Like I was Jesus

Harper’s Magazine, August 2009.
Last summer, forty Christian missionaries, members of the Child Evangelism Fellowship, roamed the housing projects of Connecticut telling children the condensed and colorful story of Jesus’ life. The goal was salvation, but the missionaries rarely used that long word. They employed monosyllabic language and avoided abstract concepts and homonyms. “Holy” was a problem, the missionaries said, as children thought it meant “full of holes.” “Christ rose from the dead” was also tricky because children mistook the verb for a flower.

One afternoon in July, on a basketball court in Waterbury, Scott Harris, a black nine-year-old in an oversized sleeveless jersey, was inspecting a wound on his knee. The wound was sloppily stitched and looked grotesque, like a pair of lips. “I’m mad at Adam and Eve,” Scott said to a missionary named Isaac Weaver. “If they hadn’t eaten that apple, there would be no more bushes, prickers, and bugs. I wouldn’t have busted my knee open.”

“But do you ever think,” Isaac asked, “‘What if I were the first one?’ I think I’d probably make the same mistake as Eve.”

“No, I wouldn’t have tasted that fruit,” said Scott, his voice high and hoarse. “I’m trying not to get in trouble all the time. People say, Sit down, and I’m already sitting down. They say, Be quiet, and I’m not even saying anything.”

Isaac, twenty-six years old, blue-eyed, tan, and willowy, picked up his EvangeCube, a plastic toy of eight interlocking blocks that tell the Gospel in pictures. (The cube comes in a box that bears the slogan unfolding the answer to life’s greatest questions.) He pointed to the image of Heaven: a pastel hole in the clouds emanating milky rays of light. “You were right about Adam and Eve,” Isaac said. “Where they lived, everything was perfect.” He asked Scott if he knew his ABCs, and when the boy nodded, Isaac explained that “accepting Jesus is as easy as A B C. ‘A’ stands for Admit you are a sinner. ‘B’ is for Believe that Jesus went on the cross and died for your sins. And ‘C’ is for Choose to accept Him as the boss of your life and go to Heaven forever.”

“But what if you sin when you’re in Heaven?” Scott took the EvangeCube from Isaac and jiggled it in the air. The blocks flipped, moving from the picture of Jesus’ crucifixion to Heaven and back again.

“You don’t.”

“But what if you do?”

“You can’t. You’re in Heaven.”

“Oh, it’s like an ability.”

Isaac nodded vigorously. “Now, Scott, it’s time to tell Jesus you believe what He did for you. And one day when Jesus comes back, He will make everything right.”

“What?”

“Tell Him you believe He died to take your sins away,” Isaac gently prodded.

“What does that mean?”

“It means you really do believe He came and took away your sins. Do you believe that?”

“Yeah, I do.” Scott’s nostrils flared. “You died for me—from taking my sins away.”

Three young boys approached the basketball court, and Scott turned to watch them. When they called his name, he slowly stood up and dusted off the back of his nylon shorts. “I’ve got to play now,” he told Isaac bashfully.

Isaac obliged, gathering together his props—the cube and a worn Bible, bristling with sticky notes. Although he and Scott had only gotten to “B: Believe,” he said he was pleased with the conversation. It was the first time he had performed what the Fellowship calls “open-air evangelism,” approaching strangers with no introduction besides “Do you want to hear a great story?” Before introducing himself to Scott on the basketball court, he had been overtaken by anxiety. He sat down on the curb with another missionary, and they bowed their sweaty heads in prayer. “Father, I don’t know if I can do this,” Isaac said quietly, flicking a fly off his sneaker. “To me it seems like an odd thing to do. But, Lord, if this is what You are calling us to do, then I say no to fear. Please direct us to the right people so that we can show You to them. They need You. We need You.”

[Subscription required for rest of the piece...]

Listening to Braille

New York Times Magazine, January 3 2010.

AT 4 O’CLOCK each morning, Laura J. Sloate begins her daily reading. She calls a phone service that reads newspapers aloud in a synthetic voice, and she listens to The Wall Street Journal at 300 words a minute, which is nearly twice the average pace of speech. Later, an assistant reads The Financial Times to her while she uses her computer’s text-to-speech system to play The Economist aloud. She devotes one ear to the paper and the other to the magazine. The managing director of a Wall Street investment management firm, Sloate has been blind since age 6, and although she reads constantly, poring over the news and the economic reports for several hours every morning, she does not use Braille. “Knowledge goes from my ears to my brain, not from my finger to my brain,” she says. As a child she learned how the letters of the alphabet sounded, not how they appeared or felt on the page. She doesn’t think of a comma in terms of its written form but rather as “a stop on the way before continuing.” This, she says, is the future of reading for the blind. “Literacy evolves,” she told me. “When Braille was invented, in the 19th century, we had nothing else. We didn’t even have radio. At that time, blindness was a disability. Now it’s just a minor, minor impairment.”

A few decades ago, commentators predicted that the electronic age would create a postliterate generation as new forms of media eclipsed the written word. Marshall McLuhan claimed that Western culture would return to the “tribal and oral pattern.” But the decline of written language has become a reality for only the blind. Although Sloate does regret not spending more time learning to spell in her youth — she writes by dictation — she says she thinks that using Braille would have only isolated her from her sighted peers. “It’s an arcane means of communication, which for the most part should be abolished,” she told me. “It’s just not needed today.”

Braille books are expensive and cumbersome, requiring reams of thick, oversize paper. The National Braille Press, an 83-year-old publishing house in Boston, printed the Harry Potter series on its Heidelberg cylinder; the final product was 56 volumes, each nearly a foot tall. Because a single textbook can cost more than $1,000 and there’s a shortage of Braille teachers in public schools, visually impaired students often read using MP3 players, audiobooks and computer-screen-reading software.

A report released last year by the National Federation of the Blind, an advocacy group with 50,000 members, said that less than 10 percent of the 1.3 million legally blind Americans read Braille. Whereas roughly half of all blind children learned Braille in the 1950s, today that number is as low as 1 in 10, according to the report. The figures are controversial because there is debate about when a child with residual vision has “too much sight” for Braille and because the causes of blindness have changed over the decades — in recent years more blind children have multiple disabilities, because of premature births. It is clear, though, that Braille literacy has been waning for some time, even among the most intellectually capable, and the report has inspired a fervent movement to change the way blind people read. “What we’re finding are students who are very smart, very verbally able — and illiterate,” Jim Marks, a board member for the past five years of the Association on Higher Education and Disability, told me. “We stopped teaching our nation’s blind children how to read and write. We put a tape player, then a computer, on their desks. Now their writing is phonetic and butchered. They never got to learn the beauty and shape and structure of language.”

For much of the past century, blind children attended residential institutions where they learned to read by touching the words. Today, visually impaired children can be well versed in literature without knowing how to read; computer-screen-reading software will even break down each word and read the individual letters aloud. Literacy has become much harder to define, even for educators.

“If all you have in the world is what you hear people say, then your mind is limited,” Darrell Shandrow, who runs a blog called Blind Access Journal, told me. “You need written symbols to organize your mind. If you can’t feel or see the word, what does it mean? The substance is gone.” Like many Braille readers, Shandrow says that new computers, which form a single line of Braille cells at a time, will revive the code of bumps, but these devices are still extremely costly and not yet widely used. Shandrow views the decline in Braille literacy as a sign of regression, not progress: “This is like going back to the 1400s, before Gutenberg’s printing press came on the scene,” he said. “Only the scholars and monks knew how to read and write. And then there were the illiterate masses, the peasants.”

UNTIL THE 19TH CENTURY, blind people were confined to an oral culture. Some tried to read letters carved in wood or wax, formed by wire or outlined in felt with pins. Dissatisfied with such makeshift methods, Louis Braille, a student at the Royal Institute for Blind Youth in Paris, began studying a cipher language of bumps, called night writing, developed by a French Army officer so soldiers could send messages in the dark. Braille modified the code so that it could be read more efficiently — each letter or punctuation symbol is represented by a pattern of one to six dots on a matrix of three rows and two columns — and added abbreviations for commonly used words like “knowledge,” “people” and “Lord.” Endowed with a reliable method of written communication for the first time in history, blind people had a significant rise in social status, and Louis Braille was embraced as a kind of liberator and spiritual savior. With his “godlike courage,” Helen Keller wrote, Braille built a “firm stairway for millions of sense-crippled human beings to climb from hopeless darkness to the Mind Eternal.”

At the time, blindness was viewed not just as the absence of sight but also as a condition that created a separate kind of species, more innocent and malleable, not fully formed. Some scholars said that blind people spoke a different sort of language, disconnected from visual experience. In his 1933 book, “The Blind in School and Society,” the psychologist Thomas Cutsforth, who lost his sight at age 11, warned that students who were too rapidly assimilated into the sighted world would become lost in “verbal unreality.” At some residential schools, teachers avoided words that referenced color or light because, they said, students might stretch the meanings beyond sense. These theories have since been discredited, and studies have shown that blind children as young as 4 understand the difference in meaning between words like “look,” “touch” and “see.” And yet Cutsforth was not entirely misguided in his argument that sensory deprivation restructures the mind. In the 1990s, a series of brain-imaging studies revealed that the visual cortices of the blind are not rendered useless, as previously assumed. When test subjects swept their fingers over a line of Braille, they showed intense activation in the parts of the brain that typically process visual input.

These imaging studies have been cited by some educators as proof that Braille is essential for blind children’s cognitive development, as the visual cortex takes more than 20 percent of the brain. Given the brain’s plasticity, it is difficult to make the argument that one kind of reading — whether the information is absorbed by ear, finger or retina — is inherently better than another, at least with regard to cognitive function. The architecture of the brain is not fixed, and without images to process, the visual cortex can reorganize for new functions. A 2003 study in Nature Neuroscience found that blind subjects consistently surpassed sighted ones on tests of verbal memory, and their superior performance was caused, the authors suggested, by the extra processing that took place in the visual regions of their brains.

Learning to read is so entwined in the normal course of child development that it is easy to assume that our brains are naturally wired for print literacy. But humans have been reading for fewer than 6,000 years (and literacy has been widespread for no more than a century and a half). The activity of reading itself alters the anatomy of the brain. In a report released in 2009 in the journal Nature, the neuroscientist Manuel Carreiras studies illiterate former guerrillas in Colombia who, after years of combat, had abandoned their weapons, left the jungle and rejoined civilization. Carreiras compares 20 adults who had recently completed a literacy program with 22 people who had not yet begun it. In M.R.I. scans of their brains, the newly literate subjects showed more gray matter in their angular gyri, an area crucial for language processing, and more white matter in part of the corpus callosum, which links the two hemispheres. Deficiencies in these regions were previously observed in dyslexics, and the study suggests that those brain patterns weren’t the cause of their illiteracy, as had been hypothesized, but a result.

There is no doubt that literacy changes brain circuitry, but how this reorganization affects our capacity for language is still a matter of debate. In moving from written to spoken language, the greatest consequences for blind people may not be cognitive but cultural — a loss much harder to avoid. In one of the few studies of blind people’s prose, Doug Brent, a professor of communication at the University of Calgary, and his wife, Diana Brent, a teacher of visually impaired students, analyzed stories by students who didn’t use Braille but rather composed on a regular keyboard and edited by listening to their words played aloud. One 16-year-old wrote a fictional story about a character named Mark who had “sleep bombs”:

He looked in the house windo that was his da windo his dad was walking around with a mask on he took it off he opend the windo and fell on his bed sleeping mark took two bombs and tosed them in the windo the popt his dad lept up but before he could grab the mask it explodedhe fell down asleep.

In describing this story and others like it, the Brents invoked the literary scholar Walter Ong, who argued that members of literate societies think differently than members of oral societies. The act of writing, Ong said — the ability to revisit your ideas and, in the process, refine them — transformed the shape of thought. The Brents characterized the writing of many audio-only readers as disorganized, “as if all of their ideas are crammed into a container, shaken and thrown randomly onto a sheet of paper like dice onto a table.” The beginnings and endings of sentences seem arbitrary, one thought emerging in the midst of another with a kind of breathless energy. The authors concluded, “It just doesn’t seem to reflect the qualities of organized sequence and complex thought that we value in a literate society.”

OUR DEFINITION of a literate society inevitably shifts as our tools for reading and writing evolve, but the brief history of literacy for blind people makes the prospect of change particularly fraught. Since the 1820s, when Louis Braille invented his writing system — so that blind people would no longer be “despised or patronized by condescending sighted people,” as he put it — there has always been, among blind people, a political and even moral dimension to learning to read. Braille is viewed by many as a mark of independence, a sign that blind people have moved away from an oral culture seen as primitive and isolating. In recent years, however, this narrative has been complicated. Schoolchildren in developed countries, like the U.S. and Britain, are now thought to have lower Braille literacy than those in developing ones, like Indonesia and Botswana, where there are few alternatives to Braille. Tim Connell, the managing director of an assistive-technology company in Australia, told me that he has heard this described as “one of the advantages of being poor.”

Braille readers do not deny that new reading technology has been transformative, but Braille looms so large in the mythology of blindness that it has assumed a kind of talismanic status. Those who have residual vision and still try to read print — very slowly or by holding the page an inch or two from their faces — are generally frowned upon by the National Federation of the Blind, which fashions itself as the leader of a civil rights movement for the blind. Its president, Marc Maurer, a voracious reader, compares Louis Braille to Abraham Lincoln. At the annual convention for the federation, held at a Detroit Marriott last July, I heard the mantra “listening is not literacy” repeated everywhere, from panels on the Braille crisis to conversations among middle-school girls. Horror stories circulating around the convention featured children who don’t know what a paragraph is or why we capitalize letters or that “happily ever after” is made up of three separate words.

