Issue 3

Searching

Views from Walden Woods

| A Triptych

Lisa McCarty | The True | Photography
Left to Right: Autumn, View from the Emerson-Thoreau Amble (2018) | Autumn, View from Walden Woods (2018) | Concord Grape Vine, Ralph Waldo Emerson House (2018) Artist’s Note The images featured in this issue are from my series Transcendental Concord (Radius Books, 2018). The series is a visual interpretation of transcendentalism: a literary, philosophical, and social movement that developed from a community in Concord, Massachusetts. Through this project—which involved equal parts photographing, walking, and reading—I sought to pay homage to the transcendentalists and make images that reflect their philosophy. Over the course of a year, I explored the landscape that inspired them as well as where they lived and wrote. While on these pilgrimages, I photographed specific places in Concord referenced in transcendentalist writings. I photographed simply, wandering on foot with a film camera. I photographed deliberately, with reverence toward the natural world, observing variations large and small in the environment. And I photographed experimentally, incorporating long exposures as well as camera movement from photographing while walking. Although I never expected to see exactly what the transcendentalists saw, I hoped to feel something of what they felt, searching the landscape for traces of history and a sense of interconnection.

Reaching for the Stars

Samantha George | The Necessary | Artwork
Reaching for the Stars, micron pen on illustration board, 10" x 8", 2021American Dream, photograph, 10" x 8", 2021 Artist’s Note For so many people, America represents a place of new beginnings and new opportunities. That’s why in 2007, my family traveled over 8,000 miles to America from our hometown of Kerala, India. Like so many immigrants, we came to America in the search of better education, better job opportunities, and a better life for me and my brother. My parents had to work tirelessly to build themselves a home. Yet through this struggle, we've built ourselves not only a home but a life: a life that, in all likelihood, we could not have replicated or enjoyed back in India. In my artwork, I sought to capture this search for the American Dream that many immigrants and minority communities hope for but often struggle to achieve. Still, their determination to provide a better life for themselves, for their families, and for future generations is unflinching, even in the face of tribulation. Whether from India like my family, whether from Afghanistan like thousands of our newest neighbors, or whether from across the Mexican border, those who seek to call America "home" should be welcomed with hands as open as theirs that—like the photo—are reaching out.

Series of paintings for Symposeum by Lucy Villeneuve

Lucy Villeneuve | The Human | Artwork
Lemonade, acrylic on canvas, 20" x 24" (2021)Currently, acrylic on canvas, 20" x 24" (2021)Sunday, acrylic on canvas, 20" x 24" (2021)Marshmallow, acrylic on canvas, 20" x 24" (2021)Yurt, acrylic on canvas, 16" x 20" (2021) Artist’s Note I have spent so much of my life planning and organizing chaos as an attempt to feel in control. Thus, my studies in Buddhism, and specifically the Taoist art of wu wei have felt like a rewiring. Infusing wu wei into my practice, I am along for the ride while also driving. The lines, shapes, and colors have a conversation, a song, a dance that I look for and honor—it’s a slippery in-betweenness just outside my grasp. As I attempt to balance the scale between intention and nonsense, I meet myself wherever I am on my canvas. My pieces, too, come with me: into my bedroom as I sleep, next to the kitchen table as I eat. Like a dissolving effort that moves forward, the colors become “of course” and the lines wax “okay” in a quiet, ecstatic optimism. Pastels are irresistible to me. They are the only element I choose outright. The soft blues, pinks, yellows, oranges, and greens undeniably bring me joy. They call to me in whispers from the shelves of art supply store, capturing me with ease. I don’t question the attraction. I pull the lines from behind my eyes, back out the top of my head, and down to my hands, the space between them dictating their existence. Above all, when I am making my pieces, I think of my mother’s hands. They were often attempting to grasp at something that existed only in her voice, twisting and flicking about in a search of understanding.

Home is where you find it

Daniel Bennett | The Human | Essay
The path to the summit of Scotts Bluff National Monument is Nebraska at its best. Morning walks among sweeping panoramas in the serenity of the prairie are treasured rituals for many of us who live nearby. So in 2015, when 25,000 tons of sandstone broke away from the side of Scotts Bluff National Monument, pulverizing the path below and closing it for over a year, hundreds of walkers and I were left a bit out of sorts. We were forced to find new morning routines, reminded that even our monuments are just here for a moment. From the history I’ve stitched together from elders, friends, and roadside historical markers, I sense that this area has always been shaped by transience. Passers through—in search of game or work in sugar beet fields or simply on their way to somewhere else—came, left their mark, and moved on. Among those travelers, however, some stayed or returned. I myself first arrived in 2013 for my first job as a community planner, made this place home for five years, and left for new opportunities. When given the option to work remotely in 2020, I returned after just 18 months away and found things had already changed. Friends had moved, some of my favorite businesses closed, my work and position in the community were different. It felt like coming home and finding some other family’s pictures on my wall. Anyone who has tried to make their home in a place that doesn’t feel “home” anymore understands. In Wendell Berry’s novel Hannah Coulter, Berry addresses precisely this sense of displacement. An iconic American environmentalist, poet, and novelist, he has written prolifically about rural life; Berry’s novels center in the fictional town of Port William, an analogue for his actual place of residence in Port Royal, Kentucky. In Hannah Coulter, the titular character is a twice-widowed elderly woman reflecting on her years in Port William. Toward the end of the book, she considers the changes in the town and her own sense of the community’s  “completeness

