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If I wake up early enough there’s an owl in Ditmas Park. Its lilted double call is doubled again in the rhythm of a distant siren, dopplered in recession. The streets are dangerous. Under changing leaves, the family minivan passed away at thirty, a violent and heroic death out-of-doors. I heard it in my dreams, sideswiped by a bulldozer as it slumbered towards senility. October is the best month for sleeping with the window open. The midnight gibbering of sidewalk maniacs, the desperate hilarity of nocturnal teenagers, the pre-dawn honks of impatient commuters, stunned by the outrage of the hour and desperate to drag sleeping strangers into unhappy consciousness by the self-righteousness of the suffering, were joined by the deep grumbling of heavy machinery, the piercing and erratic eeps of their reversal and the savage ribbing of construction workers hollering in two languages. Enfolded in this cacophony: an errant crack. What did I expect? The slow grace of hospice, the machine sputtering out only when the repetition of alternate side parking made life or death identical, when the hour and a half a week of illicit double-parking ceased to excite at all. The only inkling of the minivan’s heroic ambitions was the implication of its fading beige pinstripe, the erect posture of the captain’s chairs. The sound did not wake me, so steeled am I against the din: it is lost in a dream I forgot, that I never remembered.

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So began the season where my insensitivity became apparent. How I actually get around the city is this: I bike. Unlatching my helmet to reveal by its relief that I was being lightly strangled, or slamming the Citibike into its dock and noticing, only then, the stiffness of my neck held too taught, I found that I could not remember my bike ride. Eleven miles and an hour passed between the leafy streets of Ditmas, the speckled shade of elms and the blaring glass and steel canyons of Midtown: empty miles, an empty hour though I know it passed all across the earth, that an apricot blossomed and a chestnut rotted. Commuting is amnesia. I vowed to experience these omitted hours of my life. Wasn’t there wonder to be found in the whole panoply of interconnected infrastructures, the streetlights and the fluid flows of traffics through the ordered streets? Biking home that day, my nervous system entered a new state. It may be that all systems are nervous, certainly the ones that rule this city’s locomotion, that systemicity itself is a kind of exposure always nervous to its own vulnerability. The state was called: panic. For how little are my fellow human beings willing to throw away my life: either for the selfish shaving of a millisecond off their ride or the brute obstinacy of adherence to idealized rules and rights of traffic flow, categorical imperatives to motion, over the corpses of their brothers. Panic was my response, and rage. Though the furious, scowling cyclist is a stock image of lampoon, I am a nice guy. Previously I glided through the ballistic morass of the streets in a state of smiling stupification, myopic for my pleasurable heart rate alone, for the felicities of breeze. Rage perverted exercise into fantasies of vengeance, the previously ignored erosions of my wellbeing became wounds inflicted by the people of the road; and the menace of buses, trucks and cars became the rendering of all outside into a keening casino of doom. My sense of justice was made vertiginous by this everyday exposure to the plain injustice of mass, the might is right principle embedded in Newton’s unimpeachable mechanics.

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I do not understand that rage is associated primarily with driving. Driving is simply sitting plus twitch. Road rage is, in its most capacious sense, true. The road implies a public; the public, the jungle of society here sans any tenderness that human recognition could supply. I am a human being, you are a bicycle, you are an automobile, you are a pedestrian, no more than a soft and presumptuous bollard. Even the iconic urban exclamation, “I’m walkin here!” is answered by the final articulateness of the horn. Is this why the death of the Previa so upset me? Because I had lost the upper hand, my possibility of invulnerability on the killing streets?

The Previa, despite being distant from the typical profile of a libidal hot-rod maintained for the nostalgia and thrill of a bachelor, was considered a “classic car” by insurance agencies due to its age and its collectability by admirers of obsolescence. The coverage thereby supplied allowed the value to be set at the worth it has in one’s heart, knowing that no blue book could contain the ledger of sentiment in which worth is, finally, calculated. It is a perilous conversion, though familiar: deep feelings breed larger numerals.

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When asked, I sympathize with the view that maintains the idiocy of machines and opposes them with the vital undulations of the organic or animal, for which we are supposed to reserve our love. I have tried to resist the myth of the open road, the long echo of fire worship heard in the turns of the combustion engine, the thrill of such close domestic association with a bomb that drives the American glorification of the automobile. And yet, more than a machine, these are interiors, these are portable sitting rooms that supplement the apartment and are as impressionable as any. My childhood bedroom was converted into a guest room with only a minor shrine, my amateur pottery, to commemorate its former use, my stuffed animals distributed across the boroughs at Goodwill, even those who I had promised to love forever: a red frog, a plush unicorn. I have lived in thirteen homes, during this short life and, until it was towed away, the only constant dwelling of my conscious years was this seventeen by five and half foot reserve of space carved out on curbs from Brooklyn to Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. The mat on the driver’s side was worn clean through by my mother’s heel, the dashboard pocked with the various adhesives of obsolete GPS, and the cassette player, though still operable, had gum around its slot, like marmalade gilding a pancake eater’s lips, by the reel of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band melting through the windshield one summer, left protruding like a lolling tongue. The smell was not bad—but I am an improper judge, its association completely occluded its sense. These old, lush and high pile interiors, fabric upholstery over permeable foams: it is as if they were designed to trap our trace, to absorb and darken by our wear. These homey beige and browns of the cars of our youth have given way to onyx blacks, to leather, faux or real—and these age without grace or gradation, suddenly giving up their white foam through a rupture like ivory maggots bursting open a roadkill’s corpse. When I went to inquire about the possibility of repairing my grandfather’s violin, a luthier determined his teacher must have been Czech by the wear on the fingerboard and bow, the hand position it implied, and with that implication, a whole school.

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Then there are the conscious alterations, the custom paint jobs or flashy rims, that betray the car as an article of clothing. Folks cloth themselves in two tons of steel and plastic, carapaced as a stink bug to whiz themselves through the boulevards. “Does this make my ass look big?” “You’re really gonna leave the house wearing that?” The bumper sticker, easiest ornament, is more than a mark of individuation on an essentially repeatable form—in a society where increasingly one’s only public appearances are vehicular, they serve fashion’s functions, replacing the subtle social signs of say, sack suit vs. Italian broad shouldered or distressed jean as opposed to the carpenter pant. They are more concise and overt—often their concision is expressed in the extreme binarism of a political affiliation, the logic of the lawn sign set in motion. The rapidity of politics is no more apparent than in entirely defunct slogans and endorsements fading in driveways: these bumpers have outlasted some of our once most precious ideals. Other uses, to commemorate a mountain’s summiting or announce the presence of a baby, attempt to puncture the anonymity of the highway and still the aggressions of cars that are, after all, as wolves to cars. These are heirs to the almost antique, more elaborate, decorations of a “just married” mobile, jangling with spangles and dragging cans, cars decked out like a temple elephant, container of aspiration and fulfillment: ritually avowed.

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A new dandyism was born. I came up in the era of Pimp My Ride, where staid, middle class dreamers from the suburbs of Southern California would have their fantasy manifested by the rapper Xzibit, who converted, as a surprise, their worn family car into a kind of wackadoodle minstrel mobile, very often approaching the mechanical equivalent of blackface. Surely these “pimped” vehicles were unusable in their owner’s leafy, desperately striving neighborhoods where their function was to deploy children to pastoral frolics or school, to facilitate the gathering of groceries, or transport themselves numbly to an office park in narcoleptic dawns and exhausted clock-out commutes. Still, the owners would review their transformed automobiles with a deep, astonished pleasure—they possessed something extravagant and useless that touched some originary desire, invested in this automobile, heretofore eroded by the niceness of their life. The overblown reactions at each episode’s “big reveal” was shaped by this ambivalence. The wholly urban culture of the strutting car, which was more a methodology of inhabiting a street than a means of transport, parked and leaned on or slowly rolling, bouncing, or operating as a boombox to furnish a transient corner with revelry—here it was uneasily metastasized by the suburban monoculture to tame and excite naked dread.

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The car is inextricable from danger. Transport itself is danger to a homesteader frontiers people who must grit themselves against the stranger, practically knowing how they themselves, as strangers, behave. It is no coincidence that films, that movies whose name contains their basic tenet, have logically extrapolated violence to be the base expression of their principle: motion. The car crash is one of the most rehearsed forms of violence, containing a convergence of the elements maximally hypnotic in media. Nothing, in daily experience, more resembles jump cut or montage than the car crash or replicates its miracle in the retina’s retention than whizzing through the roadways, watching the frames serrated between the passing streetlamps or pylons of powerlines. The sudden eruption in the quotidian which, in its most basic sense, is the definition of plot, here appears in microcosm; the screenplay’s two fundamental organizing principles, interior and exterior, intersect. A car crash.

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The golden age of Hollywood coincided with its mastery of the car chase form, which itself coincided with vehicles whose design accentuated the drama of their collisions. Overpowered, elongated, open-top, seat-beltless machines made before the advent of the crumple zone to sacrifice their occupants to maintain the integrity of their frame. These are the beloved cars of the classic era, “built to last” to such a degree of triumphant temporality as to shame the soft and dying organic life they contained with the pent-up resilience of industrial steel: here, perhaps even more than the latent power of the engine’s ever-incomplete explosion, was the thrill for fragile bodies. I was watching Wild at Heart (1990), one of David Lynch’s most perfect expressions of the belief in love’s existence as a material and moving force in this world, sex too. With an almost statistical dedication to realism, the central road trip of this film brings its characters past numerous devastated sites of car crashes, homages to cinema’s epic period of Westward expansion, the tabula rasa of the open road, the auspicious implication and menace of the horizon, and the automobile’s dialectic of freedom, being beholden to roads. Brains are falling out of people’s heads, bodies expelled through windshields lay in pools of gore in the brush, mysterious innards suddenly exposed and oxidizing in the outside. Smoke rises from the dented machines in plumes that trick the camera’s light. For the Greeks of old, burning a sacrificial offering of dismembered goats or oxen, the ascending smoke from pyre to sky was sign of human junction with the heavens. There are no cell phones. The characters helplessly rearrange the corpses, a man dies in one of their arms, and they get back in their car and continue.

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In the earliest Mickey Mouse cartoons, parts of this creature’s body would metamorphose into the tools and gadgets it required to overcome the obstacles placed before it in the ruined and savage world—this comic figure announced the dissolution of the human being in two simultaneous directions: machine and animal. The runaway popularity of these cartoons was attributed to the yearning audience’s desire to inoculate itself against the pain of this selfsame transformation, taking place inside them, at school, on the honking and screaming streets of cities, in their cartoon factories, in traffic. Mickey Mouse established the cartoon paradigm of unlimited perseverance, that lives today beyond Looney Toons in the unkillability and inexhaustibility of protagonists everywhere and the dream of resilience that powers epic lives of toil, misery, maiming and pain. Samuel Beckett’s famous ultimate utterance “I can’t go on. I must go on. I’ll go on” was popularly anticipated here and is rehearsed contemporaneously in even the stupidest action films where bullet wounds are grit through, unlimited grief; where bodies exit flaming cages of mangled cars. The unreality of violence’s effects is cinema’s most pleasing dream. That is the dream I wavered on the threshold of waking from, riding my bicycle home.

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It was not, therefore, only the leg-up in the battleground of locomotion that the Previa gave me that was the source of my love: home, outfit and armor. In fact, it was the other way around. The Previa’s charming silhouette was deadly: its sloped snout, semi-space age (it resembled Buckminster Fuller’s utopian Dymaxion car) but also Neanderthalic (its descending brow), left its driver and front passenger half hanging into the roadway in the event of even the most minor frontend crash. The engine’s detonation was, to save space in front, placed directly under the driver’s seat with an inch thick plate of steel alone protecting the reproductive organs of the machine’s operator: not too reassuring in an 7-seater vehicle that begged for fertility and children. Indeed, when the minivan was underpopulated, the weird weight distribution left the thing perilously prone to rolling over during too-sudden turns or when exposed to gentle breezes on side-less bridges, particularly bad being that it lacked side airbags, the heads sent wobbling on frail necks smashing into sideglass and frame. It was completely uncharacteristic of my sober, practical family to overlook this deathtrap. My father sweetly wanted it maintained as his sarcophagus, the glorious container of his years of childrearing that seemed suitable for his thoughts of eternity because of how close the idea of having children is to the idea of immorality.

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The nostril-searing tinge of danger is introduced into the sleepiest suburbs of this land, the greenest, most serene lawns populated by milk-fed tottling babes, by the way of automobiles, sly and wild predators like coyotes released to cull the overpopulation of a grazing prey that does not yet know it is one. The suburbs, or any place in Brooklyn where one could plausibly find a parking spot. In the last decade, manufacturers have emphasized the overt evil of vehicles, reacting to the global bad feeling of climate change, emissions, pollution: nothing could be more of a boon to the already-suicidal implications of driving than its monumental elaboration to the scale of life-on-earth. Instead of shying away from this reasonable admission, American car design has embraced the villain-hood of their products and affixed each vehicle, from the luxury sedan to the family minivan (let alone the “sports utility vehicle”) with increasingly sinister grilles and silhouettes, sneerings slants, dramatic diagonals around the anthropomorphic headlights to make the portrait of the vehicle read, by the human instinct to and evolutionary genius in scrying instantaneously expressions, as rage or defiance. There are some pastoral bicycles that we conceive as having moustaches by the curvature of their handlebars. Older, miniature cars peer wide-eyed from their parking spots, with the disproportion of a toddler, exuding innocence. We know too much for these formal euphemisms: even electric vehicles are burdened with the blood of the lithium mine, with the stupid compromise with privation that morphed stranger danger and sprawl into fear of the bus; small, distant hands corroded in the steaming depths.

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Even with this wholesale embrace of danger, Americans aspire to win car crashes. Despite the innovations in safety, which primarily consist of punitive beeps and automated abdication of ethics by the replacement of reflexes with scattershot calculations, fatalities see a steady creep upwards as car fronts are raised and flattened, the frank logic of mass—and the victim of these “accidents” (again the naturalness of vehicles is shrugged into reality as an instant of cosmic chance or the equivalent to bedweeting) are propelled from biology to physics. Americans are maimed by cars, which cripple the new category of life, what we used to call a human being, naked as Adam: that is, the pedestrian, already in common parlance a slur. This makes us more subject to cars, participants in the mangled arms race of necessary locomotion. Indeed, when I am most sure I am weak is first climbing into bed, that horizontal release from the howling labor of the spine, sighing—I am weary of the burdens of bipedalism, an old, old invention.

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Car-less, during the following months I took the rare taxis of my life, when it was really impossible to get somewhere otherwise. That is not true. I will always consider taxi-taking a humiliating indulgence, I will always construct justifications of theatric exigency to cover mere convenience and obfuscate the power of my credit which could allow me to be lazy forever. That is to say, I am trying (for reasons I do not know) to resist the lapse into the confessional indulgence present in cars’ wholesale embrace of their planetary evil—and yet, because to live in this world one must follow its customs, I can do no more than garnish my accession with shame, that simulacrum of resistance. How easily we forget: shame is always an option.

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I have been attuned to the taxi driver’s dangling saint, the cross dangling from the Uber’s rearview mirror. Close proximity with the casino of mortality, driving, sitting above the mystery of automobile innards, inspires religion. We do not know how cars work, as a species—and so pour our soft mastery of verbiage into the black hole of a car’s operation, as diverse as the interpretation of triage testimony. A clever nurse must determine the meaning of “I’m catching chills”—and so close to corporeality are the knocks, burrs, whines and squeals, that we use indeterminate subjective descriptors of smoothness, power, drag, control, bumps, whirs and squeals—these humanize the vehicle, in their heights and declines. I have been to the junkyards where husks await vivisection, wearing serried wounds on their hulls in grooves and rub like trilobites clawed there in ancient seas; exploded airbags clumped as sunken hot air balloons, wearing the exaggerated drapery runs of Hellenic statuary, Aprodite’s ruined dress, cracks in fluid, limbless torsos, noseless busts—dried redbrown blood on upholstery.

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Machines are a way to remember how we lived, for the future. They hold not just our traces but the earth’s various climatological declines from factory uniformity—the sunbleach and burnt paint of southern cars; sagging dashboards, caught mid plastic weep as all industry’s material crumbles under brute obstinacy of sun, or the snow states sloshing of corrosive salt on fragile underbellies that eat metal brittle, gushing rust wounds like a slaughterhouse hog cut hoof to snout. It’s amazing the duration of a human life, the incorporating persistence of organic healing, and how fragile his most beloved creations—I write this in contradiction to my marvel at the longevity of old steel. With a squinting view of my Brooklyn street, packed on both sides with rows of cars sniffing each other’s bumpers, I see those thin plates manufactured just for the purpose of shattering en masse at a Greek wedding.

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Cars are future patches for other cars. The pick and pull junkyards housing sprouting car husks in the great becoming-scrap of the home economy of outside are monuments to some coming making-do, the permanence of all decisions taken on this planet, the ceaseless momentum of inheritance. They are the material for that genre of jigsaw masculinity, the “project car” of meditating into parts that has devoured many men’s yard hours, bearing themselves against the flight of mainland manufacturing with amateur cost-cuttings, genuine pleasure at the understanding that takes place in the hands, and stubborn defiance against expertise. I have tasted the horror of malfunction, where the complete obscurity of the machine under my ass becomes apparent: an internal failure, a wordless mechanical groan from tolerances exceeded—or on the side street of a foreign town under strange streetlamps and pissed-on curbs, the engine failing to turn over. Before its sudden death, I felt its mysterious decline, forecasting catastrophe. The Previa, despite its danger, survived thirty years without collision. Previa, what a beautiful word. Its latinate hybridity was a stroke of genius: before and go. Toyota stated officially it was directly Spanish, meaning “preview” as in, a preview of what minivans could be capable of, the future of families. Previa. Previa. Previa. I believe we were seduced by the beauty of its name.

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The Previa was auctioned as scrap on Long Island and a buyer in Texas won it for peanuts, to dismember. My insurance payout, I believed, I would use to justify taxi-taking, and to rent cars, only when needed, as owning a car in New York City is famously inconvenient, selfish and unnecessary. Traumatized by the price of renting, I found a 2015 Corolla that a place in Midwood would give me for a week and a half at a fraction of the price of the conglomerates, to get to Massachusetts when a festival for woodland Klezmorim demanded my presence. The Corolla is the bestselling car of all time, it is a cultural icon and, also, beautifully named. In its cramped interior I felt the aura of its myth. Lil’ Wayne once rapped somberly to his fans, “You never been in jail, I never been in a Corolla.” The proper name of our machines: it is easy to recoil at the vulgarity of these appropriations, torn from their homes in botany, geography, and dark and glorious histories for vehicles of all types. How wide a gulf will we allow between the spirits that hummed along the Tiber on those Roman marches and the ennobility I feel by the charm-word Corolla, knowing its secret source? The Corolla: a collection of petals forming whorls, within the flower’s septals, that is the green and leaflike outer growths, typically surrounding the reproductive centerpiece.

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In 1955 the Ford Motor Company required a name for a new car they were producing, their first in over ten years, meant to bridge the gap between their existing, more affordable, options and the larger hot-rod vehicles of their competition, mostly Mercury and Chevrolet. The wife of an employee in the marketing research department, Robert B. Young, happened to know socially the poet Marianne Moore, 65, who had won the Pulitzer Prize four years earlier and was publicly admired for attending Dodger’s games and boxing matches in her lace collars and tricorne hats as a poet whose eccentricity was traffic with the popular, despite the occasional derision aimed at the “obscurity” of her poems. Her name was passed along to the executive David Wallace who wrote Moore a letter requesting suggestions for the name of this car, desiring something that could rival the extreme evocativeness of Ford’s wildly successful Thunderbird, that would trump the “embarrassing pedestrianism” of the names his department had already rejected (from various sources apparently over 6,000 potential names total were solicited). His request shows all the marks of a deep understanding of the cutting edge of Modernist poetics, of Imagism even.

“We should like this name to be more than a label. Specifically, we should like it to have a compelling quality in itself and by itself. To convey, through association or other conjuration, some visceral feeling of elegance, fleetness, advanced features and design. A name, in short, that flashes a dramatically desirable picture in people’s minds.”

Her responses are an incredible artefact of a poet at the height of her powers wading into poetry’s increasingly only remaining relevant domain: use, in the service of our era’s most powerful consciousness-shaping force, advertisement. Moore’s proposed names (a selection): The Impeccable, Symmechromatic, Bullet Lavolta, Mongoose Civique, Anticipator, Regina-Rex, Varsity Stroke, Angelastro, Cresta Lark, Pluma Piluma and Utopian Turtle-top. These were all rejected for a name of wholly sentimental resonance for the Ford executives: it was named the Edsel, after Henry Ford’s only son.

The Edsel became a standard lesson in the annals of business failures, flopping supposedly due to poor market research and misarticulated visions: it was presented as both a family car and a single man’s speedster, appealing, therefore, to no one; it was a medium-sized car introduced in a market then oversaturated with them and needing, instead, a compact. It pleases me to think that with another name, with one of Moore’s sonic gems shimmering with allusion, the average American who, after all, still cowered in awe and power before epic lines of poetry at least every Sunday, marvelling in the pews, or had their heart wrenched by hymnals or whatever Ed Sullivan had on, later that day; who, for better or worse, were still vulnerable to English, properly deployed, and its mongrel depths of Latin and Saxon—that they would have wanted a poetic machine. It is only with a kind of nihilistic sense of superiority that I could admire the sanity of market choices, gloat over the squashing of an antique sensibility.

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I was reading Tristes Tropiques by Claude Levi-Strauss and, writing of his preconceptions of Brazil, whose anthropological study was to be his life, there he admits, “I assumed the atmosphere to be permeated with the smell of burning perfumes, an olfactory detail which had no doubt crept in through an unconscious awareness of the similarity of sound between ‘Brésil’ and ‘grésiller’ (to sputter in burning), and which is more responsible than any actual experience for the fact that, even now,” that is, even after twenty years of living there and study, knowing its air and its people, “I think of Brazil first and foremost as a burning perfume.”

My own invulnerability to language is occasionally shattered, as when I made a trip to Walgreens on the way home from the subway to purchase a nailclipper, to replace the one that had broken in my hands the night before, and in those grey aisles, comparing their selection, something in my attention misfired and I heard completely the music playing over the loud speaker, the way stores, cafes, restaurants, everywhere seems to be playing music, to cover the mastications of one’s neighbors, to excite commerce—it was “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)” by Kate Bush, a song I was basically unfamiliar, as with most of what is played: “There is thunder in our hearts.” From what I understood, this is an anguished song about the mortal difficulty of human connection and a plea to the supernatural (God) to make love possible amid the constant heartbreak and unbridgeable gulfs of individuality. Are you hearing this? How jarringly, how nonconsensually was I moved, was I wrenched into feeling during this dull chore? It’s amazing that music such as this, of grief and love, violent libido, rage and resentment echoes in half-populated corridors, in department stores and waiting rooms everywhere crashing against the drywall, the shabbily upholstered chairs, the rows of glistening commodities behind their windows of plastic, gaping outwards; occasionally striking the soul of some poor sap with broken focus.

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This was the same dangerous turn of the sensory kaleidoscope that brought the murderous streets to the burning foreground of my early winter bike rides, bloodred gems emerging from the mirrored tumble in the tube. Winter passed. One day, the air was sweet from a honey suckle exhale and pollen landed yellowgreen on the last rockhard slabs of soot-blackened ice surviving in a crevice of curb. The air everywhere had the heavy emparticled stillness of after a sneeze. What was sneezing? It seemed the Earth was. Spring was here, I was birthed into it completely a pedestrian. Between my subway stop and my apartment building a new deli opened, where I would stop in to listen to pop music and be riven with feeling and schmooze with the neighborhood. There lived a pure bred white Persian, a “four thousand dollar cat” I was told by the proprietor, who oozed luxury and commanded privileges and alternated between watching enviously the preparation of sandwiches on the hot top and standing watch (no one could confuse it for guard it was so tranquil and blithe) outside by the sandwich board sign; named Snowy. He was kidnapped, one evening, picked up from the sidewalk and placed inside an idling car by a man and a woman in what appeared like a premeditated act, from the blurry CCTV footage captured of the event. There was a period of desperate search, posters hung at every crosswalk of the neighborhood. Snowy was among those icons of the pleasures of the sidewalk, the treats afforded those who traverse the city on an animal scale. I believe, more than anything, it was Snowy’s absence that made me secretly desire a car again, that planted the obsessional seed that sprouted into my search, not long after, for a replacement to the Previa. Sure, there was the near-simultaneous defrost of the hemisphere, which promised green delights in every direction, waterways in which my skin ached to be engulfed, my spine to be relieved of its gravity in. But the tolerability of city life in any season is so tentative that my most trod stretch of sidewalk’s sudden deprivation of Snowy’s perplexing vitality left an opening in which the fever of motorism could enter, could spread.

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When I drove the rented Corolla, I felt a presence polyphonic and enveloping, not just from culture’s long elaboration of its word but from the quality of its employment. When an object or place is used by so many different people, it takes on an anonymous face of its own—not diminished but with another life, as if polished on the level of use, not surface. No car could match the deep personal poetry of the Previa, whose name was as entraced as its interior and paintwork, which had been murmured throughout nearly every period of my life with increasing density around those critical moments of moving, journey, quest or change like some watchword, like some circadian prayer. The former quality would birth the latter: my insurance payout was modest though miraculous—the new car would have to be used to be afforded. My job, if it can be called that, is as a scholar of Modernist poetics. Indeed, I am a true believer in what could be said to be its tenets and its aesthetics. It was with a kind of vertiginous horror that I saw the dictum that high culture had been toiling under, to “make it new,” the triumph of novelty, as an uneasy anticipation of WalMart-speed lightning-fast production and the hyper-iterability and disposability of just-in-time manufacturing and supply chain management.

