In this 31 Books in 30 Days series leading up to the March 14, 2019 announcement of the 2018 National Book Critics Circle award winners, NBCC board members review the thirty-one finalists. Today, NBCC board member Elizabeth Taylor offers an appreciation of biography finalist Yunte Huang’s Inseparable: The Original Siamese Twins and Their Rendezvous with American History (Liveright Publishing).

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They caught the eye of a British businessman who paid their impoverished mother $500 and assured her that her sons would return after their exhibition tour, and with the help of an American ship captain launched Chang and Eng as the “Siamese Twins” in a traveling freak show.

Bound inextricably to each other, with their livers fused, they were connected at the sternum by a 4-inch band of cartilage that stretched nearly 2 inches over the six decades of their lives.

In his empathic, deeply researched, and extraordinary biography of Chang and Eng, Yunte Huang places the twins in the complex story of Jacksonian America and a culture of individualism that was incapable of dealing with the conjoined twins as anything but freaks.

Chang and Eng revolted against the tyranny of their indentured servitude by mimicking it and of being regarded as freaks by living their lives in a way that demonstrated  what Huang describes as “the inseparable tie between what’s accepted as human and what’s rejected as freakish.”

The twins spent nearly half a century under the harsh klieg lights of the American public stage and they refused to cower, fighting back against those who basically owned them. They struck out on their own, made a significant amount of money on tour, and married two Southern sisters, fathering 21 children.

Huang reveals intimate moments of their marriages, and how one twin would be dominant and the other docile in a “sort of self-imposed ‘blanking out.’” They alternated between two residences and adopted Mount Airy, North Carolina, a sleepy hamlet that became the model for Mayberry in The Andy Griffith Show, the ultimate in “American normal,” as their home.

Chang and Eng took the name Bunker and assumed the role of Southern gentry. They ardently supported the Confederacy and sent two of their sons to war. Although they had been sold into indentured servitude and felt like “mules yoked to a grindstone,” they subjected others to that fate. Prosperous and shrewd, they bought young slaves to sell when they grew older, and because they believed that young slaves would not run away. They lost their wealth after the Civil War and went back on tour, often with their children.

Although they were displayed as freaks of nature, Huang regards Chang and Eng differently. For him, they open up questions about what it means to be human and how these men could never be free of each other. They began their life in America as freaks on display, indentured to white showmen, but oppressed became oppressor, profiting handsomely from the men, women, and children whom they enslaved.

Huang brilliantly exposes the contradictions of Chang and Eng in an epic biography that is rich with detail and speaks to significant and enduring themes that resonate today. “He follows them from the smooth rivers of Siam into their tumultuous rendezvous with America,” writes Ann Fabian in The National Book Review. “Along the way, Huang offers something of a master class in how to turn notations in a financial ledger into an outline of cultural history.”

In this particular cultural moment, Huang notices what he calls a “rising tide of human disqualification, of looking at others as less than human or normal,” which has given him an acute sense of urgency.

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Elizabeth Taylor, co-editor of The National Book Review and Literary Editor at Large of the Chicago Tribune, has served as President of the NBCC. The co-author of American Pharaoh, she edited both the Books and Sunday Magazine sections of the Chicago Tribune, and was a national correspondent for Time magazine, based in New York and then Chicago.

In the 31 Books in 30 Days series leading up to the March 14 announcement of the 2018 National Book Critics Circle award winners, NBCC board members review the 31 finalists. Today, NBCC board member Gregg Barrios offers an appreciation of autobiography finalist Rigoberto González’s What Drowns the Flowers in Your Mouth: A Memoir of Brotherhood (University of Wisconsin Press).

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The real-life stories of Mexican and Mexican American immigrants are seldom heard over the anti-Mexican rhetoric on the nightly newscasts and headlines. It isn’t often that a memoir brings us their true stories.

In What Drowns the Flowers in Your Mouth, poet and memoirist Rigoberto González offers his personal immigrant testimony—of those Americans born of Mexican parents who live in the borderlands divided by a line, a scar that often festers instead of heals; of the varied reasons why, immigrants cross to this side while others remain—and yet both maintain the deep roots and culture of their homeland.

González grew up on both sides of the southern border. His lyrical voice and bittersweet tale of the struggles, dreams, and bonds of his Mexican immigrant family, his mother’s early death, his father’s desertion, and the sacrifices and love that bind two brothers living separate lives as grown men—one in Manhattan, the other in Mexico.

His secure academic and cosmopolitan world comes crashing down when his younger brother Alex is kidnapped by a Mexican drug cartel. He is devastated. Why hadn’t he protected his brother the only living immediate family he had left in the world?

A flood of memories takes him back to their childhood in the Coachella Valley in California where his family labored as seasonal migrant workers. After their mother died, the father remarries and returns to Mexico—leaving the two boys in the reckless and abusive care of an invective grandparent.

“We had traveled very different paths toward adulthood. As his gay older brother with a long history of failed relationships, I had very little to offer Alex. He was married and had children, I was single. He had returned to Mexico, I had fled to New York. His paradise was sailing out into the open sea; mine was to sink in the whirlpool of the computer screen.”

What Drowns… is also a love song to Mexico and the many ways his love for it has been tested. The third world country’s economic and class system in opportunities disparity led the González family to the US. The often-toxic machismo made the sensitive young man feel like an outsider at home. And just as he had reached a level of forgiveness and understanding for his estranged father, he finds the recent struggles with the cartel threatening the one person he loves most.

“The weight of these burdens sent me spiraling into ill health, alcoholism, and suicidal thoughts, yet it was plummeting into the depths of darkness that allowed me to have a fresh perspective about what my homeland had become—a troubled but resilient space that mirrored my own psyche. This clarity helped me see a way out of depression and despair.”

In a final chapter, González writes of the moment he reconciled and accepted himself, his destiny unconditionally. “I felt I belonged to this private world we called manhood, which wasn’t perfect, which was sometimes painful but was my birthright.”

His journey is a heroic one. This reader was swept away by the book sterling prose, especially his rich descriptions of the Mexican countryside, the frantic lifestyle in New York City, the beauty of the Sea of Cortez, the California vineyards his family tends and harvests—beautifully attesting a kinship to John Steinbeck who also wrote lovingly about brothers, farmworkers and migrant families.

By turns, poetic, and gritty, this empowering memoir is a sensitive exploration of displacement, loss and discovery. It redefines and reveals the heart and soul of today’s immigrants. Bravo!

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Gregg Barrios is a playwright, poet, and journalist. A former books editor of The San Antonio Express-News, he is a longtime contributor to the Los Angeles Times and The Texas Observer. His work has also appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, El Heraldo de Mexico, Texas Monthly, Film Quarterly, and C-SPAN2 Book TV. He is 2013 USC-Annenberg Getty Arts Journalism Fellow and was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters in 2015. He is a 2018 Yale Fellow.

In the 31 Books in 30 Days series leading up to the March 14 announcement of the 2018 National Book Critics Circle award winners, NBCC board members review the 31 finalists. Today, NBCC board member Carlin Romano offers an appreciation of nonfiction finalist Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt’s The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure (Penguin Press).

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Pity the much-abused American mind. University of Chicago philosopher Allan Bloom famously declared it closed. Johns Hopkins humanities professor William Egginton recently deemed it splintered. And now free-speech champion Greg Lukianoff and NYU social psychologist Jonathan Haidt contend that it’s “coddled.”

Well, maybe that’s not the best verb. Lukianoff and Haidt express reservations about the word in their Introduction, explaining they don’t like the implication that “children today are pampered, spoiled and lazy, because that is not accurate.” Lukianoff has told interviewers he prefers his book’s subtitle to its title because the crisis is not the spoiling of “snowflake” Internet-generation (I-Gen) students.

The real problem, the authors argue, is “overprotection” by adults—we’re undermining I-Gen students by encasing them in a culture of “safetyism.” They’re walled off from “microaggressions, “protected by “trigger warnings,” “bias hotlines” and crackdowns on even mildly offensive speech. In doing so, Lukianoff and Haidt warn, we incapacitate this latest generation, making it difficult for them to confront the diverse challenges of the real world.

The authors believe the current dysfunctionality “on college campuses, in high schools, and in many homes” stems from “three bad ideas”: “What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Weaker”; “Always Trust Your Feelings”; and “Life is a Battle Between Good People and Evil People.”

The upshot of those ideas in action are a host of bad social phenomena: a rise in intimidation and violence; the “concept creep” by which feeling “uncomfortable” becomes feeling “unsafe”; witch hunts that demonize opponents; a huge increase in political polarization; heightened anxiety and depression among the young; paranoid, “helicopter” parenting; a decline in free play and unsupervised risk-taking among children and adolescents; and the erection of an enormous academic bureaucracy of “safetyism.”

Haidt and Lukianoff say their goal is to assist us in “wising up” about these unfortunate trends. They suggest such solutions as cognitive behavioral therapy, limiting smart-phone use, and “free-range parenting” that allows children and adolescents the space to take risks and independently solve their problems by thinking them through. Young people should be “seeking out challenges,” “freeing themselves from cognitive distortions,” and “taking a generous view of other people.”   

Along the way, the authors cite many of the most highly publicized academic incidents of recent years that illustrate the disturbing developments they discuss, among them the effort to add trigger warnings to Columbia’s Core Curriculum; the Halloween-costume brouhaha at Yale; the protest against Charles Murray at Middlebury College; the Milo Yiannopoulos/anti-fa debacle at Berkeley, and the opposition to conservative speaker Heather MacDonald at Claremont McKenna College.

In this trenchant, nervy, data-driven rebuke to the lazy pedagogic assumptions and groupthink that increasingly permeate American culture and education, Lukianoff and Haidt happily upset standard political categories. While a number of their observations jibe with right-of-center complaints about political correctness, the authors identify themselves as center-left, but concerned nonetheless about self-defeating constraints on free discussion.

Together they’ve created a readable, startling narrative full of facts, ideological challenges and common-sense solutions. It’s a welcome macro-aggression against, in Harold Rosenberg’s memorable phrase, the “herd of independent minds“ who have created “safetyism.” Lukianoff and Haidt achieve, in The Coddling of the American Mind, what the best nonfiction should: a comprehensive, incisive portrait of a problem-filled world that, happily, contains hints of its own solutions within it.

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Carlin Romano is critic-at-large of The Chronicle of Higher Education and Professor of Philosophy and Humanities at Ursinus College.

In the 31 Books in 30 Days series leading up to the March 14 announcement of the 2018 National Book Critics Circle award winners, NBCC board members review the 31 finalists. Today, NBCC board member Mary Ann Gwinn offers an appreciation of nonfiction finalist Steve Coll’s Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America’s Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan (Penguin Press).

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Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America’s Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan, veteran journalist Steve Coll’s investigation into the United States’ entanglement with Afghanistan and Pakistan from 2001 to 2016, chronicles the tragic costs of the U.S. campaign to oust Al Qaeda and the Taliban from Afghanistan after 9/11. Despite assistance from 59 countries, despite thousands of lives lost and billions of dollars spent, the effort failed. Strategic bungling and distraction from the war in Iraq helped sink the effort, but the shadow opponent in this epic struggle was the Pakistani secret service, the Inter-Services Intelligence Agency (I.S.I.), and its covert support of the Taliban through its secretive wing, Directorate S.

This sequel to Coll’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning Ghost Wars tallies the monstrous losses in this struggle:  battlefield casualties; civilian deaths from military action and CIA drone attacks; murders of American and NATO troops by Afghanistan soldiers recruited by the Taliban. To staunch the carnage America negotiated both with the I.S.I. and in secret with the Taliban, but in vain: believing America would eventually abandon Afghanistan, the I.S.I. never withdrew support of Afghanistan’s Taliban, even as the Taliban mounted bloody attacks in Pakistan itself.

Coll has covered Afghanistan for almost thirty years, an odyssey that began when the Washington Post dispatched him to India in 1989 to report on South Asia, and Directorate S rings with deep authority. He conducted 550 interviews, including players in the Bush and Obama administrations, Afghan and Pakistani officials, spies, diplomats, and soldiers on the ground. Told with empathy for all sides, his account is sad, frightening, and moving in its depiction of the human toll of the conflict. With his even-handed approach, gift for limning character and dazzling reporting skills, Coll has created an essential work of contemporary history. Said the Guardian: “In the pages of Directorate S, the story is delivered with a literary prowess that has been absent in previous western accounts of America’s longest running war. The dance of blame, with the U.S. swaying at one moment towards Pakistan and the next towards Afghanistan, is a choreography familiar to C.I.A. chiefs, U.S. presidents and writers who have tackled the subject. Coll refuses to follow this tired tune, and the result is masterful.”

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Mary Ann Gwinn writes about books and authors for the Seattle Times, Newsday and other publications. She won the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for coverage of the Exxon Valdez disaster, and has chaired both the nonfiction and biography committees for the NBCC. She’s on Twitter at @gwinnma.

In the course of my research for my new novel, in which I bring Virginia Woolf back to life in modern-day New York, I set out one cool clear morning to find her books in Manhattan bookstores. Borders had gone, Barnes and Noble was still open, but huge red SALE notices spread across the books like flames, and no sign of Woolf. I at last tracked down her work in a small and beautiful independent bookstore, but only by thinking laterally and going upstairs to the European languages departments, which had a few copies in Spanish and Italian translation.

Earlier, on the ground floor, in English Fiction, I had asked a charming young man to help me. “Yes, I’m familiar with her work,” he said. My heart lifted. And then sank disproportionately when he continued, after a pause, “I associate her poems with those of Sylvia Plath.” Alas, though Woolf wrote rhythmic poetic prose, she was never a poet. The only possible association was that both women lost their lives to suicide.

I was recently at a Polari writers’ event at London’s prestigious South Bank Centre and one of the acts, a male poet, talked about his teenage fixation on Sylvia Plath—the crush of a (then) unhappy boy who had found his bard of sadness and anger. He raised a swell of wry laughter and fellow feeling from the room. It was fond; it acknowledged that many had shared his crush; it did not undervalue Plath, but implied the recognition, by a group of people who had lived to adulthood, that suicide is not a happy ending.

Would I have felt differently if the poet had been a woman, describing her fixation on Sylvia Plath to an audience of teenage girls? Probably. I would have feared that those teenagers were too young to see tragedy and comedy are emotional poles you can, if you’re lucky, move between, alive. So young, indeed, that Plath could be a role model. 

In short, I fear the cult of self-destructive female creativity, a shrine in which images of Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and Virginia Woolf gleam like holy relics in the twilight. The Ranker website puts Woolf and Plath respectively at Number 2 and Number 3 in their list of “Famous Writers Who Committed Suicide,” after Ernest Hemingway at Number 1. This sort of thing makes me shudder, put on my coat and go out swiftly for a walk.

But then, Woolf herself was a great walker, who frequently wrote light-filled sketches of the landscapes near Rodmell where she lived, and the garden of her house, which at first glimpse gave her “profound pleasure.” “An infinity of fruit-bearing trees; the plums crowded so as to weigh the tip of the branch down; unexpected flowers sprout[ing] among the cabbages.”

I hazard a guess that Charles Beresford’s much-reproduced marmoreal profile portrait of Virginia Stephen, as she then was—a black and white photo of a pale young virgin in a pale dress, bloodless, precious, isolated on a blank background—has had nearly as much influence on the melancholy glamour of her reputation as the cold March day in 1941 when she drowned in the River Ouse. When I decided to create a 21st-century fictional avatar of the writer I so admire, I found myself drawn instead to a sunlit, active, amused Virginia. This may surprise some of her fans, but listen to the author’s real-life diary entry of Saturday, September 13, 1919: “I think perhaps nine people out of ten never get a day in the year of such happiness as I have almost constantly.”

Woolf is still an icon for women writers everywhere, taught not just in anglophone countries but in Turkey, Libya and elsewhere where female freedom cannot be taken for granted. How did I have the hubris to try and recreate her? Though I am a novelist, I spent many of my early years in universities, and have read and re-read Woolf throughout my life. The first time, I was a 17-year-old undergraduate, disappointed to find the Oxford syllabus did not go beyond 1850. Longing for modernity, I read Woolf’s brief, effervescent Jacob’s Room, in fits and starts of wonder. Years later I studied her as a PhD student; at 40, I wrote the text and booklet for a British Council Virginia Woolf exhibition that traveled worldwide. Preparing to write my novel, I began again.