Declaring your own illiteracy seemed to be a rite of passage. A vice president of the federation, Fredric Schroeder, served as commissioner of the Rehabilitation Services Administration under President Clinton and relies primarily on audio technologies. He was openly repentant about his lack of reading skills. “I am now over 50 years old, and it wasn’t until two months ago that I realized that ‘dissent,’ to disagree, is different than ‘descent,’ to lower something,” he told me. “I’m functionally illiterate. People say, ‘Oh, no, you’re not.’ Yes, I am. I’m sorry about it, but I’m not embarrassed to admit it.”

While people like Laura Sloate or the governor of New York, David A. Paterson, who also reads by listening, may be able to achieve without the help of Braille, their success requires accommodations that many cannot afford. Like Sloate, Paterson dictates his memos, and his staff members select pertinent newspaper articles for him and read them aloud on his voice mail every morning. (He calls himself “overassimilated” and told me that as a child he was “mainstreamed so much that I psychologically got the message that I’m not really supposed to be blind.”) Among people with fewer resources, Braille-readers tend to form the blind elite, in part because it is more plausible for a blind person to find work doing intellectual rather than manual labor.

A 1996 study showed that of a sample of visually impaired adults, those who learned Braille as children were more than twice as likely to be employed as those who had not. At the convention this statistic was frequently cited with pride, so much so that those who didn’t know Braille were sometimes made to feel like outsiders. “There is definitely a sense of peer pressure from the older guard,” James Brown, a 35-year-old who reads using text-to-speech software, told me. “If we could live in our own little Braille world, then that’d be perfect,” he added. “But we live in a visual world.”

When deaf people began getting cochlear implants in the late 1980s, many in the deaf community felt betrayed. The new technology pushed people to think of the disability in a new way — as an identity and a culture. Technology has changed the nature of many disabilities, lifting the burdens but also complicating people’s sense of what is physically natural, because bodies can so often be tweaked until “fixed.” Arielle Silverman, a graduate student at the convention who has been blind since birth, told me that if she had the choice to have vision, she was not sure she would take it. Recently she purchased a pocket-size reading machine that takes photographs of text and then reads the words aloud, and she said she thought of vision like that, as “just another piece of technology.”

The modern history of blind people is in many ways a history of reading, with the scope of the disability — the extent to which you are viewed as ignorant or civilized, helpless or independent — determined largely by your ability to access the printed word. For 150 years, Braille books were designed to function as much as possible like print books. But now the computer has essentially done away with the limits of form, because information, once it has been digitized, can be conveyed through sound or touch. For sighted people, the transition from print to digital text has been relatively subtle, but for many blind people the shift to computerized speech is an unwelcome and uncharted experiment. In grappling with what has been lost, several federation members recited to me various takes on the classic expression Scripta manent, verba volant: What is written remains, what is spoken vanishes into air.

Rachel Aviv is a Rosalynn Carter fellow for mental-health journalism with the Carter Center and writes frequently on education for The Times.

Speak as Little as Possible

The Nation, Sept 2009

Clarice Lispector doted on the ugly, dull and superfluous. Over the course of her fifty years as a novelist, her characters became less intelligent. She began with self-conscious and lonely heroines and moved on to less pensive creatures: dogs, chickens, cockroaches and the smallest woman in the world. The triumph of her career is a dimwitted virgin named Macabéa, who subsists on hot dogs. Macabéa’s “story is so banal that I can scarcely bear to go on writing,” Lispector notes in her finest book, The Hour of the Star, published a few months before her death in 1977. Macabéa works as a typist in Rio de Janeiro but knows the meaning of few of the words she commits to the page. She sleeps in cheap cotton underwear, with her mouth wide open, and then rushes to work in the morning, smiling dumbly at everyone she passes. Her few moments of leisure are spent drinking Coca-Cola–a refreshment she adores “with servility and subservience”–and watching horror films in which women get shot in the heart.

Lispector was fascinated by the possibility of extinguishing self-consciousness; she idealized animals and idiots because they were free of the desire to translate their experiences into words. Macabéa is the perfect fool, whose life has been reduced to a “tiny essential flame”: she does nothing more than exist, without wondering why. Then she gets hit by a car and dies. The novella’s drama derives not from Macabéa’s pitiful story but from Lispector’s struggle to render in full a life so mundane. “I feel so nervous about writing,” she admits, “that I might explode into a fit of uncontrollable laughter.”

Unlike writers who make a game of their creative angst, Lispector appeared as if at any moment she might stop midsentence and abandon her typewriter. She was forbiddingly quiet–fans called her “the sacred monster” and “the great witch of Brazilian literature”–and she worried that her penchant for writing had become a pointless tic, a way to stave off loneliness. In Why This World, the first English-language biography of Lispector’s life, Benjamin Moser describes a surprisingly tedious adulthood oriented almost entirely around writing. Lispector wrote to escape from herself, as if by spilling enough words onto the page she could slake the need for self-expression, an impulse she deemed gross and irresponsible.

Moser, a book critic at Harper’s Magazine, thinks that Lispector took less pride in her writing than in her looks, a theory she would have likely appreciated. She had long limbs, a sullen feline face and pouty lips. She applied makeup meticulously. Gregory Rabassa, one of her English-language translators, remarked that he was “astonished to meet that rare person who looked like Marlene Dietrich and wrote like Virginia Woolf.” Even Elizabeth Bishop, who translated several of Lispector’s stories, seemed seduced by the writer, calling her “better than J.L. Borges.” When Bishop was living in Rio de Janeiro in the early 1960s, she confided to Robert Lowell that the two were getting to be “friends”–she used quotation marks–but the relationship never took off. In the end, Bishop found Lispector “very coy & complicated” as well as hopelessly shy and indolent.

Moser, too, seems to want to get closer to Lispector than she allows. Despite the wealth of revealing anecdotes he summons, Lispector still feels out of his reach, almost unreal. Moser argues that Lispector moved closer to God with each book, and he calls her body of work, which is explicitly self-referential, “perhaps the greatest spiritual autobiography of the twentieth century.” He often returns to the fact that Lispector was born in Chechelnik, Ukraine, a town with a tradition of mystics dating to the eighteenth century. Though her family immigrated to Brazil when she was a year old and she later proudly claimed that she never set foot in Eastern Europe (as an infant, she was carried), Moser writes that Lispector resembled the saints of her homeland–the Hasidic zaddikim, “bearers of that irrational something”–and that, like other Jews, she “sought the eternal amid crisis and exile.” Moser is not the first to call her a Jewish mystic (she has also been dubbed a Christian mystic and a “mystical atheist”), but the claim is difficult to sustain across a full-length biography. Lispector did not read Jewish holy texts, nor did she pray. One of her few known public references to her religion was to correct “this nonsense about the Jews being God’s chosen people. That’s ridiculous.”

In Moser’s hands, Lispector is most “mystical” when she describes her longing for silence and her belief that she could never express in words what she called her “truest life.” She was obsessed by the inaccuracy and dullness of language: it dooms us to become common, to repeat what others have already said. In her ability to bring these anxieties to life, Lispector is more terrifying than Samuel Beckett. By placing her in a religious lineage, Moser pushes beyond a more conventional reading of Lispector as a Modernist, but he also privileges the least impressive part of her work. Lispector was willfully enigmatic and flirtatious when she alluded to the divine (which she does far more frequently in her novels than in her short stories), and she treats God as a kind of intellectual exotica. She seemed to admire the idea of faith in part because she found it impossible. “I don’t know what it is I’m calling God, but it can be called that,” she allowed. It is never quite clear that it is God she is seeking, as Moser suggests, nor is it evident how she could have been a “mystic.” Moser wants the word to encompass so much that it loses its meaning. It seems to describe less a belief system than a species of women: pained and introspective, prone to silence, hunger and self-loathing.

If Lispector was truly a mystic, she would have renounced the medium she found so degraded and degrading. But she was unable to stop writing. In addition to her short stories and novels, she supported herself by writing perky crônicas, newspaper columns that focused on women’s issues like gift-giving and cosmetics. Her aversion to language seems to have derived as much from principle–the conviction that silence is truer than speech–as from anxiety. An insomniac, she took sleeping pills even for her afternoon naps. She rarely left her home and endured social engagements only in pain. In a column she described partygoing as a “dangerous sport.” The goal: to avoid faux pas. Who will make the mistake? Who will destroy the meal? Rather than wait and see, Lispector was said to ruin dinner parties by leaving a few minutes after arriving. When asked by an interviewer to describe the role of the Brazilian novelist, she replied, “To speak as little as possible.”

Lispector’s birth in 1920 was supposed to have caused a miracle. Her mother had contracted syphilis after being raped (before getting pregnant) by a gang of Russian soldiers. It was thought that having a child might cure her, but her health only deteriorated after the birth of Chaya. By the time of the move to Brazil (at which point Chaya’s name was changed to Clarice), the illness had left her paralyzed and mute; she sat inert in her rocking chair while the rest of her family began new lives.

In her early 20s, Clarice Lispector abandoned the Judaism of her youth, in part because she felt the religion had failed her. Despite her childhood prayers, her parents died young and without dignity (her father was killed in a botched gallbladder operation). Lispector almost never talked about her past or homeland, and she claimed it had left no trace on her; she hired a speech therapist to tame her lingering Russian accent. At 22 she was naturalized as a Brazilian citizen–in her formal request to the government, she described herself as someone who feels “in no way connected to the country [I] came from”–and married a Brazilian diplomat, Maury Gurgel Valente, with whom she never seemed particularly impressed. She followed him unhappily to posts throughout Europe and the United States for sixteen years. Her first novel, Near to the Wild Heart, which she published to great acclaim at 23, is a coming-of-age tale about a cold and selfish woman suffering through a loveless marriage and unaware of her effect on her husband. “She is never actively malicious,” Moser explains. “She simply inhabits another world, beyond good and evil, like a pet uncomprehendingly shitting on the carpet.”

Much of Brazilian literature until that time had been patriotic and sweeping in scope–Machado de Assis wrote that Brazilian poems and novels always “dress themselves in the colors of the country”–and Lispector’s strange, lyrical syntax and introspective style was heralded as a much-needed break in tradition. Reviewers in Rio and São Paulo compared Lispector to Joyce, Proust and Woolf, none of whose novels she had read. (As an adult, she read few modern novels.) She said the word “literature” made her “bristle like a cat,” and she wasn’t concerned about whether she was following or abandoning a literary tradition. Still, she shared with contemporaries like Woolf a suspicion of language, a sense of deep alienation and a fear of madness that led to heightened self-consciousness. Perhaps a difference in vocabulary, more than subject matter, explains Moser’s tendency to classify Lispector as a mystic. Woolf, too, imagined the possibility of a world where language would regain sublime intensity and meaning. But she was an intellectual and didn’t dare use words like “salvation” or “God.” She dismissed mysticism as embarrassing and silly, attributing the impulse to “lack of a good head.”

Lispector had less regard for social norms, and she seemed to give up on the idea of herself as a social creature when she finally left her husband, whose constant presence she had found unnatural and invasive, in 1959. She returned to Rio and became increasingly solitary and alienated from other writers and even old friends. Her writing has the quality of a woman who talks to herself: circular and fragmented and uncomfortably personal. Her characters rarely speak (and don’t even move much), but they are constantly exhausting themselves by thinking. In one of her most disturbing stories, “The Imitation of the Rose,” Lispector chronicles a young woman’s excruciating decision to send a friend flowers. While preparing for dinner, the story’s heroine, Laura, is struck by the sight of a bouquet of roses in her apartment. “Really, I have never seen such pretty roses,” she thinks. “How lovely they are!” She tries to assure herself that, by gazing at these flowers, she is having a pleasurable experience. When that fails, she decides to send the bouquet to her friend. With nervous glee, she imagines a scenario in which her friend refuses the gift and Laura modestly and appropriately insists. “What exactly would she say? It was important not to forget.” She rehearses the scene until she finds the perfect remark: “It is because the roses are so lovely that I felt the impulse to give them to you!” As soon as she tells her maid to deliver the roses, though, she is devastated by the loss. She never meant to give them away; she simply got carried away by the cascade of well-constructed phrases.

Laura’s need to fashion every flicker of a thought into a proper sentence is comically familiar–we all bore ourselves by narrating our lives in this way–but Lispector focuses so closely on the habit that it appears compulsive and sick. She transcribes Laura’s thoughts before they can even be called that. If there is a spiritual dimension to Lispector’s writing, it is her effort to eradicate that inner voice: to hold on to a sensation before it is transformed into a phrase. And yet she recognized that to live without language–to stop calling things “salty or sweet, sad or happy or painful”–would be dangerous. “I do not believe the state of grace should be bestowed on us too often,” she wrote in one of her crônicas. “Otherwise we might pass forever on to the other side of life, which is also real but no one would understand us any more.”

Lispector may have been speaking from experience. She was unnerved by the precocity of her first son, Pedro, who as a young boy picked up his foreign nanny’s language in only a week. Soon he could no longer communicate with other children his age. He strung together nonsensical words or thought so hard about what he wanted to say that he said nothing at all. He was consumed by the ambiguities and inadequacies of language, but his anxiety did not take the form of “mysticism.” He was eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia. He had passed to the other side of life. As an adult, he would follow Lispector around the house calling out unceasingly: Mother, Mother, Mother! Lispector was terrified by this kind of linguistic alienation even as she inched toward it herself. She shared her son’s suspicion of the arbitrary link between the sound of a word and its meaning. She fantasized about discovering some authentic means of expression, but instead she clung to the one she had. Writing was salvation in the most literal sense, and she could never do without it. She called herself an “audacious coward.”

