I’m Nobody! Who are you?

Are you – Nobody – too?

I love this sentence: “I’m nobody.” It’s uncanny.

It also strikes me as a model of a certain kind of interesting (maybe vital) artistic posture: a psychological and ethical refusal to tell a story about oneself to an audience that cannot give the right kind of uptake or recognition. It is a refusal to give an account of oneself under the wrong conditions.

All the ways of being seen represent a kind of danger. To be seen risks exposure. To be unseen risks oblivion. Even to be seen sympathetically risks domestication. There is no safe position.

Dickinson and Ethical Withdrawal

In Dickinson, what makes her withdrawal ethical is that it is an act of self-preservation. It is an act of love that says of herself and of her work, “this is worth the brutal commitment of faithful silence rather than compromise.” Rather than compromise with a world that not only misunderstood her but was hostile to her freedom.

Failure of uptake caused by ideology is not always partial or local. It can be global, as it was in Dickinson’s case, placing hard limits on her ability to communicate the truth of herself or to relate in a fully authentic way with the poetic public of her time.

Much Madness is divinest Sense -

To a discerning Eye -

Much Sense - the starkest Madness -

‘Tis the Majority In this, as all, prevail -

Assent - and you are sane -

Demur - you’re straightway dangerous -

And handled with a Chain -

Dickinson exemplifies a kind of deontological excellence, to do one’s duty to oneself and one’s art in self-imposed exile, isolation, and silence. It requires faith to sustain that silence without extinguishing hope.

Metaphysical Horizon

Dickinson acts and sees in a metaphysical frame. She suspends, in some sense, her awareness of her finitude. She commits herself as if she were speaking to eternity. In that space, she is able to be authentic, follow her judgments, and wager her life, as an artist, on her perception.

If you were coming in the Fall,

I’d brush the Summer by

With half a smile, and half a spurn,

As Housewives do, a Fly.

…

If certain, when this life was out—

That yours and mine, should be

I’d toss it yonder, like a Rind,

And take Eternity—

Her hope seems almost metaphysical, a frame which allows the extension of her intentionality such that she can commit her whole life in a single action. Without that frame, the weight of her isolation would be too much to bear.

But, now, uncertain of the length
Of this, that is between,
It goads me, like the Goblin Bee---
That will not state--- its sting.

Salinger and the Courage to Be Nobody

The notion of “nobody” in Salinger bears a strong family resemblance to the substance of Dickinson’s refusal. Her withdrawal, her rejection, is ethical and authentic, not neurotic, not pathological. Where Holden Caufield might be dismissed as a depressed rich kid with nowhere to go, Franny’s situation is unambiguously serious. In Franny and Zooey, Salinger gets closer to the deepest issues raised by Catcher in the Rye, both in terms of the logic and the music of the text. Franny’s is a journey of faith.

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It is the faith to refrain from telling a story about yourself. It is a matter of having the courage to be nobody:

“That’s why I quit the Theater Department. Just because I’m so horribly conditioned to accept everybody else’s values, and just because I like applause and people to rave about me, doesn’t make it right. I’m ashamed of it. I’m sick of it. I’m sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody.”

Both Franny and Dickinson are unnerved by the obscenity of the public. In Salinger, this disturbance takes the form of crisis rather than withdrawal. There is something in the spiritual frame of mind that struggles with immediacy, contingency, particularity, the realm of the body, the realm of indignities, where we are always forced into narratives, categories, and cliches. Or lured in by tepid applause. This is the cost of many kinds of commerce with the world. Both Dickinson and Franny feel it at an existential level.

Dickinson is just further along, having accepted and embraced an ethical withdrawal from the world as an expression of narrative autonomy.

Narrative Refusal

Narrative refusal often occurs in history as martyrdom. Jesus refusing to make himself comprehensible to Pilate, or Socrates to Athens. Giles Corey, the Salem man crushed to death with stones, who responded to every demand for confession with the words: more weight.

These are epic refusals to participate in a coercive narrative frame. But every human being, in order to reach full maturity and psychological integration, has to make the same move on a more mundane level, to begin to resist other people’s narratives and insist on telling their own story. Children are narrated into being. At some point, that scaffolding becomes a cage.

Narrative Self-Denial

The ultimate horizon of this insight is a Zen self-discipline: the courage to refuse to tell a story about yourself even to yourself, maybe especially to yourself, because the inner voice is loaded with the baggage of language, culture, and history, compressed into a self-policing psychological phantom.

This is well understood as an aspect of Buddhist and meditative practice, and it is present in therapeutic spaces and various critical practices: psychoanalytic, feminist, anti-racist, etc., wherever the scrutiny of internalized narratives is treated as a form of liberation. Typically this is a guided thing, with theories about how and why one ought to examine one’s self-narratives. But there are reasons to practice it more broadly, maybe even daily, as a kind of discipline.

The stakes of uncritical repetition of internalized narratives are multifaceted: social, political, epistemological, psychological. And the construction of such narratives has always been a function of cultural power. But there is a sense in which genuine culture now holds only a minority share. Most of those narratives today originate in forms of media where the stories told, and even the heuristics provided for critical thought, are being used to manipulate attention for profit. That ought to make them fundamentally suspect.

The thoughts one has about oneself, one’s sense of identity, one’s sense of limitations and faults, these are often stories told by others that have been internalized. It is an almost necessary, constitutive act of self-respect when one refuses to continue rehearsing, inwardly, the narratives which oppress them.

In Illness as Metaphor, Susan Sontag deconstructs the tendency within various cultures to apply metaphors to illness, and she traces the destructive impact of this tendency. As she writes, “Any important disease whose causality is murky and for which treatment is ineffectual tends to be awash in significance. First, the subjects of deepest dread, corruption, decay, pollution, ennui, weakness, are identified with the disease. The disease itself becomes a metaphor.”

I want to think about this insight in relation to borderline personality disorder. Borderline is one such illness where its causal opacity lends it to metaphorical capture. The symptomatic expression of the illness in behavior pushes the metaphor in a severe direction, such that we arrive at the borderline as emotional predator or vampire of intimacy.

This notion was popularized, it seems, by a pop-psych book called Emotional Vampires. I know what you’re thinking - Isn’t that the guy who wrote Dinosaur Brains? It is. A promotional description of the former:

“Emotional Vampires will help you cope effectively with the people in your life that confound you, confuse you, and seem to sap every ounce of your energy. Bestselling author Dr. Al Bernstein shows you how to recognize each vampire type--antisocial, histrionic, narcissists, obsessive-compulsives, paranoids--and deal with them effectively. He uses many examples from the latest news headlines, which will help you distinguish between the types and deepen your understanding of each one.

In response to the daily calls and emails … Dr. Al Bernstein has added his advice for dealing with those emotional vampires who come in the shape of spouses and lovers, relatives, and children. Dr. Bernstein shows you how to deal with each vampire type and what you need to do to keep from getting drained.”

The problem with metaphors is often not what they bring to our attention but what they license, and even children fall under the permission structure created by this one.

Borderline personality disorder, as defined by the DSM, is roughly characterized by four kinds of instability: emotional, social, self-concept, and behavioral. Emotionally, the borderline experiences sudden and extreme mood shifts, recurring melancholy, loneliness, and shame. Socially, an extreme sensitivity to abandonment makes intimate bonds precarious; the strategies adopted to secure love often destabilize the very relationships being pursued. In terms of self-concept, they report feelings of hollowness and operate with a fragmented or disjointed narrative of identity. Behaviorally, they engage in self-harm, substance abuse, and suicide attempts, behaviors best understood as attempts to regulate a hyperactive nervous system.

BPD is associated with early childhood trauma, inconsistent caregiving, abuse, and neglect.

People with BPD are intense. They are sensitive. They are prone to act in ways that seem extreme to their social environment.

At the level of official culture, Sontag has been effective. Her prohibition of metaphor seems to have taken hold. The use of metaphors of the borderline personality as a vampire or predator is mostly absent from clinical, diagnostic, and institutional discourse. This does trickle down to non institutional language and culture, e.g. online forums, support groups, etc. What one sees in these communities is not so much the employment of metaphor to describe BPD, but BPD itself acting as a metaphor, a kind of bag of infinite holding where any abusive or bad relationship can be placed without argument.

Once Sontag’s point has been understood and digested by official discourse, the metaphor moves underground into places like Reddit forums. When a discourse moves underground, it becomes more isolated and extreme, in feedback loops that exclude voices which resist the hardening of a narrative. Online communities become breeding grounds for just-so stories that develop a kind of dangerous memetic virality in particular historical moments.

If you want to see the stabilization of a narrative regime around a disease, one interesting window into this phenomenon can be found at the subreddit BPD Loved Ones. Here you will find not mere venting, but the stabilization and hardening of a dehumanizing narrative.

The language is possessive: your person with BPD, my person with BPD, yours did this, mine did this. There is an ever-present “they.” They think this way. They hurt me. They can never change. The person suffering from borderline is fundamentally, uncannily, other:

“I don’t care what she is. I don’t care if she ever feels remorse. I don’t care what happens to her. She was always just a stranger…”

First, diagnosis is invoked. The underlying logic of the discourse is such that diagnosis gives a sense of inevitability, but the exculpatory force of the diagnosis is withdrawn, and moral agency is smuggled back in. The disease is both real, in that it creates an inevitability of harm, and yet not real enough to mitigate against culpability for that harm.

What we find on BPD Loved Ones is not a support group in the normal therapeutic sense. In clinical language, a support group has to meet some minimal best practices.

Such spaces, in order to remain minimally therapeutic, must not structurally prohibit nuance, discourage self-implication, or bar counterexamples.

When these are forbidden, this is not a clinical support group. It is a folk ontology hardening into a hateful narrative regime.

***

When I think through the details of my own case in light of the broader literature on borderline, the following hypothesis occurs to me. Borderline is a condition which is constituted in the following way: There is a rupture in some important early relationship. Some form of withdrawal, neglect, abuse, or abandonment. And the child, if they are sensitive to meaning, responds by overdeveloping an interpretive capacity by which they attempt to make sense of what has happened. This inner tendency is amplified in environments where frank expressions of emotional sensitivity are met with punishment, mockery, or silence. This is a dangerous double burden: of meaning, and of silence.

In my own case, the logic was simple. My father disappeared and my mother did not want to talk about it. Or rather, if she did want to talk about it, it was from a place of deep anger and resentment. This creates a double burden: first, the burden of making meaning out of the absent, neglectful, or abusive parent, and second, a burden of silence imposed by the social environment through punishment, censure, or isolation for what are deemed excessive expressions of psychological pain.

The obsessive construction of narrative interpretation to situate oneself socially becomes an ongoing psychological need, now pushed inward, and denied opportunities for healthy expression.

The inner dialogue begins as compensation, and hardens into compulsion. This creates a relational style which is highly sensitive to signs of rupture, abandonment, or even devaluation. This intense relational style is often somewhere between semiotics and divination, and in turn puts an incredible burden on relationships. Interestingly, many people react to these strains and demands by retreating into ambiguity. Thus we have a negative feedback loop: excessive interpretive labor exhausts the social partner who retreats into ambiguity, restarting the process of interpretation. Furthermore, this exhaustive inner narrative keeps the self under construction, such that no long term stable self seems to emerge.

In the clinical literature we see a wide range of behaviors associated with the borderline diagnosis. This view explains why. Because external behavior, and relational patterns themselves, are downstream from the real causal mechanism - a runaway inner narration of meaning. Thus, we see the same inner logic expressed differently according to different configurations of: introversion/extroversion, high/low inhibitions, emotional literacy, etc.

The folk ontology that treats borderline as quasi-demonic collapses root cause with one of its many effects.

The value of this perspective is that it allows us to understand borderline not as inherently malicious or manipulative, but as burdened with a tragic hyperdevelopment of something fundamentally human: the instinct to insulate oneself from loss and pain through narrative and interpretation, i.e. meaning.

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So normally, a metaphor works like this. We have the tenor, which is the thing we are talking about, and the vehicle, which is the image or idea we borrow to talk about the tenor. Meaning flows from the vehicle onto the tenor. In Sontag’s case of tuberculosis or cancer, the tenor is the illness and the vehicle is some moral, political, or military idea: repression, corruption, invasion, punishment. Even when the metaphor is harmful, the illness remains conceptually downstream. It is the illness that is stigmatized by the metaphor.

With personality disorders, something different begins to happen. Instead of metaphors applying to the disease, the disease becomes the metaphor itself. It becomes the vehicle rather than the tenor. It becomes an abstract container where cruelty, manipulation, emotional harm, and social rupture are identified with the label. The label explains far too much.

There is an ethical and ontological slide. If BPD is real, then the harm it produces in relationships can be understood as symptoms of emotional dysregulation. This does not eliminate moral condemnation, but it gives it limits. If BPD is not real, what remains is intentional, characterological choice, something for which blame is not only allowed, but required.

The culture toggles between these two positions. It employs a strategy of ontological instability. The illness is neither fully real nor unreal. In the double movement of applying and retracting the medicalized label, we are left with the residue of pure stigma.

***

Iris Murdoch, in the Sovereignty of the Concept of the Good, makes the case for the necessity of metaphor:

“...we are creatures who use irreplaceable metaphors in many of our most important activities.”

At minimum, Murdoch makes a strong case for the indispensability of metaphor as a tool of cognition. I don’t think Sontag is really at odds with this. It seems to me that Sontag is concerned with the creation of mythologies around illness which hinder proper understanding and treatment. Murdoch is corrective: What we need is not a purely mechanical medical language but also better and truer metaphors, which illuminate more than they obscure. I want to turn now to art for better metaphors.

***

I want to return to Joanna Newsom as a phenomenological poet. The experience of Newsom’s lyrics shows the way in which the poet doesn’t merely replicate their own phenomenology, but creates a kind of instrument for the reader to explore the depths of their own inner life.

Here I want to look at Peach, Plum, Pear through the lens of borderline personality.

“We speak in the store.
I’m a sensitive bore.
You seem markedly more,
And I’m oozing surprise.”

For me, this is a classic borderline scenario. “We speak in the store, and I’m a sensitive bore.” She is aware of her sensitivity and aware of its psychological cost on others. Her neurotic self-awareness is overcome by an encounter with the lover, who has some kind of excess, which is experienced as a release. She’s oozing surprise. It’s leaking, it’s uncontrollable, her boundaries are breaking apart, which is a radical state of being for a mundane setting.

After this stage of attunement, we have an abrupt, disorienting withdrawal.

“But it’s late in the day
And you’re well on your way.
What was golden went gray
And I’m suddenly shy.”