The more I re-read her, the more the Woolf I wanted to inhabit my pages danced and laughed. Like her diaries, my Virginia is full of life, ideas, jokes, sensuality. She is much more joyous than melancholy. She is, in fact, exactly what I take Woolf to have been: a person with a great capacity for pleasure who at times became dangerously ill with depression. Unless you think it right to let an illness define a person, it’s just as possible to interpret Woolf via her coexisting gift for happiness. Novelist Elizabeth Bowen remembered her on the floor mending a curtain, “and she sat back on her heels and put her head back in a patch of sun, early spring sun, and laughed in this consuming, choking, delightful, hooting way.”

And so my novel gave her a new chance to be alive, and happy. My Virginia shops in Bloomingdales, buys an indigo-blue broad-brimmed hat, drinks in the Algonquin with the ghost of Dorothy Parker and, after too many glasses of champagne, leap-frogs a fire-hydrant. She flies to Istanbul, the city which (as Constantinople) enthralled her in her long-ago real-life girlhood, finds two lovers, one male, one female, and attends an international conference on Virginia Woolf, where she naturally steals the show.

Nearing the anniversary of the day when Virginia Woolf died, I raise my glass to her work and her dark and bright moments of being. My fictional Virginia’s last words to her audience of young writers play on her real-life masterpiece, A Room of One’s Own: “The light is on you. It is in this room. You are in the sunshine which, while it’s here, feels as though it will last forever. Write while you’re here. Write while you can . . .”

Ramón Illán Bacca: There’s gabolatría on the part of critics, commentators, journalists, and they create a crushing, definitely overwhelming presence. Especially for those of us who came later and were trying to write. Everybody aspired to writing the other novel that would define an epoch. I even recall that in the novel of Aguilera Garramuño—A Brief History of Everything, it was called—there was a strip of paper, a sticker, that said: “The Successor to One Hundred Years of Solitude.” Everything was sold like that. Ay! the ravages of garcíamarquismo.

José Salgar: I believe he influences everything. He had a bad influence on the generation immediately following his. Something similar to what happened with Watergate. After Watergate all the professional journalists felt obliged to bring down their presidents. When Gabo had the great success of the Latin American literary boom, all the journalists believed they were obliged to write better than he did in order to succeed. And many of them thought Gabo was a poor writer and that they wrote better and they began to imitate him.

RIB: I remember Juan Gossaín, a journalist who acquired a good deal of prestige writing like García Márquez. It was very clear that he garcíamárquezed all the time.

Quique Scopell: I remember one day in Kid Cepeda’s house when Gabito told Gossaín to stop imitating him.

JS: It’s a normal development. I lose the thread with Gabo and he begins to make his own character different, but he quickly returns to Colombia. He never lost the connection to journalism except for those five years. Until we all suddenly convinced him, especially Guillermo Cano, to write his columns. He began with one about a brilliant minister; he wrote from wherever he was, and he sent it in on time, but now he was a different Gabo.

RIB: Then came the overflow about him. at’s when he becomes Gabriel García Márquez. And it’s when everyone is trying to know things about the man, right? There were even gabolaters. Gabolatry began, which still exists, of course. Universally. Here there were people like Carlos Jota who was involved in gabolatry, he began to write down facts about García Márquez, to collate things; if he was here, if he was there. It was a little later, when Jacques Gilard, the Frenchman, arrived . . .

Miguel Falquez-Certain: Jacques Gilard arrived in Colombia maybe in 1977. When he arrived, he communicated immediately with Álvaro Medina, since he already knew about him from references, and he helped him find all the necessary research materials to write his doctoral thesis on García Márquez and his friends from La Cueva, whom Gilard would later baptize the Barranquilla Group.

RIB: That’s when I become involved in the complicated story. I come back from the interior, I return to the coast, and then I hear things about him, I meet Jaime García Márquez, his brother, yes, but I wasn’t one of the gabolaters. I didn’t have much interest in looking for information.

Fernando Restrepo: When I return to Colombia, the figure of Gabo always appears among us, and the first thing we did when I came back was to produce In Evil Hour for television. And that’s when Gabo’s real interest in visual media is born. We began to talk a lot, a great, great deal, about the possibilities of his plots being transferred to television. In Evil Hour was the first work by Gabo brought to television, to the screen.

RIB: Well, every great author really arouses a great deal of interest, not only in his work but in his person. What hasn’t been written about Thomas Mann? The other day I read a very long biography.

Even in minor authors, a great deal of interest is suddenly awakened.

For example, there’s a character who attracts my attention, that is, Somerset Maugham, and I, for example, read almost all the pieces I see about Somerset Maugham. If you do that for a minor author, how will it be for the authors whose presence is so imposing?

Nereo López: He wasn’t made in Colombia. He lived in Paris and in Mexico City but Colombia . . .

FR: I come back to Bogotá in ’68 from Europe. So I encounter the presence of Gabo everywhere.

QS: I assure you that if you ask one of those types from the capital, they won’t understand half the novel. They don’t understand it because it’s a regional novel about Barranquilla, about the coast. Because Colombia has three regions: the Paisa region; the Cachaco region around the capital; and ours, the region of the ignoramuses to them. That book, half of the Cachacos don’t understand it because they can’t imagine that a man would do the things the novel says. It’s a completely regional novel. Nothing’s imagined.

Santiago Mutis: That’s a world lived by him, which I don’t have. I’m from the city. I have a family life that’s totally different. My education was different.

Eduardo Márceles Daconte: It’s difficult. Not only for a person from Aracataca but for any writer. What Gabo marked out in literature is a very high point, so one often feels . . . What shall I say? He’s a figure that somehow has weight within the literary trajectory, not only of the coast but of Colombia. Of course, of the world too, but let’s at least leave him there. So it’s a very high fee we writers from that region paid, but filled with admiration in any event.

SM: Gabo has traversed almost all of my life. The first books I read were by Gabo, and Gabo still continues to be an important influence; so the relationship with him has been real. For any person of my generation who has written it is permanent, because ever since he began to read until he became a man, until he became a writer, Gabo is there. One cannot deny that. He is a tremendous presence. But it’s also very different, let’s say, to reread him now than when one read him as a boy. As a boy, Leaf Storm or The Colonel is the truth. What an intense way of approaching life and literature! From then on you began to make your own way. The only thing that’s an influence is that one attempts to have the same intensity with things, but with one’s own things. at’s the lesson. His intensity. How much one can demand of oneself. But with things that are one’s own. And each person has his own.

Rose Styron: Bill had met Gabo with Carlos Fuentes in Mexico City. At a very, very large party where they both were, but I didn’t have the chance to meet him and talk to him until ’74. I really didn’t know that he was going to be there. I had been in Chile at the time of the coup and returned early in ’74. I think this was later in the year, in ’74. It may have been in ’75. It was during one of Bertrand Russell’s tribunals and a conference of some prominent Chileans who had been imprisoned by Pinochet had finally gotten out: singers and diplomats, all kinds of people. The tribunal brought them to Mexico. So I flew to Mexico City to meet Orlando Letelier, who had just arrived, not knowing that Carlos and García Márquez would be there too. We were all activists at the time, and we were all anti-Pinochet. We had all been involved the previous year in the Chilean fiasco. So that’s how we happened to meet, and then the three of us became very good friends, and since then we’ve spent a good deal of time together.

QS: Besides, a person who had his beginnings, so humble . . . As I’ve said, for me that’s no sin or offense. On the contrary. He’s a tenacious guy. Honest. Because he’s been honest his whole life. A working man. Persistent in his work. What else can you ask of a man? One can be furious with him as a person.

Not as a literary man, but as a person. He deserves it. That place he has in life, he’s worked it.

Emmanuel Carballo: There are two García Márquezes: before One Hundred Years he was a common, ordinary person, and after One Hundred Years he began to be another person . . .

Translated by Edith Grossman.

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NEW YORK: Join Silvana Paternostro and Álvaro Enrigue tonight at McNally Jackson for a conversation on García Márquez’s legacy on his 92nd birthday.

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Excerpted from Silvana Paternostro’s new book Solitude & Company: A true account of the life of Gabriel Garcia Marquez told with help from his friends, family, fans, arguers, fellow pranksters, drunks, and a few respectable souls, published today by Seven Stories Press.

In August, heavy showers lash the city of my birth, Calcutta. From the Chowringhee neighborhood of central Calcutta, Rabindranath Tagore wrote in a poem dated August 20th, 1928 (translated by K. K. Dyson):

In the dripping evening, friend, you brought me
a single ketaki. I was by myself
my lamp unlit. In the tossed green of a row of arcea-palms
fireflies flitted, unflagging in their quest

The August rains of Calcutta from the years preceding my move to the US are less lyrical. Instead of the Kadambaand Ketaki flowers of which the poet speaks, I smell sewage. My college was a mile or so away from Chowringhee. From the classroom’s window, I would watch rain skim the tapering head of a deodar tree and know that I had to wade through muck, accumulated over hours of incessant rainfall, to catch the homeward-bound metro train. If I had a prayer for the clouds, it would be that rickshaws run. A narrow, open drain flowed sluggishly in front of my apartment, carrying polythene bags and household waste, but a little downpour and it would flood the alley like a mighty river. Yet, when I think of Calcutta monsoons now, I picture a rain-washed city soaking magical light.

One blurry morning last August, I woke up to find my car covered in tiny ash-color particles. I live in Sacramento, California, and drive a hybrid Toyota, like half of my neighbors. The color of my car is not white, but pearl, the sales staff at the dealership had said. To my eyes—that of a new transplant in California—ashfall on pearl suggested the vehicle’s paint peeling off. My first impulse was to take it to the dealership. The second was to Google. The particles covering my car were debris billowing out of the Carr and Mendocino Complex Fires. Ash travels thousands of miles during the fire season. A few hundred miles from the burning forests, the Sacramento Valley had become a bowl collecting the remains.

#CaliforniaWildfires was trending on social media. I posted about the ashfall. A friend advised me to keep my passport and other essential items ready, in case the fire reached Sacramento and I had to leave home in haste. The comment disturbed me, though given the speed at which the North Bay and Thomas Fires spread in 2017, I knew, it was pragmatic. My discomfort, then, had less to do with my lack of knowledge than my unwillingness to imagine the possibility of evacuation. I did not want to believe I can be forced out of home, and that despite the fact that I know something about leaving homes—I migrated out of Calcutta, eight years back, and I grew up listening to my ancestors’ stories of being forced out of their homeland, the present-day Bangladesh, little more than 70 years ago.

I was born the year James E. Hansen testified before the United States Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources about the onset of global warming. It was 98 degrees in Washington, D.C. on the June day he testified and central Calcutta was flooded the August afternoon I was born. Over the course of my lifetime, global carbon emissions increased. My mind still finds ways to block the worst out. And in this, I am not alone.

“It is worse, much worse, than you think,” David Wallace-Wells writes in an essay, first published in New York Magazine, that opens his new book, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming. The book approaches the dearth of collective action addressing climate change as a crisis of imagination. When we are told that the earth will be 3.2 degrees warmer by 2100, even if all the commitments made in the Paris Agreement were to be immediately implemented, “Human experience and memory offer no good analogy for how we should think of those thresholds.” So Wallace-Wells offers readers worst-case scenarios to consider—imagine Dhaka in Bangladesh completely flooded, along with hundreds of other cities. Imagine the territorial reach of wildfires in the United States sextuple. Finally, to make the threat of climate change real, Wallace-Wells appeals to the idea of home. “You can choose your metaphor,” for what climate change is, but “You can’t choose the planet, which is the only one any of us will ever call home.”

Imagining the sweeping scope of climate change requires us to first accept the vulnerability of our homes.

I moved to Sacramento to teach contemporary literature at a university. Between August and November 2018, an eager group of undergraduate students studied contemporary fictions about forced displacement and migration with me. From a windowless classroom, we would conjure up the ebb and flow of peoples, their desires, and delusions, though this often meant coming up against the limits of imagination.

Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West, one of the fictions we read, follows characters migrating from one city to another in a world where wars are commonplace and endless. The protagonists eventually land in Marin, California, but Hamid leaves readers with the sense that there are no final stops. Once uprooted, you are always in transit. To my students, endless war as well as endless migration were foreign. Some of them would tell me about their ancestors’ journeys from Mexico, Philippines, and South Asia to the US. Still, war and displacement belonged elsewhere, on the fringes of imagination. In Exit West, Hamid never names the protagonists’ place of origin. I am not sure during which group exercise my students decided that a war-torn region from where characters come West must be that fuzzy piece of land called the Middle East, but that impression stuck, making its way into their written assignments.

“In the wealthy West,” Wallace-Wells says, “we’ve come to pretend that war is an anomalous feature of modern life, since it seems to have been retired as fully from our everyday experience as polio.” Students in my university are not quite the beneficiaries of Western wealth. They are casualties, I think, of a certain indifference with which the powerful in the West consider the day-to-day realities of the relatively powerless communities. The sense of remoteness associated with wars and the accompanying death and displacement is also exacerbated by the nature of the armed conflicts with which the US military remains involved. The veterans in my class have served elsewhere, deployed in the Middle East, Afghanistan, and so on. Therefore an extensive armed conflict displacing civilians within the US in the near future—the premise of Omar El Akkad’s novel American War—comes across as an unlikely event.

American War imagines a second civil war fought in America over the use of fossil fuels. When we were reading the novel, the Woolsey and Camp Fires broke out. The fires didn’t reach Sacramento, but, they affected the community and, in a few cases, destroyed family homes of students, faculty, and staff. The Sacramento Valley was a smoke bowl again. The university shut so that we wouldn’t  breathe the hazardous air.

After the first couple of days, I was tired of following the health advisories and remaining indoors. Outside, my eyes didn’t itch, and my head didn’t ache. I did cough a lot, though. Grading student responses to American War from a coffee shop, I couldn’t escape the notion that their thoughts on the polluted environment of 2075 was also a commentary on the dense haze pressing against the café’s glass walls.

The California wildfires of 2018 surpassed the scale of those from the previous years, becoming the “deadliest” in modern history. The distinction is, however, unlikely to last—wildfires will recur. The next fire could be deadlier. Stephen D. Fillmore, a wildland fire manager, wrote for Slate, “Lately it seems that the fires that defy our initial suppression efforts are escalating rapidly and catastrophically. Fires are doing things we aren’t used to them doing.” Wildfires do not happen because of climate change but the fires burn longer, cause more wreckage in a hotter planet.

Wildfire in Yosemite National Park, 2009, by Kip Evans.

Should we take measures to prevent them? Biologist and writer Maya Khosla’s documentary on post-fire biodiversity Searching for the Gold Spot: The Wild after Wildfire provides reasons why we should not, one of them being the black-backed woodpecker that thrives in burnt coniferous forests. Can the devastation be prevented? According to Fillmore, “The unpalatable truth is that there may not be an overarching solution to California’s wildfire problem.”

In the aftermath of the Camp Fire, fictions that earlier seemed to be about elsewhere—about a different place or time—came home. The political rhetoric that demonizes refugees and immigrants had motivated me to design this course. The growing resistance to immigrants in the US and elsewhere, along with the narrative of “crisis” used to justify the separation of families at the US-Mexico in summer 2018 were my immediate points of reference. However, when the university re-opened in the last week of November, the same fictions sparked conversations that I could not have foreseen. The Camp Fire had been contained by then but families based in or around towns like Chico and Paradise had nowhere to return. The experience of forced displacement was more proximate than before.

On FM stations, I would hear homeowners’ insurance companies advertise quotes in anticipation of future disasters and wonder how many people in the US will evade forced displacement during their lifetimes. As we continue to wage wars against one another and the planet, isn’t home becoming an obsolete concept?

Catherine Malabou, a French philosopher, observes that Western thought generally refuses the possibility of complete change. From Greek mythology to Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis, there are numerous instances in Western literature of people, animals, or objects altering their external shape. However, deep down the being stays the same, unaffected by the outward transformation. The Western imagination insists on continuity, believes that essences of things endure.

Despite such conviction, however, Plutarch’s famous paradox asks whether a ship with all its components replaced can fundamentally remain the same ship. Fire consumes a house that took a lifetime to build. The structure is reconstructed, return on the regular insurance premiums. Is it home? Malabou would say, no. An accident or trauma produces a definite cut—“a brain injury, a natural catastrophe, a brutal, sudden, blind event cannot be reintegrated retrospectively into experience.” A catastrophe is a breach in history.