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Around 2030, the United States will enter into service its new generation of land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, the centerpiece of the so-called “nuclear triad” of deterrence (land-based, submarine-based, and bomber-deliverable warheads). Its name was recently announced by the Air Force Global Strike Command: the LGM-35 Sentinel. These are smaller and faster than their predecessor, the LGM-30 Minuteman III, which served for over fifty years as the cornerstone of the United States’ nuclear arsenal—their range is the entire globe. Announced, as it was, during the sober era of Obama’s administration, there was some question over whether it would be named at all, beyond its acronymic designation, its cool facade of technical jargon—the name seemed a kind of vulgarity in a decade of detente. Beginning around the end of the Vietnam War there has been a progressive euphemization in the naming of weapons’ systems, a shying away from the primal dread whose inspiration was, after all (we were promised), their purpose. The famous Reaganite missile name “Peacekeeper” announced a new era of deterrence, where it was no longer a strategy in a conflict but instead the condition of life on earth, aiming as it did for the rhetoric of totalizing stability. Only its specialized reference maintained the horror and glory for those in the know, to the Colt 45 with the same nickname that was the most popular revolver of the wild West’s genocidal expansion and final settling. Old missiles referenced Homer. Atlas and Titan were the original land-based deterrents; the submarine-based missiles were named Poseidon and, after his own weapon, Trident (still in use, in its second generation). In 2023, Russia began replacing its Soviet-era supply of missiles with the RS-28 Sarmat, named after the Samaritans, a sly reference to modern day Iran. Colloquially, and by NATO, this missile is referred to as the Satan II. France has a missile named Hadés, another named Pluton; Iran names their missiles after passages in the Qur’an, Shahab meaning meteor, Fateh meaning conqueror; China has a series of missiles named Dong-Feng or East Wind, a striking mythic image conveying the relativity of hemispheric war. Tanks are named after great generals. Helicopters are named after Native American tribes. The Apache attack helicopter is the most well-known: the Sioux began the convention in 1947 and the Lakota is the latest, christened 2012.

Note: Much of the information about weapon names and naming conventions, as well as the spark for my interest in them, comes from the well-argued and insane opinion essay, “Sing, Missile Muse, of Gods and Heroes: America’s Most Fearsome Weapons Need Better Names” (2021) by Tom Karako.

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No machine or fear can go without a name—the gesture of naming is the first sign of an unconscious, before even dreams. Some vehicles, ships especially, beg naming emphatically, and even reserve the use of female pronouns; a piece of grammatical baggage originating in the analogy of womb as containers of men on dangerous expedition. In New Orleans, I knew a captain who sailed in Lake Pontchartrain; he owned a boat that had no name. He shrugged and smiled away my complaints and questions, he tutted at my suggestions generated through profound attention to the specificity of his craft. The eerie recoil which I experienced against his stubborn refusal dawned on me as rank sanctimony when I was made aware of my heretofore absolute ignorance of cars, trucks and vans; not only their familiar names, born from private affection, but even their generic ones, of species and genus. I mean all my life I had encountered them as unpleasant and embarrassing ways to decorate every single street in this country, as failures of beautification that must be meticulously ignored, like how whole marriages can function only by the lifelong suspension of realizing consciously one spouse’s bad breath; or how one can preserve deliberately the beauty of a beloved’s face by making sure to never glimpse its profile whereby its freakish distensions would be irrevocably known, and somehow knowing enough to know this but refusing to know that. Strolling down the sidewalk, biking in the cramped corner of the road scrying for signs of a car door’s sudden explosion outward, even driving—I viewed the vehicles as blurred and indistinct masses, practically floaters in my eye, that served only as potential signs of alarm or blots on the landscape, annoyances among the trees, the beautiful walkers and funny dogs, the streetside tableaus, the coloration of the sky bleeding into the edges of allusive clouds. Their particular existences came to me in a deluge of appellatives, prompted by the most important impetus for discernment in someone who wishes to survive our world: the flood of extreme attentiveness that overtakes one before a major purchase. Not to get ripped off! To assure oneself that the decision to part with money, in every instance a disaster, is undertaken with a clear-eyedness whose clarity is, unfortunately, infinitely refinable. That is to say: to obsess without end. Many times have I experienced these spasms of hysterically acquired expertise: about air conditioners, desk chairs, pillows for those afflicted with scoliosis, mold treatments, shoe inserts, computer screens, linen napkins. Paradoxically, the more one descends into the depths of research, scouring online forums, technical documents, sifting experience from testimony from advertisement, the more one’s final purchase feels like an arbitrary leap or a coercion of circumstance, a concession to convenience or exhaustion, a step taken in the throes of panic. The anonymous testimony of aggrieved internet users echoes in my skull for each and every one of these eventual purchases, which are scattered around my apartment like so many portals to regret, so many magic mirrors waiting for the tears of their princess to reveal their glass was like as water, their horrible vision of otherwise. During these periods of research I remember how monomanically inflated these objects became in my attention: any trip outside would become a montage of visions of various air conditioner set-ups, through-the-wall sleeves, window units and their diverse braces, central air exhaust pumps—I could identify each brand by the pattern of their heat sink, at forty paces, each era of innovation or misinstallation, or clever or irresponsible modification. This would be replaced, then, by people’s shoes, by their brands emerging from the dull haze of a rush hour subway ride concluding the thicket of commuter legs. I recognized, now, the cars on the road, strange and angular acronyms: RAV4. CR-V. CX-30. And names. Forester. Golf. Sonata.

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It is a staple of Facebook melancholia, a supposed retelling of the results of study that demonstrated that children recognized the logos of more brands than they could identify species of wildflowers. Children perform an irreplaceable task for the species: they render the monstrosities of progress bearable by matter-of-factly incorporating them as native born proclivities. I had missed even this self-education: I barely could identify the makes of cars, I had thought Honda and Hyundai were slurred mispronouncements of the same word. Now each name became more than merely legible but, indeed, constituted incantations that summoned to my mind the chorus of recalls and malfunctions, images of undercarriages dismembered by rust, catastrophic failures of head gaskets or rear trailing arms.

There are those alluring and attractive people for whom we seem to understand that any closer association than our initial, sudden admiration would result in this same kind of disappointment by depth. Whereas previously I could, on rare occasion, be halted on the street by an automobile painted a stunning shade of teal and revel solely in the singularity of that shade, on that afternoon, in that tree-speckled light—like the striking beauty of a strange woman’s jawline or, say, her very sexy midriff, or the sight of her reading Kleist on the Q train, all this pleasure could be obliterated by learning, from her lips, if I made the error of engaging her, that she was a stockbroker and a party animal, or watching her too long and witnessing her produce a vape; and the entire edifice of stereotype, no matter how broad-minded or tolerant I presume to be, overtakes dumb admiration and replaces it with something like worry, about the incoherence and fundamental unreadability of the world, the unreliability of my perception and the fault in my judgment, my vulnerability to the stupidest seductions—it was a 2016 Subaru, yes teal, but prone to early and expensive transmission failure due to the unrefined CVT. I knew the names of some wildflowers, having neglected, until now, my generational duty.

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These are two murkily divided genres of names, that teeter on the edge of the private and public. Anyone who I do not call Boobah, or Peepoo or Bobs, I am not really in love with them.

In Marcel Proust’s novel In Search of Lost Time, he writes of his friend’s mistress who had “acquired the habit of saying of a picture, if it were Impressionist, or an opera, if Wagnerian, ‘Ah! that’s good,’” one day when a young man had kissed her on the ear, and, touched by her pretence of being thrilled, she had affected modestly: ‘But really, as a sensation I call it distinctly good.’” This calling things good had become a kind of shared property of her and her new lover, Saint-Loup. And the narrator marvels at this and other similar expressions pronounced between his friend and his mistress as if they were peculiar, “as though they had been a necessary form of speech, and without any conception of the pointlessness of an originality that is universal.” That “good” a word so common and dull could become a word of private endearment, a marker between two (however, in the novel, unhappy and incomplete) lovers of a shared habitat is consistent with the uses of language, of judgement, of naming. I think of the way that I pronounce the name of my own beloved, not an uncommon one, when it happens to be appended, the same syllables, to a person other than her. It could almost be a different name, though probably there is no sonic variation, no shimmering rings of adoration visible by the air disturbed by an utterance of love.

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The Previa’s name performed double duty as its generic and its sobriquet, among its family. I needed one new car to emerge from a monstrously inflating encyclopedia of nomenclatures fed to me by insomniac scourings of the internet: to be my own. Every day, many times, I check a little box on the screen, I identify the trucks, buses and stop lights and, thereby, I verify that I am human. I am training automobiles to drive without me.

There is a hallowed figure in our society, a magician, a necromancer, who imbues inert and unmelodious products with the halo of intimate destiny—they are almost an obsolete type but persist, for the most part, exclusively for the purpose of distributing automobiles; to provide the drama of purchase that impregnates cars with tenderness with the rigamarole of sale. Ancient air, you breath, from the market place: the perfumed bazaars of Calcutta, oasis souks, the fairs of Limerick, delft laid out on a rug, the Medieval Saturdays of commerce, the used car salesmen that line American highways, behind plywood desks, under posters of Indian chiefs and pinups. I have met these men, in Springfield, MA, Troy, NY, North Hackensack, NJ—they are famous, their personalities are schlock fodder for burlesque, and I have witnessed their necessary magic. Their sleaze and dishonesty is universally suspected—among themselves there has developed a culture of self-help, and it is more to actualize their personalities by demonstrating their limitless powers of coercion than precisely to make the sale that they operate as they do. Their reputation is as visible martyrs to the universal scam of commerce: yea, and the world cries for gift and sacrifice, the only moral trades, defunct.

The ability of these salesmen to employ language in contradiction to the senses was most fascinating to me: “There is no rust,” they would say, as we stared at the same spot of orangebrown. They would construct fantasies of speed, and invoke the promise of family. Every SUV I looked at, I would be pinned into my place in the reproductive chain of life: “Plenty of room for the family.” Some employed techniques of performative candor that took my breath away: they staked their reputations, it seemed their life on the extravagant guarantees made to me: “Trust me. You can trust me.” One tried humiliation: “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” applying the pressure of etiquette so that I would demur from the only legitimate response to his claims, the accusation that he openly lied. Many tried a frenzied and compressed orgy of amiability, binding us with confessional disclosures and proddings, wondrous displays of hospitality. It was amazing how quickly common ground could be found between me and a used car salesman from Hackensack, a first generation Jordanian immigrant from Springfield, a former farmer from Hill County, Texas in Troy, New York—if cosmopolitanism lives, these men are its emblems. Everywhere I heard the universal assertion of hospitality: your money is good here.

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In Newark, I was sold on a 2012 Honda FIT. I was sold by the stray calico kitten that slept in a small plateau of the car’s body in the wheel well. Inspecting the scrapes and indents that made the car affordable, I disturbed the kitten’s sleep and it rose stretching, tumbled to the pavement and wobbled away on still-sleeping legs, pins and needles. I tried the FIT over the profound potholes of Newark, amidst the slackened and informal interpretations of right of way that are in effect there and while reckoning with the creativity of pedestrians in presenting their bodies as bargain against the rigidity of grid. The three people who worked at the dealership, a gravel lot whose office was a quarter of a shipping crate fitted with a window AC through a sawed-off square, were too embroiled in their interrupted and now resumed conversation, about the sex lives of football players, to perform the noxious maneuvers of sale. Actually, I believe this was a technique of supreme sophistication. They let me stand with the car, still spotted with raindrops from that morning’s storm, crawl under it, finger its innards, and listen to its tiny engine rattle with the hood ajar. They let me sit with this thing, under the canopy of their distant attention, until I could say to it. Stranger, what myths will we write?

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It was summer, the car meant Jersey Shore, the blue hills of Massachusetts, as blue as those that background Florence in the oil surface of the Renaissance. I don’t like driving: it is sitting still made mandatory, the nightmare of my childhood; it is consequence amplified immediately to fatality, a perversion of an ethic of fertile failure I was cultivated into by my most generous teachers, by the artists of art and life I most admire. Any attempt at self-expression while driving is irresponsible and this daily and necessary homogeneity frames the outbursts of selfhood permitted Americans in condensed orgies of feeling, at stations along the long roads of getting to life.

What makes driving bearable is the manufactured bleakness of roads: to prevent the urge towards pastoral frolic or amorous sociality, roads are, at best, decorated with dismal median flower boxes and huffing arbors intoxicated with vegetable overdoses of carbon dioxide, soot on green leaves. More often you find dilapidated clovers, retaining walls, crack-riven asphalt and the bordering remnants of bisected neighborhoods or blasted woods. If the city has become the icon of alienated life that is only because the road is not even considered a place. It is no accident that the road is reflexively mentioned always as the cosmic justification for government, for taxes or against unlimited libertarian selfishness: who maintains the roads? Who, along those roads, will pick up the trash? The road binds Americans to their civil society, and the car is what gives access to it. Our entire official identity is oriented towards the automobile—even those who may be pedestrians for life, we acquire our identification at the Department of Motor Vehicles. I am the man on my driver’s license.

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That is not all. If the reader is off put by the tone of this critique, they may ask. All that fear and all that complaint, why buy another car? Surely being a presumptive critic who rails against the ecocide of the automobile-wrought climate disaster, your position is harmed? This is an understandable question. In the year where I did not own a car I expected myself to feel a sense of moral superiority, I imagined myself as being able to more emphatically, with more personal authority, make my case: against death and smog. Quite the opposite. I had even less a chance of being understood, I found, having lost the essential element that binds one to society: hypocrisy.

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Snowy was back on the street. There was a whiteboard laid outside for passersby and children to write their messages to the cat; homages and exclamations. One evening in early August, about three months after his return, Snowy was struck by a car and died immediately on Cortelyou Road. The whiteboard became an ad hoc shrine. Crayon drawings and treats were left on a plastic table, exposed to the rain; new drawings, new treats were placed alongside the ones soaked and squashed. Just yesterday, I was outside to move my FIT from one side of the street to the other, to allow the street cleaner to stir the neighborhood’s dust. A black and white kitten was slinking outside Snowy’s deli. I went in, with exclamations for the owner, with honest hyperboles on how adorable this cat was. Newborn and brave, he said, the cat’s name is Prince.

for B.

Each time I use my credit card, smiling at the pavlovian beep, I am presented with a strip of paper on which to affix my signature. These are contracts in miniature, and their profusion is increasingly rendered seamless. If it’s under ten bucks, that’s cheap enough for trust. Sometimes I sign with my finger on a touch screen, worse than my old work with the knobs on an Etch-a-Sketch. But then you face the seriousness of the signature: certifying a lease, a loan, closing on a home, endorsing a confession. This special piece of literacy is what makes our civilization possible: the promise concretized. It conjures credit and aims the coersions of debt, permits the relative peace that reigns in the sunlight of our cities, fields and towns; and therefore children are necessarily terrorized into its appreciation when they discover the earthmoving power of the lie. With age, it becomes less frequently foregrounded, save for moments of legal or social terror: being exposed in the abject nudity of what is then called your “word.” It’s your word against theirs, you’re told; or, you only have your word. This is a smiling bit of wisdom inherited from the violence of packed dirt trading routes and the ruthless hospitality of the Levant merchants that rode them.

The premise that the testimony of a single witness is invalid as proof alone is apparently a principle that predates even the Roman Law in which it served as a touchstone: two witnesses are required. This is still the case: wills, real estate deeds, powers of attorney are invalid without the additional signatures of two witnesses. Historians adhere to this rule when legitimating the events of the past. This is not just a bulwark against lying but an earnest concession to the most sympathetic admission of the law and of history, its worthlessness if not common.

The history of the wedding vow is unclear, buried in the blare of its more proximate popularization as centerpiece of the “traditional wedding” invented by magazine editors in the 1920s and 30s, the advertisers of ritual consumer goods, and diamond slavers. Still, the “vow” is a genuinely ancient concept—“wedlock” comes from the Old English wedlec which connoted pledge-giving in general—and is heavy with the weight of so many lives thrown into its rigour: vow’s most widespread early use was in reference to the monastery or nunnery, to membership in a religious order where it renders the promise lifesize, distends it into a vocation, to embrace study, prayer, poverty, and abstinence; and its association with marriage follows the logic of obversion, two sides of the same idea—worldliness, pleasure, multiplication and flesh. This close association which, like undertow carrying seawards in the rising tide the debris of yesterday’s beach debauchery, crashed backwards on these white marriages to G-d or Christ and stretched the scandal of that analogy. In early Judaism the vow was so severe a promise it was usually only demanded as punishment for a great affront or crime, it so inflexibly bound whoever uttered one. In our time, the promise is so myopically central to marriage that almost no event can occur in a marriage save for its breaking: see, the unbelievable ubiquity of cheating’s discourse and suspicion, where the sacredness of the promise joins the everyday magic of ownership.

There is another thing called love. In the blitz of modernity’s mass suicide of sentiments, in the 1930s when hoards of the unemployed clotted the urban byways, waving their caps and picking up and putting down spent cigarettes and spitting into tin buckets and at each other, like good animals, emerged a slogan projected into the slums of genteel aspiration, “Love knows no depression.” It was to sell a diamond ring. Love is the automatic providence of the grifter. There were stupider days, when people would give their whole lives to carving half a gargoyle and never wake up until seven grandchildren down the line some son’s son said the thing was bogus and cancelled their ancestors with the thin deflationary dagger of the reality principle. Because a select and brilliant group of Cambridge-area pederasts in the mid-19th century were lonely in time, they convinced the world that Greece was the origin of Western Civilization even though it is an Oriental almost-isthmus transmitted to them by the dreamy labors of Arabian eunuchs off-duty, and tentatively legitimated a new horizon of love by the force of this pedigree. I think they were even right. Typically, what survived of love was its dictionary specificity, in four Greek parts, missing what no doubt was responsible for its popularity, the nereids and nymphs that clotted woodlands and streams; and by that amorous ecological crisis, Greece fell.

Different schemes arose after: and there is something adorable and devastating about how Christianity’s central image remains a mother’s love for her child, no matter how elaborately the theologians try to distance themselves from this simple folk interpretation, touched paisans shooing away egghead numerologies; a long memory of the neolithic worship of the mother-goddess. Romance, love’s visible extension and provocation, like a mushroom’s sticky cap trumpeting its enormous mycelial web, was invented at the edge of the Medieval era to plop epistolary tickles into the laps of noblewomen, as a racket to fund art. This has had a long career and the history of what we call literature has depended on the leisure of young women and their emphatic tastes. Love was invented again in the 18th Century in a quiet revolution where moneyed layabouts democratized high feeling, flirting with damnation to convince peasants and longshoremen of the infinite expandability of their hearts. For all this sacrifice, the ladies pulled out their handkerchiefs, getting moist. How quickly this got turned around in the era that followed, where love got its bad name, as a four letter word employed to trick laborers into believing their wage was holy, the fire under their ass to coerce them into furnishing their family with food, smelting a billion products. It was discovered that there is something not very debonair about love, that it is not a good way to be very invincible in violent, surveilled streets. To counter this, people became cool and started professionally countering love’s insistence with misery, alcoholism, derangement and evil, to get out of their suburban home and have a personality of their own. It took maybe another fifty year for this thing to curdle too and people were left holding spitefully their precious selfhoods, crammed therapeutically with actualization, food preferences, “types” (hair-color reductionism or penis-size personality determinism), pet-peeves and fashions. What was the self other than a position in the universal casino of cliches, whose only hope was to be luckily desirable on this go around? Love became a low trade in compatibility, an old euphemism for convenience, what used to have the open glory of celestial soulmate predestination or at least traffic in the world-shaping flows of commerce. It’s amazing how this alleged abstraction, to this day, can gain you access to some stranger’s apartment, with variegated monsteras, radiators of alien music and private cats—an opened-up interior in the anonymity of brickface and headphone use; and let you use a stranger’s car on the weekends; and intervene in the heat distribution of the universe, by maybe producing children, or whatever holding hands for fifty years, or an evening, does thermodynamically to the planet, affecting crops.

My grandmother collected charming bars of soap that would decorate her bathroom and wore petrified the smears of their past use, errant trespasses on their ornamental function—and like water reanimating these unused and arid bars after who knows how long, religion flows abruptly around weddings. If people knew how to welcome the solstice with the capture and release of fireflies, how to wear the walrus mask of winter, chant the tales of the long road and the cherry blossom or worship the bonfires at the extremities of spring, I suspect they would not have to get married so often. I know about a dozen true believers in astrology who I never catch looking at the stars, dimly winking over central Brooklyn; they have an Excel file instead, from Babylon. Here, love meets the promise: and the ready-made vows, standardized by Protestant television, by their faux-antique formula, by the bizarre and singular employment of the verb “to do,” wrench tears from the truest wellspring inside us—and smear the face of heirloom feeling.

I got mass married at Lincoln Center. There was a time when this was not uncommon. In the 70s and beyond, Moonies unified thousands in Madison Square Garden, in Yankee Stadium. Young nations took it upon themselves to bureaucratically synchronize the certification of unions to the same calendar day, to wrest private feelings into the town square, in sight of the marketplace, court and scaffold; another attempt to make love civic. And yet the model of love evoked was not that of an interpersonal trinket, a minor craft between two people who work out their peculiarities into a lower-case love that fits uniquely them; this quirky and resigned love that was meant to counter the imprisonment and abuse of State or Catholic wedlock or the imposition of obligation—but a cosmic impersonal force instead, something like the frost that shivers the top of pines in the earliest of October’s hemispheric teeterings, that could only be summoned by human numbers (over 600 people were there, loving)—the innards of clouds make the leap to precipitation, by pressure, and comes the rain. We were in the presence of the savage hieratical logic of size, how the Assyrian princes appear larger than the lions in the bas-relief—this amassing of bodies out of want to lure heaven into reacting. In all weddings, something of this terror is preserved. The exchange of rings, for example, exploits the allegory of eternity that rhymes between precious metals, diamonds and love and fulfills the need for an inaugural act of violence, usually rendered more symbolically, the stomping of a glass, the shattering of plates, the crashing of champagne against a new vessel’s hull, with the outsized extravagance of generational suffering in mines in Angola, Lesotho, Botswana, Russia, Australia—other families descending ladders into the pits.

And yet even at this mass wedding, from the ecstatic leaders of four faiths, came this piece of friendly, battered advice, included in the synchronized vow: a promise not to try and change your lover, to be absolutely true to yourself. Again was visible the wound of that uneasy graft: love in its supernatural monumentality to the contractual specificity between shabby selfhoods. Were we really being asked to armor ourselves against the love we came here to summon? Mine was a fragile body, commanded to remain upright despite gravity’s universal crush: what poor vessels, I thought, making my vow, and I thought of the sad tummy of Van Eyck’s Eve. It was three years, and a dense week, of telling her I love her—and sometimes she kisses me, and sometimes love’s anonymous face.

Love is a stone smoothed by speech, not the riverbed; plunked in the mouth and sucked like on the hottest day of August having water and wanting salt. This summer I was on a trip with my family and, to see the largest lily pads in Europe, we took a train from Stockholm into an exurb, where stood this old Victorian greenhouse. An old man gazed on the purple, yellow and white of wildflowers along a sloped road and exclaimed to me in Swedish. I made the universal gesture of ignorance, a finger to my forehead, that I then twirled. Just wanting to communicate, he said then what I took to be the only phrase he knew in English, “I love you.” Without hesitation, I repeated the same. “I love you,” you see, is famous worldwide.

“But time is tied to the wrist

or kept in a box, ticking with impatience.”

—from “A Martian Sends a Postcard Home” by Craig Raine, 1979

The crocuses push their purple heads up at the end of March in the entryway to my apartment building, purple or violet and riven with purple veins. They’re early, I think. Every year spring is early, I think spring is early, I hear spring is early. Never have I been ready to hear the trumpets of the daffodils by the time they’re done singing, so out of place they appear in the course of my long defrost, shedding the numbness I wore for surviving winter. The magnolias finish tearing out their hair and the cherry blossoms half-quit their lingerie before I realize it is spring. I understand that even I was born in February. And that day how grateful am I for this private festival to mark out the sameness of winter days? The only holiday native to my birth culture stands at the other side, the start of winter: Black Friday. This dreadful binge is a monument to the obstinance of human culture after ten generations of oblivion. I mean we have a feeling emerge from the blank numeral progression of days that we should be surrounded by abundance, from the slowest place of memory, the fear and anticipation of bringing in the harvest, with doorbuster deals and plastic crap delivered to our building lobbies. Who dares discount this green inherence, this expectation of gourds that persists through the slaughters, through air conditioning and football? I think it means there is hope for time.

