often in the following years, frequently with
longing or despair, but sometimes with hope. While Lazlo remained in Dachau, my
grandmother fled to England with a group of refugee children.
"As we read further, we came to care about the characters like we knew them
ourselves."
The transition was hard. She was placed in a girls’ home with a strict matron
who scolded the children often, although Lilly couldn’t understand what she was
saying. English seemed to Lilly an ugly language, one she had no desire to
learn. She did not get along with any of the other girls. She didn’t need anyone
else, she wrote in the diary. She would embrace independence until things
changed for the better.
The transition was hard. She was placed in a girls’ home with a strict matron
who scolded the children often, although Lilly couldn’t understand what she was
saying. English seemed to Lilly an ugly language, one she had no desire to
learn. She did not get along with any of the other girls. She didn’t need anyone
else, she wrote in the diary. She would embrace independence until things
changed for the better.
Yet even as she dealt with her own struggles, a refugee child alone in a strange
new country, she clung to the memory of Lazlo. The loneliness she felt was
palpable. It grew. Whether love or mere idealized fantasy, she longed to be with
him. To her, Lazlo seemed the last glimmer of something resembling joy.
Eventually, she heard through friends that he’d been released from Dachau. Then
nothing more.
●Burgess Hill, 19 March 1939
There are rumors here that all of the camps, including Dachau, will be closed
soon. I don’t believe them one bit. It’s so boring here, all I do all day is
worry about my poor Lazlo and think of the times we spent together. On last All
Saints Day, Lazlo and I were riding on the street car. He told me cemeteries
scare him and he doesn’t like them at all. But later, when I told him I was
going to visit my father’s grave, he insisted on accompanying me. Maybe he
really does like me. I hope so.
Yesterday was a beautiful summer day, reminding me of one evening in Vienna with
Laci all those months ago. Back then, I didn’t think that fate could be so
cruel. But now I think it would be best if I had just dreamt the whole thing.
Burgess Hill, 7 April 1939
I hate it here at the girls’ home, and I don’t think I can last much longer
without going insane. Because I’m one of the oldest girls here, I’m minding one
of the little ones, a tiny Hungarian girl who’s only six years old. The
Hungarian girl is sweet, and I do have some friends here, but I feel too much
like a stranger. Wherever I go, I get the feeling that I don’t belong. I’m so
homesick I could die. Last night I cried almost all night.
Thank God, my mother got passage to America. Last week she left on an Italian
ship, the Vulcania, and will arrive in New York soon. As soon as she gets there,
she will begin arranging for me to join her. I’m anxious to go.
I miss my mother, my Laci, and my Vienna.
●After arriving in America, Lilly’s story grew more pitiful. She moved into a
small apartment with distant relatives who resented her “foreignness.” She began
dating a man twice her age, who subjected her to insidious manipulations and
abuse. She fought with her mother. She felt totally alone in America, that ugly,
unfamiliar place.
"She didn’t need anyone else, she wrote in the diary. She would embrace
independence until things changed for the better."
Through all of these hardships, she never stopped thinking about Laci. In diary
entries, she mourned her love for him, recalled a memory of him, or regretted
that they had ever met. For my grandmother, the memory of Laci melded together
with her memory of Vienna. He became more than a girlhood crush, transfigured
into a symbol of a happy childhood, a beautiful home, a time before isolation
and misery. Laci was hers, just as Vienna had been hers, even as both the boy
and the city slipped from her grasp: Vienna was lost to German annexation in
1938, while Lazlo was lost in 1941 to the Mauthausen concentration camp.
Through all of these hardships, she never stopped thinking about Laci. In diary
entries, she mourned her love for him, recalled a memory of him, or regretted
that they had ever met. For my grandmother, the memory of Laci melded together
with her memory of Vienna. He became more than a girlhood crush, transfigured
into a symbol of a happy childhood, a beautiful home, a time before isolation
and misery. Laci was hers, just as Vienna had been hers, even as both the boy
and the city slipped from her grasp. Vienna lost to German annexation in 1938.
Lazlo lost in 1941, to the Mauthausen concentration camp.
Now those memories survive only in her diary, as shadows of her experience.
After leaving Lazlo and Vienna behind, she went on with her life. She married a
nice Viennese boy, another Jewish refugee who had made it out alive. She had
children. Although she still made them Sachertorte and schnitzel, she vowed
never to teach them her native tongue. She died in a convalescent home, much
like the girls’ home she hated as a child. Through all of this, she kept the
memories in her heart and her diary alone, never speaking a word of it out loud.
Part of me believes she never spoke of Lazlo because she wanted to keep him a
total secret as a way of preserving the purity of that memory. Her Vienna had
been destroyed. She returned to visit only once, but it was not the same place
it had been. It couldn’t have been—it had betrayed her when it embraced the
Nazis. But her fond memories of Lazlo were one thing from her youth that
remained untainted, pure.
Yet the existence of her diary makes me think otherwise, that maybe these secret
memories were not intended to be kept secret forever. She kept the diary all
these years, through marriage, through motherhood, through old age. She did not
throw the diary away, but placed it among her belongings. She had to know we
would find it. She placed it where, one day, someone else would read it.
Revealing painful and personal struggles may seem an odd thing for my
grandmother, who I’ve learned was mostly a very private person. But one more
theory I’ve mulled over is that she left the diary intact and conspicuously
placed for Lazlo himself, for his memory. Lazlo’s entire family was killed in
the Holocaust. He did not live to have children. She was the sole heir of his
memory, and perhaps she chose to preserve it, even if it meant exposing her own
private pain.
For a long time after reading the diary, I thought about my grandmother’s love
story, wondering whether she ever shared her loss with anyone. Did she ever
mention Lazlo to my grandfather? When I think of her reputation for having a
private, withdrawn air, despite the vulnerability of her writing, I find it easy
to believe that it was a secret she kept completely to herself.
My own chest feels tight when I think of her holding the memory of Lazlo all
these years, sharing her grief with no one. I think about how, without her
words, that sweet boy from Vienna would have been forgotten forever.
Now that I have read the diary, I feel closer to my grandmother. I know what she
was like. As a young girl, she was flirtatious and unapologetic, loved her home
fiercely, pretended to be brave in the face of fear. Love to her was a
passionate thing. She wasn’t always sure she was worthy of it. She held onto her
memories of love like treasures, bringing her comfort on her hardest days.
Although I’m glad to know my grandmother better, it seems odd to call that
feeling happiness, knowing all that Lilly suffered. But it’s fair to say I feel
satisfaction, a sort of peace, to know and understand her better. She doesn’t
feel like a stranger to me anymore. She was my grandmother, my family. Her story
is a part of my own.
There is a photograph we found, tucked into the yellowing pages of the diary,
black and white, of a roguishly handsome young man. Lazlo. When I look at him, I
see not just one anonymous face among millions, the way you might at a museum.
Rather, I saw a memory, a relationship, an individual who managed to profoundly
touch another in his tragically brief life. I can picture him and Lilly
strolling down the Alten Donau at sunset, talking about cemeteries and their
futures and far-flung places like Palestine and London.
“Look, there’s a note on the back,” my aunt said. She flipped it over to show
us. Scrawled in a clumsy cursive hand: With love, so you won’t forget me, from
your Laci who will not forget you. 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 taMara 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 Heinz Godde was startled by the terrifying
thuds of Allied bombs that reverberated through the tin grain silo he called
home. He’d already fled home once as the war closed in on Germany.
At the end of the Allied air armada stretching four hours long, my grandfather
Wally’s ten-man B-24 crew led a formation of heavy bombers during this final
invasion of Germany. After crossing the Rhine over Wesel, he faced a barrage of
small arms fire from church steeples and hospitals. Machine gun fire tore
through the aluminum skin of his bomber, jingling like pop rocks. Bullets tore
into his right thigh, unleashing a torrent of blood and pain.
Flying low, the B-24s were slow, easy targets for enemy flak guns, the
anti-aircraft gun that was the bomber’s fiercest predator. From a corn field
outside Wesel, a flak battery shot indiscriminately at the formation of B-24s my
grandfather’s crew led. Tracer rounds zoomed past Wally’s bomber before the two
identical aircraft on either side of him took direct hits. Twenty-year-old Bob
Vance braced for impact on enemy soil. The belly of his B-24 bobbed up and down
before slamming into a field, breaking in half, and exploding.
On the other side of the Rhine River, Britain’s Prime Minister Winston Churchill
stood on the balcony of the Wacht am Rhein Hotel flanked by Allied top brass. He
was hellbent on watching the final invasion of Germany, called Operation
Varsity, from the front lines. He’d waited six long years for Allied forces to
cross the Rhine into Germany, the heart of the Third Reich, and the symbolic
beginning of the end.
Churchill marked the occasion by urinating in the Rhine and climbing on the
rubble of the bridge that I gazed at seventy-five years later, in a very
different Wesel.
●Wesel was the climax of my journey to find out the role that my grandfather
played in WWII. Wally’s fateful mission over Wesel would also prove to be the
climax of his internal war—a battle he took to the grave twenty years ago.
Growing up, nothing about my grandfather was typical. He bled shrapnel from his
leg until the day he died. Tiny pieces of lead from the bullets that struck him
would surface through his thigh, requiring regular trips to the doctor to be cut
free. His family knew neither how nor when this wound was inflicted, only that
it happened in the skies over Hitler’s Europe and was the cause of the Purple
Heart medal hidden in his sock drawer.
Wallace Truslow is awarded the Air Medal at Shipdham Airbase during WWIIAll that
Wally said in his lifetime about the war could be counted on two hands. The
short of it was he’d flown on a B-24 crew dropping bombs on enemy-occupied
Europe, and he stayed past his tour of duty. His untreated PTSD was an unspoken
truth in the family. I knew Wally only after his mind was ravaged by a dozen
strokes and dementia that only intensified his psychological condition. He
struggled to speak and moved robotically. I was eight when he passed away.
My own memories of Wally are few, so second-hand memories shared after he was
gone colored my opinion of him. Inevitably, these anecdotes highlighted his
idiosyncrasies: a penchant for eating cold beans from the can, an insatiable
sweet tooth, a distaste for crowds and socializing, and unmatched
stubbornness—he once refused to stop for bathroom breaks on a twenty-four-hour
road trip.
In the twenty years after Wally took his war to the grave, I rarely thought of
him. But in 2018, his memory resurfaced; his war story asked to be recovered. It
was Shipdham, a tiny village in England, that brought Wally front and center in
my life. It was a place I’d never heard of when my dad, Wally’s son, mentioned
it in passing: “Could we add a side trip to Shipdham during our upcoming
European adventure?”
I’d later learn that no place was more important than Shipdham in Wally’s war.
Hailing back to the twelfth century, the quintessential English village of two
thousand inhabitants transformed into a B-24 base during the war. Shipdham was
where every one of his wartime missions began and ended. It was Shipdham that
Wally yearned to see once again when he was shot over Wesel.
Where Wally’s war began, so too did my journey to find his role in it. Shipdham
was the spark—a story he didn’t want told, a story he spent a lifetime trying to
forget, a story he took to the grave.
Planning a side trip to Shipdham left me wondering about the air war fought from
this makeshift base. I was shocked by the horrific conditions: unpressurized
bombers, negative fifty-degree temperatures on eight-hour missions,
anti-aircraft fire that could pinpoint a bomber four miles high, and fighters
keen to knock bombers back to earth. It was a hell I could not see Wally in. How
did the ordinary man I knew fight this extraordinary battle?
“Wally’s fateful mission over Wesel would prove to be the climax of his internal
war—a battle he took to the grave twenty years ago.”
I was desperate to find Wally’s place in the history of the Eighth Air Force,
but finding any trace of him in the war was nearly impossible. He kept almost no
records from the war; he told the family almost nothing of his service; he’d
lost touch with his crew. The ultimate gut punch was learning his military
records were burned in a tragic 1973 fire at the National Archives’ Personnel &
Records Center in St. Louis, Missouri, along with eighteen million others. I
chased Wally’s story for months, navigating through a maze of archives and
databases, but I was left empty handed.
So I leaned into my profession as a data scientist, looking for a needle in the
proverbial haystack—Wally’s wartime missions. For over a year, I mined a million
data points about the men who served at Shipdham. It began when I found the
wartime missions, and it was complete when I was able to match the missions to
enlistment records and combat losses from the National Archives for each of the
five thousand men Wally served alongside.
At long last, I found fragments of my grandfather’s war.
Cleaning and crunching the data, I saw the man I’d pegged as ordinary as
something entirely different. His survival in the war was statistically
improbable. Wally once revealed he’d flown over forty missions, staying beyond
his tour of duty because he didn’t have a wife or children at home. None of his
family knew just how impressive a fact that was. The data I mined revealed that
Wally flew more missions than over ninety-nine percent of the thousands of men
he served alongside at Shipdham.
