Sometimes when we’re sitting on the couch, S looks up at this painting of a mountain. It couldn’t be more of a cliché-classic landscape. A single boxy mountain right in the middle, trees you can’t see the top of in the foreground on the left, and full trees in the middle-ground on the right. Water between the trees leading up to where it puddles before a forest at the foot of the mountain. It looks like light is shining in on the mountain from the side. And kind of behind it too.

Our son is very interested in this painting. Sometimes there is awe on his face, sometimes there is a frown from his effort, straining to see. We wonder what the mountain means to him. Before he was born he lived in his mother in the Appalachian Mountains and he’d been to the Rocky Mountains and the White Mountains. And when he’s looking at it we wonder out loud if there’s something he can recognize there. He looks at it with such longing. But I’ve been told he can only see so far, and in black and white, and everything’s just blobs and shapes and light splotches.

Maybe it’s better the way he sees it.

S was born this winter and he’s a joy. He has an older brother, born a year and a few months before him. He’s a joy too. It’s different, though. S’s older brother Henry was born and died three days later.

I keep thinking about the strange grace of S’s circumstances. He’s a gift from his brother, Henry. Henry’s a real good boy. If it wasn’t for him, S wouldn’t be here.

That’s it.

That’s my heady thought.

That’s me seeing strangely.

S also likes to look at a print of a painting hung up above our bed called Halloween Dogs, Salem by Yetti Frenkel. There’s few kids and a handful of dogs in costumes in the Commons. There’s an obligatory witch—Salem… there’s a basset hound angel, a flower-petalled mutt.

He likes to look at it before his mom feeds him, when he’s eating, and after he eats when he’s having what we call his night thoughts.

The real painting is hanging in the hospital where Henry and S were born. We first saw it around with Henry. We saw it every time we went to see him. He had to be in a different room, floor, building than us. A room that specialized in helping his heart function. Henry had to stay in the CICU. He passed away due to a kind of de novo gene occurrence. I don’t know the right language for this, how to use it in a sentence. He had a gene that was “de novo.” A new gene that just happens. It wasn’t inherited from either of us. It helps me to think this way.

Henry isn’t here in the normal sense. But he’s with me all the time. It helps, because I need it, for me to think and to feel this way and to know it is this way. I say he’s here and I feel him here because he will always be a part of me and a part of my little family. A son’s DNA can stay in his mother’s brain for a lifetime. And I’m lucky enough to spend every day with his mother and his brother—and him, too, still living materially, chemically, and lovingly in his mother’s brain.

We had to stay on the postpartum floor because Rae needed a different kind of care. We could visit him whenever we wanted so I visited him as much as I could and wheeled Rae over when her doctors said she could.

We saw the painting, Halloween Dogs, Salem, a lot. There’s a dog that’s distinctly hound-like—different from a basset hound, more like a pointer or birddog—and it looks like our dog. And the dog that looks like our dog is in cartoonish horizontal prison stripes. And we’d laugh at it every time we went by saying something about the outlaw qualities of our dog.

After everything, I emailed Yetti Frenkel, the painter, and asked how much a print would be, if any were available. She emailed back and I couldn’t afford it. A couple months later she asked what my address was. She had a print she could drop off. We were already back in VA so I gave her my parents address. I’m grateful for her kindness. I wonder what reminded her a couple months later of me asking for a print.

S looks at it smiling every night and every morning. He looks like he’s noticing some new-to-him detail or like he’s surprised some other detail is still there, or like he’s really got an idea about what the hound dog’s brown eyes are looking at.

A month before he was conceived, for Valentine’s Day, I surprised Rae by having the print framed nicely and we hung it up in our house in Virginia.

When S has his own room, that’s where we’ll hang it up.

He gets a look in eye before eating, like he remembers he wants to look at it for a second. Grunting, smiling, straining and craning his neck to see it. I don’t know what he really sees. It’s only a few feet away from him.

Sometimes I get to watch S smiling in his sleep. Sometimes he starts cracking up like he just heard the funniest thing he’d ever heard, he’ll ever hear. His mom told me that when newborns laugh in their sleep it’s because someone in heaven is playing with them.

When I get up at 3, 4, 5, winter mornings, because he grunts himself awake, our boy needs to be held. If I can’t get my mind to read, I bounce around with S and I watch X-Files.

When we drive to S’s doctor’s appointments now, run-of-the-mill check ups we hadn’t experienced before, we put on some quiet music. If he’s fussy, we’ve learned the gentler Sparklehorse songs help. It’s a Wonderful Life title track.

One line: “I am the only one can ride that horse up yonder.”

S looking at the one painting of the mountain in the distance out west.

Another: “I’m the dog that ate your birthday cake.”

S smiling at the painting of dogs all dressed up.

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This essay is part of Strange Visions, our ongoing series on defamiliarization.

I spend time in the woods. A brief walk from my house. Ten acres of oak and maple too hilly to farm surrounded by a sea of corn. The woods is not the wilderness. The woods feels timeless but is not. The oldest trees are 90 years old. Acorns sprouted up through the sun-beat wasteland of a clear cut a hundred years ago. They’re all dying now from a fungal infestation.

I’ve chased purity my whole life. Geographically. Religiously. Intellectually. Denied the body. Became a glutton. Every time is the same. There is nothing pure in this world. This accumulated realization has brought me great relief. It enables me to set roots. Make a home. Wanderlust once consumed me. It vanished when I realized what I yearned for does not exist.

My faith wavers. I’m not sure I’ve ever had it. I pretend to have it. For the ones I love. I preach to my eight year old the importance of letting go. There is little in this world that we control. Encourage her to ask for help. Pray. Give God her worries. Praise Him. He is perfect. We are not. Nothing in this world is perfect. Yet it is.

“You’re making a German forest,” my brother in law told me as we walked through the manicured wood lot in early fall. I became obsessed with purity again and I didn’t realize it until I started writing this. For six months I manically cleaned the forest floor of all the dead fall by hand. It was a great battle that broke me more than once. I thought I’d won. Huge piles of branches, stumps and trunks to burn in winter. Trying to create something perfect and pure.

Rain has destroyed my plan for a late night fire. Without rain the sun loses its majesty. It becomes a tyrant. Chasing purity I become a tyrant. Piling the rotting stumps by hand in a ten-acre wood lot.

Nothing is pure in this world. Yet it is. I tell my daughter, “If we were having fun all the time, would that even be fun?” I’m in the woods now. Sitting in my truck writing this as it rains.

My faith wavers. I will not accept an agnostic state of mind. There’s nothing gray about me. I am black or I am white. On the trough of this wave I am a self-loathing atheist. On the crest of this wave is my spiritual experience. I’m hitting the ceiling, or, as William James said,

A paradise of inward tranquility seems to be faith’s usual result. A paradise of inward tranquility seems to be faith’s usual result […] The transition from tenseness, self-responsibility, and worry, to equanimity, receptivity, and peace, is the most wonderful of all those shiftings of inner equilibrium, those changes of personal centre of energy, which I have analyzed so often; and the chief wonder of it is that it so often comes about, not by doing, but by simply relaxing and throwing the burden down.

I continue to remind myself that as beauty is dependent on an imperfect world. My momentary glimpses of a perfect God are dependent on my doubt and despair and how I react to this world’s chaos. I still pick up branches. More often I allow them to lie where they lie.

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Your social class has piano lessons as a feature of childhood.

And the lessons are meaningful.

They teach you about inequality.

Because piano lessons are a privilege of your class.

Why piano? I am sure you did not choose piano.

It is an impressive movable good: piano.

An heirloom: piano. A place to store your wealth.

And because skill at piano isn’t determined only by class.

If you practice, if you have decent teachers, you can get better at piano.

And there are levels of skill that can be attained, with practice, only by a few; for the rest of us, practice will not avail, lessons will not avail.

I was a child with this privilege. I could have gone further and learned more (I did not reach the limit of what I could have learned) but I could not have learned to play piano for an audience.

But piano lessons reveal their meaning only when people hear the difference between levels of skill.

Piano lessons are wasted if no one knows how the sounds of the piano ought to feel.

Ross, do you know this?

You want to say that Stevie Wonder’s albums from the early 1970s are “among the finest stretches of artistic production in history.”

In this you’re doing your job: finding resources for art in the music of the past.

You also want to say that “anytime someone says something stupidly categorical like that I always think what an asshole and stop listening.”

Because you are an ambitious poet, you can’t help making judgments.

Because your judgments interfere with other people’s ambitions, you can’t help feeling there is something wrong with judging.

Something unseemly, something insulting.

You said that you “give almost nary a shit” about the fact that people hate poetry. That can’t be right.

Because you wrote an essay about it.

Because you were replying to an essay by Ben, your contemporary, with whom you have been competing.

Because, you said, “I live in a Midwestern college town where once a month the line into the poetry slam at a bar actually wraps around the block and inside all variety of people share their poems to an audience of a couple hundred.”

You want poems to do something like the kick step in House Party.

You want to celebrate the dance and your skill in imitating it for the talent show in ninth grade.

You want to say you won with the kick step, but you want to say the school was right not to declare a winner.

“I agree with the middle school pedagogy,” you said.

No. That can’t be right.

If they don’t declare a winner, people aren’t looking at the same object.

They don’t see the kick step.

They don’t know what they are looking at.

The dancers know this in House Party.

Because the scene where they demonstrate the kick step has a tournament format.

—Now. This is very complicated.
—What are you doing?
—This ain’t aerobics class!
—You can’t do it!
—Is that a challenge?
—I think it is.
—You better come on out here.
—Come on, come on.

At the poetry slam, they know this.

Because they declare a winner.

That’s why the event is called a slam: they are fighting to sort out which poem is best, or at least which performance is best.

Stevie Wonder knows this. He knows how a song should feel.

“Just because a record has a groove,” Stevie Wonder sings, “don’t make it in the groove.”

“Time will not allow us to forget,” he sings, “Basie, Miller, Satchmo, / And the king of all, Sir Duke.”

Shakespeare knew this. He was a member of a society where whole classes of people wrote short poems.

Ariana, do you know this?

“I read the sonnets,” you said, “of Shakespeare today. Not all of them are great.”

This much is true: great sonnets are in short supply, even in Shakespeare’s Sonnets.

The great ones depend on the less great ones. And the reverse.

Because they are watching each other and competing with each other.

That’s sweet.

It’s suitable for a talented poet to challenge Shakespeare. To try to invent more interesting solutions than Shakespeare found in the sonnet form.

Don’t use what Shakespeare left unachieved to justify your commitment to dissolute living!

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NORTHERN

Snap. The wooded fire
of red. Orange.
Sift-air sifts
through the branches.

ALBION, ID

Green, the valley into duller hills whose jutted rock
shows slower time. The dipped sun
whisped by fraying clouds, curved toward
deeper sky.

Below.

Cattle graze what the machine has mown.

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Irene wanted resurrection. It didn’t seem like too much given the state of things. The state of things was that for a long time she had been in bed. She was told that if she moved, something inside her might burst. And then there was Pollard. The state of Pollard was that Pollard was dead.

“But how do you expect a resurrection without even a body here?” asked Reverend Slate.

An odd place to draw the line, Irene thought.

When he was alive, she had received visits from Pollard on Sundays and Wednesdays. Mostly he sat bedside, eating the hot meals he brought and growing increasingly bothered. Irene tried to calm him down. She told him his head was like an apiary, like a box with slats and bees inside. He talked about riding bulls. Bull riding was his purpose, he told her, his calling, and sometimes he listed everything it would take to achieve his goals. It was not only staying on the bull, he explained, it was matching the bull’s movements with your own. When he wasn’t talking about riding bulls, or denouncing the many people who did not support him in his calling, he sometimes read to her from the scriptures, a thing he seemed to think was part of his responsibility being there.

Her body was beyond saving, and her soul, such as it was, was a flickering thing. She could feel the bones in her legs beneath the blanket. She could feel the blanket on her bones. She hoped only that she might evacuate her body, bit by bit, until there was so little of her left that the body could die while she looked on idly. She wanted to abandon her body, to move discreetly away like she had once moved when she was still young and lovely, her legs, incomprehensible, carrying her silk-footed across the cracked back porch, down the steps, into the alleyway lined with garbage cans and rosebushes.

Pollard told her who was having babies and who was getting married. He held pictures of smiling families in front of her face.

Sometimes she woke to Pollard’s chest as he reached across. “Oh,” he would say. “I thought you were asleep.”

She could not remember when he first arrived, or how long he had been visiting. He came on Sundays and Wednesdays, but the days were wobbling. Tuesdays and Thursdays seemed to have disappeared entirely.

“Don’t put yourself out on my account,” she told him more than once. “I’ll call if I need anything.”

If he heard, he ignored her. He was still there, and when he wasn’t there, she sometimes wondered if it was him around the corner in the next room mumbling.

“You have as much to offer me as I have to offer you,” he told her. “And I don’t say this to just anyone. I don’t want you thinking this is the sort of thing I do, say this kind of thing to just anyone I visit. I am generally a very closed-off person.” This last thing he said like it was a thing once told to him that he was now repeating.

There was a window beside the bed and when a fog settled over the yard, Irene could hear the clip of her mother’s sharp voice arriving as it would arrive through a fog. Come along and stop dawdling, and following the fog’s retreat—her mother’s voice guiding her—Irene was led to the lake not far from the country house, where the fog settled on the water like a plume of smoke, and there, standing in the lake: her mother, the image of a woman from a storybook, a distant woman, a wax statue with button eyes, mossy stones for waders weighing down the hem of her skirt as she washed cabbage and carrots in the steaming green waters.

She had done it, Irene thrilled. She had died without fear, without knowing she was dying, and now her body was gone, good riddance, away, and she had found her mother’s second body in the lake, and in the fog, surely, her father too and all the rest of them waiting.