Lispector’s fifth novel, The Passion According to G.H., begins as a seemingly dainty tale: a well-dressed, sophisticated lady sees a cockroach in the maid’s quarters of her apartment and is overwhelmed by fear. She tries to crush it but is too repulsed to follow through. We expect her to get on with her day, but she can’t take her eyes off the insect. A bit of the cockroach’s back is missing, and she examines the creature on her hands and knees, inching closer and closer, until finally–daring herself to overcome her revulsion–she scoops up some puss from the cockroach’s back and puts it in her mouth.

“Oh God, I felt baptized by the world,” cries the narrator, G.H. “I had finally performed the lowest of all acts.” There are no words to describe the taste of the cockroach’s secretions, and she feels she has escaped the burden of her consciousness. Of all of Lispector’s books, The Passion According to G.H. comes closest to a mystical text, and yet a shade of irony hangs over the novel. G.H. is constantly undermining the drama of the story by stepping outside it. She’ll eat the cockroach, but tomorrow, she tells us in a parenthetical note, she’ll be so relieved to have accomplished this feat that she’ll put on a new dress and go dancing at the Top-Bambino, a nightclub, and flirt and eat shrimp.

Even in her most radical moments, Lispector can never abandon language or self-consciousness. Her characters may achieve a kind of wordless purity, but as a “mystic” she always fails. Opinions and insecurities come rushing in from outside the fiction, and the author seems to be hovering over the page, drawing attention to herself. G.H.’s revelation seems forced and inauthentic because she is never able to find the words to convey what happened–only that it was something wild, transgressive and profound. Lispector is far more persuasive in her portrayal of pathology than in imagining its resolution, perhaps because she wrote best from personal experience. She craved freedom from her hyperactive consciousness, but she never achieved it. When her characters reach this state of grace, it feels contrived, an obvious fiction.

Lispector makes a difficult, often lurid subject, and Moser’s account of her life is riveting–he draws extensively on previously untranslated letters and criticism (he does the translations himself, from Yiddish, German, French and Portuguese); at times the book reads like a gothic horror story. But he seems to take Lispector’s religious inclinations too earnestly, portraying her anxieties about writing and self-expression as exotic, cosmic and timeless. “Few great modern artists are quite as fundamentally unfamiliar,” he writes. “How can a person who lived in a large Western city in the middle of the twentieth century, who gave interviews, lived in high-rise apartments, and traveled by air, remain so enigmatic?” Because Lispector is a modern woman whose life revolved around the articulation of thoughts, Moser assumes she will somehow be understandable, knowable. And when she is not, it is because she is mystical. By portraying her as a spiritual figure, he turns her life into a mystery that can be solved.

But it is hard to imagine Lispector ever considering herself a “saint,” particularly a Jewish one. She longed to believe but couldn’t, and her best stories dramatize the moment when her characters collide with the limits of what they can understand. They make “terrifying contact with the fabric of life,” and they are reminded of their own helplessness and obedience, their inability to comprehend. They suffer without ever learning from their misfortunes. In one tale, a chicken escapes from its cage, only to be captured and slaughtered for dinner. In another, a young teacher hears two men talking in pig Latin about how they want to rape her. Instead of waiting to be attacked, the woman unbuttons her blouse, exposes her breasts and pretends to be a prostitute. The men immediately lose interest and rape the next girl who steps on the train. And yet the woman longs for what should have been hers. “Fate is implacable,” she thinks: “Atefay siay placableimay.” Pig Latin is the language of superfluousness, born purely from the desire to use words, make noise–regardless of what that noise means. Lispector may have understood all of language in roughly these terms. To create meaning when there is none, to string together a story out of chaos, is the impulse Lispector finds most distasteful and hardest to resist.

Lispector was always haunted by the memory of her mother’s affliction, which could not be rationalized or mitigated with any amount of storytelling. (Did that brittle shell of a woman inspire Lispector’s fondness for cockroaches?) “Something deep down tells me that we are all semi-paralyzed,” she wrote in one of her crônicas. “And we die without so much as an explanation. And worst of all–we live without so much as an explanation.” Lispector once complained of the “intolerable burden of not being a plant.” The world is empty, she knew, but it had gone on for so long, with so little reason, that there must be something sacred in submitting, like a plant, to its rhythms.

In her later years, Lispector underwent her own version of paralysis, as she became increasingly withdrawn, taciturn and needy; she was dependent on a close female friend, who served as a kind of personal secretary, assistant and nurse. When Lispector was 47 she fell asleep while smoking in bed and awoke with her room in flames, her nightgown melted to her body. It was a tragicomic end to a life of such beauty. For the rest of her years, her body was scarred and her right hand deformed.

After the fire, she mostly stayed indoors. She felt it was in bad taste to be seen outside with an aged body and flesh that was wrinkled and loose and thick; it disrupted the city’s symmetry. She hired an aesthetician to come once a month and apply permanent makeup to her face and fake lashes to her eyes. By the time she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, at 56, she had been waiting for death for many years. Dying was seductive, a direct confrontation with an unknown so enormous it could never be captured in words. In one of her last interviews, given a year before she died, a television journalist asked if she felt “born and refreshed” each time she wrote a new work. The reporter must have wanted her to provide a cheerful narrative about her writing process, but her response was impassive and casually nonsensical. She never could commit to this kind of tale. “For now I’m dead. We’ll see if I can be born again. For now I’m dead,” she repeated. “I’m speaking from my tomb.”

Rachel Aviv is a Rosalynn Carter Fellow in mental health journalism at the Carter Center.

Exit to Eden

N+1 Book Review, March 2009

Anne Rice. Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt. Knopf. November 2005.
Anne Rice. Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana. Knopf. March 2008.
Anne Rice. Called out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession. Knopf. October 2008.

Anne Rice wrote Interview With a Vampire, one of the best-selling books in history, shortly after the death of her 5-year-old daughter. Rice’s Catholic faith had been waning since college, but the loss of her child destroyed whatever remained. In earnest and terrified prose, the novel dramatizes her plunge into atheism. Rice’s dead daughter takes form in the novel as an immortal child named Claudia who has blond curls, a doll face, and fangs. Stranded in prepubescence, she can never have sex and has purged herself of all sentimental beliefs. She is the youngest of an order of vampires who know “the most fantastical truth of all: that there is no meaning to any of this!”

Rice’s vampires do not understand why they have been granted eternal life, a gift that strikes them as both horrifying and ridiculous. Claudia and her vampire caretaker, Louis (whom Rice says was loosely modeled on her husband), travel from New Orleans to Transylvania to Paris to meet the oldest vampire in the world. But when Louis, the book’s narrator, demands a history of the vampire’s origins, his mere mention of a higher, spiritual realm becomes a source of embarrassment.

“Then God does not exist … you have no knowledge of His existence?”
“None,” he said.
“No knowledge!” I said it again, unafraid of my simplicity, my miserable human pain.
“None.”
I stared at him, astonished.

Rice has sold nearly one hundred million books, and she built her career on heartbroken—and later, cavalier—expressions of this revelation. Nearly all of her twelve novels about vampires include a version of this event: the vampire searches for a wise, old creature who will render his life intelligible. “There is no God, is there?” he stammers. The answer is always no.

As if to fortify her characters against this void, Rice endowed the vampires with new, magical powers with each successive book. They became increasingly protean and god-like: They learned to fly, read mortals’ minds, travel through time and space, and rise from their bodies, releasing their spirits through vibrations in their heads. They cease sleeping in coffins and even learn to endure the glare of the sun. But these tricks lead them no closer to what Rice has described as the “Golden Moment,” the instant when “everything made sense.” Their only consolation is that their disenchantment was universal. “This is the spirit of your age,” the oldest vampire in the world told Louis in Interview. “Everyone feels as you do. Your fall from grace and faith has been the fall of a century.”

Rice wrote these lines in 1976. In the decades that followed, she herself came to embody this spirit of the graceless century. Domesticating her gloom, Rice became what her readers wanted her to be: the so-called “queen of the damned.” Every fall, she threw a massive Halloween ball at her New Orleans mansion, a converted Catholic orphanage. Readers from across the country arrived with their faces painted white and plastic teeth glued to their necks. Rice greeted them seated atop a gravestone in her front yard. Her young son, Christopher, now a best-selling author of thrillers, provided tours of her collection of more than 400 dolls.

Rice’s tales were embraced as allegories for gay life: alienated and often genderless, her vampires were initiated into a secret subculture in which they could finally be free. They perpetuated their species by sucking the blood of mortals—a tender interaction that left them trembling with arousal. They exuded a kind of Victorian anxiety about their own physical desires, which made the murder scenes all the more seductive. Readers from any subculture where sex was problematic—and in America this was not only teenagers, Catholics, and gays, but also everyone else—could find solace in the sex-substitute that Rice was offering.

As the years went on, however, Rice’s writing became sensuous to the point of tedium. Her later novels read like self-parody. Her vampires begin to resemble ancient vegetation gods who’ve learned to say “yo” and use e-mail. Cursed with eternal life, they flit around the globe, boring themselves and their readers.

Rice herself began to tire of the damned. She was no longer interested in a world that was cold and dark and unfathomable. Unable to invent a convincing alternative spiritual universe, she gradually returned to the beliefs of her childhood. Her novels, although still pulpy, moved away from the underworld and featured ghosts and spirits. “I saw it as a progression on the ladder of my heroes, that I would now deal with the ghost,” she explained in a 1996 interview with the scholar Michael Riley. “I had dealt with vampires. I had even dealt with the mummy; and I wanted to go into a supernatural persona that didn’t necessarily have a body.”

Four years ago after writing twenty-one books about vampires, witches, mummies, psychic humans, and pleasure slaves (there were five books of erotica, under pseudonyms), she progressed one step further on the ladder of heroes. She announced that she was abandoning her vampires. From now on, all her books would be for and about “the ultimate outsider, the ultimate immortal of all”: Jesus Christ.

+ + +

Growing up in New Orleans, Rice believed that “all was right with the world. The world made sense. God made us and God loved us,” she writes in her 2008 memoir, Called Out of Darkness. She went to a conservative Catholic girls school and attended mass every Sunday at a local chapel. (Later, she purchased the building, “as it had tremendous meaning for me.”) When she was eight, she fell in love with the story of Saint Teresa of Avila and decided she wanted to be a Carmelite nun. With the help of her father, she turned her three-by-five-foot bathroom into an oratory, where she would spend hours kneeling and praying. Even as a child, she was transfixed by the erotic power of Jesus’ crucifixion; she liked to imagine him splayed on the cross, his body drained of life.

It wasn’t until she discovered existential philosophy at San Francisco State College in the early ’60s—she enjoyed slipping on long, black gloves to enhance her reading of Sartre—that she was tempted away from the Church. Most of her friends were intellectuals, and she decided that she should become one, too. But she quickly bored of “the fiction of alienation and cleverness” popular among her peers at the time. Her intently sober stories would suddenly erupt into perverse or magical scenes. Her husband, the poet and painter Stan Rice, told her to abandon realistic fiction because she was an “imaginativist.” She had an appetite for spectacle that she couldn’t quite squelch. “Modernism had supposedly killed the well-plotted novel,” she writes in her memoir Called Out of Darkness. “It had supposedly killed the hero. Well, not for me. I didn’t even really know what modernism was.”

When her daughter died of leukemia in 1972, she and her husband sank into a two-year-long alcohol binge—what Rice called their “Scott and Zelda period.” As Katherine Ramsland describes it in her 1991 biography, Prism of the Night, Rice emerged from this phase as another hapless housewife who entertains dreams of becoming a Writer. Dutifully, she attended workshops composed of married women who were rightly skeptical of one another’s work. Her workshopmates scorned Rice’s gaudy style. It was too “rococo.” After learning that she had sold her first book, Interview with a Vampire, for $12,000, she called her friends to share the good news, only to find they were not as cheered as she’d expected.

As it turned out, the novel appealed to an unusual cross-section of readers who believed that reading Rice was a mark of cultural protest. It created a mainstream by convincing its readers that they were outside it. Rice’s most visible fans were goth teenagers and gay men, although there were plenty of housewives too. “Countless times people out of the mass audience havecome up to me and said, ‘Yours are the only books I can read,’” Ricewrites in her memoir. “Others have said, ‘Yours are the only novels I’ve ever read.’ Still others have said, ‘Your novels started me reading. After I read you, I read everything. But before that I never read at all.’”

Rice had such faith in her creative process that she engaged in a kind of automatic-writing: in her memoir, she claims that she can write five times faster than she reads. She viewed every novel as a dare. With each, she reached for something forbidden—a new unknown. When readers criticized her chaotic and bloated style—the novels were tangled with flowery descriptions of everything from upholstery to a young child’s puckered, wet lips—she saw it as a mark of their intellectual limitations. In the first chapter of Blood Canticle, her last book about vampires, she scolded her readers for being careless and disloyal. “Oh, you bought the book, I’m not complaining about that,” she writes of her previous book, Memnoch The Devil,which had a million-copy first print. “But did you embrace it? Did you understand it? Did you read it twice? Did you believe it?” She anticipated that her readers would be similarly disappointed with the overstuffed book in their hands: “Go ahead, throw this book away. Cast me out of your intellectual orbit. Throw me out of your backpack. Pitch me in the airport trash bin. Leave me on a bench in Central Park!”

Throughout Blood Canticle, Rice repeatedly chafed against the boundaries of the fictional universe she had created. She invested her hero, the vampire Lestat—formerly an angry and hedonistic rock star—with the burgeoning desire to be a saint: to achieve “peace, the certainty of the sublime, the irresistible joy of faith, the cessation of all pain, the profound abolition of meaninglessness.” She realized that her readers did not want a meditation on the power of goodness. “Don’t worry we’ll snap back in less than five minutes! … I’m almost ready to pick up the conventional frame of this book.” She repeatedly burst outside the bounds of the novel before reigning herself in: “TIME TO TELL YOU WHAT HAPPENED AND SO I DO.” Her tone wasthat of a confused and frantic adolescent, testing the limits of her own control. “Okay, enough about Merrick,” she wrote of one character.”But keep her in mind, because she will definitely be referred to later. Who knows? Maybe I’ll just bring her up anytime I feel like it. Who’s in charge of this book anyway?”