Searching for the Blue

Ahmed Hmeedat | The Plain | Artwork
#1, acrylic on paper, 13" x 20" (2020)#2, acrylic on paper, 13" x 20" (2020)#3, acrylic on paper, 13" x 20" (2020)#4, acrylic on paper, 13" x 20" (2020)#5, acrylic on paper, 13" x 20" (2021)#6, acrylic on paper, 13" x 20" (2021)#7, acrylic on paper, 13" x 20" (2021)#8, acrylic on paper, 13" x 20" (2021)#9, acrylic on paper, 13" x 20" (2021)#10, acrylic on paper, 13" x 20" (2020)#11, acrylic on paper, 13" x 20" (2020)#12, acrylic on paper, 13" x 20" (2020)#13, acrylic on paper, 13" x 20" (2020)#14, acrylic on paper, 13" x 20" (2020) Artist’s Note “Searching for the Blue” is a series of portraits conceived during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, its origins can be traced back to my final days in Alexandria, Virginia. The night before I was to return to my native Palestine, I looked carefully at my belongings. Much to my chagrin, I came to the realization that I would not be able to bring my full set of art supplies. Thus, I decided to give them away to my friends. As I held the last tubes of paint in my hand, I recognized that my love of blue exceeded my sense of generosity. Suddenly, the dictum of German-American architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe popped into my head: “less is more.” At that moment, I made a compromise with myself; the ultramarine blue, the titanium white, and the ivory black acrylics would make the journey back home with me. I wasn’t sure how this limited color palette would inform my artistic practice, but I was optimistic that I could create something. On March 5th, 2020, the Palestinian authority declared a national state of emergency due to the rapid spread of COVID-19. During lockdown, I transitioned to working remotely from home. Searching for something to do with my extra time, I sought out the suitcase that housed the remainder of my art supplies from the States. As I quietly contemplated the three colors, a flash of inspiration came to me: a series of portraits. Seeking the spirit of collaboration during a time of isolation, I decided t

The Black Dogs of Enlightenment

Sean Murray | The Human | Short Story
The setting was old Tbilisi, a strange destination, fable-like. The rough brown bricks of the ancient baths, the second-story verandas, enclosed in the vernacular architectural style. The dry cliff faces and banks rising in random juts around the city. Scrub vegetation. In truth, except for the myth-feeling, it didn’t have much to recommend it. Nevertheless, tourists came from the clandestine North in search of stimulating heat, the weird half-desert, half-mountain conditions that revved you up if you let them. If you drank the strong local chacha, the hundred-proof brandy, and ate raw green figs. Pomegranates. It was, allegedly, a sensual city. Fruit was not the topic, however. Nor liquor. The topic was philosophy, of a kind, the argument of the day between old friends: Mo Kaplan and Chrissy Halsted. “Listen, let’s discuss this.” Mo speaking. “There’s myth and then there’s enlightenment,” he said. “But the end is the same for both modes: to banish the unknown. Myth assigns it to categories of either local or universal mystery. Enlightenment makes it the object of science. Thus, myth is rigid with classifications, while enlightenment admits no hypotheses unless they can be tested. Both are weighed down by the tendency toward dogma. Face it. They operate under the same human headings of error and limitation.” Mo (Morris) was much the senior of the two, genially bald and dressed sensibly in the cotton pants and soft-soled shoes of American old age. His knees turned in slightly when he walked. He carried a canvas tote bag full of notebooks and pens, lip balm, sunscreen, an incomprehensible bus schedule. His one eccentricity was to turn up the collar of his polo shirt. Identifiable as a professor at fifty paces. Chrissy was harder to pin down. Her age indeterminate. She had the authority of long experience about her, but this had to do with her movements: precise, definitive. She was an empiricist. Her straight and delicate nose invited admiration. Her smooth, tan

Jamais

Meghan K. McGinley | The Human | Poetry
Poet’s Note I first realized that I was a multiracial person in kindergarten. When my mother came to eat lunch with me one day at school, her presence bewildered some of the other children. Many asked me afterwards if I was adopted. One even followed up the question with a matter-of-fact declaration: “You look nothing like your mom.” How does this blonde-haired, light-eyed, fair-skinned child belong to this Black woman? She was frequently mistaken for the nanny, given countless double takes and stare downs. As I grew older, I began to search for a tangible sense of identity. When I heard a story about my mother’s great-grandfather from Haiti, my young mind fashioned herself a Frenchman. It was not until much later that I understood the terrible irony of this “adoption.” My undergraduate work in French led me to the poem “Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard” (“A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance”) by the French symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé. Its strange spacing, varied typefaces, and resistance to meaning drew me in like nothing I had ever read before. As I struggled to articulate the “searching” theme for this issue of Symposeum, Mallarmé’s poem called to me again, its black and white imagery more vivid than ever before. The idea that my mother never imagined me as I am—in this pale yellow body—collided with the shipwrecks in Mallarmé’s verse. Inspired by the Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers—who reimaged Un coup de dés in a purely visual manner, blacking out its words as if they were censored—I reconceived Mallarmé’s piece as an erasure poem. Instead of Broodthaers’ black bars, I created white rectangles with black outlines, working digitally on a PDF of Basil Cleveland’s English translation of the poem. The poem’s quadrants, drawn from Cleveland's formatting, cradle my archipelagoes of empty space, the remaining text like shards of silence. Who I am and where I belong within the Black community as a white-passing person are questions wit

