When people would point at something and ask if there were a world behind it I would always say I liked a parent walking past their kid playing the same video game habitually and sees Vippo, the lead. ‘Oh my kid plays that game where the orange guy in shorts with the pointy ears jumps really high and squeals when they land on exploding cabbages or something.’ The parent takes the kid to a gaming conference. At the entrance there is an 18 foot inflatable of Vippo. The kid is foaming at the mouth sputtering about how Vippo is wearing his emerald flip flops that he received after saving a jetski tournament from being engulfed in a lava flow, and that Vippo’s hair is done in the style it was the one time he won a mambo competition on a side quest. The parent is happy to see the kid exuberant and looks forward to taking them to a design your own gummy shop afterward to make it a perfect day.

I talked about getting off a plane and seeing some kind of corpse burning ceremony and not having significant understanding of what was going on. People are speaking in a language I do not understand. Everything is on fire people are moving in chorus people are standing around watching. Maybe some of them are like me. Maybe some of them have some conception of what is happening beyond appearances and smells. One time the pace of my body moving through a space determined the rate that time progressed in the environment. When things were like this I was looking at a very red sunset through some hills covered with reeds. When you’re on the highway in the US, there are glarescreen delineator blades on top of a concrete barrier dividing the north and south lanes. The broad side of the blades face the driver. They look like an infinite line of dominoes evenly spaced a few inches apart facing you—they are distinctly opaque like a succession of skinny walls all arranged kissing the edge of a long contour. When you are riding as a passenger in the back seat looking sideways at the delineator blades they disappear, the blades are so thin that when driving past them the solid objects appear as a blur the same way that helicopter blades become a translucent blur. If the delineator blades are green then all of the backdrop that the blades overlap with will appear tinted by a rhythmically translucent field of green. When I was running looking at the reeds, if I moved slowly I knew that the reeds were solid objects, if I went fast they became a tinted blurry field almost like a succession of refrigerator-sized frosted prismatic lenses arranged in an infinitely long reed-height wall. In traditional Indian music (dhrupad alap, vilambit khyal ektaal, carnatic mridangam tani avartanam etc) tabla rhythms often occur at time signatures unfathomable by Western musical time scales—hyperbolic comparisons come to mind like your intestine is 20 ft long but I know another creature that’s intestines can wrap around the world like a rubber band ball 20 trillion times before they are halfway coiled. In contemporary Western music most rhythms resolve, repeat, or rhyme with themselves in a few seconds. In Indian rhythmic structures, similar cycles can take 18 minutes or more to unfold. Those time scales are so extremely different that to most Western ears the cycle is imperceptible as a cycle because the listener’s attention cannot zoom out far enough to see a pattern, they see a near infinite forward movement that never references what came before it.

In tabla rhythms there is this thing that happens where the drum taps increase in density until they tumble from being perceived as rhythmic patterns to being continuous or undulating tones, similarly to how spinning propellers go from being an arrangement of blades to a translucent wall. Elsewhere a snare rush or snare roll tumbles from being sequences of taps to stuttering fields of tones.

Whoever first arranged rhythms in these 18 minute tumbling cycles I thought was familiar with the way I was experiencing time.

I saw people actually burning. They smell very good like honey ham wrapped in a white sheet. That is not a put on, it’s just how it is. They do not burn you if you are under 10 years, over 80, 4-6 other conditions that I can’t remember, or if you have been bitten by a cobra—because you either are still pure or have gone through enough that you have been made pure again. A cobra bite radically transforms the composition of your blood such that your blood becomes solid. A vein full of blood with a lifetime of wear and tear, a tablet dropped into the heart that spreads through the core of the stream in a corkscrew pushing the deepest undercurrent of the flow outward to the surface as it hardens from the inside out. There is suddenly a dusty skin on the noodle that a burst of wind wipes clean leaving a snaking ruby. If you’re one of these people you are wrapped in a white sheet with a rock tied to you and placed in the river to sink. If you are not one of these people the fire makes you one.

People go to Varanasi because dying there delivers moksha, freedom from the obligation to reincarnate on a plane that is always too hot or too cold. Many would say this is an over simplification and add many conditions or dismiss it completely saying that this would make it too easy. Some of those same people would agree that if a woman goes to a temple and prays for a house in exchange for her good deeds and whole heartedly believes that contract to be fulfilled that she will receive the house, and that someone with a more byzantine model of the world that features more doubt will watch the house fall through the cracks of their shaky faith.