There’s no rejection here, only the anticipation of such. The shift from golden to gray is a phenomenological shift. “Suddenly shy” is the self whisked away by some strange psychic movement. If this were well understood on its own, this sudden shyness, it’s absolute inner authority, this would go some way toward shedding a sympathetic light on borderline as a condition.

This relational pattern forms a kind of mania of meaning, a burst of intellectual activity to decode the logic of relationships so that one can live inside them.

“And I have read the right books
To interpret your looks.
You were knocking me down
With the palm of your eye.”

***

“And we were galloping manic
To the mouth of the source.
We were swallowing panic
In the face of its force.”

A rushing momentum toward a fantasy of deep reunion, of home. There is desperate resolve here to hold on to the beloved, like holding onto a wild, galloping animal as you try to make your way home.

“And I am blue,

… and unwell.”

I can only tell you here, where language begins to fail me, that I’m not well. The sum of what I’ve described, my experience, is making me sick.

“Made me bolt like a horse.”

Gabriella often walked the country roads around her village in the early morning hours. She would sometimes carry a bucket to keep people from talking, but today she didn’t have one.

She sang to herself.

Anda Jaleo! Jaleo!

She had a very vivid imagination, and was prone to bouts of fantasy, and she was frequently unable to sleep. She found the daylight oppressive. In it, people were grating and harsh. She was always praying for rainstorms. Even if the crops failed. She didn’t care.

She was a tall girl and she had a slight bounce in her walk. She had black hair that hung to her shoulders, bright, pensive eyes and prominent features owing partly to genetics and partly to hunger. She had one hand in her pocket, and the other swung at her side. Her fingers twitched at an imaginary pistol, which she kept pretending to draw.

Anda Jaleo!

It was just past 4 in the morning when she arrived at the little white farmhouse on the edge of the village of La Placita. She went quietly to the back of the house. She reached in an open window and tapped Sophia on the foot.

Sophia was dreaming. A massive flock of sheep were being brought in from the fields, there were men shouting and shooting guns into the air. The sheep looked like a swarm of bees from where she sat on the hilltop. It was early in the evening and the hills were glowing red, and the sheep were crying out loudly as they pushed in through the narrow gate.

Gabby pulled at Sophia’s foot and Sophia woke with suprise.

“What time is it?”

“Almost light,” Gabby answered. “Let’s go.”

Sophie got up and dressed quietly in the dark while Gabby smoked by the window. Sophie came out a few moments later. Sophia was shorter than her friend, with softer features. This bothered her for reasons she didn’t understand, she was sometimes too aware of it, and she would act strangely. Gabby thought she was beautiful. Gabby did not guard this secret as well as she thought.

Sophia smiled.

“How is she?”

Gabby wasn’t worried about the goat.

“She’s fine. It’s coming. Let’s get the water and then you can come and see her.”

They each grabbed a bucket and walked together further along the little country road. They passed the cemetery and the church, and made their way slowly down toward the well.

Sophie asked about the goat again and Gabby talked about it in enough detail to satisfy her friend, though Gabby was bored with goats and with farm work in general. She didn’t want to talk about it. She was excited for the tobacco harvest.

She was about to change the subject, when she saw an old man sitting on the low stone wall. He was dressed well, but he looked as though someone had put him in someone else’s clothes. Perhaps he was just drunk. But he looked very worn down and beaten. She thought, perhaps he is not even an old man. Just old before his time. She was disciplined in her expression. She did not want the man to feel that she pitied him, though she did. The girls both nodded at the man as they passed, and he nodded back but said nothing. He looked ahead with the same sad, bloodshot eyes.

They continued on into the little town to the well.

“The tobacco harvest will be fun. My cousins are coming, and bringing some other boys from Seville. We will ride out with them in the truck tomorrow.”

She was referring to Esteban and Francisco, who were both tall skinny boys, good looking and very well read. Esteban was a socialist and Francisco was an anarchist and they both went on and on. They could argue for hours over the finer points of historical materialism, nature of the proletariat, and many other such things. The anarchists especially had been preaching in the tobacco farms of Andalusia for years by now. There were thousands such political misfits among the Andalusian farmers, especially among the day laborers and itinerant workers, and the tobacco harvest was sure to be something of a spectacle.

The men would argue endlessly. They talked all through the day and into the night and a great festive atmosphere grew up around the men arguing. There would be guitars and dancing, and meat roasting on the fire.

For Gabby it was comfortable, like a storm, the people were different by the light of the fire. The songs and the laughter softened them, even as the young men argued themselves into a frenzy. They would fall together hugging by the end of the night.

The freedom to say such things seemed to appear out of nowhere, as if someone found suddenly they could fly. The mere exercise of such a freedom was intoxicating to her, and it led Gabby to wonder what other new ways there might be of seeing the world, and what other great injustices might be overturned, by small turns of the mind and imperceptible actions of the soul.

When they got to the well the plaza was empty. Gabby could smell flowers from somewhere and the smell of a cigar. Then a cool wind blew down from the north and the air seemed suddenly clean. She thought it might rain. She thought about going somewhere where it would rain. People said it rained in England. They got their water and walked back up the hill past the little white house and up to Gabby’s barn where the goat was about to give birth. The goat was happy to see them and she made a pained greeting and lovingly rested her head on Gabby’s lap as the girls sat down beside her. She gave birth without difficulty and seemed pleased with her son. The girls witnessed the scene with tenderness. After a while they crept out of the barn and the sun was climbing in the sky. Sophia walked back down the hill and Gabby watched her go.

Late that night the boys arrived and they all slept on the floor. They were all up at dawn and they piled into the truck. Sophia was waiting for them when they arrived. Gabby waved at her and she jumped into the back: They started down the road to the tobacco farm, kicking up dust in the road behind them.

The group arrived just before dawn. They watched as workers poured in by the dozens. Whole families came up the hill on foot, and a few men rode old, worn out horses. When about 100 people had gathered in the field the bosses came out, led by an old man in wide hat. The people became quiet. It was first light.

A few of the men from among the workers, including Esteban and Francisco, approached the old man and spoke with him. Both groups of men took on an air of extreme seriousness. The old man spoke with urgency. His name was Juan Carlos Garcia. He began to walk and point and bark. The men all walked alongside him. They spoke in softer tones.

The little temporary villiage whirled to life. The men began calling out for people in the crowd and people began to move about with purpose, carrying things to and fro, setting up for the day. And before ten minutes were passed the girls were working along in rows picking the lowest, heaviest leaves off the plant. The leaves were sticky with resin and soon the girls were too. And the young men were pushing wheelbarrows, and the old women were threading the leaves onto long sticks, which were put into bundles. It was hard, intense work. And it would get hot soon. In the summer the wind blows up over the Sahara and North Africa into Andalusia, and the summer heat was deadly, at the limits of what a human being could withstand.

Esteban and Francisco and the other organizers said little the first day. They worked along with the others until they were sore, and aching, and tired.

That night in the little camp they spread out amongst the little groups of men and began planning for the morning.

The organizers could get you more money. If you had the courage to stop work and the food, however meager, to go without pay for a day or two, the organizers could get you a better deal.

The only potential problem was Juan Carlos Garcia, the old man who owned the farm. He was a hateful man. He had supported the Carlists in his youth. Had they known the depths of Garcia’s paranoid resentment, they would have organized elsewhere.

The next morning Francisco and Esteban went out to meet Juan Carlos Garcia and his men. They were big strong humorless men with nervous eyes.

Having established that it would take around ten days for the workers to complete the harvest, and that there was a fortune to be harvested, organizers wanted to renegotiate pay or work would stop.

The movement had begun to see some success, and all the people were hopeful that they could resume work on better terms. It had worked on other big farms. The organizers assured the people that little strikes were happening everywhere in Spain. The people nervously awaited the outcome of the meeting. You could see the old man shake his head. He shook his finger at the young men, but soon relented when he was convinced that the whole little villiage was willing to disperse without pay’. To old man could not replace the workers in time to save all his crops, so he had little choice but to meet the demands for increase in pay. He would have shot the two young organizers on the spot if not for the riot that would be sure to follow. Such affairs often ended badly for men like the old man in the wide hat, often with their farms burned to the ground. The old man spat on the ground as he walked away. The work went on and the people were paid well, and the young men from Seville were like heroes to all the people, and Gabby especially loved them for what they had done.

And she was happy and relieved when the work was done for the day and this night the men really would get to have their impassioned debates, and there would be dancing and laughter and the sweet smell of tobacco lingering in the air.

The harvest took only six more days. The success of the threatened strike was talked about in all the surrounding villages and was greeted with enthusiasm by some quarters in Seville, and grimly in others. And each night in the camp there was a sense of triumph and there were many sentimental toasts and speeches. Then on the seventh day the job was done and the little village disassembled and carried itself like a column of overburdened ants, down the hill. The old man with the broad hat came out on his high horse to watch them go and spit on the ground and cursed them from atop the hill. Some of his men were already in La Placita, asking questions and making dark plans.

Back in the village, the girls were happy to be home. They were washing clothes together by the river when they heard the shooting. Gabby climbed a tree to get a look, and she saw, after a few minutes, a car racing away from the town and trail of dust behind it. She climbed down from the tree and ran toward the little town. Sophie ran after her. Estaban had been shot and lay bleeding in front of Casa de Moreno. Francisco was screaming for help and Gabby ran as fast as she could but she could do nothing but hold her cousin as he lay dying. They carried Esteban to the doctor, who was not far, and they left a trail of his dark blood in the dust. The doctor saw right away it was hopeless. The priest was sent for, and he came just in time to perform the last rites and Esteban died. The girls held each other and as Francisco paced the room. He wept silently as he watched the little street, waiting for danger. The truck pulled up and the other boys were in it and they picked up everyone and went back to Gabby’s house where many people were already gathered. Gabby’s father showed the boys where the guns were buried. Under cover of night, Esteban’s friends, aching and hungry for revenge, dug up the guns.

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They wanted to go right away to find Carlos Garcia. It was his men, some of the same men who had been with him on the tobacco farm, that had come looking for Francisco and Esteban. They had been in high spirits, sitting and drinking beer together and talking with the owner of the bar. The man who owned the bar liked the boys and they liked him and the day was cooler than usual. The windows were open and the bartender’s wife was cooking in the back, and the smell of eggs and coffee drifted through. Francisco finished his beer and stepped away to use the washroom. Esteban walked out front and lit a cigarette. He heard the car but he didn’t look in its direction. He was looking out toward to the old fort tower, which stood awkwardly by the well in the plaza. It was a small round stone tower. There were holes from which you could fire a rifle. Esteban wondered what forgotten conflict had caused the people to build it. He loved history and he dreamed of studying it at the university. But just as he was thinking of studying history, and admiring the tower, and enjoying his cigarette, shots rang out in the quiet little square and Esteban felt a series of thuds in his chest, looked down and saw the blood gushing out. He felt it pool hit in his lap as he sank down the wall. He saw the men’s faces who had shot him. They were disfigured with cruel smiles. He knew he was dying as the old bartender rushed out and shot an antique pistol which hit the door of the car sending it speeding away. As Francisco came running to his side, the car was just turning out of site. Esteban whispered, “Carlos Garcia”, and lost consciousness. Those would be his last words. Francisco screamed and a few moments later he saw Gabby running down the hill.

When Gabby heard the plan to go and find Garcia at his home, she instinctively understood what was at stake. She didn’t think it was a good plan. She convinced the young men after long pleading and many sincere tears to wait for their revenge. The outline of an alternative path was forming in her mind. So, the revenge was postponed and the next day was Esteban’s funeral. Many family and friends came from Seville and the surrounding villages outside La Placita del Rio Bonito came and mourned the young man, packing the little church there up the road. They buried him in the cemetery behind the church. As they walked back down the hill, Gabby, eyes full of tears, plucked a red flower from the roadside and put it behind her ear. The bartender distributed bottles of wine and the whole crowd got drunk as the sun went down on the lovely, sad occasion.

The day after the funeral the Guardia Civil showed up. When the bartender called them it was the following day and the man was already dead and soon to be buried. The officer on the phone said it wasn’t any hurry. He would send someone to take statements from the witnesses. When they spoke to the bartender, he told them truthfully that he was the only living witness to the shooting, and while he had not known the men he saw, everyone knew the boys had almost caused the work to stop on Garcia’s tobacco farm. The policemen laughed skeptically at this.

“So these communists squeeze the man for his money. These reds are causing havoc everywhere. They go around scaring all the landowners and farmers everywhere, all over Andalusia. And driving up the price of labor. And this boy is one of those same agitators. Who killed him? My suspect list would include Señor Garcia yes, but every gentleman of property in Spain. They should all want him dead. If they are rational. Many are.”

The officer blew a great cloud of smoke from his cigar. He said the same thing to Gabby and to Sophia. When the Civil Guard said this to Francisco he became angry and the policemen used it as an excuse to beat him up. His nose was broken. Several ribs were broken. His eyes were swollen shut. They were careful not to kill him and they thought highly of themselves for this.

On Sunday, after mass, the girls filed out with all the people greeting the priest as the left. The young priest looked at Gabby with pretend seriousness,

“Let every soul be subject to the higher power. For there is no power but of god. The powers that be are ordained of god. Whoever resists the power resists god, and they shall be damned.”

Do you understand the words of St. Paul, Gabriella?

Yes, father.

She went back to her room. His words stuck to her like wet clothes. They knocked something off track in her mind, and her rage multiplied. Her thoughts grew hotter and hotter.

She looked in on Francisco. He agreed with her that when he was able to go and speak with them, he must order the young men to put most of the guns back in the ground. Which he did.

Gabby had racked her brain for a month. She could not figure out how to kill the old man without leaving behind someone, most likely herself, but also possibly Francisco and his friends, possibly her father or Sophia, to take the blame and be killed or tortured by the Guardia Civil. She would have liked to kill his men too.

She though about Esteban’s murder constantly, as if it were some kind of prayer, a kind of prayer which drags you down to hell. Finally, painfully, she surrendered to the feeling that she would rather die than let his murder go unavenged a moment longer.

The following evening she lay in bed and waited for everyone to fall asleep. She arose and dressed quietly in the dark. She wore a black dress. She took the gun from her top dresser drawer and a sharp knife which she used to scale fish. She wrapped some bread and cheese in paper, and walked out into the world. It was about 1 in the morning.

It was now October. And the evening was cool as she walked down the hill. Garcia’s farm was about ten miles from La Placita, and she thought she could make it in 3 hours if she walked quickly and didn’t stop. The road was long and open and you could hear any cars coming for miles. When the wind rose so that you could not hear, you could still see the headlights reflecting from the mountains. She had to hide a few times to let the cars pass. You could also hear the horses from a long way off, but they could get spooked and give you away as they passed. She held her breath as they did, hiding in the brush.