When Wally got home from war, like most in his generation, he did his best to
put it behind him. But he couldn’t forget it—the black puffs of flak ripping
through skin and steel, B-24s engulfed in flames, the smell of scorched skin,
and the footlockers of downed airmen emptied in the early evening at Shipdham.
Wally survived the war, but he spent a lifetime trying to escape the memory of
it.
Dementia drew bright lines around the war in Wally’s final years—his nightmares
intensified. Fifty years after his homecoming, he woke in his California home,
put on a baseball hat, and told my grandmother he was going to save the women
and children in Germany before bolting out the front door. With the help of
police, my grandmother searched the neighborhood for him. Hours later, when
Wally was found curled up in the backseat of their car parked in the garage, he
laughed and said he’d learned how to escape Wesel, Germany.
The shrapnel he bled from his leg came from Wesel. What had Wally seen in the
war that haunted him forever?
A year before Wally died, a man named Burns called looking for him. There was no
one Wally respected more than Burns, the sage, skilled command pilot of his B-24
crew. It had been fifty years since they had last spoken. Despite Burns’ efforts
to find Wally, it was too late. The strokes had robbed Wally of speech. When my
grandmother asked Burns why the crew hadn’t stayed in touch, he hesitantly
shared that they had. Since the war, yearly Christmas calls, reunions, weddings,
and funerals brought them together. But they never could find Wally.
And I was too late to find Wally’s crew, the men who he trusted with life and
limb, the men who could have helped piece together Wally’s war better than
anyone else. The last of his brothers in arms passed away in 2015.
How could I piece together Wally’s war in vivid color when he took all traces of
it to the grave? When those who’d lived it were gone? The data scientist in me
said it was statistically improbable, but the months ahead that led me to Wesel
would prove otherwise.
●By March 1945, the buildings of Wesel dating back to the Hanseatic League, now
Swastika-draped, were replaced by bomb craters. Six-hundred civilians were
killed in February alone. Wesel’s population decreased ninety-two percent by the
war’s end.
The few who remember pre-war Wesel have a complicated relationship with the war
and their memory of it. Most aren’t keen on memorializing the circumstances of
its destruction— toppling Hitler came at the expense of their homes and
livelihoods.
Over a year after I first learned of Shipdham, England and the war Wally fought
from there, I stepped foot in Wesel. It was an overnight pitstop on a month-long
pilgrimage through Europe retracing the steps of the Forty-Fourth Bomb Group.
After a year of emotional archeology, digging for fragments of Wally’s war, I
had a better idea of his harrowing moments over Wesel, as well as the forty
missions he flew leading up to it.
It was an unseasonably hot April day when I arrived at the Welcome Hotel Wesel
on the east bank of the Rhine. When I handed over my passport at check in, the
clerk stared at my name, then made a peculiar motion with his arm. A moment
later, a man I did not know appeared beside me.
His hair was white and wispy, and he dressed sharply in a pressed green sweater
and collared shirt. In the lobby cafe, an espresso dotted the neatly folded
newspaper where he’d been waiting for the arrival of an American woman.
“Heinz?” I asked. He nodded his head. I hugged this stranger who’d called Wesel
home for a lifetime.
Heinz led me through the lobby to the back of the hotel, which abutted the east
bank of the Rhine. He pointed to the remnants of a brick bridge on the opposite
bank. His hands motioned intensely, punctuated by an occasional English word,
the language barrier crystallizing. “Montgomery,” he said eventually. That I
understood, a reference to the famed British Commander during WWII. The bridge
was so nicknamed because German forces destroyed it as Montgomery’s forces
approached the Rhine in an effort to thwart the Allied advance at the tail end
of war. The exploded bridge was still fresh when Wally crossed the Rhine
seventy-four years earlier.
Heinz led me back through the hotel to his compact VW in the parking lot.
Weaving through a maze of country roads, we headed northeast, away from the
Rhine. In my lap, I unfolded a map of Wesel with a highlighted route to the
crash site that I struggled to follow. Heinz effortlessly navigated the
backroads of the place he’d called home for eighty-one years. En route, he tried
to piece together, in broken English, French, and Latin, the story of who I was
and how I was connected to the WWII crash site where he was taking me. Our words
were few, but full of intent.
Fifteen minutes later, we turned onto a dirt road bifurcating farm fields. To
the right, high electric pylons crossed through the crops, and a forested area
abutted the manicured fields. When we reached the thicket of trees, Heinz
flipped the ignition off. “We’re here,” he said.
He moved slowly, reflecting the somber nature of this unmarked final resting
place for a coterie of American airmen. I followed him on a narrow foot path
into the untouched woods. Birds hummed nearby. Heinz left the path and began
weaving through the trees. Leaves crunched below my feet. At a copse of birch
trees, Heinz stopped, turned to me, and said once more, “here.”
This hallowed ground looked no different from anywhere else in the woods, other
than the fragments of a B-24 I knew were buried beneath my feet, the final
resting place for two bomber crews that took off from Shipdham alongside Wally’s
crew and never returned. I’d brought with me two plaques to leave here in memory
of the sixteen men lost. Heinz looked on as I tucked each under a rock at the
base of the trees.
Heinz Godde leads me to the crash site of two B-24 bombers in Wesel, Germany●
When Heinz was born in 1938 on the eve of war, the Nazis already had their
clutches on Wesel. Swastikas hung at every turn. To get married in Wesel, men
had to sport the party uniform. Freedom of the press disappeared and fanatic
Nazism flourished. Nazi Party Leader Joachim von Ribbentrop’s Wesel roots were
worn like a badge of honor in town. Before Heinz’s first birthday, anti-Semitism
fomented, and the Jewish synagogue in Wesel was burned to the ground on
Kristallnacht, a nationwide pogrom against Jews.
In January 1945, Heinz turned seven and celebrated another austere wartime
birthday, the only kind he knew. Wesel had been lucky up until then, surviving
five years of war relatively unscathed by Allied strategic bombing. But, the
final months of war would bring it to total ruin.
In February 1945, the bombing began. Wesel was consumed in fire and smoke.
Heinz’s family fled before their home was leveled. Ten miles east of the Rhine,
his family of six, including his pregnant mother and aging grandmother, were
housed in the grain silo. German soldiers fleeing the Allied advance camped out
on the farm, too.
On March 23rd, Heinz once again woke to the terrific roar of bombers and watched
as flames engulfed Wesel squarely where his father worked as an air raid warden
in the basement of a fifteenth century Prussian Fort. His father was responsible
for sounding the alarms when enemy planes approached. After the Allied attacks,
he pulled dead and wounded from the flames. Heinz looked at the plumes of smoke
in horror.
●At Shipdham Airbase in England, twenty-one-year-old Wally and his crew were in
the throes of a top secret briefing for a mission unlike any other. With forty
missions under his belt, Wally had flown more than nearly every airman on base.
His crew had been designated lead of the formation, which was also the position
German flak gunners most viciously shot down.
But the mission to Wesel, Wally learned during briefing, would, unusually, drop
no bombs. Instead, the B-24s would carry supplies to Allied airborne troops
landing in Wesel just before.
Instead of flying the typical four miles above earth, Wally’s crew was to fly at
treetop level for the supply drop. The Eighth Air Force Headquarters called it a
daring mission. In reality, it was reckless. The B-24 bomber wasn’t designed to
fly low and crews weren’t trained to do it.
In the briefing room at Shipdham, the airmen were told to expect light enemy
resistance. In reality, sixty thousand enemy troops were positioned in Wesel,
waiting for their arrival.
●When the air armada came into view over the Rhine, it appeared to go on
forever. The sky was dense with every variety of Allied aircraft—transports
dropping gliders and paratroopers, fighters, and bombers. Four hours after the
first Allied transports reached Wesel, Wally’s crew crossed the Rhine into enemy
territory.
British Field Marshal Montgomery’s battle cry on the eve of Operation Varsity
was conjured: “Over the Rhine let us go. And good hunting to you all on the
other side. May the lord mighty in battle give us the victory in our last
undertaking.”
It would be ten minutes of hell for Wally’s formation to reach the drop zone,
take a skidding turn, and cross the Rhine once again. Time suspended when the
run on a target began. The bomb craters over Wesel were still smoking. If he’d
had time to think, Wally would have been stunned by the destruction. Small arms
fire caught the B-24 crews by surprise immediately. Wherever a building remained
standing, be it a church bell tower or a hospital, a German shot at Wally’s
formation. Bullets ripped through the aluminum skin of their bombers from all
angles.
The B-24s were sitting ducks. At fifty feet, they lumbered by the enemy. “A well
thrown rock by a one hundred and eighteen pound weakling would present a serious
danger to the planes and crews,” reflected an airman on the mission.
At 1:07 PM on March 24, 1945, Wally’s formation reached the drop zone and shoved
out twenty-five hundred pounds of supplies from each bomber in eight seconds
flat.
The first tragedy of the day struck a bomber adjacent to Wally's. During the
supply drop, Anibel Diaz, a gunner shoving supplies out the tail of his bomber,
got tangled in the static lines attached to the supply chutes and was ripped
out. The fifty-foot fall from his bomber to the ground below was swift, but he
tumbled like a weed on impact. It was impossible to survive.
There was no time to dwell on Diaz. It would take unwavering focus to get out of
Dodge. Wally’s crew led the formation in a sweeping turn back towards the Rhine,
away from the enemy. As the formation straightened out on a direct path off the
target, they flew on a trajectory directly above a flak battery concealed in the
fields below. The German flak gunners looked up at the incoming stream of
“gigantic monsters,” guns readied, waiting for the perfect shot.
At point blank range, the flak guns unleashed hell on Wally’s formation, scoring
direct hits on the bombers on either side of his crew. To the left, the Chandler
crew had two engines on fire and part of their tail shot off. To the right, the
Crandell crew took a nasty engine hit that unleashed an inferno of flames that
ripped the engine from the wing.
The Chandler crew crashed first. The B-24’s fuselage bounced along a field as
Chandler, the pilot, fought to regain control, and just as he did, an
electricity pylon laid just ahead. He turned sharply. The wing clipped the
ground, pulling the bomber earthward in a violent spin. On impact, the bomber
broke in half, then exploded in a tremendous inferno seconds later.
Meanwhile, Crandell’s crew also fought to regain control. Down an engine, with a
mangled wing, they climbed in altitude, almost two-hundred feet vertically.
Then, they stalled and dove nose first to earth. The explosion was immediate, a
red flash. Then, a plume of black smoke rose like a geyser. Unlike Wally,
Crandell had a wife and child he left behind stateside. His two-year-old
daughter Jan lost her father in the blink of an eye.
In five minutes, two bombers and sixteen men from Wally’s formation were gone.
●At the crash site in Wesel, I stood with Heinz on the hallowed ground where the
black plumes erupted seventy-four years before. I felt a flood of the past and
present. In that copse of trees, the last two years of digging for needles in a
haystack that led me here flashed by. I felt the overwhelming sadness of this
unmarked place where sixteen young lives were lost, and I wondered why it was
them and not Wally.
Heinz and I walked silently out of the woods. “It was a terrible time, but we
are friends now,” he said gently when we reached his car. I felt paralyzed by
his words, unsure until that moment how Heinz felt about bringing me here. We
were both acutely aware how the scars of war from a lifetime ago still feel
fresh today. I looked Heinz in the eyes, recognizing I was not alone in fighting
back the emotion bubbling over from a knot of guilt, gratitude, pain, and
forgiveness that we were unraveling together. What would Wally think of me
touching down in Wesel, finding solace with a wartime enemy, turned friend?
●The path to Heinz and Wesel was meandering. But, it began in earnest with two
earth-shattering findings. First, there was Super 8 color footage of the mission
over Wesel captured from a bomber in Wally’s formation. It purportedly showed
both crashes. Second, two airmen on Chandler’s crew miraculously survived the
crash, even though they’d been thrown from the bomber on impact.
For the better part of a year, finding either proved elusive. And in a twist of
fate typical of this stranger than fiction story, it was connections with the
Chandler and Crandell crews that led me to the crash site and the footage I’d
long sought.
“What would Wally think of me touching down in Wesel, finding solace with a
wartime enemy, turned friend?”
The first break came when I tracked down and cold-called the younger brother of
Crandell, the pilot killed over Wesel. Joe Crandell wove the pieces of his
brother’s story to find his crash site with the wartime footage of the mission,
visiting shortly after in the year 2000. He agreed to send me a map that would
lead me to it, but warned it was difficult to find. When I asked if Joe knew
anyone in Wesel who could show me the way, he described a man he’d never met
named Heinz.
Crandell received a card from Heinz and his wife some years after he left a
plaque at his brother’s crash site in Wesel. The German couple wrote that they’d
noticed the plaque on a bike ride, and they were now leaving flowers at the site
regularly, which they wanted Joe to know.