But then she felt his hand on her arm and smelled Pollard in the room and knew she had only closed her eyes and that it wasn’t over yet. And it wasn’t even Pollard—Pollard was dead. Pollard had beaten her to it. “Irene,” Reverend Slate was saying. “Did you hear what I said? There are others who can come visit you. You won’t be left alone.”

When she was young, just a small girl in the basement of the church, a boy had come to her and asked if she wanted a touch from God. She said yes. The boy said for her to lift her dress and show her stomach. And so she did. She felt a rush of blood in her cheeks because she knew what she was doing was untidy, but she couldn’t help herself in case the boy had some secret knowledge. The boy bent while she stood with her back to the cinderblock wall, pressing herself against the drawings of green and blue crosses on sheets of white paper taped to the wall, hosts of angelic forms hovering over scribbled mangered babies. And though she couldn’t see him, she felt the boy blowing a thin stream of air over her belly. She imagined his puckered lips. She felt warm all over. She imagined him imagining the Holy Spirit riding on his breath. When he stood, the boy was radiant.

“Did it work?” he asked eagerly. “Do you feel any different?”

Yes, she told him. She felt new.

“But how will we know?” the reverend asked. “How will we know without a body here?”

She could hardly stomach this man. They would know when Pollard returned, of course. When, on Sunday or Wednesday, Pollard strode once again through the door looking at least alive, with slight traces of the afterlife behind his eyes. That’s how they would know.

“Father,” the reverend prayed, and she felt his clammy hand on the back of her own. Maybe this was all others wanted, she thought, to be appeased, to be clammyhanded and held, but what she wanted had nothing to do with that. “Father,” he prayed, “we ask that it be done in accordance with your will—” It was like sitting with wet bread, his words like soggy bits of it dissolving on the surface of the water.

As far back as she could remember, Irene had a way of distinguishing souls. There was this life, and there was the next life—both of which received too much attention, she thought. Not enough attention was paid to the life between the two, the place where souls stayed.

Pollard’s soul was chalky and strained, with marks like pin knots all over it that would easily cave if pressed. His soul was like a crumbling, misshapen fingerprint cookie. That’s how she thought about it in physical terms.

On one occasion, he brought her pictures of a bull. “See this here,” he said, pointing to the upper foreleg. “1,700 pounds of muscle.” A real honker, he called it, a head hunter. The bull was named Two Places At Once. Irene looked at the pictures as he held them in front of her. The bull’s hide was white all over with golden shades, vicious little horns curved down the sides of its massive head. A fatty mound rose between the bull’s shoulder blades. The slanted, almond eyes of Two Places At Once were tired and resolute, and the patch of hair between the eyes was darker and curly and more golden than the rest of the bull’s pale body.

“Feel this?” Pollard held her hand against his arm where the muscle, beneath his shirt and his skin, formed a small fibrous hump. “I stayed on for ten seconds,” he told her.

It took great effort to get the reverend to understand what she wanted. “Oil,” she said, stretching the single syllable into two, and after repeating it like this and repeating her instructions, he rose, finally, and brought her a cup of cooking oil from the kitchen.

Sometimes, when Pollard was cruel, moving her too roughly, tucking her sheets tightly beneath the mattress, flattening her legs to the bed, she would look in his eyes and see many other souls mingling with his, and she knew then that he was not looking at her alone, that many others were with him, watching her in the bed, watching her and daring her to keep on living a little longer, looking at her from a place without good footing, these other souls mingling with Pollard’s soul and all of them on the verge of slipping and falling away.

The cooking oil was yellow and sludgy in a clear glass jar. “Is that all?” the reverend asked, and Irene waited for the click of the latch before she tilted the jar so that the viscous, yellow surface of the oil broke into a stream over her cupped palm, coming faster over the lip of the jar than she’d anticipated.

Not having a body to anoint or anywhere sensible to spread the oil, she drew a sign of the cross in the air with her thumb. The oil was running down her wrist and across her forearm. Oil drops stained the bedsheets green.

When she had done it and chosen words that matched—as nearly as she could remember them—words spoken in the scriptures—she lowered her hand to the mattress.

No tongues of fire, no winds. If it worked, and Pollard returned, he’d be in no shape to ride. He’d be weak, undoubtedly, and what kind of life would that be?

Irene folded the sheets below her knees. She looked at her skinny legs and, with the aid of slippery hands, lifted one after the other and slid them over the edge of the bed. To the window, to wait.

Then there was light—too much of it. Everything in the room bright and swimming, stabbing light like a new kind of darkness, glittering at its edges, throbbing and distorted. She steadied herself on the table—on her knees now—next to the bed, feeling for the window sill. A clap of thunder, a descending cloud, waiting for the trees to catch on fire or for the ground to shift beneath them, the rush of a hawk or an owl’s wide wings approaching, anything like this would do, but all she heard was the clattering of the jar and something else falling—the clock maybe, a soft thump. The leftover oil pooled at her knees, darkening her gown. She heard the sound of the door behind her and turned, dazed, half expecting Pollard to come through the door dressed however he’d been dressed for burial, or if not Pollard, her mother then, with stringy wet carrots hanging at her side, her father even, his shirt unbuttoned to the waist—but there was no one at the door and the room was empty and dark. The walls of the room were untrustworthy and cut off from one another. The only light was the light from the window and the fog out the window pressed toward the house. Somewhere within the fog was the swaying form, dashed white against the white fog, trudging unhurried beneath the indifferent weight of its immense muscled body—Two Places At Once. It stood in the fog watching the house with beady almond eyes, its pale flanks wet with water and dripping.

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Editors note: When NYRB sent me this book, I was totally blown away by it. Carlisle is a brilliant and thoughtful philosopher; a biographer of Søren Kierkegaard and George Eliot who manages to write about the great themes with deep care and attention, and in a way that is fresh and accessible. What follows is a small meditation on the relationship between writing and life. If you are a fan of the kind of thing we publish here, Transcendence for Beginners is well worth the purchase.

Consider this childhood memory. When I was a little girl, before I started school, my mother taught me to write. First I learned to write the alphabet with a pencil on lined paper. Letters were a mixture of curved and straight lines. An ‘a’ was quite difficult: you began to draw a circle—but you didn’t make it a whole circle—and then you put a straight vertical line on the right-hand side of it. ‘b’ was a tall letter, made from a circle and a vertical line twice the height of the ‘a,’ on the left side. When I wrote my name, I had to draw a ‘C’ as tall as a ‘b.’ The lined paper helped me get the proportions right. My mother’s writing was round, clear, flowing, very beautiful. She could join all the letters in each word together. I tried to make my letters more beautiful, like hers. I tried hard not to make any mistakes.

At some point in primary school the daily act of writing became so habitual that I no longer thought about it. Even as a philosophy student and, eventually, a professional philosopher, I hardly paused to wonder, what is writing? What are we doing when we write?

Recollecting the experience of learning to write helps to lift this veil of habit. When I bring my attention back to writing, I discover that in some ways it resembles life. Writing a text means drawing a certain line on a page; living a life means drawing a certain line through the world. These lines move through space and through time.

A path seems a fitting metaphor for writing as well as for life. In each case you must find or make a path through terrain that is teeming with possibilities. And yet the path of writing, like the path of life, can quickly acquire a trajectory that feels irresistible, even necessary. Often your path is formed by following others who have gone before you. Sometimes it is formed by choices—a decision to go this way, not that way. Every path is a combination of following and choosing, and choosing whom to follow, and following others’ choices. Every path is some combination of finding and making.

Life is relational, and so is writing. It is the relationships between words, and then between sentences, that make a meaningful text. And in writing as in life, linearity combines with complexity. On the one hand, the line of writing is unidirectional. It only moves forwards. On the other hand—yet at the same time—it loops, folds, gathers, knots, stitches itself together, forming layers. For example, a recurring metaphor, a rhyme, or a repeated word tacks one point in the line to another. Life shares this double character. It flows irrevocably in one direction: sooner or later (it’s taken me many years) we learn that we cannot travel back in time. Yet our experience continually folds back and loops forward—in memory, in habit, in the deliberate repetitions of practice and ritual, in all the moods of anticipation, and in all the moods of looking back.

The line of writing, like the line of living, has an intermittent and rhythmic quality. On paper there are spaces between words; in our bodies there are spaces between breaths, between heartbeats, between footsteps. In consciousness there are longer intermittencies of sleeping and waking, and irregular intermittencies as attention lapses and returns. Underlying these stops and starts is a flow, such as the flow of blood through the body, and the flow of thought—unconscious as well as conscious—that underlies the act of writing. A piece of writing, like a living being, has rhythm, and its rhythm is essential to its structure (how it moves) and its texture (how it feels).

Inseparable from this rhythm is temporality. As soon as a text comes into being it is there all at once on the page. Yet writing and reading are active, imaginative experiences that unfold in time, bringing the text to life and sustaining it in existence—just as a footpath through the countryside is formed and renewed by each person or animal who walks along it. Likewise, we can distinguish these two aspects of a human life: it is a dynamic shape unfolding moment by moment, and it can be conceived as a whole. Then it transcends the flow of time. Indeed, this is an image of time, like an aerial view of a great river from its source to the sea, seen from miles above the earth—‘under the aspect of eternity,’ as Spinoza put it. When we imagine it this way, it becomes quite beautiful. A whole life, moving through the world from its source to its end: unique, slender, searching. A God looking down on it may well be moved to love—and also, perhaps, to tears.

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Pre-order Transcendence for Beginners here.

This essay is part of Strange Visions, our ongoing series on defamiliarization.

Two summers ago, I bought a condo down the street from an empty lot. It was empty in one sense. There was a chain-link fence around the perimeter, and behind the fence, a pit. I often walked past this minor pit, this rectangular space where, presumably, a building used to be, on my way to the co-op or the library, or on one of my aimless, hourish walks. The pit was attractive—not pretty, of course; it was just a lot of dirt and some litter—but it always drew the eye. It was probably as deep as a backyard pool—just deep enough to be mysterious, and a little bit threatening. You wouldn’t want to fall into the pit; it would be hard to climb back out.

Whenever I walked by this pit, I thought about holes. It put me in mind of John Berger’s “ideal field”: “the field most likely to generate the experience” he’s trying to describe in his short essay, “Field.” The pit, to be clear, was not a field; it was a pit. It was a hole. But was it an ideal hole, the type of hole best suited to my contemplation? An ideal hole has roundness—draw a circle on a piece of paper and it already looks like a hole. My friend Sommer wrote a book, called The Circle Book, in which she drew 99 circles and assigned each circle an interpretation: atom, manhole cover, doorknob. Peep hole. Entrance wound. Abyss. I once read that snails chew perfectly square holes in leaves, but a square hole is not a perfect hole. A hole can make up for what it lacks in roundness or legible shape through grandeur—the wider or deeper or more bottomless the hole, the more sublime it is. The 9/11 memorial holes are square, yet vast, yet so deep you can’t see the bottom of the holes from any angle. The edge of an ideal hole is more vertiginous. I think of the feeling of dropping a ring in the shower. If it lands too close to the drain, the drain becomes a precipice. Edges are where meaning gathers.

John Berger passed his field often, though not every day. “From the city centre there are two ways back to the satellite city in which I live,” he writes:

The main road with a lot of traffic, and a side road which goes over a level crossing. The second is quicker unless you have to wait for a train at the crossing. During the spring and early summer I invariably take the side road, and I find myself hoping that the level crossing will be shut.

This paragraph, the fourth in the essay, is where it becomes clear what Berger is talking about. The first three paragraphs of “Field” are strange, by which I mean, strange for John Berger. His essays usually begin quite directly. “Uses of Photography,” which also appears in his book About Looking, begins with this almost absurdly direct sentence: “I want to write down some of my responses to Susan Sontag’s book On Photography.” The essay “Millet and the Peasant” begins: “Jean-Francois Millet died in 1875.” “La Tour and Humanism” begins: “There is no doubt that Georges de la Tour existed.” “Field” stands out as the only piece in the book to begin with an epigraph, a Russian proverb (“Life is not a walk across an open field”), and the prose of the first page is lyrical, elliptical, almost fictive in its atmospheric approach. The first long meandering sentence is this:

Shelf of a field, green, within easy reach, the grass on it not yet high, papered with blue sky through which yellow has grown to make pure green, the surface colour of what the basin of the world contains, attendant field, shelf between sky and sea, fronted with a curtain of printed trees, friable at its edges, the corners of it rounded, answering the sun with heat, shelf on a wall through which from time to time a cuckoo is audible, shelf on which she keeps the invisible and intangible jars of her pleasure, field that I have always known, I am lying raised up on one elbow wondering whether in any direction I can see beyond where you stop.

Strange—again, for Berger—the way he meanders, and keeps adding clauses, and the way he uses pronouns, calling the cuckoo a she and then referring to the field in the second person (“beyond where you stop”). There are two more paragraphs like this before we get to the point. (If it were me writing this essay, I’d probably start with the fourth paragraph—but I am not John Berger.) That fourth paragraph is where we get the first turn: a shift in style and tone, and a moment of surprise: “I find myself hoping that the level crossing will be shut.” I almost always dislike the construction “I find myself,” or “I found myself”—it’s so often used as a fake transition, a way of pretending your character or persona just popped into existence somewhere, with no agency or memory of a chain of causation. I found myself at the Louvre, people write, as though they were drugged and kidnapped. But Berger’s employment of the phrase feels different. It reminds me of Nietzsche’s idea that a thought comes “when ‘it’ wishes, and not when ‘I’ wish.” In other words, the thought thinks you. Berger here is noticing a counterproductive, contradictory desire: “invariably,” he chooses the route that should be quicker, but then he hopes to be delayed.

This moment of contradiction is where the cycle of the essay’s essential thinking begins: a moment of rupture, between the self’s apparent intention and the self’s underlying desire, which makes itself known through an unexpected hope. The rupture is a feature of the field experience. It’s like flipping a coin to find out which of two equally appealing choices you actually want. You don’t know what you want until you flip the coin; the desire thinks you.