She made it out to Garcia’s farm with lots of time. She crept along the fence line waiting for the dog. The farm was patrolled by a large angry looking black dog. But during her time working the tobacco farm they had plenty of opportunity to get to know him. At first he would growl from the edge of the firelight. But slowly they coaxed him in with the bones and scraps from the pig they had roasted.

When the dog approached he did not bark. Good boy. He pushed at her with his nose. His eyes were kind in the moonlight. She shared her bread and cheese and made her way toward the house. As she approached the back entrance, she almost bumped into a guard in the dark, who leaned drunkenly against the house, relieving himself. She waited for him to finish before bringing the butt of the old revolver down swiftly behind his ear. He fell unconscious to the ground. She knew she had come too far now. She would kill the old man and then go wake up the priest. She would give her confession and wait for the cops. She was resigned to this fate as she crept in the kitchen door.

Another of Garcia’s guards sat at a small wooden table. He was clearly struggling with a bottle of rum before him. He had bitten off a bit more than he could chew and he was very drunk. There was a set of keys on the table. An idea came to her. She pulled out the gun and cocked back the hammer. David looked up, mystified.

***

About a month before, when David and his friends heard about the coup they had organized quickly. There was a young philosopher at the University of Madrid, Romero Cruz, active in the student left, and fatally, a regular contributor of anti-clerical essays to El Sol.

The students were playing baseball on the campus lawn when David and his friends approached. David waved at the boys with a smile. He recognized Cruz, and asked for the department chair, and Cruz pointed him toward the building. Down the hall, he said. Look for the sign.

David strolled confidently toward the building. His friends sat around a bench smoking and laughing. The baseball game was underway. Someone hit a foul ball which smashed through a nearby window.

Do you prefer Plato or Aristotle? David asked.

Santiago was confused. He didn’t realize what was being asked.

Well, it’s complicated.

David’s face seem suddenly stern and impatient.

Plato.

When the young men heard the shot from inside, they opened fire on the baseball game. They were not quite indiscriminate. They were fixated on Cruz and shot him a dozen times. This allowed several of the boys to escape. The rest of them lay bloody on the grass.

David left soon after for rebel territory.

***

Gabby put a finger over her mouth. He nodded in understanding. She gestured with her pistol toward the bottle. Drink, she whispered. David was afraid but he did as he was told.

He finished the bottle and could barely see. She stood him up and walked him through the door. He had no sense at all of where he was. She put her arm around his waist and took him across the yard to a dubious looking wooden shack where the car was parked. This was the car which had kicked up dust as she watched from the olive tree as Esteban lay dying. She opened the door and pushed David in. She was prepared to struggle with him but he took her for an old sweetheart, and wrapped in this drunken delusion, David went willingly inside the car. She hit him over the head again for good measure.

She found Garcia’s room right away. He was sleeping like a baby. She wandered around the house in the dark for a long time, stuffing a pillowcase with valuables. When she was done she went back to the old man’s room. “Hey”, she said, “wake up”. The old man reacted like a cornered animal to the sound of a stranger’s voice in the dark. He shot up. “Quien es?”

His breath was rapid and unsteady and his heart was beating wildly. He fumbled for a pistol he kept under his wife’s pillow. She had died a few years before and ever since he had never felt safe sleeping alone. He had been a cruel, selfish husband. But he missed his wife after she died, and he cried out for her in that frantic moment as if he were a little boy crying for his mother. He lifted the pistol, pointed it at the sound of Gabby’s laughter, and pulled the trigger.

The hammer fell and there was nothing but the click of metal on metal. There had been four shots left in the revolver when she emptied it. She held the bullets in her hand now and she looked at him with dreadful cunning as she threw the bullets on the bed. He raced to put a bullet in the chamber but he could not calm himself, nor could he take his eyes off Gabby, for long. His hands were shaking and he dropped the bullet, and then the gun, and then slumped over and died.

She put him back in bed as he was, put the bullets in her pocket, and his pistol in the pillowcase. She walked out of the house.

She drove the car up along side the house to pick up the other sleeping guard. He moaned as she lifted him into the back seat. Blood oozed from the wound behind his ear. She drove the car almost all the way back to La Placita, and at the last overlook as the road meandered toward the village, there was a steep cliff, about 30 feet high. She got out of the car, and with some difficulty, pushed it off the cliff. There was a great crash and a burst of fire. She could hear screaming as she walked down the hill. It was still dark and she just made it home in time to beat the sunrise.

The Guardia Civil were divided. Some said the guards had killed the old man to rob him, perhaps after some conflict. Garcia was known for his cruel tongue which he never spared those closest to him, including these guards. Others said that the old man had died in his sleep, and the guards, having drunkenly discovered him, sloppily looted the place before fleeing. Both sides agreed that the two drunk men had driven too fast down the mountain and died as a result of the crash.

Gabby took her gun and buried it.

The next morning she grabbed a bucket and walked down the hill to Sophie’s. She woke her friend and they went down into town, past the old tower, and to the well. They talked quietly together in the still of the early dawn, filled their buckets, and trudged back up the hill.

Havana 1921

Santiago was from a wealthy family in Cuba. He grew up outside Havana in a large white house with a long porch, and a living room with a radio that looked like the facade of a polished wooden cathedral. He and his father would sit with the windows open and listen to baseball games. Actually, they were recreations of the games. The radio station based in Havana would get the play by play by telegraph from New York and recreate the commentary along with canned bat cracks and crowds cheering. The Yankees had a good year in 1921, the year Santiago turned nine. His father would smoke cigars, and when the game was done they would go out onto lush green grass and play under the shade of the flame tree. Their laughter mingled with the roaring cicadas.

Santiago’s father was called Jorge, and he liked to drink rum. He hated physical work of any kind. He didn’t understand how people could do it. He had been sent as a young man to college in Madrid, where he met Santiago’s mother, Helene. They wed in Madrid and sailed to Havana in 1914. Helene was an elegant young woman and Santiago always remembered her as she was in the 1920s when she was young and warm and gentle as the shade.

Babe Ruth hit 59 home runs in 1921, and each one sent the little family into fits of cheerful laughter. Each at bat brought a magical sense of anticipation.

Jorge discussed baseball as if it were a subject of great philosophical seriousness. If the Yankees lost, he would always rack his brain trying to find the moment where they had lost the momentum.

Or the critical mistake which had cost them the game. But the 1921 Yankees rarely lost and he spent the spring and summer of that year very happily.

Havana, 1925

After an early game on a pretty but humid Saturday morning in May, the family drove out to Santa Maria Del Mar. The water was clear and inviting. Jorge was in good spirits, and he was still ranting to his son about the genius of the Yankees, when Helene walked into the water. She meant to swim out to the sand bar, but was caught up in a rip tide which dragged her under. Her head emerged for a moment, she screamed, and was dragged under again. Jorge ran, then swam to her. He dove for her and after a few minutes he made his way back to shore and collapsed from exhaustion. Santiago stood on the shore dumbfounded.

Jorge went back into the water. Diving and searching until he could not breath. He made his way back to shore. He did it again. Santiago stood there watching, crying for his father to come back, the realization of his mothers death overwhelming him.

The next day, they finally found her body. Some boys were playing on the shore about a mile from where she drowned, and they saw a woman in the water. One boy, thinking it must be some kind of joke, turned over the dead woman who was floating face down. He screamed. Much of her face had been eaten by crabs.

Not long after this Babe Ruth disappeared from the lineup. Jorge was in a highly agitated state as he paced the floor, listening to the radio as if it were news of an impending hurricane.

Then word came that Ruth had collapsed while waiting for a train in North Carolina, then again while waiting to see a doctor in New York. Without him, the Yankees lost game after game. Jorge paced the floor, drinking. The Yankees dropped from 2nd place, to 5th, then finally 7th. Jorge was inconsolable.

New York, 1929

In 1929, Jorge traveled to New York for “business”, really he was there to watch the Yankees win a World Series, and Santiago, who had been in a boarding school in Spain, sailed across the Atlantic to meet him. Santiago watched the surface of the water like a portal to another world. Night after night he watched from the deck as the boat was lifted on mountainous swells. He felt the sink of the ship as it slid down the mountain, and the wind, and the darkness.

He was happy to see his father who was waiting for him on the dock. They embraced. Santiago was not aware of how much he missed his father. In the years they had been apart, Santiago had made Jorge into a legend. Now, here, he seemed smaller.

Santiago was tall and thin like his mother, and as he neared his seventeenth birthday, he looked more and more like her. Santiago had grown a foot since Jorge had seen him last. The boy was beginning to tower over his father, and the feeling was off putting for both of them.

At first they stayed in the Plaza hotel and walked along the park to the games. An old woman at the hotel had told Jorge that The Polo Grounds was just north of the park. But she had never been to Harlem, let alone the Polo Grounds, and they walked until they had blisters on their feet to make it to opening day. The Yankees were incredible. They waited for a long time after the crowd thinned out to find a taxi back to the hotel. They soon found a suitable accommodations n Harlem.

Each day, Jorge would make a show of reading several newspapers with his breakfast and coffee. He would call his friend at the bank.

Sometimes they would meet for lunch and Jorge would always come home drunk. This fig leaf was to preserve his dignity more than anything, though Santiago could have cared less if his father worked. His father was rich and so he did not have to work, Santiago reasoned, without any sense of judgement.

Santiago and his father attended every home game that year. The Yankees won their first three games, but so did their rivals the Boston Red Sox, who, in fact, went on to win six in a row, leaving the Yankees one game out of first place at the end of the first week. Jorge was nervous but optimistic. He wasn’t worried about the Red Sox, he said. If the Yankees play the right kind of baseball, they would make it to the World Series, as they had the previous three years. Jorge was sure of it.

The 12th game of his he year was played against the Pittsburg Pirates, whose new starting pitcher, Edmund Meadows, gave up back to back home runs. First to Gehrig, then to Ruth. The Yankees ended the 1st inning up 3, and by the time they pulled the exhausted Pittsburg starter in the 6th inning, the Yankees led by 9. Then the Pirates scored 5 in the 8th, and 4 more in the 9th to send the game into extra innings.

It was a cool spring morning in New York. Jorge was sweating profusely. Though Jorge was always careful in America to show that he spoke English, even going so far as to insist that Santiago address him in English when in public, he began to shout at the opposing players in Spanish, drawing looks from some of the people with them in the stands.

The Yankees bullpen had suffered a series of injuries during spring trading that year, and had been used extensively the first week of the season, and was about to be exposed. The pitcher they sent out meet the Pirates in the 10th was Andrew Jackson Webber, a sad eyed kid from Texas, tall and slender, sweat dripping from his worried brow, and he regretted the first pitch just as it left his hand and he didn’t look back whe a young Pittsburg outfielder smashed the ball into the upper deck. The crowd was in a frenzy. The next pitch was also a regrettable one and also left the yard. The joy had left the crowd, and many people began to shuffle out. The Yankees came up short in the bottom of the inning and the game was over. Jorge and Santiago walked back to the hotel in silence.

The Yankees were never able to overtake the Red Sox that year. They finished in second place, 18 games back. The team the father and son watched that year were a great baseball team, with an explosive offense, and ended the 29 season with a record of 88-66. But anything short of the World Series felt like a failure.

Ten days after the end of the 29 season, the stock market crashed. Jorge lost nearly all the money he had inherited from his own father. He would even have to sell the house in Havana to cover his debts and finish paying for his son’s education. Santiago was on a ship bound for Spain, watching the horizon, when his father jumped off a cliff into the East River and drowned.

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Madrid, 1936

Santiago studied philosophy at Universidad Central de Madrid. He was a talented student, who benefited from a cool temperament and a steady, analytical mind. Another benefit he had was that he did not deeply care for the politics of Spain. Neither the right nor the left, he thought, could rob him of his life’s pleasure, so long as he had a half dozen books, a pen and paper. And so as elections, and rebellions, and strikes distressed his classmates, they meant nothing to him. Too much of himself was left across the Atlantic.

His freshman year he had sparked up a friendship with another Cuban boy named Romero. The boys were instantly connected by their shared love of baseball. Romero studied literature, and was a communist. They had the idea to create baseball teams to take advantage of the already combative and competitive atmosphere between the two groups of underclassmen. They found eager recruits, though neither team was especially good at baseball. The philosophy students played the literature students in their first game in 1934. The philosophy students won 5-4, and everyone went off and got drunk. In the two years since, the two teams had played dozens of games, and since no one had written down the outcomes, it was unclear to either side how many games had been won or lost. Both sides claimed victory. That same year the Yankees won 100 games, 20 games ahead of the Tigers, and they would go on to win the World Series against the New York Giants, 4 games to 2. In those four games the Yankees outscored the Giants 49 to 17. Santiago wept when he read the news.

Madrid, 1939

Three years passed, and Santiago continued his studies in philosophy. He became fascinated with an idea that had first come to him while listening to his father discuss baseball.

“In life, baseball, and in politics”, he wrote, “we tend to overestimate individual agency and underestimate the role of discrete causal processes. In baseball, elite hitters succeed only 30–40% of the time, despite often doing everything correctly…

This suggests that outcomes, are heavily shaped by complex, intersecting causes beyond any one agent’s control. Accordingly, the epistemic position of participants in such systems is one of causal opacity: actions and outcomes are only loosely correlated, and reliable feedback is limited. Success may reflect favorable variance, i.e. luck, as much as virtue or skill.”

The sun was going down on the city, and Santiago was packing his things to leave, he could hear the sounds of a baseball game coming together on the lawn, when a confident, eager young man named David knocked on the door of Santiago’s tiny office. Just as Santiago stood to answer the door he heard the crack of a bat coming from the field outside and the sound of breaking glass.

This is the first in a series of three interconnected stories set around the time of the Spanish Civil War.

The three brothers watched from the darkened balcony. The sailor stumbled out of the alley and into the light of the street lamp. He was drunker than usual; it was perfect.

The boys moved swiftly down the stairs, the last one grinning stupidly, but quiet like the others.

They were out in the street just in time to see the man drifting sideways into the park.

They followed the crunch and thud of his heavy footsteps along the unlit gravel path, barely able to see him, until, just as the babble of the fountain could be heard, he came to a sudden halt.

“Who’s there?”

The sailor was an Englishman.

The tall one with the dark red hair was David. He unsheathed his long knife, but was otherwise motionless in the haze and moonlight. They all held their breath.

“¿Quién es?” the sailor growled. He spoke a little louder this time, frightening the resting birds into the air, seeming to shake the leaves on the trees. There was something ravenous and predatory in his voice.