“How did they know to contact you?” I asked. Joe explained he’d left his address
on the back of the plaque, and indicated I should do the same if I left
something to honor the crew behind. Armed with Heinz’s address, I posted him a
letter, hoping this shot in the dark would get me to the crash site in Wesel.
Inspired by Crandell’s tale of connecting with Heinz, I created my own plaques
in remembrance of the crew to leave at the crash site, including my contact
information, wondering if it would lead me to another thread of Wally’s war.
Finding the footage of the mission over Wesel led me across the country to
Ontario, California. After a prolonged search for the two survivors of the
Chandler crash, I found a ninety-six-year-old Bob Vance whose details matched
that of one of the Chandler crew survivors. I called the phone number listed in
the White Pages. A woman answered. When I asked to speak with Bob Vance, I
expected her to say I had the wrong number. She didn’t. A moment later, Bob
Vance was on the phone.
A month later, I sat in his living room in southern California on a quiet
cul-de-sac framed by the San Gabriel Mountains. We spent two days together. He
didn’t much like talking about the war, even now. But he’d kept meticulous
records of it. He showed me the POW tag strung around his neck after he was
captured in Wesel. From his shed, Bob pulled the flying boots he’d worn when he
crashed.
When Bob gave me the Super 8 footage of the missions I’d long searched for, it
was not excitement I felt but nerves at finally seeing the horrors over Wesel in
vivid color. In the grainy video, I saw Wally’s bomber come into view for a few
sweet seconds. It bobbed in the air, flying low over Rhineland fields.
A still from video footage showing Chandler’s B-24 in upper right just before
the crew crashed in Wesel, GermanyI could envision inside the silver fuselage
Wally’s ten-man crew, still shocked and adrenaline racing: hours from home base,
hours deep into the mission, years deep into the war. In fifteen minutes, they’d
lost so much.
For all that I uncovered about those fifteen minutes of hell over Wesel, I never
did uncover the exact circumstances of Wally’s Purple Heart. I know 20
millimeter machine gun fire tore into his left thigh, but not precisely where or
when it happened.
The wound would have been messy, bloody, and painful on the ground. In the air,
it would be agonizing. With no medical care beyond what his crew could offer, he
writhed in pain on the two-hour journey back to Shipdham.
Wally was lucky to make it back at all, even blood-soaked with bullets and
shrapnel lodged in his body. His wounds too serious to be treated on base, an
ambulance rushed him to a nearby field hospital that specialized in treating the
most gruesome flak wounds.
On the other side of the Atlantic, Wally’s mother, Helene, received the telegram
every mother dreaded: her son had been wounded over Germany.
The telegram Helene Truslow received in California after her son Wally was
wounded over GermanyThe torn envelope and yellowed telegram are one of the few
artifacts of Wally’s war. It was this scant Western Union message that was the
first breadcrumb back to Wesel, on the hunt for the story behind Wally’s Purple
Heart. At first blush, I wondered why Wally had been the unlucky one of his crew
to be hit.
But when I watched the Super 8 footage of the mission that Bob Vance gave me, I
saw the war through Wally’s eyes for the first time. It reframed everything I
knew about his war and thought about him as a man. Watching the Chandler and
Crandell crews shot down within inches of my grandfather’s bomber, I saw Wally
as lucky. The shrapnel in his leg didn’t kill him. His survival over Wesel and
throughout the war was against all odds. Statistically, he shouldn’t have lived.
But he did.
After the war, Wally’s memories of war intensified with time, cracking him from
within. He struggled to survive surviving. Silence was the only weapon left in
his arsenal. He evaded his crew’s lifelong bond and their many reunions. He
stayed far from the inside of a B-24. He didn’t speak of the war. All in an
effort to contain it, to lock it away.
●Heinz was newly seven years old when Victory in Europe Day marked the end of
war on May 8, 1945. It was the first period of peace Heinz would know in his
lifetime. After I left Wesel, Heinz and I corresponded via email about this
tumultuous period.
Despite the calm that peacetime suggests, Germany remained in chaos. Heinz’s
family was left homeless by Allied bombings that leveled their Wesel home.
Newly-freed POWs, marauding through Germany, took revenge on civilians. Heinz’s
family lived in constant fear.
Ten days after the war’s official end, Heinz’s very pregnant mother gave birth
in a cellar. With no medical care available, Heinz’s father—a lawyer—assisted
with the birth.
The first years post-war were replete with suffering and deprivation far worse
than wartime. The Reichsmark was worthless. Food rations were catastrophic.
Heinz remembers, "The Cardinal of Cologne declared that it was not a sin for
people to steal coal from the railways for their heating." Twenty people,
Heinz’s family included, crammed into a single home.
There was no school for three years. In 1948, when he was ten, Heinz finally
returned to the classroom. Most vivid amongst his post-war memories is his
gratitude for the pea soup and cornbread served by American forces at his
school.
It wasn’t until 1951 when Heinz’s parents were able to rebuild their family home
that had been leveled six years earlier.
For Heinz, in war and peace, Wesel would always be home.
●In the late afternoon, I said farewell to Heinz with a warm embrace and
retreated back to the bank of the Rhine. Sipping that glass of crisp wine, I was
lost in the barges floating down the glistening river, the laughter of children
and parents enjoying the Easter holiday, and remnants of Montgomery’s bridge
that hinted at the city that once was. The sun set over the Rhine, and I boarded
the train from the platform at Wesel early the next morning.
The seasons changed. Leaves fell from the copse of trees at the crash site in
Wesel, blanketing the plaques I left there six months before. That fall, I
received a letter from a woman named Jan, who’d just returned from Wesel. She’d
visited the crash site of her father’s crew for the first time, and while there,
she found the plaques I’d left for Crandell, for her father who left for war
when she was an infant and never returned. She hoped we could talk.
●Wally took his war to the grave. A lifetime later, I formed friendships across
generations and geographies, bonds formed in the darkest days of war, recovering
what he had lost. 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-oldAli 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—emphasizing its
wisdom, and reminding us of our responsibility to protect what is valuable and
irreplaceable. Her humorous and insightful prose immediately immersed me,
revealing what magic may be found when we choose to open our senses to the world
beyond ourselves.
“Recovery is making use of something once thought worthless,” the author writes.
“I might have been washed up but I can be renewed.” In The Outrun, recovery
translates into healing in the midst of destructive behavioral patterns.
Liptrot’s relationship with alcohol was destroying her life: unable to keep a
job or maintain precious relationships, she drank to the point of
life-threatening tremors. She had tried, with little success, to stay sober in
the past. But finally she reached a turning point—multiple court appearances and
a violent attack on her life pushed her to enter a rehab program. “I was faced
with the reality of doing it for myself,” Liptrot confesses, “which is really
the only way.” Choosing herself meant retreating from the world that was
familiar to her but could no longer serve her.
Selkie (2021) by Courtney W. Brothers | ink on paper | 12 x 12 inchesThe memoir
is structured in staccato chapters retelling the author’s journey to find
internal healing. Instead of conventional chronology, her narrative weaves
scenes from her former experiences of addiction in London, meditations on her
childhood, and descriptions of her contemporary environment in Orkney—a series
of disjointed vignettes reflecting the complexity of her psychological
landscape.
Replacing the thrill of intoxication with the potency of the sublime, Liptrot
transforms herself through an intense process of purification (indeed,
“sublimation” denotes the purification of substances in chemistry, or
transmutation to a higher state of spiritual existence). Her descriptions of the
ecosystem around her reveal an insatiably curious individual making meaning out
of mundane materials. She introduces us to ambergris—a rare, valuable substance
used in perfumery which originates in the stomachs of sperm whales. Through her
distinctive lens we learn about lambing season, the history of global trade
routes, corncrakes, selkies, and constellations.
“Replacing the thrill of intoxication with the potency of the sublime, Liptrot
transforms herself through an intense process of purification.”
Liptrot’s intertwining of ecological processes with local lore locates magic in
everyday life. In contrast to the illusions and distortions that characterized
her long season of inebriety, she tells us of naturally occurring wonders such
as the Fata Morgana, which suggests the kind of sober experience that helps
soothe her recovery. Almost an ephemeral hallucination, the superior mirage is a
phenomenon of light bending as it passes through layers of air at different
temperatures. “A Fata Morgana can be seen yet never approached,” Liptrot
explains. “It always remains on the strip of the horizon.” Echoing Kant, who
characterized the sublime as being uninhibited by limitations, the author’s
encounters with the sublime in nature usher her toward a deeper understanding of
her potential, replacing the faux sublimity she once sought in the depths of a
bottle.
Amy Liptrot’s first day of sobriety fell on the Spring Equinox. Each solstice
and equinox since then has marked another quarter year of sobriety. On one
particular summer solstice she ran naked circles around a neolithic structure
that she’d previously noticed after looking for corncrake. That night, the pile
of stones had interrupted her fantasies of spotting the enigmatic bird.
Returning on the longest day of the year, she celebrated the cycles that
dependably governed the earth, relishing the meteorological pivot that
commemorated her own. The witching hour found her far from any
nightclub—orbiting rocks much older than addiction, enraptured in the dry core
of her being.
Today, scrolling through Liptrot’s Instagram, I’m perusing pictures of her
adventures in nature. I’m comforted to see snapshots of her beautiful family,
daily swims in an icy sea, and the seals at Papay, where she found solace time
and again.
Her most recent post features old photos from late nights driving around Orkney,
listening for the elusive corncrake. Her caption confirms that these weeks
around midsummer still feel full of possibility for her. She’s still looking for
night-shining clouds, keeping her ears out.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—emphasiziLyle 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 after she was born,
Em arrived at the hospital in a red REACH helicopter.
The flight delivered the medevac team in fewer than fifteen minutes, whereas my
drive to the hospital took forty. It felt like hours, despite the clock on my
dashboard telling me otherwise. The scientific definition of speed is distance
divided by time. During my drive I imagine new units of measure: times per
minute I worried about Em, thoughts per hour of Allison in the maternity ward,
trying to recover without me by her side.
For the two and a half days since Em’s birth, I’ve been clinging to every detail
in the present. Even when I tried to take a break from the turmoil inside the
hospital, I saw the landing pad, an empty square in the middle of a languid
summer evening. I found myself in freefall again.
●We’ll learn later that Em suffers from cerebral palsy (CP), caused by a lack of
blood and oxygen to her brain when she was born. We’ll learn that her particular
type of CP is called dystonia. It’s marked by involuntary muscle contractions
and movements, and typically develops after an injury to the basal ganglia
portion of the brain. We’ll learn of the damage to her brain when she’s two
weeks old. When it comes, the official diagnosis will feel more like a formality
than a big revelation, but that won’t make the consequences any easier to
handle.
CP is a life-long muscle movement disorder. Although the severity can range
drastically, for Em, it means she won’t crawl, hold her head up consistently, or
even swallow properly. She’ll receive her nutrients through a feeding tube. Her
physical and occupational therapies will help, but only incrementally and
extremely slowly. It may take her several years to learn to eat or walk or
talk—if she ever does.
Em’s condition will make me acutely aware of the relationship between
possibility and time. While she’s young, her brain will have enough
neuroplasticity to form new pathways around her injury. For some while, there
will be a chance for real improvement. Those pathways, though, will never be
perfect, and so we’ll have to throw the typical baby developmental milestones
out the window. How long it takes Em to do certain physical activities is not
important. Our only goal is for her to be able to do them at some point in her
life—if possible.
I’ll have to adjust my expectations, even to let go of them. It won’t be easy;
Em’s limitations will be a daily reminder of the trauma of her birth. Although
the intensity of the trauma will fade with time, it will always be in the
background, ready to stop the clock at any moment. But now, despite my distorted
experiences of time, I find myself hopeful for the value of presence—recognizing
the triumph of small improvements.
●Nine months after the trauma of Em’s birth, we’re at the Stanford Children’s
Specialty Health clinic in San Francisco for a neurology appointment. We are
meeting with Em’s neurologist, Dr. Morris, who does a quick evaluation of her
reflexes and asks us some questions about her progress.
Things have been going more smoothly at home lately. Em’s been sleeping better
(which means Allison and I have, too). She’s been retching less often. Her
therapies have progressed steadily. Time has advanced more normally, giving us
room to breathe. But lately, Em’s started doing something new—something that
babies usually grow out of by her age.
When we place her flat on her back, she startles. Her arms fly out wide to her
sides. Her hands try to grasp something, and it looks as if she feels like she’s
falling. Then she screams. I’ve taken a video of this, though I’m sure it’s
nothing to be concerned about. As I show Dr. Morris the clip on my phone, I wait
for her to tell us that it’s a phase—that there’s nothing to worry about; that
we can drive Em home, eat snacks in the car, let this visit fade behind us.