“Field” could be classified as an “I noticed a thing” essay, as my friend Catherine has dubbed it: a meditation on something the writer has noticed. What Berger has noticed is his unexpected wish to be waylaid near the field, and the experience that follows. He knows it’s a recurring experience, familiar and in some way bounded the way that a field is bounded by fence. But the contours of the field experience are elusive. He’s writing in order to define for himself what it means.

The difficulty for him is apparent—it’s why he begins with such uncharacteristic, almost awkwardly lyrical reaching. He knows he is struggling, writing from a place of unsureness: “The experience which I am attempting to describe by one tentative approach after another is very precise and is immediately recognizable. But it exists at a level of perception and feeling which is probably preverbal.” This struggle reminds me of singing a tune that’s a little bit out of your range. The strain to hit the notes increases tension, and strain in a performance is sometimes more moving than mastery.

Berger never ventures to the field on purpose, in much the same way I never went down to the pit near my house just to look at it, to gaze in its abyss; I only looked at it in passing. And this, this accidental-ness, is the first important feature of the field experience: “It is a question of contingencies overlapping,” he writes:

The events which take place in the field … acquire a special significance because they occur during the minute or two during which I am obliged to wait. It is as though these minutes fill a certain area of time which exactly fits the spatial area of the field. Time and space conjoin.

My favorite kind of essay is what you might call a “long-thinking” essay. These are essays about something the author has been thinking about for months, maybe years, and maybe their whole life. “Field” could be classified this way too. One gets the impression that Berger has been having the field experience for a very long time. He’s been through this cycle of thinking repeatedly for years, but hasn’t allowed the thinking to rise to the surface entirely. “Preverbal” thinking, emotion and image, is only semi-conscious. You can’t tell it yet to others, or even, quite, yourself; you might say you literally can’t hear yourself think. In “Field,” Berger is accessing all this long, looping thinking, a messy layering of similar experiences like a Cy Twombly drawing, and trying to put whatever parts of the experience recur and overlap into language. This essay you’re reading, or will be reading, and which I am currently struggling to edit, could be classified this way too.

The long-thinking essay is ritualistic. Whatever experience or material you’re writing about, you’re also writing about the ritual of thinking certain thoughts, a ritual with certain steps or stages. Berger here is writing about the field, but more so, he’s writing about the self and its repetitive encounters with the field. The philosopher Samuel Scheffler has written of tradition as “repository of experience,” and “the kind of wisdom that comes from experience.” This wisdom, in my view, if given a long enough time frame, comes automatically. You may see the moon as an isolated instance for many years, beginning in childhood. Eventually, in your life on Earth, you look at the moon enough times that you start to understand how the moon behaves, day and night, in relation to Earth and the sun. This learning is mostly passive. Repetitive experience is cyclical, it generates automatic meaning, and ritual thinking generates automatic wisdom. This is why essays that come from long thinking are so powerful. Repetitive thinking acquires a tone, a mood, over time—the ritual makes you feel a certain way. And repetitive thinking is structural—it follows a pattern, a pattern that tells you the order of your thoughts.

Structure is a problem that every essay needs to solve. It’s partly one of information management. Consider this simple diagram:

Points A, B, and C are points in time, but also points in knowledge. If you’re writing about events in a linear fashion, you can still only write the events from the knowledge position of point C. The events in themselves have automatic “plot,” automatic suspense. This is because there is deep causation at work in the world, causation going back to the beginning of time in the universe—yet, we don’t know the future. We don’t understand the causation that well. To let this inherent suspense take effect, we can’t reveal everything we know at the beginning. We have to create an authorial persona that remembers what it felt like to be at Point A. (It’s important to note this is already hard. You can doctor the timeline, and structure information in other ways, but telling a story in order is already difficult.) However, the knowledge we bring from Point C, the wisdom of experience, imbues the whole essay, often in subtle, subliminal ways. It’s part of what gives the voice of an essay authority. The task is to bring readers with you on the cycle of thinking, to show the thinking happening, so they can get some inkling of the wisdom you’ve acquired through these years of experience. It’s almost like the essay allows you to cut out all the gaps, the empty time on the tape. You can show the reader a supercut of only the most relevant moments in all this long time. The essay is a way of distilling and concentrating long and slow thinking into something that can be absorbed quickly, in a handful of pages, a thousand or two thousand words, down the hatch, like a magic pill. How do we do that? How do we solve the problem?

Berger has solved the structure of “Field” by beginning the essay in a state of apparently limited knowledge—all evidence suggests that he started on the writing before he’d fully worked out what he wanted to say. When he writes it, in 1971, he may be at Point C, but he’s gone from Point A to Point B to Point C and around again many times, without yet fully understanding the cycle of thinking that accompanies the experience. We could also say he has understood it, but only in that preverbal way which makes it harder to communicate and harder to remember in all its aspects. In the same way that telling a dream to a friend makes it easier to remember, giving a name to a thing helps us know it. We may not have been so lucky as to walk down a country road with Berger, but reading the essay, we feel we’re thinking with and alongside him; we’re given the grace to witness him figuring all this out. And so, when we get to the essay’s last, beautiful sentence (“The field that you are standing before appears to have the same proportions as your own life”) it’s almost as though the idea has occurred to him and to us at the same time.

“It is a striking fact about human life that we have almost no control over our movement through time,” writes Scheffler, in his essay “The Normativity of Tradition.” A personal tradition or ritual, according to Scheffler, is one way we wrest back a little control. These rituals can be very minor and still have significance. The first time I went to a divey karaoke bar in Denver that was called Barricuda (the name was misspelled, with an i), the poet I was with ordered a greyhound. I thought that sounded good, and I ordered the same. Afterward, for years, I ordered that whenever I went there, though I never ordered greyhounds anywhere else. This was a kind of tradition. However small and random in its origins, it lent a certain ceremony to the experience at the dive. The pit, too, became a kind of ritual for me, even though I didn’t really do anything when I passed by the pit, no dance or incantation. Just thinking of the pit as I walked by the pit was its own form of trivial prayer.

For Berger, stopping by the field was more properly holy. The ideal field, in the minute or two of imposed delay, became a kind of canvas, “having certain qualities in common with a painting,” as well as a kind of stage, “a theater-in-the-round.” The field, being framed in this way, in both time and space, allowed him to experience such quiet events as “two horses grazing,” or “an old woman looking for mushrooms,” as though they were art.

The essay becomes a kind of score for the performance, repeatable and enduring. The magical time pill of the essay allows us to enter the same state we enter in ritual, one where time feels layered, present over past, like a ladder we can climb up and down, instead of a relentless moving forward.

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This essay is part of Strange Visions, our ongoing series on defamiliarization.

“Where is the spirit world? It is right here. Do the good and evil spirits go together? Yes, they do. . . . Do they go to the sun? No.” (Brigham Young, Journal of Discourses, 3:369.)

Quinn drops me off at the travel stop near Shelley, Idaho. It’s a Love’s Travel Stop, but we call it Mike Love’s Travel Stop, in honor of the worst Beach Boy.

It’s 5pm. We’ve fished the glacial channels of the Snake River below American Falls Dam since sunrise. A pallid, arctic, February day. We didn’t see another soul. My pincushioned waders had seeped river into my skin. The occasional fish lets you forget the cold, for a moment, but now here it was, a burning and frigid pain, rich and strange like polar bear milk.

I hadn’t eaten all day. Through my shivering, I ordered chicken McNuggets from the McDonald’s retrofitted to the side of Mike Love’s. A 20 piece. Sweet and Sour. I’m not scared.

Sitting in the oily, windswept parking area of Mike Love’s, where every Walmart bag on earth comes to die along a chain-link fence, the aroma of fried chicken parts fought through the dank dampness of me, inundating the oil-scorching SUV as the heater roared. I swear that light emanated from the chicken box as I opened it, as I peeled back the sauce so sweet and sour, dipped, and devoured.

I began then, in earnest, to eat the nuggets with a near maniacal fervor. The nugget number ticked quickly skyward, the pace of a turnstile in a rush hour subway tunnel. In my shivering gluttony, a gurgle, a guttural gulp came from me—the congress of exhaled air, and inhaled nugget, nugget sauce and Coke Zero. I startled myself, looked up, though completely alone, embarrassed of someone privy to the bacchanalia of Joe.

And in that moment, the memory. The Mormon belief that the spirit world is here, among us. The souls of those long passed browse the yard sales of our lives, watch us in our waking moments. My Scots-Irish ancestors, forging iron in smithy shops to pay their way across the Atlantic for a better life. The Voortrekkers, taking bullets and lion’s teeth for their children.

My namesake grandfather, having flown 50 harrowing missions in the South Pacific. Dusted, dysenteried farmers and drowned kinsmen, peering at me through the warped windows of my wagon, the sacrificing eyes of millennia resting full upon me, as I sat hobbled and hunched in my rattlecan Subaru Outback, inhaling chicken nuggets like a damp rat.

I paused for that moment in fearful deference of their certain disapproval; a stuffed mouth, a crumb-flecked flannel, these conditions my gauntlet, borne upon their centuries of suffering.

And then I inhaled the rest.

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Mom said Nini was my mom in a past life
and I got confused—listen to music afk with eyes
closed—most glass blocks UV light—the older
I get, the more I like clouds. Flashes of light
when startled by sound. My brother makes
a mysterious “tze” sound. We can’t read
literature from the Golden and Silver Ages
because languages morph like clouds and water
placed in moonlight becomes Moon water. My cats
look East Asian—a blue outer space—without time,
nothing moves. The avocado trees looked like eyes
in 2019, slowly crying happy tears of green fruit—
I’m covered in everything—a large enough number
becomes a cloud. Metaphor of broken screen
not being transmittable via screenshot. Watery
eyes don’t close—they’re covered—studies show
people experience aesthetic chills—peak emotional
moments often associated with perceived sadness.

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There is an old cemetery in the lava out front. There’s free parking in back. The gardener has cataracts. The graveyard is in very bad shape. Everywhere they ask for donations. It overlooks Kealakekua Bay, where Captain Cook took his last breath for his arrogance. We traveled by rental car. Outside, there are fruit trees like starfruit, orange, and coffee. It reminds me of Sainte-Chappelle in Paris. It looks just like this Gothic cathedral in Burgos, Spain but with tropical flair. It is objectively a beautiful place. The murals were created by a Belgian Catholic priest using donated house paint. I can only imagine what it was like when the paint was fresh–1899. I loved the representation of a good death. Hell. Lives of the saints, and so on. The century of sharp sunlight has cracked the frescos and discolored the hell panel. Color is not among things that last. Some of the panels are blank and unfinished. The painter got sick and left one hundred years ago. Perhaps, one morning we will awake and find that he has returned to finish them! But when you leave things unfinished I think that means they are actually finished… The writing was on the wall. They did have bathrooms and a little stand of fruit and jewelry for donations to the church. I have a weakness for gift shops. Rosaries.. Pens.. Melons…Buttons…. I took the red reusable shopping bag and now use it for heavy groceries–meat, milk. I used the pen to write a little wishlist for God… Trust me, I make addendums. I did not have cash on me to make a donation. I don’t trust God. I am just a historian. The walls are covered in Celandine Green—Like Beryl. Pearl Grey. Purple Hesperia. Flint. Being writers, we decided to visit the small church instead of the erupting volcano—three of us, non-practicing Jews. Went to Mass. The Creed immediately contradicted the priest’s main point. I almost walked out. We could not get inside—construction. The woman at the ABC Souvenir Shop had said to make sure we went to the right church. The one on the postcard she sold me. A few miles away, in Kalapana, there was another church which was hauled off on one truckload away from the path of the lava and dropped down less than five miles to where it sits now. That is a copycat church. This is The Painted Church. I met a very handsome volcanist there who prayed behind me and then offered me aloe vera for my shoulder and a chocolate covered macadamia. I cannot tell if it was flirtation. If you read this, here is my number 305-281-2956. It's on the top of a hill so there is a large chance you will find it is windy. Wind is my least favorite element—I don't like being caught by surprise. The view of the ocean is so wide and so blue it feels as though the eyes on your head were spread further apart when you look out. God was beguiled by his own talents here. There are all the bells and whistles of heaven on hand and the green is enchanting in an almost sinister way. Like chewed grass! It brought back memories unrelated to the moment. It took my breath away. The church was very small so with a busload of people someone was always talking and there was no chance for reverence or peace. The century was blocked off, so really no place to wait for the crowd to leave. Otherwise, it was nice. It gave me real feeling. Prayed here for a miracle for a dying friend. He recovered & drs say it was a miracle. We lit up inside. Lots of open windows and the front door propped for good cross-breeze. Looks out over the sea—above it—as if the church is a plane landing. The curve of earth is visible. Missable. Unmissable. Don’t miss this. Skip it. A bit of a shabby place. I was enchanted. I was disenchanted. Unless you like art, don’t go there. I feel a little guilty whenever I am in a church because I am a liar. I have never been in love but I would like to get married there one day if I do end up finding love. I wish my dining table was made from the wood of the pews. There was a family of rabbits scurrying under the rectory. I went there with my brothers. I went alone. When it was time to go, I did not want to leave. We brought the rain in with us on our shoes and I slipped and scraped both knees as I approached the altar. I felt so badly I had no way to clean up the trail of blood. The restroom was out of toilet paper. It’s hard for people with bad knees to get to. Praying is just one of few things you do on your knees. I got down on my knees there for the first time. They leave the doors open at night.

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For a few months we lived in the Tower of Babel. Above, heaven. Above that, God. Between us and the firmament stood a single penthouse apartment, currently undergoing heavy renovations.