The sailor took in a long, deliberate breath. He waited. When the wind shifted he took in another, his head tilted, his eyes closed.

The boy with the stupid grin was scared now and took a tentative step backward. The gravel crunched under his foot. David reached out with his free hand, grabbing his brother by the shirt collar. He whispered,

“You know what to do?”

Roberto and Juan nodded silently.

“Go.”

David kept his eyes on the sailor, and the footsteps of the two boys could hardly be heard as they retreated back along the path.

The sailor’s wild grin softened into a smile.

“Left you alone did they? Plans come apart so easy, mate.”

David could not quite breathe. He took a step forward, knife held out before him like a crucifix.

“You there? Ah, there you are. I can just make you out… who are you?” The wild grin returned as he began to move toward the boy.

“Stop!” The boy felt real fear now. He felt that if he moved, his feet would come off the ground. The sailor stopped, though still grinning.

“I’ve seen you,” David shouted.

“I know what you do.”

The boy’s voice was frightened and unsteady. The sailor savored the sound of it.

The sailor again took a slow, deep breath.

“What’s that? You know what I DO? I must be misunderstanding your Spanish, my young friend. Step into the light. “

“I know what you do and I know where you live,” David said. Neither was really true, but especially the latter. David had been fighting the instinct to run, and now he finally gave into it. He pivoted on the balls of his feet and ran back toward the light of the city. The sailor gave chase.

The sailor was much faster than David had allowed for, he barreled down on the boy, growing larger with each step. David imagined himself in the man’s grasp. Neck throttled and broken. Blood leaking from his mouth and nose. The boy ran swiftly as the monster gained in his pursuit.

The sailor was himself thinking something similar, but his vision of what to do with the boy was something more elaborate than David had the experience to consider.

The sailor was almost on him now. He loved the way the boy’s breath sounded like a panicked animal. He loved the way the boy’s legs wavered and buckled as the fear pulsed through him. The sailor loved the smell of the boy, which carried past him like a roasting ham. He savored it.

Roberto and Juan had taken up their positions on either side of the pathway. They watched their brother come flying by them in a pale shaft of moonlight. As soon as David passed them they pulled hard on the rope. The sailor’s foot caught, and he tumbled wildly, and the boys could hear the sound of something snap as he crashed into the ground. The sailor groaned. He took some heaving breaths and began to laugh as David approached, knife trembling in his unsteady hand.

~

David was alone when he first saw the sailor, waiting for the old woman on La Calle ——. Each night she would leave a loaf of bread on the doorstep, wrapped in a page of the ABC. He waited patiently for her to close the door and retreat down the hallway, before emerging to grab the stale bread. He had to do it quickly or the hungry rats would start to swarm it, and he would have to fight them off. Neither he nor his brothers had eaten since the night before.

As he was about to emerge, David heard heavy footsteps coming up the alley. The sailor smelled like rum. He wore a red scarf. David’s jaw clenched tight so that hours later he could only open it painfully, and with difficulty.

The sailor walked up to the old woman’s door. Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out a strange looking key. He fiddled with it in the lock, which made a subtle groan and a cracking sound, and the door opened. The sailor slipped into the house.

The rats made for the bread and, snapping out of his disbelief, David ran to snatch it up. He thought he could hear, very faintly, the old woman scream. He waited for a long while in the dark and listened. He heard another soft cry, then … nothing. The sailor reemerged a few minutes later. He had a bottle in his hand and he drank as he walked.

And David followed him toward the park.

That night David had followed the sailor just along the same path which took him toward El Retiro. David had from a young age learned to walk with a soft step, first to avoid the anger of his father, and later as a thief. In a narrow street just off the plaza the sailor had stopped and seemed to be waiting for someone. The sailor wore a heavy brown coat with a hood. He had short brown hair and a weird, square face with eyes that were at once wholly blank and sedated, the next moment lively and curious and intelligent. He was whispering to himself. Seeming to go over various arguments, imagining responses, he laughed several times as if someone had said something stupid, and with the wave of his hand and a sharp look away he was heard to say, several times, “you must not believe everything people say.” His Spanish was not perfect. David knew he was a foreigner and by his red scarf a communist. David had learned about the communists from his father. His father was a gullible man, a drunk and an ideologue. The old man was plagued with headaches and when he drank he was mean. David’s father was also an insomniac, whose boredom and drunkenness and sleeplessness were fertile ground for his cruelty.

The sailor’s face was occasionally illuminated as he smoked his cigarette, deep drags which caused the cherry to glow bright orange. The sailor blew a cloud of grey smoke which swirled and revolved like a primitive galaxy in a shaft of moonlight. The smell of it was sweet. David was tired and half mesmerized by it. The sailor took a piece of chalk from his deep pocket and kneeling, put a small indiscreet mark on the doorway. He moved along and David followed him silently through the park and out the other side where he disappeared into a boardinghouse as the boy stood numb in the eerie blue of the early dawn.

It took three agonizing days for the story to appear in the newspapers. He had become expert in stealing newspapers during this time. You could learn to steal almost anything if you really tried. And the cheaper something was, the easier it was to steal. Finally on the third day, the story appeared. The old woman had been killed by an intruder. There was some money on the old woman’s dresser, and the killer hadn’t taken it, and the police mentioned this to all the reporters.

David sat reading one such report when he came across an alarming detail. One policeman claimed that a young boy may have acted as lookout. A neighbor had seen a boy lurking in the shadows, around the time of the murder. A feeling : a lurch and a drop. He took a deep breath. He tapped his finger on his knee and his face contorted subtly as he continued reading. The policeman said, “A neighbor saw him, a little boy, hiding there… and we have his footprints in this spot.” He read the sentence over and over. He went to the bathroom and threw up. He came back pale. He put the newspapers away in the closet.

His mother had held up for a few days after his father died. She was always a quiet woman, and her sad eyed blankness was taken for grief. David tended to speak for her. At her side, holding her hand. David kept the other boys clean and fed them all for a few days on the money they had taken from their father’s pockets. When David’s father’s angry heart wore out, with no ceremony or even well chosen words to mark the occasion, he fell over on the kitchen floor. But the money soon ran out.

David was pompous, the way many little boys are, and he was too proud to beg for food. So he began to steal. What made it pompous was the hours he spent going over his plan with his little brothers, drawing little diagrams of this or that plaza, such and such a tienda and which escape routes, etc. Oddly, even though his mother was again soon lost inside her mind and unaware, mostly, of what was happening, she would eat what he gave her, she would wash herself every few days, and mostly she said nothing to anyone else, sitting and praying the rosary. David took this to be a quite lucky state of affairs. He had heard about the orphanages. His great fear was that they would be discovered, and sent away. His mother sent away. He wasn’t sentimental. He viewed it practically. Or so he told himself.

A week passed and the sailor had not been caught. David would make a round in the morning and steal one newspaper, he’d find a place to sit down and read, then he’d steal another. He stole food as an afterthought. His brothers would tear into whatever he tossed on the table for them. His mother’s portion he would place on her bedside table. On this day his mother seemed almost half lucid. He was glad. “You must not forget to take your brothers to mass”, she said. He had not forgotten.

The grey haired priest with the sharp face would be looking for him. The old man was meddlesome, he could often be seen coming and going about the neighborhood. Clicking his cane as he went like a cop. The old man would come to the house if David didn’t go to mass. So David went to mass. He dressed himself and his brothers in their best clothes, hand-me-downs, ill fitting. A family from the parish had given them some clothes after seeing the rags they all wore at their father’s funeral. So David dressed them all in their best, and marched them down to hear the mass. The grey haired priest with the clicking cane and the sharp face nodded to David as he ushered the boys into a pew in the back. Another priest said the mass in Latin. The boys kneeled and prayed and listened with practiced, performative devotion.

The next day was the first mention of a reward. Now David’s imagination began to run wild with possibilities. He knew he could not go to the police empty handed. They would never believe that he wasn’t a lookout. They would find out the sailor was a communist, he thought, and they’d think David was one too. No. He’d have to capture the sailor himself. A plan began to formulate.

He hardly knew what he might do with the money, he imagined it would make them impossibly rich. In reality, the 500 pesetas would keep them going for a year at most. He was dreaming of glory, perhaps even a commendation from the mayor of Madrid, perhaps the general himself. He imagined sitting in the front pew in mass, the old priest nodding in approval. David spent the next hour lost in fanciful speculations until roused by the church bells. He went out hurriedly, stole a length of rope, a loaf of bread, and a newspaper. He was back in his room in 1 hour.

David first tried waiting outside the old boarding house he had seen the man enter. In the morning, he felt he was too conspicuous, so he came at night. He kept up this vigil for a few days before giving up. Then he thought he would look for the sailor outside the old woman’s house. Perhaps he would come back, or perhaps the little alleyway was along a path he often took. But he was afraid of being seen by the police, who may have had the same idea.

Then he remembered the mark that the sailor had made on the doorway. The next morning David had his little brothers distract their mother while he retrieved his father’s hunting knife from his top dresser drawer, where it still sat atop the old man’s folded underwear. David stuffed the knife into the waist of his pants.

Late that same night, David waited at his mothers door, listening to her breath. When she was finally asleep, her breath became steady and deep; there was an audible release of tension in the sound. He crept out into the darkness of night to try to find the sailor.

He had followed the sailor east from the old woman’s house. So he retraced his steps until he came along the building where the sailor had knelt and left the mark. There it was, about ankle high, and faint. David waited an hour before deciding it was too cold. When he came back the next night he brought a warm coat but there was no sign of the sailor and David went home disappointed. The third night as David approached he could see that the door to the marked house was eerily ajar, opening and closing with the wind as if it were the scene of some great gathering of invisible spirits. The doorway across the street was covered by a deep shadow, and the boy stood there for a long time in the dark watching the open door, expecting the sailor to emerge, which after a while, he did. The sailor made no attempt to close the door. He walked confidently into the night air, again, toward the park, where he was soon lost amongst the shadows and the trees. Again, however, he stopped and had a short conversation with himself, illuminated by the glow of his cigarette. And again, he marked the door where he stood.

The next night there were police everywhere. Nevertheless, David made his way toward the door with the mark. The door was a green so dark it seemed black. Women’s clothes were hanging on a line above it. They were worn but colorful and soft. Red, orange, blue and green. They twisted in a high wind that continually whipped up in the mountains and came pouring down through the narrow passages. David hid and waited, but the sailor didn’t come. The police were continually coming and going, smoking cigarettes and complaining about the cold. Loud steps on the cobblestone.

The next night the police were fewer. And the next night there were almost none. When David saw that it was safe for the sailor to return, he knew that the sailor would soon be breaking the lock on the house with the mark. And that he would do horrible things to whoever lived inside, possibly kill them. It never occurred to him to try to save them. He was afraid to lose the trail.

David took frequent walks about the neighborhood, looking for chalk marks. It was the dead of winter and fairly cold. The wind blew steadily and everywhere there were the sounds of flags, and sheets whipping, and shutters banging out an irregular rhythm. Like far off gunfire. It was on one such morning that David first noticed the empty apartment. The terrace was oddly blank and there were no curtains in the window. The ornate edifice was easy to climb and that night when he made his way up to the second floor balcony, he found it as he had suspected, as he had hoped, unoccupied.

The apartment was much larger and nicer than the one he lived in. He imagined his family there. Even his father, who had perhaps purchased the mechanics shop on some money he had saved. Or his mother who would be treated more kindly by the women at church, even by the priest. He saw that there were rooms enough for him to have his own. His brothers would still have to share but their new room would be twice the size of the old one. David didn’t want to go home. He spent a long time pacing the old hardwood floors there.

David reasoned that the sailor would always walk through the park. So, when the sailor finished up in the house with the mark, he would turn left at the corner and walk directly under the balcony, where David would be waiting. He thought about trying to trap him there. But it would draw out the neighbors if anything went wrong, and David was afraid of drawing out the neighbors. For a reason he didn’t understand, he simply did not wish to be seen by them.

The next morning, David told his brothers the plan. No plan of David’s was too much for them. Once they had tried to build a parachute out of sheets and a rope and a harness men used for painting houses. The summer before Juan had jumped, at David’s insistence, from the roof of a three story building. Luckily, the parachute “worked”. It grabbed onto a bit of wrought iron, and brought Juan slamming into the side of the building, rather than falling swiftly to his death. One of the sheets began to rip and that lowered Juan another six feet or so, where he then fell again. This time he was able to break his fall by grabbing the railing on the second floor balcony which came off in his hand and sent him crashing into a wooden cart below. Juan was miraculously uninjured, and the foregoing episode quickly became an object lesson in David’s ingenuity and leadership. Of the two, Juan was particularly devoted to David. When he explained his plan to them about how they would capture the sailor, and collect the reward, and perhaps even use the money to move into a larger apartment, Roberton and Juan did not require convincing. They swallowed his vision easily, like tea with honey and cream.

And so, they were full of naive confidence as they waited in the darkness of the abandoned apartment. And no one but David was surprised when the sailor came, drunk and stumbling down the alley only an hour or so later. And they were generally satisfied with the genius of their older brother when, as he predicted, the sailor had tried to run David down in the dark, and tumbled catastrophically over the trip line. They were not, like David, afraid. They were in a waking dream, as boys often are.

David, despite his fear, ran at the man with his knife drawn. David took a mean, deliberate swipe at the sailor’s leg as he tried to crawl away. The sailor screamed in agony and blood seeped from the open wound. Meanwhile Juan was working the rope.

David was wild with excitement. The sailor turned to face him, tried to stand, and failed. His left collarbone was broken, and he was concussed from the fall. David continued to swing the knife at him, and the sailor continued to feebly back away.

Juan tied the rope as David had taught him. They had practiced for an hour the day before. With David coaching him and giving instructions, watching him work, with a pretend seriousness, as if it were a technique of some great art. Two quick knots, one loose and one tight.

Juan fed the rope into the loop. He crept around to the back of the man, who kept his eyes fixed on David. Juan took a breath. He slipped the simple noose over the man’s head and pulled backward violently.

David was crouched over like a predator. The blade no longer seemed strange in his hand. It felt warm and heavy and comfortable. He just stopped himself from pouncing on the man. Roberto ran over to Juan and they both pulled backwards on the rope like a game of tug of war. They dragged the sailor some way before tying the end of the rope hastily to a tree.

David checked that the man was alive. He was, somehow. David wished he had brought more rope. He sat down in the dirt beside the sailor, exhausted. Roberto and Juan ran for a policeman. After a few minutes David could hear them calling out. A man’s voice shouted back in the distance. In a few minutes the police had arrived.

