From the Blood of the Cannibal Moon: He Borara Part 3 Chapter 1

          The move into the mythic past encompasses a transition from existence to essence. When the events in these stories told by great shamans took place, the characters and places described in them had no beginnings and no ends. You must understand, if you want to appreciate the underlying truth of the stories, that the boundaries separating the mythic realm from the time-bound world are sometimes porous, but never more so than they were in the time of Moonblood. So there’s no contradiction when a shaman says, in a time before men, two men drew their bows and fired arrows at the moon.

            These two brothers, Uhudima and Suhirima, were not men as we know them today, men like you and me. They were no badabö, which means “those who are now dead,” but also means “the original humans,” and they were part human, part animal, and part spirit. The moon, Peribo, likewise partook of multiple essences, and he nightly stole away with members of the no badabö village to press them between two pieces of cassava bread and devour them, until the two brothers decided Peribo must be stopped. As the moon retreated toward the horizon, Uhudima aimed his bow and loosed an arrow. He missed. Then he missed again. The Yąnomamö say Uhudima was sina—a lousy shot.

            But his brother Suhirima was an excellent marksman. Even after Uhudima missed shot after shot, allowing Peribo to escape nearly all the way the horizon, Suhirima was able to take steady aim with his own bow and shoot an arrow that planted itself deep in Peribo’s belly. The wound disgorged great gouts of blood that fell to the earth as Peribo’s screams echoed across the sky. Wherever the blood landed sprang up a Yąnomamö—a true human being like the ones in these villages today. Something of the moon’s essence, his fury and bloodthirst, transferred to these newly born beings, making them waiteri, fearless and fiercely protective of their honor.

            The first Yąnomamö no sooner sprang forth from the blood of the cannibal moon than they set about fighting and killing each other. They may have gone on to wipe themselves entirely out of existence, but in some parts of the hei kä misi, the layer of the cosmos we’re standing on now, the blood of the moon was diluted by water from streams and ponds and swamps. The Yąnomamö who arose from this washed blood were less warlike, fighting fiercely but not as frequently. The purest moon blood landed near the center of the hei kä misi, and even today you notice that the Yąnomamö in this area are far fiercer than those you encounter as you move toward the edges of the layer, a peripheral region where the ground is friable and crumbling.

            Even the more peaceful Yąnomamö far from where the purest moon blood landed would have died out eventually because there were no women among them. But one day, the headman from one of the original villages was out with his men gathering vines for making hammocks and for lashing together support beams for their shabono. He was pulling a vine from the tree it clung to when he noticed an odd-looking fruit. Picking it from the tree and turning it in his hand, he saw that the fruit, which is called wabu, had a pair of eyes that were looking back at him.

            The headman wondered aloud, “Is this what a woman looks like?” He satisfied his curiosity, examining the fruit closely for several long moments, but he knew there was still work to be done, so he tossed the wabu on the ground and went back to pulling vines from trees.

            What he didn’t see was that upon hitting the ground the wabu transformed into a woman, like the ones we see today, only this one’s vagina was especially large and hairy, traits that fire Yąnomamö men’s lust. When the men finished pulling down their vines and began dragging the bundles back along the jungle trail to their shabono, this original woman succumbed to her mischievous streak. She followed behind the men, jumping behind trees whenever they turned back, which they did each time she ran up to the ends of the vines dragging behind them and stepped on them, causing the men to drop their entire bundle. They grew frustrated to the point of rage. Finally, when the men had nearly reached their shabono, the woman stepped on the end of a vine and remained standing there when the men turned around.

            Seeing this creature with strange curves and with her great, hairy vagina in place of an up-tied penis, the men felt their frustration commingle with their lust, whipping them into a frenzy. They surrounded her and took turns copulating with her. Once they’d each taken a turn, they brought her back to their shabono, where the rest of the men of the village were likewise overcome with lust and likewise took turns copulating with her. The woman stayed in the shabono for many months until her belly grew round and she eventually gave birth to a baby, a girl. As soon as this girl came of age, the men took turns copulating with her, just as they had with her mother. And so it went. Every daughter conceived through such mass couplings mothered her own girl, and the cycle continued.

            Now there are women in every shabono, and all Yąnomamö trace their ancestry back to both Moonblood and Wabu, though it’s the male line they favor.

            Around this time, back when time wasn’t fixed on its single-dimensional trajectory, a piece of the hedu kä misi—the sky layer, the underside of which we see whenever we look up—fell crashing into hei kä misi. The impact was so powerful that the shabono the piece of sky landed on, Amahiri-teri, was knocked all the way through and out the bottom of the layer, finally coming to form a subterranean layer of its own. Unfortunately, the part of hei kä misi that fell through the crater consisted only of the shabono and the surrounding gardens, so the Amahiri-teri have no jungles in which to hunt. Since these people are no badabö, they are able to send their spirits up through the layer separating us. And without jungles to hunt in, they’ve developed an insatiable craving for meat.

            Thus the Amahiri-teri routinely rise up from under the ground to snatch and devour the souls of children. Most of the spirits the shamans do battle with in their daily rituals are sent by shamans from rival villages to steal their children’s souls, but every once in a while they’re forced to contend with the cannibalistic Amahiri-teri.

            When Yąnomamö die, their buhii, their spirits, rise up through to the surface of the sky layer, hedu kä misi, to the bottom of which are fixed the daytime and nighttime skies as we see them, but the top surface of which mirrors the surface of this layer, with jungles, mountains, streams, and of course Yąnomamö, with their shabonos and gardens. Here too reside the no badabö, but since their essences are mixed they’re somewhat different. Their spirits, the hekura, regularly travel to this layer in forms part animal and part human. It is with the hekura that the shamans commune in their daily sessions with ebene, the green powder they shoot through blowguns into each other’s nostrils.

            The shamans imitate particular animals to call forth the corresponding hekura and make requests of them. They even invite the hekura to take up residence inside their bodies—as there seems to be an entirely separate cosmos within their chests and stomachs. This is possible because the hekura, who travel down to earth from high mountains on glittering hammock strings, are quite tiny. With the help of ebene, they appear as bright flashes flitting about like ecstatic butterflies over a summertime feast.

            “Sounds a bit like our old notion of fairies,” says the padre. “Fascinating. I’ve heard bits and pieces of this before, but it’s truly fantastic—and it’s quite impressive you were able to pick all of this up in just over a month.”

            “Oh, don’t write it down yet,” Lac says. “It’s only preliminary. Even within Bisaasi-teri, there’s all kinds of disagreement over the details. And I’m still struggling with the language—to put it mildly. Lucky for me, they do the rituals and reenact the myths every day when they take their hallucinogens. I think many of the details of the stories actually exists primarily because they’re fun to reenact, and fun to watch. You should see the shamans doing the bit about the first woman stepping on the ends of the vines. Or the brothers shooting their arrows at the moon.”

            “Sex and violence and cannibalism. The part about the woman and the fruit—wabu, did you call it?—is familiar-sounding to us Bible readers, no? But there’s no reference to, no awareness of sin or redemption. Sad really.”

            The two men sit in chairs, in an office with clean white walls, atop a finished wood floor.

            “They also have a story about a flood that rings a bell,” Lac says. “When they realized I was beginning to understand a lot of what they were saying, they started asking me if I had drowned and been reincarnated. They explained there was once a great flood that washed away entire villages. Some Yąnomamö survived by finding floating logs to cling to, but they were carried away to the edges of hei kä misi. When they didn’t return, everyone figured they must have drowned. But one of their main deities, Omawä, went to the edge and fished their bodies out of the water. He wrung them out, breathed life back into them, and sent them back home on their floating logs—which may be a reference to the canoes they see Ye’kwana traveling in. Of course, we come by canoe as well. They conclude we must be coming from regions farther from the center of this layer, because we’re even more degenerated from the original form they represent, and our speech is even more ‘crooked,’ as they call it.”

            The padre rolls his head back and laughs from his belly. Lac can’t help laughing along. Father Santa Claus here.

            “Their myths do seem to capture something of their character,” the padre says, “this theme of a free-for-all with regard to fighting and killing and sex, for instance.”

            Lac resists pointing out the ubiquity of this same theme throughout the Old Testament, which to him is evidence that both sources merely reflect the stage of their respective society’s evolution at the time of the stories’ conceptions. He says instead, “It’s not a total free-for-all. They find the Amahiri-teri truly frightening because they feel they’re always at risk of turning to cannibalism themselves—and they find the prospect absolutely loathsome and disgusting. I think that’s why they prefer their meat so well-done. I ate a bloody tenderloin I cut from a tapir I’d shot in front of some of the men. It was barely cooked—how I like it. The men were horrified, accusing me of wanting to become a jaguar, an eater of raw human flesh. So they do have their taboos.”

            Lac wishes he could add that the moral dimension of the story of Genesis is overstressed. By modern, civilized standards, the original sin stands out as a simple act of disobedience, defiance. You live in paradise, but a lordly presence commands you not to eat fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil: this sounds a bit like, “You have it made, just don’t ask questions.” Or else, “I’ve given you so much, don’t you dare question me!” One could argue you’d have a moral obligation to eat the fruit. Or you could even take morality out of the interpretation altogether and look at the story as an allegory of maturation from a stage of naïve innocence to one of more worldly cynicism, like when your parents can no longer protect you from the harsh realities of the world—in no small part because you insist on going forth to investigate them for yourself.

            Had Laura eaten from the Tree of Knowledge when she discovered the other women she encountered at U of M were only there to meet prize marriage prospects? Was that her banishment from paradise? Did I eat the same fruit by coming to Bisaasi-teri and witnessing firsthand how much of what I’d learned from my professors was in dire need of questioning and revision? Of course, I’d eaten that fruit before. We probably all have once or twice by the time we’re approaching our thirties.

            “Taboos and temptations, indeed,” says the padre. “I wonder,” he adds somberly, “what the final mix of beliefs will look like when my time in the territory has come to an end. Hermano Mertens says the Indians he speaks to across the river from you at Mavaca confuse the name Jesus with the name of one of the figures from their myths.”

            “Yes, Yoawä—he’s Omawä’s twin brother.” Lac forbears to add that Yoawä is usually the uglier, clumsier, and more foolish of the pair in the stories. But he does say, “Chuck Clemens did once tell me it was all but impossible to convince the Yąnomamö to reject their religion wholesale. The best he could hope for was to see them incorporate the Bible stories into their own stories about the no badabö.”

            The kindly padre chuckles. “Ah, that’s how it looks for the first generation. For the children, the balance will have shifted. For the grandchildren, the stories they tell now will be mere folktales—if they’re not entirely forgotten… I can tell that prospect disturbs you. You find fascination in their culture and their way of life. That’s only natural, you being an anthropologist. And your friend is a Protestant. Here we all are in the jungle, battling it out for the savages’ souls. It was ever thus.”

            It was not ever thus, Lac thinks. Those savages used to be exterminated by the hundreds for their land, and for their madohe if they had any. People like me were called heretics and burned at the stake. “One of my informants,” he says, “tells me the hekura find it repulsive when humans have sex. He says he’d like to become a shabori, a shaman, himself, but the initiation entails a year of fasting, which reduces the men to walking skeletons, and a year of sexual abstinence. See, to become hekura oneself, you must first invite the hekura spirits into your chest. And they won’t come if you’re fooling around in hammocks or in the back of the garden with women. The hekura believe sex is shami, filthy. You can’t help but heed the similarity with the English word shame.”

            The padre laughs and Lac laughs easily alongside him. There’s no tension between him and this priest, obviously a beneficent man. “I suspect,” Lac says, “the older shabori tell the initiates the hekura think sex is shami because they want to neutralize the competition for a year. So many of their disputes are over jealousy, liberties taken with wives, refusals to deliver promised brides.”

            “They receive no divine injunction to seek peace and love their fellow man?” the padre asks, though the utterance hovers in the space between question and statement.

            “That’s not entirely true. One of my informants tells me they face judgement when they die. A figure named Wadawadariwä asks if they’ve been generous in mortal life. If they say yes, they’re admitted into hedu, the higher layer. But if not they are sent to Shobari Waka, a place of fire.” Lac pauses to let his Spanish catch up with his thoughts. The Yąnomamö terms keep getting him tangled up, making him lose track of which word fits with which language. He imagines that, while in his mind he’s toggling back and forth between each tongue somewhat seamlessly, in reality he’s probably speaking a nearly incoherent jumble. “But when I asked the man how seriously the Yąnomamö take this threat of a fiery afterlife, he laughed. You see, Wadawadariwä is a moron, and everyone knows to tell him what he wants to hear. They lie. He has no way of knowing the truth.”

            Now the padre’s attention is piercing; he’s taking note. Lac half expects him to get up from his straight-backed wicker chair and find a notepad to jot down what he’s heard. Nice work, Shackley. You just helped the Church make inroads toward frightening the Yąnomamö into accepting a new set of doctrines.

            “Curious that they’d have such a belief,” the padre says. “I wonder if it’s not a vestige of some long-ago contact with Christians—or some rumor passed along from neighboring tribes that got incorporated into their mythology in a lukewarm fashion.”

            “I had the same thought. The biggest question I have now though is whether my one informant is giving me reliable information. You work with the Yąnomamö; you know how mischievous they are. They all want to stay close to me for the prime access to trade goods, but I can tell they don’t think much of me. Ha! I’m no better off than Wadawadariwä, an idiot they’ll say anything to to get what they want.”

            This sets the padre to shuddering with laughter again. “Oh, my friend, what do you expect? You show up, build a mud hut, and start following them around all day, pestering them with questions. You can see why they’d be confused about your relative standing. But I understand you want to report on their culture and their way of life. Maybe you really are doing that the most effective way, but maybe you could learn just as much while being much more comfortable.” He stretches and swings his arm in a gesture encompassing his own living conditions. “It’s hard to say. But since the Church’s goal is different—our goal is first to persuade them—we feel it best to establish clear boundaries, clear signals of where we stand, how our societies would fare if forced to battle it out, in a manner of speaking. And battle it out we must, for the sake of their immortal souls.” He makes a face and wiggles his fingers in accompaniment to this last sentiment.

            Lac appreciates him making light of such a haughty declamation, but he’s at a loss how to interpret the general message. Does the padre not really believe he has to demonstrate the superiority of his culture if he hopes to save the Yąnomamö’s souls? Or does he simply recognize how grandiose this explanation of his mission must sound to a layman, a scientist no less—or a man aspiring to be one at any rate.

            “But naturally we’ve had our difficulties,” the padre continues, pausing to scowl over his interlaced fingers. “I hope however that once we’ve established a regular flight schedule, landing and taking off from Esmeralda, many of those difficulties will be resolved.”

            “A regular flight schedule?”

            “Yes, we’re negotiating with the Venezuelan Air Force to start making regular flights out here, maybe make some improvements to the air strip. Ha ha. I’m afraid I’m not the adventurer you are, Dr. Shackley. I like my creature comforts, and those comforts are often critical to bringing the natives to God. As Hermano Mertens is discovering now at Boca Mavaca.”

            Lac remembers standing knee-deep in the Orinoco, watching smoke twist up in its gnarled narrow column, wondering who it could be, wondering if whoever it was might have some salvation on offer. He’d only been in Bisaasi-teri a few days. It was a rough time. The padre, naturally enough, asked after the lay brother setting up a new mission outpost across the river from Bisaasi-teri soon after they’d introduced themselves. “Honestly,” Lac answered, “I just managed to get my hands on the dugout because the Malarialogìa are trying to get pills to all the villages. It’s a really bad year for malaria. Many of the children of Bisaasi-teri are afflicted. I did hear some rumors about a construction project of some sort going on across the river, but I have yet to visit and check it out for myself.”

            “Hermano Mertens had such high hopes for what he could accomplish there,” the padre says now. He pauses. One of the traits that Lac has quickly taken to in the padre is his allowance for periods of silence in conversation. Back in the States, people are so desperate to fill gaps in dialogue that they pounce whenever you stop to mull over a detail of what’s been said. The Yąnomamö are worse still. With them, you can forget the difficulty of getting a word in; every syllable you utter throughout the whole conversation will be edgewise, if not completely overlain. No one ever speaks without two or three other people speaking simultaneously.

            The padre is thoughtful, curious, so he offers any interlocutor opportunities for contemplation. Lac is relieved that the one shortwave radio in the region isn’t guarded by a man who’s succumbed to the madness of the jungle, a man who’s filled with delusions and completely unpredictable in his demands and threats, like the ones the Venezuelans downriver had described to him in warning—to encourage him to both watch out for it in others and to avoid succumbing to it himself—a reprising of the warning he originally received from his Uncle Rob when they were trekking across the UP. Lac is glad to have instead found in Padre Morello a man who’s warm, friendly, thoughtful—thoughtful enough to speak clearly and at a measured pace to help Lac keep up with the Spanish—and kind, a perspiring Santa of the tropics, with a round belly, scraggly white beard, and exiguous hair thinning to a blur of floating mist over the crown of his head. The figure he cuts is disarming in every aspect, except the incongruously dark and sharp-angled eyebrows, a touch of Mephistopheles to his otherwise jolly visage.

            Still—first Clemens, now Morello, both hard to dislike, both hard to wish away from the jungle, away from the Yąnomamö, whose way of life it is their mission to destroy. Yet how many nights over the past month have I, he thinks, lain awake in my hammock listening to the futile bellicose chants of the village shabori trying to wrest the soul of some child back from the hekura sent by the shabori of some rival village? Every illness is for the Yąnomamö the result of witchcraft. And there’s a reason the demographic age pyramid is so wide at the base and narrow at the top. There are kids everywhere you go, everywhere you look, but how many of them will live long enough to reach the next age block?

            As much as Lac abhors the image of so many Yąnomamö kids sitting at desks lined up in neat rows, wearing the modest garb of the mission Indian, he’s begun to see that those kids at least won’t have to worry about missing out on their entire adolescence and adulthood because they picked up a respiratory infection that could easily be cured with the medicine a not-too-distant neighbor has readily on hand.

            “You know, every president in the history of Venezuela has attended a Catholic Salesian school,” the padre says. “It shouldn’t be too difficult convincing the officials in Caracas how important it is that we are able to supply ourselves.” He’s talking about his airstrip in Esmeralda. The influx has begun; now it will want to gather momentum. How long before the region bears not even the slightest resemblance to what it is now? How long before Yąnomamöland is a theme park for eager and ingenuous young Jesus lovers?

            Soon after he’d docked the new dugout—newly purchased anyway—here at the mission, the padre led him to the office with the shortwave. As both men suspected would be the case, no one answered their calls. Regular check-ins are scheduled for 6 am every day. Outside of that, you’re unlikely to reach anyone. Lac had left Bisaasi-teri with the Malarialogìa men at first light. They said they were returning to Puerto Ayacucho, so Lac agreed to take them as far as Esmeralda after buying their motorized canoe. They passed Ocamo about halfway through the trip, but Lac pressed on to fulfill his promise. He was tempted to stay in Esmeralda, but instead turned around to make sure he could make it back to the mission outpost, with its large black cross prominent against the white gable you could see from the river, before it was too late in the day. He had doubts about his welcome among the Salesians. Had they heard of his dealings with the New Tribes missionaries? Would they somehow guess, perhaps tipped off by his profession, that he was an atheist?