Collectively, we are yet to acknowledge climate trauma. The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) estimates that one in every 110 people globally is a refugee, an asylum-seeker, or an internally displaced person. This includes climate- and weather-related refugees, along with the population that armed conflicts displace. Storms and wildfires already cause thousands of people within the US to move every year. Climate-related displacement also lays bare structural injustices at the global level: Least Developed Countries (LDCs), such as, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Ethiopia, though not major greenhouse gas emitters, face the direst consequences. Nepal is a land-locked country, but home to some of the highest glaciers in the world. The Himalayas are projected to lose one-third of their ice by the end of the century. Kunda Dixit, editor of Nepali Times, notes that the Himalayan thaw will have devastating consequences for as many as 1.6 billion people. The concept of “environmental migrants” has existed since the 1970s, but climate refugees are neither internationally recognized nor protected. The backlash against refugees in the US and other nations, along with the obliviousness to patterns of climate-related internal displacement, sustain the illusion of peace and environmental stability.

Since extreme weather, contaminated air, and displacement feel remote until one experiences them firsthand, artists are simulating the horrors in an attempt to draw attention to them. British visual artist Michael Pinsky’s Pollution Pods—geodesic domes—recreate the heat and smog-filled air of London, New Delhi, Beijing, and Sao Paulo. A fifth dome simulates the clean air of Tautra, a Norwegian island, for comparison. Pinsky identifies the installation’s audience as the West that breathes relatively cleaner air while its craving for cheaper goods poisons the environments of other regions. Pinsky hopes that “the visceral memory of these toxic places will make us think again before we buy something else we don’t really need.” Tackling the crisis of imagination through simulation, Pinsky can evoke guilt and possibly even impact individual choice. But will that be enough?

Those of us not in climate change denial mode try to “do our bit.” Avoid plastic, drive electric cars, if we can afford them, or go “hybrid.” We believe that our choice of having or not having children has planetary significance. But when we “do our bit,” what are we really doing? While picking paper bags over plastic in a grocery store, we exercise choice, though as Wallace-Wells explains, “Plastic panic is another exemplary climate parable, in that it is also a climate red herring. […] while plastics have a carbon footprint, plastic pollution is simply not a global warming problem—and yet it has slid into the center of our vision.” Plastic is at the center of our vision because, as individuals, we can “do something” about it.

In the face of powerlessness, the ability to do anything feels empowering. During the Camp Fire, an acquaintance based in Chico texted me to say she was upset with herself for leaving town at the fire’s onset, when her acquaintances hadn’t yet evacuated. She felt guilty for being able to get away. I understood this. That I had donated to GoFundMe set up for victims of the fire had to do with my own guilt for being this close to the wreckage and yet safe.

Though the university shut for 10 days during the fire, the fitness studio I attend was open. The group classes were packed to capacity. We crunched and planked with the doors bolted. We clapped at the end of each session for making time for ourselves, a standard practice in such classes. But we cannot sweat off the world’s toxins, and avoiding plastic bags will not save us.

Actions and policies that draw on individual guilt get us nowhere when the US, a major greenhouse gas-emitting country, declines any guilt or debt on the global political stage. Todd Stern, America’s Special Envoy for Climate Change to the 2009 UN negotiations in Copenhagen, maintained that “We absolutely recognize our historic role in putting emissions in the atmosphere up there that are there now, but the sense of guilt or culpability or reparations, I just categorically reject that.” Climate-related art or parables that evoke either fatalism or individual guilt shroud the bigger picture. Wallace-Wells considers large-scale carbon capture from the air and other geoengineering strategies worth exploring to mitigate the present climate crisis, but his optimism on this front is guarded. He argues that only a combination of collective political will and international policies will make any difference.

The implications of climate change are manifested everywhere and, yet, remain intangible. It must be, in part, because of the stories we tell.

Contemporary studies claim that climate change multiplies the threat of both international conflict and civil unrest. Syria is offered as an example of this. Wallace-Wells observes that, “From Boko Haram to ISIS to the Taliban […] drought and crop failure have been linked to radicalization.” This line of argument is contested, like many others related to climate change. However, can we deny that the history of colonialism, domestic, and international conflicts is fundamentally connected to scrambling over resources? Or that natural resources become bargaining chips for conflict resolution?

During winter vacations from school, I used to go on picnics with my family to various spots by the Ganges river in India. That is how I saw the Farakka barrage, a dam India had constructed in 1975. Farakka barrage diverts water from the Ganges River System and flushes the sediment deposited at the Calcutta port. The mile-and-a-half long Farakka bridge offered a panoramic view of the river, which is probably why the area was a popular picnic spot. Post-lunch the larger picnic groups, their bellyful with mutton and beer, broke into dance on the embankments. The latest Bollywood and Bengali film songs played on their portable sound boxes. But for my sister and me the highlight of the trip was the spell of water discharge from log gates. We hadn’t seen waterfalls, and I liked to imagine that this was it.

What I didn’t know and couldn’t imagine was that the barrage, built 10 miles from the Bangladesh border, increased the river’s salinity on that side, affecting human health, agriculture, fisheries and the livelihood of fishermen. Water remains a tipping point in India-Bangladesh relations as it does in India-Pakistan relations. India and Pakistan, despite their long-standing hostilities, honor a treaty signed in 1960 to oversee the distribution of water between the two countries. In 2016, when political tensions between the two countries heightened, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi said that blood and water cannot flow together. By 2018, India had decided to expedite the construction of three dams that would prevent the water that was allotted to India under the treaty but remained unused from entering Pakistan, rebuffing Pakistan’s objections to the projects.

Disputes about water-sharing can only aggravate as these densely inhabited tropical countries become hotter, more river beds dry up, and groundwater depletes. Yet, conflicts among India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh will probably continue to be understood in terms of religious and ethnic hostilities, rather than in the context of the changing climate.

My father’s father and his siblings—children of a schoolteacher in Faridpur, East Bengal (present-day Bangladesh)—began trickling into Calcutta, West Bengal, in the 1930s. They did not own much land or property, and Calcutta, which was once the capital of British India, offered more opportunities to economic migrants like them. The male siblings put up in dormitories until they had the means to bring their spouses. Soon the large, joint family was cramming small, rented houses. The first years of the family’s settlement in Calcutta coincided with the Second World War.

The British were exporting grains, essential goods, and human labor from the Indian subcontinent in order to sustain Britain and those people who the British forces were liberating from the Nazi occupation. Meanwhile, crop disease, flood, and cyclone diminished India’s rice harvest. The result was the infamous Bengal famine of 1943. Winston Churchill said that Indians brought the famine upon themselves by “breeding like rabbits,” though as economist Amartya Sen contends, the colonial government’s policies were responsible for the crisis. If grains were imported to India during this time, they were distributed among those who served the British army or toiled in industries the British prioritized. By 1940, my grandfather, having earned a master’s degree in English from Calcutta University, was employed as an administrative officer of the Alipore Jail, under the British Raj. His profession seems to have aligned with the wartime priorities of the colonial government. So, while the large family did not thrive, they also did not starve. In 1947, with the end of the British Raj, when the Indian subcontinent was partitioned, Calcutta and Faridpur stood on opposing sides of the border.

Families, like nations, choose the events that constitute their history. When asked why my ancestors remained in Calcutta when the subcontinent was partitioned, their homeland being forever relegated to the “other side,” my oldest aunt mentions the communal violence. We are Hindus, and the Muslim-majority East Bengal that first became East Pakistan and, then, Bangladesh (after the 1971 war) had no place for us. But it is also true that the life my father’s family carved out in West Bengal, India, had strategic advantages. Here my ancestors pursued careers that were less exposed to the vagaries of the weather. My father believes education and government service saw the family through the turbulent years of famine, war, and Partition. Had the family remained in East Bengal, without a large piece of land to farm and hoarded harvest, the famine would get them.

Sundarbans National Park.

The single-minded focus on communal violence in the aftermath of Partition overshadows the fact that currents of movement from Bangladesh to India cannot be solely explained by that factor. Saline intrusion, riverbank erosion, and rising sea levels cause communities to move away from the coastal regions of Bangladesh. Disappearing mangroves on the Bangladesh side of Sundarbans also uproot communities. Many of these displaced people make their way to India. However, India is unlikely to remain the last stop on the trail. It is posited to be badly hit by the climate crisis, as is US where I am currently based.

I go to Calcutta for winter holidays. On my last visit, as soon as the flight landed, there was a niggling sensation in my nose. I sniffed burning coal. It took my sleep-deprived, jetlagged brain a few moments to gather it was the haze. Runway edge lights bore through thickets of smoke. I was home.

The international airport in Calcutta has a ceiling textured to resemble bamboo sheet, a nod to the foliage of rural Bengal, I suppose. Enlarged and screen-printed, Tagore’s verses in his flowing handwriting run on the ceiling. Outside the terminal, individuals waiting for the arriving passengers had pollution masks covering their mouth and nose. In December, the city of my birth smells of charred remains.

A few years after India’s independence and the Partition, my father’s father was deputed to form the Oil and Natural Gas Company (ONGC) along with nine other colleagues. My mother’s father was also among this group of founding members. That is how my parents’ families met in 1955, and my birth, decades later, owes something to the company’s inception.

Meanwhile, other relatives—primarily, on my father’s mother’s side—who had previously lived in Dhaka, East Bengal (East Pakistan by that time), came to Calcutta as refugees. This group of newly displaced relatives took turns to squat in the already crammed house in which my grandfather and his siblings were living. It would be a while before these relatives were allotted land on the outskirts of Calcutta, where they could build a mud hut. They were lucky—not all refugees from East Bengal were rehabilitated.

Eventually, my father’s maternal uncles found employment as drillers in ONGC, camping in remote locations for exploration projects. The grueling working conditions translated to financial reward. Where there was a hovel, I have only ever seen a bungalow with a garden. It is impossible to spend a summer night there anymore without air-conditioning.

Now a prominent public-sector energy company, ONGC has been indicted for flouting environmental norms by the Central Pollution Control Board on several occasions. The company is responsible for the oil spill in Kathiramangalam in 2017. When facing protests for contaminating water used for irrigation, a regional communications team of the company released an online video in which a man corrects a seemingly naïve woman’s perception that ONGC’s actions influence farming conditions. The problem, the man says, is the lack of rain, not the Oil and Natural Gas Company.

Generating energy is a priority in a developing country like India, and it is playing catch up with developed nations by taking the same route: increasing the emission of greenhouse gases. In this scenario, whose responsibility is the climate?

My grandfather did not see the home he built in Calcutta shrouded in smog. But I have. This would be generational injustice if I could self-righteously claim to have taken paths that are radically different from those of my predecessors. Using paper bags in place of plastic does not count for much. At the same time, being alive today means belonging to a generation that can push for cultural and political metamorphosis and reimagine life on the planet in ways that avert some of the forthcoming disasters. Our generation is hard pressed for time.

I remember the small, round tin lunchbox my mum packed for me with rice and chicken vibrating in my hands as we made the weekly drive in our clunky, baby blue Volvo, from Summer Hill to Hoxton Park to attend my abuela’s astrology lessons. Disguised by the dusty blonde brick exterior of the government housing block, her unit was legendary in my eyes, its interior decor evolving over months and years like a painter’s body of work. I later learned that these moods were often strategic and responsive to particular astrological transits—many years later she instructed me to wear uplifting red and dab rose oil on my wrists during a particularly damning Neptune transit.

As the upholstery, wall art, and rugs shifted according to color, some things were constants: the scattered semiprecious stones along the mirrored sidetable, the bookcase filled with astrology and crystal magic manuals and mythological texts, and the bowl of plastic fruit on the small dining table whose grapes I had, in earlier childhood, tried to chew more than once. On the balcony were plants surrounding a designated smoking wicker chair and often an audience of pigeons. Back inside, just past the balcony door, was a chunky beige PC running Windows 98 with a permanently magenta-tinted screen.

This day, the monitor threw blue-pink light over the mostly yellow-toned room, as the sun was setting and abuela was preparing to begin the lesson. She was reminiscent of a middle-aged Eartha Kitt, petite and expressive, but with an accent I have only heard on the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua. She passed out cue cards she had made to each of her students: three women ranging from their twenties to their fifties, and me, ten years old. There was a lilac card for each sign, with a short description, element, mode, ruling planet, and key phrase. I remember looking over Capricorn—my Sun sign—and finding the key phrase “I use.”

*

What does it mean to identify with astrology? Within astrological discourse, this question is usually a matter of the Sun, the luminary which determines our conscious self, our choices, our trajectory and life purpose. Mainstream predictive astrology and the rise of New Age countercultural beliefs in the 60s popularized the Sun sign as the most accessible and determining part of our chart. We don’t need to know the time of birth or even year to know our Sun sign (although more precise astrologers would challenge that). It is likely to be most people’s first glimpse of Western astrology.

But like the concept of identity itself, our Sun signs cannot encompass the whole of who we are. Astrological discourse has speculated on the prominence of Sun sign astrology in the West, in comparison to Vedic astrology which focuses more heavily on the Moon. The Sun may rule identity, but it also rules individualism and ego, and comes to strength in the signs Aries and Leo, traditionally associated with masculinity and action, pride, and self-orientation, all rewarded traits in patriarchal, colonial, neoliberal capitalism. In this same traditional astrological framework, the Sun is weakened in the signs Libra and Aquarius, which focus too heavily on relationships and communities respectively to have a strong self-concept.

Stuart Hall, cultural studies theorist and exemplary Aquarius Sun, wrote about identity to unstick it from its false premise of stability. He forms a discursive approach which shows identity to be a process, often ambivalent and indeterminate, never fully “won” nor “lost,” neither “sustained” nor “abandoned.” Elaborated in his essay “Who Needs Identity?,” identity is thus often an urging toward stability, an investment in the “fantasy of incorporation,” which sometimes tries and always fails to erase internal difference. However, identities are also formed as a way to mark difference and exclusion, as they are “produced in specific and institutional sites within specific discursive formations and practices, by specific enunciative strategies.” Hall clarifies identity as bound to cultural meanings, formed by the interplay between political and historical context. Both unconscious and intentional, identity is more than an affiliation—it is a political project.

I sometimes try to imagine what Stuart Hall would say about a lot of things, astrology included, drawing on his warm yet incisive critical voice. Sun sign astrology is an essentialism, certainly. What does it mean to identity with an unchanging stock personality description, especially one often carelessly written to perpetuate assumptions about people’s motivations? Perhaps there is some agency in being able to choose to invest in stereotypes, even if, at the same time, believing in these simple stereotypes can close down and even damage the self. (Many, of course, resist overdetermination.) And perhaps it offers access to a rare sense of commonality for some, across hierarchies and more public, entrenched social identities.

Skeptics such as Benjamin Radford have compared astrology to racism due to this stereotypical, deterministic thinking, but these critics are usually unwilling to go beyond the realm of thought, and define racism as a purely interpersonal phenomenon, rather than composite matrices of domination that limit access and freedom. As of yet, astrology has not manifested power structures along the lines of its signs. It is merely annoying to its detractors. In contrast, many falsehoods lie within the stereotypical, deterministic thinking of patriarchy, white supremacy, anti-Blackness, transphobia, capitalism, ableism, homophobia—but these structural formations will never be considered irrational so long as they benefit those in power. The western notion of “rationality” is closer to a sense of legibility: what is able to be seen, measured, and understood within the frame of the West, and discrediting that which cannot be fully translated or captured.

Despite the one-dimensional astrology perpetuated by some critics, there are many shades of potential investment and basically no actual, enforced rules in astrology, making it one of the most unpredictable spiritual practices. No one will stop you from forming your own interpretations of planets and signs—although many astrologers will question you for attempting to include the recently discovered “thirteenth sign” Ophiuchus in your chart readings. Some astrological traditions have mathematical reasons for their interpretations of signs, planets, houses, limiting their scope to keep their charts in order. Others are more open to the expanse of different, fluid meanings and astronomical bodies. Some focus on fate and fortune, others on inner life and emotional growth, some on both.

Going beyond the simple Sun sign, there is the basic natal chart: constructed as a wheel divided into twelve sections, it paints a picture of the way the sky was oriented at the time of your birth. Knowing your birth time down to the minute can be crucial, and can mean the difference between a loud Leo Ascendant and a shy Virgo Ascendant. From there, the position of the twelve signs is set across the twelve houses, and the planets are scattered along the wheel accordingly. The planets are seen as points of “energy,” throwing emphasis to particular parts of your life. A planet’s sign determines its style of expression, and its house determines where its effects are most seen. From there, you can create charts for transits, solar and lunar progressions, solar returns, as well as synastry and composite charts mapping relationship dynamics, and draconic charts. Once you gain a feeling for the basic twelve points, you can then include different asteroids, fixed stars, or midpoints. The Sun sign is still incredibly meaningful, but as your knowledge expands, it becomes harder to see it as a defining personality trait. Past a certain threshold of knowledge, astrological charts become responsive and incomplete, reflective of the continual process of self-making.