The sun was just rising when the two policemen found David trembling in the cold. He put down the knife as they approached and got to his feet. He hadn’t really eaten in weeks and had slept even less. He was delirious and happy. They took him into custody. They were a little bit rough with him. He told them, “This is the man that killed the old woman on La Calle ——— “. They didn’t believe him at first. It seemed unbelievable. But then they found the chalk in the sailors coat. There was a lot of circumstantial evidence which pointed to the truth of the boy’s story. But the chalk sealed it. They let the boy go.

The family got the reward. David and his brothers got new clothes, but not a new apartment. There was no parade for him, no one gave a speech in his honor, and it didn’t bring his father back to life of course. But David didn’t notice any of that.

David became a kind of legend among the boys in the neighborhood, and they collected around him like a warband. They listened to his story over and over, which he recounted with his nose ever so slightly in the air and his chest swelled with pride. The boys took to patrolling the city, harassing drunks and vagrants, hoping for a sequel to the drama of the sailor. But they were soon a public nuisance and the police would break them up when they saw them.

David began to read more and more about politics; his bigotry began as an imitation of his father’s but soon outstripped that man’s simple prejudices with something far darker and more intelligent. He began giving little speeches to the neighborhood boys, and he loved the way they looked at him. He was sorry the police had taken away his father’s hunting knife.

He never heard what happened to the sailor. It wasn’t in the paper.

The title of this piece echoes the title of a highly inflammatory essay by Jerome Stolnitz. Seek it out if you want to be inflamed.

Philosophy was once addressed to a set of cognitive and political elites. It didn’t need to be popular to have influence. Today, many people, including elites, still have an interest in philosophy. But they no longer believe in the power of living philosophers to conjure ideas which are useful or dangerous.

Careerism has killed the moral urgency of philosophy. Today, the idea that a philosopher would have meaningful material consequences seems utopian. You may be better off waiting for the proletarian revolution than waiting for another Marx, the former being much more likely than the latter.

I believe Fukuyama is significant here. It is clear that history has not ended in the liberal democratic republic. The Trump administration, the war in Ukraine, the genocide in Gaza should be viewed as brutal counterexamples to the historical stasis Fukuyama described.

However, Fukuyama may have been wrong only in a very specific way. Rather than liberal democratic republics being the end of history, perhaps they are simply at the end of an argumentative chain, for a once historically significant group, namely western philosophers, about what counts as a just social or political system. Even if we grant this, however, we’d still be left with the unfortunate fact that people, including philosophers, prefer movement to stasis, even if it is movement without advancement or progress.

Even if we accept the idea (we could celebrate it, really) that The History of Western Political Philosophy has come to an end, we are still left in a post-historical White Lotus, where there is nothing to do but “hang out”. At first glance, this looks fine, even preferable. But after a day or so soaking in the sun and drowning in sugary tequila, one finds gunfights breaking out all over the pool area.

Long before Fukuyama applied a Hegelian thesis to the decline of authoritarian regimes, academic philosophy had lost connection with politics as a lived practice.

Philosophers, and intellectuals more generally, will remain politically marginal so long as the powers that be expect two things of them. First, that they value their careers more than the real political value latent in their work. Second, that their thoughts be expressed in a manner that does not easily escape the institution and has little chance of becoming widely influential.

Generally speaking, the philosopher today will neither clarify his or her positions such that they can be understood by a broad public, nor go and act directly in the world such that their thinking represents a freestanding threat. Thinking is a courageous and even anti-authoritarian act. But if the transmission of that thinking, and action on the part of the thinker, are practically foreclosed, if the ability of the thinker to communicate those thoughts is constrained, then those thoughts are no longer dangerous. And in the political realm, they are no longer useful.

I want to be very clear. Like that of art, the value of philosophy is sui generis. I am not saying philosophers need to adopt political commitments. I am addressing those who claim to have them.

I saw Joanna Newsom with some friends at the Village Tavern in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, around 2004 or 2005. She was touring on The Milk-Eyed Mender, her first album. The Village Tavern was a small, intimate club. My friends and I were there to see Smog.

I remember Joanna Newsom setting up her harp. Here was a girl about my age, shy but self-possessed, smiling to herself as she settled on her stool and adjusted her microphones.

She seemed small next to her instrument, which felt out of place, too fine, too classical for the sticky, beer-soaked floor. The air was heavy. The light was dim, but not romantically so.

Then she began to play, and you felt like you were holding your breath. There is a moment in “The Book of Right-On” where the high parts drop out, and the tempo shifts, and she sings, Do you want to run with my pack?

There was more swing in the moment live than you hear on the album. The audience, which was small, was totally captured, and it occurred to me how special it was, what we were seeing.

By the time she finished, I had forgotten the exact context of what was happening. Her performance was so vivid and unexpected. Bill Callahan seemed oddly tame compared to her. He was leaning into some kind of lounge act thing.

It’s been 20 years. And the record, Milk Eyed Mender, keeps coming back for me. Each time I listen to it, it gathers up memories and carries them away somehow, like debris picked up by a storm. And so each time I listen I am pelted with little fragments of my past self.

***

A brief explanatory detour:

Kierkegaard distinguishes between the hero, who acts in the world, and the poet, who is a witness, who absorbs and reflects. The hero operates in a world of action, finality, and risk, and the poet abandons that frame, moving into language, memory, and symbol.

Kierkegaard’s distinction begins to come apart when we consider J. L. Austin’s injunction to treat speech as action. One does not just speak. One declares, proclaims, questions, cajoles, defames, berates. We do things with words. Likewise, the whole field of symbolic activity is, in essence, a field of action. The distinction comes apart.

With this in mind, we can see how the poet themselves can be heroic in another’s reflection. This seems to me the proper, most interesting, and most humane relationship that the critic can have to the artist. The word critic itself implies a false standard of judgment, adjudication, or analysis with a view to some ideal, whereas the poet’s relation to the hero is more reverent, more exposed.

Much music criticism, much writing about music or art, seems to presume to teach the artist or the work. They should write about what teaches them instead.

Some cultural artifacts act like prisms. When we pay the cost of entry, which is to say attention, the object takes that attention the way a prism takes a beam of light, refracting it onto the wall as memories, feelings, passions, loves, losses.

I want to focus my attention on Milk-Eyed Mender and see what patterns strike the wall:

We sailed away on a winter’s day

with fate as malleable as clay;

As we drove away from Charleston, I was exhilarated, but quietly devastated. Neither of my parents were in good health. Plane tickets were expensive. I didn’t know when I would be back again. My stepfather was the one who worried me. He had a bad heart, even once getting open heart surgery. But it was my mom who died before I could come back again.

Crossing the country going west is a mystical experience. There is a long, slow drive through the low country, somewhere that plane gives way to hills, and finally to mountains. The whole southeastern United States is one humid, swampy, forest. The feeling is claustrophobic. There is no horizon except where ancient mountains lift you up like titanic tortoise shells. When the trees clear out in Oklahoma, there is something revelatory about it.

…

I once confessed to a friend that I was afraid of the ocean at night. I am to this day. There is a feeling in the black, the whole wobbly black mass of the ocean at night, that seems to me so full of monsters. Of course, I know there are no monsters in the ocean per se, only animals which exactly resemble monsters.

But my friend convinced me to go with her and sit in the ocean together as the sun went down, out there on Folly Beach. The water is warm, and the beautiful South Carolina sunset is spraying wild colors on the horizon behind Charleston. My friend and I sit there talking as the sky goes from pink to purple to blue to black. I held her hand tighter.

O my love,

O it was a funny little thing

to be the ones to’ve seen.

…

We drove into Mississippi in the middle of the night. We stayed in a seedy motel not far from William Faulkner’s house. We drove past the gas station where the kids gathered at the soda counter, the one that caused Faulkner to despair for the future of Western civilization. The mark of the beast, the phrase: “You betcha.”

When you go into William Faulkner’s house, the ready-to-hand metaphor is haunted. It’s very cliché to say of the South that it’s haunted, but William Faulkner’s house did feel haunted, though this is only a premonition of what’s really happening. If you hang around the South long enough, you’ll find the ghosts aren’t ephemeral or shy. They’re poltergeists. They’re loud. They wake you up in the middle of the night. They are not, furthermore, disembodied.

The ghosts that haunt the South live in the old, whitewashed churches, the dark pine forests, the cobblestone, the marble, the horses. The ghosts that haunt the South don’t whisper in the night. They stand up and shout, naked in the daylight. The South is not haunted. It’s possessed.

Nevertheless, I remember the living room of the house, a very quaint, very ordinary, kind of plain Southern living room. It was roped off, and there was a plaque with some information there. It told the story of Faulkner’s wife, Estelle, who, for years, suffering through the Mississippi summers, had begged Faulkner to install an air conditioner. He refused.

The day he died, before calling the funeral home, before calling a single friend or family member, Estelle called someone to have an air-conditioning unit installed.

I remember my friend standing there in the summer haze at Rowan Oak, sweat beading on the back of her hand, a southern girl as sacred and fragile and powerful as any one Falkner could imagine.

That the difference between

the sprout and the bean

is a golden ring,

it is a twisted string.

…

You become entangled. You have to be cut apart.

I remember climbing the trail in Colorado. Up and up along the smooth rocks which cradled the stream, at turns lazy and furious, until we reached the alpine lake, still as a stone, reflecting the grey sky. I remember crossing the continental divide on that ancient footpath, where dense knotty little trees huddled in the high meadow, with yellow flowers all around, and lightning above. The hail fell and we walked down into the valley as the ice gathered in the groove of the path until it ran down and soaked our shoes. We turned a corner and saw the little lioness gathering herself on the fallen ash tree. She asked only for the pause of your breath to withdraw. Dignified.

When you drive along the edge of the grand canyon, just near the entrance to the park, the little road is lined with high desert pine trees, which suddenly open up like a curtain, and you see the canyon, deep and wide, large birds circling over a great void, and the feeling is one of the most sublime space. Somehow, here, Newsom achieves this effect musically.

Do you want to run with my pack?

…

There is something strange in how we were taught to love. This line captures it. This is a love that lives on air:

And even when you touch my face

you know your place.

…

We drove again until summer turned into torrents of snow. We talked and talked until we had nothing left to say. She dropped me off in an avalanche. I tunneled to my room and got drunk. My memories are vivid but incomplete. Desire cannot be killed, but it can be starved until it’s brittle and it breaks apart in the wind.

And all that I’ve got

and all that I need

I tie in a knot

that I lay at your feet.

I have not forgot,

but a silence crept over me.

…

I hear my little girl crying in the other room. She cries insistently, defiantly. She has powerful muscles in her back, which flex heroically as she tries to escape her mother. She is Hellenistic. Her cry is sweet, then sharp and high. She is a bird of prey. She is the intrusion of the real. All the faint, weak ghosts of memory scatter like cats when she howls.

“Bless this house and its heart so savage.”

Epstein.

Yesterday, feeling overwhelmed, I tried to reorient myself within this sick, fucked up story.

I went back and watched some interviews with Julie K. Brown, the Miami-Herald journalist who (re) broke the Epstein story in November 2018, leading directly to Epstein’s arrest in the following July.

However, the problem with “orienting yourself” in all this is that it’s like orienting yourself in a hurricane. The big picture is helpful, but in some way disorients you to the details, which come flying at you unannounced like some decapitating shingle in a category 5.

The brutality of the story is too much to bear. On the one hand, it is good that it is so. Some things, as Falkner says, should be unbearable:

“Some things you must always be unable to bear… you must never stop refusing to bear. Injustice and outrage and dishonor and shame… Not for kudos and not for cash, not for your picture in the paper nor the money in the bank either…”

However, I think we have to be very careful about what becomes unspeakable, because strangely, this sets up a structure that benefits the abuser. There is a curious, poisonous effect that the very obscenity of predatory desire that must be named, limits or distorts the uptake that such testimony may receive.

***

In another piece in which I’m writing about Joanna Newsom’s Milk-Eyed Mender, I employ the metaphor of the album or the song as a phenomenological prism, something like a kind of psychological technology to help us explore our inner lives, and something about the weird structure of intersubjectivity and symbolic life, etc.

This essay is a companion piece to that one, employing its method and acting as a counterbalance to its overbearing sweetness. Here I want to consider Yahweh or the Highway, the album by Arab on Radar.

***

In SF CityBeat writer Peter Hoskins’ interview with Arab on Radar singer Mr. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, there is one exchange which is probably relevant for our discussion here,

Hoskins: One thing I always couldn’t wrap my head around was whether you guys were making weird, sick jokes or if your perverted, often disturbing lyrics were sincere. Do you consider it a joke? Or something more sincere? Or maybe a mix of the two?

Mr. PTSD: I have always viewed the lyrics as a very important Public Service Announcement for the mentally ill.

This album is normally treated as a kind of pure provocation, and I think that ignores the really interesting diagnostic work that is being done in the lyrics, and the very interesting phenomenological work that is being done in the chaotic and intense musical expression - in a work I take to be about abuse. In particular, I want to address the obscenity of the album and treat it not as some kind of pure excess or spectacle, but rather a lens which is required to see clearly the structures of abuse which it diagnoses, and the psychological weapons of the abuser.

I’m reminded of the scene from The Exorcist, where coming up the stairs, the doctors and the priest, and the mother (the whole official, straight world with its authorities, both ethical and epistemological), encounter the possessed girl writhing uncontrollably in her bed. I’m sure it’s commonplace to point out the tragic sexual connotations of the scene. The girl begins to shout really upsetting sexual obscenities. Here the film echoes (perhaps consciously, perhaps not) something dark about real abuse, which is the way predatory adult desires colonize the mind of the victim - Regan’s sexual proposition is a dark ventriloquism, but it is also plausibly testimony, which embodies its truth though its own forbidden form, the obscene.

Yahweh or the Highway is doing something like this. This is a testimony which originates in the forbidden places of the body,

My nuts are a pressure cooker.

But is managed and suppressed by cognition,

My mind is a muffler.

The mind is downstream and acts to suppress and contain.

The images here are disturbing. Read on with care.

The opening section of the first song, My Mind is a Muffler, reads as the Epstein files rendered in poetry.

Sometimes I just gotta jerk off,

my nuts are a pressure cooker,

my lymph nodes are swollen laughter,

canker sores in traffic, sponge bath his habits.

Here, sexuality is in some sense perverted and turned into a painful condition like a canker sore or some kind of dirt or stain which needs to be bathed away.

Sometimes I just gotta watch her jerk off my mentor.

The word “mentor”, as it is used here, is gutwrenching.

This speaks to the way in which the abused are often coerced into participation. Again, this is the Epstein files rendered in the abstraction of poetry, but the brutality of this image might be the cost of its existence as a kind of artistic testimony.