            He was in the canoe all day, still feels swimmy in his neck and knees, still feels the vibrating drone of the motor over every inch of his skin, but nowhere so much as in his skull, like a thousand microscopic termites boring into the bone, searching out the pulpy knot behind his eyes. He’s a wraith, wrung of substance, a quivering unsubstantial husk, with heavy eyelids. But all his vitality would return in an instant were he to hear Laura’s voice—or any mere confirmation of her existence on the other side of these machines connecting them through their invisible web of pulsing energy. Just an acknowledgement that while she may not be available at that particular instant, she is still at the compound, clean and safe and well provided for, her and the kids; that would pull him back from what he fears is the brink of being lost to this hallowed out nonexistence forever. They’ll try the radio again before he retires to the hammock he’s hung in the shed where the good padre has let him store his canoe. Their best bet of reaching someone, though, will be in the morning. He can talk to Laura, say his goodbyes to the padre, perhaps set a time for his next visit, and be back to Bisaasi-teri well before noon, before the villagers are done with the day’s gardening, before it’s too sweltering to do anything but gossip and chat.

            He yawns. The padre is still talking about the airstrip, about how convenient it will be to them both, about how silly the persistent obstacles and objections are. They’re going to win, Lac thinks: the Catholics. A generation from now there will be but a few scattered villages in the remotest parts of the jungle. The rest of the Yąnomamö will be raised in or near mission schools, getting the same education as all the past presidents of Venezuela. Could I be doing more to stop this? Should I be? At least this man’s motives seem benign, and he’s offering so many children a better chance of reaching adulthood—maybe not the children of this generation but more surely those of the next.

            The padre has access to a small airstrip here at Ocamo too, and he’s always sending for more supplies to build up the compound, including the church, the school, the living quarters, and the comedor, which is like a cafeteria. You can’t really get much in, he complained, on the planes that can land here. But it’s the steady trickle that concerns Lac. Morello talks about his role here in the jungle as consisting mainly of helping to incorporate the Indian populations into the larger civilization. Not extermination, of course—we’re past that—but assimilation. It’s either that or they slowly die off as ranchers, loggers, and miners dispossess them of their territories, or poison their water, a piece at a time, introducing them all the while to diseases they have no antibodies to combat, and taking every act of self-defense as a provocation justifying mass slaughter.

            The padre wants the Indians to be treated the same as everyone else, afforded all the same rights: a tall order considering Venezuela as a country has a giant inferiority complex when it comes to its own general level of technological advancement. You take some amenity that’s totally lacking in whatever region you’re in, and that’s exactly what the officials, and even the poorest among the citizenry, will insist most vociferously they have on offer, more readily available than anywhere else you may visit in the world. Just say the word. The naked Indians running around in the forests are an embarrassment, so far beneath the lowermost rung on the social ladder they’d need another ladder to reach it, barely more than animals, more like overgrown, furless monkeys. That’s the joke you hear, according to the Malarialogìa men. The funny thing is, to the Yąnomamö, it’s us nabä who are subhuman. Look at all the hair we have on our arms and legs, our chests and backs. We’re the ones who look like monkeys—and feel like monkeys too after spending enough time in the company of these real humans.

            Without our dazzling and shiny, noisy and deadly technology, there’d be no way to settle the conflicting views. But we know it will be the nabä ways that spread unremittingly, steamrolling all of Yąnomamöland, not the other way around. Insofar as the padre and his friends are here to ease the transition, saving as many lives as possible from the merciless progress of civilization and all the attendant exploitation and blind destruction, who is Lac to fault him for being inspired by backward beliefs? Of course, it’s not the adoption of nabä ways in general the Salesians hope to facilitate; it’s the ways of the Catholic Church. The Salesians had no interest in the Indians’ plight—particularly not a foot people like the Yąnomamö, living far from the main waterways—until the New Tribes began proselytizing here. The Christians, Lac thinks, are plenty primitive in their own way; they’ve carried on their own internecine wars for centuries.

            “Don Pedro will be there when I check in at 6 tomorrow morning. I’ll have him try to reach the institute in Caracas by phone and then patch us through so you can talk to your wife.” The padre pauses thoughtfully, and then, donning a devilish grin, says, “I wonder: you said both you and your wife attended Catholic schools in Michigan. Did you also have a Catholic wedding ceremony?”

            Lac appreciates the teasing; the padre is charming enough to pass it off as part of a general spirit of play, one he infuses at well-timed points throughout the conversation. Ah, to speak to a civilized man, Lac savors, whose jokes are in nowise malicious. Smiling, he answers, “Oh, Laura’s mother would never have accepted anything else as binding.” The two men laugh together. “And you?” Lac counters. “How does the Church view your readiness to converse with people of other faiths?”

            “Other faiths?” the padre asks skeptically.

            So he has guessed I’m an atheist.

            “Miraculously enough,” the padre says without waiting for a response, “I’ve just read in our newsletter that the pope recently issued an edict declaring priests are free to pursue open dialogue with Protestants and nonbelievers, and that such exchanges may even bear spiritual fruit in our quest to become closer to God. What this means, my friend, is that I don’t have to feel guilty about enjoying this conversation so much.”

            “And many more thereafter I hope.”

            The padre smiles, his teeth flashing whiter than his scraggly beard. “You know,” he says, “throughout he war, I lived in the rectory of a church in my hometown near Turin. Now this was Northern Italy, so there were planes flying overhead all the time. We’d often hear their guns rattling like hellish thunder chains in the sky, and on many occasions we felt obliged to rush to the site of a crash. For years, the Germans had the upper hand, but if we found an Allied pilot at the crash site, we’d bring him back to the church, shelter him, and keep him hidden from any patrols. Had we been caught harboring these enemy pilots, feeding them, nursing their injuries, it would have meant the firing squad for us for sure. But what could we do?

            “When the tides shifted and it was the Allied forces who dominated the skies, we started finding Axis pilots at the crash sites, and now it was the Allied firing squads we feared.” The padre leans forward with a mischievous twinkle in his eye, holds a hand up to his mouth and whispers, “Here’s the best part: a couple years after the war, I started receiving a pension, an expression of gratitude from the military for what I’d done saving the lives of their pilots, in recognition of what I’d risked—first from the Axis side, then another one later from the Allied side.” He leans away, his head rolling back to release a booming peel of laughter. 

            Lac too laughs from deep in his belly, wondering, could this story be true? The doubt somehow makes it funnier. Does it even matter? He’s already regretting his plans to leave the mission outpost tomorrow after talking to Laura, already looking forward to his next visit to Ocamo.

The padre has told him he’s writing a book about his life in the jungle, prominently featuring his mission work among the Yąnomamö, and he’s interested in any photographs Lac may be able to provide from his own fieldwork. In exchange, Lac will be free to visit the outpost at Ocamo anytime and make use of the shortwave. He will also be free to store extra supplies and fuel for his dugout’s motor—which will make it easier for him to reach all the towns downstream.

You help me with my book; I’ll help you with yours. Sounds like an excellent bargain to me. But now that you have all these ways of reaching and communicating with the world outside the Yąnomamö’s, you really need to forget about them and get back to work.

*

            “—chlan –ell me –u’re alight.” Laura’s voice. English. Bliss.

            One candle bowing across the vast distance to light another. The hollowness inside him fills with the warm dancing glow.

Padre Morello discreetly backs out of the room upon hearing the voice come through, and Lac is grateful because he has to choke back a sob and draw in a deliberately measured breath before he can say, “I’m alright Laura. Healthy and in one piece. Though I’ve lost a bunch of weight. How are you and the kids?”

            “Healthy and in one piece. They miss you. I think we’re all feeling a little trapped here. There’s another family, though, the Hofstetters—they’ve been a godsend.”

            Lac’s mind seamlessly mends the lacunae in the transmission—one of the easier linguistic exercises he’s been put to lately—but every missing syllable elevates his heartrate. He leans forward until his cheek is almost touching the surface of the contraption. He asks, “Are you getting everything you need by way of supplies and groceries?” He feels a pang in recognition of his own pretense at having any influence whatsoever over his family’s provisioning; the question is really a plea for reassurance.

            “The Hofstetters have been taking us in their car every week to a grocery store down in the city.” Lac is already imagining a strapping husband, disenchanted with marriage, bored with his wife; he’d be some kind of prestigious scientist no doubt, handsome, over six feet. “Dominic had a fever last week, but it went down after we gave him some aspirin and put him to bed.” We? “He misses French fries, says the ones here aren’t right. He wants McDonalds.”

            Lac decides to break the news preemptively, before she has a chance to mention the plan for them to come live with him in the field. “Laura, I have some bad news. The conditions are more prim… it’s rougher than I anticipated.” He proceeds with a bowdlerized version of his misadventures among the Yąnomamö to date, adding that with time he should be able to learn the ropes of the culture and secure regular access to everything they need. “Don’t worry, honey, I’m through the most risky part myself, but even I have to be cautious at all times. I need to make absolutely sure you’ll all be safe before I bring you here.”

            “Are the Indians dangerous?” she asks innocently. “When they’re demanding your trade goods like you described, do they ever threaten you?”

“Oh yes.” She knows I’m holding back, he thinks. Am I just making her worry even more? He hurries to add, “They’re full of bluster and machismo. It was intimidating at first, but I picked up on the fact that they’re mostly bluffing.”

            “Mostly?”

“You have to understand, all the men are really short. If they get too aggressive I can stand looking down at them. Ha. It’s the first time in my life I’ve been the tallest guy around. And the key I’ve found is to stand your ground, not budge, make sure it’s known to everyone that you’re no easy mark. Now I worry more about the kids making off with anything I leave out in the open.” He turns away and curses himself. Until that last sentence, he’d managed to stick to the technical truth, however misleading the delivery. But he intuited a need in Laura for him to segue onto a more trivial threat, so he brought up the kids, even though it’s the grown men who have the stickiest fingers.

So now I’m officially lying to my wife; I got carried away weaving true threads into a curtain of falsehood and I lost sight of which threads were which. Now I can’t pull out that last thread without the whole thing unraveling, revealing the stark reality. He foresees being haunted by the guilt from his little fib for weeks, or until he’s able to show her firsthand that he really is safe, safe enough to keep her and the kids safe too.

He’s got his work cut out.

*

Padre Morello sees at a glance that Lac has no wish to speak; he makes no effort to continue the conversation from the night before, though doing so would be in keeping with his natural disposition. The men exchange a few words as the padre guides him part of the way back to the shed, where Lac will repack his belongings, do some preventative maintenance on his motor—or pretend to, as he knows embarrassingly little about engines, for a Shackely—and drag the dugout down to the riverbank for the trip back to Bisaasi-teri, back to his hut, back to Rowahirawa and all the others. Rowahirawa, formerly Waddu-ewantow, has taken over the role of chief informant, even though Lac still reckons the chances that he’ll turn violent toward him someday rather high.

The padre never asked him questions like that, about how much danger he felt he was in. That’s the other reason for recreating your own cultural surroundings, or at least a simulacrum of them, when you come to live in this territory—the safety. The dogs living at the Ocamo outpost would alert the inhabitants of any unwanted guests, and the offer of rich food would make it relatively easy to demand visitors disarm themselves before entering the area. Morello had focused on the symbolism, the message sent to the natives about how much more advanced our ways are than theirs, but what if the real reason was more practical, myopic even? You’d have to be insane to come out here and live next to one of their shabonos in a dank and gloomy mud hut. By contrast, even the creak of the wood floor beneath his feet in this place speaks of deliverance.

If it ever gets too bad, he thinks, I’m not too proud to come back here and hole up with the padre. He’ll be able to arrange transportation out of the territory—if it comes to that. “The people of Bisaasi-teri are talking about some trouble brewing to the south of them,” Lac says without having decided to speak.

“Ah, I’ve heard that the Yąnomamö often attack one another’s villages.” Lac can tell the padre has more to add but decides against it, maybe to let Lac finish his thought.

“My first day in the village, I ducked under the outside edge of the wall and stood up to see a dozen arrows drawn back and aimed at my face. I learned later that the Patanowä-teri were visiting to try to form a trading partnership with Bisaasi-teri, and that’s when the men from a third village, Monou-teri, attacked and stole seven of the Patanowä-teri women. The Patanowä-teri in turn went to Monou-teri, less than a day’s walk, and challenged them to a chest-pounding tournament, which they must’ve won because they returned to Bisaasi-teri with five of the seven women.”  

The padre nods in thoughtful silence as he walks alongside Lac, who has an inchoate sense of remorse at relaying these most unsavory of his research subjects’ deeds to a representative of the Church. “When Clemens and I arrived, we spooked them. The headman of the Monou-teri had been incensed and swore he’d take vengeance, and the two groups at Bisaasi-teri feared he was making good on his vow. For days, I looked around and it was obvious that something had them on edge, but it wasn’t like I had a baseline to compare their moods against. When the Patanowä-teri left after two days, though, I noted the diminished numbers.”

“You know,” the padre says, “if things get too tense at the village, you’re always welcome to stay here for a while.” This echo of his own earlier thought floods Lac with gratitude. He remembers once silently declaring that he’d never say a word against Chuck Clemens; he now has the same conviction about Padre Morello, though in this case it’s more of the moment, whereas with Clemens, well, he’s still sure he’ll never have anything bad to say about the man.

“I can’t tell you how much I appreciate that, Padre. I’m not expecting it to come to that, but it’s reassuring to know I have a friend to turn to if it does.”

The men shake hands. Lac continues on to the shed and his dugout canoe, while the padre goes back to his day, back to his routine as the head of the mission, directing the ghostly white-clad sisters, feeding and clothing the Indians, swaddled in his nimbus of mirth, like a saint from a bygone era. Isn’t everything out here from one bygone era or another, Lac thinks, including you? He chuckles at the thought, then comes abruptly to the verge of tears—because it’s a joke Laura would enjoy, but he’ll almost certainly have forgotten it by the time he talks to her again.

*

Lac returns in time for another commotion inside Bisaasi-teri’s main shabono. Until docking his canoe, he’d been considering landing on the far shore and journeying inland to introduce himself to the Dutch lay brother who’s building a comedor across the river to attract the Yąnomamö for food and proselytizing. It’ll have to wait for another day. Lac already feels guilty for having been away for so long, a day and a half, imagining the villagers to have engaged in myriad secret rites while he was downriver, or merely some magnificent ceremony no outsider had ever witnessed. Smiling bitterly, bracing himself for whatever chaos he’s about to thrust himself into, he thinks: every ceremony they perform has never been seen by outsiders; the big secret is that they’re not like you’d imagine; they’re like nothing so much as a bunch of overgrown boys getting high and playing an elaborate game of make-believe, boys who could throw a tantrum at random and end up maiming or killing someone, starting a war of axes and machetes, bows and arrows.

He squats under the outermost edge of the thatched roof, sidling and bobbing his way into the headman’s house, where he sees a very pregnant Nakaweshimi, the eldest wife. Since he’s begun addressing the headman with a term that means older brother, he’s obliged to likewise refer to Nakaweshimi as kin, as a sister. “Sister,” he calls to her. “I’ve returned to your shabono. I’m glad to see you. What is happening? What is causing excitement?” Not much like her fellow Yąnomamö speak to her, but they’ve learned to give him extra leeway in matters of speech and etiquette, like you would the village idiot. He’s even been trying to get everyone to tell him all their names, this addled-brained nabä.

Nakaweshimi nearly smiles upon seeing him—at least he thinks she does—but then waves him off. “Rowahirawa will tell you what Towahowä has done now,” she says. Her expression baffles him, showing an undercurrent of deep concern overlain with restrained merriment, like she may have almost laughed. Could she be that happy to see me, he wonders, maybe because she thinks I’ll ward off the raiders with my shotgun and other articles of nabä magic? Or maybe I’m such an object of derision the jokes following in my wake set people to laughing whenever they see me.

He continues through the house out into the plaza, sees the men, some squatting, others standing, pacing. High above them, he looks out to see the thick blur of white mist clinging to the nearly black leaves of the otherworldly canopy and is struck by the devastating beauty, feeling a pang he can’t immediately source and doesn’t have the time to track down. The syllables and words of the men he’s approaching rise up in a cloud around him, a blinding vortex that simultaneously sweeps up the identifiable scents of individual men, bearing aloft the broken debris of shattered meanings, all the pieces just beyond his reach. Straining, he lays a finger on one, then another. He envies these men, naked but for strings, arm bands, sticks driven through their ears, their faces demoniacally distorted by the thick wads of green tobacco tucked behind their bottom lips—envies them because the words swirling away from him flow into their ears in orderly streams.

He sees a squatting man scratch the bottom side of his up-tied penis; another spits, almost hitting a companion’s foot. They’re discussing war and strategy, but we’re a long way from the likes of Churchill and Roosevelt—and yet, probably not as far as us nabä might like to think. Bahikoawa is telling them about his relationship to some man from Monou-teri: he lives in a different village and yet descends from the same male progenitor, meaning they’re of the same lineage. Lac reaches for his back pocket but finds it empty, his notebook, he then recalls, still tucked in a backpack full of items he brought along for the trip to Ocamo.

When the men finally notice Lac’s presence—or finally let on that they’ve noticed him, some of them walk over with greetings of shori, brother-in-law, asking after his efforts to procure more of his splendid nabä trade goods, which they’re sure he’ll want to be generous in divvying out among them. He haltingly replies that he was merely visiting Iyäwei-teri and the other nabä who lives there and is building a great house. He adds that he asked this other nabä to bring him back some medicines—a word borrowed from Spanish, with some distorting effects—he can administer to the Yąnomamö, but it will be some time before they arrive. They respond with aweis and tongue clicks. One man, a young boy really, tells Lac to give him a machete in the meantime—“and be quick about it!”

Ma. Get your own machete.

Among the Yąnomamö, Lac has learned, it’s seen as stingy, almost intolerably so, not to give someone an item he requests. What they normally give each other, though, is tobacco—often handing over the rolled wads already in their own mouths—germ theory still being millennia in the future, or at least a few years of acculturation at the hands of the missionaries. Lac has to appreciate his madohe make him rich, after a fashion, but his refusal to give them away freely makes him a deviant, a sort of reprobate. They don’t exactly condemn him as such. They struggle to work out the proper attitude to have toward him, just as he does toward them. The culture has no categories to accommodate the bizarre scenario in which an outsider in possession of so many valuable goods comes to live among them.

For the most part, they make allowances; they’re flexible enough to recognize the special circumstance. They tolerate his egregious tight-fistedness—what do you expect from a subhuman? And this particular subhuman appears to be trying to learn what it means to be a real human, translated Yąnomamö. Why else would he be so determined to speak their language? Though they seem to think there’s only one language with varying degrees of crookedness. The Yąnomamö to the south speak a crooked dialect for instance, but at least it’s not so crooked as to be indecipherable. Lac must have traveled far beyond those southern villages when he was washed to the edge of the earth by the Great Flood. Really, though, Lac isn’t sure how to gauge what percentage of the villagers actually believes this story, or to what degree they believe it. He’s noted a few times that their beliefs in general seem to be malleable, changing according to the demands of the situation.