*

My interest in astrology had a deeper foundation than Abuela’s lessons—it came with my kindergarten obsession with the anime series Sailor Moon. Each Sailor Senshi (then dubbed as “Scout”) had her own elemental kind of power, which I later learnt was somewhat cohesive with the astrological significance of her planet. I wanted to belong to space and to have my own special kind of power.

Sailor Moon creator Naoko Takeuchi’s celestial symbolism was fused with a mundane romanticism, directed towards friends and lovers alike. Relationships were held in equal weight to the quests and goals of the Sailor Senshi—often, the power of relationship was what fostered the strength to defeat the villain and restore peace. These emotional lessons imprinted on me as a lonely child, and turning to astrology seemed reasonable to figure out what my elemental power would (hypothetically) be.

Unfortunately there were no astrology books for children. I was contending with a 90s postfeminist boom in New Age self-help, which mostly encouraged Capricorn Sun women to exploit their canny investment skills and strategically date older men. I was left with a confused, premature self-knowledge of being serious, depressive, and achievement-oriented, which was probably lodged in my psyche for good. Capricorn is ruled by the planet Saturn, traditionally known as a “malefic” planet that brings suffering, and my early experiences with astrology were retrospectively colored by Saturn themes. It was embarrassing more than anything else, because at that time not many other people entertained astrology, kids and adults alike. But it was also painful in other ways, as I didn’t have the emotional toolkit to protect myself from being defined by astrologers whose interpretations often fed unhealthy notions of personality, selfhood and identity. My Capricornian “maturity” became a way to justify my isolation and distance from other children.

I only watched the first two seasons of Sailor Moon, the English dub broadcast on Cheez TV before school. Later series of Sailor Moon introduced Hotaru Tomoe, who transformed into Sailor Saturn. Her chronic illness and quiet demeanor hides her power to destroy and rebirth the universe. Takeuchi merged and blended some of the astrological themes of Saturn and Pluto in Sailor Saturn’s abilities, represented by the long scythe she carries: a symbol of harvest and the shift from spring–summer to autumn–winter, the conclusion of the agricultural lifecycle. In ancient astrology, Saturn was the farthest planet visible to the naked eye and thought to be the edge of the solar system, and thus was theorized as the planet ruling death, sickness, and loss. Ancient interpretations of a Capricorn Sun, being “born under the sign of Saturn,” were considerably harsher than the icy, reserved images fed to me from those astrology manuals for “the modern woman”—with exposure to this older mythos, I may have had a terrifyingly precocious understanding of myself as tethered to death. While relieved, I also mourn the baby goth that could have been.

Traditional astrology, derived from ancient astrology, focuses less on internal experience and traits and more on the events in an individual’s life, in line with its practice as divination. The Sun can indicate what your life path will look like, but can also be seen as a representation of your father, depending on the reading. Likewise, the Moon’s position can be used to divine health conditions, fertility, or events affecting your mother or even any significant women in your life.

The position of Saturn could show where your life’s difficulties lay so you could be reasonably prepared. Demetra George, an astrologer noted for her return to ancient Hellenistic astrology, makes a gentle case for good fortune/bad fortune astrology in , writing that:

. . . for many people, despite their best efforts and excellent aspirations, life continues to be filled with loneliness, unrealized potential, suffering, and failure. From an astrological perspective, the poor condition of certain planets in the chart can indicate that these individuals may have an extremely difficult time bringing about certain matters that will benefit them.

George suggests spiritual practice in the form of prayer and meditation, ceremonial rituals, and even modern psychotherapy as a potential remedy for people with afflicted charts. In her view, being carefully honest and upfront about weakness and bad luck in the chart is potentially compassionate, even just as a recognition that “bad things happen to people and [. . .] certain astrological factors can and do indicate these misfortunes.”

However, more modern astrology rejects this causal, fatalistic approach. The contemporary school of psychological astrology, based largely on Carl Jung’s analytical psychology, sees the chart as correlation not causation, reflecting meaningful coincidences which can be used to seek insight about the individual’s psychological experience, including needs, motivations, defenses and projections. Psychological astrologers such as Dane Rudhyar, Liz Greene, and Stephen Arroyo recuperated and rewrote astrological planets, signs, and houses as essentially neutral rather than conferring qualities of luck. A particular cornerstone of psychological astrology is Greene’s manual on Saturn, A New Look at an Old Devil, which conceptualized Saturn as able to provide valuable wisdom as part of experiencing hardship. My experience of Saturn transits have often been this kind of clarifying internal process where difficult situations teach me where my values and priorities lie. In line with the symbol of the scythe, Saturn transits can give you the opportunity to “reap what you sow,” where small advancements and long-term planning pay off.

In many ways, psychological astrology’s application is a form of emotional self-help, encouraging reflection and introspection, giving strategies for growth, and sometimes promising to be able to unlock inner power. Much is to be said about contemporary self-help, particularly in the neoliberal age, as it frequently promises happiness and fulfillment without questioning oppressive social structures, individualizing and depoliticizing mental distress and lack of fulfillment. Social work academic Joanne Baker’s research on young Australian women documents self-help and astrology as a particular “psychological strategy” for navigating neoliberal and postfeminist contradiction.

Neoliberal postfeminism tells you that you can do it all, you can find your inner power, and you have so much opportunity, so you have to make the most of it. Even if you’re struggling to pay rent, you’re still in underpaid casual work, you need a master’s now for the job you want, or your boyfriend won’t respect your boundaries, the solution is seeing how you are “attracting” these circumstances. The solution is “improving” yourself. The solution is “healing.” You have the agency to build a happy, fulfilling, successful life—you must remain optimistic.

The psychological strategies Baker details include general optimism, viewing difficulties as “learning experiences,” viewing others as “worse off,” and pragmatic fatalism. These all aim to obscure the patterns of exploitation and disadvantage present in these young women’s lives, as well as to avoid being labelled openly as “disadvantaged” or “oppressed” in any way. Baker notes that pragmatic fatalism—believing that certain things such as losing a job, an unplanned pregnancy, or other “failures” were predestined and meant to be—is incongruent with the general neoliberal self-belief that “anything is possible” if you work hard enough, try hard enough, etc. is belief in destiny and things being “meant to be” is possibly emotionally necessary for navigating current social structures, especially when pressured to reach a certain level of success. Totalized self-responsibility—if you fail, it’s entirely your fault—would be crushing, considering that failure is not something avoidable.

This pragmatic fatalism is omnipresent in astrology, even modern, psychological astrology. The question of why astrology has seen such a revival amongst millennials has been posed again and again, and I feel that this is part of the answer: astrology is vague enough to carry both optimism and pessimism depending on emotional necessity. Look to contemporary psychological astrology to unlock your future and become a better you, and look to traditional astrology to process your past and radically accept what is. This is an oversimplified binary, of course, and I don’t believe most people approach astrology in such a purely pragmatic way.

I believe sometimes—even if you’re half aware you’re looking up your transits because you’ve been crying for three hours and it’s 4am and you need something to calm yourself down because you have a doctor’s appointment you can’t miss at 11am the next day and you’ve been sleeping in too much and mornings are supposed to be the most productive time of the day and anxious thoughts keep rattling through your brain—a little bit of the magic can filter in, like a slight breeze, when you check your astrology app and see that Jupiter has just moved into Sagittarius, a traditionally lucky and benevolent placement. In that moment, things feel a bit more in place, and I half-know it’s not true, but my heart has slowed down, because I’ve remembered that both the planets and my feelings keep moving.

Progressing through her interviews with young Australian women, Baker comes across an “atypical case” of a woman who does not attribute difficult experiences as “learning experiences.” Having been the victim of sexual abuse and violence, and currently living in poverty as a single mother of two at the age of 24, she made little “optimistic revisions” to her life narrative, instead of openly expressing regret and emotional distress from her experiences. Notably, however, she was also the only woman interviewed by Baker to voice empathy for others who shared her experiences, and to challenge the status quo by asserting that women deserved more.

Overall, those women who denied their own difficulties also tended to close down the possibility of fully recognizing the difficulties of others, and were less likely to draw connections between them. Their belief in meritocracy and denial of victimhood—being subjected to by forces outside of their control—was also projected onto those seen to be perpetual “failures” in the eyes of neoliberal capitalism: unemployed people, young single mothers, migrants, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, people with disabilities and chronic illnesses. A lack of self-compassion translated directly to reduced compassion for others, which Baker acknowledges is “likely to reduce the possibilities of mobilization for social change.”

Using astrology to navigate and survive neoliberal capitalism, patriarchy, racism, oppression generally carries the risk of falling into blaming people for their circumstances, so long as it draws on the heightened personal responsibility pushed onto individuals to “make their own destiny.” Although I have no experience in any other spiritual practice, I’m aware that transcendence is part of the appeal, believing that one can go beyond what is handed to you, that you can truly become “bigger than your circumstances” given the right touch of fate and faith. There’s something else on your side, whether that be planets, archetypes, spirits, ancestors, powers much older than these destructive systems we’re entangled in, even as we speak it through the languages and histories of those systems.

Love possibly falls under this category, as a very, very old power. In Sailor Moon, Usagi Tsukino’s elemental power is seemingly “love” or “healing,” sending vibrant, crushing pink hearts out of scepters and wands. It corresponds with the Moon’s astrological association with the emotional body, physiological response, maternity, attachment bonds, lineage and kinship. Self-healing and healing others is on the same continuum, in which connection can be found in being able to admit one’s vulnerabilities and thus recognize the vulnerabilities of others. Joanne Baker’s “atypical case” reminds me of Sara Ahmed’s writing on fragility, in which she resists the temptation of aspiring to wholeness, and instead encourages and embraces a sense of brokenness—from emotional, political, collective pain and vulnerability—in order to fully see and connect with the brokenness of others.

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If I could go back in time, I might not have invested in learning about astrology so early that I became so unthinkingly invested. I understand why some people advocate for children to grow up without religion. My brain was too young and pliable, too hungry to make sense of other people.

Growing up with religion often seems to come with community, rituals, places of worship, all embedded in cultural practice and significance. My only sense of what church could be like came from Abuela, both in the way that she could hand down transcendental wisdom and guidance as casually as she would pour my sister and me glasses of juice in the morning, and in the sanctuary and protection her space gave me. I was not only a Capricorn, but a racially confused and isolated Afro-Nicaraguan girl growing up in predominantly non-Black spaces. Abuela’s unapologetic vibrancy drew me in. Her astrological practice seemed inextricable from the glow she put out. It was one of the few models I had of Black womanhood, and one that seemed to recognize how futile it was to try to assimilate.

I consult her on occasion and she sends me links about important transits on WhatsApp, but ultimately we have our own individual ways of practicing astrology. Visiting her a few years ago in Cairns—she refuses to move back to Sydney because it’s too cold for her—we spent quiet mornings on our laptops with cups of black coffee. The solitary nature of practice made astrology feel like witchcraft more than any association with the occult. While I never thought I would be totally ostracized for my belief in astrology, I also knew my interest was something not many other people would take seriously.

Years later, watching astrology become more popular online—particularly on Tumblr, Twitter and Instagram—was dumbfounding at first. It was not something I ever expected, although I did notice that for a few years before that, people began engage me in conversation about astrology as an enjoyable topic rather than as an absurdity. I even started to find people whose level of interest met mine—they knew their whole charts, and tracked their transits—and a part of me began to relax about it. It felt warm to be understood.

Even then, a lot of the astrology I saw was a blend of meaningful self-reflection and memes. The quantity of memes and relatable posts began to rise and rise, and even seasoned astrologers began to make their own, using the reaction image of the moment. I realized that it was possible to engage in astrology without necessarily fusing it to the core of your being—it could be light and fun. The sheer volume of memes led to its own complexity of meaning, often reflecting the creator’s personal experiences with other people, coded by their own individual signs.

I think this kind of simple, joyful engagement, while reliant on astrological stereotypes, isn’t quite equivalent to the typical, reductive Sun sign astrology of decades past. The messy sprawl of diverse astrological content is one reason, but another is the general lack of interest in proving astrology to be real or justifying its practice. There’s less of an investment in being totally “rational” or “logical.” It operates on the same level as having lucky omens, soulmates, believing in ghost stories—concepts which aren’t fully filled out, stable or coherent, leading them to fluctuate in significance. These things can feel so real, even as you know your understanding is piecemeal. It affects us as a twinge or a jolt, or a shiver. It disjoints from the framework of “rational” existence, both as emotional epiphany and silly tweet.

*

Traditional Western astrological texts refer to the fire and air signs as having a “positive” charge, being extroverted and focused outwards, being dynamic and creative (fire) or objective and communicative (air). Earth and water signs occupy the introverted, “negative” binary opposite, associated with embodiment and materiality (earth) and emotionality and connection (water). In the book Symbols for Women: A Feminist Guide to the Zodiac, Sheila Farrant critiques this gendered framing of the signs, instead constructing a “matrilineal zodiac” based on different female mythological figures. She even invokes the writer Simone Weil as a figure for Aquarian women.

As an astrologer and gender studies major, finding Symbols for Women at a university book fair was astounding. Farrant shifted the valence of each element, showing how each could be interpreted in a masculine or feminine way, and further, how patriarchal ideology underpinned our understandings of personality and psychology itself. In deconstructing the hierarchical binaries present in astrology, where body/emotion is implied to be of a “lower order” than mind/reason, Farrant radically opens up the zodiac. She also makes note of how each sign operates “under patriarchy,” acknowledging that social structure constrains personal expression and personality through upholding specific values.

While psychological astrology can present seemingly limitless opportunities for growth, and traditional astrology preordains fortune, Farrant’s feminist astrology conceives of energies and archetypes which are stifled by an imbalanced social order. One example is her interpretation of Pisces, often stereotyped as overemotional, reclusive and with addictive, self-sabotaging tendencies. Farrant returns to the core themes of Pisces: responsiveness, vulnerability, global interconnection, dreams and the subconscious, creativity. Instead of essentializing people with Pisces aspects as “just being that way,” she speculates that existing in Eurowestern capitalist modernity as a Pisces is incredibly difficult—Piscean values are not respected or integrated into wider society, hence the escapism and need for sanctuary.

Like many other disciplines, most of the historically prominent astrologers were men, but the most recent wave of interest in astrology is led by women and LGBTQI+ people. Queer astrology has emerged as a specific practice, with astrologers like Chani Nicholas and Alice Sparkly Kat synthesizing politics and astrology, encouraging movement towards liberation. Astrolocherry, a renowned, poetic Tumblr astrologer, also strongly hints that outer planet transits (Uranus, Neptune and Pluto) are on the side of the oppressed, bringing greater social structures closer to dissolution.

These astrologers use a combination of serious, thoughtful analysis with tongue-in-cheek memes to communicate to their audiences, shifting between different registers to display the full range of astrological practice. Relatable symbolism is at the heart of astrology, forming multiple levels of connection, none requiring commitment. As Chani says at the beginning of her new moon workshops, “take what you need.”

*

Seeing psychics and astrologers advertise the ability to know events in your future, detect unfaithful partners, find true life purposes is stressful to me. A fortune teller once walked into the florist shop I used to work in, during an idle afternoon. I told him I wasn’t interested (knowing my natal, draconic and progressed chart is already too much) but he was generous enough to say he sensed success from me.

In the 31 Books in 30 Days series leading up to the March 14 announcement of the 2018 National Book Critics Circle award winners, NBCC board members review the 31 finalists. Today, NBCC board member Walton Muyumba offers an appreciation of criticism finalist Terrence Hayes’ To Float in the Space Between (Wave).

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Terrance Hayes’ first book of prose, To Float in the Space Between, is a critical exploration of Etheridge Knight’s poetics. The book’s title comes from the final lines of Knight’s great poem of filial piety, “The Idea of Ancestry”: “. . . I am all of them, / they are all of me, I am me, they are thee, and I have no children / to float in the space between.” Hayes has also lifted line fragments from that poem to name the book’s twenty sections of prose, drawings, and poems. Each section is a kind of annotation for the corresponding line and title. 

Hayes asks readers to imagine him kind of “Charles Kinbote,” the protagonist of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel, Pale Fire. Unlike the weird, beautiful, mad scholar, Kinbote, who “sees himself everywhere” in John Shade’s poem, “Pale Fire,” Hayes’ criticism isn’t driven by self-aggrandizement. Instead, Hayes writes to understand Knight’s influence on his poetics.