How many have threatened someone saying they would leave them looking like a Michael Jackson Jacket covered in zippers.

It’s 1am in the city and the haze is foggy. A White Limousine that looks like a pitbull face that ran into a wall if you squint pulls up at the curb and rolls back on the rubber of the tires slightly as the driver brings it to a halt. The driver has acne scars and a face shaped like a Hershey kiss slammed between book pages. She tries to unlock the doors in the back but accidentally rolls down the passenger side window. She hits the button in reverse because she is embarrassed by her accident. The door clicks.

All the chrome goes black in a gasp. A flirty snub nosed pelican faced person in a black turtleneck beret and blonde swoop bob snaps their fingers to the poet’s clap and accidentally shatters their fingers like a tuning fork made of chopsticks.

All the puddles on the asphalt hold their breath freezing the reflections of the pink and blue video walls with girls with huge eyes dancing on them in chiseled images. The water stopped moving so all the reflections became very clear like a chiseled image but they also kept moving but some of the people who were there wanted to pretend that the images in the reflections were frozen.

Everything is purple.

Dr. Sevi steps out of the rear of the car. Her white pants fill everyone’s vision. They call her Dr. because of all the bad things she has done. She has kidnapped people in ways no one can imagine are real any place else. 60% of Cambodia’s GDP comes from camps that run online phishing scams running on slave labor in the jungle. Thailand’s tourism industry is in a crisis because an enormous chunk of their tourism came from China’s growing middle class. In the early 2020s a Chinese actress was kidnapped when she arrived in Thailand and trafficked to Cambodia to work in a phishing camp. This is close to unimaginable in many places. Dr. Sevi is the boss of this. It happens because she wants it to happen.

When her shoe steps out of the car the driver tremors shoot up her arms and into her face. The street cries. Everybody cries. Now the shoes are on the street. Soon they will be on everyone. Right foot left foot. Right shoe left shoe. Elbows pressing down on the table very heavy after the steps. A pig in a pork pie hat selling translucent peach paper folded in the shape of chrysanthemums on a vending tray looped into their makeshift twine suspenders trips launching salt out a cracked thimble tied around their neck into a quarter sized puddle of tonic water on the edge of the table. Dr. Sevi looks at the salt dizzy. A moment ago the puddle was reflecting a deep blue light and now suddenly something piercing and white bounces off of it. It was very white for an instant. When the salt hit it, it combined with the other white and became very bright.

Dr. Sevi’s eyes were carpet. They were also sand. The cuffs of the shirt had become impossibly itchy she could not move she could not suck her cheeks. Her eyes would not close all of her toes were tied to the column supporting the table.

Through the window she’s at the cafe on the lake choosing a ceramic stuffed animal to paint with the paints they give you when you take a coconut to drink from. She’s filling in the eye with white paint and going way beyond the bubble of the eye onto the forehead to make the pupil look smaller. Everything below her ankles are being goaded into separating under the pressure of swelling tendon the same way they were when she was peddling the swan boat. She did not walk for so long that her thighs have no fat on them and almost no muscle. She moves her legs with her ab muscles. All her muscles are exhausted and the higher tendons in her thighs risk snapping because there is nothing to support or insulate them. She is 1 ft deep in the ground from the kicking and chunks of the sidewalk cough up in pulses landing around the edge of the crater. The table legs are 2 ft below the sidewalk the table is always diagonal. The table jumps with every kick. The ceramic stuffed animal jitters and slams against the table as they descend. It is half maroon now and there are deep green swirls penetrating the maroon coat. The underside of the toes are bleached raspberry. Now her feet are revealing emeralds and rubies. Now her legs fray inside but stay pumping from inertia. Heat is inside paper thighs. Nobody knows her head is underground. A cookie on a belt disappears under pouring chocolate ribbons and a bone is enveloped by cascading honey cools into the sticky squishy ridge of a forehead. A finger with the residue of rubbed grass blade glides through the friction of a sheet of warm watercolor paper in a menu spitting distance from a pond where mosquitoes press targets into the water with their weight. At both tables at the same time Dr. Sevi and Shelia. Would you like some? A nostril-width spoon with wet tapioca slides into her mouth. The fluid holding the tapioca is cold at one table and warm at the other beads at the rim shaking onto her shirt. My legs swinging off the edge of Morgan Creek with the sister that remembers me I know home.

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

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.

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

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

Also, come to our 2026 Zoë Conference in Napa to see Tao Lin and many others…

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

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.

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.

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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