Letter to Readers

The Editors | Letter
Dear Reader, The theme for this issue was chosen nearly half a year ago, before the delta variant, the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and other unpredictable events. We are left searching now even more than we were then: for the right thing to say about what’s taken place in the past six months, the right thing to do in response, and the right way to use these pages as a space for reflecting rationally yet optimistically about it all. Of course, our search is just as much a reaction to the world around us as it is an earthling expression of deeper, constant yearnings. More time. New plans. Beauty in brokenness. Balance in chaos. Community in social distancing. This issue’s cover art, “Lemonade” by Lucy Villeneuve, evokes a sense of self-discovery in the act of searching. Her shapes, lines and colors work in tandem with one another to move forward, her canvas capturing their quiet dance of ease and joy. As the zeitgeist of our own moment in history becomes increasingly characterized by cynicism or catastrophe or both, there is an undeniable sense of urgency in post-pandemic transitioning where patience formerly prevailed. We’re back to errands, even running them. We’re back to traffic in the rush to work. We’re back to scheduled leave and busy airports and sending invitations and declining them because of calendar conflicts. A collective challenge is thus finding true connection amidst so much connectivity. This issue, like all issues of Symposeum, is a product of connecting people, ideas, and stories through collaboration. In plays, poetry, prose, and photography, from fictional worlds to Walden Pond, we engage the topic of searching because it represents the first step in our collective response to the dire challenges of our day. When faced with a problem, even countless problems, we go searching for answers. We explore this theme both literally and abstractly. In Home Is Where You Find It, Daniel Bennett meditates on reclaiming our “birthright of belong

Tracking Your Life

Boyd Varty | The Plain | Essay
As a boy I spent every day in the South African bushveld apprenticing under some of the greatest Shangaan animal trackers in the world. I was taught to attune to a hidden world of stories and information etched faintly in the earth as scuff marks and gait patterns. Tracking an animal was like learning a new dialect that opened my understanding of a foreign land. Even the language of birds gained meaning as I learned, in the face of tremendous unknowns, to find and follow the faint trail of a lion. Life, I eventually realized, works in the same way, at least if you are going to lead a meaningful life. We must attune ourselves to meaning. It is something we must track. It moves like a wild animal whose faint footprints and scent we must follow. I have spent my adulthood trying to stay on the track of my own life, and trying to help others do the same. Along the way, I have learned important lessons about tracking meaning. Photos C/O Boyd VartyFINDING THE FIRST TRACKS Tracks are hard to find, with the first tracks being the most difficult of all. We live in what the Celtic mystic John O’Donohue calls a neon culture. The modern societies of the world seem to be losing the foundational structures that fill our lives with meaning. We have forgotten how to belong. We have forgotten how to be deeply connected as a community. We have become robotic, almost hybrid, as we collectively forget our relationship with nature. We live in a society with a schooling system that has a “you should know, you have to get it right” mindset. So often we stand on the edge of a search because we feel that only when we know exactly what’s right for us will we make the changes and begin the journey. A tracker, however, knows that more often than not we must begin searching without any clear sense of where we are going or what we will find. The search is more about attuning our awareness than needing to know. We start the search at peace without knowing what we are searching for. It may

Cartoons on Searching by Brooke Bourgeois

Brooke Bourgeois | The Plain | Cartoon
Artist’s Note Brooke is a cartoonist and illustrator who primarily finds inspiration at the intersection of unlikely themes. She is constantly ‘searching’ for jokes that are specifically suited to visual anchors, and this often involves re-imagining historical periods, fairy tale characters, and even cartoon tropes. In the collection of cartoons she has provided for this issue, she explores this meta theme of searching in her practice while each individual cartoon employs searching on a micro level somehow: searching the internet, searching for love, searching for a way out of desert island, searching for purpose.

Terrain

Jesse Graves | The Necessary | Poetry
Haven't I shared all my memories already? Sweated into ink the anchored years When the sun drove us like a team of plough-horses through the summer sky? No, I’ve kept a few things back, fears now half-forgotten, loves remembered always but never acted upon, never sent out into the world to meet their fates. None of that matters now to anyone but me, and to me only because it pointed a direction, gave some oblique shape to the edge of the trailing, unmapped, interior terrain. Poet’s Note Searching seems to me the essential calling of poets. What we do is more purposeful than simply looking, or observing, or recording our sensory perceptions, though those activities all contribute to the enterprise. The poem “Terrain” engages many of my favorite associations with language, with its equation of writing with labor and the exploration of unknown territory. The opening image feels somewhat mythical to me, with the sun driving my memories and me like horses through the sky, which seemed like a good approach to overarching concerns about how we write and what we are called to write about. I employed a technique here that I have not attempted often, to ask questions and then try to answer them in a direct way. The interior terrain is inexhaustible, and it draws us forward in pursuit of the poem; nothing could give a writer more hope than that.

Star Tours

| The Rise of Space Tourism and the Return of the Sublime

Lauren Spohn | The True | Essay
On the dusty morning of July 11, 2021, two hundred miles south of Albuquerque, Sir Richard Branson squeezed into a blue and gold jumpsuit and shot into space. He was the first person in history to ride fifteen kilometers short of the Kármán Line—the international boundary between the atmosphere and the void—on a rocket built with his own money. “To all you kids down there, I was once a child with a dream, looking up to the stars,” Branson said [https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-57797297] to the camera inside the Virgin Galactic spaceplane. “Now I’m an adult in a spaceship, with lots of other wonderful adults, looking down to our beautiful, beautiful earth. To the next generation of dreamers, if we can do this, just imagine what you can do! Heyyyy!” Branson unbuckled his straps and wafted out of his seat. “Come out, mister!” yelled one of the wonderful adults in the background. Three minutes later, Branson and crew glided into southern New Mexico and doused their blue and gold jumpsuits in expensive champagne. Standing on the press-release stage like a rock god, Branson announced that from now on, anyone could have the same life-changing experience for only $400,000. And so, with one small step for mankind and one giant leap for one man, the Age of Space Tourism began. ●Branson is not the only billionaire hurtling into space these days. Amazon mastermind Jeff Bezos followed [https://apnews.com/article/jeff-bezos-space-e0afeaa813ff0bdf23c37fe16fd34265] Branson a week after the Virgin Galactic stunt, launching from Van Horn, Texas, to upstage the British music mogul by twenty-one kilometers. Never one to let other genius-billionaire-playboy-philanthropists steal the spotlight, SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk sent [https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/18/21142137/spacex-tourism-orbit-earth-private-citizens-dragon-space-flight] four tourists into orbit 366 miles above the Earth for three days in September. The Inspiration4 mission, the first all-civilian sp