+ + +

In the mid-’90s, Rice felt she was being pursued by the Lord. At first she told herself she was just “fulfilling childhood fantasies.” She began reading books about Jesus, but, again, reminded herself it was merely a hobby. “I was just ‘interested in Jesus,’ because Jesus was an extremely interesting man,” she explains in Called Out of Darkness.She says she didn’t even know the name of the pope. But in the ensuing years, during which she visited her childhood church and read classics of Christian philosophy, she found a “kind of delirium, a kind of joy” in surrendering to the religion she had resisted so long. “There was the sense, profound and wordless, that if He knew everything I did not have to know everything. In this great novel that was His creation, He knew every plot, every character, every action, every voice, every syllable, and every jot of ink.”

The image of God as a novelist, controlling time, love, and death, is by no means a new one. His omniscience is total and exhilarating. “If there were a God,” Nietzsche wrote, “I could not endure not being He.” Rice, too, seems seduced by the promise of getting inside His mind. In 2005, she published her first book about Jesus, Christ, the Lord: Out of Egypt, written in the first person. In a letter slipped into review copies of the novel, she reassured her readers that her books would make people believe in Christ just as they made readers believe in vampires. “In humility,” she explains, “I have attempted something transformative which we writers dare to call a miracle in the imperfect human idiom we possess.”

In her attempt to tell her first “true” story—cobbled together from details in the Gospel and apocryphal books—Rice resists spectacle, as if newly fearful of her own artistry. The book chronicles Jesus, Mary, and Joseph’s journey to Israel, and it is taut, polite, and numbingly monotonous. Having decided to enter the Lord’s waking consciousness, Rice is perpetually putting Him to sleep. For much of the book, the central narrative event appears to be Jesus’ overpowering need to rest. Rice offers an astonishing amount of detail about the various positions and places in which He nods off, and how He feels when He wakes up. He begins and ends many chapters unconscious. It’s as if Rice is incapable of rousing Jesus from the world of dream and myth into everyday life. She is still outside of him, watching without comprehending.

For Rice, Modernism couldn’t kill the well-plotted novel, but Jesus can. In Christ, The Lord: The Road to Cana, she is content to merely note the passing of days: “And so the next day went. And the next day. And the day after.” Although she does indulge herself with a brief romantic interlude—a peasant girl falls for Jesus; he must say no—much of the novel is concerned with Jesus’ dawning understanding of his place in the universe. When a friend asks Jesus (whom Rice calls Yeshua) if the stories circling around Him are true, He shyly admits that He knows the secrets of his origin. The exchange resembles the conversation between Louis and the oldest vampire in the world, only this time it ends very differently.

“Do you yourself believe these stories?” [Jason] asked. “Tell me; tell me before I go out of my mind.”
I didn’t answer.
“Yeshua,” he pleaded.
“Yes, I believe in them,” I said.
He stared at me expectantly for the longest time.

By answering yes, Rice lets Jesus do her work for her. He silences the skeptical reader who sees the book as a fantasy, a fiction. She no longer has to contend with her readers’ ornery demands on her plot. She can put to rest her anxious questions: “Did you embrace it? … Did you believe it?”

Although Rice speaks passionately of her own religious awakening, it is hard not to wonder whether her return to Christ was as much a spiritual decision as an aesthetic one. Throughout her career, she worried that her outlandish characters were confining her to second-rate genres. “Only in our time,” Rice told Newsweek in 1990, “is Gothic fiction associated with low-level writers like H. P. Lovecraft. I mean, I love him, but he’s a hack.” In her 1992 The Tale of the Body Thief, a novel about body-swapping, the vampire Lestat is stalked by a stranger who hands him Xeroxed copies of Lovecraft tales and other horror stories. When Lestat sees the man approaching with a “small thick wad of pulp pages, stapled together,” he is filled with revulsion and tries to run away. Lestat is desperate to avoid being placed in this lineage of heroes.

Rice, too, tried to escape her genre, even as she recycled the same basic plot line: a lonely, immortal creature attempts to comprehend the secrets of the universe. But while the vampire novels had an anxious force, the Christ books feel bland and lifeless. Rice does not work to make her vision feel true. She spent her career searching for “a moment of exploding truth,” a “powerful core of meaning” she called It. She wrote best when she was fanatical. But, in her attempt to preserve her intensity, she has abnegated theforces that led her to become a cultural icon. In ceaselessly searching for a force larger than herself, she has relinquished her own authority as a novelist: the It has taken over. The story’s message is out of her control. “If this path to God is an illusion,” she admits in her memoir, “then the story is worthless.”

Hobson’s Choice

Psychoanalysis turns all psychiatrists into literature critics; what does it do to neuroscientists studying the brain during dreams?

The Believer, October 2007

Early this year, Allan Hobson, a recently retired Harvard psychiatry professor, was on his Vermont dairy farm preparing to open a dream museum. His barn, which until recently held more than forty cows, now contained a small, glass-enclosed bedroom at its center. Two dummies lay under the covers. Their faces were made of plaster—one molded from Hobson’s head and the other from his wife’s. Beside the bed was a preserved brain in a jar and X-rays of Hobson’s own skull.

Hobson has arguably been the dominant scientist in dream research for the past thirty years. He decided to open the museum when his Boston neurophysiology lab shut down (the whole hospital relocated) and he no longer had a place to showcase his favorite belongings. Several of the items come from his 1977 traveling science exhibit, Dreamstage, which attracted some thirty thousand visitors and popularized his theory that dreams are the result of random neural firings. In the original show, a volunteer slept in the glass bedroom while his brain waves and muscle twitches were projected onto a wall with laser lights.

For many years, there were often just two scientists represented in Intro to Psychology textbooks: Hobson and Freud. Hobson cultivates his reputation as the “Anti-Freud”—he’s even published an essay in which he pretends to be Freud congratulating Hobson on his work. Only recently have scientists begun challenging Hobson’s sweeping dismissal of psychoanalysis with actual neuroscience. His success (people called his lab the “Dream Team”) is due in part to his charisma and PR skills. He speaks with sanguine authority, announcing that he will save psychiatry, that we must objectify the subjective, that psychoanalytic theory makes us lazy babies: “It’s too comforting, like the Bible. It makes you brain-dead.”

Hobson has pale blue eyes, a few white tufts of hair, and an air of worn, preppy polish. One cheek droops slightly from a recent stroke. As he moves through the museum, he addresses the “fundamental problem” of whatever he’s discussing and tends to trail off into a series of knowing “blah blah blah blah”s when he feels he’s made his argument clear. On the walls is a narrative of the dreaming brain with large illustrations, designed to appeal to schoolchildren. He wants students to come here and know they have brains, “not minds floating up in the air like clouds.” He leans in close to an image of cilia magnified to the point where they appear edible. “It looks like a tidal pool,” he says. “Or maybe an ovary.”

Despite his distaste for Freud, Hobson is happy to divulge his own feelings, particularly sexual ones. He’s kept a dream journal for the past forty years, in which he freely analyzes his cravings, territorial problems, and preoccupation with being bigger, smarter, and more powerful. He began his training with a firm belief in psychoanalysis (he wrote his undergraduate thesis on Freud and Dostoyevsky), but about a year into Harvard Medical School he became frustrated by the scientific flimsiness of ideas he had once accepted as truth. “I was seduced,” he says. “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.”

In the early ’70s, while planting microelectrodes on the brain stems of cats, he formed his widely cited Activation-Synthesis theory and broadened its implications, perhaps unduly, to disprove Freud’s claim that dreams are caused by unconscious, often sinister desires. He and his Harvard colleague Robert McCarley proposed that dreams are strange and fragmented not because secret urges are being censored, as Freud claimed, but because the brain is in a naturally chaotic state. During REM sleep, the phase most ripe for dreaming, the brain stem sends random signals up to parts of the forebrain that control emotions, movement, vision, and hearing, and these higher brain centers patch together a story out of the electrical input. Hobson accused psychoanalysts of reading dreams as pieces of literature and creating narratives when there weren’t any. (“I’m more interested in their grammar,” he says.) The media quickly picked up on his theories, distilling his research into one catchy idea: dreams are meaningless.[1] Hobson didn’t mind the popular exaggeration.

“It took the wind out of the psychoanalytic dream sails,” says Robert Stickgold, a prominent Harvard dream researcher as well as the author of two science-fiction novels centered around medical experiments gone awry. “At that time, psychoanalysis was the only game in town. Think of it as the civil rights movement, which went through this period of Black Power before coming back to equilibrium. Or the feminist movement, which led to separatism before coming back to balance. Any time you’re trying to produce a dramatic shift in public belief you have to overshoot.”

Hobson was unconcerned whether hundred-year-old theories were an appropriate target to shoot at. “To be wrong about something so important as human motivation is a capital sin,” he says. He frequently references Freud’s 1895 Project for a Scientific Psychology, a failed attempt to provide a neurological explanation for emotional life. Not enough was known about the brain at the time, and Freud ultimately gave up, dismissing the endeavor as “scribble,” “a kind of absurdity.” Hobson sees himself as fulfilling Freud’s original goals. In his office next to the new museum, he still keeps a double-exposed photo of Freud’s office on his wall: it’s shot so that Hobson appears to be both sitting in Freud’s chair and lying as a patient on his couch. He calls it his mystic corner. “What I’m trying to do is continue where Freud left off,” he says. “Freud knew he needed brain science to make a decent theory, but he didn’t have it. So he went off and woolgathered. He’s a brilliant man, super stuff, great writing. But it’s all wrong.”

*

In the past few years, Freud’s Project for a Scientific Psychology has been taken up again, this time by a group of researchers—the International Society for Neuro-Psychoanalysis—who believe Freud’s theories have been wrongly demolished by scientists like Hobson. One of Hobson’s most prominent critics is Mark Solms, a neuropsychologist at the University of Cape Town who accuses the field of neuroscience of ignoring the mind, “our own beloved self,” and treating the brain as if it had the reflective capacities of the liver.

Solms, who was analyzed for nine years, five times a week, now travels around Europe and America, lecturing on the intersection between psychoanalytic theory and what we know about neurons. He’ll sometimes end his speeches with an enthusiastic “Freud is not dead!” He tempers his arguments with hard data, making Freud seem sophisticated, almost new. He’s at one extreme in dream research, while Hobson is at the other (there are plenty of dream scientists who don’t concern themselves with Freud). “Solms is like the leader of a new cult,” says G. William Domhoff, a professor of psychology and sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “And Hobson is the anti-Freud, just like the anti-Christ.”

Solms began studying patients with brain damage in the late ’90s, and discovered that people who suffered lesions to a part of the frontal lobe crucial for motivation—what he calls the “I want it system”—stopped dreaming. The results, he is quick to explain, are consistent with the Freudian premise that dreams are rampant with unchecked desires.[2] “Why are we lying there for eight hours every night doing nothing?” he says. “Our motivational system is telling us to explore and forage and want things. The dream is the alternative to going out in the world.”

Hobson originally congratulated Solms on his research, but when he discovered that Solms was on the board of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute and was working on an English translation of the complete works of Freud, he stopped writing him friendly letters. He has since altered his own theory to allow for more activity in the forebrain, not just the brain stem as he had originally proposed, but still insists that dreams have no inherent meaning: they’re the equivalent of Rorschach blots, and analysts or dreamers can make of them what they choose. He’s addressed the controversy in a series of journal publications with titles like “Freud Returns—Like a Bad Dream.” Or “In Bed with Mark Solms? What a Nightmare!”

Hobson’s colleague Robert Stickgold says he’s amazed by the place Freud is given in these debates. “You might as well say, ‘Dopamine urges reflect Ecclesiastes 12:43,’” he says. “It’s like, excuse me? It’s not logical. When Einstein came up with his theory of relativity and basically said that everything Newton found was subtly wrong, there were no people out there screaming, ‘How dare you, how dare you challenge the laws of Newton!’”

But Freud has a peculiar hold on people, in part, perhaps, because his theories make so much sense. With the help of a psychoanalyst, all the random, disparate events of one’s life come together in a coherent narrative. We can blame each of our quirks and failures on any number of plot points. Over time, even Hobson has come to acknowledge the allure of the Freudian worldview. “Freud wanted to have everything: god, sociology, sex, family,” Hobson says. “We can let him in later, but not until we first rebuild the whole fabric of psychiatry. He’s too domineering. That was our problem. We let him in too soon.”

*

At a conference hosted by the Center for Consciousness Studies in Tucson last year, Solms debated Hobson for nearly two hours on Freud’s theory of dreams. At times, the conversation resembled a high-school class election—“I hope that when you vote at the end, you’ll vote for me!” said Solms cheerily—with each scientist becoming increasingly emotional about the other’s foolishness. To illustrate how dreams are like hieroglyphics, Solms gave an example of one in which he is a schoolteacher and Hobson is a young student sitting in his classroom in a uniform. An interpretation, he said, might uncover the wish “I want to teach Allan Hobson a lesson.”

While both men now agree more or less on the neuroscience, they disagree on how to read Freud. Hobson believes the central tenet of The Interpretation of Dreams is the disguise censorship theory—the idea that dreams come to us in secret code. Solms concedes that this particular point might be off, but takes a more holistic view, praising Freud for his poetic generalities: the shift between animal and civilized drives. “A veil is lifted while we sleep,” he says, “and that’s the crux of what Freud claimed.” Hobson might agree with the first half of the statement, but not the second. His objections are less about science than literary interpretation.