But when the video ends, I look at Dr. Morris. Her brow is furrowed. I feel time
slipping.
“Can you show that to me again?”
I restart the video. It’s as if I’m watching her in slow motion. Her eyes move
from my phone to Allison, then to me. She inhales through her nose and exhales
from her mouth. After nine months of absorbing the challenges that have followed
Em’s birth, I’ve developed an ability to sense the arrival of bad news.
“I’m a little worried about this,” she says. “There’s a chance that this is
something called infantile spasms. They’re a form of seizure and they can be
very serious. I’d like to do another EEG study on her.”
My body feels like it’s heavy and floating at the same time. Like I’m suspended
in molasses. But I find words to tether me to this moment and string them
together:
“Okay, when should we schedule that?”
“No scheduling,” she says. “We’re admitting her for an overnight stay.”
“But knowing that it will happen doesn’t mean I know when. Trauma doesn’t wait
for permission to reassert itself.”
The crisis of Em’s birth returns in an instant, transforming the room’s silence
from banal to threatening. I thought I was an hour from home, but this news
thrusts me back into a sea of uncertainty—a present I can’t see beyond. I should
have known that something like this would happen; we have a child with an
erratic medical condition, and unexpected complications are bound to arise. But
knowing that it will happen doesn’t mean I know when. Trauma doesn’t wait for
permission to reassert itself. It simply ambushes you.
When Dr. Morris leaves the room, I notice the clock on the wall has stopped
ticking: 11:52 a.m.
●Just over two years later, I’m in our backyard relaxing in our new spa with my
twelve-year-old stepdaughter, Sara. The jacuzzi was a pandemic purchase.
Apparently many other people had the same idea, since it took over three months
to arrive. We’re still in the honeymoon period, using it every day.
Em is asleep in her room. I can see her on the video monitor resting on the
patio table. Almost three years after her birth, my constant worry has waned.
We’ve gained some semblance of routine. But I can’t help glancing at the
monitor, because when trauma returns, I know it won’t knock. It will come
barging in.
I lean my head back in the warm water, thinking about the trip that Allison, Em,
and I made earlier today. We drove to San Francisco for Em’s latest eye doctor
appointment at UCSF—a routine check-up after her eye surgery three months ago.
The short trip was remarkable. The drive there, the appointment, and the drive
home totaled nearly four hours that Em went without music. Usually she fusses if
we don’t play it. Though Em is unable to talk, she spent the ride making happy
noises, looking out the window from her car seat.
In the past, car trips were awful. Em’s uncontrollable muscle movements made
riding in the car seat unbearable. I was always the one driving, which meant I
couldn’t help while Allison tried to comfort her. The only respite we had from
Em’s distress was achieved by playing “Old MacDonald” on a constant loop. Time
crawled.
Lately, my frustration is reduced (though I still have “Old MacDonald” looping
in my head the whole drive home). The gaps and intrusions in time manifest more
subtly. CP is a life-long disability—I still deal with the trauma of Em’s birth
on a daily basis. But I’m learning to adapt, and to understand what our life
will look like in the future, even if I can’t predict it.
Today’s trip wasn’t what most people would call normal. We fed Em meals through
a feeding tube and I wheeled her into the hospital in a specialty stroller. But
it finally felt like time was passing normally.
After we got home, we ate dinner as a family. Allison, Sara, and I played a card
game while Em played on the iPad. Allison gave Em her medications and rocked her
to sleep before heading off to bed. Now, only Sara and I are up, relaxing in the
spa.
“Whoa, check out how pruney my hands are,” Sara says, leaning toward me.
I look at her hands and then my own. “Yeah, mine are getting pruney, too. We
should probably get out. It’s a school night for you.”
She wipes a bead of water from her brow. “What time is it?”
“I have no idea.” 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 hoursAna 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 similar seizures. My husband, Peter, took our older
four children home while Nove and I took a taxi to the hospital. On the way, I
began praying as if on autopilot, asking God to protect my child and make clear
to the doctors whether this was a fever-induced fit.
“You have nothing to worry about,” the ER doctor assured me, confirming Nove had
a low-grade fever and no sign of infection. “Nove will grow out of these febrile
seizures by the time she’s five. And it’s likely this is the only one she’ll
have.”
But over the next few days, the seizures kept coming. And they were different
from Abe’s, which took over multiple parts of his body. Nove’s seizures, only a
few minutes long each, localized in her face and left arm—like rhythmic twitches
as she stared, seemingly unconscious, at the ceiling. She also stopped walking.
Then she couldn’t sit up without toppling over. And then she started to scream.
“She has an ear infection,” the next ER doctor confirmed. Worried about the
combination of an identified source of infection and repeat seizures—signs the
convulsions were not febrile—he admitted Nove to the hospital for a
twenty-four-hour observation period. Four days and multiple tests later, we were
still there, and no further conclusions had been drawn about the source of the
seizures. Nove was deteriorating rapidly. She had lost intentional use of her
limbs; they jerked and flew out from her body without apparent cause. She
couldn’t reach for her favorite stuffed bunny or clasp her fingers around the
doctor’s pen. She was no longer eating solids of any kind, and had barely nursed
that morning.
●Before stopping on the side of the highway, I had been on my way home to see
the four children I hadn’t held in two days, likely the last time I would see
them for a while. Nove and I were supposed to be flown out of our home in Amman,
Jordan.
In ten years working with Palestinian and Syrian refugees in the Middle East, my
husband Peter and I had multiple experiences with the Jordanian health care
system, sometimes with refugees, sometimes for personal needs. We had always
been satisfied with the standard of care. But now, four specialists told us we’d
exhausted all options when it came to testing and diagnosing our regressing
baby.
“If you can get her out,” our pediatrician said, “get her out. Get her somewhere
with more advanced testing.”
Everything was approved. Multiple specialists signed off on the urgent need of
an air-ambulance. A world-class hospital in London approved Nove for immediate
admission. Our insurance authorized our request and arranged a medevac company
in Istanbul, Turkey to send a plane—one equipped with a doctor, nurse, and the
IV set-up Nove required—to shuttle us from Amman to London. But we still had two
more days to wait because important people in important offices from all of
these aforementioned places needed time to sign important papers. While pages
transferred from desk to desk until someone scratched a perfunctory signature,
my baby got sicker. And my prayers became more desperate. Desperate for a
diagnosis, for a cure, for calm. Desperate for clarity of meaning or purpose to
all that was unfolding, for the assurance that it was all going to be okay.
Desperate for faith itself. The divine protection I’d been asking for seemed as
slow-coming as the bureaucratic scribbles we required to access Nove’s
life-giving care.
I had reached the end of any power held by my American passport or bank account.
From the start, I’d been aware of my privilege and what money could buy. The
first day Nove underwent her first brain EEG, the nurse informed me the
technician required two hundred Jordanian dinar—just shy of three hundred U.S.
dollars.
“Do you still want the test?” she asked.
I glared at her. “Of course! The money doesn’t matter!”
“Of course.”
My shoulders fell slack as realization crept in. Oh, God. How many parents
aren’t able to say “Yes”? Afterwards, I would agree to all of Nove’s following
tests with a guilt-ridden gratitude. We had the resources to help keep my child
alive, and the thought that other mothers and fathers couldn’t do the same was
overwhelming.
●I slammed my fist onto the dashboard and unleashed one last guttural roar. I
didn’t have time to wait around for God to answer my burning question about why
this was happening, or care if He was offended by my obscenity. I had to see my
four other children that I hadn’t seen in days, and time was of the essence. In
a couple hours I needed to return to the hospital and try to nurse Nove again.
Taking a deep breath, I wiped tears from my cheek with the back of my hand and
used the neck-line of my shirt to dab my nose.
Merging onto my neighborhood exit, my longing for my children peaked. I had been
so absorbed with Nove the past week that most details of my other kids’ lives
were off my radar. I hardly knew which friends were watching what children, had
no idea if anyone had eaten a fruit or vegetable in days, and had even forgotten
to ask Peter if they were all sleeping through the night.
Walking up to the front door, I saw my five-year-old, Jed, pressing his face
against the window and waving his arms at me. He’s been waiting for me. Two long
days had left me pining for my children, and Jed’s innocent excitement revealed
he’d felt the same. Swallowing the lump in my throat and pushing down the guilt
for those extra minutes I spent crying on the side of the road while my children
eagerly awaited my return, I forced a smile.
“I’m home!” I yelled through the window.
Within seconds, four affection-hungry babes surrounded me in the foyer of our
apartment. Kneeling on the floor, little padded hands rested on my arms and
shoulders, small noses brushed against my cheeks, and the chill of the damp, sad
December day thawed under the warm embrace of tiny limbs. I wished it could last
forever.
But it didn’t. It couldn’t.
Driving back to the hospital, I passed the pull-off where, only a couple hours
before, I’d flung four-letter prayers towards Heaven. The warmth of being with
my big four dissipated, and I steeled my heart as I returned to my hurting baby
and the acute reality of questions—both medical and spiritual—that remained
unanswered.
●Before the triplets were born, Peter and I spent four years working on the
Jordanian-Syrian border with thousands of refugees who had just escaped a
gruesome civil war. Almost every day, bombs from Syria vibrated the ground
beneath our home and painted the night sky an eerie neon green. Day after day, I
sat with mothers and fathers who held dying children in their arms before
crossing the border. Shrapnel. Stray bullets. Assad’s regime ravaging his own
people.
I knew my shock was secondary. Still, it was painful enough that I developed
ways of numbing the graphic tales I heard over and over again. In my stronger
moments, I prayed. Turning to prayer for peace and petition was a habit I’d
built my life around when times were trying. That’s not to say that the act of
prayer dissolved the pain, but it did make discomfort at least a little more
endurable, believing that there was some redemptive glory in the mere act of
faithfulness, patience, and trust.
When I couldn’t find relief in prayer, I distracted myself. I blasted music. I
cooked. I decorated Pinterest boards. I followed Beyoncé and Ellen on Instagram
and suppressed the realities of the people around me, including my own.
Distraction proved to be shallow and often ineffective. But ping-ponging between
put-together piety and denial of the things coming apart kept me functional
enough to do my day job and preserve the familiar shape of my faith—to keep
believing that good things would come out of the bad, someday, somehow.
With Nove in her condition, I didn’t want to numb myself to what she was
experiencing. I wanted to be present for all of it. A mother’s love can reach
beyond reason, and in a strange way a part of me desired to feel what she was
feeling so that I could be close to her, so that I could bear the pain instead
of her. If there was a physical way to switch places with her—to take on her
suffering for her—I wouldn’t have hesitated. Once again, I was reminded of the
faith I was finding hard to grasp: faith that was not just running low and
wearing thin, but faith that was hard to grasp in the intangible sense of
comprehending the redeeming, sacrificial love of a God that could intervene but
wasn’t. Prayer was different for me before Nove got sick. It became more erratic
as my concern peaked and understanding waned. My Christian faith upheld that God
could take on my suffering for me, that He had. So where was God now? In the
midst of my most heartfelt pain? In the midst of Nove’s physical pain? I didn’t
see the working hand of the divine. And I certainly didn’t feel it.
Of course, great thinkers and theologians have wrestled with questions of
theodicy for centuries: the coexistence of suffering and a merciful, gracious
God. Having been nearly broken at the hands of their own respective suffering,
many have arrived at eloquent and profound conjectures about God’s intersection
with pain. But at the height of Nove’s suffering, I was incapable of hearing
wisdom or taking comfort from the words of philosophers and theologians. In
these early hospital days, my pain proved base and unrefined. Gut responses to
Nove’s illness—anger, confusion, fear—led my heart, proving to me that the
primitive “fight or flight” response isn’t just a physical reaction to a threat
but also an emotional and spiritual one, cutting off headspace where logic,
reason, or even wisdom might usually prevail. I had no desire to be propelled
forward in hope or healing by heralded greats of my faith who’d already done
their grappling with God and written about it. I even found it hard to accept
consolation from well-meaning family and friends who sent me Bible verses and
“thoughts to chew on” concerning the greatness of God.
My image of God was the only appropriate contender with whom I could enter the
ring and wrestle. After a lifetime of “staying the course,” or “fighting the
good fight,” to quote the New Testament, I felt owed an explanation.
During this first week in the hospital in Jordan, in rare moments of stillness,
I often thought back to a simple sentence I grew up hearing in church: “Jesus
wept.” This was, I believe, the bubbling up of years of my faith training. I had
long-practiced the art of choosing to see the light in dark situations. But this
was the darkest place I’d known yet, and I wasn’t wishing for any silver lining
that didn’t include Nove’s full recovery. Still, these two words found their way
into my quiet moments.