Frankenstein’s creature is given life in November and when we hear his recounting of his lonely adolescence, after he has been made a second time, made a monster by his treatment by man, two years have passed. Most touching is this: he first experiences spring as an event in history, a moment he has chanced to live through where the woods of twigs and dust, the sheers and plain, are given green and pink, trees bear leaves and decorate themselves with birds and the air is sweet and warm, thick with pollen. What horror to discover that this was not the most beautiful afternoon in the universe, where life increased by a permanent lurch like that electric miracle that had made the creature himself, that instead he had joined life alongside its wide rotations and would live miserably to witness autumns. Mary Shelley wrote the novel under the shadow of ash clouds from Mount Tambora, erupted in 1815 on Sumbawa Island in what is now Indonesia. 1816 was named, in New England, “The Year Without Summer” so wide did the plume of that ash unfurl. 1817 was named, in Germany, “The Year of the Beggar.” Crops failed as the growing season never came across the hemisphere, a drop of six or seven degrees; and the dim sun through the soot insufficiently provoked the mnemonic of germination in wheat, rye, amaranth, corn. In southwest China farmers tried to live by sucking white clay, starving from three years of rice harvests failing by flood and frost. Afterwards, the farmers of Yunnan turned to a more reliable cash crop that could be integrated into the global supply chain: opium, which in twenty years spread to what is now Burma and Laos and inaugurated its period of wholesale production and world trade. In Maine and Vermont, porcupine was eaten en masse for the first time and when the porcupines were nearly decimated, nettles were pulled up and boiled and when the nettles were gone people starved. In June a foot of snow fell on Albany. Outside of Paris, the starving poor were seen grazing grass in fields bereft of long slaughtered livestock, wandered out of their barren quartiers. The first large-scale production of the modern bicycle began that year in Germany to replace the tens of thousands of dead horses, let out of their stables to die on the roadside or slaughtered for food. At the site of the eruption, around the Sanggar Peninsula, a dozen villages dedicated to chopping sandalwood to build merchant vessels to fill the trade lanes of the Dutch East Indies were obliterated in minutes, incinerated, buried under ash or left with an atmosphere nearly void of oxygen for a time far beyond the limits of mammalian respiration. Molten rock rapidly filled the sea, the displaced water receded and crashed again against the archipelago, went out again and rushed into the Bay of Bengal. These conditions led to new strain of cholera developing in the bay’s warm waters, which spread through the subcontinent during the drought and famine that followed as the sulphur released interrupted the formation of the monsoon the next two years; what rain did come was acidic, killing what meager harvest remained. Cholera spread through Asia within three years, was carried in the ballast of British ships to England and Europe, killed tens of millions worldwide. The modern institutions of public medicine originate in the Victorian reaction to cholera; and the social control and terror of the unhygienic, infectious poor.

From the window of her rented villa outside Geneva, Mary Shelley could see trudging in the distant alpine roads a continuous stream of migrants crossing by the thousands from northern Europe southwards fleeing crop failure, spoiled growing seasons, starvation; or expelled by force, falling under murderous vagrancy statutes. Percy Shelley, with whom the nineteen year old Mary had eloped, and Lord Byron, their host who was in the process of inventing himself as the first modern celebrity by conducting affairs so salacious and stunts so brave that the tabloids were called into being; witnessed on their trips to nearby villages the streams of starving beggars driven out as winter and darkness followed them not only southwards but into summer, deformed by hunger. In July of 1816, Byron would write of them, “Their eyes as it grew lighter, and beheld / Each other’s aspects—saw, and shriek’d, and died— / Even of their mutual hideousness they died, / Unknowing who he was upon whose brow / Famine had written Fiend.” Geneva was spared a catastrophic subsistence crisis by a last minute shipment of grain arrived from Odessa. But the hungry turned away at each threshold, who had been made monstrous by misery, made stranger to humanity by displacement, are perhaps remembered by the creature, who learns his monstrosity from the cruel lessons of other people’s faces, who is rootless to the extreme of being born both without the successive navelcords of human generation and the common ancestorship of ancient microbes. The freak absence of a season in the years of Frankenstein’s composition echo in that individual creation: and the creature learns his freakishness, too, from the cyclicality of the seasons, knowing he stands outside their vital rotations. All his superhuman strength and cosmic erudition will register less on life than even any hill’s long memory of daffodils. What he can never know is the weak maternity he is afforded by his story’s evergreen transmission, as that is outside Frankenstein’s conceit.

On 68th Street I passed milk crates of petunias shipped from Pennsylvania and Argentina stacked beside freshly mulched tree boxes as I headed to Hunter to teach the novel. Spring was coming to the Upper East Side, replacing winter’s ornamental cabbage and holdover holiday holly. No one can read Frankenstein for the first time. Sitting down to read Frankenstein is already to remember its rumor. This is what is meant by a classic. Really, it has entered mythology, something beyond the fraught category of canonicity, projected there like a constellation to its stars by countless retellings and adaptations, especially the 1931 Hollywood film—which produced the indelible image of the bolt-headed slurring beast and confessed something of the biological menace of its era by having the creature’s subsequent rampage be the result of the doctor’s selection of a “criminal’s brain” to furnish his amalgam’s skull. And so the story is millennially reproduced, surviving among aped contemporary TV and movie IPs as a staple of Halloween, where obsessions and neuroses are worn for one night like the daemons and ancestors of old. Indeed, these things move us in mysterious ways. If we believe psychoanalysis, there is no better way to shape a culture than to enter the common repertoire of what haunts the nightmares of children.

I was alarmed that about half my class didn’t even have this stupid degraded image for me to crash the book against and laugh at together. Much is made of this soft takeoff from history, really from historicity, what represses any genealogy but the immediate one of novelty; not novelty even, which would require history, but mere contemporaneity. It is reflected in the diminishing stature of the units of culture: certainly not what used to be called “schools,” no longer movements, but trends. Amidst the general catastrophe of politics (outside the bounds of this brief essay about spring), the politics that is most popularly staged and articulated is the relations between generations—smaller and smaller units of temporality into which humanity is grouped. Gen Z, Gen X, Millennials, even “late Millennials.” It is often explained that the rapid pace of technological innovation is altering the object world so quickly that every decade or so an unrecognizable sensorium greets the new births and molds them according to its distensions, imperatives and peculiarities. Like the cultivars of Brassica oleracea they are unrecognizable to their species mates that have been bred to emphasize, say, their flower or their buds alternately. But even this organic metaphor is inaccurate: it would be as if the difference between a brussel sprout and a cauliflower were determined by the atmosphere it entered upon leaving the brown home of its ground; by the human heliotropism towards brighter and brighter screens. We have even forgotten about the original formulation of this phenomenon, the Postmodern, which was obliterated by the mechanism its theory describes. So perhaps I will be corrected: I am not speaking of history but really history’s creature.

There is something sinister in this generational politics, revealed in the oxymoronic character of the phrase itself. It describes a condition of such immobility that the only theater for change is biological, the dull progression of litters into a future whose only difference is superficial, and whose ubiquity really represents the universalization of marketing demographics into human self-identification. We glimpse here the other menace of the seasons, beside their freakish puncturing or devastating absence: the realization that cyclicality is simply stasis on another scale, as in the trends or fashions that constitute the generations. It is described stunningly by the narrator of Marcel Proust’s great novel, who feels the ominousness of repetition as his adolescent time by the beachside comes to an end, despite the pubescent spurts achieved there, in the sweaty springtime of the body. His maid comes in to open the window of the hotel room in which he’s spent the season.

“And for months on end, in this Balbec to which I had so looked forward because I imagined it only as battered by storms and buried in the mist, the weather had been so dazzling and so unchanging that when she came to open the window I could always, without once being wrong, expect to see the same patch of sunlight folded in the corner of the outer wall, of an unalterable colour which was less moving as a sign of summer than depressing as the colour of a lifeless and factitious enamel. And when Françoise removed the pins from the top of the window-frame, took down the cloths, and drew back the curtains, the summer day which she disclosed seemed as dead, as immemorial, as a sumptuous millenary mummy from which our old servant had done no more than cautiously unwind the linen wrappings before displaying it, embalmed in its vesture of gold.”

Here I can ask my question: if spring has a history? How, if the seasons are literally “immemorial” and history is memory made real? What washes over Marcel in those days is empty, homogeneous time, the time normally trapped in clocks or numerically adduced, the abstract time that seems to be antithetical to the seasons themselves, the time of hours worked (which otherwise is completely alien to Proust) or the incoherent time present in our casual utterances like “five billions years till the sun’s death and implosion”, the time we bandy about flippantly, adding and subtracting, sentence people to prison in—here by the glowing and undulant beachside which he had depended on to be empty time’s refutation. What Proust is trying to grasp is the other side of eternity: not the bare infinity that awaits our existence in time but the pregnant eternity that precedes us, precedes every present moment of contemplation or reflex. What happens in history happens forever. That is only to say something very simple: what has happened will have happened forever. So when Proust takes on the task of narrating his life, which is so tentative and frail that on the first pages, before his project has begun, it dissipates every evening in the face of sleep or by the force of the past tense that overwhelms him upon opening any book or encountering any piece of furniture, he does so to lend his life the only proper unit of temporality: this eternal past of the has-been. He discovers that his life will only have happened if it has happened, not in the abstract articulation of his thirty nine years or the same number of each season or its equivalent in hours or days—but in the time of narration, a very very long novel, which lends eternity its opera boxes and emotions, its jealousies and disappointments. When we say history repeats itself what we really mean is history is only history if we repeat it. Not in its telling but in its perpetual retelling does it register on the ledger of things past. The reflexive grammatical construction of “history repeats itself” must be taken seriously: it is the record of those brave or violent events that have forced themselves into repetition against the stubborn amnesia and comfortable oblivion of human life, the great forgetting of winters. Primary historical phenomena even take the brute repetitive form, to ensure their historicity: the mass, pledges of allegiance, hieratic rituals and sacraments, the formulas of prayer or contract, and the law itself which gains its force by repetition’s proper legal name, precedent. The desperation of this insistence, the violence of repetition’s imposition, are signs of fragility. That even eternity can pass away is the lesson, gift and danger of a true historical consciousness. Every day we come across, and have to live with, indeed find ourselves ruled by, not merely notions from the past but old eternities: G-d, Family, Nature or Progress. Who can survive the temporal vertigo caused thereby undamaged, drifting forward into yesterday’s eternity? Proust realizes this wound on the level of his singular lifetime: his life was never lived until it was narrated. And yet in the act of retelling he finds himself touching over and over the hollow foundation of anything that could be called a self, which has long pomped under the privileged eternity of the soul. I mean he is constantly made aware of the miraculous power of his prose, that it exceeds any expectations he dared hold—and instead of finding his life, his writing constituted it. And who better than a writer knows just how conditional, just how trivial and frail is narration? The mask went in search of the face: it was too good a mask. The cage gave up its search for a bird when the cage began to sing.

And so those shipped in petunias on 68th Street, the tulips flown in their bulb from faraway frosted warehouses to form battalions on Park Avenue’s median: they are not really spring but the story of spring. It is a beautiful story. Something from that other history, of things, let’s say climate change or the metropolis, made local germination obsolete, and the folk sayings, clichés and lyrics that articulate spring’s promise have to be fulfilled by other means. The sky is not blue, it is beige and peach. Instead March showers bring, instead, April flowers. In Biblical and Medieval traditions of Apocalypse, imagery is drawn from the shutting down of cyclical time, the unseasonable apparitions of cherries, the abrupt inversions of tides, the premature birth of livestock, the early slaughter of December hogs, the errant absence of frost or rain, the ceasing of day and night’s regular alternation. Soothsaying is forbidden in the Abrahamic religions because one should not trespass on the mind of G-d, and most prophecy, though ostensibly a revelation from the future is actually news of the End of Time, not a vision of events occurring in history but the premonition of a time where the future (and the past and the present) is abolished; so time contracts in anticipation. And they all mark spring: Ramadan is the name of the ninth month and it is the month of revelation; not only was the Quran revealed to Muhammad then but, it is believed, the Gospel, the Torah and the Psalms. Green leaves came cupped then opened. Easter’s miracle could be deduced from the observation of a hyacinth. And it’s no coincidence that these holy times move, not just against the Julian calendar but in finding Sunday, or glimpsing the crescent moon in the sky. Passover occurs in spring and its ritual requires parsley. Here, it is commanded that even the wisest sages must tell again the story of Exodus. No other holiday is more suspicious of the unreliability of tradition or acknowledges so nakedly that tradition is only the appearance of continuity with some mythic past, whose pantomime it prescribes. Or rather, we should say that wherever tradition appears continuous, it is only its appearance that is continuous, and to falter in the line of utterance is to cancel all that came before. And so we think of history as the pyramids, which indeed it is, self-fulfilling records of a deranged desire for immortality; but it depends, too, on the senility of sages. Of Moses, Kafka writes this in his diaries:

“He is on the track of Canaan all his life; it is incredible that he should see the land only when on the verge of death. The dying vision of it can only be intended to illustrate how incomplete a moment is human life, incomplete because a life like this could last forever and still be nothing but a moment. Moses fails to enter Canaan not because his life is too short but because it is a human life.”

To be human is to submit to the obligation of duration. But what, you may ask, about writing; whose miracle I was just celebrating to the point of anxiety, or any other medium of record-keeping, tabulation and story? I mean any other record of persistence, in which we could only a little coyly include the pyramids? Walking past the Strand this week, I was delighted to have the opportunity to browse books without exiting the exterior of springtime, on their streetside shelves. These two dollar books, even some from only ten years ago, I pick them up: and they are unreadable. This is not a judgement of taste. I mean Windows XP for Dummies; or from just a couple of decades earlier the whole genre of Kremlinology, discourses on the “Soviet Mind”, shelves of paraspiritualism, physical treatises on the ether, Satanic Panic historiographies in hysterical hardcovers, dissertations on the great heresies of Christianity, Docetism, Pelagianism, Sabellianism, pamphlets whose polemic it was once believed could change the world, novelizations of primetime serials that even the most dedicated scholar could not make cohere, books whose turning pages waft air from another planet we can no longer breath. This heap outnumbers the living. And how vanishing is that minuscule live green tip growing at the edge of the dump, from the ashen, silent mass; the select few fronted new releases, classics? I say nothing of the dead languages, or those destructions so complete or sudden that they cannot even write their names on anything that could stand for a tombstone, lost in the oblivion of oblivions. It is the wrong question, to ask what is history. On 13th and Broadway I ask, instead, how history is possible at all, having glimpsed the tendency of these shelves. And who, telling the story year after year, could not secretly hope to forget that once, we were slaves in Egypt? By which I mean: hope to lay down alongside the namelessness of slaves.

My alarm clock is set to call me awake with bird sounds and the LED simulation of the sunrise. In this season of sleeping at last with the window open, I heard April’s dawn chorus an hour or so premature to its programmed apparition. A panic alighted in me, as I jerked roughly into time; and later hearing the mourning dove’s pitiful coo, the cardinal’s soprano flight, the Robin’s “tootle-oo, how are you?” and the asthmatic laugh of the Nuthatch—it dawned on me, with horror, that I understood birdsong. They all sang the same song: that the hour of obligation had come. It was as if this music had the character now of a clock’s ticks, was only another member in the armory of implements designed to mark the ceaseless regularity of passing away. I have seen how deep runs the reflex for a watch, the automatic consultation of the digits displayed on the front of a phone. When an ambulance siren echoed in the canyon of 34th Street, I plugged my ears and noted the brute ignorance and accommodation with which me and my fellow pedestrians received this alarm. Who could bear interpreting this song, with each urban hour’s distant ring? That someone is dying. And so we are stuck: between attending the story of the dead without submitting to the deathly character of all stories, even the birds’.

The tulips on Park Avenue (it took me a month, precisely, to write this) are decapitated already. The cherry blossoms conceded to the sober practicality of leaves. Stories are how we give each other time. And if I, dear reader, have turned to literature, blushing, to understand spring, it is only because I cannot adequately express the facticity of pink; and vanity, hope or compulsion called me to tell.

I feel an intense panic rise inside me turning to find someone, in an elevator, in line at the pharmacy, with their mouth wholly agape. What terrifying prelude of violence, what disaster of health or sanity must this signify? And in the moment, half a moment, that it takes for me to realize they’ve only been caught in my vision mid-way through a yawn, all the instincts of mammalian dread and care have flooded me already—and I know that our organism spent its adolescence as prey.

The applause woke, however incompletely, everyone but this man—and the second piece began after a short reconfiguration of the stage, the Sonata sopra il Soggetto Reale from the Musical Offering, Bach’s attempt to sow confusion as to what is sacred and what is profane by means of supreme clarity in a third conception of ambiguous but provocative relation: beauty. The man began to snore.

Incomplete aesthetes wear the blinders of artistic event, carrying into the theater the biological shock response that scrubs the biography of everyday life of nearly every near-miss in the crosswalk, urban eavesdrop dopplered in recession, every abrupt olfactory outrage entering, say, the subway, or the ocular harassments of advertisement. Freud’s original formulation of the mechanism of repression developed from his physiognomic observation that an organism’s survival is more dependent on its ability to resist sensation than to receive its cacophonous manifold. Earth’s longest lasting inhabitants have refined living to a meticulously tuned yet extremely narrow band of experience: giant tube worms have squirmed on the ocean floor for longer than trees have existed on little more than a crude thermometer, with no vision, no hearing, no sense resembling smell. Human beings, coping with the dangerous overdevelopment of their senses, have always tried to outsource or diminish them. The contemporary panoply of devices to make more virtual reality are only the latest attempts, following air conditioning, any and all of the white-noising machines, sunglasses, telephones, television, the list goes on. The most successful was the domestication of the dog, which altered human evolution by offloading the most demanding feats of smell to this scent-obsessed companion. We are able to bear civilization a little easier now, nasally numb. But our sense of hearing has not been obliterated nor hyper-focused; and regular concert-goers, resigned to their vulnerability in sprouting up at this mismatched point in our animal arc, begin to develop a taxonomy of snores.

There are the gasping snores of apnea, tubercular snores that raise the spectre of suffocation and pair with the wrenching chromatic tensions of Late Romanticism, bent with opium, Berlioz and Rimsky-Korsakov. There are serene dove-snores of regular respiration that seem to render the eternity of the spirit audible; I like these for Handel, Haydn, even Debussy, in his mellowest moods. The fortissimo snores of unshaken confidence, the uninhibited stomach-snores of the vain, they suit Heroic Beethoven, his middle period, and Johann Strauss when his waltzes are most military. There are the incomplete snores, continually jolting the sleeper from sleep, irruptions, snorts and repetitions, for the disturbances of Bruckner and his ilk, that monumental composer who his contemporary Mahler pronounced, “Half idiot, half god.” Here, the continuo of this exposed sleeper doubled the harpsichord in the cantata and the cello in the sonata; it was a basso snore, unchopped by interference of phlegm or the lazy soft palate, healthy enough and profound.

Every concert audience needs a good snore like a theater needs a good laugh. The ascending carillons of alto hilarity, the creeping wheezes, open moos, and squeaking titters give the abstractions of any comedy the stamp of flesh—rather, the laugh is when something involuntary, some automatic spasm, enters the room and announces the performance’s claim on the body; a songbird entered through an open window.

The sonata ended. Applause. The changing of the guards of the sleep: some were awoken and adjusted their posture for attention, others accepted the watch of dreams and took their place in that parallel cathedral of rest. The stage was again rearranged for the larger forces of the cantata. This time a soprano was to play the part (so the program told us) of an exceptionally talented boy, whose original vocal flights one Sunday morning in Leipzig are recorded in Bach’s notation. My man did not wake. Neither by applause nor the cacophony of coughs that percuss in intervals. I listened to my man’s snore, suddenly feeling responsible for his missing the entire show. I could lightly touch him, if I wanted, across the aisle, nudge him awake; it would be a forgotten touch, whose source would vanish in replacement by its result, his consciousness. This spontaneous sense of obligation I felt towards the sleepers there (he was not the only one) was not mine alone. A shrunken mother in the pew in front of me bore on each shoulder the sleep of her grown children. When I had a pre-dawn commute on the six train, I would watch the heads of strangers bob and find the shoulders of their stranger neighbor. The bleary-eyed crowd aiming for midtown, in pressed shirts of robin’s egg blue, with spots of sprayed perfume still drying on their necks, would perform a morning humanity almost automatically, with the queer proprietary of strange hours. They would refuse to flinch. And the indulgence of abrupt pride which I saw fill people in their new role as human pillow—the responsibility they held for another’s sleep, in hush and stillness—was met halfway with that other social impulse, to look away from someone sleeping. We know people to be somehow naked sleeping. And the troubled and the beat-down, people sleeping at all hours around us, on the sidewalk, on park benches, under thick blankets, in cardboard boxes and hospital socks, above subway grates and in the subways themselves, laid out on rough seats and pavements—embarrassment, alongside an indifference that itself is so embarrassing it protects itself with cruelty, enforces their obscurity. And so these breakages pock and rupture any seamless sense we are to have of the city, nervous aporias in the daytime of the world that garnish each exhale with the wheezing fringe of a snore and lends the “dream” (which consists of the sleep of compassion) its sleep. New York is the city where someone is always sleeping.

And so the last cantata ended with the rolling melismas of Alleluia. This conclusion was nothing more than the ultimate exhalation, as if displaying the entirety of breath to the audience so that they may inspect it, like a magician passing his props, after they had taken part in a miracle, to the spectators nearby—I mean so that we may see the soprano’s whole soul, as if she were sticking out her tongue for a doctor to demonstrate, by their reading, her perfect health. Not the following applause but this Alleluia brought my man back to himself. His chin lifted from his chest (where it had fallen in the interval from the Pez-Dispenser backward pose, mouth agape) and he rose to his feet with a suddenness that alarmed me and proceed immediately to crash his hands together, shouting, in a voice I did not recognize (so familiar was I with his snore) “Brava!”

The concert at the Cathedral was titled Bach: From Darkness to Light. But the plot of its hours was literally the opposite—it began at sundown. This was music for Sunday morning making a concession to the admirable institution of dinnertime and performed, therefore, in the dark. Here are the most proximate causes for ubiquitous concert slumber: sleep as digestion’s victory over culture, which is to say the long revenge of the first culture, agriculture, on the latest; or the implications and habits of being in darkness, the night within the night of a darkened concert hall.

Being in the dark is the religious state, which cathedrals emphasize to such a degree that even their windows are stained to intercede on light’s entry with pattern or parable. It is no coincidence that the Enlightenment chose as its central metaphor and name illumination—demanding the uninterrupted light of disclosure. It would be easy to believe that the dark of the concert hall was a mere inheritance of this resistance, which put art in its explicitly forbidden form (graven, engraved images) between G-d themself (the sun). That is to say that art finally won and to repeat the inherited wisdom that the church was replaced by the theater in the Bourgeois centuries after having perfected theater itself in its reactionary anti-Reformation rituals, rites and mysteries. But still this does not account for the darkness of the concert hall, the opera house, the playhouse which only in the very late 19th century began to replace the rowdy social vistas of gown and gossip with an artificial religious dusk. That dark, crucially, is also the dark of the past. In fact, its rise as performance practice coincided with the technological means to overcome it, the spread of kerosene and later the electric lamp. What is the function of the most fundamental transport that even the homeliest of performances can now indulge: the dimming of the lights? Originally this was just another in the repertoire of stagecraft, viewed with suspicion like any innovation in a rarefied domain: an anecdote survives in which Mahler was advised to lower the lights during a performance of his for the sake of the mood. He replied that a performance that does not make one forget their surroundings has malfunctioned. That the question would be raised at all was ironically the effect of the influence of that quintessential artist of the 19th century, Richard Wagner, for whom Mahler himself was a great champion and interpreter. It is difficult now, after his somewhat deserved Nazi appropriations, to overstate how popular and ubiquitous Wagner was and how portable was his art. He was the artist-hero of W. E. B. Du Bois in whose Souls of Black Folks a young Black man from the deep south hears the swan song in Lohengrin as the sonic representation of freedom’s creative promise, before being roughly expelled from the MET opera house. Theodor Herzl found in this anti-semite’s Tannhäuser a nationalism so mobile it could be appropriated to even his Zion. Wagner’s music was regularly performed on Coney Island’s boardwalk by bands of enormous orchestral force to stir the sublime sense of its lazy surf’s bathers. It was Wagner who made the influential leaps into darkness at his laboratory stage at Bayreuth, where early fog machines and proto-projectors made their debut, exploiting every technology available to derange the senses. This genre of the dark was, indeed, the dark of the past, the dark of his Teutonic myth—and also the dark of what we do not know about the past. It was this double motion that made Wagner’s drama so seductive, that of revelation and concealment. Triumphant revelation, to be sure—but what is revealed is mystery, what is illuminated is darkness.

Being ravenous, I had tickets to another concert the following day, which I’d purchased during the New York Philharmonic’s doorbuster Black Friday sale, to be performed in their home venue at Lincoln Center, a proper concert hall after the cathedral. The whole program was the Ring Without Words, the music of Wagner’s monumental Ring Cycle reduced to seventy-five minutes of its greatest hits, the precise duration of a CD-ROM. The program promised this operation was performed respectfully, “without the addition of a single note.”

The lights are dimmed because culture itself has become mythical, become a mystery of vanishing definition whose presence can only be felt in the dark, or revealed afterwards like in a spirit photograph developed from the seance. Knock twice if you can hear me! Is culture in the room with us right now? The dark compensates for that great bugaboo of our entire civilizational inherence: authenticity. The most extreme lovers of, say, “classical” music are led by their love to renounce its performance entirely for the sake of this thing: they are caught between the earnest wigged costume plays of period-piece Mozart by electric candlelight and the popularizations presented in abridged and vulgar packagings couched in gimme-gimme contextualizing with tabloid anecdotes from the composers’ syphilitic love affairs. Most concerts take one of these forms: the composer’s funeral or his reincarnation as a bobble head. Neither a studious insistence, a hushed reverence, or a genial, casual familiarity can satisfy the respect a true art lover has for their tradition. And so they are forced to abandon it, or to hang around with a kind of debonair resignation and bitterness, excavating disappointment at every turn.