The word on the street was that multiple bathrooms and a kitchen were being rearranged up there, a process that reverberated in the human jaw. In the evenings, my husband and I turned our gaze to the jackhammers on high and asked, in all sincerity, “How is there any apartment left to renovate upstairs?” We fell asleep to Reddit-sourced mantras of structural integrity: beware the load-bearing wall. It never occurred to us that the primary risk was not the collapse of our Tower, but something insurance agents would soon translate as a rupture to the “water main.”

We were the good Babylonians: resigned, unambitious renters with no plans to renovate ourselves. If the ceiling fell, it was God’s will.

Most Swiss will tell you that Geneva isn’t really Switzerland, nor Europe, but some other, third, supranational thing. It is a whole collection of cities in one. A crude census puts the diasporas of Southern Europe and the former Yugoslavia alongside the acronymic expat workforce (UN, WTO, UNICEF, ICRC, CERN), alongside the asylum seekers, commodity traders, watchmakers, art dealers, and the Free Port, where much of that art is stored. Then come the actual Swiss, or the French who cross the border every morning in search of higher wages. The passport-rich stick to compounds in the suburbs, and exist in tax and legal brackets of their own.

This is to say there isn’t really a common language or city genevois. And yet public administration works world-famously well.

You know the story: Once upon a time, the people of Babel built a tower tall enough to touch heaven and rival God. It was an early experiment in urban mass housing, and a testament to human ingenuity at a time when the whole world was “of one speech and of one tongue.” As a display of hubris, it was all the more astonishing for arriving just after the Flood. To punish mankind’s inflated pride, this time God sent not deluge but division: “Go, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech” (Genesis 11:7). The citizens of Babel woke up mutually incomprehensible to one another. They scattered to the far reaches of the Earth to begin dysfunctional nations of their own.

The parable warns against hubris in general. More specifically, it guards against the particular megalomania homogeneity tends to spawn when humanity is of one language and one mind. I imagine a single bad actor with big dreams about that ancient Tower’s plumbing, and not a naysayer in sight. Humankind is terrifying when everyone agrees. Polyglotism is the gift that saved us from ourselves.

In retrospect, I think “water main” must have been a mistranslation. A “water main,” I have since learned, refers to the municipal supply—a collective resource, like the Nile or the ocean, that connects us even when we hate each other. The access point for any particular building is usually located in the basement. This makes it an unlikely culprit for a Flood originating on the top floor.

Pumping from the basement “water main” to the upper stories posed a challenge for early mass housing projects. The first developers relied on gravity, erecting the rooftop water towers you still see in cities like New York. By the 1970s, when our own housing block was constructed, engineers had figured out how to ratchet up the pressure to reach the highest floors, then lower it again through a series of valves. It is one of these pressure-regulating valves, I suspect, rather than the “water main,” that burst in our upstairs neighbor’s newfangled plumbing system sometime after midnight, raining many thousands of liters through the complex and flooding every single apartment below, especially ours. Gravity-powered plumbing was suddenly back in play. We woke up to a custom waterfall streaming down our bathroom walls.

At the time, we’d been in Geneva for a little over two years. When we first arrived, I spoke English and German; my husband, English, Bengali, Hindi, and a bit of Spanish. I had begun to learn French in earnest a few months before, when I’d found out I was pregnant. One of us would have to advocate for our child. I was up to the task. Then came the miscarriage, and I gave up. This complacency proved a liability in the aftermath of the Flood.

A lot of expats lack motivation to learn French in Geneva, and not only the Americans. You can get by pretty easily with the basics. Still, there’s less English than you’d think. At the tax office, or the immigration office, or over the phone with your healthcare provider, and especially in insurance disputes, people pretty reasonably prefer to speak French. Many don’t speak English at all. For the past two years, at the annual fête des voisins, my husband and I had stood in our building’s courtyard, nodding and smiling over glasses of wine, radiating what we hoped would be taken as nonverbal goodwill. There was linguistic friction, sure. But until we found ourselves trying to translate things like “water main,” the language barrier wasn’t really a barrier at all.

I’ve spent most of my adult life trying to make myself comprehensible. Even before we moved to Geneva—my husband works for one of those acronyms—when I was first teaching myself to write, I used to type up stories during lunch breaks at my Midtown office job. It was during this period that I came across the work of Viktor Shklovsky, the Russian Formalist. He wouldn’t have thought much, maybe, of my professional obligation to project and regularize the future based on what came before, which is more or less what statistics is. (I was a number-cruncher for insurance.) Art, Shklovsky argued, is meant to do precisely the opposite.

Shklovsky is most famous for his concept of “defamiliarization,” more commonly captured under the writer’s imperative to “make the familiar strange.” Human perception tends toward routine. It renders our experiences “habitual” and “automatic,” to the point where we stop noticing things at all. The job of literature, by contrast, is to make us see the disaster-zone to which we have grown accustomed as if “for the first time.” Shklovsky was a smart guy. He has since been validated by neuroscience: today we understand that the human brain not only filters out but furnishes known variables, the white noise of our lives. When we enter a room, we supply what we already expect to see, rather than deducing dimensions and contents from scratch. We fill our prescriptions and fifteen minutes later ask, “Did I take my pill today?” We become quickly inured to the ribbons of paint peeling from the still damp walls. Leonardo da Vinci, by contrast, once wrote that a real painter, “by looking attentively at old and smeared walls,” can “see in them several compositions, landscapes, battles, figures in quick motion, strange countenances, and dresses, with an infinity of other objects.” If there were divine signs to be detected in our peeling living room, I missed them.

It is due to our tendency to project the familiar onto a world of strangeness that neuroscientist Anil Seth, professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience at the University of Sussex, argues that consciousness is less a form of “processing” external information than a “sustained hallucination” originating in the brain. The most energy-efficient form of perceiving life starts from within your cranium, rooted in biological processes designed to recognize what is already expected, and then projects outward, rather than the other way around. In other words, we do not take in the world “as it is,” whatever that may be, but stage passive best guesses based on prior experience. Encounters with the unfamiliar—or the defamiliarized—interrupt this hallucination. They bring us out of ourselves. A Russian Formalist like Shklovsky calls this encounter art. A moral philosopher, someone like Levinas, might call it an encounter with “the Other.”

The actual brain-rewiring required to become more attentive to our surroundings is related to my favorite definition of plot, which Shklovsky later derived from this same concept. If slowing down is a “general law of art,” then plot is a “retardant force.” It’s what prevents a story from ending too soon, or at the wrong time. It tricks us into lingering where a more efficient storyteller would hurry on. To see or experience things as if for the first time, in other words, takes time.

Consider for a moment the Tower of Babel not as an isolated narrative, but as one episode in a much longer, more literary plot—the epic (and, from the view of most major religions, unfinished) story of humanity’s attempt to reach heaven. From this point of view, God’s motivation for sowing linguistic division on Earth isn’t “punishment.” It is, rather, what is needed to slow the story down, to keep the plot from ending too early, before its full effect has been realized. After all, at the time Babel fell, the human race hadn’t even founded its many nations yet. Pentecost was still a long way off, buried in the Book of Acts. On that day, the Holy Spirit—the water main of Christendom—flowed through the Apostles, allowing them to speak every language at once. Fluency became an act of grace. I find it increasingly significant that this miracle, often interpreted as a “reversal” of or coda to the Babel curse, did not, in the end, collapse the world’s tongues into one.

If you really want to learn a language, I suggest entering a legal dispute. I now speak Flood French, learned through months of wading through the insurance claims, repairs, and negotiations a major deluge entails.

It was in line at the renters’ association, where we pay dues, that I had my own Pentecostal breakthrough. Our landlords had denied our request for a rent reduction. There were still confusing disagreements over who ought to pay for repairs. The morning I arrived, there were maybe forty of us crammed into folding chairs in the carpeted lobby, clutching copies of our leases and awaiting appointments with association lawyers. An underpaid staffer took the opportunity to solicit us for a survey. Could we anonymously provide our addresses, rents, and approximate square meterage for a collective database meant to support future appeals for rent decreases? This rationale reached me with the burst of clarity that usually accompanies a righteous suggestion, soon overwhelmed by the clarity of actual comprehension: I understand.

Our new place is on the train tracks. I am eight months pregnant. From the front room, you can watch the express line come in from Paris. (The child in me imagines my own child doing just this, her face pressed up against the glass.) There’s a pawn shop across the street, next to an anarchist bookstore. Voltaire’s former villa is just up the hill.

My Flood French has since expanded to cover negotiations with movers, pediatricians, the nurse who administered my prenatal iron transfusion, the midwife who taught my birthing class. (Oui à la douleur!) At the Bureau d’information petite enfance, reserving my daughter a spot in publicly subsidized daycare (crèche) in my waterlogged accent, I feel vulnerable on her behalf. What if I miss something? What if I don’t understand? What if, by the simple fact of being foreign, I harm her chances of gaining access to services, of fitting in? These are the kinds of questions that drive you to the language school. My classmates were notably all women, mostly mothers, and overwhelmingly refugees from Afghanistan, Kurdistan, Iran, and Iraq. An interloping New Zealander claimed an allergy to the sun and to Geneva’s water supply, in response to which she’d developed a rash and a rich grammar of complaints.

One day, the exhausted teacher (nationality: French), out of tricks, posed a lazy conversation starter: “What is one positive and one negative stereotype about your country?” We spoke around the obvious. We lacked the vocabulary. The teacher conflated someone’s pronunciation of touriste with terroriste. We took to sharing wedding photos instead.

The above are also the kinds of questions—am I equipped to raise my child here?—that generate the baseline paranoia that is any parent’s due. Though one hardly needs to be a parent to be paranoid. There was another game we played in language class that I’ll call, How Swiss is it? The projector flashed images of mountains, a cow with its bell, Heidi from the famous 1974 Japanese anime series, whose avatar—now quintessentially Swiss—welcomes you on inter-terminal trains in the Zurich airport. We discussed the Swissness of swimming, skiing, fondue, glacial lakes. Geneva, for its part, is perched on Lac Léman, from which the canton’s water supply is sourced. It is considered “Swiss” to swim in it all year round, even in the winter; I know at least one foreigner who, in an arctic attempt to assimilate, developed temporary nerve damage. What is one positive and one negative stereotype about your country?

The construction of such clichés, Shklovsky taught me, amounts to the absence of mystery. A quest for purity always does. It imposes a totalizing familiarity. Its logical conclusion is a purge. Where cliché succeeds, everything worth looking at will disappear. In such a world, there is no need for language or stories anymore. (Why write, if I’m already convinced that your sustained hallucination is just like mine?) It occurs to me there will always be people with ambitions to divert the water main. How laughable that anyone could still believe that they, and they alone, will be spared the Flood.

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This essay is part of Strange Visions, our ongoing series on defamiliarization.

I grew up in a family where the practice of going to confession was actively discouraged. At liturgy with my Greek grandma, the priest suggested during his homily that we should all avail ourselves of the opportunity to see him for confession. My grandma whispered in my ear, “We don’t do that.” I asked her what she meant. “We don’t tell our business to other people,” she said, “because they might gossip about us.”

Gossip is part of the air that Greeks breathe. It’s part and parcel of our cultural legacy. After my religious awakening in college and my decision to enter into full communion with the Catholic Church, I started going to confession regularly. But it wasn’t until I heard Pope Francis call gossip a “diabolical cancer”—“the worst weed” that can grow in a community, because it leads to division and resentment—that I started including the sin of gossip on my list.

Harsh condemnations of gossip date back to the early Church, when some desert fathers recommended putting a stone in one’s mouth in order to learn to keep silent and avoid vain talk about others. St. John Climacus called gossip a leech “draining and wasting the blood of charity.” Even recent Greek Orthodox writers have issued warnings about the evils of gossip. Hieromonk Gregorios said gossip is a form of lying: by spreading negative information about other people, the gossiper implies knowing the full story, including the state of a person’s heart (which only God knows). Saint Paisios insisted that Christians ought to be like the bee who looks for the flowers—only speaking about the good that others do—and avoid being like the fly who wallows in filth, dwelling on others’ worst attributes.

Living in the information age has not exactly made this easy. The expansion of technology—mass and social media, exposure to sensational public spectacles, and constant surveillance—subtly encourages the impulse to play God: to see, know, judge, and disseminate as much information as we can access about others.

But we ought to exercise caution and avoid moralizing—both about gossip and Big Tech—in simplistic ways. The more I’ve reflected on my seemingly endless battle against the sin of gossiping, which is likely fueled by my addiction to my phone and social media, I’ve come to see how much this struggle is not so much a curse from the devil as it is a source of divine grace.

The first time rumors spread about a girl in my eighth-grade class losing her virginity, I greedily consumed to all the information I could get so I could tell everyone, piecing together all the details and using my imagination to embellish them a little more each time I recounted the tale. I even told my mom, who found the story to be so riveting that she gathered everyone in the living room to have me tell it to them. My family didn’t even know who the girl was. What enticed them was not finding out private information about this girl or judging her. It was the sensationalism of the way I told it.

There is a real craft, an artform to gossiping. One need only watch a YouTube compilation of the “hot topics” segment from Wendy Williams’s daytime talk show to see someone who has truly mastered the craft. Her audience doesn’t only crave information about the private lives of the stars—they crave the salacious and witty manner in which Williams presents it. (Williams once took up the challenge to give up gossiping, which lasted a whole ten seconds. Some have dared to conjecture that her current cognitive impairment is divine intervention to stop her from getting—in the words of Mariah Carey—“all up in [people’s] bidness.”)

Some argue that gossip can be a force for good. Gossip in the form of venting can easily spiral into a bashing session, in which you wallow—like the fly—in your resentment toward the person who pissed you off. But it can also open the door to a constructive conversation about how to deal with said person and arrive at some kind of resolution. And some more socially-conscious voices have argued that gossip can be a means for powerless, underprivileged people to warn, protect, and uplift each other in the face of unjust treatment by those in power.