The short sentence—subject of some of the longest interpretive debates and
discussions in Christian thought—hails from a passage in the Book of John. My
faith tradition holds that two thousand years ago—in a place not far from the
Jordanian desert my family called “home”—Lazarus, a beloved friend of Jesus,
fell sick and died. In the story, Jesus heard Lazarus was fatally ill but idled
for days before making the long journey to visit his suffering friend. By the
time Jesus approached the town of Bethany, Lazarus had been dead for four days,
buried in a tomb, and mourned by many.
What follows in the Biblical passage is the account of Mary, Lazarus’s sister
and Jesus’s friend, confronting Jesus as he entered the village. She charged at
Jesus, threw herself on the ground, clawed at his sandals and cried: “If you had
been here, the one I love wouldn’t have died!”
As I sat in the hospital with Nove, I identified with Mary. I imagined her
recorded words having a similarly unbridled tone to my roadside prayers.
The Bible recounts this response to Mary’s breaking open: Jesus wept. Before
this experience with Nove, these words had been a sign to me of Jesus’s love for
Mary and her family. A sign that the Son of God had empathy for humanity.
But I was angry. There’s no plainer way to put it. I didn’t want God’s
compassion or tears. All I wanted was for my baby to be better and life to be
normal again. Mary’s story pointed to Jesus’s nearness in the chaos. For me,
though, nearness wasn’t enough. I wanted an end to the chaos. For my child, who
was barely hanging on, I needed a miracle like the life-saving one Jesus granted
to Lazarus.
●The next two days at the hospital in Amman were a jumble as we waited to go to
London. The quiet moments of Nove peacefully sleeping in my arms flew by; the
long, extended periods of semi-conscious screaming and terrible experiences
changing IV catheters and still waiting for the medevac team felt unending. The
source of infection and swelling in Nove’s brain—encephalitis—remained
ambiguous. What we did know was that the encephalitis was causing the seizures
and collapse of mental and physical capabilities. I wondered with each passing
hour whether she was losing ground she wouldn’t be able to regain.
Finally, after six days, it was time to leave. The flights to London were
smooth, but difficult. I went alone with Nove—Peter and the kids followed later
on a commercial flight—and held Nove on my lap for the nearly three hour trip to
Istanbul, then the next four hours from there to London. She writhed in pain and
confusion. I did my best to comfort her. The hardest part of the trip was the
final, hour-long ambulance ride from the small airport where we landed to the
hospital in downtown London. Having hardly slept on the plane, Nove was beyond
tired. Fire lit up my back from holding an almost-toddler in awkward positions
for nine straight hours.
But my discomfort dissolved when we arrived at the hospital. A team of doctors
and nurses were waiting for us at close to midnight with files and clipboards in
hand. I’ll never forget the sight of them standing in that hallway.
“We’ve been studying Nove’s case today, and we’d like to dictate it to you as we
understand it,” the leading pediatric neurologist said. “Stop us if we get a
detail wrong or leave something out.”
I didn’t have to interrupt once. The team quoted exact dates, times, and lengths
of seizures. They listed each test undergone and what the results had or had not
revealed. They told me of their plan for the next seventy-two hours: what
additional tests Nove faced, what they had discussed as plausible causes for her
deterioration, and what they hoped to learn about her case.
“Right now,” the doctor wrapped up, “I want you to sleep. Both of you. It’s what
you need the most.”
At his words, my knees buckled and I hunched over my baby. Relief let loose and
so did the tears. Multiple hands found my shoulders and back, and someone lifted
a sleeping Nove out of my arms.
“You can let your guard down now,” a nurse whispered while helping me into a
chair. “We’ve got you. Both of you.”
●The next day was Christmas Eve. Peter and the kids made it to London and
settled into an Airbnb. My sister-in-law, who had come from the States with her
family to support us, strung colorful lights around the room, and I tethered
seven felt stockings to the bars of Nove’s crib. Despite the joy of the season,
the day felt heavy to me. It was partly due to my own drawn-out displeasure with
my crass, doubtful questions I’d been asking of God. Having relied on my faith
as a constant despite circumstance, I was beginning to grieve this loss of
assurance.
But the day also felt heavy for another reason: I knew what was happening at
midnight.
Nove was scheduled to receive a slew of tests, ranging from slightly
uncomfortable to painful. Because of her age and current medications, she could
only receive a light sedation to help her through them.
At a quarter to midnight, a team of four doctors and nurses entered our room. I
was to stay in the parents’ waiting area across the hospital floor. Before I
exited, I took one last look at my sleeping Nove. Her golden hair glowed in the
soft light opposite her crib. I hovered my hand above her small back, not
wanting to wake her, and mouthed, “I love you.” Squeezing my stomach tight, I
released a deep breath as slowly and evenly as I could, trying to relax a taut
bundle of nerves and guilt from leaving my baby to suffer for her own good.
For ten minutes I sat in silence in the small parents’ room of the pediatric
long-term care unit. Peter and I had decided it was best for him to stay back
with the other children, but now I regretted it. I felt alone, helpless. Closing
my eyes, I attempted to pray. I tried to get back to the Ana I knew—a person who
trusted that God was good and who prayed from a stance of faith, not fear. A
person who could lean into the nearness of God and sense Jesus weeping over my
child’s suffering and my pain. But since my moment on the side of the road a few
days ago—since screaming an over-simplified admittance that God wasn’t showing
up for me or Nove the way I believed was within the realm of possibility—I had
found it hard to pray. I managed to utter “help her, help her, help her” a few
times. But my honest, raw sentiments hadn’t changed, and my questions still
hadn’t been answered.
I glanced down at my phone: three minutes until midnight. Earlier that
afternoon, I updated friends and family about Nove’s tests via Instagram and
Facebook. I asked anyone who was able to join me in singing “Silent Night” at
midnight London time—a song of hope for my baby as she began the challenges this
night would bring. At exactly 12 a.m., I started singing. I barely made it
through one line before I began choking on the words. Prayer wasn’t the only
thing that now felt disingenuous. Singing “all is calm” about a “tender infant”
did, too.
I persevered for Nove, but as I reached the second verse, I heard it: a
terrible, chilling scream from down the hall. I pulled my knees into my chest
and covered my ears. My carol halted, overtaken by an audible lament.
Simultaneously, I felt a buzzing from my phone, followed by a series of dings,
one after another, growing in number and frequency. Concerned it could be Peter
trying to reach me, I took a breath and peeked at the screen. Instead of a
single message from Peter, I found dozens of notifications, from photos to
videos, of friends and family across the world, sharing that they were singing
for Nove: individuals standing and singing in their kitchens, families lifting
their voices in front of sparkling trees, entire congregations clutching lit
candles and releasing words of hope in honor of my baby.
That Christmas Eve, Nove endured four lumbar punctures (more popularly known as
spinal taps), a handful of throat and nasal swabs, and a tray-full of blood
samples. I heard the sound of those tests; it was anything but a “silent night.”
And yet, as Nove slept and recovered from her tests, a flicker of unexpected
comfort rose in me. It wasn’t a superficial presumption that, in the end,
everything would be okay. And it didn’t erase the fact that my child spent an
hour of the night screaming in pain. But it was enough hope to last until
morning.
●Over the next two weeks, we got answers. Nove’s life-threatening bout of
encephalitis was caused by the common cold. More specifically, Influenza A and
something called “Corona.” For us, clear results meant medication could be
tailored to Nove’s needs. She responded quickly and well. Her doctors ran
further tests to decipher whether a predisposition to traumatic reactions of
this nature existed, and if we needed to be concerned about future
life-threatening occurrences. Nothing came back conclusive, but our spirits
lifted as Nove recovered her strength. The day after a specialist had told us it
might be six months until Nove regained her ability to walk, she pulled herself
up to standing. The following day, she took several individual steps. In less
than a week, she toddled around the hospital floor, awkwardly bending arms and
legs as if she remembered them working for her before, but wasn’t certain she
could trust them presently. My baby’s hesitant physical movements served as a
visual for what was taking place deep down inside my faith world—trying to
recover rhythms and grace of the past, unsure I could trust them to sustain me
beyond the moment but hopeful that something was beginning to rebuild.
Soon, Nove’s rehabilitation surpassed my emotional recovery. Over a few months,
with the help of six to nine rehab appointments each week and heavy daily doses
of anti-seizure medication, she returned to the Nove we remembered. And yet,
pain changes a person. It changed how I perceived God and understood the
workings of my own faith. Before Nove got sick, I didn’t have the vantage point
to realize how transactional and expectation-laden my belief system was. As
often and easily as I had professed the “goodness” or “greatness” of God, I had
rarely questioned how I defined or understood good or great. I assumed they
meant I served a God who agreed with my interpretation of these words—health,
safety, stability, happiness, abundance. In a way, I realized I had approached
prayer as a magical incantation, that, if I said the right words the right
number of times from the right state of heart (“right” being a relative word),
my deepest desires would be granted. One might think that a thorough reading of
the Biblical canon and an honest glance at the lives of fellow Christians around
me would have abated these rosy presumptions. But it wasn’t until Nove’s
illness—and really, my lingering trauma months after her physical recovery—that
my faith perspective seismically shifted.
Nove at the hospital in AmmanNove todayNove todayIn March 2020, two months after
we returned to Jordan with our healing Nove, I had a strange and unusually-vivid
dream. I was walking on the shore of a long, cloudy beach, staring out at a grey
sea. The cold water lapped against my ankles and I was fixated on what looked
like people stranded far out in the middle of the ocean. They seemed to be
drowning—like the swelling waves were about to overcome them. From behind me, I
heard Nove’s voice.
“Mama, come! Mama, come!”
I turned to see her standing on a small, grassy slope, rays of sun bouncing off
her blonde head, a smile stretched across her face. She held her hand out toward
me, beckoning me to join her, to play with her. I longed to leave the sea
behind, to run after my joyful toddler. But I was rooted to my spot in the sand,
and troubled by what I thought I’d seen in the waters. The dream shifted, and I
found myself standing in my kitchen. My five children were seated around our
table, eating snacks and laughing freely.
“Mama, come!” someone called.
But I couldn’t peel myself away from the window above the sink. In the dream, my
line of dusty olive trees was replaced by a swirling sea. Again, I saw people
struggling against its violent waters. Torn between beloved babes and struggling
strangers, I hesitated before reaching for the latch on the window.
I don’t know what would have come next. I woke to a weird sensation of longing
and helplessness. In vivid pictures, the dream expressed the spiritual
restlessness I felt during my waking hours. Like I was living between a tension
of genuine thankfulness that, once again, all five of my children were healthy
and under one roof, and the newfound awareness of what it actually feels like to
live through a first-hand traumatic experience.
●It has been well over a year since that dream, and nearing a year and a half
since Nove fell sick. I’ve spent countless hours wading through lingering
questions related to suffering, recovery, and faith that follow trauma.
Sometimes, I fear I’ve arrived at a more cynical view of faith in general. But
more often, I feel like I’ve drawn closer to—and continue to approach—a more
authentic and holistic understanding of the God I thought I knew so well before.
“I feel like I’ve drawn closer to a more holistic understanding of the God I
thought I knew so well.”
I’ve recognized that the salve to my soul-suffering began in mourning and tears:
fleeting feelings of God’s nearness amidst my audacious grief (even the kind of
grief that might communicate irreverence or a lack of propriety), and overtly
expressed empathy from my global community. My unanswered prayers for an initial
swift and complete healing for Nove forged the possibility of accepting relief
in unexpected forms. Despite my initial rejection of it, I’ve reread the
Biblical account of Mary and Lazarus over a dozen times in the past year. As
time goes by, I feel more and more a sense of completeness at the words “Jesus
wept.”
Truthfully, I’ve settled into these two words as the source of God’s answer.
This passage is a partial answer to my prayers, an answer permitting me to stay
near to pain, to take comfort in knowing that I do not weep alone, to consider
suffering as a necessary—even holy—experience of faith.
So far, Nove’s story has continued as well as I could hope: my baby has grown
into a toddler, refusing vegetables and fighting bedtimes and pointing bossy
fingers at older siblings. And while the comforting end of our medical nightmare
has undoubtedly altered the course of my life, it is the middle of her tale—the
pain, the questions, the vision of a weeping Jesus in the midst of un-silent
nights—that roots an ongoing recovery of faith and informs an expanding vision
of hope in spite of a world in pain. “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 sHadar 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 reactionary fearmongering
[https://thefederalist.com/2020/09/04/the-left-doesnt-really-want-to-abolish-the-police-they-want-to-be-the-police/]
.
While the prevailing impulse of thinkers, activists, and politicians discussing
this issue has been to turn to the future—tacitly acknowledging that many
proposals for change are without historical precedent
[https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/6/12/21283813/george-floyd-blm-abolish-the-police-8cantwait-minneapolis]
—this, too, is a form of myopia. To achieve a just system, we must also draw on
the counsel of the past—and not just in the West.