Their attitudes toward the Patanowä-teri, for example, have undergone a dramatic shift in the brief time he’s been among them. The Patanowä-teri had come to attend a feast at Bahikoawa’s invitation, hoping to establish regular trade in goods like bows, clay pots, dogs, tobacco, and ebene—or rather the hisiomo seeds used to make it. The Monou-teri, meanwhile, were invited to be fellow guests at the feast, but on their way to Bisaasi-teri they happened upon those seven Patanowä-teri women hiding in the forest, a common precaution, Lac’s been told, to keep them safe from the still suspect host villagers. The Monou-teri couldn’t resist. This led to the chest-pounding duel he’d heard about, though it must have been several separate duels, more like a tournament, the outcome of which was that the Patanowä-teri returned to Bisaasi-teri with five of the seven women, just before Lac and Clemens arrived. The Patanowä-teri then left the village early to avoid further trouble with the Monou-teri, who, if he’s hearing correctly, are now determined to raid the Patanowä-teri at their shabono on the Shanishani River. This despite their having come out ahead by two women.

Now, even though the Patanowä-teri have in no way wronged the people of Bisaasi-teri, Bahikoawa is considering whether he and some of the other men should accompany the Monou-teri on their raid. It seems Bahikoawa is related to the headman of Monou-teri, the one who’s causing all the trouble. This man is waiteri: angry or aggressive, eager to project an air of menace and invincibility, traits considered to be manly virtues rather than political liabilities.

Bahikoawa, it seems, is related to many of the Patanowä-teri as well, but more distantly. The men argue over whether Towahowä, the Monou-teri headman, is justified in launching the raid—not in the moral sense, but in a strategic one—and over whether they should send someone to participate. Bahikoawa, drawing on the juice from his tabacco, looks genuinely distraught, like he’s being forced to choose between two brothers, and Lac feels an upwelling of sympathy. He couldn’t speak for anyone else in any of these villages; he’d be loath to turn his back to any of them. Bahikoawa, on the other hand, is a good man; it’s plain for anyone to see. He also appears to be sick. He keeps clutching his side, as though he’s having sharp pains in his abdomen. Fortunately, the war counsel is breaking up, partly in response to Lac showing up to distract them.

The men have all kinds of questions about the villagers at Ocamo, the Iyäwei-teri, almost none of which Lac can answer: How are their gardens producing? Was everyone at the shabono, or were some of them off hunting? Did they appear well-supplied with tobacco? Lac, realizing he could have easily stopped to check in with the villagers—he’ll want their genealogical information too at some point—tries to explain that he merely went for a chance to speak with his wife and ask after his children. When they assume, naturally enough, his wife must be living at Iyäwei-teri, he’s at a loss as to how he can even begin to explain she’s somewhere else.

Lac asks where Rowahirawa is: out hunting for basho for his in-laws. So there’s little chance of clearing things up about where Laura is and why Lac could nonetheless speak to her from Ocamo. Lac decides to step away and go to his hut to relax for a bit before starting his interviews and surveys again. He’s shocked by his own oversight, not anticipating that the people of Bisaasi-teri would be eager to hear about what’s going on at Iyäwei-teri. Travelers are the Yąnomamö’s version of newspapers; it’s how they know what’s brewing at Monou-teri; it’s the only way for them to know what’s going on in the wider world—their own wider world anyway. But is what the Bisaasi-teri are after best characterized as news, gossip, or military intel?

At some point, it’s disturbingly easy to imagine, he could unwittingly instigate an intervillage attack simply by relaying the right information—or rather the wrong information. Lac is also amazed by the Yąnomamö’s agility in shifting alliances, and he can’t figure out how to square it with his knowledge about tribal societies vis-à-vis warfare, which is thought to begin when a society reaches a stage in its evolution when the people start to rely on certain types of key resources like cultivable land, potable water, or ready access to game. Intergroup conflicts then intensify when the key resources take on more symbolic than strategic meanings, as when they’re used as currency or as indicators of status. Think gold and diamonds. But Bisaasi-teri was working to establish trade relations with Patanowä-teri when the Monou-teri headman, in a brazen breach of diplomacy, instigated hostilities.  

What resources, he wonders as he steps into his hut, can they possibly be fighting over?

If anything, the fighting seems to be further limiting their access to the goods they may otherwise procure through trade. And why should the Bisaasi-teri men consider sending a contingent to represent their village in the raid? When the first offense occurred, the Bisaasi-teri were seeking to strengthen their ties to Patanowä-teri, and Bahikoawa’s lineage is present in both villages, so why bother picking a side? Why not sit out the fight? What do they hope to gain?

Lac lies back in his hammock, trying to make sense of it. He could easily fall asleep.

As he was preparing to board the ship in New York with Laura and the kids and all the supplies he was going to take with him into the field, he’d read in a newspaper about the U.S. sending military advisors to Southeast Asia, another jungle region, to support a group of people resisting the advance of communism. The Soviet Union apparently has already established a foothold in the country by supporting a rival group, the Vietcong. The threat of a proxy war between the great powers looms.

What resources are the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. fighting over? It seems to Lac to be much more about ideas: capitalism vs. communism. Is it only nations at the most advanced stages of technological advancement that battle over ideologies and economic systems? Dozing off, Lac’s last thought is that for the Bisaasi-teri men at least, the real motivation seems to be the opportunity to assert their own impunity alongside their readiness to punish rivals for any miniscule offense. It’s about projecting an air of superiority, acquiring prestige, for yourself, your village, your lineage, your tribe, your nation, your very way of life.

*

He dozes for maybe twenty minutes, his eagerness to work blunting the edge of his now-chronic exhaustion. Overnighting at the mission afforded him a superb night of sleep, comparatively. The Yąnomamö don’t keep to the strict schedules Westerners do; they have no qualms about late-night visits, even if those visits require rousing the visitee from a deep slumber. They do fortunately happen to be adept at midday dozes, a skill they like to practice during the day’s most oppressively hot stretches, when doing much of anything else is a loathsome prospect. Lac has adapted quickly, hence the short nap when he really felt like a longer sleep.

One good stretch of uninterrupted sleep, he thinks, hardly makes up for the weeks of erratic events, bizarre occurrences, and anxiety-fueled insomnia. When I finally leave this place, in just over a year from now, I may spend the first month home doing nothing but sleeping. What bliss. For now, though, he has work to do, and thanks to the encroachments into Yąnomamöland by the New Tribes and the Salesians, he’s on a diminishing timetable. Already, it will be difficult to tell how closely the population structures he uncovers reflect outside influences versus the true nature of tribal life in the jungle. He keeps hearing about more remote villages to the South, near the headwaters of the Mavaca, where there’s supposedly a single shabono housing over twice as many people as Bisaasi-teri. According to his main informant at least. According to his whilom persecutor, his bully, his now sometimes friend—as reticent as he’s learned to be in applying that term, and as wary as he’s become in allowing for that sentiment.

It’s still hot. The trip from Ocamo took a little over six hours, twice as long coming upriver than it was going downstream. He’s hungry, but the lackluster range of choices on offer dulls his appetite. He guesses that in the little over a month he’s been in the field, he’s lost between ten and fifteen pounds. He may never successfully remove the crusty, bug-bitten, sticky film clinging to his body; he imagines Laura catching a first whiff of him when they’re finally reunited and bursting into tears.

But I’m on to something, he thinks as he stands and moves to the table. From his discussions with Rowahirawa, he’s learned that the proscription against voicing names isn’t a taboo per se; saying someone’s name aloud is more like taking a great liberty with that person, much the way Westerners would think of being groped in public, an outrageous gesture of disrespect. But, while it may be grossly offensive to run your hands over a stranger, or even an intimate if it’s in a public setting, you can often get away with more subtle displays of affection; you can touch another person’s arm, say, or her shoulder; you could reach over and touch her hand.

Remembering a night with Laura, back before Dominic was born, Lac has one of his rare flickers of sexual arousal, a flash of a scene overflowing with the promise sensual indulgence. Lac looks around his hut; it’s only ever moments before someone arrives. He’s probably only been left alone this long because of the excitement in the shabono over the impending conflict to the east. He’s yet to see a single Yąnomamö man or woman masturbate, he notes, but the gardening time of day is when the jokes and all the innuendo he can’t decode suggest is the time for trysting. Someone’s always gone missing, and then it’s discovered someone else has gone missing at the same time. Lac’s never witnessed these paired abscondings. Sexuality is notoriously tricky for ethnographers to study, a certain degree of discretion being universal across cultures. People like to do it in private. It seems this is particularly true of the Yąnomamö, if for no other reason than that they fear detection by a jealous husband.

And Lac himself?

He’s awoken in his hammock from dreams of lying alongside Laura on the smoothest, cleanest sheets he’s ever felt—awoken in a compromised state his unannounced Yąnomamö visitor took no apparent notice of. He feels an ever-present pressure crying out for release, but the conditions could hardly be less conducive to the proper performance of such routine maintenance tasks. He’s never alone, never anything less than filthy—sticky, slimy, and moderately uncomfortable—and the forced press of Yąnomamö bodies he keeps being subjected to has an effect the opposite of sensual. So he feels the tension, physiologically, from having gone so long without release, but nothing in the field comes close to turning him on.

None of the Yąnomamö women? Not one?  

There’s something vaguely troubling to Lac about this, as it seems to have little to do with his devotion to Laura. His devotion to Laura manifests itself through his resistance to temptation, not its absence. So why is he, an aspirant acolyte of Boas, not attracted to, not sexually aroused by any of the women among this unique group of his fellow humans?

Shunning the implications, his mind takes him back in time to some key moments in his budding intimacy with the woman he’d go on to marry. He would enjoy hanging out in his hut and reminiscing like this, but sensing its futility, he decides instead to get to work, get to making something worthwhile out of this expedition, this traumatizing debacle of a first crack at ethnographic fieldwork, get to securing his prospects for a decent career—oh, the bombshells he’ll be dropping on his colleagues—get to securing a living for his family and a valuable contribution to the discipline, his legacy. Maybe Bess and Laura are right, he thinks; maybe I’m incapable of accepting a cause as lost; maybe I have something to prove, a vestige of some unsettled conflict with my father and brothers. So be it. I may as well turn it into something worthwhile.

*

At last, he writes later that night, I’ve succeeded in getting some names, and I’ve begun to fill in some genealogical graphs. My work has begun, my real work. What I couldn’t have known when I decided to study the Yąnomamö was that I would be working with the most frustratingly recalcitrant people ever encountered by an anthropologist. My project of gathering names will be a complex and deeply fraught endeavor, and every mistake will put me in danger: my subjects getting angry with me at best, violent at worst. It doesn’t help that the Yąnomamö also happen to be consummate practical jokers, who see having an ignorant and dimwitted nabä around, someone who’s just learning the basics of their language, as an irresistible opportunity.

One man will casually point me toward another, instructing me to say, “Tokowanarawa, wa waridiwa no modohawa.” When I go to the second man and repeat the phrase, careful to get the diction right, he is furious and begins waving his arms and threatening me—and rightly so since I’ve just addressed him by name and told him he’s ugly. Here’s the peculiar thing: even though the man I’ve insulted witnessed the exchange with the first man—even though he knows I’m merely relaying a message—he directs his anger at me and not the actual source of the insult, a man who is by now in hysterics over the drama he’s instigated. (This prank, along with a few minor variations at other times, was pulled on me by one of my most reliable informants, Rowahirawa.)

The Yąnomamö love drama. They love trouble. And I have to be careful not to give in to my inclination to respond to angry subjects by offering them madohe to make amends, a response that would  make (and to some degree has already made) me appear cowed, and cowardly, encouraging and emboldening them to make more displays and more threats. But, as delicate as one must be in negotiating the intricacies of the name customs, I’ve managed to uncover some underlying threads of logic to them. The worst offense when it comes to names, for instance, is to publicly say those of recently deceased relatives. The second worst offense—which is probably just as dangerous to commit—is using the name of a browähäwä, a politically prominent man, most of whom (all?) are also waiteri, warriors.

What I’ve observed, however, is that when the Yąnomamö refer to one of these men, they usually do so through teknonymy: they imply his identity through his relationship to someone safe to name. They’d never say the headman Bahikoawa’s name out loud, but instead refer to him as “the father of Sarimi,” his daughter. I can therefore begin building out my genealogies in a similar fashion, starting with the names of children and working my way up. Over time, I may light on new methods that will bring me closer to the names of the browähäwä and the ancestors, but by then I hope to already have their relationships with all the other villagers mapped out using the same sort of teknonymy as the Yąnomamö use themselves.

My plan is to create a standard list of questions and then to interview as many of the villagers as possible, offering them fish hooks or nylon line or disinfectant eye drops as payment. I’ll interview them individually, so there will be no witnesses to any sharing of sensitive information, and I’ll encourage each interviewee to whisper the names in my ear, as a demonstration of how much I personally respect the individuals being named. Still, I don’t expect to be able to draw complete charts the first time around. This first round will be more like tryouts. I’ll be looking to identify the most helpful, articulate, and reliable informants, an exercise that will involve checking each candidate’s answers against the others’.

For round two, I’ll stick to the individuals who most readily provided me with the best information in round one. And I’ll offer them more valuable trade goods in exchange for their help: machetes, axes, game meat. Over time, as I build up some trust and establish rapport, I’ll start pressing them for the more sensitive names. I’m estimating that by mid-March I should have everyone’s name on record, along with a chart that fits each village member into the kinship network. I’ll be able to pass these charts along to Dr. Nelson when he and his team arrive for their genetic research next year. And the information will also form the basis of any theorizing on my own part about the nature and evolution of larger societal patterns. At the same time, it will give me a head start on the charts for neighboring villages, and subsequently for the more remote ones I hope to visit on future expeditions. 

Lac closes the notebook, leans his head back, and sighs. A lot of things that could very easily go wrong will need to go right for this plan to work. Thinking about all the variables is overwhelming. But what really scares him now is the thought of those future expeditions, of having to return to the jungle once he’s made it out.

If he makes it out. 

***

Find my author page. 

Posts on Napoleon Chagnon:

NAPOLEON CHAGNON'S CRUCIBLE AND THE ONGOING EPIDEMIC OF MORALIZING HYSTERIA IN ACADEMIA

And:

JUST ANOTHER PIECE OF SLEAZE: THE REAL LESSON OF ROBERT BOROFSKY'S "FIERCE CONTROVERSY"

Why Tamsin Shaw Imagines the Psychologists Are Taking Power

Tamsin Shaw’s essay in the February 25th issue of The New York Review of Books, provocatively titled “The Psychologists Take Power,” is no more scholarly than your average political attack ad, nor is it any more credible. (The article is available online, but I won’t lend it further visibility to search engines by linking to it here.) Two of the psychologists maligned in the essay, Jonathan Haidt and Steven Pinker, recently contributed a letter to the editors which effectively highlights Shaw’s faulty reasoning and myriad distortions, describing how she “prosecutes her case by citation-free attribution, spurious dichotomies, and standards of guilt by association that make Joseph McCarthy look like Sherlock Holmes” (82).

Upon first reading Shaw’s piece, I dismissed it as a particularly unscrupulous bit of interdepartmental tribalism—a philosopher bemoaning the encroachment by pesky upstart scientists into what was formerly the bailiwick of philosophers. But then a line in Shaw’s attempted rebuttal of Haidt and Pinker’s letter sent me back to the original essay, and this time around I recognized it as a manifestation of a more widespread trend among scholars, and a rather unscholarly one at that.

Shaw begins her article by accusing a handful of psychologists of exceeding the bounds of their official remit. These researchers have risen to prominence in recent years through their studies into human morality. But now, instead of restricting themselves, as responsible scientists would, to describing how we make moral judgements and attempting to explain why we respond to moral dilemmas the way we do, these psychologists have begun arrogating moral authority to themselves. They’ve begun, in other words, trying to tell us how we should reason morally—according to Shaw anyway. Her article then progresses through shady innuendo and arguments based on what Haidt and Pinker call “guilt through imaginability” to connect this group of authors to the CIA’s program of “enhanced interrogation,” i.e. torture, which culminated in such atrocities as those committed in the prisons at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay.

Shaw’s sole piece of evidence comes from a report that was commissioned by the American Psychological Association. David Hoffman and his fellow investigators did indeed find that two members of the APA played a critical role in developing the interrogation methods used by the CIA, and they had the sanction of top officials. Neither of the two, however, and none of those officials authored any of the books on moral psychology that Shaw is supposedly reviewing. In the report’s conclusion, the investigators describe the responses of clinical psychologists who “feel physically sick when they think about the involvement of psychologists intentionally using harsh interrogation techniques.” Shaw writes,

It is easy to imagine the psychologists who claim to be moral experts dismissing such a reaction as an unreliable “gut response” that must be overridden by more sophisticated reasoning. But a thorough distrust of rapid, emotional responses might well leave human beings without a moral compass sufficiently strong to guide them through times of crisis, when our judgement is most severely challenged, or to compete with powerful nonmoral motivations. (39)

What she’s referring to here is the two-system model of moral reasoning which posits a rapid, intuitive system, programmed in large part by our genetic inheritance but with some cultural variation in its expression, matched against a more effort-based, cerebral system that requires the application of complex reasoning.

But it must be noted that nowhere does any of the authors she’s reviewing make a case for a “thorough distrust of rapid, emotional responses.” Their positions are far more nuanced, and Haidt in fact argues in his book The Righteous Mind that liberals could benefit from paying more heed to some of their moral instincts—a case that Shaw herself summarizes in her essay when she’s trying to paint him as an overly “didactic” conservative.

            Haidt and Pinker’s response to Shaw’s argument by imaginability was to simply ask the other five authors she insinuates support torture whether they indeed reacted the way she describes. They write, “The results: seven out of seven said ‘no’” (82). These authors’ further responses to the question offer a good opportunity to expose just how off-base Shaw’s simplistic characterizations are.

None of these psychologists believes that a reaction of physical revulsion must be overridden or should be thoroughly distrusted. But several pointed out that in the past, people have felt physically sick upon contemplating homosexuality, interracial marriage, vaccination, and other morally unexceptionable acts, so gut feelings alone cannot constitute a “moral compass.” Nor is the case against “enhanced interrogation” so fragile, as Shaw implies, that it has to rest on gut feelings: the moral arguments against torture are overwhelming. So while primitive physical revulsion may serve as an early warning signal indicating that some practice calls for moral scrutiny, it is “the more sophisticated reasoning” that should guide us through times of crisis. (82-emphasis in original)

One phrase that should stand out here is “the moral arguments against torture are overwhelming.” Shaw is supposedly writing about a takeover by psychologists who advocate torture—but none of them actually advocates torture. And, having read four of the six books she covers, I can aver that this response was entirely predictable based on what the authors had written. So why does Shaw attempt to mislead her readers?

            The false implication that the authors she’s reviewing support torture isn’t the only central premise of Shaw’s essay that’s simply wrong; if these psychologists really are trying to take power, as she claims, that’s news to them. Haidt and Pinker begin their rebuttal by pointing out that “Shaw can cite no psychologist who claims special authority or ‘superior wisdom’ on moral matters” (82). Every one of them, with a single exception, in fact includes an explanation of what separates the two endeavors—describing human morality on the one hand, and prescribing values or behaviors on the other—in the very books Shaw professes to find so alarming. The lone exception, Yale psychologist Paul Bloom, author of Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil, wrote to Haidt and Pinker, “The fact that one cannot derive morality from psychological research is so screamingly obvious that I never thought to explicitly write it down” (82).