Big Stories

| They Still Matter

Will McCollum | The True | Essay
Perhaps, like me, you’ve noticed a curious sort of temporality since the pandemic began. Time is passing both unbearably slowly and frighteningly quickly. The slow dragging days add up before they come to pass. History seems to outpace itself, leaving absences of memory in its wake. We’re moving into the future without the chance to catch our breaths, and without the time or frame of mind to organize our recollections and observations in the passing present into a coherent story that can bring us safely to a future worth living in at all. In the nineties, there was much think-piecing and hand-wringing about the imminent end of history. Famously, historian Francis Fukiyama confidently proclaimed in 1992 that we had reached the end of history, with Western liberal democracy having shown itself globally ascendant and historically necessary with the fall of the Soviet Union. At that time, Western liberal democracy was a metanarrative that helped us to frame historical events in a cohesive and forward-looking framework. Twenty years after September 11, 2001, the apparent decline of Western liberal democracy and its more recent spawn, neoliberalism, leave us wondering about the viability of such stories, as well as their perceived truth value: if liberal “progress” isn’t assured, as the last several decades seem to suggest, then what are we to do? What Big Story should we be telling? ●Narratives are essential for my day job. I recently returned home to Birmingham, Alabama, after spending five weeks in a small tent outside the town of Munising in the piney woods of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. I spent the summer working on an archaeology project excavating logging camps that were operated in the early twentieth century. On projects like that, studying the relatively recent past, you’re not really expecting to find buried treasure. Rather, it’s a lot of tobacco tins and nails and bits of broken glass and bottle caps. The point of the project was to identify how poor

Searching in the Dark

| The Case for Dark Matter

Max Fieg | The True | Essay
*The artwork featured in this piece was done in collaboration with digital artist Kendra Oliver, an educator and artist living in Pittsburgh. On a September evening in 1846, German astronomer Johann Gottfried Galle received a letter requesting that he point his telescope at one small patch of the night sky. The letter detailed that by performing this observation, Galle might solve a puzzle that vexed the scientific community for years. This puzzle concerned the orbit of Uranus, the only planet whose orbit couldn’t be predicted by Newton’s theory of gravity. Uranus would be expected to be in one place but show up in another. Spurred by this mystery, Galle’s letter-writer asked himself: is Newton’s theory not a description of our world, or is there something else responsible for this anomaly? Prior to writing his letter, French astronomer and mathematician Urbain Le Verrier made a calculation he hoped would explain the orbit of Uranus and maintain support for the theory of gravitation. Le Verrier and others suggested that there was a dark companion responsible for the disturbance: an unknown, massive body orbiting near Uranus providing an extra gravitational pull. Supposing this massive body existed, Le Verrier predicted where and how heavy Uranus’s dark companion must be to explain the data. He sent his letter to Galle telling him where to look. On the night the letter arrived, Galle searched the sky and discovered a royal blue planet three billion miles from Earth, known today as Neptune, within one degree of Le Verrier’s prediction and after less than one hour of searching. The mystery of Uranus’s anomalous orbit posed a serious challenge for nineteenth century science. The puzzle and consequent discovery of Neptune are exemplary of a recurring pattern in physics: an observation is made that doesn’t agree with a theory’s prediction, so scientists must either come up with a better theory or find an effect (like an undiscovered planet) which might explain the obs

The Cloud and the Fire

Foster Swartz | The Human | Comedy
*The following piece contains passages that may be best suited for a mature audience. This play is based on a true story. Its lessons are manifold: Don’t ride in elevators. Be nice to gay people. See to it that your lady finishes, too. I can only thank my lucky stars that I was there to see it all. It is my sincere hope that you, the Reader, come away from this play a new man, especially if you happen to be an old woman. Furthermore, it is my sincere command that you, the Reader, reflect on the following themes as you read: 1. The rapid decay of communication skills not regularly exercised 2. The superficiality of the purported evolution of interactions between heterosexual males 3. The part played by God in an age which has largely forgotten Him 4. The criteria duly considered in the evaluation of whether the proverbial life is proverbially good Think on these things, and let me know what you discover. My editor says we need the answers by tomorrow. Good luck! ●EXODUS 13:21 GERALD enters an elevator, wherein the ATTENDANT awaits him. ATTENDANTWhat for? GERALDWhat? ATTENDANTWhat for? GERALDI...I have a meeting. ATTENDANTWhat floor? GERALDOh! I thought you were saying something else, ha-ha. The ATTENDANT presses the button for the top floor. ATTENDANTWalk down if you need t'. The elevator ascends. GERALD, confused and perturbed, tries to form the words to confront the ATTENDANT. He cannot; he elects cordiality instead. GERALDThis is the first elevator ride I've taken in a year. The ATTENDANT does not respond. GERALD (CONT'D)Feels like I've forgotten how to talk to people after so long, y'know? Ha-ha. The ATTENDANT does not respond. GERALD (CONT'D)You, too, huh? The elevator bell dings, and the ride comes to a stop. CYNTHIA enters. She begins texting, as GERALD searches for just the right thing to say to her. GERALD (CONT'D)So am I the only one here who has COVID? Not acknowledging GERALD, CYNTHIA reaches into her pu