They blamed me for eating the dirt.

I just lack the nutrients found in the American meal

The album, it seems to me, again and again inverts the moral claims of those who occupy the anti-obscenity position. There’s something in the dirt which is lacking in the American diet - artistically, spiritually, and morally. One is better off eating dirt than consuming the hegemonic package.

Sex offenders seek salvation in batting practice

We’re warned off, in some sense, the more we think about this song from seeing Epstein, et al., as embodying a form of primarily elite nihilism. This take seems to be an emerging orthodoxy. The position is basically:

Every social and moral order has an obscene shadow element, such that public virtue is a mask, and underneath it a face of sadistic obscenity. This breeds elite nihilism - which then breeds abuse.

I basically agree that any moral order has an obscene core which it publicly disavows, but we ought to be careful seeing this as a purely elite phenomenon. Obviously, Epstein’s money and connections shielded him from accountability. But the dark promise of our system is spread out pretty “democratically”. Just as anyone can drop in the MET, or fly in an airplane, today the public may also take part in the most venerable of aristocratic pastimes, obscene cruelty.

***

I am punished by her sober etiquette.

This insight is well understood in politics, where respectability acts as a kind of filter which forbids the expression of political truths, particularly in their proper emotional register. And one thing that maybe is not as well appreciated is the symmetry between that and the logic of abuse and of abuse within families in particular, that a prohibition on obscenity can in many ways act as a prohibition on the naming of abuse.

And so here, we have Christian and perhaps specifically Catholic purity culture exposed and implicated, and not simply parodied.

In Semen on the Mount, you have the kind of obscene core of Christian purity culture put on display,

Ejaculation is a waste of valuable resources.

This is about controlling reproduction. Familiar.

Now we’re launched into a series of culture war attacks, also familiar:

your kids are not safe from us homosexuals,

your kids are controlled by the intellectuals,

your kids will dabble in the devilish stuff.

This is standard fare for Christian attacks on the wider culture.

The last line,

they will dream about their teacher’s muff,

The very vocabulary here betrays the speaker’s own deep ambivalence towards sex and sexuality. The discourse that is nominally dedicated to preserving the innocence of children, is itself obviously eaten away with forbidden and suppressed desires. So, the obscenity is embedded in the purity discourse. The poetry of Yahweh or the Highway isn’t enacting violence, it’s diagnosing and naming it, while refusing to step outside of the way it feels.

They say I blew the neighborhood bully,

I just wanted to compare his leg to mine.

This brings me back to Epstein and this certain analysis that I think is recurring, this notion that the elite consistently need to find more and more extreme ways of acting out their desire for pleasure. But I think we really miss the point of modernity after Madison Avenue, is that the jouissance of the whole culture is on life support, for everyone, not just the elites. And perhaps this is a recipe for widespread cruelty and exploitation. But to the extent we start looking for it “out there” on some island somewhere, instead of “in here” - at church, school, and in the home, we (to invert a phrase) are shocked by the plumage but still love the bird. Our ever growing discomfort with obscenity blocks the kind of intimacy with reality necessary to see such things clearly.

According to Roland Barthes, from Le monde où l'on catche, wrestling functions not as a sport but as a spectacle, which is to say a system of signs. It does not reveal truth through technique or application, the way judo or boxing might. Instead, the point of wrestling is that it renders moral states visible; it stages and celebrates their logic.

One particularly important figure in this moral theater is the “bastard”. For Barthes, the bastard is an abstraction. He is not merely a villain but a serial character whose moral qualities are mythic in nature and whose essence is stable across appearances. As Barthes puts it, he is “someone unstable,” someone who adopts the rules cynically when they are useful and transgresses them when they are not. He is asocial and opportunistic. His morality is instrumental, even Machiavellian.

In the staging of this morality play, the bastard is not merely an attack on morality, but on its logic. Barthes notices that the crowd responds more violently to inconsistency than to treachery or cruelty. It is the contradiction in the bastard’s arguments that offends. These contradictions become the basis of the crowd’s rage and produce a demand for reckoning, for punishment.

The bastard is constitutive of the form. Barthes notes that there are occasionally wrestling matches in which the combatants display fairness and magnanimity. The crowd enjoys these and congratulates itself for appreciating fair play. But if there are more than two or three such matches in a row, the same crowd becomes bored. The antisocial figure of the bastard is necessary. Someone must be punished.

***

There is another level at which the bastard is intelligible and necessary. He represents, for the audience, their own marginality, to the extent that they are alienated from social norms. This goes a long way toward explaining the appeal of figures who present themselves as rule-breakers while still demanding moral resolution.

At its core, the function of the bastard is to set up a ritual. He establishes the moral logic with mathematical clarity so that when the equation is complete, when the equal sign appears, what is logically entailed is a demand for reckoning, for accounting, for punishment. The bastard does not only reveal something. He sanctions something. He licenses a form of ecstatic violence.

“There is another ancient posture which appears in the coupling of the wrestlers, that of the suppliant who, at the mercy of his opponent on bended knees, his arms raised above his head, is slowly brought down by the vertical pressure of the victor. In wrestling, unlike judo, defeat is not a conventional sign, abandoned as soon as it is understood. It is not an outcome, but quite the contrary, it is a duration, a display. It takes up the ancient myths of public suffering and humiliation, the cross and the pillory.”

This image is ubiquitous in ancient art:

Narmer Pallette, Egypt, circa 3000 BCE

(Mayan Art, circa AD 700)

(Hulk Hogan vs. Andre the Giant, 1987)

As Barthes says, a wrestler can irritate or disgust, but he never disappoints, for he always accomplishes completely what the public expects of him.

This places wrestling closer to an ancient ritual theater, staging mythological tales and motifs. In our own time, the language, the forms, and the logic of wrestling have been adopted by power. We deal more than ever with the aesthetic state. As a consequence, we are trapped in its cartoon logic.

As Barthes points out, the body of the wrestler, his clothes, his hair, are immediate signs. What they signal is the deep essence of the character. It is constitutive of wrestling that the sign of the body, the body as persona, should never be violated in action. All actions flow from the moral insight one is supposed to grasp visually.

Obama was the ultimate face. The good guy. Widows and orphans, etc. Who could oppose that?

Everything in the social world gives fuel to its own opposition. Obama’s ambition toward beauty, i.e. his sophisticated use of the aesthetic frame in its most normative form, his continual insistence that he was playing by the rules, these all necessitated their rhetorical opposite. Ugliness follows.

Trump is a “master” of the form.

His history in the world of wrestling is well known, but his political success depends on his conformity to, not his understanding of, its logic.

He is a classic villain. He is ugly. He is crass. He makes a mockery of the rules. He hides behind the ropes when he is down, taking advantage of legal technicalities. He protests loudly when rules are violated against him, then violates those same rules moments later with shamelessness. He provokes the crowd by design.

He leers and grins and stomps on his fallen opponents. He ritualizes and aestheticizes exaggerated cruelty. He gives the audience what it wants.

The audience is both aware of the falsity, the artifice, the performance, and at the same time not. This is what marks it as ideological. The audience experiences pain as pleasure. Here is the mark of the aesthetic.

Growing up, my family was strange. My home environment was defined by all kinds of unspoken power dynamics, strategically deployed silences and ambiguities, mysteriously withheld emotional sustenance and care. This caused in me a high sensitivity to relational injury, to slights and rejections, which was rational and adaptive in that environment. It also created a psychological pattern of attachment which is overbearing and sometimes severe. There is a psychological intensity to the way I interact with the world. I’ve always felt that I was too difficult, or too expensive, to love.

Some people are expensive to love in the sense that they demand a lot of attention. Others are expensive to love in that they demand a lot of understanding or grace. People can be difficult to love for a lot of reasons, simply because the psychological resources which constitute the real labor of loving another human being are finite. There is emotional labor that goes into loving. That capacity in us to love, love as an action, is limited.

When we think through the consequences of this ecological constraint, while rational, it remains tragic. One of the deepest explanatory causes of human suffering is that we have finite resources to translate effectively into care. There is a heartbreaking mismatch between human aspiration and capacity across a whole series of existential questions.

People become harder to love under all kinds of circumstances. People become harder to love in moments of upheaval, dislocation. They become harder to love when treated unjustly or in the aftermath of trauma. What is particularly interesting to me is when they are harder to love because they rebel against a relational ecology in which there’s asymmetric regard and asymmetric care. Attempting to correct such asymmetries is one way to become harder to love. Sometimes we must insist on behaving in ways that make it more difficult for others to love us.

Being difficult to love causes a shame which is ontological. As distinguished from moral shame, “I did this or that wrong” , ontological shame is: I am too much of X. I’m too intense, too withdrawn, too private. I require too much intimacy, too much honesty, too much fidelity, or I require too much care in this or that respect. Moral shame is often earned, ontological shame is often not.

I’m not trying to theorize away the notion that people bear responsibility for how they behave in relationships, but rather to expose that so much of what we experience as rejection, contempt, and ill will (etc.) is really an incapacity to psychologically harmonize with us. It’s often about a mismatch in the capacity to meet, or tendency to exceed, certain psychological thresholds with regards to many things, among them (another dash of autobiography): seriousness, intimacy, legibility, etc.

When we have the experience of these gaps in psychological and relational capacities, one frequent maneuver is to allow that intuition to crystallize around a particular exemplary behavior and to retroactively cast blame. We search around for a justification of why this behavior makes us feel pressured or rushed or abandoned or neglected. This retroactive blame is a form of self-narration, in which we act as a prosecutor in the trial that we’ve put on in our minds. And of course, this casts our friend or lover in the role of transgressor. We don’t have to tell ourselves this kind of story.

***

Recently, I’ve been putting hard boundaries around how long I’m allowed to ruminate on a piece of writing. Lately, when I’m stuck and want to speed things up, I’ll ask myself, what are you really interested in here? In this case, the answer is pretty simple.

I’m interested in dissolving the shame for everyone involved. The person who stays, the person who goes, the person who is difficult to love, the person whose capacity to love strains under that difficulty.

We’re all living in a world of limitation. Understanding is restorative.

Zendik Farm was a sort of eco-anarchist commune founded in the late 1960s by a man named Wulf. The group emerged out of the post-hippie, back-to-the-land counterculture and presented itself as anti-industrial and anti-capitalist in orientation. Its stated ambition was to replace alienated labor with cooperative work and artistic free play, a collective life in which people could live in closer equilibrium with one another and with the land.

When I arrived, Wulf Zendik had recently died. This was around 2000. His writings were still treated with something like religious reverence, and the community appeared to be in a liminal period, reorganizing itself around his widow and longtime partner, Arol. This was the situation when I arrived at Zendik.

It was the middle of the night and it was freezing. The Greyhound bus from Charleston had dropped me off at a Waffle House about twenty miles away and I had hitched a ride with a man whose manner became stranger and stranger as we made our way through the weird, isolated mountains and valleys of North Carolina. He dropped me off in the dark of the parking lot and I thanked him. I was glad to see him go.

I could see people gathered in the big house at the center of the farm complex. They were having a party. A guy cheerfully showed me to a small circular cabin with four bunks and a wood-burning stove. I went to bed.

The next day, a tall guy in an old, beat-up sombrero-type hat showed me around the grounds. The whole farm smelled like patchouli and fresh-cut wood and dirt and winter. I liked it. Briefly.

I quickly realized that while Zendik advertised itself as a working farm / artists’ retreat, it was really just a working farm to occupy people like me who showed up. It was only an “artists’ retreat” for the people who had started it and occupied positions of authority and power - if it was one at all.

Most of my time was spent chopping firewood, clearing brush, and cleaning out the pens where the sheep and goats pissed and shit, which collected into a thick layer that came up in sheets and went into a wheelbarrow for fertilizer. It was backbreaking labor. That’s mostly what I did.

Everything there was tightly controlled. When I arrived, the whole farm was in a state of sexual abstinence. This was without a doubt what sociologists call a “high control group”, and sex was definitely one of the things they controlled. I later encountered this interview with woman who was there around the same time as me:

“Before having sex for the first time—in February 2000, at the age of 23—I had to ask permission of a man I barely knew, at a “sex meeting” attended by all but a few of the 50-plus adults then living at Zendik Farm.

What qualified this man … to make this decision?

… (he) drew his authority to dispense advice not from a record of wisdom or empathy, but from his rank in the Zendik hierarchy.”

(A Tangled Web: Sex at Zendik Farm by Helen Zuman. Her account here is harrowing.)

It was Stalinesque. Each morning the faithful had to wait to find out what precisely they believed:

“Sexual interaction couldn’t just happen; it had to be pre-arranged. If I wished to “get together” with a guy, or vice versa, one of us had to “hit up” the other for a “walk” … How the hitting up happened shifted with Arol’s whim”

I wouldn’t stay at Zendik long. But even based on the short time I was there, I can corroborate most of what is included in this woman’s story, including the above detail specifically. These rules were in flux when I arrived, and Arol’s pronouncements on the topic were eagerly anticipated. It took me a while to see how deeply fucked up the place was. Somehow, I knew but didn’t understand.

***

I want to interrogate weaponized “honesty” (honesty here is synonymous with sincerity, rather than truth-telling) and distinguish between two categories. Both were very common at Zendik, as they are in social life generally. Though in the former they took on an illuminating intensity.

The first is honesty as brutality. This is the telling of an actual truth in a way that is harmful or domineering. Let me give you an example.

I was pushing a wheelbarrow full of shit one day and the matriarch, Arol, stops and looks at me.

“You’ve got a real attitude problem.”

I smiled defensively.

“There’s something very irritating about your face.”

I might be slightly misremembering the second one. In any case, both are true. I do have a bad attitude and this does often lead to my committing what I’ve come to call “face crimes”.

The second form of weaponized “honesty” is something like narrative domination. This is the imposition of interpretive narratives on people where there is no settled truth (because the facts are complex, and open to interpretation) and where narrative autonomy is called for.

The latter often occurred while I was at Zendik. It appeared in speculations about a person’s psychology and motives within their sexual pursuit of this or that person. It appeared in light of very spontaneous and intimate interactions with anyone, at any time, a glance, a joke - setting in motion a vindictive meaning machine that could grind you into dust.

The Zendik philosophy of radical honesty, particularly in the compulsive policing of each other’s intimate relationships, was deeply at odds with a spirit of friendliness or gentleness toward other people. Their honesty almost always took the form of brutality or interpersonal violence.

People were loudly and meanly scrutinized in meetings, in something like struggle sessions. Hypocrisies and self-deceptive narratives were sniffed out and exposed, whether they were real or not. And the shit always rolled downhill.