When it comes to my own taste for gossip, it’s a bit more complicated. As time went on, I began feeling like Gretchen Wieners of Mean Girls fame: my head was full of secrets. Somehow, I just happened to know everything about everyone. Perhaps it was because my Aspergers made me pay attention to and remember little random details I observed and heard. Maybe I have an unhealthy appetite for knowing information about others that I’m not entitled to, and am thus guilty of the vain curiosity that drove Adam and Eve to disobey God. Or maybe it’s just because my family groomed me to notice and retain information about other people.

Most of the gossip I grew up around was harmless. Yet I can’t deny that plenty of the gossip I indulge in is malicious. Sometimes I’ve said things that are really mean, and have spread information about people that ended up hurting them afterwards. The more I’ve examined my own conscience, I’ve had to admit that there’s more than just playfulness or curiosity driving my itch to gossip about people. Ultimately, it’s an attempt to compensate for my embarrassingly deep-seated insecurities.

Like most other millennial narcissists, my entitlement complex is fairly massive. I’m embarrassingly insecure and desperate for approval. When people don’t do what I want, I take it as a grave injustice, an affront to my dignity. Rather than accept that I’m not entitled to everything I want—and pull a Matthew 18:15 by confronting people when they actually disrespect me—I allow the resentment to fester internally. The resentment eventually oozes out of me in the form of talking shit about them—usually not in the aforementioned constructive manner, but as a way of punishing them for their affront to me. It numbs my insecurity by letting me pretend that I’m more powerful than them.

But there is also another mode of gossiping—one that’s less impassioned, requires less effort and serves a more mundane function—that risks being even more diabolical. Unlike the aforementioned forms of theatricality or maliciousness—this kind is gossip as mere filler, background noise used to numb boredom, a lack of passion for life and substance in a conversation.

I once asked my grandma why we gossip so much. She said that we weren’t gossiping, we were just making conversation. Gossip was a way to pass the time together. We didn’t give much thought to it; it was second nature. More often than not, it was done for sport. This form of gossip can be incredibly pernicious. When you’re engaging in malicious gossip, you can at least know you’re sinning and feel bad about it at some point. But this blasé kind of gossip requires no engagement of the heart or the mind. It’s most common among those who are accustomed to looking not up at the cosmos or into the eyes of the other, but down at the ground. Gossip of this sort fulfills the same function as other forms of algorithmically-regulated background noise like streaming services, AI, doomscrolling: it’s slop that distracts from the existential dread.

This apathetic, low-labor intensive form of gossip has followed in the direction of celebrity gossip: innovations in technology and media have moved us past the sensationalism of the paparazzi era, when tabloid photographers put their—and celebrities’—lives on the line in order to snap a shot that would get people around the world talking. Gone are the days of the paparazzi harassing Britney and Paris as they stumbled out of the club, and chasing Lady Di down the tunnel to her ultimate demise. The dawn of social media—where celebrities can determine which images of themselves get projected out into the ether—has taken the edge off the sensationalism of celebrity gossip. The sheer overload of information we’re barraged with has made it so that even the most scandalous image or story is quickly forgotten in a matter of days—or hours—as newer, more sensational stories make their way into the news cycle.

When the media that disseminates information about people’s lives assumes god-like proportions of omniscience and omnipotence, the thrill of “playing god” and gossiping loses its edge. Asking your friend if they saw Cardi B’s latest Instagram story performs that same space-filling function as commenting on the weather—indeed, information about the private lives of celebrities has become as pervasively unavoidable—and mundane—as the weather itself. Perhaps the greatest mark of the falling off of a friendship is when the two people cease sharing juicy, impassioned gossip with each other, and when they resort to DMing each other cringe stories of people they follow. (Lately, I’ve been indulging in DMing friends politically-charged posts by our mutuals, deriding them as libtards…and conservatards. My new low has been DMing our mutuals’ thirstraps and bodyshaming them...)

From the artful, to the malicious, to the lazy varieties, I’ve employed various tactics to conquer my pet vice of gossip. I’ve done that thing when you start saying “Did you hear about…wait no, nevermind.” I’ve tried highlighting a person’s most positive attributes after talking shit about them (“He’s such an asshole…but you know, when you think about it he’s actually kinda smart…”)—simultaneously being the fly and the bee. In an attempt to adhere to the Golden Rule, I’ve tried conjuring up memories of how I felt after being told that people were gossiping about me, hoping that would keep me inflicting the same pain upon others. I’ve tried looking at the log in my own eye before talking about someone else’s log, probing my conscience for the ways that I’ve perpetrated the same crime as the person I’m tempted to gossip about. I’ve tried—as much as it goes against my millennial temperament—to get a little more confrontational and tell people how I feel to their face rather than being fake nice venting my emotions behind their back. And I’ve even asked people forgiveness for what I’ve said about them after the fact.

But much like my addiction to doomscrolling, I’ve come around to accepting that gossiping is a vice I’ll never fully kick. Neither denying the sinfulness of my habit nor moralizing about it have been useful. Rather, the most helpful advice I received was from a priest to whom I was (yet again) confessing the sin of gossip, who recommended that I focus my energy not on avoiding the sin, but on looking at God Himself. When tempted to look at people’s faults and talk about them with others, when hurt or scandalized by people’s actions, even when I’m bored and feel the need to fill the empty space—direct my attention toward Him. Even if I’ve already started indulging in the act of gossiping, shift the focus of the conversation back to Him. Offer everything to Him—your resentment, your scandal, your insecurity, your boredom. Trust that he can transform and elevate all of these things. For it is only in this dialogue, in this humble act of offering, that the empty vacuum that gossip tries to fill can be filled with something of true beauty and substance.

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What does your house smell like?

Wood
Earth
Malt
Linden

Trunk of a live oak
Disemboweled black and thick
Contents spilling
Not exactly unpleasant

List only types of clothing
That are carriers for scent
Pillowslip impregnated with sweat
Grotesque conditions inside of a shoe

Sometimes a smoky smell from outside
Smell of old leather

Famous smell of rotting garbage
Savory smells
Animal smells

Please bury your face in
This is too strong to be truly shameful

“Nor is it beside the point to remember that
Births as well as deaths are announced
By stunning, singular smells” (Saenz)

Your spit interfering with your hair
What kind of an event is that
Or is it hair that entraps

Receptacle of a human life’s
Intake of cigarettes

Another thing about smell is it can feel like
Being enveloped in someone else’s world
I find that very appealing

When you enter on a cold day and you

Fabric sucks to your body
Wraps around and picks up some of the seasoning
I mean what you leave on your
Bicycle seat is only a shadow

Chrome

Smell of wetted fur
Felt drenched to the core
A syrupy smell

And a vulgar scent

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This poem is part of our ongoing series, Strange Visions.

We live in an age of stylized truths and simplified realities, video snippets and short-form fragments of text that each claim to stand in for reality itself. Describing how short-form, aphoristic writing related to the radically “cutup” and abbreviated media landscape of the early twenty-first century, Jean Baudrillard sought to draw some distinctions between these kinds of content. “The aphorism, the video-clip and the advert seem to share an instantaneity, rapidity and ephemerality,” he allowed, but the aphorism represented a different kind of phenomenon:

It’s a fragment, but a fragment that creates a whole symbolic space around it, a gap, a blank. Whereas our techniques and technologies create the instantaneous, but linked by continuity with the whole network. They are networked fragments, if I can put it that way!1

Aphorisms (while they might superficially share the fragment’s brevity) are dense, compacted, and complex statements of truth that are often posed in the form of riddles or paradoxes. They stop readers in their tracks and demand to be unpacked. Their meaning tends to make itself apparent only after a period of meditation. The kinds of media fragments represented by the video-clip and the advertisement, on the other hand, only make sense when viewed as constituent parts of a larger stream. They capture viewers’ attention only momentarily before the next piece of serial content in the queue makes its appearance.

The tensions between the word and the stream have only intensified in the twenty-five years since Baudrillard made his remarks. The most obvious contemporary manifestation of Baudrillard’s “networked fragments” is the algorithmically generated social media timeline or newsfeed. Here, various “shards and fragments of discourse” are placed in relation to each other and the assemblage presented to the end user as a supposedly faithful representation of current social reality itself.2 However, social media has just as profoundly reshaped our understandings of writing itself, rendering it, too, into a series of fragments within a network.

When users join social media, they are given a profile, which both authorizes and assumes responsibility for whatever content is posted under its name. Profiles work via a logic of networked affiliation. On X and Bluesky, for instance, statements and ideologically-coded emojis entered in the free-text biography and display name fields enable users to position themselves in ideological space and to affiliate their profiles with workplaces and institutions, as well as with political movements and moral causes. These are complemented by the “public displays of connections” (lists of following and followed accounts) accessible from users’ profiles, which provide additional evidence of network affinities. Those who encounter these profiles in digital space will (provided that they are familiar with the visual “codes” of affiliation on X and Bluesky) know in advance where their creators stand in ideological and political terms. Users can further indicate that they are members of their communities “in good standing” by editing a profile to keep it “up to date” as new norms of ideological signaling or new “causes” gain currency within particular follower groups.

Ideologically coded profiles signal to the like-minded while simultaneously deterring those from different platform subcultures. They also contribute to a phenomenon I call metadatafication—the way in which status and reputation online is influenced by users’ network affiliations. Metadatafication inheres in the impression given by the other users one chooses to follow, or the ideological flavor of the content one chooses to post or reshare. In a world of linked profiles, whoever one chooses to associate with, link to, or follow back, has become a marker of credibility. Information, too, has become newly coded by the logic of metadatafication, according to who shares or engages with certain “facts” or particular sorts of content, and who rejects or ignores them.

Knowledge has been reduced to its associated topics, relationships, and keywords. Follow circles, filter bubbles, and digital cliques may seem congenial to those within them but will inevitably appear alienating to those from outside. We still lack an agreed-upon language to describe what this sense of being involuntarily exposed to “someone else’s bubble” feels like, beyond a general unease when faced with unfamiliar facts, or an information environment that is not our own. Anxiety is therefore the defining emotion under the regime of metadatafication, particularly with regard to ambiguous or as-yet undescribed material or figures located on the edge of bubbles of acceptability. Is it safe for us to engage or connect with these people or forms of content? What might these engagements say about us? Is to engage necessarily to endorse?

We have been culturally conditioned to accept a certain kind of condensed writing and speaking as an urgent expression of an underlying truth. As the literary critic Ben Grant writes, the aphorism (crystalline and gemlike in its textual economy) tends simply “to declare what it says as true, and to brook no response.”3 Dicta similarly declare what they say to be beyond question. Protest slogans are devised in order to be unerringly and unquestioningly repeated. When chanted in ritual fashion by crowds, they resemble charms or spells, creating the illusion that their demands could be brought into being through the simple act of ardent mass expression. Although the vast majority of social media posts lack the verbal complexity and involuted cleverness of “classic” aphorisms, they have arguably inherited some of the cultural legacy of the aphorism, the slogan, and the dictum.

The assumption that what is condensed and immediate is also somehow true is intensified by the affordances of social media. The profile claims to represent the poster’s “authentic self” at its most unguarded (and therefore “real”) level, granting whatever is posted under its authority the seal of personal truth. The newsfeed and timeline make similar, quasi-aphoristic truth claims. Their constantly self-updating immediacy mimics what Susan Sontag calls the “rapidity” of the aphorism, the sense in which the aphorism’s recipient “gets” the truth “fast.”4 In the same way that early Midjourney fakes like “Balenciaga Pope” hacked into a culturally specific cognitive weakness (the belief that the camera never lies), the baseless online assertion exploits our cultural expectation that speed and concision signal the presence of the plain truth.

During a meeting with X employees in October 2023, Elon Musk claimed that the social media newsfeed was not simply in the process of replacing the news media, but that it was somehow resolving into an unmediated expression of collective psychic reality itself:

There’s really, I think, a profound shift in news. When you really think about information, I sort of approach this as like the collective consciousness, where if you can think of humanity as a superorganism and all the humans are basically the eyes and ears of the collective mind of humanity, you want to have all those eyes and ears feeding information into the collective mind. Not going through the slow and often distorted lens of media but actually just directly.

Instantaneity, combined with human connectedness, fosters the illusion that what appears on the timeline is unmediated and, in Musk’s words, “direct.” It resolves in real time into the thing in itself rather than a belated and “distorted” media representation of it. If there is an ideology of the timeline, it is fundamentally fractal or hologrammatic, representing the logic of the network itself. Every part is supposed to contain (or at least reference) the whole. The most globally circulated fragments of discourse and moving imagery posted to the stream—a stabbing in a train carriage captured by surveillance cameras; a shooting on a Minneapolis street—scale up into absolute truths imbued with an immediate planetary significance. However, what we might call “the algorithmic construction of social media reality” militates against Musk’s naïve (or cynical, or naïve and cynical) suggestion that the newsfeed represents some kind of “human superorganism,” whose every pair of eyes and ears has access to the “full picture” through media participation.

The mass audiences that existed up until the early twenty-first century were temporally synchronized around their consumption of the same programmed media objects (broadcast television; cinema releases) together at the same time. Now, however, programming works differently. Audience members continue to consume media objects en masse and at the same time as one another, but the feed is personalized. The old monoculture (centered on the shared exposure to the same content) has given way to a new monoculture (centered on synchronized behavior on the same digital platforms). Increasingly, what the content-siloed members of the new media audiences have most in common with each other is the fugue state of simultaneous screen fixation. However, rather than leading to a state of total atomization, this divided state of affairs instead intensifies the desire of all parties to represent their own algorithmically constructed social realities as normative and universal.