Artwork by Rebecca Arp

Rebecca Arp | The True | Artwork
Can the body be a searchlight (Eye) (2021) glass, lead, fluxUntitled (Sea Ache) (2021) deceased grandfather's oar, acrylic | paraffin wax, tissue paper, ink Artist’s Note My artistic practice concerns emotion, memory, ritual, and spirituality as seen through the lens of my experiences as a queer woman raised in the rural Midwest. I often use materials and motifs associated with the family, the home, and the church alongside the barriers of participation and acceptance in those structures for the LGBTQAI+ community. In all of my work, I am searching, researching, constructing, deconstructing, and reconstructing commonly accepted ideas and beliefs. I invert the traditionally hard and soft, explore the nuances of interpersonal relationships and selfhood, and attempt to capture the quotidian with sincerity. Rembrandt's Storm on the Sea of Galilee, one of the most valuable objects ever stolen, remains missing to this day. I explored the idea of forming a relationship with a piece of artwork that I will likely never see in person. On the oar, I inscribed quotes from Mark 4:35–⁠41, some personal associations, and a Dutch quote from Rembrandt, who said he wishes his work to portray "die naetuereelste beweechgelickheijt" or, "the most natural/lifelike emotion/motion". I also sought associations in astrology and music. Rembrandt is said to be a Cancer sun and a Scorpio rising. Lana del Rey has these same placements and her song "Mariner's Apartment Complex" fits into the theme nicely. The music video also includes seascapes. I have embedded, on wax, an image from this music video, an image from the music video for “The System Only Dreams in Total Darkness” by The National, and the Rembrandt painting itself. My lantern series approaches searching in a different light. A gay Christian may be taught that their faculties of loving are unholy, directed toward the wrong aims. One may have a crisis of integration—how does one feel at home in a body where even its unconscious a

Antibiotics

| To the Clerk at the Pet Shop, Chicago, Lower West Side

Yuriy Serebriansky, Sarah McEleney | The Human | Essay
Since we didn’t make it to that pet shop, let’s just say we’re still on our way there. I write “we” because I wasn’t looking for it alone. Actually, all of this happened only because there was a “you” back then. Someone might say that we were only going there on account of you, and technically that’s the rotten truth. But the thing is, already four years later I still keep going back to our pet shop. I want to clear my conscience there. I remember it clearly, and if it exists in actuality, I’d be able to recognize it from a block away.  A small but, of course, respectable store. Along the left side from the entrance are shelves of dog food. Deposits of cheap pellets, promising “the tender meat of delicious turkey” (I’ve always wondered about that job—a taste-tester for dog food). Above the door is a bell like the ones at Seven Eleven. On the right is an entire wall of aquariums.  There aren’t any expensive saltwater fish with digital-looking color combinations here—only nice old freshwater ones are sold.  There’s a school of zebrafish (Danio rerio) wearing the striped outfits of disco dancers. There’s the “Siamese fighting fish” (Betta splendens), who, with the faded glamor of discolored dressing gowns on their sides, wander, not looking at each other, like married artists who have grown old together. The top aquarium to the right is completely without fish, here there are only aquatic plants, snails, and water bubbles. Finally, I notice that there are bubbles in every aquarium. The aquatic plants are the most ordinary ones—Sagittaria Spec and Vallisneria. I break the silence and start telling you about duckweed (Lemna). About how there’s a kind of duckweed, of which the little leaves, if you don’t stop them, will multiply and spread over the entire surface. Like parasites. They’ll block out light to the large fish. You have to thin out duckweed from time to time. I tell you about how when I was a child I wanted to lie in shallow water, slightly below the surf

Shooting Stars after Shooting Penguins in Frigid Isolation for 27 Years

Madeline Goetz, Jack Sentell | The Human | Comedy
A nature photographer pivots into the world of paparazzi. After twenty-seven years of documenting penguins in Antarctica, I was desperately searching for a new career. I left behind the desolate, frozen tundra devoid of any human interaction for New York City. On my first day I found myself standing outside of a Ruth’s Chris Steakless Steakhouse, ready to shoot the vegan celebs as a new photographer for People magazine. Now I’ll admit: I was nervous. I had never seen a celebrity in person. For twenty-seven years, I had rarely seen other people at all. All I’d seen was carnage. Most people don’t know that when you shoot penguins, you’re not actually allowed to intervene if they’re being attacked by a seal or succumbing to the elements. I had to remain calm and totally disregard the bloody bloody bloodbath soiling the snow at my feet. Anyway, there she was...Hailey Bieber! My first celebrity sighting! I wiped a speck of penguin blood off of the lens and started shooting furiously. “Hailey!” I screamed. “Are you vegan?” “Today I am,” she said. “Oh, so you wouldn’t burst out of the Antarctic Ocean onto an unsuspecting mother penguin and gnash your orca teeth through its skin, chewing it up, bones and all?” “No, I would not do that,” she said. This was clearly a different type of subject than I was used to shooting. As she walked away, I checked the photos I’d taken. Sadly, I’d made a blunder. When shooting Hailey, I had habitually set up my tripod to be penguin level, as I had done for twenty-seven years, so I only had photos of her calves. I’ll sell you one for $35. I need the money. Just like I knew I needed to learn on the job, and fast. Next up was Lin-Manuel Miranda. From my recent IMDB crash course, I knew he was from Broadway. Well, I knew another star that could have been on Broadway once: the penguin who inspired the character of Mumble in the feature animated film, Happy Feet. “Lin!” I hollered. “Lin! Over here!” He turned. “Lin, do you