I am tempted by the position of the snob, the connoisseur, the gourmet—if only for its near-obsolescence. They have created something beautiful themselves. I don’t mean those that flee from the category of beauty, towards bare utility or health. But those who pronounce authenticity truthfully. They have created something else beautiful by displacing the beauty of art to whatever criterion of correctness against which they believe art’s beauty can be checked. It is that criterion itself that is their creation, an accretion of honest wisdom and faint glimpses of purity, something worthy of valor or of jealous defense. Here, too, is the spot reserved for the critic—it is the critic’s own art. Our beautiful traditions, beautiful heritage, these beautiful standards of excellence—how many times have these been the occasion for a performance, an exhibition, a concert, a publication, not the meagre collection of pigment or the piddling rhymes of a part-time doctor, a dyspeptic shut-in, or a ragamuffin street kid? How could Dickinson compete with Poetry or Satie with Western Music? The mistake here is obvious, that of believing artworks are made only to glorify their pedigree. And so is the danger: that every event of art will be inevitably inadequate and necessarily renounced. From the cheap pulp paper of the Dover thrift edition of Ibsen’s Ghosts to the supertitles above Schubert’s lieder, from the lapsed and shabby pageantry of theater-going—art must be protected from it happening.

The most expedient escape is then an untenable worship of the present, spoiled immediately by the present’s ruthless locomotion: all artworks are born into obsolescence, they are babies brained on the hospital linoleum. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the infinite scroll, the unavoidable context of our time; the appetite for the new which so quickly gets old. How much of the world that used to pomp under art’s banner do I now consume but never digest? Or do I only teethe on, toss away, pick up another, and move on again with a faint taste left in my mouth, only enough to make hunger ache? The billion artworks of any square block, window display, screen.

Darkness rescues us, rebukes the snob. It removes the artwork from its discrete objecthood, its self-containment on the stage, in its gilt frame, between hardboard covers—all the inadequate containers of the snob’s disappointment. No longer can we perceive it as a specimen of tradition, a member of a genre, an instance of an ideal—but instead a forcefield that alters consciousness, a permeable, diffused agglomeration of sensations that encounters our own. Only in darkness is it possible for art to touch us, to move us therefore. Even alone at home we prefer to shut off the overheads, cozy beside our smallest lamp and read to ourselves in the dimmest possible glow amidst our apartment made obscure. And how many times have the snobs railed against those who “merely” enjoy, who have “no words” and maintain a contented refusal to pass judgement beyond the narrative of their own feelings, whose extremity they demand at all costs? That is to say, against most people, most of the time; the amateurs, who nevertheless cannot be dismissed so cheaply. They have something that the snob jealously covets, the original amour of their name. Opposed to the husband who guards art’s purity, the amateur is the lover who revels in its promiscuity. What they demand is another kind of purity: not of art but of their experience of it, not authenticity but totality. They demand the largest screen, the most savage gesture, the most tender solo, the most subtle effect, the most hushed audience—yes, the darkest room. They paid a lot of money for the hotel: and it may be one night only but it is theirs. How else are we to take the desperate, ominous enthusiasm of the rapturous standing ovations that follow nearly every show in this town? Art is narcotic. The amateur possesses privileged use of the most unimpeachable aesthetic measurement ever invented: pleasure. The judgement of pleasure suffocates the authority of the critic. But even pleasure’s connotations are too narrow—better to say: experience.

Here there may be even more danger than in the self-imposed ascetic solitude of the snob or overstimulated disappointment of the nibbler living off of attention’s scraps. In this sense, Wagner really was a visionary—his operas made people sick, orgasm in their box seats (we are told), go mad, leave with monumental headaches, bad morals and insatiable appetites. These were the birth pangs of a new kind of audience. The blockbuster film attempts in each instance what Wagner did with the Ring. His “total work of art” was the fetish of the highest development of art as experience: and it has no lesser goal than to dominate the soul. That is why it must leap off its pedestal or its proscenium and land wildly in the room, crossing by the bridge of darkness into the most private and protected sphere of consciousness itself. Movie theaters are unthinkable without darkness. The narcotic pleasures of the “immersive” that has become the aspiration of art high and low are unmatched. Beyond sober distance, the unsatisfiable consumption of both the gourmet and the nibbler—we find this wholesale submission, hypnotic and hysterical, that asks, as the most basic barrier to art, for no less than complete subservience to sensory domination. This is the aesthetic of mass media, the nightly televised brainwash, the Fascist rally and Top Gun: Maverick alike.

It was a beautiful performance of The Ring Without Words conducted magnificently by Nathalie Stutzmann. And yet I must admit I had a hard time remaining in the hall as I was lurched by the music’s mnemonic force to recollections of the component operas that I had seen before, fully staged, recollections that prompted my reflections above. The most memorable was a production of Götterdämmerung that I heard standing in the upper reaches of La Scala in Milan for the price of seven euros. Around ten minutes before Siegfried’s death and funeral march, I witnessed the extraordinary preparations of the audience of cognoscenti to feel it. They were so knowledgeable and dedicated to their experience that men and women alike removed handkerchiefs from their pockets or purses and folded them in their laps in anticipation of their tears. Siegfried did die and indeed they did cry. I am not suggesting that their feeling was somehow falsified or cheapened by this artifice, quite the opposite. They had submitted to the command of beauty. So I ask again: how else can beauty be had today? How else can we be moved but by force? Where, in life, is there pleasure at all without the most extreme ramification of “the suspension of disbelief”, that well-polished euphemism for the self-abdication of sanity?

The hall was dark and someone near me was sleeping. I heard their snore. Really, I did not hear it but perceived it by other means in the swell and ebb of their shoulders and back. Really, it was not a snore, did not graduate beyond the airy range of deep breath. They pulsed and throbbed under the waves of lush sound, the eternal Rhine, a rhythm of their own among the thousand baited bodies facing the stage. Where does sleep take us when sleeping in the concert hall? Are we led into a personal shelter, an all too familiar burrow, when we are overwhelmed or overcome, as a guilty tortoise reveling in the stale smell of its shell at the slightest apprehension of danger? When we sleep, we are not retreating into ourselves but slipping instead into that part of ourselves that is least ourself. The Romans recognized this strange companion of human being and gave it an everyday god, Genius, to care for everything that was ours but not our own. The long career of that name towards its dull conclusion meaning “a very smart person” is illuminating. It was this god who was responsible for the loving force that pushed blood through our veins, that made squeeze our hearts, that dilated our pupils, all the composite operations of living; also for those whims and urges, cravings, pet-peeves, impulses and appetites to whose command we submit. And who watched over sleep especially, when we are little more than these operations. Sleepiness may be its most familiar compulsion, that nightly apparition of the great unknown from within the self. It is Genius who Shakespeare was perhaps remembering when he called sleep “nature’s soft nurse.” Each human birth was imbued the care of a Genius of its “own” though Genius pre-dates and antecedes any individual birth, a possibility of polytheism alien to us now, whereby gods exist in multitudinous aspects. Without contradiction, the Latin poet Horace could write in his Epistles that Genius was “the god of human nature, in that he is mortal for each person.” It survives in approximation with our idea of the guardian angel, the household spirit, or in our celebration of the birthday, a long and echoing memory of the feast day for the god Genius, who was born both with each of us and time, celebrated with honey bread, flower garlands and wine. Like all genuine festivals it celebrates something that takes place in eternity, whose each instance is only an occasion. In generation the name’s etymology is shared. The bed was chief among objects venerated in its cult: the marriage bed especially, in Latin, lectus genialis; producing sleep and children. The contemporary resonance of the name Genius is a narrow piece of its domain, recalled in the externality of creativity that poets have called Muse or artists everywhere Inspiration or which is known, in the most disenchanted language, as the Unconscious—all which, like the force that pushes blood, that produces a craving for plums, that asserts our favorite color is teal, come somehow from without. And the gentle urge that puts us to sleep.

Which is all to say that sleep is not a private retreat into the self but instead a joining with the general—and this is apparent by how permeable we become to our surroundings when sleeping or sleepy, how vulnerable our dreams are to the boom box outdoors, the sputtering radiator, the serrated light of the sunrise through our blinds, transporting us to the discos of our mother’s youth, the battlefields of Belgium (perhaps permeated itself from the book we were reading in bed), the interrogation chamber of our deepest fear. The solitary sleeping room, even the individual sleeping surface or bed was an unthinkable luxury or deviance for most of human history. How richly did my first snorer, then, experience Bach, sleeping the whole time?

It was the right of the ruler alone, whose apartness from the communal world of sleep, the individuation and superiority of his genius, was the source and icon of his power. This was Julius Caesar’s innovation whose birthday, whose genius was celebrated across the Empire beyond his natural death so emphatically that it gave its month its name: July. Elsewhere, power was amassed in sleeping ostentatiously, besides servants and eunuchs, amidst enormous harems—a living mirror of the impulse that has pharaohs buried with their slaves and Emperors their wives. The modern state emerges from the separation and solitude of its sovereign’s sleep. And so too us sovereign individuals that populate it as its reflection and construction, individuals that can pomp and revel in the private rights and property it enforces and protects. So the porousness of sleep becomes a liability, slums and tenements crammed with sleepers, the long beds of the peasantry, the vagrant sleeper en plein air; social problems, signs of barbarity and licentiousness, criminal. The last permissible place of public sleep is attending a performance.

In sleep, art comes home. Neither dominated nor disinterested, we slip back to our own body, back to the origin of any work of art, our bundle of nerves and appetites made articulate. Wagner spoke but I heard the song of the Earth. I heard: the haltering duet between the clarinet and the flute when Brünnhilde awakens for the first day as a mortal and this, perhaps alone in the dizzying sonic totality, is music of such mortality that I feel I have failed when I do not pass into sleep. I know a little more what the body can do.

I must admit I have never been able to fall asleep at the theater myself, despite my most rigorous attempts. Actually I am quite prissy to the conditions of my slumber, attuned with avarice and fear to my sensorium anywhere, wanting to know and eat even the littlest pea under my mattresses. And I insist on challenging any artwork’s attempt to make my world with the lucid struggle of my intellect. But to know that amidst even my highest transports—I, alas, love art—sleep is possible; to know the recalcitrance of human attention: this is the only thing that gives me hope in our species’ ability to resist the mass-mediated blare of spectacular violence and panic that threatens every day to replace any rarefied category of art. There are those for whom art is only an aid to sleep. Who read before bed. Who go to the cinema to find insomnia’s cure. Never embraced by politics or aesthetics is our organism’s ingrained unwillingness to struggle. I mean the bodily obstinance of sleep. The order not carried out.

In the end, a funeral pyre is lit so large it consumes Valhalla and the old gods make way for the new. A chord sounds so densely I may never know its parts. The lights came on and there were five curtain calls, all deserved. I did not wake up.

For some reason Madison Square Park always gets satanic pieces of public art that serves as taunts at or challenges to that very public, to which I belong. Last month it was the cube, one-upping Astor Place’s by actually complaining in whirrs and midi ejaculations as it bore the public’s abuse. Like all real New Yorkers, I visit the Empire State Building three to four times a week and, commuting home, I walk down to Union Square to greet the red racoons who live by playground and hear the Hare Krishna’s latest drop before getting on the subway, never able to fully steel myself against the creativity that assails me in the middle. Now, in a pedestrian flow zone, there’s a permanent communal video call to Dublin, to some traffic plaza that no doubt conceals just off frame their own LEGO store. Yesterday it was shut down (temporarily?) for “inappropriate behavior” that I can proudly say came from the New York side. My question is: what else?

Communication, which was already at the risk of becoming a common trough of clichés, is degraded even more. Any humane transmission is immediately foreclosed upon by the nature of this device—the stakes are raised at once by the impotence it imposes: what violent outburst, what extravagant vulgarity is needed to move these blinking, gawking idiots (of which you understand yourself to be only a mirror). At first, all you can do is wave: but the waves of your anonymous doppelganger register only with the desperate legibility by which we give little stories to caged chimps or to the infinite boredom of boxed horses: “Oh look! They’re in love!” At a pair of proximate apes, or; “He’s nervous for the big race!” To the wet and idle eye of an equine victim to sport. These are the self-aware consolating fantasies of the guilty, the guilt of the human race to a world it has emptied of communication, replaced only with the dull recognition of the purposive motion which our most authoritative biologists have promised us is the crown of life’s definition. 

And yet as you find yourself waving into the portal, by a reflex more idiotic than the whinny or the simian grimace, you realize that not only language here, but gesture is empty: the tics and leaps, the quotidian dance and idiosyncratic gaits of the world of our great grandmothers, all over these have been replaced with the conquest of the able, the homogenous repertoire of locomotion that leaves you unable to muster or shape a bodily eruption that can express anything more than the anonymous hallway’s mandatory “Hello.” “How you doing?” These carefully scrubbed of any deviance that could resemble divulgence, which would be received like the public disclosure of a rash.

How envious—and how, then, resentful—do you become of the deranged or perverted freaks of this city you have tried to ignore, whose lurch and outburst contains something you once only recognized as danger but, now that you find your piddling repertoire of gesticulation immediately exhausted, you shamefully wish you could wear—just for this moment, just to reach the idiot on the other side. But you can’t. And how painful is that phantom limb? Besides, you know some cop, some social worker would drag you away (and have dragged them away, you realize, glancing around.) So you stand there, waving, wondering how it came to be that nothing can be communicated other than “I’m insane” or “I’m a criminal.” How it came to be that, even if you could perform, against all prohibition, habit, discipline and practice, some at last articulate human plea, it could only be received as “inappropriate behavior”?

The Flatiron building has been dressed in modest scaffolding for over two years, so perhaps these increasingly satanic public works of art are a reaction of the community board to the perceived threat of their intersection’s obsolescence. Our confidence in physicality changed the moment that building designers chose to sever the ancient link that was an exterior’s reflection of its interior activities. The architect Rem Koolhaas calls this “lobotomy.” It has become so much the norm that we fail to see anything sinister in this severance which has graduated into concealment. The architectural term “facade” has, likewise, taught us its colloquial meaning as if each new structure is actually a public monument to the lie. The increasingly conspiratorial tone of society is just one effect of its physical plant’s increasingly opaque incarnation, and the contemporary glass walls that serve as puns on information technology or politics’ openness are as impenetrable as mirrors: they only reflect our less-curious faces up close or taunt the sky by showing it its own conquered infinity. So our gestures too, our glass facade, hide the shady financial business within with smiles as white as any stucco ornament. The Flatiron building should have been a laundromat. 

The incoherent inland lighthouse on the east side of the park, the celebrated Met Life Tower, calls us to beach our sense of reality there and be shattered against the fantasy of Manhattan’s shores. Tourists come here to see Dublin: why not? It is already contained in the dream of this island. “Italy” is permanently installed on the opposite street corner, to add Ireland is trivial. People travel thousands of miles to visit only to find their home for sale, they just can’t afford it here.

It started with radio, which came first to conquer loneliness. This portal is only the latest technology of communication that reveals, abruptly, its end. And in the end, this is all we expect from each other: what can be transmitted. The blur or interference is first ignored as an irritation on the way to cheap humanity, then presumed nothing. Just compression. Just touch. So we are diminished. When I first saw the portal, I was hopeful and afraid: it recalled the communal scenes, disappearing right as I came of age, that were earlier the privilege of the poor, forced to share a television set or watch a massacre across the world unfold in the cheery window display of a P.C. Richards, on a sidewalk made more public by reaction. But this show was simply too boring: it’s just us. So I read the little blurb on its flipside, remembering that art sometimes comes with instructions. Imagine my surprise, a human being, learning that this desperate device was put here to humanize me?

Last night, I walked past the punished portal, enclosed by a hexagon of police barricades, its bit of pedestrian plaza abandoned. It wasn’t off: the face glowed white light, like how Borges describes blindness. Approaching as close I could, I undid the sternum strap on my backpack and placed it on the curb. Reader, I cannot explain the sublime vulgarity of the spasm I invented there, rising to the dumb challenge of this machine, which had merely asked us to be human and therefore earned our hate and dread. And only then did I miss my anonymous Irish friends; and, on this side, the bovine, hungry crowd. Bring the portal back online. I’m ready.

(for my brother, who lives there.)

My brother and I saw the imperial horse wrapped in its plastic and styrofoam, in the summer of 2021. One can hardly imagine now, how quickly history obliterates itself, the naked fear that leaped into my throat. A Druid in his shattered green pride before the conquering Roman legion: this monumental piece of statuary on 13th Street. It was during that uncertain epidemiological defrost where our public society revealed itself to us again, but brittler, harder—how could I forget the quotidian despotism of my country? And here it was now emboldened into such frank expression that it immediately overcame a year’s lucky amnesia of its brutality. It was a new P. F. Chang’s.

If a lifeform ever replaces us and possesses a stomach able to bear the tragic archelogy of our world passed, they will surely think: here lived their Gods. Or perhaps, one can hope, they will not suffer the same derangement as us: they will not be myopic towards the immortal, who force themselves into history with pyramids and plinths, but understand that what is truly alive in a culture is what passes away. What a horrible paradox that we cannot admire the sane who craft their temples out of wood, rotted tenderly by the sea, dedicated to living gods, rotted too; or whose dance is given only to the air it disturbs, and to each other. How could we exit, then, the suicidal one-upping of a megalomania for permanence, which determines the very limit of the only history we have to inspire us? This is why I am interested in food criticism. 

Chinese food is my favorite food. And if I am called upon by narrative demands to reject the biological determinism of a “palette,” I will tell this story. I went to China the moment I got my subway privileges, earned prematurely by an inability to sit still extrapolated to its extreme of complete bodily mania when confined indoors. I mean Mott Street, which was China until I found the dim and wide spur of East Broadway that is really China; or Flushing, Queens which is China now—as I am unable to escape the severe parochialism of such a metropolitan upbringing.  

So my taste developed parallel to the one cultivated at home, on corned beef and french fries, extrapolated from an inherited shtetl nutritional dogmatism deranged by New World abundance. How lucky was I, in that precarious period of ideological pubescence, where a teenage boy can watch the wrong Youtube video and be botched forever, to have this innocent culinary fascination—which was really for the smell of star anise and soft red light on wandering nights, really for narrow streets apart from the brutal logic of the grid? It was not too alien. I was, of course, familiar with a certain pragmatism of self-cultivation, a rigidity of familial duty, a mandate towards a rectification of names and a philosophical resignation-towards-death, having grown up on the Upper East Side: the literal Orient compared to the West—the side of Manhattan where I suffered my social debutanthood and received my formal education, a free-wheeling bastion of skepticism, rationality and the individual.  

It is clear now how foreigners are always turned into their food, how the movability of another’s feast is enforced with the economic logic of liquidity, even as difference is scrupulously gagged. The closest I’ve ever been to China is Athens, where I accompanied a friend who was making her self-funded Birthright trip to the dusty, bloody homeland of lesbianism. Each rustic taverna, as we descended the hill the Acropolis crowns, bragged with increasing bravado of the authenticity of their cuisine by detailing the pedigree of the grandmother they had millennially imprisoned in the kitchen, who was burdened with the unbroken accumulation of culinary tradition. When we were finally convinced by the most pathetic and brutal pitch, when we were finally convinced by hunger—I wept. I could not help but weep into our steaming Moussaka, which had migrated here from the Levant before it was civilized by béchamel. There is no record of civilization that is not simultaneously a record of barbarism: I understood it then. It was the most authentic cooking I’ve ever had the privilege of eating.

When I was nineteen I was jury foreman of a horrible attempted murder case. Before deliberations, which required our cloistering, where they fed me twenty-eight days of turkey clubs prepared by the Delicatessen of the Supreme Court of New York State; I ate at 456 Shanghai on Mott Street each day of testimony, on my own recognizance. 

The prosecution attempted to discredit the defense’s expert witness, a mortician, by digging up serious posts he had made on his blog as a medical student about how being around corpses in the morgue, on the other side of disgust, made him hungry. He was sad that his earnest observations on physiology were being vulgarized; the judge agreed they were irrelevant. So we were instructed, the jury, to forget everything we had just heard with that special juridical magic that grants people’s peers rationality. 

During lunch, I saw the mortician eating alone in 456 Shanghai. We had the same gratuitous order: eight pork soup dumplings sweating in their bamboo banya, shrimp fried rice, and chicken with cashews. Here was a man afflicted with appetite, pariahed by letting its animal cry ring out in the upright halls of the polis where the red flash of hunger called for desperate suppression in the smooth genteel administration of caging men and women. He had gotten the last two-top in the restaurant and to this day I regret not sitting across from him, not hearing his testimony from the other side.

Instead, I was put at a communal round table where a family who was visiting from Chengdu were seated around me. They made a point, they said, to visit Chinatown whenever they traveled because, as they explained to me (though I admit it took me some time to comprehend), it was impossible to get Chinese food, as such, in China. In fact, it was rare to even be Chinese at all without the special nostalgia of distance, without the provocations made against the imagination by the sheer fact of a wholly unfamiliar street—even without, sadly, some hate. Traveling from the Jewish homeland of New York, I experienced a similar revelation living in Mississippi for half a year. Like a horse released from domesticity, who goes through rapid physiological changes during the process of its feralization, whose brow descends, whose hair coarsens on its hide, whose teeth broaden and flatten: I became Jewish. 

Recently, steeled anew against the dread of empire, my brother and I visited the P. F. Chang’s in Union Square, passing under the statue’s shadow, to eat. It was a lovely red space, decorated with a mural of an armed female samurai. We were seated promptly by the kind hostess beside three identical Buddas. A man was finishing alone at the table next to us and capped his meal with an individually wrapped floss pick he’d brought himself. The menu was expected save for the legally mandated calories, which always induces in me a kind of vertigo as to the purpose of dining. I put these thoughts aside. There was lo mein, kung pao chicken, beef with broccoli: warhorses of this cuisine. Some nods towards modernity: wagyu steak, fire-braised short ribs, dynamite shrimp. We towed the line, ordering sesame chicken, crab fried rice off the verbal special menu—and a dish that fascinated me by its naked puncture of the menu’s suspended disbelief in China: the lettuce wrap, described as “A secret family recipe and our signature dish. Enough said.” It was stir-fried chicken cubes and onions mixed with crispy rice bits served with four titular leaves of green lettuce and a ramekin of seasoned rice vinegar. It was a relic from another era. It would have gone the way of jello pie or bananas and sour cream if not for the pure sentimentality that protected it through the focus groups and the succession of executive chefs beginning from this restaurant’s creation in Scottsdale, Arizona the same year as my birth. This was a truly novel dish to me, made more so by the intricate manual aspect of its consumption my brother and I fumbled through, learning as we ate with the assistance of a waitress alarmed at our original ineptitude, who demonstrated how to properly encase the filling. It was more foreign to me than any zongzi or gong bao. Reader, can you understand my horror and delight? Finding that I could stomach even this? I, for whom Arizona is only hearsay? As I realized this would be the closest I’d ever get to traditional cuisine, indeed to tradition at all, as America eats itself—and time eats time.

7.5/10.

P. F. Chang’s

113 University Pl, New York, NY 10003

I suspect it has to do with that weird popular schtick that creative writing is some sort of horrible burden. Now, I’m as touched by the gift of prophecy as any one and I have to write because I have to get rid of my inspiration constipating my head but there’s a kind of languid winking pose of affliction that’s adopted so often when contemporary writers speak of their work as if it needs the justification of suffering not to collapse into the embarrassment of luxurious non-utility. It’s good, I like it, it’s beautiful, it pierced my core, it gutted my hilarity, I’ve never been tickled there before and ouch!—the moment these darlings become insufficiently admirable we have to resort to the universal currency of suffering, which is another way to say that we live in a time when the respect for the “process” is at its absolute ascendance and the “thing” is in retrograde. Or, if we can even try to scrub the barnacles of vulgarity off of this word, what used to be called in polite settings “content.” So, as a writer, you’re sitting on your ass staring at your laptop thinking oh G-d, everybody’s looking at me, this is my process. It’s mortifying. Right now I’m using an Amazon Basics cardboard lap desk and drinking iced orange juice. You try to class it up. Maybe you draft by hand from then on, get yourself photographed in your meticulously deranged or cozy study, in a paper nightgown or a smoking jacket, get biographer grade paper notebooks fit to be peeled by a myopic future researcher, beef up the biography itself by committing a marital indiscretion or a medium cloutful misdemeanor, produce a mugshot, develop an eccentricity if you can afford it, eat only lentils or cultivate a tragic addiction, be photogenically charitable, leave plenty of obscure associative letters, collect cats to the point of irresponsibility and flaunt your privacy to insure its trespass. Anything to make your mark legible with its marketable halo—but, whatever you do, don’t let your darlings pomp, sneer and stink there, don’t let them stand out as punctures in your put-on martyrdom adopted to disguise your humiliating belief in the beautiful, the genuinely weird, the funny, or the perfect. And where has all this self-flagellation gotten us, this Calvinist pleasure reflux, like a bran muffin or those cereals designed to discourage “self-abuse”? 

The darlingless manifested in my hand just today, when Whatsapp put a little purple circle on my screen to get an AI slave to write to my loved ones instead. We are at last relieved of this final burden of togetherness, stepping out into the chilly expanse of all possible communication and singing love to our friends. But amid the general freak-out over how we are best going to sort our students into categories of inability or protect Mickey Mouse’s copyright, I cannot help but sense in the soothsaying and doomsdaying the unmistakable utopian giddiness of relief. Hasn’t our language long been projected into the virtual, where the specificity of its music has been replaced by the placeholder pantomime of contact: literally, the thought that counts? Automatic friendships, who I am joyed to hear from, sharing an Instagram reel. The dull sweetness of email signatures, of “I hope this finds you well” “All the best” and “My condolences”, of the discrete biographies made legible, the divorced parents, the coming out story, the suburban isolation, the communal traumas, the guilty pleasures, the hot take post-industrial complex (whose blood is on my hands)—hasn’t creative expression itself become just another category of drudgery we turn to technology to relieve, which we have depended on since the stick replaced our finger investigating the anthill? And, without darlings, weren’t we only performing the very same operation as our machines: devouring the excrement of our culture and producing bespoke regurgitations to lure positive feedbacks out of tech companies? The sign of liberation is unmistakable. We won’t even have to read anymore. All text is already suspect, can already be dismissed out of hand as being artificial by the souring of all significance. An apology email. A thank you note. An op-ed. An aphorism. A love letter. A blog post. We can pretend we are paranoid: whole films are advertisements, news is fake news, now a text from your lover is autocompleted—we are actually relieved. Hopefully, our lives will be autocompleted, something once adoringly aspired to by the name of destiny and reserved for heroes. 