The need to be seen “communicating what is right” (and one’s own affiliation with that rightness) has led social media users to become skilled in a particular mode of writing—cant. Cant, as Todd Gitlin defines it, is the reduction of speech to sloganeering. It is “the hardening of the aura around a concept.”5 Like the dictum, cant acknowledges no legitimate opposition to its point of view. Each statement stakes a claim to absolute truth. Ideas and political positions are made to seem unimpeachable through the armoring of the language in which they are expressed. Cant simplifies, compresses, and places an enormous stock in the sincerity of the speaker, but, as Gitlin writes, that claim to sincerity “also protects it against scrutiny.” Cant has now become the dominant register in which political and academic arguments are conducted on social media. Anchoring one of her daily anti-immigration posts on X in the coercive moral certainties of the Second World War, the right-wing British journalist Allison Pearson reposted a picture of an exhausted Royal Air Force fighter pilot taken during the Battle of Britain with the text: “Imagine if [Flight Lieutenant] Brian Lane came back and saw what they’d done to the country he fought so valiantly for.” A reply to her post countered this emotive historical simplification with some emotive historical simplifications of its own: “He didn’t fight for a small, fearful England. He fought against the hate that divides us. Brian Lane flew beside Indians, Muslims, Caribbeans, Poles, people from every corner of the world who stood together to defeat fascism.”

Cant inevitably invites its opponents to express their arguments in its own terms. Both sides seek to have the final word, but finality is impossible given the endlessly self-regenerative nature of the social media stream. The discourse thereby devolves into the repetitive sparring of binary moral certainties—fragments purporting to offer the whole picture. Each piece of discourse manifests as a series of capsule “truths” and snippet-sized assertions (“fought so valiantly”; “the hate that divides us”), each packed together like alleles in the pared-down genome of a virus. While they deliver maximum emotive payload for minimal semantic content, each seems capable only of maintaining the balance of the polarity itself. There is no final resolution, only the armored intensification of emotions and moral certainties on either side of the divide.

With the ability it offers users to snippet images and discourse and paste them into new contexts, social media has become the ideal medium for perpetuating the culture war. When Tate Britain organized its “Hogarth and Europe” exhibition in 2021, it generated immediate pushback from visitors, who posted images of the exhibition’s gallery texts on social media (with their own derisive commentary), and then from journalists in the right-wing British press, who turned those initial posts into news stories. However, what was also notable about the exhibition’s wall texts was how they, too, seemed like a series of “networked fragments,” governed by similar social media logics—simplification, the need to immediately grab a reader’s attention, and the anxieties about association typical of metadatafication.

In the exhibition, The Tête à Tête (the second painting in Hogarth’s Marriage-A-la-mode series) was accompanied by a wall text that focused on one tiny detail in the painting—the pamphlet visible in the pocket of the steward, who is exiting the composition with his sheaf of unpaid bills. The caption writer (the University of Pennsylvania’s Chi-ming Yang) noted that the pamphlet’s title:

references a sermon by the Methodist evangelist George Whitefield, who preached moral purity in North America and Britain while helping legalise slavery in colonial Georgia in 1751. However indirectly, in this painting the atrocities of Atlantic investments are invoked in relation to the outsized expenditure on Asian luxury goods – overall, a picture of White degeneracy.

Of the chair in Hogarth’s 1757 self-portrait, Hogarth Painting the Comic Muse, an accompanying label suggested that its (presumably) imported timber might “stand-in for all those unnamed Black and Brown people enabling the society that supports his vigorous creativity.” The aim of these captions was to encourage visitors to think in terms of networks as well as objects, and to be as mindful of what was not on display as they were of what they could see on the wall in front of them. At the same time, however, they excluded the kinds of specific details about the original contexts of these artworks’ creation (and their intended meanings) which might have enabled a viewer to make sense of them as art objects. Potential associations, rather than the art itself, now seem to set the terms for exhibitions and what can (and cannot) be said about the art objects in museum collections. The logic of the feed, metadatafication, and cant trespass on the viewer’s ability to have an un-premeditated aesthetic experience.

As anxious as institutions are to provide them, labels like this can also get between the works and those who simply want to engage with them on their own terms. Years ago, a work colleague described to me some of the frustrations she had felt when she was an English Literature student. Her course readings came to her as a weekly succession of sublime experiences, but in the seminar room she was compelled to discuss them in the much drier terms of applied theory and historical context. There was no opportunity, no space, no language, for talking about the poems in the terms in which she had actually experienced them. Narrowly prescriptive labels risk taking the air out of museum and gallery visitors’ lungs in the same way.

What matters here is not the specific political content of any one label, but the form of explanation that now predominate. In each case, the artwork is treated as a node in a moral network, requiring immediate contextualization. The label becomes a kind of terminal—less an aid to looking than a screen through which contemporary norms are continuously refreshed.

Following its 2022 refurbishment, museum texts at the Burrell Collection in Glasgow now obey similar logic. A sixteenth-century brass dish from Germany depicting the martyrdom of St. Sebastian now has a label noting that, although St. Sebastian was originally a religious figure, he is now “seen as a gay icon” and that “the arrows fired into his body are like the words that can still prick us as LGBTQI+ individuals.” The label reframes the image through contemporary identity categories and invites visitors to locate themselves personally within its meaning, asking, “Who is your icon?”

Although the new Burrell Collection texts are printed using the same authority-signaling fonts and visual formats as a conventional museum label, they in practice function more like screens or terminals, receiving and displaying (as though in real time) the most up-to-date signals from “the discourse.” What we might call “activistic ways of knowing” are given formal recognition as a kind of “expert knowledge” through their consecration in the form of gallery text, with its aura of expertise and definitiveness. The new Burrell Collection texts are knowingly provocative. They break the fourth wall of professional convention in order to center (as cant does) the curators’ own emotions and ideological commitments. They make a claim to an unassailable emotional truth through subtly coercive normative frames. The controversial 2025–6 “Hear Us” graffiti exhibition inside Canterbury Cathedral operates according to a similar “terminal-style” logic. Exhibition text posted on the cathedral’s website reported that:

The workshops conducted as part of this project not only ignited inquiries but also stirred up poetic expression, leaving participants feeling affirmed, empathised with, and embraced by their peers. These gatherings offered a platform for individuals to share their perspectives, connect with others who resonated with their questions, and delve into profound discussions about their lives, experiences, and aspirations for change.

Combining public relations and therapeutic language with the style and syntax of a ChatGPT-generated student essay, this text takes one of Gitlin’s definitions of cant (“automated thought”) to its logical conclusion. In the subsequent social media furore, the cathedral walls effectively became a screen for the projection of the contemporary culture war, the (as ever unresolved) clash of polar perspectives offering both sides the illusion of total righteousness.

Liberated from the duty of explaining the past in its own terms, and following the logic of short-form content, cultural history has become increasingly judgmental and present-focused. A compulsion to signal one’s responsiveness to contemporary moral concerns by finding fault with history has become pervasive within the institutions. Even very recent cultural artifacts have come to seem retrospectively “problematic” and in need of mediating commentary and “correction.” Streaming and the culture of the rewatch put older movies and TV shows back into current circulation, inviting new audiences to judge them by contemporary moral norms. As a result, culture is becoming flattened and simplified into a decontextualized mulch, reduced to the lists of rules, shortcomings, and topical talking points that can be applied to it.

The role of rules is to ensure accountability; new categories of retrospective judgment function similarly. The new forms of present-focused cultural criticism enable users to redescribe past works, making them accountable to contemporary moral norms. The result is something like a return to the neoclassical literary criticism of the early eighteenth century, in which the role of the critic lay in separating a past work’s putative “faults” from its “beauties.” The rules of neoclassical criticism included the requirement that virtuous characters be rewarded, while the wicked were made to atone for their actions. Contemporary “culture auditing” performs the same function with new ideals. Now, as then, the moralized idea of the “fault” becomes a way of retrospectively dealing with the problem of historical distance, of squaring past practice with current frameworks. Past “content creators” (working in less “aware” eras) cannot be blamed, it seems, for failing to anticipate current sensibilities. Nevertheless, apparently “outdated” material must be identified (and disavowed) before a work’s “beauties” can be fully endorsed for viewing by contemporary audiences.

The new content warning devised for Mad Men’s season 3 episode “My Old Kentucky Home” (aired originally in August 2009) illustrates the mixture of moralism, auditing, and compliance that typifies the new culture. When the episode was made available for streaming for the first time in July 2020, it was prefaced by a sternly moralistic new title-card, which stated that the episode contained “disturbing images” of “one of the characters … in blackface,” but that “the series producers are committed to exposing the injustices and inequities within our society that continue to this day.”

In this case, it did not matter that the image of Roger Sterling bellowing the episode’s title song in blackface at his country-club Kentucky Derby Day party was clearly intended as both an historical and character critique by the makers of the show. Viewers in 2009 were given strong cues for how to interpret the scene from the visible horror on the faces of in-show moral barometers Pete and Trudy Campbell, as well as by Don Draper’s equally disgusted decision to quit the party at this point and look for the bar. For the episode to be streamed uncut only a decade after its first screening, however, it had to be redescribed (with cantish corporate sincerity) as an “exposure” of “injustice” and “inequity,” as though it were a piece of sociology rather than a self-supporting work of art. As such, it illustrates what the French political scientist Olivier Roy calls the characteristic “explicitness” demanded by the new communication norms associated with digitalization, in which content must be “constantly explicated” to remove ambiguities and “only literal meanings matter.”6 A TV episode that was easily comprehensible in 2009 as (among other things) an implied critique of 1960s upper middle-class American racism becomes “problematic” in 2020 because it trusted its original audience to know what they were seeing.

The contemporary dominance of short-form writing and thinking speaks to our contradictory desire for immediacy—to be “told it like it is”—and our need to feel protected from the potential harms of immediacy’s disclosures. The caption, the content warning, the AI summary, the list of followed accounts—all make versions of the aphorism’s promise (the rapid revelation of an absolute truth). In practice, however, they offer us predigested snippets of information in lieu of the things themselves. What the reduction of reality to tags and topics really enables is ease of consumption. In a world dominated by the logic of flows and timelines, information must be flattened and standardized, its meanings redescribed according to their observable relationship with—their relevance to—other fragments in the feed. When imposed as an explicatory overlay across culture, this logic ultimately negates any sense of ambiguity and strangeness in favour of binary moral certainties.

Cultural explanation is increasingly moving away from describing direct encounters with works or objects in favor of broader commentary with a public relations or stakeholder agenda—how can we make this seem relevant to current issues? To put it in metadata terms, the tag or “topic relationship” must be asserted, no matter how reductive and anachronistic this move may seem according to pre-feed understandings of culture and history.

The consumerist logic of the timeline (with its intrinsic bias towards “new content”) is now being applied to cultural zones that have traditionally been cordoned off from this way of thinking by the concept of historical distance. If it was until recently acknowledged that “the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there,” this exemption no longer seems to hold. The universalizing imperatives of “communicating what is right” must be extended to history’s territories also. In the process, historical explanation has been exchanged for the more immediate pleasures of instantaneous moral judgment. The graph-like certainties of guilt-by-association reasoning are thereby replacing explanation and analysis.

No matter how attractive the “new topicality” may seem to cultural institutions looking to assert their legitimacy and satisfy funders in a rapidly changing environment, it nevertheless imposes significant costs. Once institutions step onto this path, it can become a never-ending treadmill. When cultural value is transferred from the object itself to the object’s capacity for being deemed relevant to “topics of contemporary interest,” the fashion system’s dance with perpetual obsolescence ensues. Topics, jargons, and “critical approaches” move relentlessly onwards. “Badly needed” new contextual labelling needs to be continually updated if it is not to later appear “unresponsive” and cringeworthily behind the times. Nothing ages more rapidly than something specifically engineered to seem fully up to date.

In promising immediacy and easy access to topicality, short-form truths short-circuit our intellectual understanding and aesthetic responses. The crisis of meaning for the arts and culture industries in the 2010s and early 2020s has been the global generalization of these ways of understanding cultural value. Social media has enabled members of the global intelligentsia to become networked and ideologically synchronized with each other, forming an interlinked “global new class” of symbolic workers. The end result of these synchronizations, however, is that everyone has seemingly started speaking and thinking in the same American-derived, quasi-academic jargons, as though standardizing our disciplines in this way was the only path to “contemporary relevance.” In seeking new routes to legitimacy as therapeutic mediators and commentators on the globally agreed Big Topics, we risk cashing in our old institutional legacies for the timeline’s more ephemeral assurances of perpetual relevance and up-to-date-ness, promises that stay good only so long as we remain compliant and connected to the network.

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For the last few weeks, there’s been a monster living with me. He wakes up and thrashes his tail whenever I leave him out of some mundane activity: leaning to pick up a fallen spoon, putting on my socks, taking off my socks or trying to get into bed. We’re both big fans of painkillers. We’ve been living together since I broke my shoulder.

What happened was that I went out with my brother for his birthday (20th November if you wanna send him a card.) That morning, I swapped my trusty Timbs for my relatively dainty Nike Dunks. We had a bunch of drinks at different spots—I didn’t count how many. As we were leaving the last pub, I stepped down from the doorway onto the street. Or I tried. My back foot was not where I expected it to be, no longer twice its normal size in a Timberland. I overstepped, I tripped and fell with a thud onto the pavement—the slapstick classic. I heard a blitzed girl drawl, “Oh, my god…” on impact—one of the traditional sounds of London nightlife. I scrambled upright and wished my brother a happy birthday before he went for a midnight feast at McDonald’s. No biggie. I mean, I fall down a lot.

Earlier this year, I broke my toe tripping over a stick looking for the grave of a vaudeville comedian, a tribute act that was both fitting and painful. I’m so flat-footed that an orthopedic specialist once called over a colleague to marvel at the sublime mystery of my clodhoppers. I stood in my examination room shivering in my underwear. I promise you, no matter how many slack-jawed medics tell you that you’re rare, you don’t feel special afterwards—you feel lonely.

I got the bus home. A nice lady pointed out I was gasping from pain and I waved her concern away like a dandy lightly wounded in a duel: “Merely a scratch, I assure you!” I crashed onto bed and snoozed. It was only when I woke up the next morning and couldn’t get my shirt off without a lurch of nausea and some wicked flinching that I thought, Maybe I should get this checked out.