Knight, who died in 1991, is like a ghost rhythm in Hayes’ aesthetic.  Hayes has tried to catch and hold that rhythm in poems like “Poet Dying at the Window” from Muscular Music (1999); “The Blue Etheridge” from his Wind in a Box (2006); and “Portrait of Etheridge Knight” from his collection, How to be Drawn, a finalist for the 2016 NBCC Citation in Poetry. Knight is “both a muse and mystery” for Hayes. To understand how that influence might enter his own poetics, Hayes develops a theory of influence. 

The essay, “Line 14: I Have The Same Name,” finds Hayes defining “the poetics of liquid.”  Riffing on the essay as form, Keatsian Negative Capability, Zygmunt Bauman’s Liquid Modernity, and confessional poetry, Hayes describes liquid poetics as dwelling in uncertainty while maintaining “mutable sisibility: adaptive temperaments and temperatures and forms.” One’s art achieves the liquid state when her poetics bridge, synthesize, transform, taking on any and all forms—“recipes, glossaries, powerpoints, obituaries”—and, like water, “does not give in so much as give away, give a way.” Poetry, Hayes explains, is where we “influence and are influenced by what influences us” and “where we shape and take the shape of what shapes us.”   

While “biographies mean to spell out influence,” Hayes declines that possibility because he recognizes that Knight’s poetic practice springing from the African American fine art of rhyming, toasting, and boasting. In poems and interviews alike, Knight “was often blowing smoke” about his ideas and the details of his life. In order to fashion a life for Knight, “one would need to gather all that smoke into something solid, something you could hold and turn over in your hands,” writes Hayes.  Though Hayes once believed that writing Knight’s life would involve simply “the accumulation of ideas,” he now understands that a life is about “the accumulation of details.” And “somewhere between detail and idea” Hayes notes, “is the truth.” 

Since Knight defies boxing-in, Hayes’ criticism must be imaginative rather than scholarly. While the scholar looks upon the poet through a window, framing the poet’s oeuvre “according to things like genre, talent, culture, history,” the poet taking in his fellow poet “sees something of himself reflected in the work.” Hayes looks upon Knight “not only through a window but also through a mirror.” In other words, Knight’s “The Idea of Ancestry” offers Hayes both critical window and a mirror for self-regard.  Floating in the liminal space between detail and idea, Hayes limns truths about literary ancestry and inheritance from Knight’s poem.   

One truth Hayes must reconcile is that studying Knight inevitably becomes a kind of self-examination.  In my readings, the book has three stages. In the first eight essays, Hayes establishes his theory and practice for analyzing Knight’s poetry closely.  In a brief interstitial section—the space between detail and idea—Hayes imagines versions of Knight in short story-like pieces wherein he imagines Knight’s experience in the Korean War and approximate the poet’s voice. 

The ten essays in book’s third phase drive Hayes toward a confessional mode. Thinking through ideas of literary ancestry, Hayes illustrates his links to the poets Langston Hughes, Yusef Komunyakaa, Christopher Gilbert, and Mary Karr. These essays are not exclusively about Knight’s lyrical force.  However, his spirit encircles these writing into a kind of poetic community: “I am all of them, they are all of me.” You might also notice that Hayes’ labor in the opening phase establishes context for these seeming divergences. Eventually, Hayes’ criticism turns from lines of poetic descent to the facts of his own familial arrangements. Working in a kind of essayistic confessional style, Hayes considers political poetry, black masculinity, the end of marriage, absent biological fathers, the affections that fathers hold for sons, the beginning of love, kinship, and dream song. At each turn, one feels Knight pulsing in Hayes’ self-interrogations.

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Walton Muyumba is a writer and critic. His essays and reviews have appeared in Oxford American, The Crisis, NPR Books, The Chicago Tribune, The Dallas Morning News, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. He’s the author of The Shadow and the Act: Black Intellectual Practice, Jazz Improvisation, and Philosophical Pragmatism (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2009). He is an associate professor of American and African Diaspora literature in the English Department at Indiana University-Bloomington.

In the 31 Books in 30 Days series leading up to the March 14 announcement of the 2018 National Book Critics Circle award winners, NBCC board members review the 31 finalists. Today, NBCC board member Kerri Arsenault offers an appreciation of nonfiction finalist Francisco Cantú’s The Line Becomes a River (Riverhead Books).

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Francisco Cantú’s account of his work as a US Border Patrol agent is Lodestar in our understanding of who crosses the border and who guards it, an issue of political and human significance as we watch the US President try to implement a zero-tolerance immigration policy on our southern border. Cantú negotiates his own crossings as well: as an international relations major who descends into the world of armed law enforcement; as the grandson of Mexican immigrants living in the US; as a compassionate man who looks into the eyes of men and women he processes for deportation.

Working at the border was the only way Cantú thought he would really understand the situation, that books, ironically, don’t seem to really show the full situation there. What he finds that largely very ordinary people straggle across the line in the sand, so to speak, tired, hungry, frazzled, or even dead. While the journeys are harsh enough, Cantú watches as agents piss on the food left behind by hiding migrants, acting like dogs marking their territory. He witnesses acts of cruelty that are difficult to comprehend, never mind watch, and the repeated transactions of these violences lead to their normalization. Moreover, Cantú finds the act of watching its own sort of violence. Who’s in or who’s out depends on who has the panopticon’s view.

This work may determine for future generations what building a wall does to magnify the heartache of plight and flight, of people moving between nation and nationality, of people disenfranchised and unmoored, defined by their landscape and the arbitrary lines of a map, without the agency to define it themselves.

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Kerri Arsenault is the Book Review Editor at Orion magazine and is a Contributing Editor at Lithub. Her book-length essay, What Remains (St. Martin’s) will be published in 2020.

Since my daughter was born (four months ago, at the time of writing this) I’ve been thinking about rooms. The ones we enter in the early days of motherhood, the ones we exit, the ones that envelop us, welcome us, and the ones that keep us away. Virginia Woolf was right, a woman needs money and a room of her own, and a writer certainly needs somewhere to write. I wasn’t fully aware of what Woolf’s words meant until I had lost my room, both the space I needed to keep my mind at ease and a place to write. You see, since my daughter was born I can only write in sentences that read like first lines in a novel. I don’t feel like a writer anymore. I am myself and I am also not close to recognizing who I am anymore.

She clings to me as I write this with one hand.

She drinks from the nipple as I try to make out a full sentence in my head.

She is vocal about her wants and needs.

I have to abide and leave the page.

I think back on the delivery room at the hospital and remember how foreign the setting was: the absence of warmth in the lights, the furniture in the room functional and nothing more, the air tight. Each person entering the room gave me a name and I forgot it immediately. I do remember how well they did the job they came to do.

From the recovery room, I can recollect the light coming in from the windows, the laminated pages with bulleted advice stuck to the wall at the foot of my bed, and the blackness of the TV screen I never turned on. Two days spent with the doors always open and my chest always bare. With mind and body torn, I gave in fully to my new environment.

From the moment my daughter was born she slept by my side, in the hospital and in our bedroom. As she was testing her lungs, she made the faintest sounds that kept me from sleeping. The baby often startled herself as if she was surprised by her own existence outside of the space—within me—she’d occupied for so long.

I miss her deeply in the belly, and from the bottom of it. My midsection, now saggy yet still somehow bloated from compensating for her absence. Even here, there is an emptiness.

It didn’t take long for us to move the baby into the room my husband and I had intended for the nursery. Before her arrival it was my husband’s office and the place where I kept my clothes and shoes, perhaps also some art supplies. Before her arrival I wrote at our small dining table or in the café around the corner. I never thought I needed my own set of walls.

I started nursing into the late and very early hours of the night in her room. The noise machine constantly on like a forever ocean wind or a wave that never breaks. Time became elastic and staying awake in dim lights warped my mind. Morning came and turned into the day and folded into the early evening and there we were at the same place as the day before and none of the hours mattered yet all of the seconds were felt, each gnawing away and making dents at the back of my head.

Welcome to the Milk Bar—I’m open 24 hours, seven days a week.

Since I’m not a writer anymore, I’m also not much of a reader.

When I was pregnant, friends of mine—ambitious new mothers—told me they had finished Moby Dick or plowed through audio books from the many hours of nursing. Even in the early weeks of motherhood, while my baby and I were knee-deep in a kind of echo chamber of liquids, I tried to be a deep and romantic mom. I read poetry out loud while she was in a bottomless boobie trance. I felt none of the words but I did feel stupid.

Sometimes motherhood makes you feel like an idiot with sore nipples. What was the point in consuming art when I barely had any energy to enjoy it, let alone make any myself?

Like a tender rhythmic leech my daughter attached to me each night, and while she was gobbling away at the nipple, creature-like, I felt myself in a kind of gentle mourning, saying goodbye to the art I imagined I wouldn’t ever create.

Above us hung the picture I painted for her in the last weeks of my pregnancy. Looking over her changing pad a mobile dangled in the dark and still gave off some devious shadows. I sewed it together in the very first days of knowing she was something small but becoming. The baby was still oblivious to both.

One friend and mother told me that if you stop wanting things in the early days, it gets easier.

*

I read Deborah Levy’s The Cost of Living on the subway, commuting to work. It’s a slim autobiography from the two-time Man Booker Prize finalist but it’s packed with descriptions of simple things in life that envelope larger themes of motherhood, womanhood, heartache, redemption, and writing (just to name a few). There’s a store-bought chicken that dies more than once, a speedy motorcycle, a revolver that’s really an electric screwdriver, bees appearing from the cold, sturdy succulents, and oranges split and shared with daughters. Levy elevates these ornaments and other details from life to such a degree that she’s convinced me that life is meaningful.

When she paints her walls orange, they hurt my eyes. When her necklace breaks, I see how each pearl escapes the confines of the string and where they skitter off to hide. Levy can make the purchase of an ice lolly bring you to tears, and it feels like a kind of magic; even the brief appearances of dull men with their unnamed women, rendered by Levy with deserved but delicate mockery, are enjoyable.

Few of the reviews do the book justice (or maybe it’s just that most of them give away her incredible tales: don’t tell me how the chicken dies the second time!). A couple of them mention the shed she rents from a friend in order to write but don’t spend too much time on its importance: this is the shed the autobiography is written in, the shed within which she will write other books.

As Levy mentions in the book, there are countless factors that have come together for her to write The Cost of Living, and just as many (if not more) for me to read it in these crowded, musty subway commutes. But of all of Levy’s marvelous details, the one I am most thankful for is the aforementioned shed: I cling to the freedoms it has given her. I take great comfort in imagining her sitting there alone with her thoughts and books and old journals, a blanket of freedom across her shoulders keeping her warm into the evening.

As I came to understand the importance of the shed to Levy and realized The Cost of Living was a direct result of the freedom and time she found within its walls, I hate to confess but I became jealous. My days now are filled with baby and daycare obligations, pumping, and, of course, my job, all in a seemingly neverending cycle. My evenings are consumed by more baby duties and keeping the milk bar open at all times. Blink twice and the weekend is over, with laundry still drying on the rack, a thousand miniature pieces of clothing in need of folding, like tiny envelopes addressed to no one. Sometimes my husband and I find moments where we inhale into a kiss and exhale into each other’s arms. Time spills away, like water.

Perhaps I didn’t quite “consider the facts” that Woolf laid out, about the years of dedication a mother gives to her child, and all those opportunities lost to make (potentially) great art. But those facts seem pointless to me now (and were, in some way, even before the arrival of my daughter). I have always wanted her. What I’m thankful to have realized with Levy’s book is that the great art can come later. I can work towards my room. Earn my money, get my shed.

I can’t quite convey the many thoughts you have when nursing in the dark, into the late hours of the night—that is partly the work I want to do—but I can say now that I have visited the most horrific places, met some vile creatures, stumbled upon love and light, structured plot and wondered about what will happen to this character or that. I’ve set the scenes for a story or two that I’d like to tell. For now, I play it on loop as my child draws nourishment from me.

At four months, she smiles a toothless grin and it really is something to see a part of yourself smile back at you. One day I’ll be able to describe it.

Date: January 9, 2019
Time: 2:10-5:00 pm
Location: Café de la Mairie
Weather: Cold and gray

I’m in Paris for a week, and I have been sitting in a lot of cafes. Yesterday I sat in cafés for six hours, just watching people. This is one of my favorite things to do, if it is a thing to do, and you can’t do it in the small North Carolina city where I live.

Today I’m sitting in another café. The Café de la Mairie. If you are facing the Église Saint-Sulpice, the Café is to the left. It has a red awning.

I choose a table at the front of the café, by the door, so I have a good vantage point on the Place Saint-Sulpice. The door keeps opening and closing, but I’m behind it, so I’m out of the draft. There are silver ashtrays on the café tables.

Outside, there are tables and chairs lined up, but no one is sitting at them. Inside, the café is crowded, and I can hear men talking at the bar behind me, standing up and drinking their drinks. I keep my coat on for a little while, and then I decide to take it off and hang it on the back of my chair. I order a glass of white wine and a croque madame and water.

I have brought Georges Perec’s An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, or Tentative d’épuisement d’un lieu parisien, and I pull it out of my purse and put it on the table. The book is short. He wrote it over three days in 1974: October 18, 19, and 20. And he wrote the majority of it in this café.

Perec was interested in the everyday, in the things that escape our notice but are nonetheless important, even essential, parts of our lives. He called this the “infraordinary.” An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris is about the kinds of ordinary occurrences that make up the experience of sitting in a café. Much of the book reads like a list. It is a kind of inventory: an attempt to catalogue, to exhaust, a place.

In Marc Lowenthal’s translation, Perec writes at the beginning that, “There are many things in place Satin-Sulpice…” and that,

A great number, if not the majority, of these things have been described, inventoried, photographed, talked about, or registered. My intention in the pages that follow was to describe the rest instead: that which is generally not taken note of, that which is not noticed, that which has no importance: what happens when nothing happens other than the weather, people, cars, and clouds.

He was at the café on October 18 and 20, but not on October 19. At the beginning of each of the four sections that he wrote here, he notes the date and time:

Section 2 – 18 octobre 1974; 12 h 40
Section 4 – 18 octobre 1974; 17 h 10 (he is seated “a little toward the back in relation to the terrace”)
Section 8 – 20 octobre 1974; 11 h 30 (he notes that it is dimanche)
Section 9 – 20 octobre 1974; 13 h 05

He sat and watched.

There were pigeons on the plaza. The church bells rang. Cars and buses and people passed. He noted these things, these “tens, hundreds of simultaneous actions, micro-events, each one of which necessitates postures, movements, specific expenditures of energy,” as he wrote on the first day. He noted the weather in each section. (Day 1 is “Dry cold. Gray sky. Some sunny spells”; Day 2 is “Fine rain, drizzle”; and Day 3 is “Rain. Wet ground. Passing sunny spells.”) He noted delivery men, dogs, colors, babies, a man eating cake, a girl carrying a tennis racket, tourists taking pictures of the fountain, an undertaker’s van, taxis, traffic jams, and lettuce sticking out of shopping bags. He noted the passage of time. His own fatigue. Pauses. A man carrying a plank. A man carrying a crate. The book ends with, “Four children. A dog. A little ray of sun. The 96. It is two o’clock.”

Now the plaza is different, of course, but it’s also the same, still home to the same daily activities. From where I’m sitting, I can see a women’s clothing store (with a purple sign Seraphine), Vangelder Joaillier (with an orange awning), a Saint Laurent store, and a store with some sort of rabbit design in the window (appliqué on the windows).

To the side of the church, not far from the café, there are several Christmas trees with red and white bows on them, shaken by the wind. People walk around the trees. There are still lots of Christmas trees in the city. I have seen them over the last few days.

I drink my wine. I eat my croque madame. I look at the paper coaster under my wine glass and try to remember to take it with me when I leave, as a souvenir.

It begins to rain, and people huddle under the café’s awning. It also rains on Day 3 in the book (in section 8), so I turn to that moment. The third line reads, “The rain starts falling again.”

I watch.

A man walks by with his dog.

A woman walks by with an umbrella.

A car drives by.

A bus drives by. (Perec noted all the bus numbers and sometimes if they were empty or full or half-full.)

A woman walks by with a newspaper held over her head.

A woman walks by with a scarf tied around her head.

People wait at the bus stop.

Another car drives by.