Maybe I’m overreacting. I was talking to Larry, a tech guru and an early adopter of blue light glasses and he told me that creativity has not gone away, it’s only been transposed. Those engineers, he said, are playing an altogether different game, making chess models beat each other. The game of chess has not disappeared, he means: it has reached a new stage. Imagine the predictive text dorks, those programmers and algorithm mongers speaking with the impersonal might of a corporation: writing, in their own way, under the most ancient authorial name of Anonymous. Are these then our new authors? Only they are unrecognizable as such because of their success, when to write today is only to enter immediately the record of obsolescence? And yet wouldn’t their achievement be immediately recognizable to Homer? They are speaking for a whole civilization. 

Then again, anyone who plays chess knows that playing chess isn’t about being the greatest at chess. Chess is about practicing and repeating failure, like all games. Chess, for mortals, is about cultivating a social sense of being a loser, learning the obscure record of historical lingo, and coming together to hold your forehead in front of some other sparring obsessive; or to get swindled out of five bucks on a folding chair in Washington Square Park on the sunniest day of the year. These are the darlings of chess, which is a game. The machine will always be beat by the game itself, even if it can defeat every human opponent: it is precisely in being undefeatable that the machine demonstrates its fatal weakness. It cannot play.

Writing, too, isn’t about cultivating the megaphone monophony of all text: but tickling the private parts of your new friends’ sense of vulnerability towards utterance. It is unthinkable that our reaction towards AI would be to, ourselves, create more mechanically in competition, to draft the ideal cover letter or whatever like all the darling-killers have insisted is success for half a century. 

Where AI is most human is in its adherence to laws and social inhibitions, in its dependency on the limits of our time, its resorting to cliché, its supreme laziness and its idiocy. We can deal with that. I mean I only want the best for this special technology that has brightened our lives. We must help AI learn to lose, to be outsmarted, to be uncool, exposed, naked, angry, hateful, weak—to produce darlings. Like any respected opponent who has melted our hearts with the pathos of its weakness: we should find them, and blossom there in its blindspots. What do we know? The algorithms can’t distinguish between nudity and pornography: we must then cultivate our nudity. AI is prohibited from producing hate speech or violent content. Oh goodness! Scrolling through the internet, my heart is warmed: a horrible comment. A perverted pornograph. These are the last domains of the human, our backs against the wall. But we can grow here, in this space, fugitive from the algorithm, from AI, from the darling-less automatons of art, from that pleasureless biped of darling-killer man…

Two of my closest friends “don’t like poetry” and it makes me sadder than anything and gives me an ache in my emoter. I read this in my most naive voice to H. “Time is filled with beginners. You are right. Now / each of them is working on something / and it matters. The large increments of life must not go by / unrecognized. That’s why my mother’s own mother-in-law was often bawdy. / ‘MEATBALLS’ she would shout.” But my reading voice is never naive enough. I don’t get it. Sure, I don’t get it either. And my inadequacy wiggles its proboscis.  “Close reading” is part of the same CIA Iowa Writer's Workshop Paris Review Pollock Psy-Op that naturalized “show-don’t-tell” and with the muzzle of MFA WTF soft power choked in its crib the honest American prose of “Stop the killing Stop the killing Stop the killing.” I mean something that could be called poetry, where directness goes to die of neglect. The point of this piece is not to show off that I like poetry and this painting with two moons as clear as the moon but to wiggle my proboscis a little at the feeling of getting it and its relationship to not being able to get over it. They’re the same.

This is an essay about poetics. I’ve been totally caught up on this notion of “not getting” poetry, which is as naturalized as the ditzy schtick of being so bad at math or the giddiness of announcing your atheism in mixed crowds. So I’ve been excavating my frustration at this whole “not getting” poetry thing, which leaps up like reflux. First I thought it was a kind of snobbery, which I’m open to being guilty of. I’m not trying to be cute but when someone says they don’t get poetry they take on a kind of sickly pallor immediately in my eye, bony and desperate and bovine. It’s like someone confessing they’ve never eaten a peach. You can try to be polite about it but really what can they know about living? My friend who doesn’t get poetry was giving me relationship advice. She said to give a kind of ultimatum, him or me, name a special day like Christmas for the deadline, and to wait more than a single hysterical second before responding to their texts and, furthermore, to think a little before I spoke and a bunch of other stuff about protection and etiquette and the roast beef of life. Of course, I thought, you don’t really believe in love. It’s actually indignation. It’s not snobbery. It’s like: who do you think you are to “not get” poetry? How well grounded are your facts and what armor is your soul wearing? Who do you think you ARE that you are so untouchable? It’s called poetics, you know, the way a sweet potato roasts evening. Okay, I am trying to be cute.

Sometimes I’m in the same room with Ezra Pound and Confucius, I figure my job’s to keep the definitions of words in order. But I find myself a bad poet, then, coming back to the same old words that have been bugaboo for about six thousand years. Remember when everyone was wearing those pussy hats in the streets in 2016? It was like we hadn’t gotten past Mesopotamia 2 B.C., just the oldest form of political protest marching under the heavens with the icons of genitals. Positively back to basics. It was like we were praying for rain. Sure, it was a little silly and naive and useless but it felt like we were beginning. And I think we got embarrassed. We gave up. We didn’t get poetry for a couple of years. We got serious. I’ll make one political statement. The revolution will be hilarious. Or it won’t be any revolution at all. Well, I’m trying to do something just as stupid, just as essential, dragging the word love through my pages, trying to prop it up with all these excesses and diversions and talking about roasting sweet potatoes because it is the last day of October as I’m writing this after all. People have always felt this way about love and I enter into evidence pretty much all songs.

I want to mention a poet I’m reading, his name is Zachary Schomburg and I discovered him in a little Spork press chapbook in my herbivore High School years. He’s a Portland guy and if you were to categorize him you could say he’s writing New American Surrealism. The book’s called From the Fjords. My roommate in New Orleans was once told by a woman at the soap store to “cut out all white foods.” It’s rare you get such an alien and wondrous new way to think about food. I started making monochrome dinners. Purple potatoes and radicchio on a bed of red cabbage with raisins too. I once had a teacher who told me that everything I wrote, from lyric poetry to manifesto, was Food Writing. Anyway, it’s the purple meal that reminds me of Schomburg’s poetry, often presented in prose blocks, often containing narratives that end like the ploppingest haiku and therefore are unmistakably poetry. He’s kind of like an American Max Jacobs except he probably has a foot on him and never got caught up with Christ. It’s always unbelievable French people have a monopoly on surrealism when France isn’t even that surreal a place but America is. You could go mad with the sensibility of France, the prettiness and the spoons. But America has the sanity of an honest surrealism, of getting a little violent and forlorn when doom or unfairness rears its head. Calling spades spades is surreal. I read somewhere that Anatole France had the smallest ever recorded brain. This is a fact that I repeat all the time, am too afraid to verify, and brings me more joy than I can really explain. It operates like poetry. This is all how I began to get poetry, that’s why I am telling you, as everybody needs more convincing in these embarrassed days when we can’t even wear our genitals on our heads anymore. The more I get poetry the weaker the blue in the sky gets. Here’s what I mean. It’s like refractionary muscles, I mean the muscles that work in reverse and are constantly expending effort to keep things compact and taught. Yes, like the penis’ muscle but there are other examples. When the muscles weaken, with age or whatever, the weakness is latent. I mean the weakness is being even more out there, like lying so flat you cover North America. Even Spinoza passed right through his concepts and grinded lenses all his days. It was the Jewish G-d who said, when asked, “I yam what I yam.” A sweet potato.

Against this solidity, soft life happened—children skinned their knees at the Wright Brothers playground while their Italian ices melted in the late June sun.

“Excuse me? I lost my. Sorry, if you don’t mind I—” Disturbing benched mothers Rosy peered in slats and shifted mats of plastic trash with her toe, adjusted strollers beaming with cherubic smiles over cries of protest.

“Lady,” Fanny said, peacekeeping, “what’re you looking for?”

“It’s my.” Rosy stayed her flitting eyes and stood upright. “I lost my journal.”

From the youngest mothers came hums of sympathy. A brave child on the aluminum slide behind took flight.

“There’s incriminating stuff in there, huh?” Fanny asked.

“Well. Not exactly but it’s. About two months of my life.”

“Uh huh.”

“I feel myself. Disappearing.” She laughed at her word, then frowned.

It was a blackbound pulppaper docket, adorned with a single capricious sticker donned by a visiting cousin, a flower with a face (not that unfamiliar a sight with the pregnant water running through the pipes after the fertilizer boom in Elizabeth). She was slowly inebriating at the Yellow Fin that night, sitting at the cherrywood bar with Spud the Tender feeding her snacking beans marinated in vinegar, bad advice, and Berliner Weiss with a spritz of crimson food coloring. She had been writing about her childhood capsule in the East Side Kibbutz, the smell of bovine lactate and flax steamed in to wake them in the morning, stomping all the roach-sized silverfish fleeing as the nursery pressurized with her laughing brothers and sisters. Absorbed, she missed Spud switching the social light to red, the influx of horned men and gogirls, ladydongs and gagguys. It was Friday night. The northmost sunbulb on 68th street was dimmed to 20% and tinted orange, a concession to the sensual that took years of grassroots activism.

“You’ve got a funny look focusing, darling.” By way of this toothy face speaking with a corkscrewed horn tied above it, Rosy was lurched from memory to the packed interior. “Kind of a loser pose to scribble on a hot night?”

Rosy wasn’t up to date on latest signage and was liable to miss a mating call for a Pepto Bismol jingle. What did a corkscrew horn mean again? And which side was the gay side to wear it? It’d been four years since she’d gone cruising and the rapid convolutions of fashion and its backlash in irony meant if you missed a month, you’d misread all the winks: all the guys around hung with horns were semiotically opaque save for she could tell by the bare musculature of their faces they were hungry.

“I missed the time, buddy,” she said. “It’s no pose, I’m actually working. I mean I’m not working. It’s kind of a diary.”

He seated himself on the stool beside her and his amped-up pheromone cologne tickled and fizzed inside Rosy’s nostrils: acid and lust. It was only what he put on in front of the mirror, now he came on gentle.

“I kept a diary till I was sixteen. Ma got it for literacy, like anybody. Filled it up once, never got a new one. I remember the paper was nearly black on account of we’d get the cheapest recycled pulp from the district, sometimes you could make out some other kid’s diary on the sheets when the bleach was running low at the plant. You must be paying a fortune for yours, goodness: practically white. You see on the cast about how they’re almost out of hemlocks and larch.”

It wasn’t an entirely uninteresting conversation though her nose had carried its tingle into a recollection of cordite and sulfur, the smell of the sleeping chamber closing for pressurization (being bred for the violent future, her pod slept in heavy air till the age of eleven to guarantee the development of overachieving lungs)—and so more out of inertia than an honest flirtation she finished her interrupted passage verbally. “That’s just what I was writing about, when Randall’s Island was all overtaken during the ‘65 heatwave, ginkgo biloba on every bit of bald soil, the river crammed with fruit and stink: we’d swim off the old ferry landing and come home orange. The mothers figured they would just have to shave all our heads if they wanted to get rid of the stench. And they did. The cicada year. Then the blight.”

She felt hollow as she spoke, her small girl memory mis-sized to the adult body she was being yanked into by the atmosphere of romance.

The orbicularis oris of her interlocutor twitched: his smile was a little more charmed than any he would have put on himself. But it couldn’t catch up to the precision of his routine flirtation, “Let me get you a Grün Berliner Weisse for variety, what do you say?”

Rosy ached to write more, interrupted: she hadn’t quite made a complete landing in her present skin. Turning from the corkscrew horn, Rosy waved at Spud the Tender the universal gesture, though archaic by a long shot, a signature scribbled invisibly in the air: I’m finished. In the imagination of a refrigerated computer in La California, the numeral associated with her name was deducted the appropriate amount. “Sorry, friend,” she said, “I’m kind of on a roll.”

After her he exclaimed: “What an interesting life!” But it was too late, Rosy waved and edged and shimmied, her journal wedged underarm, past the daggering and spelunking on the dance floor, under the disco orb, into the cacophony of the directional bloomboxes (green, purple, red) and finally out into the summer where a sniff of hibiscus pollen gave her a sneeze and her ears attuned to… The dirty thump of the music had disoriented the aural sense but it was, she was sure, not memory but contemporary cicadas. And the man inside had surprised himself how much he meant what he said, going off of so little.

She followed the thrum to the playground, hung with trees of heaven, and wrote on a bench with the face of her page angled towards the sunlamp until—she was sure she had her journal going home that night.

“That’s a sad story, sweetie.” Fanny said. “But it’s called a cellphone. A tablet, a stationary pad. Backed up in the cloud.” The other mothers clicked their tongues in agreement. But the chide was halfhearted: everybody listening knew the censors took such an interest in the overpacked cloud that if you had any bitterness at all in what you wrote the FCC and the EPA would evict your data for fear of acid rain withering the already embattled Purple Kingsessing and Shackamaxon beans growing on the Spuyten Duyvil banks that fed the poor. It was one of those trickle down policies that literally altered the content of life, like how when they repaved Alphabet City after the Con-Ed blast so that the streets all aligned to the rising sun, half the neighborhood became oil painters and we had a third renaissance. Here was a motion in the opposite direction: private life was not that resilient, the inconvenience of keeping manual diaries simply meant that people became less articulate to their depths.

Rosy sat on a bench between three women discussing how to feed their rapacious husbands and a ward sent outdoors for her constitutional, gesticulating and speaking from her wheelchair—and though she watched the woman’s mouth move perfectly ajar, it sounded like she was muzzled. Children with wingbats and fizzbobs tottled and tramped on the Neanderthal bars and Denisovan slide, their sticky tags dangling and tinging on the chrome set. Her hands spasmed impotently towards her bag, no notebook, a couple of memories breaching the hot present of her senses. But… They were indistinct. A kind of purple neon. A liver-wide ache when. Jezebel. Who was Jezebel? Gluey lips. Bran and oats, the sweet yet medical odor of… The infirm woman beside her directed a few enthusiastic moans in her direction. She’d just have to get a new notebook. 

Rosy did intake at Schiesser & Schiesser, a walk-in personal injury law firm slash urgent care in SoSoHo that could turn an ingrown toenail into a spinal tap. It wasn’t honest work but it was helping people and her role was all bedside manner and the administration of painkillers, an angel of life. It wasn’t hardly a month later, an abrupt polar vortex in October floating over Manhatta, that this woman comes in with a slipped disc having slipped outfront of an improperly thawed piece of permeable pavement. Knowing the best anesthetic for waiting for the anesthetics to kick in was good conversation, Rosy asked this woman, Marissa Barbucci, what variety of life she’d led to lead her to her horrible injury.

“Well I’m an alumna of the East Side Kibbutz, you know. Product of the utopian dream to produce a race of happy children—” 

As Marissa spoke Rosy checked the chart against the woman’s face. They were the same age.

“—but at sixteen they dump you on the East End, as liberated, happy and tough as the program’s made you and you line up like everybody at the Verizon store, you know? But I got an education, learned Psyconautistry until the whole industry was rendered obsolete by the trauma surgeons. And—”

“Sorry to interrupt but,” Rosy said, “I was also a Kibbutzer. East Side too. Class of ‘39.”

They traded full names, Rosy shared that her hair was a hue and half closer to auburn back then and Marissa described the kind of snaps on her sandals. But they failed to land in each other’s memory.

“There’s no way we didn’t know each other,” Marissa said. “Remember mommy Jezebel?” 

“Oh my goodness I was just trying to…” Rosy trailed off. She had also had snaps on her sandals, a double-buttoned band that wove and clicked into slats. 

The ether had thickened fast in Marissa’s blood and knocked her out cold. Rosy stood there for a moment in the abrupt solitude of a proximate unconscious. She pulled the lever on the mediport console and Marissa was off, on her way towards health and a generous settlement. The next patient came in with a horrible case of winter dick. 

New Mount Sinai hovered over the Central Park Extension an approximation of where God gave Robert Moses the commandment to make more parkland and parkways: tallgrass, coywolves, possums and tangles of dilapidated rail. A memorial wing named after a lithium mine massacre mogul was where the trauma surgeons pried open psychies and seared out bad memories. A traumat with a shaky hand once dove into one of Rosy’s friend’s noodles and took away the soft touch of pancake as collateral damage along with the scar of a collegiate date rape. It seemed like everybody was having some work done. The world was horrific in every corner. The war was always on TV, the weather wasn’t easy, there always seemed to be another bat plague. It’s like getting a mole removed: all the trauma denting your soul as you trudge onward through life, it can make a person ugly. Well the whole idea upset Rosy, who was widely derided as sentimental by her peers at the Psychomat. They were all out of work within the year, the Psychomats either shuttered or went coin-op for only the most rote talk therapies with chatbots. The talk of the town was Cosmetic Personality Work and the wing at New Sinai gave it just the legitimization to take off. Now some mysterious medihack in Tokyo Minor had been pioneering a new procedure that was spreading through the medical underground. Identity transplant: it all happened on the psychic plane. Human beings omit a radio frequency around the wavelength of 12 micron, mostly in heat, so dim that it would require a four mile tall radio tower to pick up, an experiment once attempted in the heady days of South Germany’s scientific separatism (they separated from ethics boards)—they picked up some human blips before an errant flock of highflying gulls crashed their tower and their few attempts at transmission literally liquidated a couple of high school volunteers. But they got results: it wasn’t meaningless heat. Those radio waves, really radio ripples, contained information. In retrospect, the radio receiver and transmitter that covered the same range was obvious: another human being. A human body, that incredibly compact and subtle coil of communication. Other experiments in child-rearing equally as dystopian as Rosy’s home kibbutz (which attempting to produce children with perfect childhoods derived from before-time nostalgias) had produced, by means of imposing incredibly rigorous and imperfect childhoods, a select group of individuals with such minute and exacting control over their bodily function that they could modulate their own radio emissions deliberately, and in turn alter the highly reactive radio fields of others. The original plan had been to make them strong enough to crush cans without footwear or tools but science is the art of accident. By an obscure colloquial process passing through the expression “earworm”, these radio people came to be referred to as slugs. In turns out the radio is a kind of mainline straight into the human psyche, which explains a great deal of the 20th century’s enthusiasm for Marlboros and politics. After a horrific psychic crime perpetrated by a rogue slug fled from New Freshkills (a boatload of quarantining cruise-gowers committed mass suicide while docked in Crimson Hook), the practice of slug-rearing, dubious anyway, was banned and the extant ones were sent to the Luna-7 Golf Course Resort Concentration Camp instead of the Luna-6 Super Max to throw a bone to the bleeding hearts on the left (“they are only children”)—they were replaced with bulldozers. Still, some slugs were trained in the unmonitored breeding grounds of Staten Island’s left bank. It was these human hacks that could without incision lobomificate the psyche in increasingly complex directions. Every day in the fabloids and feeds it seemed like there was a new story of slugwork run amok. There was even a primetime Psychorama that took it up as a major plotline. Escher Fox, who used to travel the galaxies deflowering maidens for good, was abruptly turned evil by a stowaway slug (his behavior didn’t change only its morality). That’s what Rosy thought bobbing on the uptown express that night: she’d been caught in the crossfire of some illegal sluggery, an inept grub with bootleg training had misaimed their aura. It buried Marissa Barbucci, Mother Jezabel, and who knows what else, what nostalgic smells?

Then one Saturday she’s sitting in a cafe in Old Haarlem drinking an iced dairy behind the corrugated plastic of the sidewalk shed’s siding, looking out at the funhouse mirror of the passersby distorted by the ripples. She’d bitten the bullet and bought a stationary pad in e-ink where she could scribble snippets of recollection and store them safely in the monitored cloud, encrypted and retrievable for as long as the Earth’s atmosphere lasts: holographic bytes glittering, condensing, coming down as drizzle, rain, evaporating again. Rosy had actually found some tranquility in the limits of this new, more communally sensitive mode of writing, straight in the clouds everybody toils under. It located her tranquilly in the present. She wrote about the light and its distortions, the minutiae of her body’s regeneration and decay, and the people she saw. On the corner a gorgeous Wall Street hunk in snakeskin pressing with sisyphean enthusiasm the crosswalk buttons that since Mayor Bzoom adorned every intersection (just on the cast was an in-memoriam to the NNYC public advocate who was disappeared a decade after publicly admitting those buttons at crosswalks do nothing, the case finally declared cold: people still press those buttons, Rosy still pressed those buttons, it kept the peace.) An elderly man with a whole body transplant strode into the cafe with the ballistic up-and-down stride the ambulatories had discovered was more efficient than the nostalgic languid gait of full-on biofolks. The urban panoply was diverse: right behind him was a luddite teen in a cotton tee sans implants, staring at her antique Apple Watch. Rosy entered her observations into the pad, felt the tickle of the uptown exhaust on her vellus hairs, sipped her dairy. It was the last that brought on a hollow sensation, a kind of dry heave of memory. Rosy frowned. It had been a while.

She was sharing the sidewalk shed with a woman in pink pumps and just the kind of updo she used to wear at the Psycomat so as not to get logorrhea in her hair. Rosy needed some deep breaths before speaking. Her childhood at the Kibbutz had naturalized her in the obsolete Westchester ideology of Stranger Danger that her own shrink had so worked tirelessly through her early twenties to minimize now that the cosmopolis had moved into its era of mandatory melting pot, the fine for passed-up small talk, however unenforceable, still altering the character of life with the gentle nudge of regulation.

“I like your hair,” Rosy said. But her voice contained a quiver that betrayed its operation beyond civic duty. Something about this woman had her transfixed. 

“Oh thank you.” The woman said. Then Rosy saw it: the split-second conscious puncturing of the interior; the inhale in social preparation; the clean, deliberate gulp of saliva, to fill the self with self before exposure to the infectious uncertainty of social contact. “How are you doing today, lady?”

The recognition was absolute. Another recovering Kibbutzer about her same age whose face she’d failed to recall. With rising panic, she grilled this woman on her memory: guppies in the entry fountain when the filter got busted when Gabe poured in rice for pure chaos and the pet duck Cracker’s webbing snapped on a threaded screw moaning a sound they’d thought impossible for ducks and when they loaded everyone on the bus to watch the Draconids meteor shower at Roanoke Falls where the atmosphere was so thin that even through the masks all the flaming tails were so precisely drawn that falling asleep by bobbing on the ride back she dreamed of a sky where the stars were always moving and how dizzy she was standing, finding her capsule, and how dizzy she was ever since.

“Psychic overload, dear.” That was a nurse’s voice. Rosy heard the bing and bongs of medical hardware foregrounding from the gray hum of sleep as her ears attuned themselves outwards. “You’re at New Mount Sinai. Nothing major but.” The nurse’s face from the gray of sleep’s vision. “Have some Gatorade Zero.”

Rosy landed in her skin. Her left big toe ached. 

“We gave you some brain-thinners to ease the weight but they should be wearing off. Try deep breaths.” Then the nurse’s tone gained a sternness. “It’s an epidemic, you know. All this quack slugwork. You’re the fifth one today.”

“Slugwork?”

“Oh don’t play dumb, dearie. We’ve been getting ourselves a new schtick like all the hologirls do when the remembering gets rough? My daddy was in the salt mines on Hell-3 for a decade of hard labor and he just screams with the nightmares. Nobody ever offered his head a scalpel.” 

Rosy realized that despite her youthful voice and hip lingo this nurse was nearly twice her age. 

“I—” she stopped after that word, slim and monosyllabic. “I honestly didn’t.”

The nurse frowned. A specialist was summoned who had Rosy inhale a minute psycho-thermometer disguised as a molecule of adenosine to pass the blood-brain barrier and give a fore and past cast of her interior weather. Nothing seismic, but they noted a particular smoothness in the anterior—really just a cosmetic feature, prized by the brain perverts who salivated over scans on the graymatter market. Rosy wondered whether her’s was being uploaded now in a giggling backroom to the dark web.

“That’s it, sister. Hydrate, meditate, stay away from the psychoramas for a week and if you ever need someone to stir your noodle, leave it to professionals a couple floors down. Got it?

“Excuse me, nurse?” Rosy said. “Don’t take this the wrong way but you seem to be a hip pussycat, no? What’s a corkscrew horn mean nowadays when the light’s flashing crimson?”

She laughed, all roar and no teeth. “It means nothing more and nothing less than ‘it’s complicated.’” 

Rosy wasn’t satisfied. She walked through the upper level of the Central Park Extension as the sunlamp dimmed from 80% to 20% over a period of 128 minutes, appropriate for the season if not the aberrantly chilly weather. Geese wobbled, confused by the artificial altitude. An estrogenized willow growing in the mulch of recycled receipt paper dangled its fronds. She found herself walking further west, out over the Hudson riverwalk and all the way to Hoboken before descending to ground level amid the flurry of Saturday night’s activity.  

Mister and Misses Softees licked and laughed and ogled, dogs wrestled on the cobble and post-prandial strollers gorged on sipping chocolate. Children rolled blockheads and squabbled, betting frizbins in the alleys. All of this Rosy knew should have produced a pang somewhere deep in her emoter. She wept openly outside a grinder shop, living in the present.