Yet Shaw insists all of these authors commit the fallacy of moving from is to ought; you have to wonder if she even read the books she’s supposed to be reviewing—beyond mining them for damning quotes anyway. And didn’t any of the editors at The New York Review think to check some of her basic claims? Or were they simply hoping to bank on the publication of what amounts to controversy porn? (Think of the dilemma faced by the authors: do you respond and draw more attention to the piece, or do you ignore it and let some portion of the readership come away with a wildly mistaken impression?)

            Haidt and Pinker do a fine job of calling out most of Shaw’s biggest mistakes and mischaracterizations. But I want to draw attention to two more instances of her falling short of any reasonable standard of scholarship, because each one reveals something important about the beliefs Shaw uses as her own moral compass. The authors under review situate their findings on human morality in a larger framework of theories about human evolution. Shaw characterizes this framework as “an unverifiable and unfalsifiable story about evolutionary psychology” (38). Shaw has evidently attended the Ken Ham school of evolutionary biology, which preaches that science can only concern itself with phenomena occurring right before our eyes in a lab. The reality is that, while testing adaptationist theories is a complicated endeavor, there are usually at least two ways to falsify them. You can show that the trait or behavior in question is absent in many cultures, or you can show that it emerges late in life after some sort of deliberate training. One of the books Shaw is supposedly reviewing, Bloom’s Just Babies, focuses specifically on research demonstrating that many of our common moral intuitions emerge when we’re babies, in our first year of life, with no deliberate training whatsoever.

            Bloom comes in for some more targeted, if off-hand, criticism near the conclusion of Shaw’s essay for an article he wrote to challenge the increasingly popular sentiment that we can solve our problems as a society by encouraging everyone to be more empathetic. Empathy, Bloom points out, is a finite resource; we’re simply not capable of feeling for every single one of the millions of individuals in need of care throughout the world. So we need to offer that care based on principle, not feeling. Shaw avoids any discussion of her own beliefs about morality in her essay, but from the nature of her mischaracterization of Bloom’s argument we can start to get a sense of the ideology informing her prejudices. She insists that when Paul Bloom, in his own Atlantic article, “The Dark Side of Empathy,” warns us that empathy for people who are seen as victims may be associated with violent, punitive tendencies toward those in authority, we should be wary of extrapolating from his psychological claims a prescription for what should and should not be valued, or inferring that we need a moral corrective to a culture suffering from a supposed excess of empathic feelings. (40-1)

The “supposed excess of empathic feelings” isn’t the only laughable distortion people who actually read Bloom’s essay will catch out; the actual examples he cites of when empathy for victims leads to “violent, punitive tendencies” include Donald Trump and Ann Coulter stoking outrage against undocumented immigrants by telling stories of the crimes a few of them commit. This misrepresentation raises an important question: why would Shaw want to mislead her readers into believing Bloom’s intention is to protect those in authority? This brings us to the McCathyesque part of Shaw’s attack ad.

            The sections of the essay drawing a web of guilt connecting the two psychologists who helped develop torture methods for the CIA to all the authors she’d have us believe are complicit focus mainly on Martin Seligman, whose theory of learned helplessness formed the basis of the CIA’s approach to harsh interrogation. Seligman is the founder of a subfield called Positive Psychology, which he developed as a counterbalance to what he perceived as an almost exclusive focus on all that can go wrong with human thinking, feeling, and behaving. His Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania has received $31 million in recent years from the Department of Defense—a smoking gun by Shaw’s lights. And Seligman even admits that on several occasions he met with those two psychologists who participated in the torture program. The other authors Shaw writes about have in turn worked with Seligman on a variety of projects. Haidt even wrote a book on Positive Psychology called The Happiness Hypothesis.

            In Shaw’s view, learned helplessness theory is a potentially dangerous tool being wielded by a bunch of mad scientists and government officials corrupted by financial incentives and a lust for military dominance. To her mind, the notion that Seligman could simply want to help soldiers cope with the stresses of combat is all but impossible to even entertain. In this and every other instance when Shaw attempts to mislead her readers, it’s to put the same sort of negative spin on the psychologists’ explicitly stated positions. If Bloom says empathy has a dark side, then all the authors in question are against empathy. If Haidt argues that resilience—the flipside of learned helplessness—is needed to counteract a culture of victimhood, then all of these authors are against efforts to combat sexism and racism on college campuses. And, as we’ve seen, if these authors say we should question our moral intuitions, it’s because they want to be able to get away with crimes like torture. “Expertise in teaching people to override their moral intuitions is only a moral good if it serves good ends,” Shaw herself writes. “Those ends,” she goes on, “should be determined by rigorous moral deliberation” (40). Since this is precisely what the authors she’s criticizing say in their books, we’re left wondering what her real problem with them might be.

            In her reply to Haidt and Pinker’s letter, Shaw suggests her aim for the essay was to encourage people to more closely scrutinize the “doctrines of Positive Psychology” and the central principles underlying psychological theories about human morality. I was curious to see how she’d respond to being called out for mistakenly stating that the psychologists were claiming moral authority and that they were given to using their research to defend the use of torture. Her main response is to repeat the central aspects of her rather flimsy case against Seligman. But then she does something truly remarkable; she doesn’t deny using guilt by imaginability—she defends it.

Pinker and Haidt say they prefer reality to imagination, but imagination is the capacity that allows us to take responsibility, insofar as it is ever possible, for the ends for which our work will be used and the consequences that it will have in the world. Such imagination is a moral and intellectual virtue that clearly needs to be cultivated. (85)

So, regardless of what the individual psychologists themselves explicitly say about torture, for instance, as long as they’re equipping other people with the conceptual tools to justify torture, they’re still at least somewhat complicit. This was the line that first made me realize Shaw’s essay was something other than a philosopher munching on sour grapes.

            Shaw’s approach to connecting each of the individual authors to Seligman and then through him to the torture program is about as sophisticated, and about as credible, as any narrative concocted by your average online conspiracy theorist. But she believes that these connections are important and meaningful, a belief, I suspect, that derives from her own philosophy. Advocates of this philosophy, commonly referred to as postmodernismor poststructuralism, posit that our culture is governed by a dominant ideology that serves to protect and perpetuate the societal status quo, especially with regard to what are referred to as hegemonic relationships—men over women, whites over other ethnicities, heterosexuals over homosexuals. This dominant ideology finds expression in, while at the same time propagating itself through, cultural practices ranging from linguistic expressions to the creation of art to the conducting of scientific experiments.

            Inspired by figures like Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault, postmodern scholars reject many of the central principles of humanism, including its emphasis on the role of rational discourse in driving societal progress. This is because the processes of reasoning and research that go into producing knowledge can never be fully disentangled from the exercise of power, or so it is argued. We experience the world through the medium of culture, and our culture distorts reality in a way that makes hierarchies seem both natural and inevitable. So, according to postmodernists, not only does science fail to create true knowledge of the natural world and its inhabitants, but the ideas it generates must also be scrutinized to identify their hidden political implications.

            What such postmodern textual analyses look like in practice is described in sociologist Ullica Segerstrale’s book, Defenders of the Truth: The Sociobiology Debate. Segerstrale observed that postmodern critics of evolutionary psychology (which was more commonly called sociobiology in the late 90s), were outraged by what they presumed were the political implications of the theories, not by what evolutionary psychologists actually wrote. She explains,

In their analysis of their targets’ texts, the critics used a method I call moral reading. The basic idea behind moral reading was to imagine the worst possible political consequences of a scientific claim. In this way, maximum guilt might be attributed to the perpetrator of this claim. (206)  

This is similar to the type of imagination Shaw faults psychologists today for insufficiently exercising. For the postmodernists, the sum total of our cultural knowledge is what sustains all the varieties of oppression and injustice that exist in our society, so unless an author explicitly decries oppression or injustice he’ll likely be held under suspicion. Five of the six books Shaw subjects to her moral reading were written by white males. The sixth was written by a male and a female, both white. The people the CIA tortured were not white. So you might imagine white psychologists telling everyone not to listen to their conscience to make it easier for them reap the benefits of a history of colonization. Of course, I could be completely wrong here; maybe this scenario isn’t what was playing out in Shaw’s imagination at all. But that’s the problem—there are few limits to what any of us can imagine, especially when it comes to people we disagree with on hot-button issues.

            Postmodernism began in English departments back in the ‘60s where it was originally developed as an approach to analyzing literature. From there, it spread to several other branches of the humanities and is now making inroads into the social sciences. Cultural anthropology was the first field to be mostly overtaken. You can see precursors to Shaw’s rhetorical approach in attacks leveled against sociobiologists like E.O. Wilson and Napoleon Chagnon by postmodern anthropologists like Marshall Sahlins. In a review published in 2001, also in The New York Review of Books, Sahlins writes,

The ‘60s were the longest decade of the 20th century, and Vietnam was the longest war. In the West, the war prolonged itself in arrogant perceptions of the weaker peoples as instrumental means of the global projects of the stronger. In the human sciences, the war persists in an obsessive search for power in every nook and cranny of our society and history, and an equally strong postmodern urge to “deconstruct” it. For his part, Chagnon writes popular textbooks that describe his ethnography among the Yanomami in the 1960s in terms of gaining control over people.

Demonstrating his own power has been not only a necessary condition of Chagnon’s fieldwork, but a main technique of investigation.

The first thing to note is that Sahlin’s characterization of Chagnon’s books as narratives of “gaining control over people” is just plain silly; Chagnon was more often than not at the mercy of the Yanomamö. The second is that, just as anyone who’s actually read the books by Haidt, Pinker, Greene, and Bloom will be shocked by Shaw’s claim that their writing somehow bolsters the case for torture, anyone familiar with Chagnon’s studies of the Yanomamö will likely wonder what the hell they have to do with Vietnam, a war that to my knowledge he never expressed an opinion of in writing.

However, according to postmodern logic—or we might say postmodern morality—Chagnon’s observation that the Yanomamö were often violent, along with his espousal of a theory that holds such violence to have been common among preindustrial societies, leads inexorably to the conclusion that he wants us all to believe violence is part of our fixed nature as humans. Through the lens of postmodernism, Chagnon’s work is complicit in making people believe working for peace is futile because violence is inevitable. Chagnon may counter that he believes violence is likely to occur only in certain circumstances, and that by learning more about what conditions lead to conflict we can better equip ourselves to prevent it. But that doesn’t change the fact that society needs high-profile figures to bring before our modern academic version of the inquisition, so that all the other white men lording it over the rest of the world will see what happens to anyone who deviates from right (actually far-left) thinking.

Ideas really do have consequences of course, some of which will be unforeseen. The place where an idea ends up may even be repugnant to its originator. But the notion that we can settle foreign policy disputes, eradicate racism, end gender inequality, and bring about world peace simply by demonizing artists and scholars whose work goes against our favored party line, scholars and artists who maybe can’t be shown to support these evils and injustices directly but can certainly be imagined to be doing so in some abstract and indirect way—well, that strikes me as far-fetched. It also strikes me as dangerously misguided, since it’s not like scholars, or anyone else, ever needed any extra encouragement to imagine people who disagree with them being guilty of some grave moral offense. We’re naturally tempted to do that as it is.

Part of becoming a good scholar—part of becoming a grownup—is learning to live with people whose beliefs are different from yours, and to treat them fairly. Unless a particular scholar is openly and explicitly advocating torture, ascribing such an agenda to her is either irresponsible, if we’re unwittingly misrepresenting her, or dishonest, if we’re doing so knowingly. Arguments from imagined adverse consequences can go both ways. We could, for instance, easily write articles suggesting that Shaw is a Stalinist, or that she advocates prosecuting perpetrators of what members of the far left deem to be thought crimes. What about the consequences of encouraging suspicion of science in an age of widespread denial of climate change? Postmodern identity politics is this moment posing a threat to free speech on college campuses. And the tactics of postmodern activists begin and end with the stoking of moral outrage, so we could easily make a case that the activists are deliberately trying to instigate witch hunts. With each baseless accusation and counter-accusation, though, we’re getting farther and farther away from any meaningful inquiry, forestalling any substantive debate, and hamstringing any real moral or political progress.

Many people try to square the circle, arguing that postmodernism isn’t inherently antithetical to science, and that the supposed insights derived from postmodern scholarship ought to be assimilated somehow into science. When Thomas Huxley, the physician and biologist known as Darwin’s bulldog, said that science “commits suicide when it adopts a creed,” he was pointing out that by adhering to an ideology you’re taking its tenets for granted. Science, despite many critics’ desperate proclamations to the contrary, is not itself an ideology; science is an epistemology, a set of principles and methods for investigating nature and arriving at truths about the world. Even the most well-established of these truths, however, is considered provisional, open to potential revision or outright rejection as the methods, technologies, and theories that form the foundation of this collective endeavor advance over the generations.

In her essay, Shaw cites the results of a project attempting to replicate the findings of several seminal experiments in social psychology, counting the surprisingly low success rate as further cause for skepticism of the field. What she fails to appreciate here is that the replication project is being done by a group of scientists who are psychologists themselves, because they’re committed to honing their techniques for studying the human mind. I would imagine if Shaw’s postmodernist precursors had shared a similar commitment to assessing the reliability of their research methods, such as they are, and weighing the validity of their core tenets, then the ideology would have long since fallen out of fashion by the time she was taking up a pen to write about how scary psychologists are.  

The point Shaw's missing here is that it’s precisely this constant quest to check and recheck the evidence, refine and further refine the methods, test and retest the theories, that makes science, if not a source of superior wisdom, then still the most reliable approach to answering questions about who we are, what our place is in the universe, and what habits and policies will give us, as individuals and as citizens, the best chance to thrive and flourish. As Saul Perlmutter, one of the discoverers of dark energy, has said, “Science is an ongoing race between our inventing ways to fool ourselves, and our inventing ways to avoid fooling ourselves.” Shaw may be right that no experimental result could ever fully settle a moral controversy, but experimental results are often not just relevant to our philosophical deliberations but critical to keeping those deliberations firmly grounded in reality.

Popular relevant posts:

JUST ANOTHER PIECE OF SLEAZE: THE REAL LESSON OF ROBERT BOROFSKY'S "FIERCE CONTROVERSY"

THE IDIOCY OF OUTRAGE: SAM HARRIS'S RUN-INS WITH BEN AFFLECK AND NOAM CHOMSKY

(My essay on Greene’s book)

LAB FLIES: JOSHUA GREENE’S MORAL TRIBES AND THE CONTAMINATION OF WALTER WHITE

(My essay on Pinker’s book)

THE SELF-RIGHTEOUSNESS INSTINCT: STEVEN PINKER ON THE BETTER ANGELS OF MODERNITY AND THE EVILS OF MORALITY

(My essay on Haidt’s book)

THE ENLIGHTENED HYPOCRISY OF JONATHAN HAIDT'S RIGHTEOUS MIND

Alexander von Humboldt, Enlightenment Ambassador: a Reflection on Andrea Wulf's "The Invention of Nature"

Andrea Wulf’s 2015 biography The Invention of Nature: Alexander Von Humboldt’s New World garnered so much critical attention—nearly all of which was resoundingly positive (with the exception of Elizabeth Kolbert’s snooty and unaccountably small-minded review in The New Yorker)—that soon after I first started reading it I couldn’t help feeling underwhelmed. Wulf’s prose builds up to a stylistic flourish now and again, usually helped along with an apt quote or two from Humboldt himself, but if the earliest pages were any indication, the rest of the book promised to make for some pretty dry reading, an occasional scene of high adventure notwithstanding. After making some further headway, though, I found that Humboldt’s story was having a slowly incremental effect on me, as all the best stories do, of cumulative enchantment.

No more than about a third of the way in, I’d learned to appreciate Wulf’s writing, which now seemed not so much dry as scholarly, in the best sense of the term, sober and precise, but never fussily academic. I ended up reading most of the book in prolonged bouts culminating in eye strain coupled with an urge to venture out into some unmapped wilderness.

By the time of Humboldt’s death in 1859, just months before the publication of Origin of Species, historical currents in his native Prussia and elsewhere around the world were sweeping the various fields of science along in the direction of ever greater specialization. But Humboldt’s career followed a wholly separate course, and his writings would form the headwaters for a few currents of their own, less traveled and far less conspicuous perhaps, but evident to anyone taking the time to step back and savor a more panoramic view of scientific progress.

In his autobiography On the Move, the late neurologist, author, and science enthusiast Oliver Sacks describes Humboldt’s moment in history as a “sweet, unspoiled, preprofessional atmosphere, ruled by a sense of adventure and wonder rather than by egoism and a lust for priority and fame” (330). That same sense of adventure and wonder probably still launches innumerable careers today, but it too seldom survives the travails of graduate training and the harsh realities within the institutional bureaucracy most scientists are daily forced to negotiate. For these erstwhile budding explorers, there could probably be few greater delights than being reminded of the earliest upwellings of the passion that would lend shape to their lives, and books like The Invention of Nature offer a welcome opportunity to reconnect with that font of inspiration which, in more innocent and uncomplicated times, set them on the path.

            Ironically, though, Humboldt himself would have scoffed at the suggestion that he lived in a time when scientists could forgo petty politicking and pleading for funds. Though he was born to a wealthy family, he began his career as a mine inspector because his mother saw no practical benefit in financing any of the journeys to far-flung regions he was so eager to embark upon. It was only after her death that he finally traveled, at the age of 27, to South America for the expedition that would make him famous all over the world, but not before costing him nearly all of his inheritance. For a second act, Humboldt planned to climb the Himalayas, where he could compare measurements he’d made in other mountain ranges in various regions, most notably in the Andes. But this expedition would never take place because the East India Company was all too familiar with Humboldt’s widely read condemnations of Spanish colonial rule in his writings about South America. Not until he was nearly in his sixties would he finally go on one more journey of exploration, this time through Russia as far as the Mongolian border. He died back in his hometown of Berlin, though, after living for years on a generous stipend granted to him by the king, in exchange for which he was made to take on, much to his annoyance, the duties of a courtier.

This isn’t to say that Humboldt’s life was entirely without anything that might satisfy our modern nostalgia for the romantic adventures of bygone eras. What you discover reading about his journeys, though, is that the sense of almost spiritual exultation he experienced at various points during his travels was as much a product of his unique view of the natural world and its inhabitants as it was of the actual places he explored and the people he met there. In his mid-twenties, Humboldt was greatly influenced by his impassioned exchanges with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who was in turn greatly influenced by Humboldt. The two were introduced at Alexander’s older brother Wilhelm’s house in the small university town of Jena in 1794.

Today, Goethe is a towering figuring in German literature, but he was also an avid student of philosophy and science. Though the arts and sciences are Balkanized in modern universities, Goethe saw each as a path to greater understanding of the other. As Wulf explains,

Goethe insisted that objective truth could only be attained by combining subjective experiences (through the perception of the eye, for example) with the observer’s power of reasoning. “The senses do not deceive,” Goethe declared, “it is judgment that deceives.”  