No matter how much Hobson insists that dream research be grounded in concrete data, his lectures often stray into matters of art. It’s as if he has been seduced by the beauty of the Freudian worldview: he’s become an authority in the wrong field. The sociologist Philip Rieff wrote that the “psychoanalytic view transforms all men into poets”; perhaps it also turns psychiatrists into literature critics. Hobson crosses off hundred-year-old mistakes with relish, unwittingly giving Freud more credit than necessary. He tackles the question of dream interpretation with unlikely Derridean rigor. In one study, his lab took a collection of dream reports and sliced out the middles, with scissors. When they pasted the beginnings and ends back together and asked judges to predict which ones were hybrids and which ones were whole, the success rate was near 25 percent.[3] Hobson concluded that dreams can’t be read as texts with overarching themes and unities: a man who morphs into a cow that begins to fly, and then fails a Latin exam, before eating a wonderful meal, is not a story, he argues. It’s a series of random images.[4]

For a scientist who believes all mental processes can be explained anatomically, Hobson often backs his arguments with a surprising degree of philosophical reflection. In his 2005 book, 13 Dreams Freud Never Had, Hobson freely speculates about the import of his own dreams in a way that sounds Freudian. But it’s not, he says, because all meaning is at the surface level: nothing is censored or unconscious. One gets the sense that he entered each dream with the intent to point out its randomness, and left with more meaning than he intended to find. He’ll explain a particularly weird dream moment—a lobster brain half the size of a person, or a scene in which his mother and sisters are naked, giggling, and putting on girdles—by saying that all executive functions are turned off in his dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex. This may be true, but it doesn’t explain the particular image: why a naked mom and not something else? Hobson gestures at Freudian concepts, but often calls them by another name.

Solms expresses annoyance at Hobson’s tendency to waffle. “He now tells you he has never said dreams are meaningless,” Solms complained at the conference, while twisting his hair into a frustrated little turret. “Well, whether you said it or not, Allan, that’s the impression everyone got. And that was a very important part of your rejection of Freudian dream theory.”

Hobson’s explanation of dream analysis did not impress the audience either. At the end of the debate, the crowd of more than one hundred voted overwhelmingly against Hobson’s motion that Freudian theory must be abandoned. “The tide has turned again,” Solms said after the conference. “An injustice was done to Freud and I am happy to defend him in the interest of scientific fairness. Soon I hope we can move on.”

*

It wasn’t until the 1950s, fifty years after the publication of The Interpretation of Dreams, that scientists began bringing people into their labs for sleepovers. They’d spray water on them, or rub their faces with cotton puffs, or ring a bell and then wake them up and see what happened. Volunteers were kept up for days and watched closely, to see whether or not they’d go insane. The early experiments were crude and often conducted by psychiatrists trained in Freudian theory. One prominent researcher studied sexual dream symbols by attempting to correlate erections (he wrapped a nooselike device around the sleeper’s penis) with aggressive dream content, like dog- and snakebites, knife fights, and scenes of choking. He was able to correctly predict tumescence seven times out of eight.

Other researchers took a sociological approach to dreams, meticulously cataloging their content: women dream of men more than men dream of women; black people are more likely to be physically damaged in their dreams than white people; 80 percent of adult dreams have a negative component—their hair looks bad or they can’t find their keys or their kid won’t stop crying—and after ninth grade, children’s dreams become significantly more aggressive.

The field of dream research deals with the worst kind of data: reported by groggy volunteers, grasping at half-formed memories. Once you wake someone up, you’ve already interfered with the evidence. Hobson’s Activation-Synthesis model was so well received, in part, because it was based on neuroscience, not subjective reports. Rosalind Cartwright, chair of psychology at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, who is well known for her research on how dreams affect mood, recalls first hearing Hobson propose his model at a conference in the early ’70s. “A bunch of us were sitting next to each other and we said, ‘You got it the wrong way around! We won’t let your physiological tail wave our psychological dream-dog!’ I used to say about Allan, ‘Oh the trouble is, he’s looking at cell recordings, he’s not talking to people—if he were paying attention to his own dreams, he would be smarter at it.’ When he did start paying attention to these things, I felt he modified his ideas a good deal.”

Only in recent years has Hobson become willing to talk more about the part of dreams that most people are interested in—feelings, symbols, characters, themes. After waking up from a particularly vivid nightmare, few of us are wondering, What part of my brain was just functioning? With practice and the help of a Nightcap (a bandanna device that beeps every few hours, wakes you up, then records whatever you say about your interrupted dream), Hobson began focusing more on the softer side of his field. “I love to talk about my dreams,” he said at the consciousness conference last year. “I’m not sure any of it really makes any difference, or that I learn anything I didn’t know, but it’s a wonderful, wonderful thing to do.”

His enthusiasm for dreams became even more pronounced when, for a startling month in 2001, he lost the ability to have them. While vacationing in Monte Carlo, Hobson suffered a stroke that affected the precise part of the brain stem that he began his career studying. He knew how his body would respond because he had done countless experiments on how damage to this area affects lab cats. He became nauseous, lost balance, and felt he was drowning in his own saliva. For eight days, he lost the ability to fall asleep. For a month, he couldn’t dream. He felt himself becoming psychotic with exhaustion. Like Freud, inventor of the talking cure, dying of oral cancer, Hobson seemed to have the perfect affliction. “I was wide awake all night long,” he recalls. “I said to myself, I am a cat. I am an experimental animal. But this is no experiment.”

After several days without sleep, Hobson began suffering from elaborate hallucinations. In 2002, he published articles about the experience in the journals Cerebrum and Consciousness and Cognition, vividly detailing his escalating visions. Immediately upon closing his eyes, he’d imagine himself at the bottom of a swimming pool, or covered in pieces of computer paper. Later, he was deluged by images of swirling flesh: free-floating nipples, sphincters, and crotches. At one point, he saw “a Peter Pan–like version of a colleague, Robert Stickgold, and two fairies enjoying a bedtime story.”

Hobson documented the stroke with a camera and tape recorder, dutifully noting strange thoughts, vomiting episodes, small improvements, and pain. The process reminded him of therapy, he said. Finally on the thirty-first day of his hospitalization, he had a full dream, his first in more than a month, in which his wife tried to cheat on him in forty-five minutes. Writing about the experience in multiple journals, he used the illness as a rare opportunity to provide a link between his own neurology and psychology. His doctors, however, were less interested in the connection. Hobson resented their quick and systematic diagnoses. No “doctor who saw me ever expressed any interest in what I was experiencing subjectively,” he wrote.

For years Mark Solms has criticized the field of neuroscience for just this—ignoring personal experience, treating the mind as if it were a chemical pump. (He was drawn to neuroscience at a young age, when his younger brother became brain damaged after falling from a roof.) In the face of his own trauma, Hobson too has become increasingly open to the nuances of emotional life. His Vermont museum, which features animated dream reports and synthesized “sleep music,” is a tribute to the artistic and literary possibilities of dreaming. His late-age approach has a lot more in common with Solms’s “neuro-psychoanalysis” than either of them admit.

After forty years of studying dreams, Hobson seems seduced again by the mysteries that originally brought him to the field. Hard science can never adequately describe that murky, intuitive feeling in the morning—the sense that you spent the night somewhere else. When Freud abandoned his Project for a Scientific Psychology, there were problems beyond primitive technology: Deconstructing a dream is about as mathematical as pinpointing the coordinates of the Garden of Eden. The fascination endures because it’s just out of reach, never fulfilled. Hobson was equipped with far more scientific knowledge than Freud could ever hope for, but he still finds himself making imaginative leaps, translating images into themes and symbols and fantasies. The concept of dreaming is born from this impulse: it’s too hard to resist a good story.

__________

1. Freud used the expression traume sind schaume (“dreams are froth”) to describe theories that undermine the complexity of dreams. In his Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, he quickly dismisses the idea, proposed by another scientist, that dream content is equivalent to the sounds produced by “unmusical fingers wandering over the keys of a piano.” Our minds may be filled with trivial trash during the day, but at night we are compelling and disturbed. “There are no harmless dreams,” Freud writes. “They all have the ‘mark of the beast.’” Every object has significance—pencils, trees, umbrellas, balloons, lamps, nail files. “Truly,” he writes, “all of it far from innocent.”
2. MRI scans produce images consistent with these findings: during sleep the part of the brain that controls drives is much more active than the part of the brain associated with executive functions, like orientation and logic.
3. In another study, the lab cut the dreams at midpoint. This time, judges correctly predicted which ones were authentic and which ones were artificially spliced 82 percent of the time.
4. Many prominent dream researchers would disagree. David Foulkes, the former director of the dream research laboratories at the University of Wyoming, has done several experiments showing that dreams move along with storylike organization. In fact, sometimes “the dream seems to get carried away with itself,” he writes in his 1999 Children’s Dreaming and the Development of Consciousness. “Just as we can, awake, get so caught up in a line of daydreaming that we pursue it without regard to anything else, so too, apparently, when we dream we can dream for the sake of having a really good dream.”

Enter Sandman

Who wrote “Footprints”?

Poetry Foundation, November 2007

I. The pencil had a life of its own
A few years ago Burrell Webb, a retired landscape artist living in Oregon, discovered that a poem he wrote and never copyrighted had become one of the most widely circulated verses in the English language. He says he composed the lines in 1958, after leaving the navy and being dumped by his girlfriend. “I was stressed, distressed, and single,” he says. “When I received those divine words, I broke up the lines and made a kind of poem out of it.” The finished product, which he published anonymously in a local newspaper—he felt it was God’s work, not his—tells the story of a man who has a dream that he and God are walking along the beach. When the man asks why sometimes there is one set of footprints and other times there are two, the Lord says he has been carrying him through his struggles.

Forty years later, Webb was alarmed when his son informed him that the poem was on napkins, calendars, posters, gift cards, and teacups. Usually “Footprints” was signed “Author Unknown,” but other times the credit was given to Mary Stevenson, Margaret Fishback Powers, or Carolyn Joyce Carty, who have all registered copyrights for the poem. (Registration does not require proof of originality.) The three versions differ mostly in tense, word order, and line breaks. With no way to prove that the work was actually his, Webb paid $400 to take a polygraph test. Now he routinely sends the results (“No deception indicated”) to those who question his claim.

Although several people have suggested to Webb, as consolation, that God gave the idea to multiple authors in order to more efficiently spread His Word, Webb is unsettled by the idea that “the Lord would be the author of confusion.” However the verse came into being, its message has reached all over the world. “Footprints” is the kind of poem we all seem to know without remembering when or where we first saw it. We’ve read it dozens of times, never paying attention. The verse is dislocated from context, so familiar and predictable that the boundary between writing and reading seems to disappear.

Yet the authors who claim to have composed “Footprints” have memories of the precise moment when they dreamed up these lines. Mary Stevenson, a former showgirl and nurse, said she composed the verse in 1936, following the death of her mother and brother. According to Gail Giorgio’s 1995 biography Footprints in the Sand: The Life Story of Mary Stevenson, Author of the Immortal Poem, Stevenson was inspired by a cat’s footprints in the snow and scrawled out twenty lines, as if the “pencil had a life of its own.” She was so pleased with her work that she handed out the poem heedlessly, jotting it down for anyone she met without thinking to sign her name. (Early in the book her father tells her, “Poetry’s nice to read, but essentially it’s just rambling words on a piece of paper.”)

Powers, a Baptist children’s evangelist, was more savvy about licensing the verse—she sold it to HarperCollins Canada in 1993—and she describes “Footprints” as the culmination of a life of religious devotion. In her memoir, Footprints: The True Story behind the Poem That Inspired Millions, she enthusiastically recounts all the tragedies she endured while never losing her belief in the Lord. In the course of 100 pages, she gets struck by lightning, develops spinal meningitis, gets hit by a truck, and has a near-death experience with a bumblebee. Her daughter gets crushed by a motorcycle and later slips down a 68-foot waterfall while her husband, watching, has a heart attack. In the hospital room a nurse pulls out “a little piece I have here in my pocket” and recites “Footprints” to ease the family’s pain. When she casually mentions what a shame it is that no one knows the poem’s author, Powers’ husband croaks from his bed, “It’s my wife.”

Far from dead, Powers currently travels around the world giving sermons about the power of faith. She has licensed the poem to nearly 30 companies, including Hallmark Cards and Lenox Gifts. Her lawyer, John A. Hughes, a self-described atheist, won’t say how much Powers has earned from her publications, except to guess that “Footprints” might be the “best-remunerated poem in history.” When pressed, he compares its success to that of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” He has written more than 100 companies, requesting that they replace “Author Unknown” with his client’s name. “I am completely satisfied factually that Margaret is telling the truth,” he says. He acknowledges that “Footprints” is not entirely consistent with Powers’ other poems, which are composed of rhyming couplets, but he’s confident it’s within her range. (To prove that “Footprints” couldn’t be written by Stevenson, he contemplated hiring Donald Foster, the forensic literary analyst who studied the letters of the Unabomber.)

“Footprints” is far less of a stylistic aberration for Powers than it is for Mary Stevenson, who wrote sporadically, or Carolyn Joyce Carty, who struggles with punctuation and spelling. Carty is the most hostile of the contenders and she frequently issues error-ridden cease-and-desist letters to those who post the poem online. (She signs her e-mails “World Renowned Poet.”)

Carty wrote “Footprints” in 1963, when she was six. She says she based the idea on a poem written by her great-great-aunt, a Sunday school teacher. More than 20 years later, she copyrighted the verse as part of an 11-page document of stream-of-consciousness prose (“the gift, who are you, where have you come from, where are you going! I am a writers inkhorn that stands beside the sea”), which concluded with the text of “Footprints.” She declined to be interviewed but characterized her writing style in an e-mail: “I like common denominators in subjects, I always look for the common bond when trying to create a universal message.”