Issue 3 at a Glance

The Editors | Letter
Series of paintings for Symposeum |  In her series of paintings composed specifically for Symposeum, Lucy Villeneuve evokes a sense of self-discovery in the act of searching. Cartoons on Searching | New Yorker cartoonist Brooke Bourgeois finds inspiration at the intersection of unlikely themes. Scenes from Walden Woods: A Triptych | Photographer Lisa McCarty searches the Walden Woods landscape for traces of its transcendental past. Tracking Your Life | Raised on the Londolozi Game Reserve in South Africa, Boyd Varty uses his experience as an animal-tracker to describe the individual's pursuit of a meaningful life. Terrain | Poet Jesse Graves traverses his own interior terrain, in pursuit of verse itself. Preschool as a Profession of Philosophy | Philosopher Garrett Allen details his transition from graduate school to preschool, and the reasoning behind it. Home is where you find it | Returning to the small western-Nebraska town he lived in for 5 years, community planner Daniel Bennett takes the measure of contrasting approaches to the search for "home." The Black Dogs of Enlightenment | A short story by Sean Murray. As aging academics, friends Mo Kaplan and Chrissy Halsted have spent decades of their lives studying and explaining. Yet as they catch up at a conference, each realizes the depths of their unanswered questions. When disaster strikes, their discussions that pit enlightenment against animal instinct will linger over the search for resolution. Searching for the Blue | Palestinian artist Ahmed Hmeedat’s “Searching for the Blue” portrait series uses only three colors to explore the common ground and shared humanity between people of all backgrounds. Reaching for the Stars | High school student Samantha George embraces the hope of the immigrant's journey in her art. Eye Lantern and Sea Ache artwork | In this selection of pieces by artist Rebecca Arp, she searches for a sense of self through the affective channels of personal experience. The Cloud

The Ends of Information

| Searching for Truth in the Digital Age

Nissim Lebovits | The True | Essay
"The universe,” wrote the Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges, “(which others call the library), is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries, with vast air shafts between, surrounded by very low railings.” The library in question is the imaginary Library of Babel, described by Borges in a short story of the same name. Occupied only by wandering librarians, it is eternal, an endless collection of unique books, all comprised of the same twenty-five orthographical symbols, repeated in infinite permutations. And in the infinitude of this library and its symbols, realize the librarians, everything is to be found. In Borges’ universes, though, “everything” is never so simple as it sounds. “Everything,” he writes of the infinite contents of the library, includes not merely the innumerable variations of letters on a page, but > the minutely detailed history of the future, the archangels’ autobiographies, the faithful catalogue of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of those catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of the true catalogue, the Gnostic gospel of Basilides, the commentary on that gospel, the true story of your death, the translation of every book in all languages, the interpolations of every book in all books. Everything, in other words, includes everything and its converse, truth and its repudiation alike. ●Reading Borges today, one thinks it merciful that he did not live to see the internet age. His oeuvre, renowned for its dealings with memory, signs, infinity, and the like, anticipated today’s cultural atmosphere to a stunning degree. It is almost impossible to read about information—digital or otherwise—without stumbling across a reference to the Argentine, and for good reason. To enter his world is to be treated to an intricate, encyclopedic, and labyrinthian system of references—the internet avant la lettre. The mercy, of course, is that Borges’ work is c

The Long Now

Nowk Choe | The Plain | Exhibition
Photos C/O Nowk Choe Daniel Schine Lee’s “Jam and Cook” (a functional karaoke machine + oven) and “Pagoda Go-Go” (an 80s-esque analogue of Heelys) mock the cynical manipulation of trends for profit, while also asking whether art and culture cannot be meaningful despite arriving “late.” Suyon Huh’s “Monument” and “Payphone” reference the great mass of artistic movements across time and culture, materializing competing but ultimately cumulative ideas of beauty by the application of gradually-layered paper dough. Hyejoo Jun’s “Matter of Nakwon” and “Tourist Gaze” use light boxes and a microscope to display particulates from nearby cities. Suggesting that we consider ourselves “dust of the Earth,” she invites us to ponder a different timescale: that of cosmic matter. Jaekyung Jung’s “A Village” contrasts the apparent insignificance of impoverished people catching abandoned dogs with the historical narratives of the rich surrounding village, interrogating the ways that divergent identities can yield unique experiences of the same moment in time. Artist’s Note We live in capricious times. Everywhere we are pressured to keep pace with fads, and no less so in the art world. Artists, curators, and critics chase relevance by addressing popular topics, but these trends are ephemeral, and relevance itself a chimera. In this context, my exhibition The Long Now abandons “timely” topics in order to explore timeliness itself. The exhibition was hosted in the Nakwon building in my native Seoul, Korea. An official piece of Korean architectural heritage, the Nakwon building is something of an oxymoron: the destruction of most Korean traditional architecture during the Japanese occupation and the Korean War means that most of our “historical architecture” was built in the last half-century. As an employee at an architectural firm that focuses on historical preservation, I am particularly sensitive to these contradictions, and chose the site as a way to question the relativity a

To J—

Josh DeFriez | The Human | Poetry
Poet’s Note I never sent this letter to J– because it wasn’t written for him. I wrote it for S–, for me, and for anyone else searching for healing after a bad romance. People like J– say one thing but do another, and that leaves you constantly searching for how they really feel. In the time I’ve known him, J– has never had the guts to face his feelings. In one of our first conversations, he told me, “I just don’t have emotions. I don’t get them.” When he was dating S–, he’d call him his “friend,” his “guy,” and, rarely, his “boyfriend.” But he’d say it all sarcastically, with air quotes, and his face would flush at the shame of admitting to feeling something. After they broke up, J– suddenly referred to “you know who” with a name instead of a euphemism. The death of his affection restored his power, but it broke what remained of my trust. I wondered, did S– ever know that J– avoided using his name? How would that make him feel? How did the break up feel for him? How was he handling the broken dreams? Many poems feel intentional, but this one did not. I don’t remember which parts I wrote first or why it felt so necessary for a second voice to crisscross the poem. But I distinctly remember the alchemy that happened in my heart during the hours I spent spilling out the words, cutting them back, and rearranging them. As I began writing, I felt angry and hurt, but I finished it feeling hope for S–, for myself, and for all of us searching to heal from toxic relationships. The friends I’ve shared this poem with always ask, “how am I supposed to read this?” And I always say, “I have no idea.” After they sit with the poem for a while, some people see what I found by writing it; others don’t. I hope you do.