He wrote section 6 on a bench in the sun (“La date: 19 octobre 1974 / L’heure: 12 h 30”). There are benches on the plaza, but I don’t know if one of them was his bench. Probably not. These are probably different benches today. Two bikes are locked to a green bench by a tree.

I drink my wine. I eat my croque madame. My croque is getting cold. The man at the table next to me asks, “Not hungry?” in French, and I say in French that I don’t know if I am because of le décalage horaire—jet-lag—and he smiles and turns back to his newspaper. Perec wanted to read Le Monde on October 18, but he didn’t find a copy.

I watch.

Several people cross the plaza with umbrellas.

A woman walks by with a shopping bag.

A man walks by with a shopping bag

Another man walks by with a shopping bag (the sales are on).

A man walks by with a rolling shopping cart (plaid).

A woman walks by, pushing a stroller.

A bus drives by.

A man walks by in a hooded coat.

Perec wrote section 3 at another café: Fontaine Saint-Sulpice (“La date: 18 octobre 1974 / L’heure: 15 h 20”). Here, he ate sausages and drank a glass of Bourgueil. It was cold and gray that day, as it is today. And he wrote sections 1, 5, and 7 at the Tabac Saint-Sulpice:

Section 1 – 18 octobre 1974; 10 h 30
Section 5 – 19 octobre 1974; 10 h 45 (he notes that it is samedi)
Section 7 – 19 octobre 1974; 14 heures (Paul Virilio walks by in this section, on his way to see “Gatsby le dégueulasse au Bonaparte”)

Now the Fontaine Saint-Sulpice and the Tabac Saint-Sulpice are both gone. The Café de la Mairie is the only place left.

I eat my croque madame. (I have eaten half.) I drink my wine. I watch.

A man walks by in a motorcycle helmet.

A woman walks by, talking on her phone.

A bus drives by.

A car drives by.

A woman walks by, smoking a cigarette.

A woman walks by, pushing a bike.

A man walks by with a cane.

A car drives by.

Another woman walks by, talking on her phone.

These are all ordinary things in a city I love. But what I am trying to do—to do what Perec did, to see as he saw—is a wonderful exercise in futility because I could never see Paris as he did. Not now. Its ordinary goings-on are not ordinary to me. They are extraordinary, each one infused with wonder because I’m an outsider, and in a few days, I will be back home. I have always wanted to live in Paris, and maybe one day I will, and then the buses and cars and people and pigeons will be ordinary, as they were to Perec.

And for now, this futility, or failure, is okay because I still have the pleasure of watching, of tallying up the things that make up daily life, of recording the movements of strangers, of cataloguing the city. This is only appreciated by those who love to watch.

I stay until it stops raining, and then I pay my bill and leave. I forget to take the paper coaster.

In the 31 Books in 30 Days series leading up to the March 14 announcement of the 2018 National Book Critics Circle award winners, NBCC board members review the 31 finalists. Today, NBCC board member Yahdon Israel offers an appreciation of autobiography finalist Nell Irvin Painter’s Old in Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over (Counterpoint).

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In 2014, I watched a documentary about Iris Apfel, the now 97-year-old interior designer who—because of her illustrious wardrobe and bold sense of style—had become a fashion icon. At the time of the documentary, Apfel was 93 years old. And though I expected the documentary to look at Apfel’s life through the lens of a retrospective, seeing her life as something that happened—in the past tense—the documentary subverted every expectation of mine by dealing with Apfel in the tense of the present. Almost immediately, I realized that I was not looking at a life that had happened; I was watching a life that was happening.

Iris was a revelation because, before watching it, it never occurred to me to think that far into the future. The documentary made me aware that there was a limit to my imagination of what life could be past a certain point. Pushing this point even further, it hadn’t even occurred to me to ever consider that there was a point. In this confrontation with the limits of my own imagination, I was brought face to face with my own mortality. By mortality I don’t mean “death.” On the contrary: I mean life. This revelation from Iris served as the prerequisite for this 28-year-old critic to understand and appreciate what Nell Painter is doing in Old In Art School: A Memoir for Starting Over.

Almost as a rule, a memoir’s trajectory is that of the coming-of-age story—that journey we follow the writer on from childhood to adulthood. And though that point of adulthood is defined largely by the writer’s own sense of becoming, the arrival point of adulthood is often treated like a final destination instead of what could be, and often is: a pit stop on an ever long journey. As one of the most celebrated historians in America, Nell Irvin Painter could’ve made the decision to write the memoir that was “expected of her.” The memoir that told the story of how and why she became one of this country’s most important scholars on American history; she could’ve made the decision to write about her life in the past tense, as if it were a eulogy. Instead, Painter opted for the possibility that there was something beyond what others might arbitrarily consider the “last stop.”

“With my energy and excellent health,” Painter writes in the book’s first chapter, “I routinely refute expectations of the older woman, just as over the years I have grown accustomed to soaring above what was expected of me—me as a black person, me as a woman, me as a person of my generation. Why wouldn’t I be able to go to art school at sixty-four?” Her answer: “The pursuit of pleasure,” she writes, “concentrating on what I could see gave me intense pleasure, and seeing what I could make with my own hand and according to my own eye was even more satisfying.”

More dynamic than her insistence on life in the present tense—many of the verbs she uses in the book are in the present—is her desire to pursue and her ability to imagine a joy and satisfaction in the future; because what is living but having something to look forward to? Though Painter does achieve her goal of becoming some estimation of what she considers to be An Artist, you come away with the sense that her best years are yet to come.

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Yahdon Israel is a writer, professor, and creator of Literaryswag, a cultural movement that intersects literature and fashion to make books cool. He has written for Avidly, The New Inquiry, Brooklyn Magazine, LitHub, and Poets and Writers. Yahdon is the Awards VP of the National Book Critics Circle and, the host of the Literaryswag Book Club, a monthly book club that’s free and open to public.

“Wouldn’t it be marvelous if we were homosexuals?” Rex Harrison, the actor who played Henry Higgins in the 1956 Broadway version of My Fair Lady joked to the show’s playwright, Alan Lerner. They were walking along Fifth Avenue, discussing their love lives while the play was still in rehearsals. More importantly, they’d also set out to discuss the trouble with Harrison’s character. His presence faded so much in the second act that Harrison became restless. Past love affairs with women had wrung Harrison and Lerner both dry. Higgins might feel the same way. Would making Higgins gay solve his star’s presence problem?

Higgins is certainly coded as a certain gay stereotype. He is a lifelong bachelor, an upper-class man of means, sophisticated and bored. He is a snob who lives with another man. He’s well-dressed, worldly, and knowledgeable about culture. He expresses a preference for men as well, but since this is the 50s, sexuality and the deed itself must always remain in the offing, forever the tension beneath the surface of the moment.

“I said that I did not think that was the solution and we walked on,” Lerner later wrote in his memoir, The Street Where I Live. “But it stuck in my mind.”

For many viewers, it is the sexual tension between Higgins and Eliza that creates the movie’s mystique. But for others, it’s the tension of ambiguity that draws us in.

By the time Lerner reached his hotel, he already had the idea that would become the song “Why Can’t a Woman Be More Like a Man?” which Lerner calls “a perfect second act vehicle through which Higgins could release his rage against Eliza for leaving him.”

The anger is there. That’s true. But is it gay?

The lyrics to “Why Can’t a Woman Be More Like a Man?” (which is also sometimes called “A Hymn to Him”) riff on the title phrase. In the sequence, Higgins asks his companion Colonel Pickering, “Well, why can’t a woman be like you?” They have a back-and-forth, with Pickering touting his finer qualities in short quips. While this song has caused a bit of speculation about Higgins and Pickering—are they living together or are they living together?—what’s more obvious about the song is the overt misogyny it shows in Higgins’s character:

Why is thinking something women never do?
And why is logic never even tried?
Straightening up their hair is all they ever do.
Why don’t they straighten up the mess that’s inside?

Despite an increasingly obvious amount of values dissonance between the musical’s era—the 1950s—and today’s consciousness of gender and sexuality in their myriad forms, it’s clear that the audience is not supposed to like Higgins’s character at this point. Even for the 50s, an era that has become the poster child for sexism, Higgins’s lines read as black-and-white, empty misogynist pomp. Lerner made it that way on purpose. Because while Higgins is cultivating a little good breeding in Eliza, she is charming him. Higgins never would have experienced such an emotional response to a woman’s actions if she wasn’t already burrowing into his heart.

Even in Pygmalion, the 1913 play by George Bernard Shaw, the emphasis is on the reversal, but it’s perhaps more a reversal of class than a commentary on gender roles. In Pygmalion, cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle seeks speech classes from Henry Higgins so she might someday work in a flower shop. It’s true that Eliza is poor, but her main problem is that she lacks class. So Higgins attempts to shape her speech as well as her etiquette.

The same basic premise remains in Lerner’s musical stage adaptation. Lerner stuck to his source material. But the two plays do diverge. Pygmalion deemphasizes love: Shaw was adamant that Eliza and Higgins aren’t supposed to end up together. Instead, he focuses on class and, surprisingly, the rights of women.

Pygmalion came out in 1913, five years before women in Shaw’s Britain won the right to vote. Unlike many men in his day, especially stuffy, old-guard academics like Higgins, Shaw believed in women’s suffrage. Instead of the romantic comedy that the story would morph into as My Fair Lady, Shaw intended his play as a challenge to Britain’s classist, sexist status quo.

Lerner’s My Fair Lady, however, brings the possibility of love between Higgins and Eliza back into focus. That possibility ramps up between the stage and the screen. On screen, Higgins and Eliza share no overt affection, and yet “tension between them is palpable from start to finish,” Dominic McHugh writes in Loverly: The Life and Times of My Fair Lady. The possibility of things unseen was far more tantalizing for the mid-century American audience. This tension between the platonic and the perhaps is why McHugh believes My Fair Lady is so perennially compelling.

But if the stage play and the screen play are largely the same, where does that tension come from?

You may know her as the woman in the little black dress. Her name is Audrey Hepburn.

*

In 1962, the Hollywood studio system was on its last legs, and Warner Brothers was far from immune. They needed a box-office smash, and so they decided to go with a known commodity: My Fair Lady, which had garnered glowing praise from critics and six Tony Awards, including Best Musical in 1957. With George Cukor directing and Jack Warner himself producing, the studio was going all in on this one. Warner Brothers spent upwards of $17 million on filming. But still, they were being cautious.

At that time, Julie Andrews, who played Eliza on Broadway, was not yet nationally known. Audrey Hepburn, on the other hand, had quickly become America’s sweetheart after starring in Roman Holiday and breaking rules as Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Since Cukor planned to use the Broadway script and score almost in their entirety, Lerner remained attached to the production. But when Cukor and Warner decided on Hepburn to play Eliza, this alienated Lerner, and his control of the screenplay began to slip.

Funny enough, Andrews may have been pretty thankful in hindsight they passed over her for the role; her iconic performance as Mary Poppins debuted the same year as My Fair Lady and earned Andrews her first Oscar for Best Actress in a Leading Role, while Hepburn wasn’t even nominated.

For the other half of the Higgins-Eliza duo, Cukor and Warner waffled about casting. They briefly considered Cary Grant (too rough—and uninterested) and Peter O’Toole (too expensive) before settling again on Rex Harrison to reprise his stage role as Higgins. Yet still, Cukor and Warner had the gall to ask the veteran Harrison to do a screen test. Harrison refused and sent in pictures of himself instead. In these pictures, he happened to be naked, concealing himself with a magazine in one photo or a bottle of Chianti in another, according to Patrick McGilligan’s biography of Cukor, George Cukor: A Double Life.

“I don’t know why it was—perhaps because I was very thin at the time, and George may have been expecting to find me quite decrepit—but for whatever reason, those pictures appealed to him,” Harrison is quoted as saying in A Double Life. “The studios telephoned and said I had the part.”

That Cukor was gay seldom comes up in the discussion of casting, or really about the movie at all, perhaps because Cukor separated his private life from his public persona as much as he could. By the mid-40s, Cukor had come to be known as a “women’s director.” He worked with countless leading ladies: Greta Garbo, Marilyn Monroe, and Katharine Hepburn, just to name a few. But the moniker was not a compliment. Masculinity carries privilege, and not just in the motion picture industry. Many floated “women’s director” like a homophobic epithet, implying that Cukor did not have the strength of personality to manage male leads. Even as he was helping to create some of the most iconic movies from Hollywood’s Golden Age, including A Star is Born, The Philadelphia Story, and Wizard of Oz, Cukor was starting to realize he had to be more cautious.

So Cukor cultivated a public persona to obscure his homosexual private life, which, especially in those days, could be seen as unsavory or even illegal. “Cukor could go to elegant houses in the afternoons and sip high tea with titled ladies—and he could live an active homosexual life behind closed doors—as long as those two worlds never intersected,” McGilligan writes in A Double Life. “If they did, there might be scandal, damage to his career, revelation, and humiliation.”

With Cukor as My Fair Lady’s director, it’s possible that a pulse of homosexuality beats at the story’s core. But even with a close viewing, it becomes clear that what homosexual subtext there is, if there is any, became vastly downplayed.

One glaring instance is the dilution of Colonel Pickering, Higgin’s charming friend and life partner.

“The whimsical Colonel Pickering is given so little focus as to become almost irrelevant,” McGilligan writes. “Revisionist directors of the musical have spotted the homosexual subcurrent between Pickering and Higgins; none of that for the homosexual director Cukor. Their relationship is flattened, much of the affection and comedy between them stepped on.”

Maybe Cukor was being overly cautious to protect himself. Or maybe he understood how little of a chance even the slimmest spark of homosexuality stood in the 1960s box office. Remember, Warner Brothers was playing it safe with My Fair Lady. They needed to make money, so they stuck with the old heteronormative standby.

*

The idea that happy endings must involve heterosexual love is an old concept. “All tragedies are finished by a death, / All comedies are ended by marriage;” Lord Byron writes in his 1824 poem, “Don Juan.” It’s a sentiment that has echoed through centuries of western literature, from Shakespeare to Jane Austen to the campiest of modern rom-coms. (We all know Katherine Heigl gets married at the end of 27 Dresses just by looking at the movie poster.)

What complicates My Fair Lady even further is that it’s the end of a centuries’ old telephone game, the result of translations across time, place and dissonant values. So it’s no surprise that many audiences assume, despite so much ambiguity—despite almost no allusion to it in Pygmalion, the stage play or the screenplay of My Fair Lady—that Eliza and Higgins get together in the end: it’s what we’ve been trained to expect.

In Ovid’s tale of Pygmalion, a sculptor believes he isn’t interested in women until Aphrodite brings his beautiful, perfect statue back to life. Petrarch, a poet and Renaissance scholar, took the tale one step further (or backward), using the statue as critique of idolatry and as a model woman. (No, really: “The statue is a literalisation of metaphors that describe the Petrarchan beloved as cold, stonyhearted and unresponsive, and as such, an exemplar of chastity,” Sarah Carter writes in Ovidian Myth and Sexual Deviance in Early Modern English Literature.) Shaw used the story of his cockney flower girl to critique British class structure and women’s lack of voting rights. Each of these instances mirrors the preoccupations of the times when they were written. They play on readers’ expectations, try to teach, try to persuade.

Lerner’s My Fair Lady, first and foremost, seeks to entertain. It still makes commentaries on gender, but the directors left an undercurrent of the sexual unknown to entice the audience. Cukor attempted to strip away anything in the movie that might hurt its sales. What he left was a movie that, while delightful, allows the audience to assume what it wants.

If the only kind of happy endings you know involve heterosexual love, that’s what you’ll probably see. Use the lesson of My Fair Lady and train yourself to look deeper: there is more than one kind of happy ending.

In the 31 Books in 30 Days series leading up to the March 14, 2019 announcement of the 2018 National Book Critics Circle award winners, NBCC board members review the thirty-one finalists. Today, NBCC board member Charles Finch offers an appreciation of poetry finalist Adam Zagajewski’s Asymmetry (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). NBCC awards finalists read on Wednesday, and the awards ceremony is Thursday. Details here.

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Adam Zagajewski had a long line of credit with me before I opened Asymmetry, his 2018 nominee for a National Book Critics Circle prize in poetry; but the book never had call to draw on it.

Zagajewski’s work has always seemed like an ember in a dying fire. He begins—not dissimilarly from Patrick Modiano—in the bewilderment of the wars in Europe, and wherever he is writing from, writes from them, giving last poignant life to historical traumas that are starting to fall out of human memory, to our cost.