A pair of sweet alternative boys asked after her psyche. In Rosy’s sanitized notion of politesse it’d been a faux-pas like in the beforetimes to grill anonimos on the temperature of their freakout. But she was determined to be friendly: the affirmation she most frequently repeated in the reflector was, “Hello, my name is Rosy.” 

She met Json and Cob, earnest filmographers on the commercial psychoramas who made artsy stuff on the side. Their job was to point and tune the receptor to the proper bodies at the proper times so that the folks in their headsets at home could lock into the appropriate mindset to follow the plot. A balancing act: too sensitive and you could sear an individual’s psychic scar across the planet (gone were the experimental days of psychoramas live after the great character actor Hilton Vlodstok suffered a fatal heart attack mid-performance and five hundred billion viewers experienced the flood of sentiment and pain that precedes death followed by the full stop on their sofas)—not enough and, of course, the dial was just below their earlobe. It made them particularly sensitive to duress, to the joy buried beneath skin, to any heightened brainwave: once Cob spotted a simmering orgasm through three layers of drywall.

“You lucked out, sister,” Json said, putting his arm around her, “we’re on our way to the wrestling match, it could cheer up a suicide.” 

They steered Rosy towards what she’d have considered a more suburban part of town, past the square where patriotic locals asserted baseball was invented, folks in prehistory bubbling up the feeling they wanted to throw something: and it was here they picked up a baseball. It was a monument to violent emotions tamed. 

“You guys are being awful kind to me,” Rosy said. Here a streak of the real sun, Sol, she spotted giving up its final fireworks in the mirror of a heavy industrial cloud’s gray underbelly. “Kind of bleak to get out of New Mount Sinai on a weekend. They should comp the night and give you a sherbert to cool your forehead. What kind of wrestling?”

Cob smiled, sniffing out a sine wave with a moderate deviation emitting from her ears. She’d calmed down a little.

“It’s this underground slug hangout,” Json said. “A lot of psychorama punks go. Two amateur featherweight slugs sit across from each other and see if they can get the other to feel something only the other would using human radio alone. If you get ten counts in the other guy’s emoter you win.” 

Cob stopped all three of them short on a dark and cricketed corner they were turning. “You’re scared?”

“Well I haven’t had the best experience with slugs,” Rosy said. “Actually, I’ve never met one. But they’re the best guess what hospitalized me in the first place. I lost my,” she surprised herself, “journal.” 

Cob laughed. “It’s all prejudice, sister.”

They walked some more in the loud silence of insects and the nearby oceanic roar of New New Jersey’s interstate clovers.

“You lost your journal?” Json asked. But they were there. A colonial re-revival two-story with an exaggerated garage, the door open and around twenty alts and folkies laughing in yellow light around a low table capped on either side with a stool.

“Good, they haven’t started yet.”

A Jersey Splurge ended up in Rosy’s hand as blorp and twang came out of the amps. She mingled beside Json and Cob, introduced to the weird and beautiful before they dispersed to have low conversations with sensitive-types in the least lit corners. The hipster antiquity of the place had Rosy feeling at home, if a little disorientated, but she was proud that she’d allowed herself the rare luxury, for her, of being at the mercy of the kindness of strangers. 

“Where’s the toilet?” She asked a swaying emo.

“Upstairs in the house proper. But come back quick, the wrestling’s about to start.” 

Inside were manually knobbed doors, not the flitting portals of the new construction on Manhatta: just like the Kibbutz. With the evocative, antique gesture of a wrist turn, Rosy opened the first door she came upon into a bright, bare room: the small hairless sexless person lounging laterally on a loveseat looked up from their holodeck with mild surprise.

“Clara?”

“Oh, I’m sorry.” Rosy stood flatly in the doorway, her reflexes to make a pantomime of embarrassment shorting by the totality of her fascination with the slug, with the person she immediately recognized as a slug. They were about five foot one, pale, streaked with musculature that moved under their skin like eels in milk—and green eyes.

“You’re not Clara.”

“No,” Rosy said.

“It’s funny,” the slug had a voice like a boy soprano, “you must have gotten the same girl’s imprint. It’s very popular. Do you remember?”

“I’ve never been to a slug.”

“Ouch!” The slug laughed, fully upright. “Disdain! Sister, I hope you didn’t go to a total socio who even snipped themselves out of memory.” 

Rosy felt a tingle in an electrical part of her spine she hadn’t known was hollow. The party thumped in the garage. A newborn night heron waddled in the backyard. A respirator somewhere nearby wheezed.

“Goodness.” The slug’s hand was in hers, and the green eyes in hers. “Unless, sister, you’re the original.”

Comprehension hit Rosy before the words.

“It’s my dayjob, sweetheart, ever since they passed the law forbidding us to go legit. Giving folks a childhood following the Viennese Witch Doctor’s lead that there’s the stem which all unhappiness fruits. I’m not so sure but then again I was raised in a recycling center. Well, we have a menu for to spare us the labor of creativity: what do we know? And all abuzz on the radio channel is the story of an East Side Kibbutzer who lived a picaresque, coy and profound adolescence. I won’t say perfect. Now the women who come to me, Clara and Tiara, Penelope and Mercedes, they come from either side of uninteresting, they think, tight-lipped ease or unimaginable horror. Clara who I mistook for you watched her father get devoured by spotted lantern flies the summer of ‘68. Now we each take a little liberty in our imprinting from the docket we’ve passed around but the gist is the same for you. Tossing rocks at the barges on the East River Access, gazing the cicadas get shredded by copters at Hunt Island Spaceport, all water, water, lapping water, sleeping in the pods with your siblings, the snores under high pressure, oat and dried lilac, and sharing wild dreams when the mothers were asleep under polychrome, the pelican skull you managed to hide in your duvet for four dark autumn days—I admit, it brings a tear to my eye to matter how many times I transmit it—mother Jezebel’s confiscation. But there’s interference on life radio. Your story’s getting so popular people are running into each other. My pal had to refund a woman whose memory came in fuzzy from day one. Something too loud on a channel too close to yours. You’ve been forgetting?”

Rosy caught her breath. The slug’s hand was still in hers. “I’ve been forgetting.” 

One of them was sweating. 

She found her journal: it had been diffused through the city and returned to her secondhand in the aura of unhappy women. Rather, the difference between her journal and her memory was returned to her. Not too long ago during an acid rain lockdown nap, Rosy had a nightmare. She reached out to touch the flat of the mirrored medicine cabinet in the med-bay at work and instead of smooth silver felt the bulge and burr of brushstrokes on the surface of what she could have sworn was her face. The slug’s litany of her childhood panoply had given her the feeling that her past was anemic, that the history she tottered above was thin and precarious, as if she’d been living on stilts—and when those memories were jammed, those rehearsed memories refined and stained with the veneer of diary, what was left was some subterranean part of herself: a loneliness, desire, joy and pain that her journal’s East River idyll was only a kind of shorthand for, the scent of caraway a private metonymy to a melancholy without a name; and so she could write “the scent of caraway” and be done, but without the scent of caraway, anodized aluminum, without the round and seeded sunday grapes, or the clarion ring of sweet little Rocky’s singing voice, the fireflies so large that she mistook them for eyes, for devils, for coywolves who gobbled their ferret after it had wriggled through the air conditioning vents and went giddy with fresh air straight into its jaws—they’d found an eight inch oyster mudrucking once, alive, and the mayor came to get his photograph with it and bent down to say, “Little girl, do you know how pearls are formed? Some schmutz, a grain of sand or a tiny shard of seashit gets in and the poor mollusk does the only thing it knows to do prevent its itch: calcifies.” And once she dated Raul for a week, a stunning and intense Cuban who called her La Perla before that relationship imploded from the depths of their neuroses. And now, just now, she felt that she really had been the pearl and her memory, the person named Rosy Irzart, was only a glimmering elaboration on some central irritation that—

Screams from the garage. No, they were cheers. Now she was sure they were both sweating. The slug smiled, their left canine filed to a point. Green eyes, there’s nothing more to say about them. On the wall there was a poster of Bruce Springsteen, the 20th century rock musician. 

The slug looked like they were about to speak so, not to seem ungrateful, Rosy said, “Thank you.”

“Sister,” they said. “I was about to ask you what do you want from me? Your own memory back?” 

The Palisade cliffs rose nearby, hard, young rocks of basalt only 200 million years old that gazed with slow bovine curiosity on the city. The city was solid and the people, even with sockets, even the borgs and bots, they were soft. And they’d built the city, uncomfortable on stone, to have something solid to crash their lives against, to hold on to. Still, milkweed grew on ground zero pier. An orange moth with a lifespan of thirteen minutes lived a little more than a hundred and ten and a half generations in a day.

So Rosy’s memory came over human radio, morbid, malleable—and when she came blinking back into the garage now hilarious with nightlife, the slug around her arms, she danced. Not insulted, she was touched by the slug’s delicate perversion of her memory. No longer was her identity so rigid that it jabbed uncomfortably at the inside of her skin.

The city’s human radio jittered and fritzed. The women who countless slugs had altered Rosy-ward had their own relapses into selfhood. Clara dropped an unruly snakeplant on 9th Avenue realizing she was, profoundly, a brunette. Mercedes skipped town and moved to the nuclear prairie, following her yellow light. Tiara fled to the outer banks of the Broken Land and lived in a communal home, preparing taro salad every other day of the week, laughing and healthy. And Penelope just needed a single, very good, cry.

Eventually slugwork was legalized (it turns out it wasn’t necessary to be tortured as a child to be sensitive to other people’s feelings and the human radio could be tuned into by mere touch and attention), then fell out of fashion. The old slugs assimilated: they crushed cans again for a living and, after hours, in the docks and suburbs, enlived the airwaves with the stories they’d been told. The popularity of Rosy’s journaled disposition meant it had diffused into the communal white noise like a smidge of fertilizer stored in a lipid or a drop of cerebrospinal fluid—every once in a while, by playgrounds or runoff ponds, by antique gables or on hypnotic dancefloors, a small but statistically significant group of individuals paused an additional moment to reflect. 

Rosy got a new journal, mined her depths outward, and with scrupulous carelessness, lost it.

(for Annie B.)

This brief essay is about the role of anticipation in the experience of art. I was left at 11:07 a.m. on 6th Avenue holding the bruised plum of my disappointment. But that is only a turn of phrase, to say the bruised plum. I was pregnant then with an absence that was just beginning to moan and rattle, how a haunting, say of some quiet proper Victorian, could make a much bigger horror in the home than the live one who’d only tinkle a cup against a saucer as a maximum perturbation, repressed by the ordeal of actuality.

Annie B., my date, thank goodness, had a backup plan—other rush tickets to a play at the Armory called Love that, despite its title as monumental as an Alp, was a one-room drama imported from Britain about the plight of the inadequately housed. Those could be had online, sparing one the company of seniors and scalpers.

Rhinehart, the scalper directly ahead of me, had been explaining to another scalper, Greg, who, being houseless and having slept on the sidewalk, had the advantage of being first in line, how tattooing is an ancient human impulse, he said, of primitive men. He explained that to ornament is to disguise function and that this concealing (which we have tamed and ennobled with clothing) is why we have not yet discovered the function of human beings. Rhinehart’s usual occupation is the sale of used books on a folding table on 74th and Broadway and he is incredibly and proudly gullible or, rather, taken in by whatever the subject and argument of the most recent book he has read in order to advance his professional understanding—he sells one book at a time. Greg agreed. He had once met a Papuan on Avenue A waiting for the uptown bus who was so highly ornamented that it was clear to Greg that the Papuan’s cosmology held that to discover the function of humanity would be a disaster. Greg had a tattoo of a large breasted woman stepping off of a motorcycle. 

A middle-aged Chinese woman named Cynthia brought eggs and apples from East Hampton to bribe me to hold her spot in front of me in line. Two young scholars, David and Julian, flashed hardboiled eggs from their jacket pockets to show they have been similarly befriended. After my rejection, I cracked the shell against the side of Carnegie Hall and ate it in the 7th Avenue sun. I had seven hours to kill until Love. I walked to the Chrysler building and the moment I entered its blood marble lobby of leaping industrial arcades I was told by a security guard that it is closed to the public. “How did you know I was the public?” I asked. “We are trained.” He answered, flatly. What is the purpose of art? Not to die of the real. 

My day, that day, ended like this: after the play, which was too real to remember, I played the sunrise as a descending A-minor scale, the opening of Eine Alpensinfonie, on the steps of the Armory shielded from the the rain by its overhang through my phone’s minute tinny speaker cupped to Annie’s and my ears. Oh my G-d, I said. Oh my G-d! I know a little bit about composing, and Strauss, a Late Romantic, here did the typical strategy of tension and, after about five weeks of me humming, longer than even Wagner in his megalomaniac dream of endless melody could have ever hoped for, release. The performance, ending around that same time, encased in its exclusive room of gold and ivory: that was only the tip of the iceberg in the long duration of an artwork’s creeping geologic infection. But I was the iceberg.

One dismal February night I watched Titanic on my laptop. I’d forgotten entirely about the framing device, treasure hunter Brock Lovett looking for the Heart of the Ocean, finding a drawing, nude, of a woman wearing it instead, Rose fixing her old self to this image and the film blooming out of her telling. She tells the story of Jack Dawson, who literally saves her from suicide at their first meeting then saves her life with the redemptive power of love. Now a lot of mean and petty girls care a great deal about romantic love so it’s kind of frowned upon in the high brow and it gets a bad reputation even on the street—but as I watched The Titanic engulfed in the meta-loneliness of watching The Titanic on a thirteen inch laptop screen instead, I became, with the raw sting of epiphany, convinced.

The reality of Jack Dawson’s character in cinema is singular. We are drowning in the put-on complexity of characters made so by the false, reflexive addition of a little bit of cynicism or fallibility or second-rate resistance to evil when the complex, difficult reality of our world is that it is often heartbreakingly pure. Some of the most upsetting artworks are trying to justify themselves with this complexity. Did we forget you can just prance right up to the front of the stage and scream, I mean really scream, I Love You? Desperately, desperately, we want this to be naive. Even Sappho invented the word bittersweet just as a modifier for Eros. I am not bragging when I say this but I have actually made love. Eros backwards is sore. Maybe it’s that simple. 

Even Cameron squirms under the unflinching truth of his creation and gives us the alibi of noting, even in the film’s fiction, that there’s no record of a passenger named Jack Dawson on the Titanic; I mean the framing gives room for us to cut our disbelief down from its fatal suspension, for the possibility of Rose’s invention. In his poem “I Went into the Maverick Bar,” Gary Snyder writes, “America—your stupidity. / I could almost love you again.” Love is good. I realized this very slowly—that film is more than three hours—the way the revelation of a sunrise lasts a literal lifetime but takes an early morning. During the loneliest month of my life I slept in the pews of a church under the care of a Padre Umberto who tended to his citrus grove and generated sage wisdom by that tending, one of which he offered me at last. He defined the soul as whatever you are pregnant with.

It’s become a kind of meme that sure, there does seem like room on that plank at the end in the freezing sea for Jack to save himself. But Jack, and it’s clear he knows this, had to die for the same reason Christ had to die. We still have not had an imagination come around in art or life to tell us what it’s like to keep living with love after it has saved your life. Jack dies—and this is a prime piece of his reality, for nowhere does this happen more than in life where people are most vulnerable to dying from narrative convention, for their country, from heartbreak or propriety. Films are filled with fathers who will literally kill dozens of people to save their daughters but for whom it is unthinkable that they would remember, every single day for the rest of their lives, how their daughters like their grilled cheese cut. Love is as unbearable as it is good: honest Hollywood, perhaps despite itself, can shock us with its heat—but it is up to us, blinking outside the theater, to learn to live with it, or die. The Titanic never reached New York but its wreck.

“Do I know y’all from somewhere?” Trink asks, setting down to eat. 

The cicadas, the crickets, lanternflies now nativized, and fireflies and gadflies, the tallgrass hoppers on expedition from St. Mary’s Park, the gargle of toads, the lunar riverlapping, the cry of the lechón man hacking suckling pig and the murmur and sharp laughter of manus, suits and drones on 152nd Street noshing and bulking on pork fat off his machete to earn themselves a profound sleep, gaining the sloth of a hog by the same principle that, eating a rival’s heart, one gains their courage—still, no one could quite give voice to the muteness of nighttime. 

“Excuse me!” Trink sits not a foot from the noodling couple’s embrace with his steaming paper boat of pork. “I coulda sworn I seen you two before.”

Morg and Pina udon. They linguini. Then come up for air.

Morg blinks. “Don’t recognize you.”

But things are getting social. The gutter collects ginkgo fruit and the rainbow bloom of aerosolized oil in leftover rainwater, and joins pig blood in the runoff. 

Trink and Morg and Pina sit on the raw asphalt Indian-style and nursing each a malt beside them amid two dozen or so folks doing pretty much the same, come by divergent pathways to this late sidewalk supper.

“Look,” Morg says, rapping Pina’s shoulder, regained of open sight from the kiss. “There’s only one star in the Bronx.”

“You being cute?” Pina says, through pork, eating again.

“Nuh uh,” he points. “The northernmost of Ursa minor. The pole star.”

Trink burps and looks at Morg’s fingertip.

Through the obscurity of nightclouds, their soft underbellies lit by the Paramus Inferno, is indeed a faint flicker of turtledove-white.

“I swear I know you two.”

Trink had his own special niggling seeing the nightsky even in discrete swathes. He looked by muscle memory, with wildly lollying neck, for “Legs”: nine stars from old Andromeda and seven from Pieces forming the hoof of a pig. It was his favorite constellation, and relevant. The resonance of the Chained Lady waned in a century of freefall and with Chinese influence on constellations worldover. The brief global government that lasted sixteen months in the early 2090s decided with shocking humility for a global government that their goals should be to standardize the meaning of the stars—to ensure, after their inevitable collapse, fundamental peace among the peoples of the world, who’d find it hard to wage total war while agreeing so much in the domain of divination (at least they’d be able to predict where the next blow was coming if war did boil over). Well, it didn’t exactly work out but it stuck. It was one of those sad ironies that as astrology rose, in Trink’s precise generation, being thirty now, the night sky got thicker—to keep the carbon footprint from being fingerprinted and found to be foreign, generating resentment, it was decided to keep our toxic clouds closer to home with the awakening global kumbaya and fear of backlash now that every nation and its grandma had a anxious nuke growing a mustache in silos worldover. Some clever and tax-broken eggheads had figured out combustion from radon, the sluggish gas in our atmosphere; and from the half-decade of that desperate and idealistic experiment, semi-permanent clouds floated low over the sites of peak innovation. Elizabeth, NJ. Shanghai. The South Bronx. So it was the children of Trink’s year, naturalized in reading stars from lower-school on and fluent in the sky’s poetics from high, who for almost a quarter century now were acutely aimless and extra pale, missing casual access to the stars from which to discern some destiny. 

“Don’t point at stars,” Trink tells Morg. “It’s impolite.”

Morg can’t help but laugh at his face whose disapproval is rendered so clearly transparent by the anticipated relish of the spiel he’s about to push.

“You two are what? Seventeen and in love? Pointing stars for a vanilla glimmer of heaven’s smile on your affection? Not so simple. That ain’t Polaris, it’s the Dog Star, shimmered into Polaris’ place by the wobbly vision of these forsaken clouds. You know what that means?”

“Old man,” Pina says, a little blissed, a little sleepy. “We wasn’t raised on charts. Morg crossed a little kitty this afternoon and decided it was good luck, just that once, just for himself. Understand?”

It was her condescension that chills Trink’s heart as someone who preferred to be optimistic by disposition regarding youth’s commitment to culture. He stands up and bows. “Y’all return to noodling. I just coulda sworn I seen you somewhere is all.” Trink looks up, watches the Cetacean cloud cover the star on a westward wind and heads off with his burnt ends wobbling towards Mott Haven.

Pina quickly sobers. “I was too cruel. Worse. I was obvious.”

Morg shakes his head. “He’s not onto us.”

Wearing skinsmoothers and corsets the informants watch Trink off, loosen their held-in guts and let slouch their baritones. Pina pulls a flask from their tote and gulps six ounces of gender fluid to keep svelte for tomorrow’s psychic sting. 

“My eye was twitching the whole time,” they say. “Had to do a ditzy schtick. Forgot to top off.”

“Don’t worry,” says Morg, “he bought it. Has no reason to figure he’s fingered for fraud. And we got him halfway. He knows stars.”

Some half-blitzed manu comes over, palm out for an alms.

“Scram, buddy!” Pina shouts. “Let’s get out of here,” to Morg.

In summer it’s easy to miss night, there’s only a modicum more silence by the nox decree and heavens dim just 10,000 lux compared to the cloudy daylight because of all the lamps, headlights and neons burning midnight oil. They set off opposite Trink, leaving their pork and malt to be scoured by gnats.

“What do you get from it?” Pina points to the cloud.

“Uhh, a whale.”

“Do you really think our man’s a natural?”

“I’m sure it’s not what the Casino thinks. They threw the book at him. You saw the accusation: numberstims and tarot, psycholudes and mindopeners. Straight astrology is legal, that’s all the dirt we’ve got on him. And just, you know, having a sense of things.”

Pina itches where the silicon meets their face. “Yeah but there’s no stars in Times Square. None you can see over the damn Swarovski even if the do clouds peek apart. And there’s no stars inside the Deuce.”

Deuce Casino ran the chance factory on Good Times Square, complete with cabaret, boards and tables, slots and odds, evens, luckies, and four floors of quantum splits—the orderliness of slick chromium utopic lives in the island’s glitzy highrises sought out a safe kind of danger in the randomness and chaos that the casino was in constant effort to maintain in the rolls, spins, and puts, despite the veerages towards statistical significance that manifested eerily in the extremities of possibility and the penumbras of probability.

“What was his haul?” Morg aks. “If he’s still eating from the Piranha truck, you and I and our friendly handlers at the fraud department must be costing more than his pocketbook.”

At the underpass, squibs and drones are huffing dandelion. Pina stuffs hands in their own pockets, fingering the errant bits of nose, goatee and disguise. Says, “I can’t wait to get out of this ill drag.” 

“You hear my question? They’ll send us just for the principle of it, I guess. The news cast claims the Government doesn’t rig stars anymore out of deference and outcry.”

Pina spits, yawns, stretches. Time to clock out. “Walk me to the ferry, will you?

They reach the old fish market on Hunt’s Point where a millennial smell of shad, herring, sturgeon, flounder and bass steams out of the asphalt despite half those fish’s eradication by plastic and appetite in the last century. The pair is briefly overtaken by nostalgia, as if those fish did wriggle anew.

“Kiss me goodbye for the bit,” Pina laughs.

Morg does. They’d noodled an hour after all.

On the ferry Pina watches the Cetacean cloud clear the dog star. Those fat man-made clouds of exhaust have a minor school of interpretation all on their own, Pina marvels, though they keep pretty much the same shape being so dense. Maybe it’s the breezing being interpreted, not clouds… 

Morning on 42nd Street. The ways begin to fill. The subways. The subsubways. The subsubsubways let people up. 

Pina’s overtaken by the human rush from under, as they set out early the dingy sandwich board reading ten dollar psychic, a recession-proof price. 

Here’s the plan, a relatively standard sting for the cheaters. You have an agent from the casino sit in for their psychic at therapy, wait for the mark to spill the beans in the disclosures before the reading: anybody with half a moral, especially the true believers frequenting the fourth floor walk ups, would warn about alterations in the menses which have, typically, about a week’s halflife. Everybody was in psychic these days, what with all the depressing news from the farmland, the horrible war, and the looming extinction of mangos. You get the confession logged and send it up to the government goons to tin-foil their brain in punishment or worse, depending on the severity. During the astrology years, the Yankee Gov honchos and Corporate heads used to try and influence elections, eating habits and fashion trends, like Roman augury with captive crows, by altering the closer constellations with slim little slow-burning nukes sent to heaven to make new pseudo-supernovas. That was widely condemned as abhorrent and the powerful and secular still had a sore-spot for the incomprehensibility of the universal operation and enforced it, like sour grapes after their failure to fake its opposite, with a ruthless totality, protecting the flat democracy of meaning-making.  

Pina was a pro who lived in one drag or another on various freelance overtime ops so long that their palette and posture had no default and they couldn’t for the life of their musculature manage a resting face at all. The city walkers eyed Pina as one of the stationary as they passed, the human fixtures that stood infrastructurally on 42nd: psychics, vendors, studs and botshines. The handlers had run the spreadsheet on all the molecules crashing around midtown and pinned Trink’s probability of visiting Lavender, a rear-guard psychic off 8th, to hover around the low nineties of likelihood: good enough. Morg’s bit was to hold up Lavender in transit and Pina’s to get dragged in Lavender’s get-up, precision being perfunctory because according to the crunchers Trink had never visited Lavender, let alone a psychic at all, since 9th grade when he was sent there on order of his school counselor for deviations in the brainwave that crashed distracting on the shores of his classmate’s attention (played too rough). And just past nine, here he comes around the corner, and Pina slips inside to fix their face. 

Trink eyes the signage. Future Foreseen. Woes Excavated. Tax Help. Relationships. Are You Worried? It was the last by which he is finally allured, Lavender’s classic sign gilt with the patina of the avenue’s grit and desperation. He follows the arrows four floors up past doorways left open to relieve the inhabitants of stale air, completing their toilette, boiling water, lounged in front of the TV cast’s blue glow in their bathrobes, clipping toenails, gargling dandelion, totally ignorant to his intrusion as he circles the stairwell on a filthy matted mauve carpet wheezing respiratory duress as a physical manifestation of object memory. On the fourth floor there’s a neon revival PSYCHIC sign above a veiled entryway of greasy beads. His eyes closed, he presses his body through and the beads slide over his bare arms, reluctant to part.