Lost & Found

Tripp Woolf | The Human | Poetry
Shh, shh, shh... Breezes caper in the dogwoods; white petals twirl onto the sidewalk. The air smells green, and sweet, and forgiving. Shh, shh, shh... White wicker rocker creaks in the gloaming. My sister moves her downy head into the blanket and breast. She smells of talcum powder and Johnson’s tearless shampoo. I marvel at her wrinkled fist clutching the crochet weave of the afghan. I drowse on the floor at our mother’s feet, green sculpted carpet rough against my face “Down in the Valley” sung in rocking-chair time—shh, shh, shh... I lie awake in the bottom bunk, curled against my pillow, feet drawn nearly to my chin. Spiderwort hangs in a ceramic cowboy-boot planter, A gift from my grandmother that casts tendril and talon shadows across the path to my door. I wait for the tired cough to come from the room down the hall—a signal that she sleeps and will not turn me away when I crawl under her covers Shh, shh, shh... Her hand already a skeleton in my grip—shh, shh, shh... The mechanic breath of the ventilator—shh, shh, shh... Until no breath comes—shh, sh, sss— Lost. I think I see her a dozen times the first month, a dozen more in the next six. I delete her number from my contacts a year later—no longer in service. I delete her voicemails two years later, to the day. I mine for artifacts occasionally—the dusty mementos that evoke the story, A piece of clothing, a kept baby tooth in a velvet box that held a piece of jewelry. Perhaps her touch left a signature to attest to the permanence of things— Of her. An autographed baseball never forgets the hand that held it. My daughter names the world, all things must be spoken into existence. Tree, bubberfly, moon—Sophie, the dog, and Masha, the cat. When the streetlights flicker into orange and the cicadas sing their songs I fold her long-legged body into my lap, and I sing, “Down in the valley, the valley so low.” Poet’s Note As a child, my mother rocked me and my younger sister in a white wicker rocker that st

On My Mother's Passing

Ronan Quinn | The Human | Poetry
Your mellow touch has gone, off with the Blue, red flashing lights that came for you on That day. I hadn't noticed life being taken From you, seized a little bit too rudely, S0 quietly in the morning, the days, nights, I feel the presence. You have not gone. The empty space on your chair where you Sat, a reflection in the mirror I can still see. Our kindred spirits, a keen mind wandered Astray, a lost memory you did try so hard To catch, worried that you were losing it, Not knowing what it was to begin with, to Roll with the blows, a frenzy to end up like My father. Peace of mind, a point to start With, to look for, but it was in the family, a Silent killer, a slow death that came to you. A dent in your armchair looking to be filled, Deep undulating undercurrents not leaving Me be, a seismic shift in every day, I Move to make you a cup of tea, but you Are not around to drink it. Unspoken words In heart-rendering times, some ongoing Attempts to fill the time, empty results as a Twilight of day ends in a hazy dew. Loose ends, a void opened underneath me, Unsure of what I should do next, the time Thrown at me like a spring release, what to do If the walls appear the same as before. I'm wobbly on my feet, seeking to utter Your name, were I small I would yet climb On your lap as my place is lost in an hour's Absence, I am by myself that much more. If my girl could dance with me in this Empty room, telling me the right foot to put To fill the empty spaces, empty phrases. Her lilting accent, silent gaps, help defeat The dark, fill the crevices that have come. Stayed, appeased, given me a new strut, Resplendent in defeat that was, come give Me a hug, as you would, show the lead. A search among the bramble bushes and A sight of a flower garden, to lay down The ashes to sprout a tree of life and more, The risk of time blowing back in my face. That loss of intention replaced with an aim Now, the wind will take off what remains sown, The sea breez

SABBATICAL

Emily Meffert | The Human | Short Story
And did you get what You wanted from this life, even so? —Raymond Carver, "Late Fragment" The heat was historic. “This heat is historic,” they’d said on NPR. At Pike Place fishmongers were selling their souls for ice. The biologist visited each morning, drank coffee, let seagulls drown the radio in her ears. She liked the rockfish, seeing them bright and flop-bellied in their lukewarm display. At home her computer monitor gathered dust like an artifact. It had been untouched for three weeks. It baffled her that, after twenty-one years, researching adaptations in extremophiles hadn’t joined her loose ends. Was this it, then? She’d written a proposal that involved spelunking through the archives of one institution or another. To see what life at the bottom of the ocean might reveal about life on other planets, she’d explained. In the afternoons she drank espresso martinis on her porch and watched Mr. Cardoso swing his watering can among the dahlias next door. Perhaps she’d buy one of those houses built around a big tree. She could become spiritual. Start a watch collection. Fall in love. On Friday she brought home a King crab. It reminded her of—where was it that Gulliver traveled? Where everything was giant? Its spiked legs looked like a desert plant. Today was the nineteenth day of her sabbatical, she realized. Was it the twentieth? The heat made everything hazy. The haze seeped in through her ears. She could feel it as soon as she woke up, that heavy film on her brain’s machinery. The days bled together. The Pacific and the sky brewed a dull, disorienting continuum. It was there when she returned to her house. She set her crustacean on the step and squatted to examine the envelope. Someone had dropped it on her welcome mat. The letter inside had an official look to it. They requested her expertise to investigate reports of an unnamed halophile in deep sea brine pools off the coast of X. At the bottom someone had scratched an illegible signature. No name