This growing emphasis on subjectivity began radically to change Humboldt’s thinking. It was the time in Jena that moved him from purely empirical research towards his own interpretation of nature—a concept that brought together exact scientific data with an emotional response to what he was seeing. Humboldt had long believed the importance of close observation and rigorous measurements—firmly embracing Enlightenment methods—but now he also began to appreciate individual perception and subjectivity. Only a few years previously, he had admitted that “vivid phantasy confuses me,” but now he came to believe that imagination was as necessary as rational thought in order to understand the natural world. “Nature must be experienced through feeling,” Humboldt wrote to Goethe, insisting that those who wanted to describe the world by simply classifying plants, animals and rocks “will never get close to it.” (36)

What we tend to forget today, however, is that most Europeans of the 18th and early 19th centuries had no desire to get close to nature, which to them represented an absence of all that was Godly and civilized. The natural world was something to be brought to heel, tamed, cultivated, its bounty mercilessly extracted to optimize yields and maximize profits. Nature as a source of beauty and a place of refuge, as we’re more apt to see it today, was a revolutionary idea, one that would be further promulgated by some of Humboldt’s most renowned followers like Henry David Thoreau and John Muir. 

            Today, it’s much easier to imagine nature as so many gently meandering streams cascading from mountaintops overlooking scenic vistas, because we’re seldom at the mercy of a region’s climate or native inhabitants. Wulf writes about how “Humboldt wished that he had a ‘third hand’ to fend off the mosquitoes,” as he traveled along the Amazon collecting specimens and taking measurements, because “he always felt that he had to drop either his sextant or a leaf” (69). With all these first-hand experiences, his vision of the natural world was more complicated than the idylls we can’t help envisioning whenever we see pictures of places like Yosemite or Victoria Falls. Yet the connection between our environment and our inner state was unmistakable. He would go on to explore this relationship in depth in books written some time after his journeys in South America. Wulf writes,

In Views of Nature Humboldt showed how nature could have an influence on people’s imagination. Nature, he wrote, was in a mysterious communication with our “inner feelings.” A clear blue sky, for example, triggers different emotions than a heavy blanket of dark clouds. Tropical scenery, densely filled with banana and palm trees, has a different effect than an open forest of white-stemmed slender birches. What we might take for granted today—that there is a correlation between the external world and our mood—was a revelation the Humboldt’s readers. Poets had engaged with such ideas but never a scientist. (133)

Humboldt was more open to investigating this type of communion than his fellow scientists because, as his brother once said of him, his mind was made “to connect ideas, to detect chains of things” (87), but also because, largely inspired by Goethe, connections between seemingly discrete forces and elements were exactly what he’d set out on his expedition to discover.

            Humboldt came to appreciate these connections as never before atop Mount Chimborazo, an inactive volcano a hundred miles south of Quito in what is today the country of Ecuador. This climb would represent a turning point in Humboldt’s life, an experience that both Wulf’s biography and his own writings return to frequently. Having reached an altitude of 19,143 feet—a mere 1,000 feet from the peak—Humboldt took in his surroundings. Wulf writes,

As he stood that day on Chimborazo, Humboldt absorbed what lay in front of him while his mind reached back to all the plants, rock formations and measurements that he had seen and taken on the slopes of the Alps, the Pyrenees and in Tenerife. Everything that he had ever observed fell into place. Nature, Humboldt realized, was a web of life and a global force. He was, a colleague later said, the first to understand that everything was interwoven as with “a thousand threads.” This new idea of nature was to change the way people understood the world. (87)

This concept of interconnectedness broke with the tradition of such figures as Carl Linnaeus, who saw the world as more like a complex timekeeping device. Following Goethe, Humboldt was now seeing the earth as a living organism. The parts of one watch are interchangeable with those of another, but each part of an organism grows along with all its other parts; you can’t remove or replace one without impacting all the others.

            What likely stands as Humboldt’s biggest scientific discovery emerges from this more holistic way of thinking about the world. On the lookout for hidden connections all throughout his journeys in South America, he compared whatever he saw, as systematically as he could, with what he’d observed during his travels through Europe. In the process, he became the first to notice a pattern; the various plants growing at different altitudes resembled those at similar altitudes on mountains in distant parts of the world, and they also corresponded with plants at particular latitudes of the globe. Wulf explains,

For Humboldt, the days they had spent travelling from Quito and then climbing up Chimborazo had been like a botanical journey that moved from the Equator towards the poles—with the whole plant world seemingly layered on top of each other as the vegetation zones ascended the mountain. The plant groups ranged from the tropical species down in the valleys to the lichens that he had encountered near the snow line. Towards the end of his life, Humboldt often talked about understanding nature from ‘a higher point of view’ from which those connections could be seen; the moment when he had realized this was here, on Chimborazo. With ‘a single glance’, he saw the whole of nature laid out before him. (88)

What Humboldt was describing are what we now call isotherms, bands across the globe where similar climates lead to similar types of vegetation. Just as climate varies with distance from the equator, it also varies with distance from sea level. “Instead of placing plants in their taxonomic categories,” Wulf emphasizes, “he saw vegetation through the lens of climate and location” (89).

            This marked the beginning of our investigations into what one of Humboldt’s acolytes, Ernst Haeckel, would coin the term ecosystem to describe. Even more revolutionary than Humboldt’s idea that all aspects of nature are organically interconnected was his insistence that humans must be incorporated into these systems as well. The unsettling implication was that by cultivating land and harvesting its resources, people were setting in motion a cascade of consequences that could be devastating over time.

By then, Humboldt had already documented evidence of this kind of environmental degradation at Lake Valencia in what’s today northwestern Venezuela. Farmers had felled countless trees to clear the surrounding land, and they’d diverted several of the streams feeding into the lake to irrigate their crops. In only a few decades, the dense forests surrounding Lake Valencia had disappeared, the water level had declined dramatically, and already the soil was depleted. The planters’ response was to continually move their fields westward. “Forest very decimated” (57), Humboldt noted in his diary. He even went on to speculate about how the same type of deforestation all over the world could lead to unforeseen and possibly dramatic transformations. “As Humboldt described how humankind was changing the climate,” Wulf contends, “he unwittingly became the father of the environmental movement” (58).

It wasn’t merely for his environmentalism, however, that generations of readers would come to idolize him. The Invention of Nature tracks the major events of Humboldt’s life in mostly chronological order, with chapters focusing on important periods in his career interspersed with chapters on some of the scientists, artists, environmentalists, and revolutionaries who took up one or another of his myriad mantels. While this approach to organizing the biography results in some repetitiveness, it also lays bare the remarkable similarities among all of these men’s lives. You might even say a biographical template emerges from all the juxtapositions: the solitary youth of the misunderstood misfit romantic, the worryingly intense passion for nature, the wanderlust leading to a perilous but fateful adventure, the earthshaking epiphany whose reverberations can still be felt after over a century. The Darwins, the Thoreaus, the Bolivars, the Muirs—all variations on the same set of themes.

             Yet, despite her emphasis on Humboldt’s heroic stature among his many followers, Wulf’s portrayal leaves plenty of space for her subject’s less than admirable characteristics. He was a legendary speaker and lecturer, for instance, but he often couldn’t shut his mouth to save his life. Wulf recounts a famous anecdote in which Humboldt invited a celebrated pianist to play for a gathering at his house, only to shout over the music as he lectured to the audience. (“‘It was a duet,’ the pianist said, ‘which I did not sustain long’” [238].) But one of the most pleasant surprises to be found in The Invention of Nature is just how admirably humanistic this early nineteenth century Enlightenment figure was. Beginning in his early days as a mine inspector, Humboldt showed great concern for the safety and working conditions of the men he encountered, and he would be even more appalled by the treatment he witnessed of indigenous peoples in South America. Wulf writes,

For Humboldt colonialism and slavery were basically one and the same, interwoven with man’s relationship to nature and the exploitation of natural resources. When the Spanish, but also the North American colonists, had introduced sugar, cotton, indigo and coffee to their territories, they had also brought slavery. In Cuba, for example, Humboldt had seen how ‘every drop of sugarcane juice cost blood and groans.’ Slavery arrived in the wake of what the Europeans ‘call their civilization’, Humboldt said, and their ‘thirst for wealth’. (106)

Especially since World War II and the coming to light of atrocities committed by Nazi scientists, many scholars have come to see science and the Enlightenment more broadly as inseparable from the worst excesses of racist colonialism. For the modern reader, it may be a shock to learn about an early scientific explorer who wasn’t given to discounting the humanity of anyone whose ancestors weren’t European, having instead imagined some wandering sadist performing experiments with arcane instruments resembling miniaturized medieval torture devices, cutting and poking whatever parts and appendages got in the way of fitting all of humankind neatly into the racial hierarchy. Humboldt was instead such a devotee of Enlightenment principles that he felt the failure of The French Revolution to establish a lasting republic and the persistence of slavery in the U.S. as crushing disappointments all throughout the latter part of his life.

            It’s easy for postmodernists today to imagine that their concern for the racially and economically disadvantaged sprang into life sui generis as a reaction to the inherently oppressive forces of history. But the principles that have proven most effective in combatting injustice, those constituting our modern conviction that human rights are universal, in reality find their source in the same Enlightenment stream as the scientific principles that have so radically transformed our civilization over the centuries, the same stream, incidentally, out of which flows the environmentalist principles underlying our determination to deliver the planet safely into the hands of future generations.

The lessons of history often highlight the smugness and complacency with which we view our forebears. With all the amenities our technological advancement affords us the luxury of taking for granted, along with all the ready knowledge that seems so obvious soon after someone else provides it for us, we can’t help feeling superior to people from earlier periods. Yet we also can’t help feeling nostalgic for a time when our precious maps had yet to be drawn, our revolutionary breakthroughs had yet to be made, and our moral advances had yet to be accomplished. As Sacks wrote about Humboldt and some of his earliest followers,

They were all, in a sense, amateurs—self-educated, self-motivated, not part of any institution—and they lived, it sometimes seemed to me, in a halcyon world, a sort of Eden, not yet turbulent and troubled by the almost murderous rivalries which were soon to mark an increasingly professionalized world. (330)

By the time he wrote these lines, Sacks was probably well aware of all the diseases and all the wars—all the truly murderous rivalries between nations and men—that were ravaging the world during Humboldt’s lifetime. I like to think too that Sacks may have had an inkling that to many of his readers he was himself a modern reincarnation based on the same template which harks back to that halcyon world. The reality, we know too well, was far more complicated, to be sure. But Humboldt’s age wasn’t entirely unworthy of our romantic longing for a time of innocent exploration fueled by our ever-so-human sense of adventure—no more than our own anyway. 

Popular posts like this:

OLIVER SACKS’S GRAPHOPHILIA AND OTHER COMPENSATIONS FOR A LIFE LIVED “ON THE MOVE”

Percy Fawcett’s 2 Lost Cities

The Legend of Creepy Santa

         “Who was the craziest woman you ever dated?”

That’s how it started. That’s what inspired Nate to tell our group of frustrated writers what is probably the creepiest Christmas story I’ve ever heard—and that was how the discussion had begun, with each of us trying to come up with ideas for something to write about for the Christmas season. 

The air in Rob’s apartment that night was thick with everyone’s mutual disdain. Ben, Carrie, and Luke were taking turns scowling over a flame as it bowed down to a generously packed bowl they were passing around amongst themselves, each of their choked-back exhalations contributing to the insalubrious stickiness of the air. We were divided into equal groups, one stoned, the other drunk, and the drunk ones kept casting barely disguised looks of disgust at the stoned ones, who each in turn affected a pose bespeaking more supercilious boredom than any stoned person has any cause to feel. Sipping from a glass of whiskey myself, I almost wished we had some yayo. At least then we might have some real drama to inspire us.

Everyone likes meeting at Rob’s because he has a nice fireplace, and no matter how modern or postmodern a writer tries to be he can’t help being nostalgic for an age when the novel was actually novel, longing for the nineteenth century and all the accoutrements of society’s higher orders. Even the two women in our little group thought of themselves as rightful heirs to scotch-swirling, cigar-smoking aristocrats, milling about in the dancing orange light of the hearth in some preposterously outsize manor.

            We’d started talking about Christmas stories because it was late November. (I may have been the one who steered the discussion toward seasonally appropriate stories, but I would’ve done it subtly, since my role in the publications for Encounters, Inc. is something only a few of my closest friends know about.) We’d discussed Dickens of course. Then we’d taken turns taking our principled stances against the commercial dreck of the sort you find on racks in grocery store aisles.

Beneath the surface of all this casual self-assurance, though, I knew there to be a shared sense of disillusionment and failure. Six years after forming our group we were all still eagerly awaiting the moment when even one of us managed to make the tiniest ripple in the publishing world—the actual publishing world. This meeting was our first in over four months. For the first four years we’d met every two weeks. Over the last two, our collective output had diminished precipitously. A couple of us haven’t submitted a single piece of writing to the rest of the group in over a year. (My own efforts have been directed elsewhere, as many of you well know.)

            Gathered around that fireplace in Rob’s hazy and stiflingly overheated apartment, we all looked at each other and saw living, breathing emblems of our own failure, never for a moment suspecting our unvoiced creeping disdain was more for ourselves than anyone else. You felt it when Kristen barked out a laugh in the middle of Luke’s ranting about the “vacuity of the visionless visual media culture.” You saw it in the way Rob turned away during Mike’s peroration on the injustice of this or that middling writer going without some much deserved recognition, like he didn’t want anyone to catch him rolling his eyes. Lately, you heard it in the silence, as though none of us would condescend to contribute anything more substantive than a mumbled witticism.

            “Well,” Luke said, “if we’ve established anything, it’s that nearly all the Christmas stories out there suck ass.”

            Just then, the similarity of the scene to the opening of James’s Turn of the Screw occurred to me. I was about to suggest perhaps narrowing our focus to Christmas ghost stories—again Dickens lent plenty of legitimacy to the genre—when Justin, who till then had barely spoken that night, made a provocative suggestion of his own.

            “Let’s try coming at it from a different angle,” he said. “Let’s try asking ourselves a completely unrelated question and see if it sparks any new associations that might be worth pursuing. Every year at Christmas, I find myself thinking about this crazy girl I dated like ten years ago. She was obsessed with Christmas, wanted to go to every event in the city, watch all the classic movies, had the music on constantly. I mean, it was annoying. It was beyond annoying—it was freaky. I started thinking maybe something traumatic had happened to her, so now she was latching onto the season because it brought her back to a time before things had gone so wrong. I don’t know. I never really found out either way. Anyway, I could start to write a story based on that. So here’s what we should do. Stop trying to think of a Christmas story for now, and instead answer this: Who was the craziest woman you ever dated? Or for you two, who was the craziest man?”

            “What makes you think I haven’t dated crazy women too?” Kristen snipped.

            “Whatever. You get the idea.”

            The two glared at each other for a long moment, making me wonder if something had transpired between them that the rest of us weren’t privy to. Before I could remark on it though, Nate broke in with a sudden booming laugh. “Ha! I’ve got a fucking Christmas story,” he said. “It’s so obvious. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before. It’s totally Christmas. And it’s one of the most fucked up stories you’ll ever hear.”

            All five of us were looking at him now. At first, he was smiling broadly, the eureka smile of the suddenly unblocked writer. Then his smile faded and he looked as though he’d arrived at a troubling, even painful conclusion in some untraveled corner of his thoughts. “God, I don’t know, though. I don’t know if I should tell that story.” He began shaking his head slowly.

            Carrie groaned dramatically. “Something interesting seemed about to happen for once in these boring ass meetings, and now you’re not going to let us hear about it. I don’t even know why I come anymore.”

            It was the most openly disdainful any of us had been, though we all felt the same way. Before anyone could respond to it, though, Justin approached Nate, put a hand on his shoulder, and said in a solemn tone, “If you feel like telling this story would be revealing too much, then that’s exactly the story you need to tell.”

Now there’s some writer’s logic, I thought. I bet there are some people who’ve had writers in their lives who would bristle at this particular maxim. Nate looked around the room. His expression was now one of unmistakable panic. Then he closed his eyes, bowed his head, and turned back toward the fire. When he began speaking, his voice was low, scarcely more than a whisper.

            “Everyone in West Central knows the Santa playing the organ,” he said. “It’s in this little balcony over the front door of the house catty-corner to the Sheridan Court apartment building. All you see when you pass by is Santa’s back, kind of swaying side-to-side. If you’re on foot you can hear there’s actually music playing.”

            We all knew the Santa he was talking about.

“Honestly,” I said, “that thing creeps me out. I go for walks around the neighborhood all the time, and I always get a chill down my spine when I pass it. The organ music reminds me of a circus. There’s just something bizarre about it. And the fact that Santa is sitting facing away from you so you can’t see his face—I can’t help imagining he’s actually got some psycho grin on his face, like some demon-clown. I mean, I think it’s great. But I seriously doubt that’s the effect the people who live there were going for.”

            “Well,” Nate said, “the people there now aren’t even the ones who originally started putting it up every year. If you remember, it wasn’t there last year.” We all looked at each other and nodded, each of us having taken scant notice of the organist Santa’s absence and then promptly let it slip our minds. “That’s because the new people had just moved in, and they had to be talked into continuing the tradition.”

            “Wait,” I said. “So you dated a woman who lived there? I only ever saw an older guy coming and going from that place.”

            “That was Carl’s dad. Carl bought the place from him a few years earlier. I think his dad was still helping him with some kind of renovations for a long time, so he was there a lot. I don’t know. I’ve never actually seen the inside of the place.”

            Nate went silent. His reluctance to speak, his halting progression—it was unbearably tantalizing for all of us.

            “So who was the girl?” I finally asked. Nate’s demeanor as he nibbled around the edges of his story had me wondering already if what he was about to tell us could be of use to me professionally (in my capacity as story scout for Ashley).

            “The girl was Erica,” he said. “I met her through my friend at school, Bethany. She told me I had to meet this girl who was really pretty and really smart, but who was also stuck with this horrendous boyfriend. A guy who was really possessive and overbearing, not violent or anything, but—what’s the word? Controlling. He was really controlling. In a passive-aggressive kind of way. Later, I found out the guy she was talking about was Carl. They were living together in the big red-brick house with the Santa playing the organ.”

            I was anxious to get more details, but I managed to restrain myself from barraging him with questions. The way Nate had become elated when Justin’s prompt succeeded in helping him think of an idea, only to sink into the somber, neurotically contemplative state he was in now—it had me reviewing all my encounters with him over the past year. Originally, he’d been one of our most active members. I wouldn’t say he was the most talented of our group, but he was a solid amateur who could usually be counted on for a passably competent story. Over the past year, though, he’d only submitted one piece that I could think of, an overstrained prose poem about how trapped he felt in his hometown. Still, I don’t think I was alone in failing to note any change he’d undergone. Hadn’t the whole damn group lost its enthusiasm?

            When at last Nate snapped out of his reverie, his eyes darted, first at me and then onto the others. “Seriously guys,” he said, “I can’t tell this story. Carl’s dad—I shouldn’t have even brought up any of their names. Carl’s dad has a lot of money and he knows a lot of people who…” He trailed off again.