The result is that his poems often seems to contain more than their author’s years of grief, displacement, and hope. Take these lines from Life Is Not A Dream:

We tried courage, since there was no exit.
We tried cunning, but it failed.
We tried patience and fell asleep….
We tried time; it was tasteless, like water…

And life went on, inevitable life,
so skeptical, so practiced,
coming back to us so insistently
that one day we felt the taste of ordinary failure,
of common tragedy upon our lips,
which was a kind of triumph

Inevitable life. It has turned Zagajewski 73, and readers make allowances for poets of that age.  But Asymmetry wants no clemency of us. It’s not a wispy twilight volume of poems—it’s as tough and alive and vulnerable as Zagajewski’s strongest poetry.

It does contain his usual trademarks, including his memorable lyric gift. It’s October, he writes, via the unsurpassable translator Clare Cavanaugh, and the golden trees obey the wind. It has lines that will make you laugh. (One of my favorite poetic laments: If only we read poetry as carefully as menus in expensive restaurants.) It is obsessed with the subject nearest and most painful to his heart, still a child of Lvov—the grief that time must take everything.

But Asymmetry is also a gamble for the poet. More than any of his other books, it has a subtle internal organization, approaching and retreating, as in a minuet, its subject, which is the death of the poet’s mother. He comes at this impossible subject so slant—the very cover of the American edition is a horizontal picture of the two turned vertical—that it seems somehow to purify or authenticate the depth of his heartbreak, mostly invisible on first reading. He burst through his reticence just once or twice:

Only now, or so I think,
do I approach the proper tone,
only could I talk with my parents,
but I can’t hear their answers.

Every year there’s a murmur that Zagajewski might win the Nobel Prize. Canny bettors will be able to find him at, oh, 33/1 this year, I’d guess, maybe a bit lower.

To become a finalist for the NBCC award in poetry, though, is decidedly the opposite of a lifetime achievement award—this is a board that takes seriously its task of identifying and championing important new work.

It is to Zagajewski’s immense credit that he remains in both conversations. His gift in Asymmetry proves undimmed, and his sense of urgency fresh and heightened. We honor art, he writes, since we’d like to know what our life is. He doesn’t imagine that we will. And yet in his poems, at least, it seems vital that we try.

__________________________________

Charles Finch, a board member of the NBCC, is a critic and a novelist who regularly writes for The New York Times and Slate. His newest book is The Vanishing Man.

I blame my first marriage on Jane Austen. Elizabeth Bennet married for gratitude and esteem, and these were exactly the feelings I had for my first husband. If they were good enough for Elizabeth, why wouldn’t they be good enough for me? But I wasn’t Elizabeth; I was much more like Emma, a far more flawed heroine. The romantic Emma would never have been satisfied with gratitude and esteem, and neither was I. To be fair, I know my husband felt the same way, although I don’t think he blamed Austen for his mistake.

For better or worse, my hasty marriage was simple to undo—at least with respect to its legal and social aspects. For my next chapter, I returned to graduate school, pursuing a doctorate in English literature and specializing in Austen and other novelists of her time. Had I been a more daring scholar, I might have realized that my youthful folly had posed some interesting questions: Why did I look to Austen and her characters for guidance about how to live my own life? And I’m not, by far, the only one to do this. Surely this trust couldn’t be separated from the great love I had for Austen. Why do so many people love Austen so intensely, and in such a personal way?

Austen certainly isn’t the only literary celebrity among Anglo-American authors whose work inspires interest in her life. Captivated by the dark drama of Wuthering Heights, we visit Haworth, home of the famous Brontë family; drawn into Emily Dickinson’s poetic vision, we tour the unassuming clapboard farmhouse where she slowly retreated to a life of solitude and poetry. Nor is Austen the only author who’s created realistic characters. Nathaniel Hawthorne said that Anthony Trollope’s novels were “just as real as if some giant had hewn a great lump out of the earth and put it under a glass case, with all its inhabitants going about their daily business, and not suspecting that they were made a show of.” Indeed, readers tend to think of characters as real people when they read, especially when they read novels. One reason we read for the plot is that we want to find out what happens to people we’ve come to know and care about.

Nevertheless, Austen exerts a power above and beyond that of most other authors: She has a fandom rather than a following, readers whose devotion goes well beyond literary appreciation to infuse many aspects of their lives. “Janeites,” the term for Austen devotees, are more like Trekkies than Brontë enthusiasts; many are willing to dress in Regency fashion at the annual meeting of the Jane Austen Society as easily as a Trekkie dons the Federation uniform at a Star Trek convention. Many, like myself, find guidance about how to live their lives in Austen’s work. But unlike Trekkies, who are more absorbed by the Star Trek world itself than by the writers who created it, Austen fans idolize the author as well as her works. Austen is our beloved wise cousin, our ally in the quest for the good life.

Alas, the puzzle of Austen’s influence didn’t dictate the path of my scholarly research. In fact, musings of this kind were actively discouraged by the intellectual climate in many English departments of the time. At the elite institution I attended, thinking about characters as real people was strictly taboo, the sign of naïveté and ignorance. Doctoral candidates were expected to be professional readers who realized that every “text” (we didn’t call them books or novels) consisted of words on a page and nothing more. We were being trained to decode, not to read. Many of us still harbored a “naïve” love of literature and authors, but this was our shameful secret, the madwoman who lived in hidden rooms in the attic.

It would take another 20 years and a late-flowering passion for psychology to prompt me to search for the reasons for Austen’s allure. At this point, I was reading book after book on psychology and neuroscience while also taking courses in the mind-brain sciences. I began to publish essays on the connections between literature, psychology, and the brain, and to teach on that subject as well. Thinking about Austen in the context of the mind and the brain, I was now able to find an answer to my question: So many of us love and trust Austen because she possessed extraordinary powers of empathy.

Empathy means seeing the world from a different perspective, walking a mile, or even a moment, in someone else’s shoes. It means actually experiencing, although in a weaker form, another person’s state of mind, while also maintaining your own perspective. So if a friend is panicking, becoming anxious yourself wouldn’t be true empathy but rather emotional contagion. Empathy means understanding your friend’s panic while at the same time realizing that the anxiety of the moment is hers, not yours.

Such perspective-taking involves thinking and feeling. Empathy’s cognitive aspect requires theory of mind (ToM)—also known as mentalizing, or a reflective capacity—which refers to the ability to infer other people’s beliefs and intentions from their behavior. This includes facial expression, body language, actions, and speech. If you see someone come into a room, look around, move papers and books, look under the desk, and then leave with a puzzled expression on his face, you’re likely to think that he was looking for something that he didn’t find.

Theory of mind also includes the ability to recognize feelings, but in a dispassionate, knowledge-based sense. If you see your boss frowning, you realize that he’s displeased about something and that this isn’t the time to ask for a raise. You don’t necessarily enter into his feelings; it’s enough to know what they are. Many sociopaths can often read other people’s feelings accurately, yet they possess zero empathy. Instead of empathizing with pain or sadness or even anger, they use their mentalizing powers to manipulate others.

Empathy is much better known for its emotional qualities. The first of these involves emotional resonance, feeling what someone else is feeling in an intuitive, subliminal mode. Empathy further involves knowing that you’re conscious of another’s feelings, that these are not your own. In everyday usage, the word empathy is used to include sympathy, which means responding in an emotionally appropriate manner—for instance, with compassion for suffering and delight at happiness. A more technical definition of empathy refers to taking another’s perspective and feeling what someone is feeling. True empathy includes both emotional resonance, the pure feeling part, and theory of mind, which includes your awareness that you’re grasping someone’s thoughts and emotions.

Of course, when I say that Jane Austen had empathy, I’m inferring the mental powers of the living, breathing woman who’s no longer with us from the evidence of the written record she left behind. But how else to explain Austen’s array of such differently minded and totally believable characters? For Austen to have created such a variety of convincing imaginary people, she must have been a profoundly astute mindreader of real people. And no one familiar with her work can doubt her compassion for the unfortunate, or her glad participation in the happiness of others. She knew loss and thwarted love in her own life, which enabled her to portray the sufferings of disappointed love. But she could also show the joy of love’s fulfillment. I can think of no other novel in which the happy ending is rendered so poignantly meaningful as it is in Persuasion. Yes, Austen must have possessed a high degree of empathy.

Yet it’s not an abstract appreciation of empathy that draws us to Austen, but the experience of empathy itself. Austen’s uncanny ability to convey what others think and feel allows two kinds of empathy to take place for the reader. The first is the empathy we experience for her characters. Countless people have shared the feelings of these fictional people: Elizabeth’s humiliation on reading Darcy’s reproachful letter, which shows how greatly she’s misinterpreted events (Pride and Prejudice); Marianne’s pain on being rejected by Willoughby, the man she loves with all her heart (Sense and Sensibility); Emma’s sudden realization that no one must marry Mr. Knightley but herself (Emma).

The second experience of empathy is even more crucial: Because Austen understands human nature so thoroughly, we have the sense that she empathizes with us, her readers. To put this in the apt phrase of psychiatrist Daniel Siegel, when we read Austen, we have the feeling of “feeling felt,” of having our innermost feelings understood and resonated with. This is inherently gratifying because as a species, humans crave such understanding. We have a profound need for empathy, to know that we’re not alone with our joys and sorrows.

These two kinds of empathy, of recognizing and feeling recognized, are two sides of the same coin. Austen conveys her understanding of us, her readers, precisely by creating characters that we identify with. And we’re able to identify with Austen’s characters because they mirror our ways of thinking and feeling. In fact, mirroring is an important way that empathy and other forms of resonance are communicated. In person, this happens through facial expressions and body language that imitate, and through speech that restates, one person’s perception of another’s state of mind. You’re likely to convey empathy for a friend’s distress by mirroring her facial expression—a furrowed brow, for instance—and telling her that you’re sorry she’s so upset. You reflect her feelings verbally, with the word upset, and nonverbally, with a furrowed brow.

In telling your friend that you’re sorry she’s feeling bad, you also express sympathy. But this is almost unnecessary because mirroring behaviors do more than simply reflect content; they convey caring. This is because humans automatically perceive mirroring as positive and, in the case of distress, comforting. And the brain knows how to tell the difference between mirroring and simply reacting. So vital is mirroring to conveying understanding and support that counselors who specialize in crisis management and suicide prevention are trained to restate the feelings of the person at risk as a major strategy for alleviating distress; this is known as “reflective listening.”

And so, when we see ourselves reflected in Austen’s work through characters who resemble us and others we know, it’s like peering closely into a two-way mirror: We see Austen behind the glass, watching and understanding. She knows us, and we know that she knows us. We have the feeling of feeling felt.

Other features in addition to Austen’s wide-ranging portrayals of fictional people amplify our sense of empathy. Shared experience makes empathy more likely. If you’ve felt intense grief for the loss of a loved one, you’ll empathize more easily and completely with someone whose grief is of a similar kind. It’s also easier to feel empathy for people who are similar to us; the downside of this is how readily humans as a species fail to feel compassion for those who are of different races, cultures, and clans.

Austen’s subject matter is very much our own, and so contributes to our sense of a shared framework of feeling and experience. Austen famously claimed to work on “two inches of ivory” with “a fine brush,” creating a world that traces the intricacies of human interaction rather than the breadth of human endeavor. She concentrates on interpersonal relationships, an aspect of human life that’s universal. All of Austen’s heroines embark on a search for intimacy with a trustworthy person who can be both a lover and a friend; the allies and adversaries they encounter along the way include personalities of all kinds, rather than the monsters and warriors typical of the hero’s quest.

Such human universals explain why we can relate to literature of many different cultures. Literary critics argue that realism, the extent to which literature can feel true to life, consists of conventions that vary from culture to culture. Nevertheless, some aspects of being human are universal, and we tend to be able to accept the portrayal of such universals as true to life and meaningful, even when they’re set in times and places remote from our own. The literary scholar Patrick Hogan has found that love stories are told in cultures throughout the world, and that the same situations and emotions tend to appear within those stories no matter where or when they were written. We might find much about the Latin classic The Aeneid alien and even alienating, but we can still identify with Dido’s heartbreak when her lover, Aeneas, abandons her. Austen concentrates on this world of ubiquitous feelings and perceptions.

Not only does Austen tell stories of love and friendship of the sort shared by people everywhere, but these take cultural forms that are still easily recognizable to us, our vast advances in technology notwithstanding. We still live in families. We still interact with circles of friends, acquaintances, and colleagues. Marriage and other kinds of intimate partnership are very much a goal for many of us. Austen couldn’t completely anticipate our world, nor transcend many of the limitations of her day—she was insightful but not clairvoyant. And so she writes about universal topics with a limited cast of characters: heterosexual, Caucasian, upper- and middle-class families. Some find her off-putting because of this. But many readers are willing to forgive her for being of her age; they recognize her value, as demonstrated by the breadth and diversity of her global readership. I think her attitudes were progressive, given the limitations of her milieu and that her insights have value for all of us, even if they weren’t written with all of us in mind. But that’s a personal decision.

Austen’s style remains as accessible as her stories. She writes in pithy, crystal-clear sentences, creating novels that are paced quickly enough even for our impatient 21st-century sensibilities. In Austen, the heart of the matter, which is indeed the matter of the heart, is right there; we don’t have to penetrate layers of cultural and stylistic difference to get at it. Because Austen creates a world that has much common ground with our own, there’s a strong foundation for empathy.

Austen’s stories not only convey empathy through mirroring and identification, but they’re about empathy as well—who has it, who lacks it, and how some of her characters deepen their capacity for this important quality. Her novels get us to focus on the experience of empathy (neuroscientists would say they prime us to think about it) by showing its value repeatedly. So we find ourselves reflected in novels that are all about the value of being able to find yourself reflected in other minds and hearts. Yet we’re not fascinated by empathy because it’s brought to our attention, but rather we pay attention because empathy is essential to our well-being. And this is yet another reason we’re drawn to Austen—she understands this about us.

Perhaps it seems strange to characterize Austen’s novels as being about empathy. After all, Austen’s great subject is love: its different varieties, its frustrations, its nuances, and, above all, its satisfactions. And not just love between couples, but also between friends, parents and children, siblings. Austen certainly understood this most precious of human emotional resources.

But there’s no contradiction here. Austen’s novels show again and again that the most complete and satisfying relationships rely on perspective taking, understanding, and emotional resonance. Whatever its other features—gratitude, esteem, passion, nurturing—at its core, true love is empathy. Think about all of Austen’s happy couples and you’ll see that this is the case. Anne of Persuasion might be more intuitive and passionate than Elizabeth of Pride and Prejudice, but sensitivity and understanding lead to happy endings for both of them.

In placing empathy front and center, Austen knew what she was doing. For Austen is no mere copyist of nature, but a deeply thoughtful novelist who explores the morality as well as the psychology of the social brain, those aspects of the mind-brain that imbue our relationships. This was brought home to me recently when I tried to read the novelist Georgette Heyer, a 20th-century writer who emulated Austen. Here were all the window dressings of Austen’s fiction, the Masterpiece Theatre costumes, plots, and themes, but hollowed out, not only of Austen’s distinctively brilliant style, but also of her philosophical and psychological depth. With apologies to all the Austen fans who cut their teeth on Heyer, I found her unreadable. In the humble guise of the novel of manners, a genre that focuses on social conduct, Austen’s works draw out the moral implications of being human: What do we owe one another ethically, and how do we go about fulfilling this obligation?

The simple answer: We owe one another the kinds of consideration and treatment that help all of us not only to satisfy our basic needs, but to achieve well-being and self-esteem. And this depends on empathy, the key to understanding another person’s needs. And so Emma caters to her needy, hypochondriacal, and often ridiculous father in Emma. So Edmund becomes young Fanny’s friend and advocate in Mansfield Park. So Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice tolerates the more absurd members of her family with calm consideration. In that last family, we might note that it’s with regard to this fundamental ethical obligation that Mr. Bennet fails so completely. Rather than helping his foolish wife to develop whatever potential she might have, he retreats to sarcasm to console himself for having to endure her company. As a result, she remains as silly as ever, learning only to ignore a husband she can’t understand and who doesn’t empathize with her.

When Austen’s characters demonstrate kindness and tolerance, it’s because they’re able to imagine and sympathize with life from the point of view others. Emma indulges her father’s many absurdities because she can see that his worries are real to him. Edmund imagines what it’s like to be young, lonely, and intimidated in a new place, and so he’s kind to Fanny. Elizabeth knows that she might not be able to change her mother, but that failing to show her respect would be hurtful and accomplish nothing. Austen’s best heroine, Anne Elliot of Persuasion, owes her goodness and capability to her capacity for empathy. She can see from others’ perspectives, and this guides her feelings and behavior. As Wentworth, the man she loves, eventually realizes, there is “no one so proper, so capable, as Anne.”