In describing her literary taste, Carty also articulates the intangible draw of “Footprints.” The poem reads as if it were written by consensus. Light, peppy, and moderately Christian, “Footprints” succinctly dramatizes an idea that will never be original: When we think we’re alone, we’re not. God is here. The footprints metaphor is so ubiquitous that perhaps the authors absorbed the message at some point without realizing it, then later sat down and wrote it out again, seeking to appeal to the largest number of people.

II. Do I know you?
In “Cryptomnesia” (1905), a paper about accidental plagiarism, Carl Jung argues that it’s impossible to know for certain which ideas are one’s own. “Our unconsciousness . . . swarms with strange intruders,” he writes. He accuses Nietzsche of unwittingly copying another’s work, and urges all writers to sift through their memories and locate the origin of every idea before putting it to paper: “Ask each thought: Do I know you, or are you new?”

In the realm of Christian poetry, the process of distinguishing which ideas are original is significantly harder—the same body of collective epiphanies has been passed down for years. When artists open themselves up to the inspiration of the Lord, it’s not surprising that sometimes they produce sentences that sound as if they’ve been uttered before. The first line of “Footprints,” which varies slightly among versions, seems to announce the authors’ access to the collective unconscious: “I had a dream,” “One night a man had a dream,” “One night I dreamed a dream.”

One of the earliest articulations of the poem’s premise—the idea that God reveals his presence through marks in the sand—comes from an 1880 sermon by Charles Haddon Spurgeon, a noted Baptist preacher.

And did you ever walk out upon that lonely desert island upon which you were wrecked, and say, “I am alone, — alone, — alone, — nobody was ever here before me”? And did you suddenly pull up short as you noticed, in the sand, the footprints of a man? I remember right well passing through that experience; and when I looked, lo! it was not merely the footprints of a man that I saw, but I thought I knew whose feet had left those imprints; they were the marks of One who had been crucified, for there was the print of the nails. So I thought to myself, “If he has been here, it is a desert island no longer.”

Spurgeon’s formulation, more nuanced than the Footprints poem, rehearses the same fear of being “alone, — alone, —alone,” and then happily resolves it.

In other uses of the metaphor, the footprints image speaks to man’s omnipresence, not God’s. This seemingly banal metaphor has become a truism in secular writing as well. In an 1894 essay about composing his first book, Robert Louis Stevenson (whom Mary Stevenson, coincidentally, claims as a relative, and whom Carty cites as an influence) refers to footprints in the sand when acknowledging how hard it is to avoid borrowing from previously published work. After admitting adopting characters from Washington Irving (“But I had no guess of it then as I sat writing by the fireside”), as well as “trifles and details” from Daniel Defoe and Edgar Allan Poe, he invokes the footprints image. It’s as if he already associates the phrase with authorial confusion:

I am now upon a painful chapter. No doubt the parrot once belonged to Robinson Crusoe. No doubt the skeleton is conveyed from Poe. . . . These useful writers had fulfilled the poet’s saying: departing, they had left behind them Footprints on the sands of time, Footprints which perhaps another—and I was the other!

The “poet’s saying,” which Stevenson refers to, is Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “A Psalm of Life”: “Lives of great men all remind us / We can make our lives sublime, / And, departing, leave behind us / Footprints on the sands of time.” It’s fitting that in defending himself against plagiarism, Stevenson deploys a quote that has spawned so many interpretations. “Footprints on the sands of time” is a perfect image for clich�: terrain trod over and retraced, flattened with overuse.

But those claiming to have written “Footprints” argue that the image came to them as suddenly and surprisingly as a new gift. Burrell Webb rejects the notion that he somehow inherited an existing metaphor. It’s far more likely, he says, that people are trying to profit from his work. “I’ve never heard of the fellow [Spurgeon], so he couldn’t have possibly inspired me,” Webb says. “That allegorical poem was strictly a prayer relationship with myself and the Lord when I was feeling bad and crying for help and whining a little bit, which everybody goes through.”

Although nearly all of these authors claim they wrote the poem in longhand, dictated by God, the controversy didn’t surface until everyone began putting their versions online. There are hundreds of “Footprints”-inspired Web sites. One has a soundtrack of waves lapping against the shore; another features lines of the poem jiggling to the beat of Christmas songs. In Andrew Keen’s 2007 book The Cult of the Amateur, he writes that the Internet has induced a state of communal amnesia; we’ve lost “our memory for things learnt, read, experienced, or heard.” Perhaps the “Footprints” writers are living a version of this peculiar situation. There’s not only an abundance of amateur authors, but they’ve all written the exact same thing.

Along with Webb, Carty, Stevenson, and Powers, at least a dozen other people have claimed, less rigorously, to have penned this poem. None of their accounts are particularly convincing, yet they all seem to genuinely believe they wrote the poem. They describe the words coming out effortlessly, even uncontrollably, as if they were finally articulating something they’d always known.

Saddam Hussein’s Key to the City of Detroit

Bidoun Magazine , Spring 2008

Sacred Heart Chaldean Church juts out like an overgrown shed on a street of abandoned shops with names like Happiness Club and American Store. Thirty-odd years ago, Saddam Hussein donated nearly half a million dollars to fund the church and the cultural center next door, which now serve the largest population of Catholic Iraqis outside the Middle East. For years, the squat, wooden church was a gathering place for new immigrants, many of whom had come to Detroit’s east side precisely to escape Hussein. The church’s pastor, Jacob Yasso, calls the former Iraqi president “a very generous, warm man who just let too much power go to his head.”

Yasso met Hussein in 1979 at a banquet in Baghdad, where the pastor gave a speech commending the president for his kindness to Christians. “Saddam was 100 percent American then,” he says. “He arranged for the government to pay for my trip and stay at the best hotel in Baghdad.” After learning that Yasso’s Michigan parish was in debt, Hussein promptly wrote a check, the first of two, for a quarter of a million dollars. After Yasso’s triumphant return, an influential member of his flock convinced Coleman A. Young, the controversial mayor of Detroit, to give Hussein the key to the city.

Young, a cheerfully polarizing figure who had become the city’s first black mayor in 1974, displayed little interest in international politics—he had a habit of dismissing world leaders with names like “mean sucker” or “old pruneface” (though, to be fair, he also used that language on his suburban counterparts). Young handed out more than 200 keys in his twenty years as mayor—he kept them in the trunk of his car—and it’s unlikely he gave much thought to making Hussein an honorary citizen. But the so-called “dirty key” was important to many Detroit Chaldeans, who saw it as a reward for their hard work and a sign of their commitment to the city. “Young didn’t give a damn about anything outside of Detroit,” says Amir Denha, the former publisher of the Chaldean Detroit Times. “The gift was for us, not Hussein. He was proud of us.”

Today there are 120,000 Chaldeans in Southeastern Michigan. Like other Iraqis—indeed, like most of the groups that ended up here—Chaldeans were drawn to the area by the auto industry in the first half of the twentieth century. Though the majority of them no longer live in Detroit proper, they own most of the grocery, corner, and liquor stores in the city, having taken over the businesses from departing whites before and especially after the 1967 riots. They promote themselves as model citizens, patriotic entrepreneurs, and family-oriented conservatives: To make themselves appealing to their neighbors, the Chaldean community distributes a brochure to business partners, city leaders, and schools, touting their history and entrepreneurialism and featuring a collage of images of Chaldeans at work—a priest, a US soldier, and a supermarket owner reaching into his freezer.

Since the American invasion in 2003, more than half of Iraq’s remaining Christians have left, many of them bound for Michigan. There is talk of Detroit becoming a permanent Chaldean city-in-exile; area leaders have requested that the Patriarch of Babylon protect himself by transferring his headquarters, based in Iraq for over 500 years. (He has declined, repeatedly.) Last summer the Chaldean Mother of God Church purchased 160 acres from the city of Detroit to use as a summer camp for Chaldean children; on the grounds, a new church will sport a replica of the shrine to Saint Gorgis (the original is grafted into the side of a mountain near Mosul). This spring the first ever Chaldean Museum is set to open, which traces history of the people from ancient Mesopotamia to the vacant strip malls of outer Detroit.

There is in all this an element of Chaldean exceptionalism. Most Chaldeans pointedly define themselves as not Arab; the language they speak—those that still speak it, at least—is Aramaic, “the language spoken by Jesus,” and the Assyrians, their ancestors, are numbered among the earliest Christians, supposedly converted in the first century by the Apostle Thomas, on his way to India. (When The Passion of the Christ came out, some members of Chaldean community were offended that reporters kept referring to Aramaic as a “dead language”; others complained about Jesus’s accent.) More ambitious Chaldean nationalists, nothing if not nimble, will tell you that their ancestors are both “the American Indians of Iraq” and the inventors of writing, astronomy, irrigation, the number zero, bronze weaponry, and beer.

Thousands of Iraqi refugees, many of them Chaldean, are expected in Michigan in the coming years. Jacob Yasso hopes the influx of new immigrants will help reinvigorate his church, which is now attended almost exclusively by the elderly. But for Detroit’s old Chaldean Town, as for the city itself, the prospects are not good. Detroit’s population is down to the size it was in the 1920s, when the first Chaldeans came to America by sea.

Among the remaining parishioners at Sacred Heart Church, there is a sense of nostalgia that they acknowledge as desperate, even perverse. There hasn’t been such a fondness for Hussein for decades. Yasso speaks bitterly about the war and America’s unwillingness to even think about compromising with its former friend and ally. “Saddam was good for Christians,” he says. “Now he’s murdered, and look what happened.” He still keeps a framed photo above his desk of himself and other Michigan delegates handing Hussein the key. Yasso never found out what became of it. “Ask the US troops,” he laughs hoarsely. “Maybe they’ve recovered it in one of his palaces.”

Only Connect

Triple Canopy, May 2008

On Harry Stephen Keeler’s “web-work” mystery novels and the language and terrors of the Internet.

by Ed Park with Rachel Aviv

I met Ed Park at the Village Voice when he was editor of the Voice Literary Supplement, before both of our jobs were eliminated and the paper parted with nearly thirty members of its staff. Park’s new novel, Personal Days, which he began during his final year at the Voice, follows workers on the verge of unemployment, connected (and doomed) by their fondness for email. Few novels so elegantly capture the drama of the trivial, the lonely, laughable ways we pass our workdays—particularly the infinite distractions of the Web.

Park is a founding editor of The Believer, science-fiction columnist for the Los Angeles Times, and publisher of a weekly PDF publication called the New-York Ghost. The following interview was conducted by email over the course of two weeks in May.

Rachel Aviv: In the conversation that spawned this interview, you mentioned a little-known writer who, you later realized, had a secret influence on Personal Days: Harry Stephen Keeler, a mystery novelist who created and followed a mathematically ornate system of plot rules called “web-work.” Keeler believed that writers should be able to talk about plot in the same way that engineers talk about steam engines. And in his 1928 manual “The Mechanics (and Kinematics) of Web-Work Plot Construction,” he shows how:

In conceiving a story or inaugurating a plot which involves threads weaving with threads, if the thread A, or viewpoint character, should figure with the thread B in an opening incident of numerical order “n” (with respect to the incidents in the conditions precedent) there must be invented a following incident “n + 1” involving threads A and C; an incident “n + 2” involving threads A and D; an incident “n + 3” involving threads A and E; and so on up to perhaps at least “n + 4” or “n + 5”; and furthermore “n” must cause “n + 1”; “n + 1” must cause “n + 2”; “n + 2” must cause “n + 3” etc.

You once called web-work mysteries the “last great secret of 20th-century literature.” What initially drew you to Keeler’s work?

Ed Park: Keeler’s instructional manual (there is no other phrase) is either unreadable or fascinating, depending on how you approach it. It includes a diagram of his novel The Voice of the Seven Sparrows, with an illustration so hilariously convoluted that I sometimes think of the whole how-to enterprise as an enormous gag. His tone is pretty sober throughout, however, and he was addressing an audience of amateur writers eager to sell their wares. It’s his take on how to create not just a satisfyingly complex story but also one that would have a chance in the marketplace of the era.

If by some fluke I had come across “Mechanics” before reading Keeler, it’s hard to say whether I would have pursued his work. My immersion into Keeler was very gradual. I started, quite at random, with The Bottle with the Green Wax Seal (1942), which begins in medias res—if I remember correctly, there’s a character dressed like a mariachi who is seen briefly in an early chapter and then wanders off, never to be heard from again. I found appealing what some would call examples of “bad” writing. Keeler is forever being called the “Ed Wood of mystery novelists” or the “worst mystery novelist ever,” which are two very different things if you think, as I do, that Ed Wood was actually a very deliberate and canny artist.

The Bottle with the Green Wax Seal is the final book in a trilogy, and once I read the earlier books, Portrait of Jirjohn Cobb and Cleopatra’s Tears, it seemed an even more astonishing achievement: a whole trilogy that’s about talk, artifice—fiction, in capital letters. Each book provides the backstory to a prolonged climax in which several men are stranded on a slip of land about to disappear under rising floodwaters; there are enough life vests for all but one of the men, and since one of the party is actually a criminal, it’s decided that that person will be left to the waves. Who will have the most convincing alibi—or lie? It’s like Survivor avant la lettre, slow-motion reality TV. Richard Polt, a Heidegger scholar at Xavier University who started the Harry Stephen Keeler Society, is not a fan of Portrait, which he calls “one of the most astoundingly unreadable novels ever written.” (Per Polt, it “consists of four characters, two of whom sport outrageous accents, sitting on an island in the middle of a river, talking and listening to a radio, again for hundreds of pages.”) I see where he’s coming from, but to me, Portrait has one of the best things in all of Keelerdom: a moment in which a character has a revelation (is literally enriched) because he takes the time to stare at “bad” art—the titular portrait.