Things I Need to Know

Andrew Najberg | The Necessary | Poetry
I do want hope, belief in intercession. That my children, if in need, could expect bread. To know them is to know the dirt -engrained lines of their shoeless feet as they belly sprawl over coloring books. Just one state over, a blue newborn found in a blue cooler beneath a speed limit sign. This, exactly, has happened before: a life as iteration of the facets of human cruelty, what I read the first occurrence only to me—tragedy sealed in Ziplocs and four-wheel drive Suburbans parked windows up in summer sun. Blame it on the snake, or belts, or lineages of fists, but my children are too real to allow anyone such grace. I watch them totter in pajamas. They bicker about games and turns and who looks at whom, dip crackers in milk and brush crumbs off lips with forearms as they dance, make it hard to understand that as humans, something monstrous lives in us all. No parent can be innocent and expect to keep their children the same while they sing at bedtime. After mine are tucked in, I lie in bed under the fan as the dog circles its rug. Tomorrow, again, I look for new roads, choose one that leads to more than that. Poet’s Note Even before the twenty-first century, many felt battered by the brutality of daily news, but today, the internet and social media allow us to track the struggles of everyone we know alongside those we’ve never met. We coexist with tragedies that are simultaneous with our most innocent moments. “Things I Need to Know” grapples with the braiding of children’s play and horrific abuses, and emphasizes the necessity of this discordance. My intention is to show a speaker ready to break under the world’s weight, while also allowing them to recognize their worthiness of the very grace they seek for their children. In a world where a narrow few hold seemingly overwhelming power, I see this poem as a reminder that we must grasp our own agency if we hope for anything better to follow.

Preschool as a profession of philosophy

Garrett Allen | The Plain | Essay
A few weeks ago I heard a scream and turned my head to see Robert stomping his foot. He and Harry, both around four years old, were standing next to each other. Robert was leaning forward, chest out, holding his arms straight down, fists clenched. When I got there, I asked, “What happened?” “He took my train!” Robert screamed. I turned to Harry, who was holding a Thomas train in his hand, and asked him, “Was Robert playing with that train?” “Yes,” he said. “Did you take it?” “Yes,” he answered, brow furrowed. “I want it.” We talked about it and moved on. The whole encounter lasted less than a minute but it stuck with me. Harry didn’t deny taking the train or lie about the circumstances. He didn’t apologize or give an excuse. And yet there wasn’t a hint of meanness about him. He was perfectly serious when he uttered, “I want it,” which to him was sufficient grounds for taking the train. I admire the awesome simplicity of Harry’s behavior. I also shudder to think about what lies ahead for Harry and the others in my preschool class as they grow up. In infancy, reality and desire lie flush against each other. There is no boundary between them, no fault line. In preschool the first cracks emerge. A child wants a toy, or to have their mother, or simply to say what’s on their mind, but they don’t get to have it. They see the toy but don’t get to play with it. They want their mother, but she is not there. They have an idea but don’t get to make it known. The gap between desire and reality continues to grow as we age. Eventually, it’s not that we want the train and don’t get it, but that we do and it doesn’t satisfy us. It isn’t what we had hoped for. Not what we had been promised. We hold the actual train in our hands and yet seem to long for something different, something hidden and remote. We enter a school or church or career and are disappointed. We enter society and find it is different than we had imagined. The gap widens into a canyon, and the canyon becomes

Crypto's Search for Meaning

Kyle McCollom | The Necessary | Essay
Imagine that you make a salary of $100,000 a year. After taxes and various living expenses, you manage to save $10,000 of that original figure. You tuck that sum into a savings account that steadily accrues interest. You feel like you are making financial progress. Suddenly, the socio-political situation in the country where you live nosedives. Month after month, your original $10,000 dwindles in value as runaway inflation dashes your financial dreams. After a year of turmoil, a little over half of your savings remains. Almost $5,000 in value seemingly evaporates into thin air. You feel powerless. Despite your hard work, you cannot get ahead. That’s the experience of those living in countries with inflationary currencies like Argentina, where the annual inflation rate broke 50% in July [https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/argentina-inflation-seen-year-low-32-june-likely-reheat-2nd-half-2021-07-15/] of this year. As a result, the Argentine peso is a game of currency hot potato. To escape this devaluation, people seek refuge in a more stable home: the US dollar. Demand for the dollar in Argentina is so high that, in the most recently available estimate, one-fifteenth of all physical U.S. dollars were in Argentina. According to the Federal Reserve [https://www.federalreserve.gov/paymentsystems/coin_data.htm], there is a little over two trillion U.S. dollars in circulation worldwide, meaning that Argentines may hold over $136 billion—a mind-boggling amount of cash to be concentrated in a single foreign country. One of the ways to acquire physical dollars in Argentina mirrors the pre-legalization process for acquiring weed in the US: you text your “weed guy.” He shows up and sells you an illicit drug, which you store somewhere in your home. In Argentina, you text your “dollar guy.” [https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/why-argentinas-hot-delivery-item-is-cold-us-cash/2020/11/16/2aae26c2-2824-11eb-9c21-3cc501d0981f_story.html] The dollar guy shows up, sells yo