            “Who what?” I asked. “You mean like politicians?”

            “Something like that. There’s a reason none of it was in the news. If I say anything…” He groaned, shaking his head again. Then he laughed nervously before falling silent once more as he stared into the fire, which by now was mostly embers, barely casting any light.

I began forming a plan to meet with him in private so I could give him all the assurances he’d need to share the story. After all, I know some people too. But apparently the urge to unburden himself was busy overpowering whatever trepidation he felt. Without any further coaxing, Nate told us the story.

“Erica told me that when she and Carl had first started dating she was really big into Christmas. So when he invited her to move in with him, she was stoked. She was like, ‘Holy shit, I can’t believe I’m going to be living in the house with the Santa playing his organ.’ I guess Carl’s parents always went all out decorating and all too—obviously. But Erica said Carl himself really wasn’t that into it until he found out she was. Then he took it to an extreme, like he was so eager to please her that it actually got a little disturbing.

“That was the theme for their whole relationship. He was overly solicitous, intrusive—you know, meddlesome. But he acted like it was all for her sake. He interrogated her whenever she left the house. He always tried to find out what she was reading so he could read it too. It was the same with movies and music and everything else. He tried to do everything for her, like she was his delicate little flower. I guess he even spoke to her like a toddler half the time. When I first heard about all this, I thought it was just the kind of stuff you say about an ex when you’re breaking up, figuring it had to be exaggeration. But Bethany told me if anything it was worse than what I was hearing from Erica.

“That was the story I got, that Erica had broken up with Carl—or that she was ‘going through a breakup.’ I had all the reservations any of you would have about moving in on a woman so soon after her last relationship. I mean, she was obviously still living in the house with the poor idiot. But there was something about Erica that I felt really drawn to, a quietness that made me think there were much greater depths to her. I don’t know. Plus Bethany kept insisting we were perfect for each other and that things were completely over between her and her ex.

“I’m embarrassed to say it went on pretty much just like that for about three months. Looking back, I can see that the whole notion that she was breaking up was nothing but a convenient cover. No, we were cheating, plain and simple. Only neither of us wanted to believe it. So one night I get a text from her. I remember it was right after Thanksgiving. Erica had just gotten back to town after going to visit her parents in Grand Rapids. But she said Carl was still in South Bend with his family. Since he wouldn’t be back until late the next night, she wanted to get outside. ‘I want to go for a really long walk through the neighborhood,’ she said. ‘And maybe we can go downtown too. I just want to be outside in the cold and look at all the Christmas decorations.’

“Well, that’s what we did. We bundled up and walked around West Central, over on Main Street as far as the big Santa and his reindeer, down to the giant wreath. We walked for hours, talking about our best and worst Christmas memories from when we were kids, and about what we would want Christmas to be like for our own kids someday. As we were walking back, I felt this thrill—it was like a ball of tension in my stomach. I thought for sure we were passing some milestone in our relationship. I was even starting to wonder if I should ask her to move in with me, even though until then I’d hated the idea of her moving out of Carl’s house directly into my apartment. Anyway, I felt like something had changed between us.

“We walked down Berry Street holding hands, both of us with these stupid grins on our faces like we were a couple of kids who’d just raided the cookie jar. When we got to the front of their house, Erica did this ta-dah, saying, ‘And now we come to West Central’s famous Santa Claus playing his organ.’ For me, that was the first time the thing creeped me out. I don’t know if it was just the significance it had taken on—the only thing I could think about when I looked at it was how Carl had decided he was all about Christmas just because Erica was. Or maybe it was my conscience. I knew I was about to take her away from him, and however weird he sounded to me it wasn’t like I could fucking rejoice in causing anyone so much heartbreak. Maybe it was the cold. Whatever it was, I shuddered as I stood there. But then Erica pulled me to her for a kiss.

“It was one of those times when you’re with a woman and everything feels so perfect you just have to do something. I wanted to tell her I loved her. I wanted to ask her to move in with me. Hell, I wished I could pick her up and carry her away from that place back to my house. We kissed for a long time, and I was thinking the whole time that as soon as she pulled away I would do it, whatever it was. But then I heard something.

“We’d been making out with quite a bit of abandon, you know, right in the middle of the damn sidewalk. So you can imagine how any sound would startle you in that situation. We pulled away from each other a bit, but we just stood there with our eyes still locked on each other. I think I probably still had a grin on my face. Not Erica though. Erica looked terrified. The sound was like this gravely, staccato rumbling at first. Then it started to sound like someone was mumbling. We both turned toward the house. When I realized that the sound was someone laughing—laughing like he was trying to scare us—that’s when it dawned on me why she looked so terrified. But when we looked at the front of the house there was no one there.

“Now I’m a grown man and I’ve never been big on all that Halloween, haunted-house type of shit. But in all of my adult life I’ve never felt the kind of—I don’t even know what to call it. It wasn’t fear, not like the kind you feel when you almost get into an accident in your car, or when you think you’re about to get jumped coming out of a bar. It was a completely different kind of fear, like you’re in the presence of something that’s just not right. Shivers shot all through my body in like a second or two. My limbs felt shaky and weightless. I wasn’t charged up, you know. I didn’t even want to run. All I could do was stand there, every inch of my skin tingling.

“So now I’m looking up at the damn Santa, and the fucker is turning around with this big fucked up smile on his face, still doing his evil laugh. I swear the psycho must’ve rehearsed it. Then Erica mutters to me, ‘You should go.’ So I’m standing there thinking, I’m not going to leave you here with this freak. Before I say anything, though, Carl starts clapping, with his big Santa gloves, making this damn popping sound that echoes off of Sheridan Court. ‘It’s a Christmas miracle,’ he shouts like he wants to be heard all over the neighborhood. ‘True love—how amazing. How beautiful.’ Now he’s sitting on the bench, clenching his hands together in front of his heart like this, still with the big smile, titling his head to the side. Then he turns off the smile and glares at us. He says, ‘You two have been awfully naughty this year.’ I’ve got to hand it to the nutjob—he definitely went all out.

“Next thing he does is throw his leg over the side of the balcony and start climbing down. Erica must’ve sensed that now I actually was getting ready for a fight because she grabbed me by my coat and said, ‘Please trust me. Let me take care of this. Please, the best thing you can do right now is go.’ Of course I was all, ‘Like hell I’m leaving you with him!’ But she was adamant. She kept pushing me away. I looked over and saw Carl struggling to climb down. He must’ve had a rope or something on the side of the balcony. And he didn’t look like he was in very good shape. I half expected him to fall and break his neck. The whole time Erica was pushing me, saying, ‘I’ll be fine. He won’t hurt me. Please, you being here just makes it worse.’

“Finally, I start walking away really slow, looking back the whole time to see what he would do. But she went over to him and as soon as he had both feet on the ground they disappeared through the front door. So what the fuck do you do? I thought about going back and listening at a window or something. I thought about calling the cops. Hell, the guy obviously belonged in a padded cell somewhere. Eventually, I went back and stood in front of the house, listening for shouts or crashing noises or anything. After a while, though, all I could do was go home.

“After that, I kept blowing up her phone, but she wouldn’t respond. I’ll never forget that stretch of time. It was torture having no idea what was going on like that. I called Bethany but she hadn’t heard anything either. It wasn’t for like two weeks until she was finally able to tell me that she’d talked to Erica and she seemed fine. Apparently she said I was blowing everything out of proportion and that what really happened wasn’t that big of a deal. I was shocked. I mean, how many ways are there to interpret seeing a guy dress up like fucking Santa Claus to catch you making out with his girlfriend? I kept pestering her, though, trying to convince her to see me, even though it was obvious whatever plan I had to take things to the next stage with her were moot now.

“What I didn’t know when I finally did see Erica was that Bethany had been putting a lot of pressure on her too. This was about three weeks after Carl’s… whatever. We were supposed to have lunch together. I’d been insisting—pretty much demanding that we needed to talk. But it ended up going down in the alley downtown behind Dash-In. I don’t think she wanted to go inside because she was afraid someone might see us and report back to Carl. Right away she told me she wanted some time to figure out what she needed to do. I couldn’t help myself, you know. Those two weeks I’d been going out of my mind with confusion and worry. ‘What you need to do?’ I said. ‘What you need to do is get as far away from that psychopath as you can.’ ‘Maybe,’ she said, ‘but what I definitely don’t need is another fucking man telling me what I need to do.’

Nate stood silently jabbing with the poker at the embers in the fireplace for a long time before going on. “I went off on her,” he said at last. “I wasn’t in my right mind, you know. And I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I couldn’t believe she was staying with him. Unless of course he was threatening her, holding her hostage basically. She insisted he wasn’t. I accused her of defending him, said she must have battered wife syndrome or something. I’m cringing just thinking about that day. I said a lot of really nasty shit. And to think—on the way to Dash-In I had still been planning to tell her I loved her. But I guess she was right. I must’ve sounded almost just like that nutcase. What I remember most is that when it was over and I turned to walk back to my car, I said, ‘Have fun being a fucking doormat for the rest of your life.’

He went silent again, though it was clear the story wasn’t over yet. As I thumbed the phone in my pocket to pause the recording, I thought about how many of the stories I’d been collecting over the past few years featured moments like the one Nate had just told us about. Looking around the room, I wondered if the real problem for our whole group is that fiction—pure fiction—simply holds no interest to anyone anymore. Who cares about a guy getting visits from three ghosts if the whole thing is nothing but make-believe? That’s why we’d all been reviewing memories of our actual lives, trying to find some real-life incident that would make for a good story. People want their narratives to be authentic, at least in some sense true. Or, if not, they’d better have wizards and dragons in them.

The problem is that true stories always involve other people, and everyone disagrees about which version is the most valid. You can’t blame them, I thought. As much as Nate is beating himself up over how he acted and what he said, he’s still telling a story about a woman who’s a doormat, isn’t he? Not many of us possess the self-assurance to sit idly by as someone else puts forth a story that stars us but that we have no control over. You change the names (and in this case expunge all of the physical descriptions), but reputations are so sensitive, and people get so paranoid, the obfuscation as often as not only leads to more suspicion and indignation. People hate hearing the sound of their own voice in a recording because they have no control over how they sound in real time. They hate hearing someone else tell a story they feel is theirs and theirs alone to tell even more. To write good stories that people are actually interested in anymore, you have to be as much a thief as a storyteller.

“It was Christmas Eve,” Nate began again, “when I heard from Bethany. She said Erica and Carl had gotten into a huge fight—apparently over her insufficient enthusiasm for his excessive efforts to make her Christmas unforgettable. I never got the details about what all he did. I can only imagine it was something totally batshit. But here’s the thing—Erica had told Bethany that she was finally ready to leave him. I guess the argument had really escalated. Bethany said she’d never heard Erica sound like that before. This was basically good news, but I was worried about her. I thought the best thing to do was wait a while. With any luck, Erica would get in touch with me and we could go from there. According to Bethany, though, Erica actually wanted me to come see her. She’d said she needed to talk to me. So I texted her. And she responded right away, asking when I could make it over to her house.

“When I walked up to that fucking house on the sidewalk, I saw that she was already outside waiting for me. And Bethany was right—she looked different somehow. Just the way she was standing. I don’t know how to describe it. All I know is that my heart sank as I walked up to her because my intuition told me I wasn’t about to hear any profession of love. If anything, I was about to get told off. But as I approached, she turned and smiled at me and reached out for my hands. I was so relieved I almost felt like crying. I remember she kissed me and I wrapped her up in this big hug, lifting her off the sidewalk. It was one of those experiences that’s like an eternity in the span of a few moments. I had the thought again that I should hold onto her and just walk carrying her like that all the way back to my apartment.

“I asked her where Carl was, and as soon as his name passed my lips I involuntarily shot a glance over at that fucking Santa Claus. She said, ‘I can honestly say I won’t ever have to deal with any of that man’s shit ever again.’ I drew back a little, still holding onto her. Something about the way she was looking at me, or something I’d seen—I didn’t know what it was—started to give me that feeling again, like my heart stopped beating and my blood went cold. Her eyes were locked on mine, and they had this sparkle to them. I would have thought it was like this loving gaze, but there was something off about the way she was smiling at me. I let go of her and stepped away. It was that same horrible feeling, like my limbs were hanging weightless and my skin was on the verge of breaking into a cold sweat. I took another step backwards, and then another, and the whole time she just kept looking at me, with that damn smile fixed in place.

“I think I muttered her name. ‘Erica?’ And, still smiling, she was like, ‘Do you like the modifications I’ve made to the Christmas decorations this year?’ It’s like everything after that point was only a dream. Everything went perfectly silent, except my heart. It started beating again. But I couldn’t hear it so much as just feel it. I turned and looked at the Santa Claus again. Before I knew what I was doing, I had run up to the front of the house to try and get a better look at its face. I stood there staring at it—until something fucking ricocheted of its head. It was a rock or a log or—I don’t know. I never found out. When it hit him, I actually fucking screamed. Erica had thrown whatever it was and hit him right in the head, knocking him over sideways so he slumped over the rail, his vacant eyes staring right at me.

“I had my hand over my mouth and I felt myself backing away slowly, as if I didn’t want her to see me moving. But I kept staring at him—at those fucking dead eyes—even as she marched up to the front door. When she pulled the latch and opened the door, that’s when I finally looked down at her. She stopped before going inside, turned toward me, and said, ‘You can tell Bethany how grateful I am to you both. I really doubt I’d have ever been able to overcome my problem with being a fucking doormat without you two. Merry Christmas asshole. Now get the fuck out of my yard.’” 

More stories like this:

ENCOUNTERS, INC.

THE FIRE HOARDER

THE TREE CLIMBER: A STORY INSPIRED BY W.S. MERWIN

DERAILED: A REFLECTION ON DATING, DOGS, AND FAMILY

Derailed: A Reflection on Dating, Dogs, and Family

            I put the car in park after pulling into Kevin’s driveway. Tonight was supposed to have been a return to the drunken glory of the summer before last, the months following his divorce. But it was a cold and rainy night in October, and none of the three bars we’d checked out looked at all promising. I’d warned him this might be the case, but he was determined to get out and make something happen. For close to a year now, he’d been dating Susan, and for all that time he’d been repeating his litany of reasons for not wanting to be in a serious relationship with her, or with anyone else. Then came an invitation for him to have dinner with her parents. He made it clear how little the idea appealed to him. So she decided they shouldn’t see each other anymore. He casually agreed. Over the past week, however, I’ve seen and heard enough to know that neither of them is finding it as easy to walk away as they’re both trying to make out. They’re playing the old game of breakup chicken—testing to see who can withstand the self-imposed misery the longest. Hence his determination to get out to the bars for a night of unencumbered fun, and hence his disappointment now.

            Since his divorce two years ago, Kevin has taken to fervidly disparaging the married life. You can’t be yourself in a marriage, he insists. The way he sees it, all the men in his life are being stymied and suffocated, just like he had been for those eleven years with his wife—and they don’t even realize it, just as he didn’t. The willing confinement and constant stifling inevitably narrow a man’s perspective to the most miniscule of apertures. Your whole life becomes effortful, forced. You have no energy and no time for pursuing your old passions. Women’s nature and desires are too bizarre, too overbearing, too irrational to be compatible with men’s nature and desires. Once we give in and settle down, once we compromise and allow ourselves to be trapped, we begin a slow but inexorable process of forfeiting everything that makes us viable individuals, everything that makes life worth living, everything that makes us men. As we sit side-by-side listening to rain beat half-heartedly against the windshield, he repeats these sentiments once again, interspersing them amid complaints about the unreasonableness of Susan’s request for him to meet the parents she’s given so little indication of even liking herself. I know what he’s doing because I’ve done it myself once or twice. He’s reciting his motivations for keeping to a course that’s getting increasingly difficult to keep to.

Kevin had decided to divorce his wife a year and a half ago, after they both met up with me and an old friend in Nevada. While we were all there together, we did the standard Vegas thing for one night, but most of the trip was devoted to visiting national parks: Zion, Red Rock, Valley of Fire. The whole trip, he would later tell me, his wife was irritable, tetchy, impossible to please. He felt the full force of a familiar realization as he’d never felt it before: he would be enjoying the trip much more if his wife hadn’t accompanied him.

And so it was with the rest of his life. Kelly, the friend I was traveling with, is a lot like me in that she’s an uncompromising free spirit—though she’s more the free spirit and I’m probably the more uncompromising. In the two of us, Kevin began seeing a model for what life could be like. Kelly and I have both had our share of heartbreak, but now that we’re free of those old entanglements there seems to be nothing holding us back. It must look as though we’re both far better off. To Kevin, it must also look as though we’re both far better off than all those married men he sees withering away under the yoke of uxoriousness.

            In their basics, these stories about Kelly and me are true enough. Back when I was living with Erica, the ex I believed I would marry and grow old with, I really couldn’t be myself. I really did feel like I had to compromise some of the best parts of who I am for her sake. The breakup wrecked me. Now I’m far better off. I get the sense from Kelly that her story is similar. Her boyfriend was disdainful of her time-wasting creative endeavors. He was intolerant of anything that wasn’t practical. He belittled her for being too sentimental, too uninterested in making money for the sake of making money, too dependent on him in the selfsame way he loved her to be. Her final leave-taking was more recent than mine, but it seems she’s on her way to bouncing back with a vengeance, just like I eventually did. Neither Kelly nor I, however, took up proselytizing for the unmarried, uncommitted, unmonogamous lifestyle—at least not consistently. Though at times we both despair, I don’t think either of us has completely given up on the idea of finding a more compatible partner. But in the meantime we both do a pretty good job of enjoying the shit out of our single lives.

            As I sit listening to Kevin’s list of reasons for staying unattached, I find myself settling on a decision, prompted by reasons that are mysterious to me. Maybe, when it comes down to it, I just need to talk to my friend, and whatever point I work back around to will be mostly serendipitous. Or maybe I feel responsible for conspiring in the creation of an image of my life that, while not exactly false, is certainly incomplete. I have, after all, shared with him many of the juicy details of my active and quite polygamous sex life. I have also structured all the stories I’ve told him about my struggles with my ex to make them sound like some heroic journey from domestic oppression to intellectual, spiritual, and libidinous liberation. Again, the stories are all true enough. But I tell them in the manner I do for my own ends, for my own psychological benefit, and now I’m worried he may be applying the lessons in a way that’s far less beneficial to him than they have been to me.

            Anyway, for whatever reason, I start talking. I start telling another story.

            “When I was in Boston a few weeks ago, the conference I was attending was just bizarre. For the past three years, I’ve been doing this thing for my company called inbound marketing. I know what it is. I know how to do it. Hell, I may even be pretty good at it. But I realized when I was there with all these thousands of other inbound marketers that they all take it far more seriously than I do. For me, this shit is just something I do. It’s my job. But for them it’s who they are. They identify with it. So I felt like an anthropologist studying this weird cult. Which would have been fine, except, you know, fifteen years after graduating, I still identify more as an anthropologist than as a damn inbound marketer—something I do every day, something I actually make a decent living doing. I identify as a writer more than anything else, though, so I guess it works out well enough.