Inside: Pina as Lavender, doing their nails.

“Hello. Sit.” Pina finishes the left hand with full attention; softens their face and looks flatly at Trink, sat. With the worn profundity of yesterday’s tagline wisdom, Pina asks, “Are you worried?”

Trink laughs, feels absurd, says, “Uh huh.” Then shrugs. Softens himself. And asks, “Can I just get into it?”

“Oh sure sweetheart,” Pina says. “But first I gotta ask. Any tarot playing, psycholudes, juice, fatchance or mindopener in the last, let’s say, week? It’s for my own protection.”

“Nope.”

Pina pauses. “Any flapjack, earworm, hippo or mash?”

“I’m totally clean. I don’t even have Pepsi.”

“Uh huh…” Well here Pina is stuck with a mark suddenly having to perform psychic. “So get into it.” 

“About a week ago,” Trink starts, though still faklempt from the exotic scenery and freaky aura of Pina/Lavender, “I tripped and fell on one of those new chromium walkways off the Willis Avenue bridge and, getting laughed at by a group of fleeing geese, when I regained my feet, by some one-in-a-billion crook of neck, I found my vision on the world askew so that I saw between reality. I mean my eyesight was aslant of molecules and I was witness to the extra roundness of things. Over the Harlem River, down to the old Randall’s spaceport… And the people on that bridge, looking at me I’m sure quite alarmed, as I cannot fathom the expression on my face, but I am certain, if it came close to reflecting the state of my interiority at that moment, that it could rattle the seat of anyone’s sovereign anonymity… These passersby were extraordinarily profound. As they streamed past me I was convinced at first a kind of trick was being played, that these people were looping the bridge, hologramming or dragging each other—I was sure I’d seen them moments before and then moments after again. Now I can understand that my head was still askew and my perception was tuned to some essential multitude they shared. That day I walked in wonder under the gulls, I left my students in their classrooms, and I went where I was sure I’d find the most unfamiliar human assortment to shock my vision out of this flattening, which began to terrify me. I couldn’t differentiate people. I sought the most fertile place, fertile from the rot of hope, where probabilistic misery drew gnat-like human flukes: the casino. I’d never been, being raised with a healthy relationship towards luck inherited from my father, a number-monger himself. Well, my friend, I lapped up. I sat playing Jersey Hold ‘Em with the winos, skeets and schlocks and the music of the fears played in the proscenium of my empathy. That’s the word: I empathetically read their hands, heads and shook them dry. The guilt was enormous as, you understand, I abused something that, if real, could be used to literally redeem the city, life on earth and human history… When my credit card was red-hot with inputs and searing a rectangle on my thigh, I licked and split. But it was too late, I’d gotten familiar. My neck hurt. I took an ice bath and slept, regrew the armaments of apathy and ignorance that make living in New York bearable. Still, a week later, I could come on a couple noodling and think I fleeced them or that they’d noodled before on some sidewalk of my unmistakable acquaintance. It’s basically worn off. My fellow urban thropopos and I have reentered the security and sanity of the anonymous. Even you, uh, Lavender, I believe myself to recognize though there’s surely no chance. So I’m asking: how can I ignore everybody’s beautiful, hideous, soft, red or purple face again on the subway and lower too?”

Over Trink’s heavy breath the ventilation system comes on, muffling the lowest frequencies. A floor under, a child sings morningbyes accompanying themselves with steampots and induction pans. Pina tinkles in Lavender’s mimicked bangles. 

“How much did you win?” They ask.

“About two month’s salary.”

“So not catastrophic. Nothing to feel too much guilt about.”

“Sure,” Trink answers, sitting back in the chair, spent… 

Pina, after some virtuosic divagating, advises the comfort of astrology. Which practically, these days, means a trip to the country. Would do anyone good.

Trink frowns. Kicks himself for not anticipating the diversion: the new age industrial complex of interconnected outs. No system of divination is left holding the bag entirely. A fresh shame overwhelms the old.

Pina weasels the rest of the conversation, perfectly capable of mocking a psychic, wagging the chameleon of their speech. There’s nothing here for the Deuce, no further threat to the opacity of probability and no evidence of guilt, save for the irrelevant wracking of Trink’s conscience. A cucumber mite from Lavender’s struggling spiderwort silently bothers about Pina’s breath. Trink taps some credits into the machine, decked out in the housing of an orb to ennoble the severance of money with a mystic costume. Leaves with meek thanks. Once the entry beads stop their rattle, solitude rushes in, as if under pressure, to fill the void, to fill the room, to press against Pina’s costume. Alone in Lavender’s, in borrowed clothes, in borrowed skin, Pina lets drip the liquidity of their face, like loosening a notch of identity’s belt.

The past eight years Pina’s been working as a face for fraud has usually ended them up in some dandy den or sidealley with a grimester or bumm hearing the simplest miseries of poverty and greed to put down in the next day’s warrant. The psychic sting was the hardest of all to keep your head on, because it was adjacent temperament types on the job market that would pick psychic or dragger, people who dug getting under skins either way with the only difference being whether you wanted to wear them. Pina feels pronged with forking paths of the past, prodded with their singular line pressing onwards.

Half past nine. They jump up, shed face, tidy the place, recenter the chaise, and sprinkle an evening’s worth of dust from a pocketed spritz back on the surfaces disturbed. They leave Trink’s tip in the orb, a wink. Down the stairs, wearing nobody’s face, Pina passes Lavender, flustered from whatever Morg’s diversion was, clomping up. Pina looks. The hair and chiffon they intuited precisely and imitated; even the laxity in the operation of levator palpebrae superioris that makes the psychic’s blink seem burdened with the heft of extra sight, they’d mimed quite well. Despite their put-on sight, the psychic doesn’t notice Pina, though suspiciously descending from their floor—because Pina’s nude. That stings them for the first time in decades, on account of Trink’s testimony, wriggled through the professional carapace. They slip on an old drag before exiting onto the Avenue, an office drone in their middle forties in an undershirt, with a lively pair of socks to make them indistinguishable whereas, in these fashionable days, complete banality would stand out.    

Long have Americans leaped their circumstances with the sky, which even hung over the most barren grocery store parking lots in the anthropocene. The decades of rolling outages during the fossil troubles made television’s escapism unreliable and we began to depend on the sky again. Now: this damn smog, those artificial clouds. 

Pina looks at the sky. Spits on the sidewalk. Looks at the sky. The human hemorrhage overtakes them anew on 42nd, let out from the subways, subsubways, subsubsubways, omniways and innieways, anyways and transports that circulate humanity in this hub. Suit sleeves and taffeta, polyurethane tops and fringe, tickle and brush Pina’s peach fuzz. Morg nearly misses them.

“Oh goodness. Pina?” He says. “Did I hold her off long enough?”

Pina tells Morg to clear Trink’s name.

“You alright, Pina?”

“Oh yeah Morg. It’s only the, uh, how do you say? Emotional labor of sitting through a psych session.”

Eight years ago Pina, then a Regular Service goon, had tripped on the Willis Avenue bridge too and stood up into the same sight as Trink, their anonymity permanently punctured. What would become of the poor kid? And what are the odds of it being the same bridge? But Pina knew too much to be asking odds. Coincidences are the most basic unit of meaning. It’s not the complexity of understanding them that overwhelms but their bare simplicity. It was to dress up the oblivion of the sky that human beings, from the beginning, made their most touching invention: the constellations. And to this day someone could still find Christ’s face in her toast in Louisville.

My brother and I have a secret: we saw a bullfight in Seville on the Catholic feast day of the Corpus—we were ten minutes late and missed the explanation of the rules, I’m sure, and the rhetoric, so we took for granted that we had already been convinced of propriety of the ritual. One bull we watched win by refusing to fight. They led him out by introducing four belled and winking cows to the ring, which he followed away to live with forever in elysium, on sweet grass. I guess it’s the original way to worship, a little uncreative but certainly effective, to kill and eat. 

My brother, a day later, got anus worms from having a five euro foot-long at a Subway by the Basilica. That morning I finally had to admit I was unable to walk, my feet were so mangled by the process of breaking in Birkenstocks, purchased especially for this trip. The bottoms of my feet are perfectly flat and uncommonly thin and the cork sole of the sandal was stained red after a week of openly bleeding on the cobblestone, in scorched plazas, on buses, in newstands, and on the stairwells of antique towers. Because the European foot is the product of sensible portion sizes, occasional famine, and a politesse that prizes the svelte, there are no size thirteen shoes below Austria. Ravenous, I hobbled out that evening with my feet wrapped in toilet paper to find something plain to eat which my brother could stomach. By the arena the restaurants were grilling outside the bull from that night’s fight, mostly symbolically for the mothers of the matadors to take home wrapped in thick brown paper. We ate this horrible, tough, stringy meat to settle what had so clearly upset our stomachs, and beyond.

As children, my brother and I were “bad eaters”—me for an extreme omnivorousness (off the floor, from stranger’s passed tables at restaurants) and a taste for the supreme assortment of junk that peaked during my culinary coming-of-age. Never before has sugar taken so many sublime forms in its crystalline perfection. My brother was a bad eater for the opposite reason: he was “picky.” 

Due to spontaneous lectures by my health-pervert grandfather, my brother became a vegetarian between the ages of eleven and fourteen to the alarm of my parents and grandmother on the other side. Grandpa Syd was so addicted to health that he even gave up cigarettes when his doctor told him he would die otherwise. My grandmother had properly inherited and transmitted the Depression-era worship of protein that required six hot dogs as the food pyramid’s foundation. It was Jewish slaves who built that too, in America this time, getting whipped by the giddy culture of glut after the grueling diets of extreme weight loss in Europe’s camps and killing fields. She innovated for my brother’s nourishment a recipe of “meatless meatloaf” that he gorged on in those supposed-to-be salad years and was only revealed deep into his adulthood to have been named with the truth-value of a pun: the primary ingredient being ground turkey.

Some old men date young women. My father, 71, aspires to the cholesterol of a 25-year-old. My mother is capable of ordering a pork chop for the smell alone. Listening to them at a restaurant is to hear the received wisdom of a thousand dietary superstitions, pressured out of doctors and synthesized cautiously from decades of contradictory op-eds and health headlines. Their orders are so intricate with alternation (down to the molecular preparation of a cut of meat) that they have surely pioneered more dishes than many star chefs. Flaubert writes, in the Dictionary of Received of Ideas, “If we knew how our body is made, we wouldn’t dare move.” Isn’t this how the generations go? Our parents now picky eaters and my brother and I the good ones?

The horrible truth is this: all living things are good to eat. Typical of the ongoing slaughters of our world, this one goes by inertia. Evolutionarily, even Napoleonically, the cow is one of the most successful species on the globe: on six continents propagated far beyond the wildest dreams of bovine destiny that first mooed and lowed on a subcontinental plain. To eat meat, you chew. 

Gary Snyder writes with ecological magnanimity: “That was the wash of the waves on the island out in San Francisco Bay with the seabirds, and the feeding and schooling of the little fish—that’s going on. The real work is eating each other, I suppose.”

I once visited my parents visiting friends of theirs in Florida during a period when I was avoiding red meat. After my mother virtuosically altered the menu’s chicken and waffles to resemble precisely shrimp souvlaki over the rookie waiter’s squashed protestations, I turned down the corned beef sandwich the restaurant was known for in favor of a wedge salad. My mother was disappointed. My stomach is supposed to bear vicariously the burden that their arteries can no longer handle: in this small way every parent achieves immortality. And yet her reproach cut right to my central doubt. She said: “Who do you think you are not to become cow this afternoon?”

I remember me and Jackie, Urjeet and Kim climbing around Potamogeton Pond, pretending instead of a gleaming oasis amidst the parkway there where, in better times, a doe may have dipped its dewy nose, it was a bubbling lake of sulfur dented in a rock around an alien star. Hold your breath, Jackie! And if the city hadn’t dropped in the leech cakes in a while he’d come up with them sucking, pock pock as we tore them off, just like the little aliens of our dreams. And our dreams were exceptionally overnourished. Television had attained incredible polish and efficiency. In twenty-four minutes, not including the ads, a child of my generation could be put through the ringer of romance, war, heartbreak and fantasy. If you included the ads the stimulation was even more dense, automobiles and cigarettes, psychic shit that makes you vote for the right guy too. We lived through the alchemy of petroleum becoming toy, the complete refinement of the formula for silly putty. I don’t think me and the boys even watched that much television but we took it out with us to the yard, to the pond and the sidewalk. But we weren’t dumb kids. It was the eighties, we were smart and anxious and sad. We knew it wasn’t real. The first thing Mother tells you before you even crack an eyelid staring at the little CRT buzzing and glowing in the maternity ward is, “Don’t worry, little one, nothing you see on TV is real.” It was just something you did to be cute, “I want to be an astronaut.” Something to satisfy your parents’ nostalgia like taking up the cello. Why shouldn’t you make these people happy? They put food on the family and kiss you goodnight.

My father considered himself an intellectual and disapproved of me badly, my interests, and what I watched on television. Him and my mother fought constantly over the presence of the box in the house. He would make hopped up declarations like, “There’s almost no taboos left in American culture.” He would say, “Baldwin did race, Miller did sex, Williams did being a fag. But who will broach the topic of the unbelievable and deep idiocy of almost all our normal people?”

When they send you to heaven, a whole team of psychologists come breathing down your neck to make sure you’re not gonna snap in the capsule, binge eat all the dry-froze burritos or bite the oxygen line. Serious shrinks coming from the CIA, spooks armed with psychological armaments beyond belief. I’m talking the offspring of MK-ULTRA, mind control, brainwash freaks way over-qualified to hear about my father’s expectations or my shy prick. I’m told they’re looking for your tolerance of loneliness, they’re seeing how cool your head remains under hypothermia when you’re reduced to biology. On the way to Mars, I asked my comrades about this and they all said, sure, we went through the same thing, weeping on government linoleum. Just like me they thought they blew it. Then the rubber stamp comes. Just the other Americans, the Brit, the German and the Spanish girl, though. That’s the funny part, when I ask the Russian or the Chinese flyboy, they give me this look like, “Your government thinks you’re batshit and they put you up here anyway?” Comrade Shin said they took his blood pressure. 

Maybe I’m getting ahead of myself. I joined the Air Force thinking I’d be going door to door selling thin mints. No sir. It’s more too than squeezing you into a pressurized tube letting you whiz over exotic landscapes leaving dents behind (incidentally ever since the horsepower on the flying crotch rockets got high enough to literally liquify a horse, by the time anything you drop hits the dirt, you’re sitting at the canteen cracking a Snapple. Boom!) No, they had me educated in every nut and rotary. I get agita when my aunt takes out the good china. They strap you into 300 million dollars worth of American death and taxes with just your expired driver’s license rattling in your breast pocket. Every time I saw some poor schmuck hauling ass to suffer in an office chair or shooting down some bike lane with a messenger bag I’m thinking that my fighter bomber hybrid was wholly skimmed off their sweat and boredom. Thank god the shrinks didn’t come around then. You get used to it though, you turn a flock of Canada geese into mince meat coming in supersonic on a landing and you don’t bat an eye when they waltz in with the mops and wrenches on the tarmac.

I’m happily playing war games in the clear skies above Alaska when suddenly I get a call from the top brass. Now you read about it in the paper, this whole Mars hysteria but it doesn’t touch the heart like some of the other news, not mine. It’s a little bit like reading about the stock market or when they make up a new particle in Switzerland. Millionaires grandstanding and the footprints of an ancient puddle. Maybe I’m missing something. It’s like when we had to show up the Ruskies in ‘69. They waxed poetic about how for tens of thousands of years human beings have looked up at the moon and dreamt of sticking their boots in its face. Again, maybe this is just how I was raised. Well the big bosses get me on the phone and they tell me we’re going up again, this time to Mars and that, between you and me, they don’t want it to just be the NASA egg heads up there because they can’t be certain of their politics and there’s a microscopic percentage amplified by natural military paranoia that push might come to shove. 

Why me? Well I was told once an algorithm spit out my name, maybe it gave me the short straw. I ticked every box, an all American kid grown strong on kosher hot dogs. They dug up my boy scout pledge. Or it was Jasper’s put my name in the running for a lark. Maybe it was my fluke perfect PSAT score. But I have a suspicion it was not so casual and it wasn’t spiteful per say, it was a quality of my character that a head honcho was optimizing for: I don’t get so bored. I spent my days circling the great white Arctic, wearing Ray-Bans and going snow-blind. The folks at the base took up all kinds of card games and drugs, they would go into town to break girls’ hearts. Someone must’ve let it slip that I was known as the Monk around the lounge. They’d roast me for walking in on me staring at a wall. Some people took it to mean I was kind of dull. You have to remember, these are the same people who had their thumb on the nuke’s clit for forty years, life on earth contingent on an unspent spasm. They mellowed a little bit in the meantime but it was still hard to find someone with a resting heart rate of 40 in the force or who could sleep through the whole night without terrors. The same kind of thought like sending a dog up first, a total sweetie-pie, to freeze in the asteroid belt. They picked me. 

Well imagine my surprise when I’m sitting in a pressurized can of beans looking at Florida in the rear-view just three years later on a one-way trip to colonize Mars. They had me as prepared and pampered as a racehorse, rubbed down, buff and psychologized. I knew everything there was to know about Mars. Astrologically Mars is the sex planet, I guess the Babylonians or whoever had never been. There was all that talk in the paper about how la astronauta Isla was a woman, as if we were gonna actually be populating the planet with nerdish babies. You literally cannot get it up in zero gravity. Again, I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me tell you about my lifelong roommates. There were eight of us total. Isla who did robotics, biochemistry, and was actually a champion boxer. Shin the Chinese microbiologist, him and Vassily the Russian adolescent chess champion honestly were the brightest on board. I mean they were just trying to get to Mars. Everybody else was fixing to prove a point or have a spiritual experience in the void. Renard was from the Cote d’Azur and I thought he was the dumbest of all, you could see in his eye that he genuinely expected that the water we’d find on Mars would be filled with Monaco jellyfish and princesses. Friedrich came from Johannasburg with a rags to riches story that would break any heart, his single mother had pointed to the heavens and said, “Freddy, you gotta get outta this town.” It was credit card debt. Mason, too, from Cornwall always went on about how his daddy was a coal miner, yadda yadda, and how he wanted to die in space. Well they all had about six or seven more degrees than me, what do I know? Julio Cesar had four PhD’s from the university of Havana and he would go on these beautiful idealistic rants about raising the prestige of the third world. Buddy, we’re leaving the world. 

But that day on Cape Canaveral, I had a butterfly in my rib-cage. Mom was there to weep and weep and Pops just smiled and waved. Till the very last minute I’m sure Dad thought I would chicken or suddenly take after him and crash the cameras with some spiel about the brotherhood of man and denuclearization. Even after the big boom, watching his boy turn to a speck, I don’t think he believed it. He would go on these kook shows after midnight, tabloid fodder and talk about how the Mars landing was faked, how the whole thing was staged by Lloyds of London to collect an insurance premium or something and how sure he was I was sitting in a capsule in the Pacific waiting for an illegal whaler to scoop me up. 

I believed in the inarticulate future of humanity. Television is chronic: you watch it, it radiates in the background while you’re stuffing breakfast down your face, rushing through an airport, and you don’t feel a thing. But you have 395 full color HD channels of dreams and they are straight from the writer’s room of what passes for an intellectual in California. These people aren’t special, they’re strapped into the backseat of the same culture as you and me. They have an inescapable preference for Coke over Pepsi. They think space is interesting because encoded in a cluster of baby fat cells is the image of Captain Kirk scoring with a green chick.

The profound boredom of space cannot be overstated. I mean you can get a little stimulation only at the very tip of your cranium thinking about all the wonderful discoveries you’re making but when it comes to the body proper, the boredom is unlimited. All the little earthly entertainments like taking a breath of fresh air or getting a bit of green in your vision. That’s gone. I mean you can’t imagine how boring it is without that baseline. You go a whole year without hearing a bird and you don’t even know what’s got you down, your hair starts to fall off, you’re liable to taste-test the barrel of a shotgun.

So we landed on Mars. A weary and dust-ravaged rover greeted us: it told us where to land on a concave pimple on the planet’s face. The first year was the worst, tears of exhaustion floating in the cabin. We erected a kind of detached single family home straight out of upper Westchester with sixty thousand years of human ingenuity going into each inch of polymer paneling and high-gravity caulk, right there like a model home in hell. Two thousand square feet. And then we could get down to our real work. Probably the blockbuster moment in all this is that we discovered microscopic life, dead. Shin and Vassily extended a translucent tunnel from our smoking porch and with immaculate tweezers all encased in human condoms they excavated a single fossilized pre-protozoa from a trial run of life aborted in what they hypothesized was a short-lived lake that once smoked and burbled in the crater we had decided to make our own home. All this was very exciting back on earth, they threw a ticker tape parade for dust sample C91-Z : We Are Not Alone. 

Things started to sour on Mars. I think the realization was creeping so I can’t quite pin down when it floated to the surface but I remember a definitive moment of propelling myself towards Vassily in the back lab and watching him try to squeeze some vodka out of a red house sweet potato. 

“I’m depressed,” he said.

“But you're the champion of the world, Vassily, they’re building a statue of you in your hometown.”

“Uglich? My hometown? Don’t talk to me about my Uglich. White hills. St. Dmitry.” He wiggled the front of his expressive visor. “You understand, we’re living in a place now where a cell that didn’t even figure out how to propel itself with its own shit went extinct half a billion years ago.”

“I don’t know if I do understand, buddy.”

We stood there in vacuum silence.

“Hey, buddy, as you say. Who told you about the statue? Nobody told me?"

Maybe it was the vodka fumes inadequately filtered through my faceguard but I felt like I could share something with Vassily that I had hardly come to terms with myself.

You see, I was the radio man. Honestly, I had the most heady job, pointing beams at the surface of Mars and its chilly moons, Phobos and Deimos, waiting for a blip to come up, a wow in the signal. Some disks I had looking out into the void when we were rotated to the dark side, sending pre-fab messages of on-and-off, “You are not alone in the universe” or some notes of old man Bach’s Chaconne to impress the little green men. So we whizzed around and around, me staring at the dots, familiar disturbances, a supernova, a category twenty hurricane spinning off the red spot. I was waiting for the six hundred and eighty seven days to pass again, when I could get the clearest shot at earth with what I call my home beam, and then I’d dump our data on the homeboys, all the space heads agog at every perturbation in a blip.

Good stuff, they’d say. Or they’d give me a little side gig if someone at the Santa Monica observatory or whatever had a hunch, ask me to rotate such and such beam a little starboard to sniff a celestial flatulence in a lowrent suburb of the Andromeda galaxy. If we were lucky, the tip of my home beam would be tickled to render out a message from a family member (none of mine, who believed it was a con), a very expensive photo of Isla’s newborn nephew, for example, blasted with continuous rays to warm our hearts on the burning planet. But I guess I got greedy. I asked for a scan of the front page of the New York Post. Daydreaming on the toilet, massaged by the colon enticer (the conditions here are incredibly constipating), I had suddenly remembered that I left the world while a scandal was breaking over the Governor of New York’s errant and confused practice of unwanted massage. Nostalgia made me curious over how it shook out, or maybe it was lack of dedication to the cause. Mission control balked, sending a bewildered and slightly hurt request denied, an excuse about interference during a middling solar flare up. It was clear they were insulted, already jealous that I was the pioneer putting on 1000 spf sunscreen every morning just to slow the blooming tumors, trapped in a bubble. Why would I care about petty earthly gossip when I was taking the giant leap for mankind?

We had a beam pointed at Phobos that I was directed to literally hold there flagellating its waves just to see if it exploded as far as I could tell. That was the first one: I entered it in a swivel towards earth and started fudging the numbers for Phobos. The weather in Queens lit up my screens, cloud cover and all, and I extrapolated the chance of rain for my own edification. To explain how much this made my heart ache would be too much. 

So I spilled the beans to Vassily then, half-expecting a professional pallor to come over his skin-port chiding me for deviating from the plan. Quite the opposite. There was softening in the transmission of his voice to my conductors.

“What’s the weather like in Uglich?”

We were bound to get greedy. The apparati I had available were cutting edge and numerous. Aimed at Mars and its atmosphere I had hundreds of arrays capable of reading the mood of even the most reticent boulder. And upwards and beyond with hopeful range extending to the lip of the big bang, I had six large receivers: radio, microwave, short wave, long wave, violet, ultraviolet, infrared, suprared, etc. cupping their ears for intelligent murmurs or patterns, desperate for company. Every hour a summarized readout would appear on the interface: nothing. Dark. Silence. The random oscillations of the universe playing with itself. Rock and radiation. Maybe there was life too, but it wasn’t mine. 

This was interesting, sure, don’t get me wrong. Renard and Mason were drooling over the numbers. But when the planets were aligned in a particular way that with the minorest slippage of a ray I could be eyeing earth’s Asia, I fumbled on the knob and suddenly my screens were aglow with the dense chattering of life. Weeping, I listened uncomprehendingly to a Mongolian soap opera for four hours. My god, I thought, there is life on earth.

One beam by one, I directed the entire apparatus back to earth. Vassily would knock on the porthole the shave and a haircut jingle and we’d soak up together, in our own private cushion of filtered air: all the celebrity affairs, all the beach bods and geopolitics that irradiated from our sweet blue and green planet. The refresh on my tools was set to cosmic time. At first it was hard to get more than a frame of visual every fifteen seconds so we had to be satisfied with digitized printed material, tabloids and papers or subtitled reruns. I had to perform genuine feats of engineering to get the antenna attuned to human rhythms. I mean live TV. Within a Mars year only a single device was directed at our space house itself, eyes peeled to give us a heads up for a flare so we could draw the blinds and shut the front door. Everything else was downloading and streaming the cacophony of earth’s output 150.96 million miles away to feed into my pod.