***

One day a friend came to visit me. She was living in Greenville, South Carolina, about forty-five minutes away. She had heard through someone that I was there. She called the farm and asked to speak to me. We talked, and she arranged to come up that weekend. I asked her to bring a tiny bit of pot, a Snickers bar, and a soda. I had been living on water and eggs with long-grain brown rice. Underneath the hippy aesthetic, there was a general atmosphere of very severe and humorless sobriety that permeated the place.

By the time she arrived, I was already fully soured on Zendik. We hiked up a trail that snaked along a frozen waterfall. It was beautiful. We stopped at a place where you could look out over the valley. We smoked weed. I broke off a piece of the Snickers bar and ate it.

Sitting there with those small comforts of civilization, and with the genuine comfort of a real friend, I was suddenly overwhelmed with homesickness.

I went back down to the cabin and gathered my things. Without saying a word to anyone, I got into my friend’s car, and we drove away.

There is a video circulating online of masked men approaching people in Minnesota and conducting what they call a “citizenship check”, in the aftermath of the shooting of Renee Good. The video raises again the question of how masks work, psychologically and politically.

When you put on a mask, you cannot see the mask. Your experience of your own mask is entirely imaginary. There is a sense in which the way you experience it is not perceptual at all but projected. Because of this, it is very easy to identify with the mask as a persona and to lose any distance between the surface of consciousness, ordinarily the face, and the mask that replaces it. The mask becomes the face. A new persona is installed. This is a psychological movement that human beings make easily. Greek theater depends on it. Costume depends on it.

The identification with the mask as persona is not a rare or exotic maneuver. It is familiar, practiced, almost automatic - and when the mask functions as a communicative act, when it is meant to do something in the world, that act can fail.

In these videos, the mask appears to begin as an attempt to intimidate. The intimidation is the point. The mask is not merely concealment; it is the face. It is meant to speak before any words are spoken. But there is a moment, visible in more recent ICE videos, where this speech act fails.

Adorno imagines someone looking through a keyhole. This observer is absorbed in what they see. They forget themselves. Phenomenologically, they become almost disembodied, a ghost. Then someone taps them on the shoulder. They are returned to their body, to their position, to the fact that they are a subject occupying a perspective. Great art, for Adorno, should work like this.

There is a more brutal and direct version of this movement in these ICE encounters. When the mask fails as intimidation, when it no longer functions as persona, the failure itself becomes a kind of tap on the shoulder. It reminds the agent that they are not the mask. The identification collapses. The mask shifts from being a face to being a defensive mechanism.

You can see this shift in the eyes. The eyes register the return. The mask stops speaking. It stops being a persona and becomes mere protection, surprising the person with their own true identity, under a cover too delicate for comfort.

***

This essay was written before the public execution of Alex Pretti. His murder brings to mind the following quote from The Origins of Totalitarianism, by Hannah Arendt:

“The Nazis did not strike at prominent figures as had been done in the earlier wave of political crimes in Germany … instead by killing small socialist functionaries … they attempted to prove the population of the dangers involved in mere membership. This kind of mass terror … increased steadily because neither the police nor the courts seriously prosecuted political offenders on the right. It was valuable as what a Nazi publicist has called “power propaganda” - it made clear to the population at large that the power of the nazis was greater than that of the authorities, that it was safer to be a member of a nazi (organization)… than a loyal republican.”

The big wheel spins again. It ticks mechanically upward, like a roller coaster nearing the top of its high arch, toward a moment of brutal clarity.

Imagine there is an artist. He is a very popular, successful artist, and no one disputes his identity as such. Over time, he becomes progressively more extreme in his ideas about art and about what he wants to say. He is interested in theater, but is frustrated with actors, who do not meet his exacting standards for believability.

The artist announces that there will be a live theatrical performance written by himself and performed by an anonymous person. What the artist has arranged is that a man who has been kidnapped will wake up on stage just as the curtains are opening. The man is still bound, but in a relatively simple way such that if the audience were to attempt to free him, he could be easily freed.

At first, the man does not understand what is happening. He is confused. After some time, he begins to understand that he is being watched. He begins to beg and plead with the audience to be released. He tries to explain his situation. The audience is amused, or concerned, or disturbed, or has whatever reaction it has, but the audience maintains the aesthetic distance appropriate to the consideration of art.

The person begs and cries and screams. He is hungry and thirsty. He soils himself. He sits and begs the audience until he collapses from exhaustion. The curtains close.

There is a standing ovation.

Later the same evening, the artist releases a statement describing the work as an exploration of vulnerability within a conformist social frame. Many interpretations of the performance take hold in the culture. Though the identity of the so-called actor remains unknown, the performance is hailed for many years as one of the great dramatic performances in the history of theater.

When I imagine this scenario clearly, I find that I want to say: this is not a work of art. I don’t think that’s a controversial view. I think that if most people heard this thought experiment, they would agree.

This is not art.

That is the specific judgment I find myself making. What I want to understand is why it feels so clearly correct, even though I cannot yet say exactly what principle makes it so.

My intuition might be explained, and its mystery dispelled, in the following way. First, one might suggest that it is simply a question of the victim’s consent. But this does not seem to work, because we already have canonical cases of art, or works widely accepted as art, where there are serious problems with consent, if we look carefully at how human beings are used as material within an aesthetic frame. Titicut Follies is a documentary about a mental institution where the participants clearly had a limited ability to consent. Grey Gardens presents a similar problem. The Act of Killing reconstructs mass killings through interviews with the perpetrators, and in that sense the victims are used as a kind of human material within the aesthetic frame. True crime, as a genre, seems implicated in this way also. So, the move that says the victim’s consent was violated, and therefore the artwork is ontologically invalid, does not seem to work.

One could then go further and say that the work fails as art because the audience misrecognizes the situation, that it takes something real as an object of aesthetic appreciation rather than understanding its proper ontological status, specifically as an ethical emergency. But it could plausibly be said of many documentaries, especially in the genre of true crime, that “what is captured inside this frame is better understood as ethical emergency than aesthetic object”. Another problem with this reply is that it is simply too specific. What this reveals, it seems to me, is that any rule sufficiently rich to meet my example and explain my intuition might have to be ad hoc.

Finally, it might seem, at this point, that the conclusion to draw is that my objection is really a moral one, that what I am reacting to is a moral violation rather than an aesthetic failure. All I can do here is insist on my intuition. My intuition is that the judgment I am making is an aesthetic one. It is a judgment about what may, and may not, become art.

I, for one, am left with a mystery.

Drowning

When I was a little boy, I would lie in my mother’s bed, looking up at a photo on the wall of a ballerina. I could never make sense of it. I thought the dancer was a bird. I remember falling asleep in that bed and waking to horrible nightmares.

My first nightmare was just void, blackness. I couldn’t have been more than four years old. That void was instantly recognizable to me as the void of death. A nauseating movement began to happen; I could feel space itself, the blackness, the void expanding, and opening up. I was at its center, and it was opening up and up and up until I was a tiny, fragmentary grain of sand. Then the whole black scene was cut in two by a guttural, primordial scream.

When I was a little older, I began to experience bouts of depression. I would stay in my room for long periods of time, reading books. I would watch Gone with the Wind over and over again. Something about the long, slow melancholy of that film resonated with some kind of pain inside of me.

I began to have anxiety attacks in school. They became much worse after I was put on Ritalin. I would come back from lunch every day after taking my medicine with my heart pounding, beating out of my chest. My palms were sweaty. I couldn’t sit still. My foot wouldn’t stop tapping. This afternoon restlessness got me into frequent trouble.

My parents kicked me out of the house at the age of seventeen. I couch-surfed for a long time and stayed with friends. Around this time, my mother began to experience a mental decline that would never reverse. She began to have visions. The first vision that put her into the hospital was one of Satan. She saw him standing in her bedroom. I think there is something to a schizophrenic vision. Certainly many devils had stood at the foot of my mother’s bed.

After my mother died, a new layer was added, of grief and loneliness. I think my mother was the only person who could understand what I was feeling, and loved me enough to help me carry it.

***

As an adult, I find myself still trapped in the movement of a big wheel, where on any given day the sun is blacked out and I feel no happiness or any hope of happiness in the future.. I’m not sure why I feel this incredible opposition to myself.

My opposition to myself takes the form of radical self-denial. I find myself unable to take my medicine, to sleep, to eat, anything that would look like self-care. Interestingly, I am at my most disciplined when I hate myself. Self-hatred can be incredibly useful in that limited way.

The voice that is operative inside me when I feel this self-hatred feels authoritative. It claims dominion over all the other aspects of me. I experience this version of myself from the outside. I feel the hatred, and that’s it. I can’t stop looking, and I can’t stop feeling, like the way your tongue is always seeking out your loose tooth or the burn on the roof of your mouth.

For me, something about my nervous system wants to go to war with itself. It does that by adopting a code of strict discipline. No food. No sleep. No comfort. No love. Only the feeling. Only the black slime that lives in your brain. Only the bag of eels crawling around inside your ribcage. No narrative. Just the feeling. Doom.

***

This state of affairs inside my body, mind, and nervous system has had many labels affixed to it. Affective disorders are present, anxiety and depression. But there are layers to what is happening that are only explained at the level of personality, at the level of the self and the way it interacts symbolically with its environment.

Confession: I am skeptical of psychiatric categories. Psychiatry seems to me to be an art rather than a science, an interpretive activity as well as a medical one. It is dangerous in the sense that it creates social ontologies. We no longer just have people who exhibit symptoms. We have narcissists, psychopaths, borderlines. A person becomes a type.

Diagnostic systems often look for a breakdown in the social environment. The final question on any diagnostic form is always whether symptoms create harm in one’s life. This makes diagnosis relative to social environments, where different ways of being are interpreted differently, and so there is not a 1:1 relationship of symptoms to diagnosis. The social environment gets a say.

There is a murkiness to our ability to diagnose. We speak these categories into being, then supplement them with institutional facts. The diagnosis enters the DSM and becomes a fully functioning social fact that rearranges interpretive frameworks and creates a label that can then be affixed.

At the same time, the correlation of symptoms under the label borderline is too close to my own experience to feel like mere social construction. If you took away the description of borderline, if you took away those symptoms, I believe I would be what other people call mentally healthy. I have no idea what it would feel like to inhabit that mental space indefinitely.

Psychiatric diagnosis as a social object resembles art in its ontology. It is constructed. It requires an interpretive act and an act of naming. Borderline was named by psychoanalysts who encountered personalities that were neither neurotic nor psychotic but lived on the borderline between them. An imaginary container was created, and real things (biological substrates, memories, feelings, relational patterns) were placed inside it.

But the constellation is real. I can feel it now. I’m drowning in it.

Necromancers are called once again to contribute their hordes in the never-ending fight against evil kings and tyrants. Unfortunately, the necromancer’s playbook has become predictable. Two major maneuvers are typically employed in urban areas, and they have become increasingly easy to counter.

The first is the march. The march creates a point of density where the king’s men are able to outflank, and the marching does not provide a way to prevent massive loss by allowing dispersal and recovery. Occupations, where the horde is used to hold a position, are also relatively easy to isolate and clear.

What necromancers need is a new tactic, a moving urban occupation, a system that combines both the march and the occupation into a dynamic system for engaging in urban conflict that does not require any sort of command and control from the necromancer. It must be autonomous.

Charleston serves as the primary mental model, though many older or so-called historic cities follow a similar geographic logic. These tactics are not meant for newer cities with broader avenues. The horde would be raised in Marion Square, as a staging zone, not as a position to be held.

The algorithmic movement of the horde works like this. The horde is broken into four groups. Each one is assigned a color: red, blue, green, and yellow. Each color has a certain orientation toward the conflict.

Red responds to noise, resistance, and obstruction. It moves along the largest, most open path toward conflict. Red is a march, though it does not create ranks. It is simply a horde moving toward activity along the widest possible route.

Blue is oriented toward weight. Blue is an occupation. It does not advance or withdraw. It attempts to remain where it is and draws attention, making clearing it feel necessary.

Green is the opposite of red. Green moves away from conflict, away from density and congestion, along the easiest path. It avoids friction. It preserves local adjacency, but the shape of the group softens, thins out, and leaks into the surrounding area.

Yellow is total suspension. While in yellow, the horde should appear inactive, if not absent from the conflict.

At the same time, all at once, everybody’s color changes. Red becomes blue. Blue becomes green. Green becomes yellow. Yellow becomes red. Where red was marching, it is now holding. Where blue was holding, it is now decompressing into green. Where green was decompressing, it turns to yellow and enters suspension. Where yellow was in suspension, it turns to red and begins moving along wide avenues toward conflict.

What emerges is an algorithmic system where new fronts and new sites of conflict are continually created within the urban environment. There is absolutely no command and control from the necromancer. The horde governs itself. So long as each member responds properly to its color state, and so long as all groups’ color states switch simultaneously, the behavior of the horde becomes weather. The color changes are decided in advance based on time. Time is relative to geography. The color change is not reactive.

In order to keep any unit of zombies from being annihilated entirely, the system requires a built-in mechanism for de-escalation and orderly, algorithmic exit. The most important part of the process is its de-escalatory mode. At a de-escalatory phase shift, there is no red. Yellow remains yellow. It does not turn back into red. It does not seek out conflict. It stays in a distributed holding, hiding pattern.

Green from the last turn becomes yellow, so there are now two yellows hiding. Blue turns to green, and the old line dissolves. The old red becomes blue and holds while everything else is happening. There is no new red.

On the next phase shift, red remains forbidden. Blue phases down to green. Green phases down to yellow. The system fully de-escalates. The entire horde can then be reconfigured at a single position at the necromancer’s discretion.

During the process of de-escalation, it appears that the storm is passing. The horde seems to simply vanish.

In the aftermath, the king’s men are left itching for a kind of final confrontation that they are not given. The command and control apparatus of the king’s militia has been taxed. Its attention has been taxed and drawn to dealing with this storm to no purpose. What was a site of great noise, movement, and apparent chaos dissolves, appears somewhere else, dissolves, appears somewhere else.

When it finally disappears altogether, the king’s men have been occupied and distracted. The king’s men cost money. The operation itself costs attention. The king’s response is a great expenditure of effort to no end.

The purpose of the horde is to exhaust, distract, and engage the king’s men without ever providing the opportunity for a decisive engagement.

The king believes that he is entitled to conflict because he has an appetite for violence. He has an appetite for domination, and that is why silence also pleases him. The king survives because the militia believe that he, and only he, can bring order. The self governing horde is a refutation to all of the above.