What was exciting for me wasn’t web-work, explicitly, but the fact that Keeler was trying to do something different with each book. You got the sense of a mind on fire, ceaselessly generating intricate plots and mind-boggling narrative devices. (A lot of Man with the Magic Eardrums takes place on the phone—just one side of the conversation!) At his height, Keeler was amazingly productive—four books out in 1930, and several years in which he had three out. The idea of insane productivity was an important element in my attraction to his work. I was writing novels—I’d just finished my second, the elaborate Dementia Americana, a portion of which was recently published online—and maybe I needed a new literary hero, whose MO consisted of high output and bizarre scenarios. I haven’t read Keeler in a couple years now, but I’ll never forget encountering his work. It was as important to me as encountering Nabokov in college or Anthony Powell in my late twenties.¹

RA: Did you feel you suffered from (or had the gift of) “insane productivity” yourself? What do you mean by the word insane?

EP: For me, fiction writing requires giving in to the unconscious; more alarmingly put, hearing voices, falling into a trance, or even hallucinating. Which might be why Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of the Unconscious in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind has had such a lasting hold on me. Jaynes’s audacious thesis—that early man did not possess consciousness—makes you ponder the very nature of an interior life. Why do we have two brain hemispheres, and why does everyone—writer or not—have the experience of silently talking to oneself, weighing options, narrating everyday life? Who is talking to whom?

Writing nonfiction is less dependent on such a state, but for fiction, for me, everything starts with a voice—I can have an idea for a story, but as much as I might try, the writing doesn’t flow until a voice materializes and I start taking dictation. (Later comes a very conscious process of shaping and thread weaving—but the shape and the threads, I’ve found, are secretly present from the start.) And having said that, now I’m thinking of Glottis, the dictation software in Personal Days. “Voice” works on a lot of levels in the book: the “whispery” italics in part 1; Crease losing his voice in the presence of his office crush; Laars suffering indignities of the teeth; the “misrecognitions” of Glottis creating huge, even life-changing complications. Stepping outside the book, I can connect “voice” to the Village Voice, where I worked for years, and from which I was ejected, erased.

So, in my twenties, I wrote two novels, responses to voices of different registers: Each voice had its particular rhythms, phrasings, punctuational preferences, and paragraph lengths. When Dementia Americana failed to draw any interest—it didn’t even make it onto any editors’ desks—I started thinking about a different kind of novel, one that did not rely on the convoluted conspiracies of the two unpublished books I now had (vaguely embarrassingly) under my belt. I “listened” to Anthony Powell’s Afternoon Men, a book I’d recently read, which was hilarious without losing its cool. I could hear the chatter of my own characters, gradually coming into being, like an updated version of Powell’s. The first chapters of Afternoon Men became a blueprint for the start of this new book, which I called Chinese Whispers, the British term for our game of Telephone.

I felt I was writing something purely entertaining, a fizzy comedy set in New York among freelance artists of every sort; a young person’s novel at last. (The other two books feel like old people’s novels now.) The relative ease with which I wrote it made me think, “Ah, I’ve found my voice!”

In what is, I realize, a complete cliché, but true all the same, the book was never satisfactorily completed because of…9/11. After that day, I didn’t open the file for Chinese Whispers for a long, long time. When I finally did look at it, I didn’t know what to do with it. I would just close the file. Not only did I not finish writing Chinese Whispers, I didn’t feel much like writing a novel, period. Maybe—and this is nuts—my short fiction held a premonition. The few stories I wrote, beginning around the same time as Chinese Whispers, were already feeling disconnected from the real world. One story took place inside a brain. Another story, written in the summer of 2001, was set in a near-future Manhattan so ruined it was floating away.

I’ve often wondered about this sudden stoppage of novel writing, but before this conversation, I’d never thought of it in terms of Jaynes. I am about to grossly simplify his brilliant book and then apply it a bit too vigorously to my puny situation… In The Origin of the Unconscious in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Jaynes comes to many alarming conclusions, but they’re presented in such a way that they seem logical, even inevitable. He theorizes that humankind, circa three thousand years ago, did not have what we would think of as consciousness. Instead, people in ancient civilizations would, in times of stress, hallucinate the voices of their gods. The right hemisphere—the god hemisphere—would tell the person what to do, how to act.

And one of the factors that bring modern consciousness into being is when the gods no longer speak to them. This “breakdown of the bicameral mind” is attributed to a variety of causes, one of which is the friction between distinct bicameral civilizations. (Jaynes has other reasons, but I’m just latching on to this one for my purposes.) After a string of catastrophic events, goes the theory, the gods’ voices start to go mute.

If you can follow my extrapolations and contortions: In a single day, the voice that I was hearing for that book suddenly became irrelevant, or worse. So not only did that particular voice shut down, but my whole calling (another interesting word, given the notions of voice and hearing that we’re using) seemed suspect. Before 9/11, I wrote relatively little nonfiction (articles, reviews)—my energies were focused on novel writing. Afterward, I began editing more and more at the Voice and, in 2003, The Believer. I was writing things that people actually read—no longer talking to myself.

If I thought about this development at all back then, I assumed that it was simply a function of time, a gradual process, gaining the trust of editors. Which is true. But it only became clear much later the degree to which my fiction/nonfiction output had dramatically switched proportions: I had worshiped at the altar of fiction and then suddenly abandoned it. But what I’m suggesting, here, is that maybe it was the voice that abandoned me.

RA: September 11 also coincides, very roughly, with the point at which the Internet became a steady part of working life. This, too, was an event that changed the “voices” one might respond to—and, certainly, our notions of productivity.

EP: Conveniently, last week there was a blurb in the New York Times for a reading that I did, in which the writer poked fun at my productivity. I thought it was funny and appreciated the plug, but I was also shocked that anyone took notice. I feel like I am very busy these days—but I’ve felt busy for years. Even when I wasn’t writing articles, even before The Believer, I was writing and writing and writing—hundreds of pages that, I’m sure, no one will see.

But this was before the blogosphere. If I were a young aspiring novelist today, would I have the patience for solitude—a space to try and fail, in virtual secrecy—or is it too tempting to look for a more immediate, interactive readership online? I’m forever coming across things like “Samuel Pepys would have been a blogger,” or Kerouac or whoever—which is fine as a parlor game, but seems to ignore the fact that the technology of the diary or novel (or whatever pre-Web platform we’re talking about) generates its own specific geniuses and champions. Pepys putting his entries directly on the Web, in real time: Who’s to say that he would have done that? It’s one thing to think that writing is writing, another to assume that formats are interchangeable and mindsets from days of yore can simply be plugged into the present.

RA: In Personal Days, much of the dialogue takes place online, and it’s frequently about computers: whose laptop crashed, emails that colleagues foolishly forwarded, the best way to sign off (“Warm best,” “Cheers,” “Thank you in advance for your cooperation”), or “keyboard woes.” The novel ends with a fifty-page email that never finds its recipient.

I’m reminded of an email conversation we had a few years ago about Julian Jaynes. We were both complaining about our difficulty concentrating, and you joked that you were beginning to see the Web as a “model brain”:

what you were saying about your mind flying around—that was what I was like yesterday: constant, almost reflexive web-searching, email checking, blogging. It was kind of fascinating and a little scary, & it lasted for hours…the various “distracting” activities on the web—email, blogging, searching—are maybe a metaphor for the mind? So for a while I thought that I was existing in some weird state of pure though—like every “thought” I had would trigger a new screen, new site; it was instantaneous…. (Julian Jaynes would say that each age/era/setting provides the necessary physical metaphors for consciousness.)

When writing now, how difficult is it to accommodate, or resist, what Jaynes might view, grandly, as an entirely new metaphor for thinking?

EP: I remember an exchange in The Believer between Paul Auster and Jonathan Lethem, and I recall one of them saying something about not allowing such things as computers, cell phones, the Web, etc. to enter the universe of his novel. And I can sympathize with that. These new technologies bring their own unsettling charges, tones, and auras, and if a writer has already honed his voice, so to speak, to a world predating the noise of the new machines, there might be a sense of having to start at square one.

Many novels include email exchanges (off the top of my head, The Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen, and On Beauty, by Zadie Smith), and I remember seeing many short novels around the turn of the twenty-first century that seemed to consist entirely of such exchanges, in a bid to represent what the epistolary novel would mean today. But I don’t recall any of that latter class of novels and can’t imagine that people still read them. They have somehow become obsolete.

On the other hand, Richard Powers “performed” an amazing text called “The Moving Finger” that seemed to me absolutely attuned to the new frequency of the monitor-lit insomnia of the blogosphere. He found the right metaphors: The narrator slips into the blogosphere in search of information on “mirror neurons” and soon finds himself being nightmarishly mirrored on a blog that possibly only he checks. (It’s the atmosphere of Borges, of course; I suspect Borges would know how to write about the Web, though this might be another example of Ye Olde Blogger Pepys Fallacy.)

I was thinking about my novella that went online last week at Fivechapters.com—it was written in 1998 and pokes fun at satellite TV’s surfeit of surfable channels and a little bit at cell phones. Not a word about the Web, and this more than anything else dates it. TV I could understand; I grew up with TV, so satellite TV is just an extension of that. Cell phones I could understand: Hey, I’ve talked on phones all my life. But the experience of the Web wasn’t clear to me then. I emailed and, via what sounded like a hand-cranked dial-up modem, could arduously visit what primitive sites there were back then, but I didn’t really have a framework for thinking about it, imagining it, inserting it into the fiction, or somehow using its energies and language and terrors. I’d yet to grasp (how many did, in ’98?) what our experience with it would be, that it would move at the speed of thought and seem to allow you to encompass the world.

RA: In an earlier email, you wrote that you don’t like to think of yourself as the type of person who worries about computers assuming too much agency, since this is a “primitive” fear. Why is it so hard to write about computers—the language of the Web and resulting paranoia—without veering into the territory of mystical science fiction?

EP: Novelists resist including the Web because it seems to subsume or supersede the book. It is fast by design, whereas the book is slow. The Internet can reproduce the content of a book—think of a site like Bartleby.com; the novel strains to capture how one traverses the Web. (Of course, reading off a screen is a different experience from turning a page, but I wonder if, for most readers, this has become a moot point.) There are fictions that conjure the flavor (the online quest for mysterious footage in William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition), and something like Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves has a vigorously multitasking structure. But in the end, it’s a physical impossibility, matter versus light.

Writing a novel is still a solitary activity, a monument to ego. To be faced with a new medium in which authorship barely matters, information flows everywhere, and context changes constantly is to be confronted with the dissolution of an entire form. Who wants to write a novel about how the novel is disappearing?

RA: Right now, I am looking at the catalogue blurb for your NYU course, “Only Connect”:

The late W.G. Sebald perfected a sublime art of connection—teasing out associations between ancient snapshots, newspaper clippings, and the words of others. His elegantly haunting books (which blurred novel, history, and memoir) couldn’t be more different from that typically found in the so-called blogosphere. Yet blogging, with its hyperlinks and screen-grabs, calls upon a magpie instinct that Sebald and other illustrious writers would instantly recognize. This course takes students on a tour of writing methods as old as The Anatomy of Melancholy and as current as Gawker, imparting a ravenous approach to composition useful for work in any genre: fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and the borderlands of our virtual reality.

To even mention Robert Burton’s 1621 Anatomy of Melancholy and Gawker in the same breath suggests there is something productive about transposing one era’s literary metaphors onto those of another. But the analogy, even if it works, goes in only one direction: Burton may have been a master Googler, but it’s unlikely the Gawker girl in a tank top on the cover of the Times Magazine would have produced The Anatomy of Melancholy.

Why did you choose to isolate this particular skill through the ages, the impulse to scavenge and make links? This is an aspect of writing we usually take for granted.

EP: That was my first time teaching—look at me giving students the hard sell: “Robert Burton and Gawker? Hold on to your hats!” (I’ve since dropped the Gawker reference.) One thing I’m cultivating in this class is the art of the notebook, which is the art of observation. The subtext of the class is, How can you employ what’s all around you in order to create an original work of art? To me, there’s something creative in coming across the same unusual word twice in one day, or noticing (as Lawrence Weschler does) the ramifying parts of an eye in the image of a map of the Internet. How do things become metaphors for other things? It’s the writer, the artist, the human who makes it so. I always show my students these two quotes—a warning against referential mania, or perhaps just notes toward an aesthetic:

“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”

—F. Scott Fitzgerald

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.”

—H. P. Lovecraft

¹ Although Powell’s twelve-volume series A Dance to the Music of Time is far from web-work, one of the most beautiful things about that fiction is how characters dip in and out of the narrator’s frame of reference; years (and books) pass with no mention of someone, and then he or she appears, or we meet someone related to that character, and suddenly we recall the force of personality, the quirks or the tragedy. As I get older, this seems like the perfect model of how life is actually experienced: one’s connections multiply but they also lie dormant for long spells; nothing ever totally disappears. Someone versed in Keelerian web-work graphing could make the diagramming of Dance a yearlong project–it probably needs its own labonotation.

To Write About the Button

Poetry Foundation, March 2008

The late short-story wizard Grace Paley began and ended her long writing career as a poet.

In interviews, Grace Paley, who died of breast cancer last year at the age of 84, often talked about what a bad poet she was. “I just never get good. Poetry is too literary,” she told the French journal Delta in 1982. Three years later, she told The Massachusetts Review, “Well, I really loved poetry best and I loved doing it and I wrote it all the time, but there was something really wrong with the way I was working. I never got it, really.” She blamed it on her distaste for pretentious language. She thought of herself as a “neighborhood person,” not a writer, and felt that poetry made her take on a voice that wasn’t hers.