            “Anyway, so I’m feeling completely out of place—and wondering how all these people could be so taken in by all the crap we’re hearing—and I go out in front of the building to have lunch. While I’m sitting there, facing the front of the building, I see this woman with these really great legs—just stupid hot. I was working out how to talk to her, even though I didn’t have a lot to work with, and it wasn’t like it could’ve gone anywhere because I was sharing a hotel room with one of my coworkers. But, you know, you’re in Boston—when are you going to have this opportunity again? Instead, what ended up happening was that I casually butted into a conversation two women sitting beside me were having. And I talked to them about marketing for nonprofits for the rest of the lunch hour. One of them, Lindsay, I ended up hanging out with for the rest of the trip. So it was cool, you know. I made a connection.

            “But when I got back to Fort Wayne, I felt really out of sorts. It was actually pretty bad, and it lasted for about two weeks. My whole life seemed completely fucking arbitrary, you know. I kept thinking, well, I was in Boston a week and I made this connection. I could almost as easily have connected with the chick with the nice legs I’d seen. It was a cool experience, the kind you hope you have when you go on a trip like that. But I didn’t really feel it. I’d talked to her, hung out with her—maybe if we’d had a place to ourselves we would’ve hooked up. She’s awesome. She owns her own design company in Austin, Texas. She was talking about doing business deals with chauvinist dudes in Colombia. I mean, we don’t meet women like that here. But still—no feeling. It was just a bunch of stuff that happened. It was just like the whole inbound marketing thing. I do it. But it’s not who I am. It’s just a surface behavior, an act. I go through the motions. Then I’m back in Fort Wayne and I realize—that’s how I feel about my whole life lately. That’s how I feel about all the women I’ve been hanging out with. You know, I care about them. I’m not trying to hurt anyone. I just don’t feel it. And I’ve been telling myself, that’s exactly what you want, right? Now, I’m not sure.

            “So for like two weeks I’m home and I’m feeling—just hollowed out. Empty. Every day is just going through the motions. Then last weekend I drive over to my dad’s house in Clarksville for his birthday. Saturday night, I get there late, and I stay up drinking with my dad, my brother, and my sister-in-law Amy. But right away Sunday morning my niece Josalyn wakes me up and tells me how mad she is that I took so long getting there the night before that she’d already been in bed, and now she wants to go looking for my stepmom’s goat Triscuit in the woods behind the house. When the family’s all together, I usually end up being in charge of Josalyn a lot because to her I’m kind of a novelty, and she just sort of seeks me out. So we’re walking around in the woods and looking for this damn goat in the junkyard behind the property, and it wasn’t right away—but at some point I notice that for the first time since Boston I’m starting to feel normal again. Because when you’re with a little kid you don’t have that feeling that whatever you’re doing, it’s just you that it matters to, and it’s just you it has any meaning for. For one thing, you have to watch her to make sure she doesn’t get hurt or anything. Beyond that, though, you have this sense that everything you say has more of an impact on her. She’s really listening and taking it in. She’s not just nodding along and going about doing her normal thing the same as before.

            “After the junkyard, Josalyn decides she wants to go back to the trench we climbed down the last time we were back in the woods. It’s this ravine covered in loose shale that slopes down from a big pond to a bunch of old farm land. It’s actually pretty sketchy at a lot of points because it gets steep, and the rocks you’re stepping on can slip out from under your feet. But we go down a ways and come back up. When we run into my brother and my nephew Ellis back at the top, Josalyn starts telling them how awesome it is. Of course now Ellis wants to go. My brother says it’s alright if I take him, and Amy is kind of hovering around too, keeping an eye on everyone. Still, I’m not completely sure taking Ellis down there is a great idea. I slip and stumble on those rocks enough myself. And Ellis is like five.

            “I try to explain to him how dangerous it is, and how you have to test each rock to see if it’s going to hold you. But he keeps walking with us right up to the trench. When we get there, I’m expecting him to realize how scary it is and decide not to go. But he climbs right down with us. Right away, my stepmom Jan’s dog decides to start circling us. I think he’s a pit bull-Border collie mix, and he’s rambunctious as hell. Maybe a year ago when we were all at my dad’s house, I’d seen him plow into Josalyn a bunch of times. So now I’m thinking it’s only a matter of time before he runs up and knocks Ellis down, making him tumble all the way down to bottom of the damn trench. Ellis keeps on going, though. And the whole time he keeps talking—it was actually really funny. He’s like, ‘This is so dangerous. This is just crazy. These rocks are not even safe to step on. We should not be doing this.’ I keep asking if he wants to stop and go back, though, and he just keeps climbing down and talking about how crazy it is the whole time.

            “I stayed really close to him the whole way down. At the bottom, though, he and Josalyn turned around and started heading back up by themselves. I figured going up was a little easier, so I let them both get a ways ahead of me. As I’m going up myself, though, I keep thinking whenever I get to a sketchier part of the climb that I need to run up and make sure Ellis makes it alright. The first time this happens, I look up and I see Booth, that damn dog, running up right behind Ellis. At first, I freaked out a little, thinking I’m about to watch the dog knock the poor kid down. But Booth just kind of stops behind Ellis and slowly picks his way up the trench behind him. I’m thinking that’s good—if Ellis slips or stumbles, he’ll land on the dog and it’ll break his fall. So I keep climbing up along the trench a ways back from the kids. Eventually, I get to another sketchy part. So I get ready to run and catch up with the kids—and there’s the damn dog again, right behind Ellis, with his nose right in his butt. I go through the same thought process as before. You know, the dog’s going to knock the kid down, he’s going to get hurt, and then my brother’s going to kill me. I watch for a while, though, and it looks like the dog’s behaving fine. But then I get to a third rough stretch in the climb, I look up, and there’s Booth again with his nose right in Ellis’s butt.

           “This time it finally dawns on me—the dog is fucking herding Ellis along the hardest parts of the path. And he must know exactly what he’s doing. It’s the Border collie in him. Later, I told Amy about it, and she said they’d been playing a game the day before where Booth followed right behind Ellis—with his nose in his butt just like I saw—while Ellis walked around in circles in the front yard. So when it dawns on me that the dog is being really fucking smart and that he’s actually protecting Ellis, I just stop in my tracks, and it hits me like a truck. I don’t know why. I’m just suddenly overcome with emotion—ha ha, and you know how awful that feels. It was like I got the wind knocked out of me. My insides all clenched up and I could barely breathe. I start climbing again, to sort of walk it off, you know. But now all I can think about is this day I spent with Erica like five years ago.

            “It was during the summer, about a year after we broke up and I moved out of the house on Lambert Lane. At that point, I wasn’t really hanging out with her that much anymore, but we saw each other once in a while. This was the first time I’d seen her after her hysterectomy, and she was still a little wobbly on her feet, and she was moving around really slow. She’d told me about how after the surgery she’d actually passed out while she was standing in the bathroom at her foster family’s house in West Lafayette and woken up on the floor. It was this fucked up situation, you know, because I felt like I should have been there and it broke my heart to hear about it. But then I was still pretty pissed at her, so whatever. Anyway, we’re hanging out that afternoon, and she says she has to stop at the bank.

            “When we get there, we both go in the door and walk up to the counter. The teller is this older woman, and as Erica is telling her what she needs she looks back and forth between Erica and me a couple of times and gets this weird look on her face. Then she kind of half smiles and says to Erica, ‘You’ve got yourself a nice bodyguard there.’ Erica says something about how I’m easy to look at so she doesn’t mind having me around, or something like that. But I’m standing there trying to figure out what the hell the teller is even talking about. What I realize is that, without even thinking about it, every time Erica and I move I’m keeping her in my peripheral view, and I’m staying within arm’s reach of her. Because I’m afraid she might get dizzy and fall again—and I’m making sure if she does I can catch her. What the teller noticed was that I was watching Erica out of the corner of my eye even as we stood there at the counter.

            “For all of about ten seconds, I’m standing there completely shocked at how automatically I fell into that position alongside her. But then I thought, you know, are you really surprised? Because the truth is, I would derail a fucking train if I had to for this girl—no hesitation, no questions asked. And if I couldn’t do it, I’d still find a way somehow. Just moving her off the tracks wouldn’t be good enough because that fucking train needs to know it doesn’t come at her like that—not this girl. This one’s with me. You don’t fuck around.

“Have you ever had that feeling? So I’m standing there in this shitty bank, and I’m thinking, there’s all this feeling, all this energy, all this passion. And it’s all a complete fucking waste because whatever the two of us had, it was already so thoroughly ruined by then. She didn’t trust me anymore because she was sure I cheated on her—though if she had any sense she would’ve known she never had to worry about that with me. And I sure as fuck didn’t trust her anymore because she’d turned on me so many times I’d started suspecting that she was always just looking for another excuse to turn on me again. So what do you do with all that energy and feeling and passion? It’s utterly useless. Actually, it’s much worse than useless.

            “You don’t just recover from that in a couple of months, or even a couple of years. That kind of thing fucks you up for a while. After that, I kept kind of plodding ahead, doing my own things, trying not to think about it too much. I actually made the conscious decision to spread myself thin in relationships from then on, to keep things caj—I just didn’t believe I’d be able to pull it off as well as I did. But I had been on and off with Erica for like seven years. And here’s the thing—you were with Emma for about eleven years. And I know getting divorced felt like this glorious, triumphant liberation, like you were finally free to be yourself again after all those years, but so much of what you expect from people, what you expect from women, comes from what happened between you two. It sucked. It was like a prolonged type of mild torture. I know.

            “But I’ve been free, completely free to do pretty much whatever the fuck I want for the past five years now. I’m not going to lie—it’s been fucking great. Every time I’m with a woman who doesn’t have all the stupid hang-ups Erica did, all I can do is smile and think how lucky I am not to have to deal with that bullshit for the rest of my life. Every time I spend the whole day reading, or hours and hours writing, or get off work and decide to go running in the woods for like two hours, or every time I go out drinking with you or Fred till three in morning, even to this day I smile and think how awesome it is that I don’t have to check in with anyone, or deal with anyone hovering and waiting, or deal with anyone being suspicious or pissed off for no damn reason.

“Every once in a while, though, I feel like I felt when I first got back from Boston. You know, like nothing I do fucking matters. That makes it really hard to get into whatever book I’m reading. That makes it hard to get off the couch and go running. The reason any of that gets done is that I’ve made it such an ingrained habit. I just do it, unthinking, unfeeling. And writing—I could quit my job and write full-time and ultimately whatever I come up with isn’t going to mean much to anyone but me. The fiction books that have had the most impact in the last thirty years are fucking Harry Potter. I’m never going to write anything like that. I’m never going to write anything that changes the world like Origin of Species. Mostly, I’m fine with that. I write because I enjoy it. But knowing that its significance is so limited like that makes me question how much meaning I can get from it. Can I derive all the happiness and fulfillment I need in my life from writing the stories and book reviews I post on my damn blog?

“The reality is that without you and Kelly and my brothers and Amber and Fred, without all the people I’m closest to, you know, I could spend every waking hour doing the stuff that means the most to me personally, but it wouldn’t mean a damn thing. I’d probably fucking kill myself. Ha ha, and most of you guys don’t even read most of the stuff I write, or get pissed off because you think it’s about you. The reason that I’m actually happy to go to work most days isn’t that I give two fucks about inbound marketing; it’s that I love all the people I work with. Going to work is like going to hang out and work on projects with all these cool, really smart and creative people I call friends. Even the women I date—I don’t feel the way about them I felt about Erica, but the reason I enjoy spending time with them so much is that I’m friends with them all.”

Kevin has sat listening silently to my story up till now. I’ve been talking for a long time, not knowing how he’ll respond. As I take a breath before starting again, he stops me saying, “But that’s the way I think it should be. I mean, you have your friends and your family and your work. You don’t have to rely on any one person so damn much. You don’t have to live with her and tie so much of your day-to-day existence to her. I mean, you know what it’s like living with someone. That balance of doing what you want and still having people in your life—it’s not possible if you get too close with any one woman.”

“Honestly, I’ve been doing my best to make it work. But I’m not sure the type of meaning I’m talking about can come from a bunch of casual relationships. Four or five casual arrangements don’t add up to one profound connection. Doing it that way is fun as hell, don’t get me wrong. But after a while it starts to feel shallow. You start to feel empty. Any one of the women I’m dating now could decide she wants something more serious with some other guy. That wouldn’t bother me. I’d be like, ‘Cool, I hope it works out for you. It was fun hanging out.’ But the fact that I can walk away like that shows how little meaning it ultimately has. And when shit really starts going wrong—and you know it will sooner or later—when my dad dies, or my brothers get sick, or I get hurt, who knows? When shit like that happens, it’s not really fair to ask anyone you’re in a casual relationship with to be there for you. And even if they are, what are they going to do? Show up and hang out like they usually do? And if they do more than that, if they really are there for you, then aren’t they making that relationship more meaningful in the process?”

“Ugh, it’s not like that though,” Kevin says. “You’re painting this picture of being down and having some chick supporting you, but what would really happen is that she’d be there making it fucking worse. She’d be making the whole thing out to be your fault, criticizing you. Or she’d be remembering every last little thing she does for you so she can remind you of it later. I know, I know. Sometimes people are just nice to each other. But the longer you’re with someone the more resentment builds up. And it happens so gradually that you wake up one day and realize you’re basically stuck with someone who doesn’t even like you, who’s annoyed by everything you say and do—and you feel the same way, but she’s sucked out your will to live so much you don’t even have the energy to get away.”

“That’s the risk you take. You and I both got pretty much wrecked. And I don’t even want to say it’s because either of them is a terrible person. But they were terrible to us. That’s just the thing, though. You form these bonds because when it comes down to it they’re what makes or breaks your life. Every time you get close to someone you run the risk of it being the wrong person. All you can do is be careful not to spend too much time with someone who isn’t right for you. I knew from early on that Erica was going to cause me a bunch of problems. I should have stayed away, but we worked together, a bunch of crazy shit was going on in my life, and she kept coming after me. If I saw the same warning signs today, I wouldn’t go anywhere near her. And you know exactly what it was about Emma that made it not work. You know what the problem was—hell, you just described it. Aside from all the daily compromises of any relationship, there were some pretty huge fucking deal-breakers, right? Now think about Susan. Do you have any of those same problems with her?”

“Not even close. She comes with her own set of problems. It’s true though that they’re nowhere near as bad.”

“I think it’s got to be this process of making sure the person you’re getting close to is cool with who you are and accepting of how you need to spend your time. We’re both pretty introverted, so we need a lot of time to ourselves to do our own projects. We need to find women who are the same way, so when we go off on our own they’re ready to go off on their own too. We need to find women who aren’t fucktard feminists, who don’t feel like they have to get all weird about sex, and who like to fuck all the time, but who aren’t uneducated idiots. I’m starting to realize they’re out there. What happened was that we both got in really deep with women that we were just fundamentally incompatible with. And it fucked up our lives for a while. I don’t think that’s inevitable for every relationship though. I fucking hope it’s not.”

“Seriously, though, do you really think there’s someone who’d be compatible with you out there, someone you’re likely to meet?”

“They don’t have to be perfectly compatible. But, sure, yeah, there are so many people out there, someone has to be as introverted and laid back as us. You can look at the statistics on what makes people happiest. You can look at all the people who are most successful. And the trend is that most of them are married.”

“No, I mean you personally. Knowing yourself as well as you do, do you think there’s someone who’d be cool with you going off on your own as much as you like to? Someone who’d be cool with your views and opinions and wouldn’t get pissed off all the time, or take what you say personally and get hurt feelings? Just someone who’d be cool with you even after you’d spent tons of time together.”

“You make me sound like Rustin Cohle on True Detective,” I say before pausing to think. I feel like I should say yes and explain why I’m optimistic. But I don’t want to be anything less than perfectly honest. So after thinking about his question for a minute, I answer, “Judging from the women I actually know now, I have to say the chances are pretty slim. And if I never find anyone like that, I figure I can still find a way to be happy, to live with the feelings of emptiness and pointlessness that come up once in a while. I’ll just have to hope to hell you and all the other people I’m close to are still around. Still, I have to say, as shitty as the chances are, I’m feeling like I can’t help keeping an eye out, like I’m open to it in a way I haven’t been for the past five years.”

Driving home after the conversation, I wonder what Kevin might have taken away from it, if anything. It’s impossible to tell. Then, despite myself, I start thinking about my ex, about what it would be like if we’d had a little girl like my niece Josalyn. After the family had spent most of the morning in the woods behind my dad’s house last weekend, everyone packed up for the drive back to Fort Wayne. Before leaving town, though, we stopped at a fall festival hosted by an old dairy farm. Jos came and sat next to me in the back of a trailer hooked up for a hayride that took us along winding forested trails decorated for Halloween. When the guys in ape masks and other costumes started jumping out from behind the trees to scare us, she curled up in the corner of the trailer, under my arm, complaining about how they’d tried to “take my head off.” I smile at the memory. Don’t worry Jos. They won’t harm a hair on your head. They wouldn’t fucking dare.

Also read: 

In the Crowded Moment atop the Fire Wave

The Fire Hoarder

And: 

Monks: a Short Riff on Hemingway and Porter

.

Searching for Aptera's Ghost - My 2015 Halloween Project

Spoiler alert: watch the above documentary before reading the essay below.

Check out the Aptera Blog for

voiceover transcript

. 

Everyone who works at Aptera has a few traits in common. If you tell one of us we have to perform some task, no matter how complicated, no matter how unfamiliar to us, we’ll immediately start breaking it down and laying out all the steps we need to take, all the resources we need to procure, and all the experts we need to involve. We know intuitively that when people proclaim their ignorance or lack of expertise, it’s seldom because they’re trying to help anyone plan more diligently or set more realistic expectations; more often, it’s because they’re trying to dodge responsibility. Complex projects have multiple moving parts, and no one can be an expert in every aspect of them. So, if you’re not confident in a particular skill set, you reach out to someone who is.

Another trait nearly every Aptera employee shares, one that I saw demonstrated several times over the course of filming our documentary, is an ability to give impromptu presentations that sound perfectly clear and professional. This could be something we develop in the myriad routine meetings we participate in where we take turns filling everyone in on what projects we’re working on, how much progress we’ve made, what obstacles we’re facing, and what the plan is for overcoming them. Alternatively, it may be a skill each of us had to possess before making it through the recruitment process.

Ron "Whitey" Leeuw

Indeed, I was impressed again and again when I showed up in my coworkers’ offices pointing a camera at them to find that it wasn’t just project-related topics they could speak to with such polished cogency. You can just as easily get articulate and compelling answers by posing questions like, “What all have you heard about the history of this building?” or “Has anything strange ever happened to you when you were here after hours?”

            So nearly everyone here is process-oriented, team-minded, and impressively eloquent. None of these traits precludes belief in, or enthusiasm for, the paranormal, but it takes more than a decent ghost story or two to impress most of us. Present us with a mystery, and we start laying out a plan for a systematic investigation. Like every plan, though, the ones we Aptera people come up with almost invariably run into a snag or two—or ten. The trouble we run into stems not just from our readiness to take on unfamiliar kinds of projects, no matter how formidably complex, but also from what I’d argue is an excess of faith in the powers of technology.