I hate holding things. People hand me things and I become irrationally angry. I constantly think of the line from Spinal Tap, “Would you be holding this?” and that has become a kind of Kantian accusation directed at the whole world of people who have ever tried to hand me something I didn’t ask for or invite. I don’t like being weighed down by bags, suitcases, bikes, or water bottles.

When I was a teacher, students would come up and hand me things, overdue homework, papers, forms, and even though it was something I was responsible for taking, I felt irritated. I would think to myself, I’ll give you an A, just don’t ever hand me anything ever again. Possession spirals out of control. There is the sense of being overburdened, of being weighed down. There is duty and obligation, because there are rules about how we discard things.

Small objects accumulate around me because they carry sentimental traces. An envelope, a book, a bag, a trinket, a flyer, a pebble someone found on the beach. They become sanctified by someone’s loving attention. Once you befriend the fox, to part ways is abandonment. The accumulation of these objects, and even the accumulation of their meaning, can become overwhelming, suffocating.

Likewise, abstract things can be equally difficult to hold: memories, ideas, regrets, guilt. Authority, narrative positions, the stories we carry about who we are. Gender, nationality, religion. Many abstract things, nominally weightless things, accumulate around and inside a person and their mind. Some of these abstract qualities or states are heavy, and it feels good to put them down.

Often with these more abstract objects, ideas, memories, narratives, emotions like guilt, you find that you are holding them for the same reason I was holding that irritating bit of overdue homework. Someone handed it to you, and at that moment you didn’t know how to refuse it.

When we look at our inner landscape and notice features that cause us pain, often those have been planted there not just by people but by institutions, the media, increasingly the internet, social media, algorithms. Unlike the situation with my student, who was handing me something reasonable and within the rules of a game he and I both understood - we are holding many things that were handed to us not by innocent mistake but by malevolent design.

Art, it seems to me, is one excellent way of taking these inner objects and putting them down. Poetry is an especially effective psychological technology for putting things down, particularly because it is so free in its rules. That lack of form, especially in free verse, allows people to reach into a place in their mind that is not burdened by fear or paralyzed by the anticipation of a great laborious effort that would be required to rid oneself of some feeling or idea, some inner object, by way of a long form like a novel.

Many artistic forms are useful in their capacity to overcome fear or hesitation on the part of the artist. The free verse poem is the most exemplary case, but the haiku is another example. The straightforward, simple, short punk song. There are many kinds of fear that these forms overcome: fear of judgment, fear of failure, fear to begin, fear to speak. It is less costly to begin. Even in conversation, it would be much more awkward and difficult to begin properly the longer the form of the initial address. That is why we say “hi”.

The popular song tradition in general may be the exemplary case of the success of bounded short works of art from the perspective of the audience. The impact of the song as a cultural artifact, as a cultural technology, in the twentieth century cannot be overstated.

What matters less is the artifact itself than the process of producing it complete and whole and in bounded form, such that one can put it down. In this sense the practice is hygienic. It is circulatory. It purifies the atmosphere of the mind.

My intuition is: If I neglects to put my insights, ideas, and emotions into bounded form, if the complete movement is not achieved, then the insight does not disappear. It disappears back into the darkness of my unconscious mind, where it continues to reverberate in hazy and disorienting ways.

Bounded expression allows the idea to be put down. At the same time, it allows it to be picked up and carried forward. Perhaps the bounded form is precisely what makes something integrable, the kind of thing that can be carried without becoming oppressive. Taking one’s inner life and working it into artifacts is healthy in this sense. It completes a circuit. It allows things to be put down without being lost.

***

There is something to the Buddhist idea that there is a kind of primordial discomfort, and that it takes real insight and work to relinquish all the things one has to put down in order merely to alleviate one’s own suffering. The things we carry are accumulated through action under illusion.

There is an interesting meditative practice or concept I encountered, originally through Pema Chödrön, the notion of shempa. Shempa is the psychological tension, the psychological cost, or the weight of a thought. When you have an anxious thought, a depressed thought, a guilt-laden thought, one practice in mindfulness is to separate out the shempa, to separate the feeling from the propositional content.

What you see is that there is a kind of operation of the mind such that often, if you simply make peace with the feeling of irritation, the feeling of unsettledness, this peculiar kind of psychic weight, if you learn to sit with it, it dissolves - leaving an awkwardly exposed narrative without force. Putting things down, in this sense, is not always about putting things down so much as it is about letting them go. Clarity - not exhaustive, surgical clarity, but a gentle, transient, airy kind of clarity - dissolves the psychological artifacts that one carries, which cause one to suffer.

As I sit here writing, I feel currently in my back the artifact of carrying, the after effect of carrying something very precious to me, my daughter. My wife has been in meetings all afternoon and the baby is particularly fussy today and she refuses to be put down. I carry her in one arm while I make a cup of coffee. I switch arms. I check the news. I switch arms. I warm up a bottle. I switch arms. I grab a diaper from the drawer. I put her down briefly. I pick her back up again. Hours pass. She coos in my ear. She smiles at me in a way that is so joyful and innocent and beautiful that I can’t bear to put her down. I carry her. I bounce her. I burp her.

But finally, when my wife emerges from her meeting and reaches out her arms and I hand Charlie over, I feel the ache in my back and breathe a deep sigh of relief.

Renee Good, the woman killed by ICE in Minneapolis, was a mother of three. Her six-year-old son, whose father died in 2023, is now an orphan.

The administration claims that Good impeded ICE agents, blocking them with her car and shouting at them. If that much is true, then what she was engaged in was an act of civil disobedience. Impeding the work of law enforcement, even obstructing them with your car, may be illegal. It is not grounds for summary execution.

When I read about Good, beyond the sheer horror of her particular case and beyond the nightmare that is ICE more broadly, I felt there was something hiding under the story for me, something important to excavate. I felt a kind of guilt. Good was only in a position to put her life on the line because others were not. The more massive the resistance to these ICE raids, and the more massive and daring the solidarity expressed in the community’s response, the more physically protected she would have been. There is strength in numbers. Somebody is always going to put themselves on the front line. Fighting fascism is not now nor has ever been bloodless.

We owe a duty to our neighbors who put themselves in harm’s way for our benefit to lessen the danger, to share the danger, to share the burden of that danger. We have become adapted, even those of us inclined to resist, to purely symbolic and abstract rather than embodied forms of resistance. I have some experience in embodied forms of resistance, leading marches and organizing protests, sit-ins, and political actions of various kinds. Embodied resistance is extremely difficult on the nervous system. It is a burden that takes a toll on the body. There is exhaustion. The mental effort combined with moral urgency creates a kind of mania. It is difficult emotional work.

Over and over, I have seen women do this work with grace and poise.

I do believe, though I may be proven wrong, that Good was there to obstruct the operations of ICE. Perhaps she had come spontaneously. But she was there to resist ICE, which is a righteous and good and human thing to do. In doing so, she placed herself in harm’s way. She was doing a kind of emotional labor, taking on spontaneously and generously the burden of care. What an older generation of southerners called “women’s work”. And there is something maternal about it. I don’t mean that crudely.

By “maternal”, I mean something like a psychological disposition to loving self-sacrifice, often in the form of work which no one wants to do, and for which people have insufficient gratitude, as a general rule. This isn’t just something mothers do. It’s something activists do. It’s something that I could see women were doing all my life in different contexts.

In my experience, organic local activism always takes the same form. Something happens that is morally significant to the community. Serious people who care about the community begin talking. A loose network forms. There is an informal meeting. Almost every time, it is about ten people, with a super-majority being women. Still, men do most of the talking. When the meeting ends and the group reviews action items, women take on the bulk of the actual responsibility for implementing whatever was decided. What always shocked me is that they do it. They show up the next day and they go to work. Always.

Because of this, and because so many women already know this role and this pattern so well, a small group of women ends up playing a massive role in the organization. They become, effectively, the entire logistical mind of the organization. I noticed this pattern first in activism. What surprised me later, which I am embarrassed to admit to being surprised, is that women were already doing this everywhere. Growing up in the South, it was obvious that women played this role in family life. But I know now they also play it in software development companies, prep schools, and in politics and activism.

Across all of these, one thing is continuous. Every one I can think of was led by a man. The same structure repeats at the top. Men do most of the talking and a minority of the work. Women do the work. In a Southern family, the women run everything, while a patriarchal man arrives (after the work is done) to invariably give a silent nod of approval. In companies, women occupy roles like CTO or COO, doing all the actual work, receiving vague instructions from a male CEO whose function is largely symbolic, and could be replaced by ChatGPT.

Women do the hard work of social life and culture. They do the work of care. They do the work of anticipation. They do the work of implementation. And increasingly, in politics, they do the work of putting their bodies on the line. My own guilt here is not relevant, except to my testimony. But here it is. Living in Spain, and raising my daughter, I feel a deep debt of gratitude to the activists resisting ICE, though I have made choices that prioritize my safety, mental health, and my commitment to my family. This is a form of withdrawal that ought to be acknowledged without qualification. It comes as no surprise that a woman stepped up to do the work.

Even the work of dying.

In the early 2000s, I lived in a punk house in Charleston, South Carolina, with some friends. We were all heavily into hardcore music, and bands would often play shows in our living room. Experimental and hardcore bands would travel to Charleston from all over the country to play for 50 drunk, half-crazed kids. That atmosphere was cramped and loud and chaotic. It was hedonistic and fun.

This period was very interesting musically. It was perhaps one of the most fertile, creative periods for any genre in the history of American music.The music seemed to want to do some kind of critical work with regards to mainstream culture. This embedded critique put the punk scene at odds with a popular musical culture which had been sterilized and domesticated by its proximity to commerce.

There was a thrill being in those rooms and existing as a young person in those transgressive and (fleetingly) liberated spaces. There was something deeply exciting and unsettling and new about the music itself. There was something fragile and beautiful about the culture that supported it.

“Try to be great. Try to give extra. Try to, you know, be bold. Try to invent your own reality. Try to, you know, do what has not been done before. I would just say don’t even get started if you’re going to just try to do some mediocre shit, because there’s so much of that…. Give me something amazing. Give me something new. Give me something I haven’t seen before in a way I haven’t seen it. Let me feel something. Find some kind of magic. Go towards something that’s inexplicable…. Give me something that’s aggressive and gnarly. Chew up the world. Come at it from some other place, but just don’t give me the same shit over and over again because I don’t want it.” - Harmony Korine

It appeared to me that the cost of entry to this artistic community was a form of self-expression so either unique or extreme that it could not be domesticated. Every band was either too fast, too discordant, too weird. The cost of entry, it seemed to me, was to find something really strange that could be brought into a shared space and presented in such a way that its strangeness could become a kind of shared hallucination.

Explicit appeals to philosophy or theory in this group and in this cultural realm were totally forbidden. One day, feeling things becoming routine and predictable, I asked, What’s our motivation? There was an emptiness growing at the heart of our musical practice and I was trying to communicate that some conceptual reflection might be necessary to sustain this feeling of really liberating strangeness. If we didn’t think about what we were doing soon, we’d end up merely going through the motions and lose the thing that made our community interesting. Blank stares greeted my screed.

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

This group was not self-selected for argumentative capacity but for a combination of creative experience and a psychological predisposition to excess. Perhaps one of these people was rejecting the attempt to stabilize or name what was essential to our artistic practice in order to protect its authenticity, its innocence. The rest of the room were simply not in the habit of thinking hard about anything except music.

I felt a tremendous anxiety about the loss of the scene and what made it unique. There was an awareness of the danger of domestication via commercialization even at the local level. Small obscure bands could still be aesthetically out of bounds by playing corny covers and corny bars to corny audiences. To us there was no difference between that and something saturated in commercial culture and wrecked by market research and distortions of the artistic process.

By this time the aesthetic poverty of popular music was so well understood and internalized by anyone with even a tangential connection to this cultural movement. Ever since the death of Kurt Cobain there had been, from the music industry, a transparent attempt to recapture what made Nirvana commercially successful without any thought to what made them artistically successful. So you end up with bands like Creed and Matchbox 20 and Nickelback which is effectively music instrumentalized for commerce, for the radio, for a mass audience. What was missing was energy and excitement and intellect and individuality and something that could bridge the gap from the novel particularities of the aesthetic mind of a particular artist or group to translate that into something that tries to be universally human. That is serious psychological labor whether it is metabolized by the intellect or not. On the other hand, this more domesticated form of music is fundamentally unserious no matter how much or how intelligently someone talks about it.

In our little world, artistic success wasn’t rare, it was the norm. Whatever kind of artistic success was being pursued was being achieved. It was not a matter of technical expertise. There were many bands that were successful artistically where poor musicianship was almost a signature element. One felt at times that beyond a rejection of commercial music there was even a rejection of more defensible artistic qualities like virtuosity. These aesthetic maneuvers were often perceived and articulated in a very casual way by the audience but almost never explicitly articulated by the musicians themselves except in a crude way.

Something subterranean is beginning to become explicit, which is that there are a lot of ideas and discursive content embedded in this particular artistic practice. However, there is a rejection of any attempt to explicitly state the discursive content because that would risk a kind of domestication of that space. It would rob the practice of some of its magic and inexplicability.

At the surface of it, it seems like a dilemma: was this a refusal of explicit articulation a necessary component for the freedom embodied in this community and its art? Or was that refusal of clarity and articulation a handicap that guaranteed eventual exhaustion, repetition, ossification, and decline? But they are not mutually exclusive.

Harmony Korine’s quote articulates the psychological, aesthetic, and almost underlying spiritual rationale for illegibility, that repetition is boring, that sanding off what makes something unique in order to make it palatable is an artistic sin. It’s not a desire that Harmony Korine has to make things explicable. His stated desire is to experience things where he feels he is moving towards something magical and inexplicable.

***

Hemingway, in The Sun Also Rises, describes the difference between an excellent bullfighter and a mediocre one. The primary difference is exposure to risk. The mediocre bullfighter makes a spectacle, an appearance of being exposed to danger. The excellent bullfighter does not dramatize that danger, but experiences it directly. His encounter with the bull is personal and intimate and authentic, and that’s what makes it worth watching.

Grace is only possible if the danger is real. Real grace is control that doesn’t need to announce itself, which seeks out risk, alterity, or proximity to the ultimate novelty, which is death, and doesn’t flinch, but stays within the space of danger to hold what Hemingway calls the purity of line.

For the musician, what’s risked is the loss of recognition and esteem that is a regulative norm for artistic identity, and artistic identity is a permission structure to engage in something deeply psychologically healing, the practice of taking one’s insights, perceptions, judgments, memories, and all the material of inner life, and to experiment with those materials and transfigure them into something which edifies, delights, mystifies - to participate in a social technology which aims to destroy emotional and intellectual stasis.