Fidelity
By Grace Paley
Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
83 pp., $20.00

In 1940, when she was 17, Paley enrolled in W.H. Auden’s literature class at the New School, where she became increasingly aware of her tendency to write in a “British accent.” She wrote like an upper-middle-class gentleman, about war and love. When she went to see Auden for help, he gently asked if the language felt natural to her. She described the incident in the 1983 anthology Women Writers Talking: “He said to me, ‘Do you usually use words like trousers?’—I had never said anything but pants in my whole life—‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘I do . . . sometimes.’ ‘And what about this word?’ he said. ‘Subaltern.’ You know, like a sublieutenant. This was the beginning of the war. ‘Subaltern.’ ‘Well, once in a while.’”

When Paley wrote her first story at age 30—while recovering from an abortion, she had time to stay home and begin projects longer than a few lines—she was relieved to find that her fiction sounded nothing like her poems. She wrote about frumpy women in Greenwich Village who sit around in city playgrounds complaining about their “hotsy-totsy” lovers. The first lines of her stories are always concrete: “There were two husbands disappointed by eggs”; “My husband gave me a broom one Christmas”; “At that time most people were willing to donate organs.” Paley said that her poems aped the sounds of literature (Milton, Coleridge, and Edna St. Vincent Millay were some of her favorites), while her fiction captured the voices of people on her street. She described her first story as the moment when she learned to “use both ears suddenly.”

The discovery changed her poetry as well. During the 26 years between her acclaimed first book of fiction, The Little Disturbances of Man (1959), and her last, Later the Same Day (1985), she was continually writing poems and then forgetting where she put them. In the early ’80s, one of Paley’s students at Sarah Lawrence, Beatrix Gates, urged her to locate the old poems—from inside bureau drawers and wastebaskets, from under the bed—and to continue writing. Gates helped Paley publish her first book of verse, Leaning Forward (1985), a collection that received a few moderately positive reviews (Poetry called her poems “perky, likable”) but was generally ignored. By that time, her poems had lost the stilted pose of her early years. If being a “real poet” used to mean being cryptic and inflated, then Paley did everything she could to show that she thought little of her work. Her poems are about sanitary napkins and municipal centers and B.O., and they have almost no punctuation and often stop midline with an “oh.” She makes self-deprecating jokes about her own talent:

Poets!
Madness is a gift
god-given
(though not to me)

Paley began and ended her career with poetry. Her final book, Fidelity, has just been published, a little over half a year after her death. It is made up of raw glimpses of her life as it moves further and further from the genteel ideal of her early years. “I have experienced the amputation / of my left breast I hate its absence,” she writes in “Many,” a poem about her friends whose organs have become useless. She describes the death of her family (sister, mother, father) and the shock of seeing her disease headlined in the New York Times, then apologizes for making “complaints against mortality.” Her language is plain and self-effacing, yet strangely upbeat; sometimes it’s hard to tell whether her poems are appealing because of her language, or because she seemed to be such an exceedingly likeable woman. Speaking from his home in Vermont, her husband, Robert Nichols, an architect and playwright, says that the “unusual thing about Grace is that her personality and her persona as a poet were the exact same thing.”

Paley worked on Fidelity sporadically in the 15 years before her death. “She had very little time for writing,” Nichols says. “When the volunteer fireman asked her to make a pie, she’d make a pie. She was open to everything.” Throughout the book, she repeatedly alludes to how difficult it is to complete a piece of writing: “To translate a poem / from thinking / into English / takes all night / night nights and days.” In “The Irish Poet,” she describes a class of poetry students studying the masters and worries that none of them will ever put in enough work:

flashed onto a screen the poems
are by Shelley Yeats Bishop

they are serious teachers these poems
are the early abysmal drafts
of great poets the students are
encouraged they have many abysmal
drafts themselves they have usually
stopped at oh their second or
third draft what if their longing
for their own true invention
of language is not strong enough what
if they are satisfied too soon

Paley often spoke of her own indolence (“I laze. I mean really hang out”) and was rarely able to write pieces longer than five or six pages. She blamed it on her temperament: she was fairly happy. She put out few books—three story collections and four books of poems over nearly six decades of writing—because she was raising two kids, traveling, and protesting three wars. “It is the responsibility of the poet to be lazy to hang out and / prophesy,” she writes in “Responsibility,” perhaps her most famous poem. Paley once said that she started writing when she got “a strong language feeling”—when she heard a phrase she liked, sometimes uttered by a friend—and, from there, decided whether there was enough momentum to make it more than a poem. Many of her best pieces sat around as first lines for months before she figured out a way to move on.

Although she’s often grouped with postmodernists such as Robert Coover and Donald Barthelme (who lived in her neighborhood), Paley had very little interest in deconstructing or even talking about narrative form. She never graduated from college and consciously avoided becoming part of the literary world. She typed up her first few stories at the PTA office of her children’s elementary school on 11th Street. When she was honored as State Author of New York, she thanked the committee members but said she would have felt prouder if she’d won an “award from my block.”

Throughout her career, she was continually rediscovered in waves of magazine and newspaper profiles (almost always mentioning her white “halo of hair,” wonderful organic cooking, and affability), but her work, and particularly her poetry, has received little scholarly attention. When Kathleen Hulley, a literature professor at New York University, tried to put together a special issue of Delta on Paley’s work, she could barely find enough contributors. Many of those who initially volunteered dropped out, finding Paley “resistant to criticism.” In the introduction to the issue, Hulley writes that the most common excuse was “She is too direct; she leaves me with nothing to say. Paley has no secrets: she tells what she is doing.”

Paley’s poetry doesn’t fit into any particular school of writing, and her motives and themes are too transparent for academic decoding. She wasn’t averse to saying exactly what she meant. “A poet can write about a man slaying a dragon,” her mentor Auden famously said, “but not about a man pushing a button that releases a bomb.” Paley wrote about the button and made no excuses for it. She wanted nothing to do with symbolic grandeur. Her poems are easy to overlook because they are spare, candid, and make no claims to importance. “This eighty-year-old body is / a fairly old body what’s it / doing around the house these days / checking the laundry,” she writes in a poem called “Windows.”

She focused on poems, and not stories, in her final years for a simple reason: they took less time. She could do the dishes, visit her grandchildren, attend an antiwar meeting, and still find an hour or so to jot down some lines. “She was just the opposite of a Romantic poet,” says Nichols fondly. “It didn’t interest her to be a poet with a capital P. She was an absolutely ordinary person, and she was proud of it.”

The One and the Many

How revolutionary was Mao’s poetry?

Poetry Foundation, August 2008

In 1958, the People’s Daily, the newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party, congratulated the nation’s writers on their “magnificent” style, singling out the following poem for praise:

Each year our farm production grows,
Grains and cotton pile up mountain high, Hurrah!
Eat the grains, but don’t forget the sower,
The Communist Party’s our dear Ma and Pa.

Terse yet buoyant, the patriotic poem resembled millions collectively composed during the Great Leap Forward, when the nation’s push for productivity extended to poetry, and literary quotas were set for each town. In Shanghai, the number of self-described writers rose from 889 in 1957 to more than 200,000 the next year. Workers hurried to produce lou (basketfuls) of poetry that would reflect the greatness of their nation. “The people are goaded and urged, instructed and inspired by tireless party cadres [that] . . . there has to be a new epoch of poetry production,” wrote S.H. Chen in his 1960 China Quarterly article, “Multiplicity in Uniformity,” one of the few English reports on what is known as the Multimillion-Poem Movement. “The traditional concept of a poem as a long and painstakingly wrought gem is by implication bourgeois and passé.”

The Poems of Mao Zedong
By Mao Zedong
Translated and with an introduction by Willis Barnstone
University of California Press, 168 pp., $24.95

In his 1942 lectures on literature and art, Mao Zedong established guidelines for what would be China’s prevailing literary style for the next 40 years. Writers were to learn the language of the masses, abandoning fanciful themes and images (sunsets, blossoms, unrequited love) for a literature of tractors, bumper harvests, and steel plants. A poet and an avid reader himself, Mao admitted that he had shifted his position on intellectuals, whom he’d once assumed were the “only clean people in the world”; he now believed they were like heroes “with no place to display [their] prowess.” Their elegance had become irrelevant to the masses.

Mao’s stated revulsion for high culture was perhaps the easiest defense against his own attraction to it. His own poetry, which was widely dispersed and memorized throughout the country, bore much in common with the “traitor literature” against which he warned. His poems, which he began writing as an adolescent, were triumphs of traditional style: leisurely, sensual odes to Chinese landscapes, ancient legends, and war heroes (including himself), written in rigid forms developed in the T’ang (618–907) and Song (960–1279) dynasties. He recognized, with only a hint of shame, that the poems “represent an antique style and . . . might mislead the younger generation.” He often composed pieces during party meetings but then would throw them on the floor, dismissing them as “doodles.”

The quality of his versifying has long been a matter of debate. Some scholars claim that his poetry, which he began writing as an adolescent, would have made him famous even if he had never been a world leader. In the introduction to the newly reissued Poems of Mao Zedong, editor and translator Willis Barnstone, a professor of literature at Indiana University, argues that Mao is a “major poet, an original master” whose role in history “must not blind us to the original power and beauty of the poems.” But the 35 translations that follow do not reveal a particularly inventive sensibility. Mao’s writing is elegant and clean, but he rarely breaks with literary convention, and his poetry can hardly be seen as a weapon for national liberation. As Barnstone notes, Mao was a “servant of Chinese mythology” and lifted couplets from thousand-year-old poems. He employs nature as a metaphor for love, revolution, violence, and coming-of-age. “Mao, like few good poets in our century, seems immediately accessible, indeed an easy poet,” Barnstone writes.

One of Mao’s best-known pieces, “In Praise of the Winter Plum Blossom,” shows his penchant for narrating the turn of seasons. It alludes to verse by Lu You, who wrote more than 100 poems about plum blossoms in the 12th century.

Spring disappears with rain and winds
and comes with flying snow.
Ice hangs on a thousand feet of cliff
yet at the tip of the topmost branch the plum
blooms

The plum is not a delicious girl showing off
yet she heralds spring.
When mountain flowers are in wild bloom
she giggles in all the color.

Mao’s descriptions of nature tend to be both exuberant and flat-footed, and it’s hard to read phrases like “flying snow” and “delicious girl” without wondering if the poem has lost its spark in translation, bringing to mind Ezra Pound’s dictum that reading a Chinese poem in English is like having an itch and merely “scratching over the boot.”

Although Mao grew up in a peasant family, he seems to have retained little interest in writing about the ordinary activities of farm life. Instead, many of his most personal poems feel precious and picturesque, not the work of a man who scorned art that simply adds “more flowers on the brocade.” In his 1949 “Poem for Liu Yazi,” he romantically recalls the times “we drank tea / and in Chongqing went over our poems / when leaves were yellowing.” Other poems reference Confucius or the grandeur of rainbows. Mao’s verse typically features just one character: a lonely, fearless soldier, surveying a desolate landscape or the sprawl of war, remarking on his own resilience with a haughty sense of humor. At the end, he often broadens his scope and addresses his generation: “If we cannot reach the Long Wall / we are not true men,” “Only today are we men of feeling,” “Never before were we poets so moved.”

Although Mao dismissed intellectuals as dumb and disloyal—only those whose feet are “smeared with cow-dung,” he announced, are capable of true art—he could never quite wean himself from the joys of his scholarly existence. He was always neurotic and insecure about his own intellectual abilities, even in comparing himself to his own secretaries. According to one of Mao’s biographers, Jung Chang, Mao slept on a large bed partially covered in piles of books a half foot high, so that when he woke up he could immediately roll over and begin reading. When his vision faltered in old age, he ordered the construction of two factories to print books with characters large enough for his eyes.

He made sure, however, that the rest of China had few options for intellectual pursuit beyond his own work. During the Cultural Revolution, from 1966 to 1976, loudspeakers broadcast his slogans; every bookstore was supposed to stock his books and empty its shelves of traditional literature, and even train-ticket takers sang his quotations before accepting customers’ fares. The masses were told that Mao, like the sun, could shed light through his presence, and when they spoke of him, they did so through poetic allusion, referring to themselves as “red flowers” turning to the “reddest, reddest red sun.” His name rhymed with the Chinese words used to describe wind, sun, plant, and star—a fortunate coincidence for amateur poets across the country.

But Mao’s poetry had almost nothing in common with the patriotic ditties produced in the Multimillion-Poem Movement. Mao eventually attempted to produce revolutionary poetic content, but these halfhearted experiments feel stilted, and Barnstone wisely leaves them out of his book. Chunhou Zhang’s and C. Edwin Vaughan’s Mao Zedong as Poet and Revolutionary Hero (2002) offers a more exhaustive collection of Mao’s poems, some of which were written in response to policy decisions and disputes. In his 1965 poem “Missing the Charming Maiden: A Dialogue Between Two Birds,” Mao dramatizes the struggle between the Chinese and Soviet Communist parties, drawing on Khrushchev’s comment that the Communist Party needs a good dish of potatoes and beef.

In the year before last, you know, when the autumn moon was bright,
A tripartite treaty was signed.
And there was something to eat in addition,
When the potatoes are cooked,
Add beef.
Don’t talk nonsense,
Look at the heavens and earth being overturned.

The sudden insertion of political lingo (“tripartite treaty”) and colloquialisms (“add beef”) makes for a jolting change from Mao’s earlier lofty style.

While Mao ordered his citizens to channel the “lively language of the masses” by writing with “one heart and one mind,” his most coherent poetry tapped into a different kind of collective spirit. His work reads like an amalgam of the past 1,000 years of Chinese poetry—jaunty odes to flowers, to heroism in the midst of bad weather. For a man who expressed disgust with anything resembling cultural tradition, his poems are remarkably conventional and rich with historical allusions. Mao could not delete from his mind the books he had read as a child, just as he could never completely destroy China’s cultural history. Although he promoted avant-garde, almost Warholian modes of serial production, his own writing merely reinforces the gap between the artist and the public. He romanticized the masses while distancing himself from their lives.