For Austen, empathy is the core quality of all moral action. Here, Austen agrees with the philosopher David Hume, a near contemporary. In our own day, similar conclusions have been advanced by Simon Baron-Cohen, a neuroscientist who equates evil with a lack of empathy, and Frans de Waal, a philosopher and primatologist who views our capacity for moral action as grounded in empathy, which we find in less developed forms in other primates.

Above and beyond the kindness and understanding that empathy creates, it’s valuable because it unlocks the prison house of cosmic loneliness that threatens each of us with a life sentence of solitary confinement. Anglo-European politics, philosophy, and psychology have emphasized our separateness, condemned us without a trial, insisting that we’re stuck in a container, the body, looking out through windows, the eyes. We’re born alone and we die alone, even if other people are near us for these two defining events in the life cycle of every human.

But the latest work in social intelligence tells us that we’re profoundly interconnected in terms of brain, body, and mind. This has been a key insight of the literary imagination all along, that fund of wisdom and observation found in literature. In terms of understanding our connections with one another, no author is greater than Austen. And she shows that such connections depend on empathy, on being able to enter into the thoughts and feelings of others. Through such exchanges, people find meaning and purpose in their lives.

*

Explaining Austen’s appeal in terms of empathy made sense to me, but as with all literary theories, and many scientific ones as well, if truth be told, supporting my hunch was another matter. While I realized I could never definitively prove my claims, I began to wonder if I could nevertheless offer convincing evidence. My take on the intense devotion Austen inspires hinges on the observation that Austen “gets us,” that she understands us and captures our attention, because she gets us right, creating fictional people whom real people find extraordinarily true to life.

As I became progressively more interested in the mind and the brain, I began to realize that I could make a case for Austen’s accuracy in portraying human nature by drawing on various findings in the mind-brain sciences, fields that include psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience. I could show that Austen’s characters are true to what we know about social intelligence and the social mindbrain to support the claim that Austen’s appeal lies in her powers of empathy.

And if these scientific fields could be applied in support of a literary theory, that Austen’s empathy is conveyed by her ability to portray people realistically, then literature could also be drafted in the service of science. Austen’s accuracy in representing feelings and relationships makes her work ideal for discussing social intelligence, that aspect of being human that most concerned Austen herself: how people relate to one another. Austen’s characters provide imaginary case histories that illustrate the workings of the social mind-brain. These two stories, one about social intelligence and the other about Austen’s fiction, define one another in yin-and-yang fashion.

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Excerpted from Jane on the Brain: Exploring the Science of Social Intelligence with Jane Austen by Wendy Jones. Published by Pegasus Books. (c) Wendy Jones. Reprinted with permission.

In the 31 Books in 30 Days series leading up to the March 14, 2019 announcement of the 2018 National Book Critics Circle award winners, NBCC board members review the thirty-one finalists. Today, NBCC board member Katherine A. Powers offers an appreciation of autobiography finalist Tara Westover’s Educated (Random House). NBCC awards finalists read on Wednesday, and the awards ceremony is Thursday. Details here.

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Tara Westover’s Educated is a fast-paced, unsparing account of being brought up in the 1990s and the early 21st century in rural Idaho as the youngest of seven children of survivalist Mormons. Her father, “a charismatic gale of a man” with a penchant for prophecy, was haunted by the Federal government’s lethal siege at Ruby Ridge and he believed that the End of Days was nigh, ushered in by the Y2K bug. Young Tara had no birth certificate, no vaccinations, and little access to the world outside her family. She was “home schooled”—though only in a rudimentary way—and the main lesson taught in this household was the “art of shutting up.”

Westover and her siblings toiled in their father’s scrap yard where they were hideously injured—smashed, gashed, impaled, burned, and concussed. Hospitals were ruled out as government traps, leaving Westover’s mother—a healer, herbalist, and midwife—to treat their wounds. Her brothers, “a pack of wolves,” were violent and reckless. Car wrecks were frequent. Still, young Tara was drawn to learning, entertaining a vague and, she assumed, futile hope of attending college. Against all odds, she managed to study, a modern-day Jude the Obscure. She did well enough in the college-entrance exam to gain entrance to Brigham Young University where she was immediately confronted by the depth of her ignorance. She had never heard of the Holocaust, Napoleon, Martin Luther King or the Civil Rights Movement. She believed Europe was a country.

What follows is an adventure in mind expansion: a viscerally exciting race through book after book, the liberating attention of a few understanding teachers, and eventually a degree followed by a fellowship at Harvard and a doctorate in history from Cambridge University. Along the way Westover gets across the beauty of the Utah countryside, her homesickness for it, and her continuing love for her family—even though some members no longer speak to her. 

Westover has shaped the book in episodes, each as engrossing as a short story, and each told with an urgency and immediacy that comes from personal experience. She notes that her memories of certain events are disputed by other family members, and in this way, this is also a book about memory. The number of memoirs of brutal childhoods are legion, but Educated, in the austerity and candor of its writing, its story-telling muscle, and lack of self-pity, is a true standout and deservedly the best seller it became.

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Katherine A. Powers is a member of the NBCC Board, past winner of the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, and editor of Suitable Accommodations: An Autobiographical Novel of Family Life: the Letters of J. F. Powers, 1942 – 1963.

In the 31 Books in 30 Days series leading up to the March 14, 2019 announcement of the 2018 National Book Critics Circle award winners, NBCC board members review the thirty-one finalists. Today, NBCC board member Michael Schaub offers an appreciation of fiction finalist Rachel Kushner’s The Mars Room (Scribner). NBCC awards finalists read on Wednesday, and the awards ceremony is Thursday. Details here.

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Literary fiction has long had an obsession with desperate characters who find themselves in impossible situations. There’s no better example of that kind of character than Romy Hall, the protagonist of Rachel Kushner’s novel The Mars Room.

Kushner’s novel opens in a bus transporting prisoners from one California correctional facility to another. Among the passengers is Romy, who has been sentenced to life in prison for killing her sadistic stalker; the court didn’t believe her claim that the slaying
was in self-defense.

The Mars Room follows Romy’s life in prison as well as the time before her conviction. She grew up in San Francisco as a troubled young woman with an affinity for drugs; before her stalker ruined her life, she worked as a lap dancer to afford food and shelter for her beloved young son.

In prison, she endures horrific treatment at the hands of guards, and makes a host of unlikely friends, including an idealistic young teacher who provides her with reading material. The novel ends with a horrifying scene that highlights Romy’s pure desperation.

Kushner is an immensely talented author, and her considerable gifts are on full display in The Mars Room. Her prose is spare and straightforward but elegant, and it’s a perfect match for the dark subject matter. Her depictions of prison life, based on ample research, are chilling but never exploitative, and she forces the reader to reckon with the cruel realities of the American prison system.

All of the characters in The Mars Room are perfectly rendered, particularly Romy, who readers are unlikely to ever forget. She’s a wonderfully real character, broken but stubborn, loving but flawed. Kushner does a brilliant job bringing her alive without ever resorting to pathos or pity.

The Mars Room is an unforgettable novel that challenges the reader not to look away from those that our society has failed. It is, quite simply, a masterpiece of American fiction.

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Michael Schaub is a regular contributor to NPR and the Los Angeles Times. His journalism has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Guardian, among other publications. He lives in Austin, Texas.

Odes are songs of praise, to a person or an event or an object—a wedding poem, or epithalmium, is a kind of ode, as are a lot of nature poems. Often, an ode can be a way to meditate on what makes the subject worth praising, so the topic can be less direct than the title implies. For example, the way I read John Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale,” the real subject of praise is how we lose ourselves (briefly, fleetingly) when encountering something truly beautiful. You could say the nightingale is a vehicle for the poet’s praise of that feeling of losing oneself.

The great 20th-century Chilean poet Pablo Neruda wrote a series of odes in the early 1950s that are some of his most plain-spoken and accessible poems. If you’ve had trouble getting past the lush surrealism of Neruda’s love sonnets or the more epic scope of his Canto General, the odes are a great place to start. Partly motivated by a political desire to speak to (and on behalf of) common people, Neruda wrote odes to mundane things like “Ode to My Socks,” “Ode to Broken Things,” and “Ode to the Tomato,” praising their usefulness and lack of pretention but also elevating their commonness by focusing his lyrical attention on them. The poems are also full of whimsy and joy and often a bit of nostalgia. He expresses regret that we have to “assassinate” the tomato to enjoy its freshness, and wonders at how his clothes “make me what I am” and vice versa. A teacher of mine once remarked that Neruda wanted to eat the world, and there’s something boldly loving in these poems that is only matched in my reading experience by Walt Whitman.

I mention Neruda because he’s clearly one of the presiding spirits for Ross Gay’s Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, the book from which this poem is drawn, and which contains a number of odes and praise-songs. The impulse to praise the simple and straightforward, even perhaps a socio-political desire to elevate the mundane by focusing poetic attention on it, is similar in both poets. But there are also some interesting points of departure. For one thing, Gay’s odes are mostly about actions rather than things. Neruda’s tomato, clothes, and yellow bird become Gay’s “Ode to Sleeping in My Clothes,” “Ode to Buttoning and Unbuttoning My Shirt,” and here, drinking water with his hands. I want to explore this difference, but first here’s the poem:

Ode to Drinking Water from My Hands

which today, in the garden,
I’d forgotten
I’d known and more
forgotten
I’d learned and was taught this
by my grandfather
who, in the midst of arranging
and watering
the small bouquets
on mostly the freshest graves
saw my thirst
and cranked the rusty red pump
bringing forth
from what sounded like the gravelly throat
of an animal
a frigid torrent
and with his hands made a lagoon
from which he drank
and then I drank
before he cranked again
making of my hands, now,
a fountain in which I can see
the silty bottom
drifting while I drink
and drink and
my grandfather waters the flowers
on the graves
among which are his
and his wife’s
unfinished and patient, glistening
after he rinses the bird shit
from his wife’s
and the pump exhales
and I drink
to the bottom of my fountain
and join him
in his work.
— from Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude
(University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015)

If you’ve perused any of Neruda’s odes, you can see right away that the form here is a direct imitation/homage—the short lines, the straightforward language. The form forces us to slow down, but not in a way that feels pretentious. To me it reads more like the deliberate, present-tense wandering of the imagination as it connects back to memory. The act of drinking from his hands, which the speaker does “today, in the garden,” reminds him of his childhood when he first learned this skill from his grandfather.

A little side note about those first few lines: he’s telling us he’s forgotten these things (drinking from his hands, being taught how) as a way of telling us that he’s now remembered them. Just a neat little reversal as we go along, especially because it’s not only the skill that he’s now remembering.

So back to the question of actions versus things. In this poem, and in the other odes I’ve seen by Gay, the action being praised isn’t significant in and of itself. This is in contrast to Neruda, who seems to want to elevate the subjects of his attention, in part just by virtue of his attention. This is a little unfair to Neruda, but I get a vision when reading his odes of all the little items of the world—marbles, pieces of string, dead mice—waiting outside his study hoping for him to bestow his poetic attention upon them. And that he would make time for them all if he could. Neruda’s vision (like Whitman’s) is all-embracing, and a little self-important.

Gay’s odes, on the other hand, don’t presume any kind of universalism. When he praises “drinking water with my hands,” there’s no presumption that this activity is as meaningful for everyone else as it is for him. (Notice how all of the titles of the Ross Gay odes I mentioned above include the word “my.” They are intended, without apology, to be specific to his own experience.) Drinking water with his hands today, in his own garden, reminds the speaker of his own grandfather watering graves—“mostly the freshest,” but also his own—and it’s that reminder that makes the action worthy of praise. The action calls forth a whole host of feelings of grief and love, not to mention the sensual memories that get brought up with it—the sound of water coming up the pipe “like the gravelly throat / of an animal,” or the “lagoon” that appears in his grandfather’s hands. I love that word “lagoon,” how it evokes the massive size (in the speaker’s childhood memory) of his grandfather’s hands. These memories and feelings are what’s really being praised.

Weirdly, by focusing on an activity that is meaningful in his individual way, Gay’s efforts feel welcoming, open to participation by us as readers. Instead of a line of little items waiting for Neruda’s attention, I get an invitation: “This is how drinking water from my hands is meaningful for me; what simple actions are meaningful in this way for you?” I don’t personally have any strong memories connected to drinking water out of my hands, but reading this poem I’m reminded of cracking my knuckles with my own grandfather, holding up my hand to his to measure its size, and am tempted to write my own “Ode to Cracking My Knuckles,” to participate in a dialogue with Ross Gay. So the poem evokes not just his own memories, but summons similar ones in a total stranger—no small feat for a praise song. What might your memory be?

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Excerpted from How A Poem Moves: A Field Guide for Readers of Poetry by Adam Sol. © 2019 by Adam Sol. All rights reserved. Published by ECW Press Ltd. “Ode to Drinking Water from My Hands” from Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, by Ross Gay, © 2015. Reprinted by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.

In March of 1832, Honoré de Balzac received a letter at his Paris address. The postmark read Odessa—then a far distant city in the Ukraine—but there was no return address.

He opened it, of course, and inside was a critique of his most recent novel, La Peau de chagrin. The letter itself has been lost to time, “which is all the more unfortunate,” writes Balzac biographer Graham Robb, “since it is easily the most important letter Balzac ever received.” But from Balzac’s eventual reply, it can be deduced that the letter derided the “cynicism and atheism” of his latest novel, and its treatment of women, who “were portrayed as evil monsters.” The letter “urged him to return to the more elevated ideas of Scènes de la Vie Privée with their angelic victims.”

The letter was signed simply “L’Étrangère” (“The Stranger” or possibly “The Foreigner”).

Moved, intrigued, and impressed—and as Robb points out, very sensitive about any charges of irreligiosity—Balzac took out a classified  ad in a newspaper, the Gazette de France, hoping it might reach his anonymous critic. The April 4th issue that year ran his cryptic message:

M. de B. has received the letter that was sent to him on 28 February. He regrets that the means of replying has been withheld, and though his wishes are not of a nature that permits them to be published here, he hopes that at least his silence will be understood.

It’s not clear whether the letter writer ever saw this message, but she would write to Balzac again. Her name was Ewelina (Eveline) Hańska, a Polish countess married to a much older man, and a fan of the writer’s works. She came from a family of literary appreciation—her sister Karolina was Pushkin’s mistress, after all—and she was a major fan of Balzac’s. She was a particular fan of his portrayal of women—until La Peau de chagrin, that is. But being an educated noblewoman, she decided that she could do something about it, and so she became The Stranger.

The Stranger wrote to Balzac again in May, and multiple times that year; Madame Hańska arranged for a private courier so that they could write to one another directly, but Balzac was also obliged to provide lettres ostensibles, “dummy letters” that could make it seem as though she were corresponding with a family friend. Very early in the correspondence, Balzac was smitten. He began to fantasize about this mysterious princess. He wrote that he was “galloping through space and flying to that unknown land in which you, a stranger, live, the only member of your race. . .

I have imagined you as one of the invariably unhappy remnants of a people who were broken up and dispersed throughout this earth, perhaps exiled from heaven, but each with a language and feelings peculiar to that race and unlike those of other men.

She wrote back in similar terms:

Your soul embraces centuries, Monsieur; its philosophical concepts appear to be the fruit of long study matured by time; yet I am told that you are still young. I would like to know you, but feel that I have no need to do so. I know you through my own spiritual instinct; I picture you in my own way and feel that were I to set eyes upon you I should exclaim, ‘That is he!’ Your outward semblance probably does not reveal your brilliant imagination; you have to be moved, the sacred fire of genius has to be lit, if you are to show yourself as you really are, and you are what I feel you to be—a man superior in his knowledge of the human heart.

They continued to exchange love letters, sight unseen. They gradually learned more about one another, and though for a long time she protested that they would never meet, when she came to France with her husband in September of the year after the first letter, she couldn’t help herself. They arranged to meet in Besançon, on a promenade overlooking a lake. Neither was disappointed. According to Robb, Balzac would later say that he was “born in September 1833,” and write: “All my other passions were just a deposit for this one.”

Their affair continued, at distance, until Madame Hańska’s husband died in 1841. Even then, things were not simple, but on March 14th, 1850, they were married at last. Their happiness was short-lived—Balzac would die in August of that year. But still, the moral is clear: write to your favorite authors. You never know what might happen.