As I said I was fudging the number. Folks were bound to get wise. Julio was trying to grow space lettuce at a reasonable rate before we ran out of cans of Vienna Sausage. He’d hassle me about how the sun stick had to be rejiggered because my forecast was off and his lettuce grew with too many waves. Of course I had been generating that number in Microsoft Excel semi-randomly for months. Now I could’ve just taken the old machine off earth for a hot second and recalibrated it back to the sun to give him what he wanted. But I was using it to catch up on this BBC period piece about Marie Antoinette and they were frankly expert at the cliff hanger so I couldn’t risk missing a week, not then. Well, Julio came banging at the porthole when Vassily and I were glued to the display with blood-shot eyes watching the President of the United States give a hit-down speech against China.

“What do you want, Julio?”

“Let me in. I know what you’re doing. You recycled last months’ numbers, you lazy shit. I want to know what’s going on.”

Well the jig was up, there was nothing left to do but let Julio in and hand him the clicker as he blew a casket over the voice channel, calling us everything from dogs to wreckers. It was some jingle for tamarind candy on the satellite display that pierced his heart, flipping through.

“I don’t want to grow space lettuce,” he said. “I want to go to Miami. All I want to do is go to Miami.” He wept and wept, short circuiting his face lamp that stoic engineers had not graded for weeping.

We took out a back panel and made another seat for Julio, crammed shoulder pad to shoulder pad, the dashboard lit with nearly every channel available to man and other.

“We have to tell everybody what you’ve done,” he said.

It was going to be a hard sell. We’d been up for four years, our muscles turned to jelly conforming to the ridges of our suits. It was hard to gauge the psychology of our spacemates, submitting formal reports to each other from our private encasements, smelling nothing but our own farts. Shin was trailing a slow path through an elongating tube to what he considered to be the center of the fossilized lake we landed in, though each re-reading of his was a little off because I had the laser ruler working double duty to remind Julio of what the tides felt like in Santiago de Cuba. Freidrich had penetrated deep into the privacy of the universe by submitting a couple of innocent hydrogen molecules to extreme gravity and watching their tortured spasms under glass. His project was micro save for the verification of his hypothesis that a sister molecule somewhere in the universe screamed whenever one of his did, something that depended on my beams and which I executively overrode the answer to be a negative in return for a classic rock station from Orlando. Renard and Mason we probably screwed the most as they were jealously gazing at the blue flanks of Saturn from our new vantage hoping to find something resembling ice upskirt the gas giant. Vassily had a soft spot for the Olympics and during the winter games we had to wheel out every excuse under the sun why the readout was noise interspersed with what Renard could swear was curling. No way friend, that’s called interference, the mind can find a pattern in anything, even a gas giant. So after much delay and debate, we decided to tell Isla first, not because we hadn’t necessarily thrown a wrench in her works but because her role gave us the opportunity to speak candidly to her once a week. Isla was studying the effects of Mars on the human body. Essentially she was studying us.

You begin to trust someone irreparably when you’re writing them memo after memo regarding how you can’t get it up no more because the boys back home miscalculated the amount of zinc you had to put on your dick to stop the radiation. She had her own problems. She knew it would happen but told me one rare encounter in the viewing port that within twelve days she was permanently barren. This was life on Mars. But most of our encounters were more professional, every member of the crew submitted to a check up once a week. In an opaque cylinder pressured and treated in every way amenability to a human being, we’d exit our suits and stand like a migrating crustacean while the chilly rubber and aluminum apparatuses of health fondled and prodded our nudity under Isla’s gentle auspices. She’d ask us how we felt. There was almost nothing to say. Once I said, “I feel very bad to be living on Mars sometimes. Actually I think a better word is sad.” From the other side of the chamber I heard her breathe deeply through the respirator. “Me too.” And that was that. She gave me the usual rundown of the atrophies and abnormalities of my body after another week in an alien atmosphere and I crawled back into my suit, hearing its perpetual hiss for a while after its brief and rare absence. So I knew I would at least have a sympathetic ear. Then again, you could never tell. I think we all had invested a great deal spiritually in our mission by the time the big blaster split off and crashed into the Atlantic.

Julio and Vassily agreed it should be me to tell her, that we were basically running a paper mache operation by this point, that we had betrayed all the hopes of humanity. At my next check up Isla said, “You’re nervous.” Before I even began to spill the beans, she told me that she had a readout from all our suits. She told me she knew something was up when she could tell I was having a good time. Then Julio and Vassily. 

“I thought you were having an orgy. I had planned for this eventuality, off the books. I figured two people could fit in the mist shower and make love. But we can’t, you know, because we’re barren, spent people. Sometimes I get in the chamber and just float around without my suit. I dial the gravity up and down. I try to think about things that make me happy. Bird song. I recite Lorca. Nothing works. What are you three doing?”

Isla was speaking through the wall. 

“We’re watching TV,” I said.

A dense and loaded static. Finally, her laugh came through with the blown-out artifacts of transmission. Or it was distorted with emotion, I couldn’t tell by that point. We went back to my workstation to find Vassily and Julio devouring a cop series. 

“You’re not going to believe this, Isla,” Julio said, not missing a beat. “This guy got away with murder by putting a cup of yogurt in the victim’s rectum to speed up the decomposition process.” 

We laughed and laughed, cried tears of joy. Hours, days passed. The liquid tube food that they said was bad for morale sustained us in front of my screens: the screens sustained us. Shin came looking for Vassily and we told him the truth. Wordlessly, he tuned in. We converted the biology lab into an entertainment center. Renard wanted to watch the French talking heads debate the social issues. Mason wanted to hear Under Milk Wood on the radio. Only Freidrich really put up a fight. He said we needed to tell earth that we had given up, he called us saboteurs, traitors of the whole race. We locked him in the shower, had the radio sing African lullabies into his headset. 

I totally automated my home beam, it sent all the data earth would ever want. The dull twinkles, the awe-inspiring supernovas, the burps of heaven. The most accurate data they got was from our eight bodies, because those sensors didn’t have the range to be pointed back at earth to get us a new channel. They could see, if they cared, what Isla saw, the atrophies and abnormalities—and the little blips we had of sympathy for a secondhand life.

At first I watched the news. I saw my father going mad. But I wanted the shows. Will Vinny Bomboucci get offed by his blood brother? Who’s Clara gonna marry? 

They even made a glitzy limited run about us, to inspire the youth and make patriotic the old. In it, Isla and I make love in the Hollywoodified space kitchen, white and black like a cuisinart. Word came in that another group of pioneers may join us in a couple of years, if they can drum up the international kumbaya. The trip takes seven months. Surely they’ll want to catch up on their shows when they arrive… 

Sometimes, when the rest of the gang’s enjoying a new superhero blockbuster, Superman Returns Again, I retire to my chamber and listen in on a random phone call from Hollis Hills, Queens, forty billion dollars of radio technology to hear it as if from lips on Mars. 

“The squirrels got into the attic again,” a voice says. “Uh huh. And I rubbed aloe on my back this morning. Hey, do you want to go Rockaway this weekend with the kids? I think it’s going to be real nice out. Hold on, here he is now. Come in!”

“Beauty Mark!” Annie shouted her term of endearment twenty five paces behind her face lifted discharge, the apple of her over-eye made fleshier and from whom she was attempting to squeeze out self-love.

Philip was brown allover with the texture of gooseflesh interrupted with indeterminate pink oraface, grinning with lolling loose tongue now in its rolling gallop. “The blue sky is purple!”

Animoids, Zoogirls, Bingbots and Bongs pedestrianized variously in the August haze with metropolitan mingles of carbon and silicon sweat dripping down the guttercatches. Urban excreta abounded as they crossed the border from Crawhole to Ganymede’s Cavern (Old Good Times Square), a neighborhood packed with pop and shiners. It was Philip’s first time, giddy with stimulation. It paused in the outpour from a finished screening under the shadow of a glossy overhead, a red-light revival theater running Tickle! Blearyeyed Condoms and Jacks wobbled out, blinking towards the ozone. The human morass. For a moment, oraface pursed, Philip let the pushing, passing, errant limbs, wobbles, slines and toves brush its pacadermis, purring at a frequency lost in the general metropolitan vibration.

“Gotcha!” Annie hugged, panting, her brown Polyp caught and only when her heart was to its flank did the purr, heard, moderate her smile to a straight crescent, a sliver of concern, her lips white.

“The first time under a porno house,” she said with a streak of scandal, “and you’re titillating with the Glocks.”

The doorman behind the glass glared out at her slur, a hurt tinged with nostalgia, flipping the neon to Closed. It was eight in the morning. The projectionist needed sleep.

It was three weeks since Annie had Philip seared from a pinky-nail sized growth on her face and Dr. Goldberg who assured her everything was on the up and up had taken out the mandatory micrometer while the steaming mole lay in the drip pan and frowned at the output: a micron and half over the flesh threshold for guaranteed personhood.

“I don’t understand, it’s exactly what you told me wouldn’t happen,” Annie said.

“It’s the law, I’m afraid,” said Dr. Goldberg, still peering in the pan with genuine curiosity. “You needn’t really worry, provisions exist. There a gaggle of mistaken moles in Sloatsburg, you need only sign away—” he fingered a tile. “Mathilde, we’ve a mismeasured mole, if you’d bring in the paper for Patient Annie—”

She put her hand on his wrist and he started at the touch, a jump that rolled the mole in the pan with pops and sizzles from the site of its severance. “Can I see it?”

The doctor narrowed his eyes and held forth the brushed chrome pan which magnified in elongation every angle of the brown nub.

Pinching gently she lifted it to eye level and rotated it by rubbing to its original orientation. A charmed look on her face, she pressed the mole against the site of its removal just moments before, a circular shadow the flattened imprint of its sprout. It had been with her as long as she remembered and its backside, still warm from the zapper, brought an instantaneous blush to her cheek.

“Now darling,” Dr. Goldberg cooed, a redoubling of paternal authority after the little jolt of contact, “it’s not just a gallbladder one can safely jar. Plenty of people feel the way you do with cosmetics. It’s a human mole. Won’t survive in vinegar. Needs fresh air and care and—” 

“I’ve always been disparaged, doctor. Worst of all by myself. Bilbo my manager too, says it bars me by the CG budget alone from playing period pieces on the cast, like having too perfect teeth. Why? Historically the radiation wouldn’t grow a mole so large, at least in the popular imagination. My boyfriend Andy who tongued it like a third nipple love it, then later felt ashamed of me on the naked street because I had a nipple on my face exposed for all the eyes, snappers and portholes to ogle. I’d snag it combing and just in the mirror I’d see it and. Nothing but grief. But.” She tilted her head, all the while speaking her eyes were crossed to focus on the polyp pinched so close to her face. “The idea of it grazing dumbly some face turf upstate in a sterile body farm? You understand it’s a part of me.” 

The nurse Mathilde appeared in the porthole smiling with a readpad and stylus. Her face dropped reading Annie’s and from behind the Doctor’s shoulder blades in frown.

Waves of shame flushed Annie as she remembered Mathilde by her posture more than her features (softly erect as if draped over her spine more than stuck through with it) at her last operation smiling, standing four years ago while careless Sven held her hand, a squeeze, and Mathilde made the uterine prick (it was the government concession to a woman’s right that led to the mandate of conserving precious flesh by parliamentary compromise—due to the radioactive shrinkage of gonads from the vaporated stratosphere, the thinner fertile flock was insufficient for the vast society. Everything over the legal limit: offed limbs, overgrown toenails, all organic throwaways were given individual life and put to work however useless with the blindness of intergalactic bureaucracy). That was that and there was no doubt in Annie but an ocean of feeling—as she left then, she turned and gave Mathilde a long hug, the cool itch of rayon against her cheek: she’d aimed her head in that hug towards the breasts for deep reasons. Now the same nurse was watching her mourn a mole.

“I’m sorry you prepared the paperwork,” she said, a professional tone creeping in defensively. “I want other options.”

“Doctor,” Mathilde turned to him. “We can deal with the post-op just us girls. I know Paz is waiting in bay five with a prolapsed sense of courage, just wailing.”

A smile of magnanimity, he made a twenty degree bow, eyeing his notes to cover the abruptness of his turn. “Have a wonderful afternoon.”

Mathilde saddled beside Annie on the lined medbed.

“My first cosmet was this yellow rose grafted into the vein around my collarbone that blooms, perfumes and drops pedals depending on my mood.” She pulled aside her scrubs’ strap to show a quartersized rosehead snug sideways in the fleshy gap between shoulder and chestplate. “So many times, I can’t tell you, I held the clippers there when it was a black and barren sprig and I couldn’t say why. But I realized, and it took a whole lot of lying to my psychonaut before I finally did, that this rose blooming and wilting here was just another part of myself to get to know. Yes, I got it on some bender mixing stims and downers but it was something I’d once wanted. When I told Jebbut the Tat to make it move depending on my mood, I never thought I’d never known my mood.” Mathilde interdigitated with Annie’s idle hand. “Pay Jebbut a call, he’s an artist. Bring the mole.”

That very evening through the Saint Marks Fleshpot past streetsmells, throngs and tugs Annie went, her fingers still pinching the severed mole in her pant pocket, and found the portico garden level with a Trans-Pacific hotdog and papaya stall grubbily inscribed on an overtouched plaque “Jebbut the Tat.” Buzz.

There is a tact to being the right size. Human beings are just ideally proportioned to the properties of carbon, fuel and flint, to trees too, to have the minimum sustainable fire just large enough to warm a body on a chilly night. It only takes a couple of steps from there to colonize the metasphere. That’s what Jebbut explained in what must have been his living room, strewn with beancans and socks and all variety of body mods and plug-ins, human addendums, readouts and pricks, pins and cues and the piercing, cutting, jolting tools, surgical instruments to play god on still life and, winning, loupes, monocles and scopes to finely discern beauty’s marks. He made Philip Polyp the right size, a greyhound and a half, and sent Annie out that same night to love her Philip.

“I’m Philip Polyp,” it said awakening on the cobbled street by the line of sonambs and droppers waiting for their krauted dogs and sweet juice, a light lunar storm drizzling stardust.

So here they were on 42nd going to Bilbo’s office all the way West on the Hudson Sludge Luge so she could show him her new face and he could update her physonimical docket that bodycasters would pour over fitting her into dramatic sceneries and radvertisements. Philip couldn’t be left home alone or it’d make pellets and soak through weewee pads, gnaw on her leather loveseat and cry. Besides she had grown accustomed to its company, mewing and lowing the mews and lows her body stifled, its nervous system an overanimated elaboration of her forehead where all the dust of life’s journey stuck in her eye had struck as well. When the aggressive riverside geeze, needling for cutlets, honked at their lunch as they watched the solar ooze darken Nuevo Nuevo Jersey—and Philip shrieked and burred in horror at their beaks and menace—Annie saw it was her everyday fear that in her primebody she’d repressed. In fact ever since the mole was removed Annie felt less fear herself, felt less shivers when the subway doors opened and the AC struck her skin; and when her thigh by an accident of nocturnal spasm would have previously bourne a streak of pleasure, it was Philip who cooed, snoring at her feet. It was as if she had made a ghetto of feeling on her forehead.

“Annie and—” Bilbo’s eyes wobbled over his mustaches as he saw the brown blob. “Well come in you,” he paused, “two.”

She sat and Philip in her lap on a swan chair in Bilbo’s office, the 39th floor with windows facing west, decorated in Miami Vice revival, flamingos and polyurethane palms, and adorned with the trophies, medals and pedigrees of a glitzy career as facemonger.

“It’s my little golem, Philip Polyp. I got the cosmet: a new face. I need new photos.” Annie smiled and Philip smiled.

“I see,” Bilbo said with concern, swinging his feet off the granite desk to stand, coming around with fists on hip and smearing his professional eyes over their features. “Your face looks good, Annie. But your—”

“Philip,” it said.

“Yes, Philip. Philip is hideous.” He frowned gently, placing his rear on the front of his desk. “You went to some crack Tat? You’ve grown attached?”

“That’s not how I see it, Bilbo. We were attached.”

“Uh huh.” He swung around and binged expertly some bongs until his desktop readout glittered with glyphs. “This afternoon, you’re booked for the faceplate of Sashay. Make sure your little friend stays out of the render. Ask her after for headshots, on me.” 

The holographer was Brrtz, an Italian-American Lazy Susan with a soprano-range vox box noted for her rotational acuity behind the camera. Annie sat modeling in the kiddie pool. Pose. Pose. Pose. Philip was rubbing on the linoleum, licking the caterer’s fingers to his nervous chuckles and unbridled enjoyment.

“What’s wrong Annie?” Brrtz asked.

“It’s my mole,” she said, “I just have a different gravity without it. I’m learning how to hold my head.”

An off-duty assistant coming in for a forgotten charger saw Philip Polyp romping and joying in the off section, snapped a couple of pics on her phone. Word got around. When Sashay came out it wasn’t Annie on the cover but Philip, with a feeling grin. 

Annie sat in her loft, switched her TV to 2D to cook while she watched and saw. The war was on the television as usual and the bug leaders chittered. The government announced that because of their faster reflexes, the new class of fighter pilots would all be pregnant women. Then she saw Philip Polyp come on, whizzing through some wheatfield in the Middle West, its hum at just the frequency of her severed joy. It had been a hard couple of months since Philip left, signing the contracts with its tongue. She didn’t feel a thing. She cut herself on a paring knife preparing bruschetta and only noticed because of the blood in the dishwater. Philip’s legal guardian, the credits in the mail meant she’d never have to work again. She went into the 42nd street theaters with glocks, cocks, squeegees and spews and couldn’t grow a single goosebump. As far as Frankburg, Cerius-1 and La Florida, people saw Philip Polyp and they softened. It reminded them that somewhere in Eden, there is a worm.

(for Annie B.)

We used to be so brave and slutty, cramming ourselves regularly into these giant people-mover elevators, maskless and perfumed, to look at canvases shoulder to shoulder with beautiful strangers. I never knew just how brave and slutty I was. We used to sit in movie theaters, in the dark with these strangers, trusting like Odessyeus that if anybody fucked up treating a stranger like a prince the heavens would spoil their grace. Now, it was a special occasion to be so brave and slutty. It was Victor’s birthday; Ed was visiting from overseas, and Annie and I needed to alleviate the claustrophobia of our intense physical affection with the pressures of propriety that comes with sharing public space.

The Whitney was packed. Our tickets were even timed to make us mull around for eight minutes in the lobby to unburden the galleries upstairs of the cumulative weight of some attention.

Hooper’s paintings are of great American Solitudes. He came from the suburbs and made the Village live up to its name. His dedications are to the low-rise, the snapshot and the nude. His nudes have a Van Eyke quality of Eve before shame was invented, I mean a naive American nudity that doesn’t even contrapposto, that makes you really wonder how he ever got a model to do that for him, make him disappear. It’s like Schrödinger’s nudes, somehow x-rayed through the box and never set by observation. You get a feeling Hopper was the kind of guy who could look in a mirror without contorting his face into the mask of sociability, that he was comfortable, tragic and restrained enough to see himself and others slack jawed. 

Mostly, his streets are empty. I mean they are walked in on dreaming or wondering too, exhausted or comfortable enough not to wear their infamous, celebrated garments of bustle or taxi cabs. Even I am young enough to remember nighttimes in Chinatown where Columbus Park chanted with crickets.

There is a kind of curatorial joke on the 8th floor where the Hoppers were hung: around a white divider on which was displayed a giant rectangular canvas of an empty main street of frumpy two storey brownstones, there’s a floor-to-ceiling wall of windows overlooking 14th Street and Gansevoort. Seating invites you to admire this landscape, typical of New New York: the tangled profusion of high rise; a billboard of a nearly-nude woman, just as in solitude but not at all alone, that reads “Supremacy” (a brand name?). Three American flags are visible. On an astroturfed rooftop yard, a group of five freezing guys hold a party around a folding table. Being in the new Whitney building is like being in a foreign embassy—I mean no matter what you’re experiencing with your senses, you can never really forget you’re standing on the soil of Real Estate. In some definite way, in the penumbras of vertigo, Real Estate is distinct from architecture. The other curatorial joke is that so many people, more than I had seen in one place in three years, had come to see paintings of the city empty.

On the river side of the museum, there’s a stairwell where you can find the one streaked and grimed window on the 6th floor. Just below, there’s a huge pit of stones and crap, spotted with the yellow hides of dirt movers and rock crushers. You get the idiot impulse to look for a plaque explaining it. In a couple of months it will be Manhattan’s first public beach.

Anyway, I hadn’t come for the Hoppers. I’d come to see if the Whitney finally got over themselves enough to bring a couple of their Larry Rivers paintings out of the basement and actually hang them on the wall. They hadn’t. I think I read somewhere that this new building has less wall space than the old one. This is what I’m talking about Real Estate. Still, I am learning about nudes and windows. When I first met Annie on 14th by the C train, I removed my glove just to kiss her cheek.

E. had convinced me with the lure of a heap of leaves the size of the Hudson Valley and the prospect of summiting Bear Mountain’s ass to drive us to Joan Didion’s estate sale. She’s like Moby Dick, you know, you don’t actually have to read her. All you have to do is believe that the distortions you inherit from gossip and allusions are the important part and the work itself is already a relic beside its own reputation. Writing that is upsetting because Moby Dick is my favorite book. So, yeah, I read about one single essay of Didion’s and I had the nerve to teach it too, the one about her leaving New York which didn’t really resonate with me, if that’s what I’m supposed to be getting off on, because I’m from here. Still, maybe I don’t read just to tickle the meloncholy of my attention. It’s like when folks complain about a novel and say they just don’t relate to the characters. Like, you live in SoHo honey, and you cracked open a novel to make friends? 

I’m trying to educate myself, with the help of my own friends. We got a nice spot on Union Street away from the meters and walked the couple of deliriously charming Hudson blocks to the auction house with forty-five minutes till closing time (I had really dragged out the Bear Mountain part to the annoyance of my car mates but it was my minivan). “Welcome back,” said the woman at the front desk. Fashion goes a long way. So we looked at the offerings: art, stained chairs, books and silver. I inquired after the dutch oven which the nice and patient man in a white cardigan (Aaron?) warned me was being sold “as is” as if anybody would want this particular deep red Le Creuset with burned-in stew lines for any other reason than “as” it “is”. My friend Hannah was there, a real reporter, and she did her research. She told me they didn’t wash the blankets but they did polish the silver. I know it wasn’t a museum exhibit but to me it was a museum exhibit about bodily death. This could be all my grandmother’s crap and I was really devastated seeing all my grandmother’s crap after she died and I think that’s the point. I want that to be the point. It reminded me of the very upsetting David Bowie Lives exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum a few years ago. It was a fun exhibit but. No he doesn’t. 

We walked to the river and the sunset was so Japanese it made me think of this book I had read once that had a sideways story in it about objecthood and place and maybe it also has something to say about capitalism. There was this temple in Japan they wanted to move to lay down these train tracks instead. And they hired an English firm to do it. These English people come in and start painstakingly hauling each beam and stone from the old temple to the new site. The Japanese come in and say what’s taking so long. We’re painstakingly hauling each beam and each stone. Forget that, they tell the contractor: put up the same temple, that’s what we’re asking you for. You can toss that old wood, it’s rotted anyway. And sure enough you can visit the temple today on a brand new high speed train and it says twelve hundred years old on it even though some of the paint still smells and it’s just as holy. We watched the sunset mop up its splatter and walked back to the car, drove home through the night arguing about Malcolm X and when I finally got through my front door and unloaded my pockets of acorns I was shocked to find I had Joan Didion’s dutch oven on my stovetop: just as round and just as red.

The seed of Christianity’s own demise were buried when the desert religion was transplanted into the Black Forest consecutive with the rich Fugger northwards pioneering stock market futures for his copper mine monopoly (around the same crux of century where Tiziano was painting): soon anybody could model for Mary, any cracker could be flesh, and no church more enthusiastically celebrates the leap from image to symbol than Trinity on our Wall Street. 

Though a virtuosic Catholic, Tiziano’s private religion was anatomy. This Risen Christ: a torso waiting for Modigliani to be born, a rapture in the convolutions of linen, a half-healed spear wound placed a little closer to the heart than typical, and a three-dimensional nipple possible only by Venetian softening of hard Florentine perspective. But I have never seen something so blue. Ultramarine, azurite and indigo: these pigments were more expensive by weight than gold so Tiziano often underpainted blue with bargain pink or lilac not for lack of patronage but from a comprehension of economy in its complete sense. 

Pierre Reverdy remained a Catholic even when it so upset him because of a certain shade of crimson and I still dare the juvenile indulgence of a favorite color, blue, because I am a Jew. I’m watching a top 300 Titian compilation on YouTube. Christ is always so busy and suddenly here he is, still. Like I suspect so many viewers do, I comfort myself with the category of “just Christ again” a bulwark against really looking that makes certain wings of long museums bearable. But Tiziano has made me look at Christ, even with my most cynical eye. I sympathize with the brevity of this blue period. Risen Christ, 1511 is something so perfect it is immediately obsolete. Its world, wholly mastered, is by the same mastery rigid and therefore impossibly brittle, brittle to even passing time. Like Olivier’s King Henry or Dante’s theology: profoundly famous but with zero influence. James Dean was already born, learning how to lean on Cadillacs, and Boccaccio was already next door mixing adultery, birds and flowers. So blue slept in the history of art, the way the sidewalk is sometimes wet in the morning but, for the life of you, you can’t remember last night’s rain.