I’m lucky enough to belong to the cadre of freaks who like hospitals a lot. They’re a whole world within the world, humming away. I have warm childhood memories of blonde angelic nurses leading me down labyrinthine corridors that smelled like medicine cabinets—artificial pine, disinfectant, alcohol, gauze. I’m happy just to wait somewhere and hang out inside my brain. Also, on a Friday morning, the emergency room is weirdly chill. There’s one guy asleep on the floor and a middle-aged woman who insists she needs to be seen next for reasons known only to her (there’s someone like this in every emergency room in the world), but other than that, it’s people sitting still, mumbling, roaming around the wilderness of their minds while occupying physical space, or staring at their phones—all totally normal.

Maybe I’m OK because this isn’t my first time. When I was twelve, I went to a birthday party disco held in a Holiday Inn. A pack of boys hyped into madness by the discovery of a condom machine in the Gents’ toilets knocked me down on the dance floor and broke my tibia. I huddled in the lobby waiting for my mum and trying not to cry while the DJ, a morose white-haired ogre in a Hawaiian shirt, sat next to me and smoked. My mum was a doctor in the NHS for forty years and flat-out refused to go to A & E on a Friday night when all the gore, trauma and chaos would be at their peak. On Saturday, she gave me codeine for the pain. I gulped it down while E.T. was on TV, and by the time Elliott and the alien got airborne I was higher than either of them. I stroked the screen.

Another time I somehow lacerated the flesh around my ankle getting out of the shower and left bloody footprints all over the floor. My dad was downstairs air-drumming to Abraxas by Santana so he didn’t hear me yelling. The foot got infected, blowing up all red and infected like a clown shoe made of meat. Probably the most painful was the time I accidentally emptied a panful of boiling hot water into my left sneaker. My brain caught fire; I yowled like Tom from Tom and Jerry when the piano lid smashes onto his tail. I remember the thin sizzling noise as I pulled off my sock—the layer of skin came away like silk. The pain afterwards was like I’d dunked my foot in a cloud full of lightning. An underrated aspect of injuring yourself is the psychedelic aftermath. It redefines your relationship to time and space.

I’m seen by a nurse. She asks me if I want something for the pain. I try not to sound too thrilled. She asks me if I hit my head. I say, Nope, throwing the pills into my mouth like I’m performing some weird party trick because I can’t lift my arm.

“Hey, your face is bruised,” she says in a fearful cartoon puppy voice. Her scrubs are siren blue.

It’s never occurred to me that my face is my head, although obviously it is. She sends me for an X-ray.

Things around me seem to be happening but also to be totally dreamt at the same time, which is magnificent. I stare at a clock and roll my tongue around my cheek. A red-faced man explains in detail how the steak at his daughter’s birthday dinner was a disappointment: “Look at the color, mate, tell me that’s rare. That is well done.”

One porter tells another, “If you’re in there, you’re there.” An old woman looks at me benevolently. I’m in this gooey dreamscape prickled with nausea for about forty minutes before I remember that I need to tell someone why I’m there. The X-ray confirms the break. My arm is nestled in a fetching blue sling. Another nurse wolf-whistles at my X-ray. “You’ve done it!” she calls down the hallway. I remember I was trying to cook up a metaphor about existence itself being a long hallway between two doors at this point and thinking I’d probably stolen it from Beckett. The nurse tells me I’ll get a call about a follow-up appointment but nobody can tell me when that might be. “There’s no Caller ID,” she says with a Wonderland grin that acknowledges the lunacy of the situation without trashing it, “so a lot of people, they never answer the call, never show up.”

At 3 a.m. the next morning, I try to get out of bed without using my right arm to help me balance. I go cubist, I writhe. I decide I should probably go back to my parents’ house for a little while.

Back home, there’s no time. Days just melt together, grey and sleepy. Normal things suddenly scare me—stairs, mud, toast. OK, the first two aren’t hard to fathom—what if I slip on mud or stumble down stairs in my wonky state and hurt my shoulder again? But it’s suddenly revealed, too, that making toast involves a baroque duet between the right and left hand which I can’t perform anymore. Without even thinking, ordinarily I’d use my left hand for traction on the counter while I spread butter on the abrasive wilderness of the toast with my right. My hands don’t like being repurposed. I’m Edward Scissorhands trying to use a knife and fork at dinnertime. I have to cajole my socks onto my slab feet with my big toe. I’m bad at this.

My mum gets pills from the pharmacy. She says, “Well, just take six a day and see how you feel…” I don’t use the bathroom for five days and when I do it’s a mystical experience, like birthing a griffin. I stare at the winter sunlight inside some raindrops on my window and think, Yes. The dead trees outside nod in magical agreement with me like tired witches. I’m floating above my normal mind for several days, thoughts coming to me like debris on a multicolored breeze, nice and soft. I pick up a copy of Bleak House and start laughing but I’m not certain why. There’s a huge bruise like a toxic waste spill oozing from the knuckle of my shoulder to just below my right nipple, rotten tooth yellow. It’s so tender for a couple of days, the air around it tingles, halo’d with pain.

Meanwhile, my unconscious has massively upped its production budget. I begin having mad vivid dreams every night. I’m somehow both watching and fighting in a boxing match where my opponent is telling me to stay down—depressingly obvious symbolism. I’m a fire engine. I’m riding an enormous dog across the surface of a dead planet and then I’m the dog eating tons of fudge from a wrecked shipping container. And then two furry green arms are cuddling me on a rollercoaster and I know they belong to something like an angel and my brain is flooded with joy. I wake up tired, my face and pillow coated in drool. Two days into this woozy hibernation phase, my friend texts to tell me she had a dream about something bad happening to me on the night I tripped up. Every time I stand, I say, “Whoa…”

This is when being in the land of illness is kind of a golden treat. If you blank out the flammable rushes of pain and horrible dream residues haunting your wide-awake life, it’s pretty good. It’s like permission to disappear. For a little while, nobody expects you to call back or do anything except read about legal chicanery on foggy Victorian streets. It’s literally fine to be in your childhood bedroom jellifying.

Inevitably this soon wears off. You become aware of how tired you are from the slow healing of a bone you never appreciated. You make lists of all the things you can’t do. Suddenly you’re trapped alone with yourself, newly powerless and fragile, in a kind of psychic abyss. Beyond the boredom lies the fear and beyond the fear lies the horror of what comes next.

Eventually an email summons me back to the hospital. There’s one of those sinister Amazon storage vaults in the main atrium. Are the patients getting stuff delivered there? Do they creep down at night and then sneak back to the wards to unbox power tools in bed? A kid’s spinning in circles and sobbing. A shellshocked faun with two broken legs is wheeled down a corridor.

I’m seen by a precise young man named Moritz—German or Swiss, I’m guessing—who explains the nature of my break to me. “No gym, no weights, no bike for three months,” he tells me. This is an epic tragedy. How will I pull through? I do none of those things. I fear the gym. I’m ambivalent about being outside unless I’m with a dog.

I ask Moritz if it’s a clean break. He says, “Clean is not a word we like terribly much in orthopedics because it implies dirt or infection at the site of the injury. The bone did not pop out. There is no evidence of infection.” He says, “You seem a reasonably happy bunny to me.” I nod. “We talk in bones about displacement,” he points to the fracture on the X-ray with his pen. “You can see here,” he says, “where things, they are displaced.”

The monster purrs under my skin: he goes to sleep but he doesn’t disappear. This morning in the mirror, the bruise was dark purple, like a storm cloud. Now, I stare at my bone on the screen. It glows.

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This essay is part of Strange Visions, our ongoing series on defamiliarization.

Magic Farm
New York, October 2024

“I need to see it to believe it.” “Pics or it didn’t happen.”

While visiting Argentina several years ago, my mother overheard a family conversation about one of her aunts—who still lives in the countryside—slowly losing her eyesight due to pesticide exposure in the area. Disturbed by the family’s apparent resignation, we did our own research and quickly discovered that this was not an isolated case, but a widespread condition across the Global South—particularly in regions where governments can be easily influenced by corporations such as Monsanto.

What shocked me most, beyond the grim health consequences, was how beautiful the transgenic soy appeared. Lush, green, robust—visually immaculate. Of course, this resilience is precisely the point. The plant has been genetically engineered to withstand poison.

As someone whose work consistently engages with appearances, I found this paradox compelling. How might one photograph such a plantation and ensure it is perceived as a toxic landscape? Is that even possible? When Joe Apollonio and I visited the rural outskirts of Buenos Aires for a location-scouting trip, we rode in the back of a truck at sunset, passing through soy fields in full spring bloom. “Wow, I love nature,” we said to one another, momentarily forgetting that earlier that day I had discovered a pile of empty Roundup bottles at the base of a tree.

Our experience of the soy fields was one of overwhelming beauty—almost a closeness to God, or to Nature—that felt profoundly authentic, even as we knew it was not. Pure peace, and notably, no insects. I am aware that a genuinely organic farm is imperfect and uneven, but it was difficult not to be seduced into perceiving paradise in these unmarred plants, despite their origins in a lab. We were inside the famous Windows 95 screensaver of rolling green hills—aptly titled Bliss—and it felt sublime. Only temporarily, of course. Prolonged exposure to such “bliss” would result in serious illness.

Humans struggle to distinguish essence from appearance. We know our food is contaminated and that microplastics accumulate in our bodies—yet we cannot see them, so we move on. A presidential candidate poses for a photo-op at a local restaurant and is instantly transformed into a community hero. A dog appears to be smiling in a photograph, though it is in distress. Sometimes all we want is a good image, and not to be corrected on our assumptions.

My parents are archetypal Gen X hipsters, deeply invested in underground culture. Their lives revolved around cultivating a particular aesthetic as a form of rebellion—ironically reinforcing the trend-driven arm of the capitalist system. My childhood memories are saturated with trivia about bands, fashion, and youth culture, accompanied by rigid systems of classification. In response, I rebelled by shapeshifting. I role-played as an office worker while my father collected early issues of Vice magazine and my mother mocked me for not being cool and having a disdain for subcultures. My soul wears no clothes, I would think.

Through my parents and my own life choices—I attended art school, and eventually nearly everyone I knew worked for either Vice or American Apparel—I became familiar with hipster media and its tendency to exoticize and exploit “bizarre” stories from the Global South. Like Vice, I initially found humor in the provincial and formally uneducated Andean musicians such as Delfín Hasta el Fin, with his infamous song about the Twin Towers, or La Tigresa del Oriente, whose music videos—shot in Indigenous reserves with leopard-print-clad backup dancers—circulated as viral curiosities.

Yet I am also Latin American, the unglamorous type, with a religious Abuela who cleaned hotels for a living. I spent my life navigating these parallel realities: the cosmopolitan art student and the peripheral other wiring money back to South America via Western Union. This tension became the driving force behind my film Magic Farm. What if Berlanga’s Welcome, Mr. Marshall! also included the perspective of the Americans? What if my grandmother were approached by a group of New Yorkers? I wanted to make a film about a “visiting crew,” seen from both sides, unfolding through a dense comedy of errors. Most of my scripts and short stories occupy this in-between space. I am drawn to moments where innocent misunderstandings generate narratives that feel unexpectedly truthful.

In flight
October 2025

What is true? Whose perception is correct? Perhaps paranoia and distrust are the only viable responses. It’s been two years since I shot Magic Farm, and in that time AI-generated video has advanced exponentially. I am currently on a plane en route to Luhačovice in the Czech Republic to shoot a short film. Before leaving New York, the friend I’m collaborating with created mock-ups using Sora, generating images of himself in locations we had never visited. Though unsettling, the results felt disturbingly real. They made me uncomfortable. If simulation is this effortless, what is the purpose of traveling—of enduring long flights, bad coffee, and petty conflicts over legroom?

Once again, images and their contradictions. As a filmmaker, I am not afraid of AI. On the contrary, I believe it can function as a mirror, exposing cinema’s most common shortcuts and bad habits. By reproducing clichés and overused stylistic devices, AI strips away illusion and forces filmmakers to pursue more rigorous and sophisticated narrative languages. Since large language models are structurally bound to the past, should we not aim to create something genuinely new? If a cinematic “look” becomes predictable, perhaps it is our responsibility to avoid it entirely.

Before passing through security at JFK, I encountered a mediocre Dior advertisement featuring Mikey Madison, Mia Goth, and Greta Lee gently caressing grass as they walked. You know the gesture—the performative melancholy with which actors touch objects in a way no one ever does in real life. I witnessed the same affectation at the Venice Film Festival during the premiere of a famous director’s latest flick. Shortly afterward, a screening by a younger auteur felt similarly hollow: visually polished but emotionally vacant, as though an AI model had been prompted with “A24 + Safdie + gritty” and produced an image without a soul. It made me cringe.

Filmmakers bristle at AI-generated videos because they reflect our own laziness—our reliance on tropes and familiar gestures. When something looks and feels like “AI vomit,” perhaps the responsibility lies with us to be more attentive, more precise, more demanding of ourselves.

If AI is doomed to remix what already exists, then maybe our job is to insist on friction: on the miscommunications and moments that don’t scan as “content.” To make work that resists immediate legibility and to trust lived experience over simulation, even when the simulation looks better lit. And yet, when a Monsanto field appears more “natural” than untouched land, I am reminded of how easily perception collapses—and how quickly I, too, become complicit.

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This essay is part of Strange Visions, our ongoing series on defamiliarization.

In 1917, the Russian literary critic Viktor Shklovsky wrote the essay “Art as Device,” in which he suggested that much of human experience becomes invisible by habit. Habit deadens the world and makes us effectively blind. But the purpose of art, he wrote, is to “defamiliarize” experience, in order to illuminate those aspects which have become invisible; to bring to life that which has died.