Below, we have brought together three scholars of criminal justice and law
enforcement, each of whom brings very different expertise to bear on the issue
at hand. Guiding the conversation is Hadar Aviram, a scholar of contemporary
criminal justice and civil rights in the United States. She is joined by Joel
Harrington, a historian who focuses on legal and religious aspects of social
history in Early Modern Germany, and Mohammed Allehbi, a PhD candidate
researching law enforcement in Medieval Islamic cities. Via email they discussed
the diversity of historical law enforcement, and what that means for our
contemporary moment.
Hadar Aviram: In criminology—as it is taught in the United Kingdom and the
United States—the emergence of a professional, specialized police force is
usually dated to the foundation of Scotland’s River Police in 1798. And yet your
work finds that law enforcement, in a variety of forms, precedes this period.
Tell us more.
Mohammed Allehbi: The institution of law enforcement reaches far back in
recorded history, far earlier than eighteenth century Europe. It existed in
societies within the premodern Mediterranean and Middle East, such as Ptolemaic
Egypt, the Roman and Byzantine Empires, and the Italian city states. In
particular, the Islamic world has had a long tradition of policing from its
earliest eras into the late Ottoman period. I look at the formation of dedicated
and preventive law enforcement, known as the shurṭa, in the Islamic world, a few
centuries after the birth of Islam. In the medieval Islamic Middle East and
Mediterranean, cities which had populations in the hundreds of thousands, like
Baghdad, consisted of a stratified criminal administrative system which included
magistrates, district commanders, and captains of the night watch, wardens, and
policemen.
Joel Harrington: In contrast to the Islamic world, more interventionist law
enforcement evolved gradually in Europe before the eighteenth century. During
the Early Modern Period (ca. 1450-1750), the Holy Roman Empire was a highly
decentralized entity of some three hundred states of various sizes, each
maintaining its own criminal jurisdiction. Emperors attempted to maintain some
formal coherence through legal proclamations—most notably the 1532 Criminal Code
known as the Carolina—but they had little power over local interpretation and
application. The transition in law enforcement during these centuries was a
gradual shift from the typical medieval reliance on local custom, lay
accusation, and private settlement to a much expanded role for state
authorities. In other words, beginning around 1500, we see the foundations for
the modern Western model of proactive, bureaucratic, and preventative law
enforcement.
The Early Modern notion of “police” was much more closely related to “policy,”
meaning ordinances about public health and safety. While many cities had small
numbers of dedicated watchmen or soldiers, there was nothing remotely like the
concept of “police” as a body or institution. One of the earliest European
examples I know of is the first police commissioner of Paris, appointed in the
late 1660s under Louis XIV. That said, there was an alternate form of law
enforcement very much at work before then.
HA: So, Joel, in pre-modern Europe, there’s no visibility of police officers
walking the streets?
JH: In the German city I know best, Nuremberg, there were maybe a dozen
constables patrolling a city of forty thousand people. So visible only if you’re
looking hard. “Policing” of criminal offenses from the sixteenth to eighteenth
centuries relied almost entirely on either private accusations or paid informers
(who were popularly reviled). In other words, law enforcement was highly
reactive and sporadic, with just the mildest inklings of some preventive
measures.
HA: Is this any different in the context of the Abbasid empire, Mohammed?
MA: Medieval Islamic law enforcement combined preventive, investigative, and
responsive roles. Muslim rulers needed criminal justice and policing to exert
their royal authority over law and their expanding cosmopolitan cities. The
overseer of this law enforcement institution acted as the governor of the
imperial capital or the sub-governor in a provincial capital. He and his
subordinates searched for and prevented crime with their forces, using patrols,
arrests, mass incarceration and often brutal punishments. They presided over the
whole criminal process.
HA: Were these patrols and arrests in any way reminiscent of today’s
stop-and-frisk activities?
MA: Absolutely! In cities like Baghdad and Cairo, a night watch would routinely
patrol throughout the city at all hours, while guards were stationed in various
neighborhoods, and their activities were constantly supervised by their
superiors. If the crime was significant enough, it would warrant the combined
energies of the criminal justice system, resulting in policemen hunting down
suspects in the usual places, such as taverns, gambling dens, brothels, and
abandoned areas—not too dissimilar from the hangouts described in modern
criminal fiction and detective stories.
HA: It’s difficult to talk about policing without thinking about law, and in the
periods both of you study, religion and law were not always easily separated.
What role did religion play in law enforcement?
MA: Similar to European societies during the Reformation and Counter
Reformation, imperial Muslim governments used law enforcement to demarcate
religious boundaries. Typically, they did so by arresting or punishing
individuals—either from rival Muslim sects or other faiths entirely—who acted in
a manner that upset the dominant social-religious norm. Similarly, the shurṭa
invested and prosecuted heresy or general opposition to the reigning religious
orthodoxy.
“The institution of law enforcement reaches far back in recorded history, far
earlier than eighteenth century Europe.”
Religious demographics dramatically influenced criminal justice approaches. For
example, since medieval Iraqi cities had Muslim majorities, law enforcement was
more focused on stamping out heresy or sectarianism. In the Islamic cities of
Egypt, however, a large segment of the inhabitants were Christian, which
resulted in instances where Egyptian law enforcement severely policed
non-Muslims. The shurṭa often acted according to government orders rather than
on religious sentiment, as the nature of these policies were at times impromptu
and volatile. Ultimately—though religion was an important component of law
enforcement—the shurṭa prioritized fighting crimes of a social and economic
nature.
A fascinating aspect of criminal justice and policing in the premodern Islamic
world is that it epitomizes a secular and sacred divide. While the shurṭa dealt
with the political-administrative practices of governmental law, a separate
juridical system existed to enforce religious law. These two legal systems
clashed from time to time—particularly when the shurṭa enforced non-Quranic
punishments as deterrents to crime—but this separation of law enforcement into
political and religious components is unique to the Islamic world, and adds a
new dimension to the history of criminal law. Its influence can still be seen in
the modern world.
JH: As Mohammed mentions, during the European religious reforms of the sixteenth
century, many religious and other moral offenses were criminalized and punished
by secular legal authorities, such as fornication, adultery, public drunkenness,
“bad housekeeping” (usually involving drunken, spendthrift, and violent
fathers), and so on. There was virtually no boundary between secular and
religious offenses, except sometimes in questions of jurisdiction. Suicide and
homosexuality, both considered crimes against God, were typically punished
severely, the former through public shaming and property confiscation, the
latter through corporal and sometimes capital punishment. This was generally
true in both Protestant and Catholic states. Punishment of such offenses became
less severe in the eighteenth century, but legal repercussions and social stigma
lingered long afterwards, into the twentieth century.
HA: In her book Women, Crime, and Character, Nicola Lacey reminds us that
pre-Victorian criminal fact-finding relied on reputation, rather than on
forensic evidence gathering; accordingly, juries and other actors in the
criminal justice system based their decisions on their preexisting perceptions
of the accused. How much did law enforcement in Early Modern Germany and the
Abbasid empire rely on reputation?
JH: Extensively! In deciding whether to follow up on criminal accusations,
including through the use of “special interrogation” (i.e., torture), German
legal authorities always began with the social status and reputation of the
accused. The same is true of subsequent punishment. So in a case of adultery
between a married householder and a maid, for instance, the man would likely be
given a fine and maybe some public penance, while the single, unmarried (and
often poor) maid might be publicly flogged, briefly imprisoned, and then
banished. Unemployed vagrants were similarly regarded with more suspicion and
punished more severely than property-holding citizens. But sixteenth-century
Germans by no means invented such hierarchies and in fact based their valuation
of mala fama (bad reputation) on Roman legal precedents. So there was a clear
and persistent double standard based on gender, social status, and place of
origin.
MA: Much like in Germany, law enforcement in the Abbasid empire and the rest of
the medieval Islamic world heavily relied on reputation. Some medieval Muslim
jurists argued that the shurṭa could, without witnesses, initiate the arrests
and/or torture of suspects who were known felons, habitual offenders, or even
just came from bad neighborhoods. On the other hand, these same jurists advised
that individuals with good family pedigrees and reputations should be merely
questioned, and lighter penalties applied.
HA: In the United States, the FBI has long used psychological profiling to
identify likely suspects. In the periods that you study, do you see any interest
in the psychology of suspects? For example, trying to extrapolate or estimate
why people might behave in a certain way?
MA: Honestly, I wish I had more information, as this is a fascinating topic, but
sources don’t reveal any interest by law enforcement in trying to understand the
behavioral roots of crime. They just wanted to arrest and suppress crime.
Perhaps it was still too early in the medieval Islamic period for such ideas to
be explored.
JH: Early Modern legal authorities clearly made use of psychological pressure in
interrogation, but before the seventeenth century, the emphasis was always more
on whether a suspect had committed a crime rather than why. The greater
influence of physicians during the later seventeenth and eighteenth century
resulted in more successful “insanity defenses,” with a noticeable shift in the
attribution of direct diabolical temptation to melancholy and other physical
factors in certain crimes, especially infanticide.
That said, there was tremendous popular speculation and curiosity about what
motivated some spectacular killers, such as parental child killers or serial
murderers. Many colorful pamphlets attempted to get inside the mind of killers,
offering some sense to otherwise senseless crimes. The Nuremberg executioner
Frantz Schmidt (1554-1634), whose journal I have studied, attempted such
explanations during the second half of his remarkable forty-five year career. He
theorized about social influences and personal choices among the many criminals
he punished. So it’s clearly something that a lot of people thought about, but
I’m not aware of it having a significant influence on investigations or
punishments before the eighteenth century.
HA: One of our contemporary debates involves the militarization of the police.
In the second half of the twentieth century, we’ve seen the migration of
military tactics and technology into the domestic law enforcement sphere. Joel,
is there any interaction between these two realms in Early Modern Europe?
JH: Some states, like France, had rural military units (the Maréchaussée)
specially charged with capturing or killing highwaymen and smugglers, but the
function of constables and watchmen in most cities was to raise public “hue and
cry” in the event of fire or a fleeing criminal. Some of the latter officials
had weapons, but most had no more than a club or other blunt instrument. During
the later part of the Early Modern Period, military organization, and, to a
certain degree, weaponry, played a key role in the formation of bodies closer to
what we think of as “the police.”
HA: Mohammed, do you see any spillover of military techniques into the realm of
policing in the Middle East?
MA: Actually, it was the other way around. A significant portion of the military
becomes a policing power. In the seventh century, law enforcement duties were
given to the elite corps of the Muslim-Arab tribal armies who had conquered the
Middle East and had also enforced government authority over the troops. The
government increasingly delegated criminal cases to the shurṭa, at the expense
of the judiciary, because the shurṭa had the inquisitorial power and coercive
force to search for and catch criminals.
With the rise of city life, the government needed to exert its sovereignty;
rulers turned to the shurṭa to maintain public order within this rapid
urbanization. Gradually, the shurṭa transitioned from being an elite military
corps to the overseers of the criminal justice system. Although the shurṭa were
still militarized, and the members taken from army units, they became deeply
immersed in municipal law.
Shockingly, the recruitment of members of the local population into shurṭa was
necessary because of a loss of control and diminishment of financial resources
which meant that the government could not rely on the considerable army forces
of the past. As a result, the Abbasid authorities’ “monopoly on violence”
declined (to borrow Max Weber’s famous phrase), as did the effectiveness of law
enforcement.
HA: We are at a pivotal moment in law enforcement policy, in which cultural and
political attention is focused on how much and what kind of policing we want and
need. Were these debates “political” in the periods you study? Were people
concerned with the political and social implications of the role of law
enforcement in their lives?
MA: In the first centuries of imperial Islam (c. 610–1258), the literate elite
of the Islamic world debated whether the nature of criminal justice and its
effectiveness was rooted in government policy and action, or in religious
jurisprudence. Those who favored an empowered government contended that the
shurṭa’s use of coercion, discretion, and excessive violence curbed crime and
were essential to administrative tradition. On the other hand, those who argued
for religious jurisprudence criticized the shurṭa’s lack of oversight, and their
ad-hoc judgements and practices. These critics claimed that disproportionate or
extreme penalties escalated crime and contravened sacred law. Instead, they
proposed reforms where judges and jurists would have dominant roles in criminal
law, and the criminal magistrates would act in accordance with Islamic
jurisprudence. Outside of these literate elites, the populace voiced their
dissent at the shurṭa’s autocratic methods, using riots and even urban militias,
which would attack and exile policemen.
When we compare these Muslim elites to today’s conversation around policing, we
can see parallels to today’s pro- and anti-reform groups. However, the “masses,”
so to speak, actually demonstrated against the police and even fought them.
Although there was no movement for less police control, I suspect that, had one
existed, many of these people would have gravitated toward it.