This process is illustrated in a passage from the memoir White Out by Cluny Journal contributor Michael Clune (no relation):

Something that’s always new, that’s immune to habit, that never gets old. That’s something worth having. Because habit is what destroys the world. Take a new car and put it in an air-controlled garage. Go look at it every day. After one year all that will remain of the car is a vague outline. Trees, stop-signs, people, and books grow old, crumble and disappear inside our habits. The reason old people don’t mind dying is because by the time you reach eighty, the world has basically disappeared.

And then you discover a little piece of the world that’s immune to habit.

Art is one endeavor that has strived for this habit-immunity. Art is a technology for defeating habit. But there are also other experiences that jolt us into new ways of seeing and being in the world—breaking a bone, encountering a genetically-modified landscape, limiting some of our senses, learning a language. Certain technologies, spiritual practices, and interdisciplinary encounters can also defamiliarize experience.

In daily life, perception becomes streamlined, flattened, and erased—walking up the stairs, turning the bathroom doorknob, endlessly scrolling the parade of fragmented images and texts, all of which are encountered more or less invisibly, and then forgotten. “Automatization,” Shklovsky writes, “eats away at things, at clothes, at furniture…and at our fear of war.”

By restoring vividness to experience—and by exploring rather than explaining—defamiliarization can restore reality itself. But in order to make us “feel objects”—to make “a stone feel stony again”—we have to estrange it, “to lead us to a ‘vision’ of this object rather than mere recognition.” The dominant culture deals in explanations and discourse—but these often fail to affect lasting change at the level of perception, unwilling to linger in the essential strangeness and surprise of life. In the face of the soul-numbing scroll, encounters that enlarge perception can make life itself again feel new.

In this new year, Cluny Journal is partnering with Unlikely Collaborators for a twelve-part series on defamiliarization.

Every Thursday for the next twelve weeks, we will publish pieces by filmmakers, artists, writers, scientists, technologists and others who engage with the theme on a formal and/or conceptual level. We will explore moments when habitual modes of seeing are disrupted; where mere recognition is replaced by strange visions.

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There’s only one clocktower on this street, with two clocks, and they each show different times. Andy walks with me, shortening his strides to match my pace.

“You don’t have to come in,” I say when we reach the office.

“I’ll come in,” Andy says.

The waiting room is encouragingly empty. We’ve only been there for a minute when a gray-haired woman in scrubs enters the room, clipboard in hand. She calls my name, drawing it out like I’m a lost dog.

“I’ll wait,” Andy says.

“It’ll stress me out to think of you waiting,” I say.

I turn away and the nurse leads me down a hall. She asks if I need the bathroom. I lie and say no. Her accent is heavy and unplaceable. We enter a closet-sized room containing only one chair. I sit down and flex my bladder experimentally.

The nurse stands before my chair, stooped at eye level. I could balance a glass of water on her back.

She asks for my name and birthdate, cross-checking my responses with the form on her clipboard. “Lamm,” she repeats. “Where is that from?”

“Germany,” I tell her, even though it’s not from anywhere. I just made it up a few years ago when I decided to change my name.

“Guten Tag,” she says. It takes me a moment to recognize the words through her accent. She swabs my arm with an alcohol pad. “Jesus loves you,” she says.

“Thanks,” I say.

“In German,” she says. “You’re German?”

“Oh,” I say, thinking hard. “Jesus liebt dich?”

“Jesus liebt dich,” she repeats, inserting a needle into a vein in my arm. “I won’t remember that. You can open your fist now.”

Dark blood spools out of me into a thin plastic tube, and it feels too late to clarify things.

“I was there in ‘95,” she says. “I did a semester in Berlin.”

She thinks for a long moment.

My blood waits suspended between containers.

I wonder about her other patients, other tasks. The door is closed. We’ve been in here a while.

“Can I take your jewelry?” she says, gesturing to my neck. “We don’t have much time.”

It seems like we have a lot of time. She opens the door and the time rushes out like air. I undo the clasp and hold the necklace in my palm. She looks at it. The cross looks up at her, its single diamond like a baby tooth. She lets the door close again.

“You’re a believer,” she says. She looks into my face with fragile hope. “Jesus Christ?”

“Yes,” I say.

“Jesus Christ?” she says.

“Yes,” I say.

“Jesus liebt dich,” she says.

“Nice,” I say. “You remembered.”

“My name is Maria,” she says. She already knows my name. “I went back in a dream once.”

I think for a moment, then realize what she meant. “To Germany?” I say.

“July 12, 2007. I dreamt I was on my way to a fellowship meeting, wearing a long green dress.” She gestures with both hands down the length of her brief body. “A dream,” she reiterates.

I ask her why she remembers the date.

“Some German festival or holiday. For Martin Luther King?”

“Martin Luther,” I say.

“King,” she supplies.

“But why do you remember it?” I ask again. There’s a new urgency in my tone that has nothing to do with the brain scan, the co-pay, my mother’s disease. It’s the urgency I feel in church when the music begins and I can’t find the right hymnal page.

“There was a man,” Maria says, her voice like something handed to me under a table. “A Christian man.” She pauses, closing her eyes.

I think of Andy, the first time he took me to church, how his fingers found the Holy Water automatically as he walked in. How I followed blindly, my hands dry.

Suddenly I can feel July 12, 2007 taking up space in the room, like another channel of reality. When I was a kid, the TV had a feature that let you watch two channels simultaneously: one at full size and one in a little square in the corner of the screen. That way you could monitor the football while watching a movie. Maybe July 12, 2007 is like that for Maria, playing on mute through the decades.

There is a silence that might go a hundred different directions.

I am about to ask about the man when Maria speaks.

“Listen,” Maria says.

I am listening so hard, fighting to hold onto every word.

“This contrast fluid they give you, it goes into your brain. So you have to eat brain-cleansing foods tonight. Radish, big-leaf celery, turmeric. No Chinese restaurants.”

“No,” I agree.

“It’s not healthy. When Giuliani was mayor, he took them to court.”

“Wow,” I say.

“It’s good you go to church,” Maria says. But I don’t go to church. Or, I go occasionally. I get anxious on Saturday nights, stay up too late, and miss the bells. I wake up refreshed but guilty, like I’ve gotten fat off stolen food.

Andy’s church is a big, neglected building in deep Brooklyn. Gilding and granite, stained glass and hand-painted murals, largely empty pews. I sing and he accompanies the choir on a baby grand, looking too good for a Sunday morning.

The songs take up space in our brains, but we hardly feel it. Andy once taught me that the simplest way to understand chord progressions is to write them out as Roman numerals. In the key of A, for example, an A chord becomes I.

“I had a vision at church once,” Maria says, looking up at the drop ceiling. “A huge bottle of B-Complex floating in the air, spinning like a globe. You know B-Complex?”

“Sure,” I say, thinking of the alphabetized vitamin shelves at CVS. I never know what I’m supposed to take. When my mom was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis, she bought vitamins and expensive powders and medicinal teas, but she didn’t change anything else, didn’t quit drinking or start exercising, just layered holistic health on top of holistic unhealth, and nothing came of it.

I don’t talk to my mom anymore. But I drink all those same powders and teas. I swallow my bitterness. I pay for it.

“You can’t get B-Complex anymore,” Maria says. “Big Pharma shut it down because it was too effective at treating Covid.”

I give a neutral nod, wanting to share my own theories but not wanting to prolong the conversation. On Saturday nights when Andy’s asleep, I take the radio into the bathroom and listen to the after-hours conservative show. I sit on the plastic toilet lid and learn about UFO sightings, government plots. “We have all the information,” a man named Lionel yells into the microphone. “So why aren’t we doing anything?”

“Your mother is still in Germany?” Maria asks.

“No,” I say. “She’s over here now.” My mother is from Connecticut, of Jewish descent, and as far as I know has only visited Germany once, for the museums.

“Too bad,” Maria says. “In your country she could get stem cells.”

I was in middle school when my mom was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. I didn’t know what it was then. I didn’t ask. I thought it would become obvious over time, as my mother went in for scans and experimental treatments, as her brain and body declined. I worried I had it too, but how would I tell? My mother’s illness was subtle but debilitating, marked by vague pain, fatigue, disorientation. It could only be described concretely with one phrase: “Lesions on the brain.”

You can’t see your own brain. You can’t even feel it. I started to think I had the lesions. It’s a detail that would make sense somehow, like a missing page of a manuscript. But I put off the scan for years, during which the lesions have either grown or remained imaginary. Now I imagine them eating my thoughts, munching me down to a wilted core of basic functionality.

The first time I heard the word “lesion” was on Law & Order, which my mom used to watch while folding laundry. “The victim had lesions on her neck.” Even then, I was too sensitive for gunfights and pedophilia and fish-netted bodies floating down the East River. All those lesions. Now, I can’t even watch the news. “These people need God,” Andy says when we walk past posters for violent movies. It’s strange to imagine him existing, unseen, for the first three decades of my life, like a latent disease.

An MRI technician arrives to take me to the exam room. I’m wearing a gown that exposes my back. “Can I take your form?” Maria calls out to me as I leave the room.

“Where?” I ask.

“Home,” Maria says, which feels illegal. She leans in closer, putting a hand on my arm. “If you could get stem cells for cheap,” she whispers, “would you do it?”

“I don’t know,” I say honestly.

In the exam room, I lie down on a narrow plastic bed and look up at the drop ceiling. Some of the tiles have been replaced by an illuminated photo of palm trees. Instead of white foam, there are green leaves and brown coconuts and slivers of blue sky. Through the doorway, I can hear Maria talking with her next patient. “It’s hard here,” she says, “But the alternative is worse.”

With a mechanical buzz, my body slides into a truck-sized machine. Red lasers shine down on my face. I close my eyes against them. The magnetism passes through me, making my brain visible. I want to think flattering thoughts now, lesion-proof thoughts. I want my brain to be a dimpled thigh made beautiful in low light. I think about Andy. I think about us praying in my tiny studio apartment: pre-meal blessings, signs of the cross over microwaved beans, burnt kale, wet pasta. “This meal would cost $40 at a restaurant,” Andy says, and believes it.

I imagine us praying for a clean scan, a healthy brain, a long life. I imagine it working.

In my early twenties, I fell in with a group of Evangelical Christians in rural Georgia. We were young, adjusting to new freedoms, unsure whether to use them. I’d already lost my virginity. I worked overtime to compensate, reading the memoirs of repentant monks, memorizing hymns, hearing testimony from my new friends. In the evening, we hung around the living room of their big communal house and discussed the big questions. My New York friends never discussed the big questions. In the City, if you brought up death, purity, sin, you’d get only a dismissive laugh. These were questions we’d put to bed ages ago, in adolescent diaries and slumber party whispers. So what were the answers? No one knew, maybe not even the believers. But at least the believers were still asking.

I moved back to New York and gradually lost touch with the Evangelicals. In my last phone call with one of them, I confessed my doubts. All these months and still I could not honestly call myself a believer. There was a heat wave in New York and the block seemed oddly quiet, stunned like a slapped cheek. I looked up at the blazing blue sky and tried to merge my vague sense of The Divine with the highly specific personage of Jesus Christ. It didn’t work. I felt betrayed. I had taken a leap of faith but found nothing to support me on the other side. My friend was unconvinced. “If your heart is truly open to God,” he said, “God will find a way in. He doesn’t waste an opportunity.”

The machine turns off and my body slides back out into the room. I look up and see palm trees on the ceiling. This is an old photo, I can tell. They don’t print photos like this anymore. It’s a photo from a time before my mother was diagnosed, before my brain knew love or Christ or damage. It’s a windless day on the beach in a world without pain or age or Andy. It’s a tropical wonder in a grid of flat foam, a dream in the corner of a life. It’s not something I would ever choose.

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The tourists who come

Didn’t come this year

The restaurants are empty

The motels are vacant

The water on the lake is still

In the park, a passing Accord says

What we’re all thinking:

What y’all really want

*

But all this is subject to change

The length of a day

The size of a tee

The quality of methamphetamine

The love, and not love

Made within us

*

The sound of a fist on a man’s face

Is the body’s great gift

It’s hard to believe—like fear

You watch the energy ripple

From fist to cheek

From fist to rib

From sun to earth

Body to mind

And back to body

The book of today wasn’t written

But now it is:

Two cousins, heavy and red

Swollen fruit

Oozing on the ground

*

In a world without heaven

The body forsakes the mind

So the mind jettisons the self

Church bells ring through the woods

But do they move the trees?

Do they cause the birds to cry?

Wander within yourself

And see the people kneeling

See how few answers our dreams contain

*

In college, I learned big words

Then we’d give each other

Black eyes for fun

The assigned texts asked

Are men forged in strife?

Or self-directed leisure?

But who maintains

The great ledger of our lives?

Us?

Or the seven men

Standing around a rotted picnic table

At the edge of the park?

*

You might ask how I know

The two men are cousins

And the answer is—

I just do

The tall, thin one walks around

But the younger, heavier one

Doesn’t get up

He stays down, dirty and defeated

Spitting rehearsed threats

Mirrored, catalogued

And carried over to his new form

*

But the self, so long composed

Won’t return on its own

Not that easy—

Ask the heart, ask the body

Ask the mind

Real men don’t know what they want

*

They say if men move as water moves

And the lake is still

Their energy produces a film

A face can be opened

And a face can be closed

Trapped in this thought

God’s not dead

But he is getting older

And he was never young to begin with

*

Some men finish what

Other men start

And some men love to start over

Look close enough

And the edge of the park

Has everything in it—

A tree, a rock, an old boat

Battle hymns rattle the bandshell

With no one listening

The seven men turn blue

And the air turns green

A new shadow raises

Its hands in victory

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Shuffling this width of white
We are and must be hush
Mustering some private word
Up the tender steps of porch
Your living cheek melts life
From faces on the running flake
In glass a shape grows to the door
Mother willing there in wait

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