JH: Sixteenth-century political rulers in Europe realized very early on that a
key part of the price for achieving their extended territorial ambitions was
delivering on their promise to improve law and order. Even politicians in
non-democratic societies need popular support at some level. Unfortunately the
heightened popular and official expectations for better law enforcement remained
hampered by pathetically inadequate means, which contrasts with the well-funded
Abbasid system that Mohammed describes. Much of this situation owed to the
reliance on traditional methods of accusation and enforcement, with the only
“innovation” being the increased reliance on judicial torture. As I mentioned
before, even in a highly advanced city-state such as Nuremberg, there was no
such thing as “the police,” just a dozen or so “archers” and a handful of
begging beadles with ill-defined roles.
I joke that the popular cry at the time would have been “Fund the police!” but
of course back then no one could even have conceptualized an organized body
charged with investigating or catching suspected criminals. They just wanted
more robbers and killers caught, somehow. The closest analogy is the American
Wild West, where the great majority of offenders roamed freely and when some
unlucky perpetrators were actually captured, legal authorities made the most
political capital of their success with violent public executions, another
hallmark of the age.
HA: Do you see any talk of the excesses of law enforcement? Corruption,
violence, abuse of force, and maybe talk of how to prevent this and curb law
enforcement overreach?
JH: Corruption, violence, and abuse—yes! Most low-level enforcers were poorly
paid and thus relied extensively on bribery and extortion. It was a well-known
fact in most jurisdictions, and some individuals were punished on this account,
but there were no major reforms until the eighteenth century. It was also common
knowledge that many such state officials, especially informers, worked both
sides of the law, occasionally resulting in some embarrassing public scandals
for their employers.
MA: In the Abbasid era, we see a similar outcome to what Joel is describing, but
for very different reasons. Due to the shurṭa’s high ranking position and their
complete control of criminal justice, their activities were rarely supervised by
the central government unless they were not producing adequate results in their
law enforcement. Corruption, abuse of power, and even callous killings happened
regularly. There are a few notable cases where these law enforcers would arrest
someone on false charges, steal the accused’s money, and even kill the accused
to try to cover up their actions. These law enforcement agents would then even
escape retribution with the complicity of the authorities.
Such actions provoked resentment in the local population and resulted in the
formation of urban gangs to enact reprisals against these hated policemen.
Furthermore, since some policemen and informers were recruited from former
criminals, they were known to engage in criminal activities while in government
service. Although there were a few attempts to reform the system, corruption
habitually reasserted itself.
HA: How was policing funded, supported, and legitimized, and what were the
effects of this?
MA: The legitimacy of the shurṭa, as enforcers of criminal law and policing,
emerged from both their prestigious origins as the elite military corps, as well
as from pragmatic governmental need of their services. In the eighth and ninth
centuries, the shurṭa was salaried by government funds, as they were a
recognized extension of imperial sovereignty. However, financial crises caused
some governments to give the shurṭa additional duties as urban tax collectors,
which allowed members of the force to take a substantial cut of the proceeds, as
a substitute for their lack of a salary. This role caused the shurṭa to further
lose its respectability in the eyes of the public.
JH: Again, the situation was almost the opposite in Early Modern Germany. Since
there was very little ex officio policing, there were virtually no costs. This
is one of the reasons there was always such a gap between Early Modern
aspirations for better law enforcement and actual achievements. I would credit
both the stronghold of traditional thinking among authorities and their
reluctance to spend more money on something that had long been so cheap. Most
systems relied on unpaid and untrained amateurs, local notables, which political
leaders attempted to counterbalance by providing law codes and other written
instructions—which were often ignored.
The very notion of proactive, preventive policing remained an alien concept in
this time. Everyone was expected to share in the responsibility for “good public
order,” but of course political authorities shouldered the blame for failures.
As always, frustrations with perceived rising crime rates led to more severe
punishments but relatively few procedural or institutional changes.
HA: Both of you study the complex interactions between urban and state
development and law enforcement, which brings up one of the major questions in
the history of criminal justice. On one hand, some thinkers (like Norbert Elias
and Emile Durkheim) contend that things are getting better as interpersonal
violence fades away, people feel safer over time, and social change fuels a
shift from repressive to restitutive law. On the other hand, we have the more
pessimistic perspective that power has become more pervasive and pernicious,
more aimed at the soul (think of Michel Foucault’s work). How do your works
illuminate this debate?
MA: What I found in my research is that these modernization theories—rooted
mainly in generalization of Western legal history—do not fit neatly to the
developments of criminal justice in the premodern Islamic world. On the one
hand, Muslim narrative sources indicate that militarized control over law
enforcement introduced stability and expanded authority over burgeoning cities.
Conversely, these autocratic methods (particularly in periods of social and
economic crises) in Baghdad only escalated resentment among a substantial
portion of the population and actually perpetuated more violence and disorder to
the detriment of public order. In essence, the use of coercion and excessive
violence by criminal magistrates sometimes had the ironic impact of undermining
their overall mission, so ultimately, I believe the diversity of human
developments in history demands flexibility in understanding the varied ways in
which these social, legal, and political dynamics come about.
JH: Right. Like Mohammed said, these theories often lack nuance and aren’t
applicable to many non-Western contexts. Personally, I react very poorly to most
modernization theories—whether progressive or negative—not just because they are
ahistorical, but because they are teleological. Too often, such theories also
seem designed to serve current political or philosophical agendas. That said, I
think that both Elias and Foucault were on to something, just not in the
totalizing way they argued. Clearly physical violence has declined in some ways
over the past eight centuries of Western history, mainly as measured by the
homicide rate. However, I’m less convinced about other areas (such as domestic
violence), and in some respects it has increased dramatically (especially
suicide rates among the young).
What does this all mean for criminal law? I think that it lays bare the
persistence of human violence in a variety of forms, as well as the consistently
severe limitations of policing, even in a modern society with extensive
technological and personnel advantage. I also believe that it does indeed point
towards the need for more restitutive approaches—which, ironically, is what
European societies had before the Early Modern Period!
As for Foucault, I believe that he is absolutely right about a significant
internalization of disciplining methods around 1800, representing a big change
from previous reactive, externalized approaches. But I also think that his
interpretation of all social interactions as fundamentally aimed at domination
(especially “progressive” and “Enlightened” ones) is a gross mischaracterization
of humanity as a whole, based more on his own political, polemical stance than a
serious attempt to understand people of the past (or present).
HA: Much of the work I’m familiar with on Early Modern Europe highlights a power
exchange whereby violence is transmuted from an interpersonal problem-solving
mode to something that is inflicted, top-down, by the state. Is this idea
confirmed by your work?
MA: Yes. At the start of the Abbasid empire, the government monopolized the
control of violence through the shurṭa, at the expense of the elite families as
well as the rest of the civilian population in the major cities. As a
consequence, interpersonal violence diminished. In fact, the shurṭa would hunt
down anyone who took the law into his or her own hands.
The Abbasids shifted criminal law from a local Arab tribal form to a vertical,
imposed hierarchy exerted by the state over the city. However, the decline of
imperial projects resulted in the Abbasids’ successors giving jurisdiction over
criminal law to judicial bodies, such as judges, rather than solely to the
military enforcers. This change came about because the rulers’ legitimacy now
depended on the support and cooperation of both non-military notables and legal
scholars.
JH: Like Mohammed, I also find a transmutation of violence, although this was a
very gradual process in Early Modern Europe. It began in the fifteenth century
and became more firmly entrenched by the eighteenth century, but was never
absolutely established. Nor did it go uncontested—especially in the gun-loving
US.
The goal of state monopolization of violence is one of the reasons that capital
punishment rates spiked from 1550-1620 in Europe, and that the state campaign
against feuds and dueling was so intense, even into the Modern period. Notions
of personal honor and the perennial “crisis of masculinity” have always been at
the heart of resistance at the grass-roots level—even today!
HA: And of course, it’s impossible to consider violence as state power
(especially during the challenging times we are experiencing here and now)
without thinking about its main targets. Who do you see as the main targets of
state power? Were outsiders—members of marginalized groups—targeted more? Less?
Differently?
MA: Although there have been recent works examining the influence of ethnic
prejudices and hierarchies in the shaping of Muslim societies, the sources I
have read haven’t revealed ethnic biases as playing a decisive role in criminal
justice. Instead, narratives and treatises on criminal magistrates tended to
view criminals and their crimes through a social-economic lens. One text refers
to a financially marginalized part of the city as a breeding ground for crime.
Perhaps the Abbasids viewed things this way because the populations in these
Muslim metropolises were multi-ethnic. Although non-Muslim populations could be
persecuted by the shurṭa—as could heterodox Muslim sects—they were not the usual
targets of state power. In fact, non-Muslim communities generally policed
themselves with regards to internal matters, unless there was a need for
corporeal punishment of one of their members, whom they then would give up to
Muslim authorities. Records from Medieval Egypt reveal that some individuals of
the Egyptian Jewish community actually worked actively with the shurṭa, while
others were persecuted by them.
JH: Since criminal law enforcement, in my opinion, always mirrors the larger
society to some extent, it’s unsurprising that a given society’s marginalized
individuals and groups are always the most vulnerable to arrest and punishment.
In Early Modern Europe, this generally meant “foreigners” (which could include
someone from a village thirty miles away), beggars, vagrants, and locally
unpopular individuals. With the coming of the Reformation, the distinction often
applied to people of other Christian denominations, which I suppose means that
religious persecution was more common in Early Modern Germany than under the
Abbasids. Jews, of course, were always outsiders, as were Roma, and thus always
vulnerable to popular suspicions and accusations. The modern notion of race,
based primarily on skin color, was common in American colonies early on—clearly
as a means of domination—but was slower to take root back in Europe. So yes,
there was always some kind of insider/outsider filter operating, which could be
exacerbated at times by law enforcement.
HA: What about gender? In my own work with Malcom Feeley, I’ve studied how
thinking about female transgressions during the Victorian era transitioned “from
bad to mad”—their actions were no longer seen as crimes, but rather as
pathologies.
MA: The role of gender in medieval Islamic criminal justice is opaque because
authors rarely discuss female crime besides prostitution and fornication, but a
few details can be surmised. In Baghdad, there were separate prisons for men and
women with a penitentiary built solely for women, but the sources provide little
information. Some texts mention murders and robberies committed by women, but
these mentions are rare. However, Muslim authors extensively discussed sexual
crimes and the government’s attempts to curb and punish them. Conversely, given
the lucrative enterprise of brothels, the chief law enforcers of Baghdad in the
tenth and twelfth centuries would often “oversee” brothels as a source of
revenue.
Despite the sharp focus on women and sex in the accounts of crime, one
administrative treatise hints at a broader picture: in it, the head of the
shurṭa is told to consult with female informants from the criminal underworld,
which indicates that there was a greater variety of crimes committed by women
than the literary sources would indicate.
JH: In contrast to the Abbasids, gender played a very big role in Early Modern
law enforcement, although the notion of pathology was really a much later
development. Infanticide and witchcraft were the leading causes for executions
of women into the eighteenth century. Lyndal Roper has written a fascinating
book about the psychology of witchcraft accusations (Witch Craze), and argues
that anxieties about the female body and fertility in general played outsized
roles in accusations of witchcraft (and of course, infanticide). So there is
definitely something going on there.
The most common non-capital female crimes were similarly focused on women’s
bodies and sexuality: prostitution, fornication, and adultery. By contrast, men
(then and today) are much more likely to be accused of violent crimes. Obviously
the latter statistic has more to do with incidence than perception, but it is
interesting to interrogate how the two aspects are intertwined in a society’s
criminal law enforcement.
HA: Finally, historians are rightly cautious about suggesting oversimplified
lesson-drawing from historical periods that were very different from what we
experience today. But is there anything in the periods you study that can
illuminate some of the central dilemmas we face now regarding policing?
Mohammed, what can we learn from Muslim rulers about the sustainability of this
amount of police power?
MA: The period I study reveals an intrinsic link between the emergence of
militarized police and the need to extend political authority over huge urban
centers, whether they were empires or substantial polities. Furthermore, it
highlights the antiquity of the belief that suppression of crime relies on a law
enforcement that can effectively dominate cities.
Yet visions for an expansive authority over streets and human lives always gave
way to the limitations of reality, no matter the era and the society. In fact,
this level of control could never be sustained, and when combined with the
duress and violent constraints that the shurṭa exerted over society, it
ironically led to the unravelling of the very order it was attempting to
establish. Though it might be a small comfort, our effort to align law
enforcement with our own sense of justice is not a new phenomenon, and premodern
Muslim rulers, magistrates, bureaucrats, and jurists continually wrestled with
this very tension.
HA: Joel, is it too facile to draw conclusions from Early Modern European
policing to today’s world?
JH: Right, no easy lessons! But I do think that analyzing both the similarities
and differences of past societies to our own can be instructive.
For me, there are two big insights from the Early Modern Period. The first is
that despite modern societies’ much greater legal sophistication and various
powerful new technologies (forensic, surveillance), criminal law enforcement
itself remains largely reactive to problems caused by deeper individual and
collective ills. I personally believe that some kind of policing will always be
necessary, but we should unburden ourselves (and members of law enforcement)
from the expectation that some refinement of our detection and punitive methods
can eliminate the deep social dysfunctions underlying most crime.
Second, on a related note, I see the modern reliance on prisons (which Early
Modern officials deemed a cruel and unusual punishment—this from the people who
practiced drawing and quartering!) as merely the latest example of short-term
political solutions to long-term and deep social issues. Meaningful law
enforcement reform should obviously thoroughly reconsider our society’s sad
dependence on this “remedy,” as well as ways to curb the police violence, but it
should also adopt a broad and holistic approach that considers not just
restorative justice, but needs in mental health, education, social work, etc.
Obviously this is far from a new or unique opinion, but I’m hopeful that finally
running out of punitive options (or at least discarding our illusions about
them) has made such a monumental social shift possible.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 reactionNissim 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 her in a sham trial. She was released from
prison in early 2021 following a hunger strike and the application of
international pressure, though she remains trapped in the country under a travel
ban. Antonio Gramsci was an Italian Marxist. He was intentionally denied medical
care during his eleven-year imprisonment by Mussolini’s fascist government, and
died in 1937 as a result, at the age of forty-six. The quote comes from his
Prison Letters. 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 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), or were kept out
of a child's reach altogether. Her glass syringe in its neat sterilizer box. Her
ampule cutters.
"dream sequence", by way of an imagistic scatter-shot, accesses another
experience from my childhood: my great-grandmother would take me with her when
she went to the pharmacy across the street. Pharmacies were often equipped with
uncommon furniture and dispensed things that adults thought would fool me into
thinking they were something other than themselves: hematogen, for example,
which is not chocolate (look it up), or dime-sized ascorbate pills which are not
candy.
I'll let you guess what those things that swim were.
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), oMatt 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
music or even language—aural hallucination of a song or a monologue with no end.
I’m lucky enough to have the mild form, a faint but steady tone somewhere around
830 hertz (about G-sharp in the second octave above middle C). Tinnitus is not a
disease exactly. It’s more a symptom, caused sometimes by hearing loss,
obstruction in the middle ear, trauma, or ototoxic drugs. Often there is no
known cause at all. And there is no cure.
I first noticed my tinnitus while in college. Having become interested in
astronomy, I convinced a date to drive with me out to a distant field, far from
the light-polluted cities with a telescope and blanket in the trunk, so we could
view the Milky Way. As we focused on the red supergiant Betelgeuse, shoulder of
the hunter Orion, I became aware of a noise increasing in volume until it
occupied all my attention.
“Do you hear that ringing?” I asked. My date gave me a puzzled look.
“What ringing?”
I doubt I developed tinnitus that night. It was likely just the first time I was
in a space quiet enough to notice. I can’t be certain what caused the ringing.
It may be genetic, since my parents both have the symptom. More probably, it
derives from years of competitive soccer, where being able to block a fast
soccer ball with our heads was a sign of status. We looked down on those who
protected themselves with cushioned headguards or refused to head the ball. Even
if these serial concussions didn’t contribute to my tinnitus, they didn’t help.
The acne medication I took a year before my tinnitus became noticeable is
another possible culprit. But if the medication is to blame, the ringing went
unnoticed at first. In those days, I worked near loud machines and lived in a
noisy low-rent frat house.
“I've had to learn to accept tinnitus as part of myself. It is no longer a
symptom. It is permanent. It is me, and it shapes how I perceive the world.”
I recognize that I do not suffer the way people with life-threatening illnesses
and physical disabilities do. Most of the time my tinnitus is simply annoying,
like the mosquito that finds its way into your room at night while you are
trying to sleep. On some occasions, however, the annoyance has pushed me into a
feedback loop of negativity. The difficulty has been to find ways to limit the
effect. I study in places with enough background noise to mask the G-sharp. I
reduce my exposure to noise a few hours before I go to sleep. I’ve had to learn
to accept tinnitus as part of myself. It is no longer a symptom. It is
permanent. It is me, and it shapes how I perceive the world. The best way I have
found to manage the condition is a kind of deliberate inattention, training
myself to turn away from the inner noise and out toward the genuine sounds of
the world.
In Kurt Vonnegut’s well-known story, “Harrison Bergeron,” a boy genius is
required to wear a radio in his ear as an artificial impairment that scatters
his thoughts every twenty seconds. But I’ve found that my own inescapable noise
has become almost the opposite of an impairment. It has forced me to expose
myself to aspects of life I would have missed if I were absorbed in the images
on my phone or the melodies in my earbuds.
In their way, my peers, wrapped up in their hyper-personalized videos and music,
suffer from a kind of artificial tinnitus. You see them everywhere, harmonizing
to one of thousands of songs in their playlist while driving, listening to an
audiobook at the grocery store, or catching the latest episode of a true-crime
podcast while on their morning walk. They distract themselves from the sound of
the world by the noise in their ears.
Over the past few years, I find myself rarely using my earbuds in the hope of
protecting the hearing I have left and preventing the ringing from growing
louder. This choice often leaves me as one of the few people on an airplane
available to converse with other passengers. Or to chat with a Raleigh eccentric
in a coffee shop. One of my friends even worries that I’m becoming a sociopath,
to use their words, by not listening to music while lifting at the gym.
“I have opened myself up in ways that often seem all but lost. I now have
chances to form small connections with those around me.”
But in meeting other people, most who are older than me, who for whatever reason
remain AirPod-free, I’ve laughed about Don Quixote’s adventures with a
theologian from Loyola on a flight to Denver. I’ve learned while sitting in a
cafe about a barista’s dream to open her own coffeehouse. While waiting together
at the counter of a car mechanic’s shop, I’ve spoken with a plumber about the
difficulty of finding reliable workers. Such conversations are not novel or
notable but they are human. Rather than being wrapped up inside my head,
listening to a playlist on repeat, I have opened myself up in ways that often
seem all but lost. I now have chances to form small connections with those
around me.
This past year, I took a spill on my bicycle, slamming my head on a Raleigh
street. Worse than the concussions I used to get while playing soccer, this
latest concussion forced me to isolate myself in darkness for two weeks. In this
isolated state, I became even more aware of the tintinnabulation in my head. The
mental fog eventually lifted but the ringing did not fall back to its prior
volume. It was louder, much louder, and the chatting with others I had learned
to appreciate became more difficult. Even my thoughts were harder to hear.
A friend gave me a copy of Evelyn Waugh’s novel, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold.
While I read Waugh’s story of a writer on a sea voyage driven to the point of
insanity by his severe tinnitus, I had to listen to my own tinnitus.
Fortunately, I never reached the condition of Pinfold, hearing the voices in his
head plot his demise. But I can at least understand why the character (and Waugh
himself, in the experiences he fictionalized) did everything he could to flee
the ship and evade his mental stowaways. I have worked hard to eliminate
distractions from my workspace and my life, but I am left with one: the noise I
cannot cast off.
Maybe all of us have noises in our heads we wish weren’t there. It’s easy to be
consumed by the noise, making it central to experience and allowing negative
thoughts to take hold. Recovery isn’t quite the right word for managing
conditions that don’t go away, but there is a kind of getting better through
acceptance, a way of easing the effect. The first step is being intentional with
our attention.
Turning away from the hallucinatory noise in the mind generates awareness of the
sounds of the real world. By limiting internal attention—for me, deliberately
excluding the ring of the tinnitus—we can produce an increase of external
attention.
From earbuds to COVID masks, communication barriers seem to define our times. My
experience of tinnitus has been debilitating at times, especially since my bike
crash. But dealing with the condition has also proved, in its way, a good thing.
Listening, even the willingness to listen, seems rarer than it used to be.
Though my condition has grown worse, the tinnitus has at least given me one
gift. I feel more human. And that, in its own way, is a kind of recovery. 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
muErin 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 be familiar with St. Patrick’s Lorica as the invocation (based
on James Clarence Mangan's “St. Patrick's Hymn before Tarah”) that Charles
Wallace recites several times in Madeleine L’Engle’s A Swiftly Tilting Planet,
one of my favorite books from childhood.
On the plane to see my deathly ill father at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, I
thought I would write a lorica to steel myself. Things had always been strained
between us, and my sister and I had recently learned that despite our belief
that he had been a recovered alcoholic for over thirty years, he had secretly
drunk at home and was dying of cirrhosis of the liver. It felt like I was flying
straight into darkness.
I surprised myself by writing a sun-filled poem to protect him, instead. I
called upon the plants and places of northwestern Pennsylvania, where I had
grown up with him, to welcome him home. I had finally come to an understanding
about the distance that had always been between us: it’s hard to welcome another
in when you have so much to conceal. I think I’m more aligned with the Druids
than St. Patrick these days, but even Patrick knew how much strength and comfort
we can draw from the more-than-human world.
Artist’s Note
This illustration is a visual representation of Erin Robertson’s poem, “Bill’s
Lorica.” I had never heard of loricas—prayers recited for protection from
evil—until Erin told me about them, but the concept is very like the “charms” I
draw when my loved ones are in crisis. For me, drawing and painting are like
praying.
My work centers on nature and portraiture, and my guiding principle is to forge
connections between people and nature. The animals and plants mentioned in the
poem—(counter-clockwise from top left) jewel weed, fiddlehead fern, trillium,
Jack-in-the-pulpit, and grosbeak—are in this illustration as witnesses and
protectors to the passage of a life. The spiral of the fiddlehead fern is the
central portal through which the spirit, represented by a stag, finds release
and freedom along the strand. The images are framed by the border of a purple
quilt, in reference to the lines "today we weave these ragged fragments together
/ a last quilt of protection."
This artistic collaboration between Erin and me grew from an online book club,
where a group of women meet weekly during the pandemic to study books that
connect natural science, spirituality, and life. Those weekly discussions
threaded this path where words and watercolor met.
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 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.
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.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. 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.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 knowledge of piano. I
can play about two-thirds of just one song (“Once Upon a December” from
Anastasia), which I learned over a decade ago. I can’t read music, so the latter
third evades me, but in practicing the beginning, I found myself fascinated by
the body’s ability to remember in a way that seems almost totally independent of
the mind. If I miss a note while playing, I generally have to restart the whole
song. I don’t really “know” the music. The sequence is held in my hands alone,
which somehow, after all this time, can run through it on autopilot.
This poem reflects on what it means to follow one’s instinct in the process of
artmaking. I had recently written a few poems I was unhappy with; I’d known how
I’d wanted them to end when I started them, and as a result, the works sounded
stiff, even vaguely didactic. “Digression,” written in the wake of those pieces,
is a reminder to myself to allow the poem the freedom to unfurl in the process
of its own writing. The poem itself often knows more than me—can reveal its own
path to me—and its blooming requires, as the piano did, a surrender of mind to
body. Along with that understanding comes a musing on the act of creation as
something primitive, innate, capable of drawing us into a layer of ourselves
that is more natural and intuitively connected.
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 knKirsten 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
alongside so many millions.
Back in Connecticut, my mother
dreams about flowers while
our house is lifted and rebuilt.
She loved her gardens dearly.
She taught me their varieties,
how some of the prettiest petals
belonged to weeds. I think about
her devastation when the flood—
its chemical, septic legions—
made the soil barren.
The summer after was silent—
even the evergreens were dead—
until a single rose dared to bloom.
V.
My family’s living room glows gold
in the noon’s summer light as it streams
through the open windows. The walls
and floor are new, yet hung
with old familiar photos. My mother’s laugh
is carried from the garden, where
she packs soil around seedlings
(they are her children now that I
am grown). My father mows the lawn
and hums while my dog turns green
from rolling in the grass. “Well?”
my mother asks. “What do you think?”
there are flowers blooming every-
where we dance in the salty ocean air
Poet’s Note
In October 2012, Hurricane Sandy pummeled the Atlantic shoreline, causing
extensive destruction across the board. My coastal hometown in Connecticut was
flooded by Long Island Sound. The water reached four feet above the floor in my
family’s home. At the time, I was living and working in New York City, quite
naïve to the true damages that had been sustained. It was only within the
aftermath and ensuing road to recovery that I fully came to understand the
difference between a house and a home. I grew up going to the beach to find
moments of inner peace and solitude. My most vivid memories of this time are
saturated with feelings of rage, sadness, loss, and betrayal. This poem is an
homage to many different aspects of my life: my parents; the house I too often
took for granted; the home they built inside; the process of not only rebuilding
a residential structure, but also family bonds; the simultaneous beauty and
trauma of nature; and the changing tides of the ocean helping me to better
embrace the changing tides within myself.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
aMeghan 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.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.