            The Aptera Ghost Project began as a melding of two earlier project ideas. Back in August, Raul Perez and I discussed collaborating on a Halloween story. Raul is one of Aptera’s graphic designers, and he showed me an earlier ghost story he’d lain out as a series of photographs posted online. The plan was for us to come up with another story together; I’d provide the text and help with ideas for staging the photos, and he would do the photography and edit the images.

            Not long after agreeing to the project with Raul, I had a conversation with James Swihart, a recently hired project manager, about our favorite Twilight Zone episodes. James had formerly been a DJ for 98.9 The Bear, and he told me he’d originally become interested in radio because he loved Rod Serling’s voice. Shortly after the conversation, he stopped by my office to propose we work together on a short video homage to a classic Twilight Zone episode. I loved the idea.

Raul, James, and Howdy looking for William White's grave

            I try to write a scary story myself for Halloween every year, so now I was left wondering how I could possibly find the time to work on three separate projects. The idea I had, after a few further discussions with Raul and James, was that we’d scrap the photo series and the Twilight Zone projects, along with my annual literary ghost story, and instead collaborate on a documentary about all the ghost sightings we’d heard about in the building where we work. Just like that, we were off and running.

            Originally, we envisioned two basic parts to the video. First, we’d conduct a series of interviews with all of our coworkers who’d experienced something strange in the building. Next, we’d do some research on the building’s history to see who, if anyone, might be haunting the place. James assured me he had plenty of experience with video editing, and Raul showed me a brief documentary he’d put together for a film editing class. I figured I would help with an outline and maybe some phrasing for lines in individual scenes, but since I had no film editing experience myself—and little skill with technology in general—I was relying on my partners to make something of all the footage we ended up with.

            None of us realized what we were getting into. James had the idea of publishing trailers on social media, complete with dates for the documentary’s release—giving us a hard deadline. Our excitement kept being piqued all the while by new discoveries about the building’s history. We were getting great material, and we all looked forward to the final product of our efforts. Then, with the deadline just two weeks away, we had a series of setbacks.

            The first disappoint was the ghost hunt we set up on October 16th. We can’t really blame the team of amateur ghost hunters who volunteered their time and energy to the undertaking. But the fact is we were less than impressed with the tools the team had to work with. The cameras we already had on hand were far better than the ones they brought. They had no night vision. Instead, they relied mostly on flashlights and hand-held recording devices. Of course, Aptera is a tech company, so they would’ve had to show up with some pretty cool gear to impress us. But we also quickly grew impatient with the highly casual nature of their approach, which consisted mainly of sitting around and calling out to the dark.

            After an eventless night in the building, our enthusiasm waned significantly. Things looked even bleaker after the ghost hunters informed us that their review of the video and audio footage had turned up nothing. We still had all the history we’d learned, but I’m pretty sure I wasn’t alone in thinking at this point that we needed to come up with some ideas for rescuing the project. It was on the weekend following the ghost hunt that I came up with what would become, after a few discussions with James and Raul, the end sequence of the video which culminates in me getting scared and running out of the building.

            Our excitement returned when we started editing our own footage from that night and discovered the mysterious sounds we cover in the documentary. But we soon ran into another major issue. Originally, we wanted the video to consist of interviews and conversations, developing naturally and informally in a style harking to The Blair Witch Project. The historical material we’d amassed, however, was too complicated and too copious to convey in this manner—at least in a video less than a couple of hours long.

            We were already in our last week before the deadline when it became clear we needed to overhaul our entire outline. Instead of relying on discussions and interviews to relay all the important information, we would have to convey it all through voiceovers. When I first signed on to the project, I imagined that, given my areas of expertise, I’d play my part early on, in the research and outlining stages. At some point, I expected to turn things over to the guys who could use the editing technology.

As it turned out, though, we were all three up to our elbows right to the last—and beyond. Though we were able to show our coworkers the documentary on Friday the 30th as we’d promised, we missed our deadline for going live online. I wrote most of the voiceover copy on Wednesday and Thursday. And I was still providing lines as late as Friday morning, while we all sat in Raul’s office until 3:30 am, sleep being the main casualty of poor planning. We even had to shoot more footage Thursday night.

I don’t think I was alone in being both relieved and delighted after the company viewing in Aptera’s basement. But our struggles weren’t quite over. There were still some issues we needed to address before we broadcasted it online. And we still had to export the file so it could be uploaded to YouTube. This ended up taking until late Saturday night, by which point we were all at the end of our patience and just happy to be done with the thing.

            Personally, I think we overestimated what the technology could do. I’d watched James whip together one of the trailers in about half an hour—and it looked really good. That was using iMovie. With a wizard like Raul sitting at the helm of Premier, I was sure we could turn what at first looked like boring footage into a fascinating documentary. Don’t get me wrong—the technology is amazing. We couldn’t have done much of anything without it. But, at least for now, technology can’t tell much of a story.

            By far the most difficult part of the project was arranging all the facts and information into a logical sequence, one that didn’t just get the historical details across but also told a story. That’s why even though I had no idea how to use the software I still needed to be in the room with the other guys, all of us pitching and evaluating each other’s ideas, right up till the end.

            Raul, James, and I were definitely getting on each other’s nerves by the time we were finished. But, looking back, it’s amazing to realize that there’s very little in the finished product that any of us can attribute to any one person involved. It was a true collaboration—every member of the team was indispensable. However worn out, and however loath we are to ever do anything like this again, I bet three days or three weeks from now, we’re going to look back on this project with pride and chuckle at our own hubris.

            I for one, though I’m painfully aware of every tripping line and every jagged transition, think the damn thing turned out pretty good. Was it worth all the late nights, frustration, tedium, and stress? Ask me again sometime next week. 

Halloween stories from earlier years:

The Fire Hoarder

Encounters, Inc.

The Smoking Buddha: Another Ghost Story for Adults (and Young Adults too)

Bed Time Ghost Story for Adults

Just Another Piece of Sleaze: The Real Lesson of Robert Borofsky's "Fierce Controversy"

Robert Borofsky’sYanomami: The Fierce Controversy and What We Can Learn from It is the source book participants on a particular side of the debate over Patrick Tierney’s Darkness in El Dorado would like everyone to read, even more than Tierney’s book itself. To anyone on the opposing side, however—and, one should hope, to those who have yet to take a side—there’s an unmissable element of farce running throughout Borofsky’s book, which ultimately amounts to little more than a transparent attempt at salvaging the campaign against anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon. That campaign had initially received quite a boost from the publication of Darkness in El Dorado, but then support began to crumble as various researchers went about exposing Tierney as a fraud. With The Fierce Controversy, Borofsky and some of the key members of the anti-Chagnon campaign are doing their best to dissociate themselves and their agenda from Tierney, while at the same time taking advantage of the publicity he brought to their favorite talking points. 

The book is billed as an evenhanded back-and-forth between anthropologists on both sides of the debate. But, despite Borofsky’s pretentions to impartiality, The Fierce Controversy is about as fair and balanced as Fox News’s political coverage—there’s even a chapter titled “You Decide.” By giving the second half of the book over to an exchange of essays and responses by what he refers to as “partisans” for both sides, Borofsky makes himself out to be a disinterested mediator, and he wants us to see the book as an authoritative representation of some quasi-democratic collection of voices—think Occupy Wall Street’s human microphones, with all the repetition, incoherence, and implicit signaling of a lack of seriousness. “Objectivity does not lie in the assertions of authorities,” Borofsky insists in italics. “It lies in the open, public analysis of divergent perspectives” (18). In the first half of the book, however, Borofsky gives himself the opportunity to convey his own impressions of the controversy under the guise of providing necessary background. Unfortunately, he’s not nearly as subtle in pushing his ideology as he’d like to be.

Borofsky claims early on that his “book seeks, in empowering readers, to develop a new political constituency for transforming the discipline.” But is Borofsky empowering readers, or is he trying to foment a revolution? The only way the two goals could be aligned would be if readers already felt the need for the type of change Borofsky hopes to instigate. What does that change entail? He writes,

It is understandable that many anthropologists have had trouble addressing the controversy’s central issues because they are invested in the present system. These anthropologists worked their way through the discipline’s existing structures as they progressed from being graduate students to employed professionals. While they may acknowledge the limitations of the discipline, these structures represent the world they know, the world they feel comfortable with. One would not expect most of them to lead the charge for change. But introductory and advanced students are less invested in this system. If anything, they have a stake in changing it so as to create new spaces for themselves. (21)

In other words, Borofsky simultaneously wants his book to be open-ended—the outcome of the debate in the second half reflecting the merits of each side’s case, with the ultimate position taken by readers left to their own powers of critical thought—while at the same time inspiring those same readers to work for the goals he himself believes are important. He utterly neglects the possibility that anthropology students won’t share his markedly Marxist views. From this goal statement, you may expect the book to focus on the distribution of power and the channels for promotion in anthropology departments, but that’s not at all what Borofsky and his coauthors end up discussing. Even more problematically, though, Borofsky is taking for granted here the seriousness of “the controversy’s central issues,” the same issues whose validity is the very thing that’s supposed to be under debate in the second half of the book.  

The most serious charges in Tierney’s book were shown to be false almost as soon as it was published, and Tierney himself was thoroughly discredited when it was discovered that countless of his copious citations bore little or no relation to the claims they were supposed to support. A taskforce commissioned by the American Society of Human Genetics, for instance, found that Tierney spliced together parts of different recorded conversations to mislead his readers about the actions and intentions of James V. Neel, a geneticist he accuses of unethical conduct. Reasonably enough, many supporters of Chagnon, who Tierney likewise accuses of grave ethical breaches, found such deliberately misleading tactics sufficient cause to dismiss any other claims by the author. But Borofsky treats this argument as an effort on the part of anthropologists to dodge inconvenient questions:

Instead of confronting the breadth of issues raised by Tierney and the media, many anthropologists focused on Tierney’s accusations regarding Neel… As previously noted, focusing on Neel had a particular advantage for those who wanted to continue sidestepping the role of anthropologists in all this. Neel was a geneticist, and soon after the book’s publication most experts realized that the accusation that Neel helped facilitate the spread of measles was false. Focusing on Neel allowed anthropologists to downplay the role of the discipline in the whole affair. (46)

When Borofsky accuses some commenters of “sidestepping the role of anthropologists in all this,” we’re left wondering, all what? The Fierce Controversy is supposed to be about assessing the charges Tierney made in his book, but again the book’s editor and main contributor is assuming that where there’s smoke there’s fire. It’s also important to note that the nature of the charges against Chagnon make them much more difficult to prove or disprove. A call to a couple of epidemiologists and vaccination experts established that what Tierney accused Neel of was simply impossible. It’s hardly sidestepping the issue to ask why anyone would trust Tierney’s reporting on more complicated matters.

Anyone familiar with the debates over postmodernism taking place among anthropologists over the past three decades will see at a glance that The Fierce Controversy is disingenuous in its very conception. Borofsky and the other postmodernist contributors desperately want to have a conversation about how Napoleon Chagnon’s approach to fieldwork, and even his conception of anthropology as a discipline are no longer aligned with how most anthropologists conceive of and go about their work. Borofsky is explicit about this, writing in one of the chapters that’s supposed to merely provide background for readers new to the debate,

Chagnon writes against the grain of accepted ethical practice in the discipline. What he describes in detail to millions of readers are just the sorts of practices anthropologists claim they do not practice. (39)   

This comes in a section titled “A Painful Contradiction,” which consists of Borofsky straightforwardly arguing that Chagnon, whose first book on the Yanomamö is perhaps the most widely read ethnography in history, disregarded the principles of the American Anthropological Association by actively harming the people he studied and by violating their privacy (though most of Chagnon’s time in the field predated the AAA’s statements of the principles in question). In Borofsky’s opinion, these ethical breaches are attested to in Chagnon’s own works and hence beyond dispute. In reality, though, whether Chagnon’s techniques amount to ethical violations (by any day’s standards) is very much in dispute, as we see clearly in the second half of the book. 

(Yanomamö was Chagnon’s original spelling, but his detractors can’t bring themselves to spell it the same way—hence Yanomami.)

Borofsky is of course free to write about his issues with Chagnon’s methods, but inserting his own argument into a book he’s promoting as an open and fair exchange between experts on both sides of the debate, especially when he’s responding to the others’ contributions after the fact, is a dubious sort of bait and switch. The second half of the book is already lopsided, with Bruce Albert, Leda Martins, and Terence Turner attacking Neel’s and Chagnon’s reputations, while Raymond Hames and Kim Hill argue for the defense. (The sixth contributor, John Peters, doesn’t come down clearly on either side.) When you factor in Borofsky’s own arguments, you’ve got four against two—and if you go by page count the imbalance is quite a bit worse; indeed, the inclusion of the two Chagnon defenders in the forum starts to look more like a ploy to gain a modicum of credibility for what’s best characterized as just another anti-Chagnon screed by a few of his most outspoken detractors.

Notably absent from the list of contributors is Chagnon himself, who probably reasoned that lending his name to the title page would give the book an undeserved air of legitimacy. Given the unmasked contempt that Albert, Martins, and Turner evince toward him in their essays, Chagnon was wise not to go anywhere near the project. It’s also far from irrelevant—though it goes unmentioned by Borofsky—that Martins and Tierney were friends at the time he was writing his book; on his acknowledgements page, Tierney writes,

I am especially indebted to Leda Martins, who is finishing her Ph.D. at Cornell University, for her support throughout this long project and for her and her family’s hospitality in Boa Vista, Brazil. Leda’s dossier on Napoleon Chagnon was an important resource for my research. (XVII)

(Martins later denied, in an interview given to ethicist and science historian Alice Dreger, that she was the source of the dossier Tierney mentions.) Equally relevant is that one of the professors at Cornell where Martins was finishing her Ph.D. was none other than Terence Turner, whom Tierney also thanks in his acknowledgements. To be fair, Hames is a former student of Chagnon’s, and Hill also knows Chagnon well. But the earlier collaboration with Tierney of at least two contributors to Borofsky’s book is suspicious to say the least.   

Confronted with the book’s inquisitorial layout and tone, I believe undecided readers are going to wonder whether it’s fair to focus a whole book on the charges laid out in another book that’s been so thoroughly discredited. Borofsky does provide an answer of sorts to this objection: The Fierce Controversy is not about Tierney’s book; it’s about anthropology as a discipline. He writes that

beyond the accusations surrounding Neel, Chagnon, and Tierney, there are critical—indeed, from my perspective, far more critical—issues that need to be addressed in the controversy: those involving relations with informants as well as professional integrity and competence. Given how central these issues are to anthropology, readers can understand, perhaps, why many in the discipline have sought to sidestep the controversy. (17)

With that rhetorical flourish, Borofsky makes any concern about Tierney’s credibility, along with any concern for treating the accused fairly, seem like an unwillingness to answer difficult questions. But, in reality, the stated goals of the book raise yet another important ethical question: is it right for a group of scholars to savage their colleagues’ reputations in furtherance of their reform agenda for the discipline? How do they justify their complete disregard for the principle of presumed innocence?   

What’s going on here is that Borofsky and his fellow postmodernists really needed The Fierce Controversy to be about the dramatis personae featured in Tierney’s book, because Tierney’s book is what got the whole discipline’s attention, along with the attention of countless people outside of anthropology. The postmodernists, in other words, are riding the scandal’s coattails. Turner had been making many of the allegations that later ended up in Tierney’s book for years, but he couldn’t get anyone to take him seriously. Now that headlines about anthropologists colluding in eugenic experiments were showing up in newspapers around the world, Turner and the other members of the anti-Chagnon campaign finally got their chance to be heard. Naturally enough, even after Tierney’s book was exposed as mostly a work of fiction, they still really wanted to discuss how terribly Chagnon and other anthropologists of his ilk behaved in the field so they could take control of the larger debate over what anthropology is and what anthropological fieldwork should consist of. This is why even as Borofsky insists the debate isn’t about the people at the center of the controversy, he has no qualms about arranging his book as a trial:

We can address this problem within the discipline by applying the model of a jury trial. In such a trial, jury members—like many readers—do not know all the ins and outs of a case. But by listening to people who do know these details argue back and forth, they are able to form a reasonable judgment regarding the case. (73)

But, if the book isn’t about Neel, Chagnon, and Tierney, then who exactly is being tried? Borofsky is essentially saying, we’re going to try these men in abstentia (Neel died before Darkness in El Dorado was published) with no regard whatsoever for the effect repeating the likely bogus charges against them ad nauseam will have on their reputations, because it’s politically convenient for us to do so, since we hope it will help us achieve our agenda of discipline-wide reform, for which there’s currently either too little interest or too much resistance.

As misbegotten, duplicitous, and morally dubious as its goals and premises are, there’s a still more fatal shortcoming to The Fierce Controversy, and that’s the stance its editor, moderator, and chief contributor takes toward the role of evidence. Here again, it’s important to bear in mind the context out of which the scandal surrounding Darkness in El Dorado erupted. The reason so many of Chagnon’s colleagues responded somewhat gleefully to the lurid and appalling charges leveled against him by Tierney is that Chagnon stands as a prominent figure in the debate over whether anthropology should rightly be conceived of and conducted as a science. The rival view is that science is an arbitrary label used to give the appearance of authority. As Borofsky argues,

the issue is not whether a particular anthropologist’s work is scientific. It is whether that anthropologist’s work is credible. Calling particular research scientific in anthropology is often an attempt to establish credibility by name-dropping. (96)

What he’s referring to here as name-dropping the scientific anthropologists would probably describe as attempts at tying their observations to existing theories, as when Chagnon interprets aspects of Yanomamö culture in light of inclusive fitness theory, with reference to works by evolutionary biologists like W.D. Hamilton and G.C. Williams. But Borofsky’s characterization of how an anthropologist might collect and present data is even more cynical than his attitude toward citations of other scientists’ work. He writes of Chagnon’s descriptions of his field methods,  

To make sure readers understand that he was seriously at work during this time—because he could conceivably have spent much of his time lounging around taking in the sights—he reinforces his expertise with personal anecdotes, statistics, and photos. In Studying the Yanomamö, Chagnon presents interviews, detailed genealogies, computer printouts, photographs, and tables. All these data convey an important message: Chagnon knows what he’s talking about. (57-8)

Borofsky is either confused about or skeptical of the role evidence plays in science—or, more likely, a little of both. Anthropologists in the field could relay any number of vague impressions in their writings, as most of them do. Or those same anthropologists could measure and record details uncovered through systematic investigation. Analyzing the data collected in all those tables and graphs of demographic information could lead to the discovery of facts, trends, and correlations no amount of casual observation would reveal. Borofsky himself drops the names of some postmodern theorists in support of his cynical stance toward science—but it’s hard not to wonder if perhaps his dismissal of even the possibility of data leading to new discoveries has as much to do with him simply not liking the discoveries Chagnon actually made.

            One of the central tenets of postmodernism is that any cultural artifact, including any scientific text, is less a reflection of facts about the real world than a product of, and an attempt to perpetuate, power disparities in the political environment which produces it. From the postmodern perspective, in other words, science is nothing but disguised political rhetoric—and its message is always reactionary. This is why Borofsky is so eager to open the debate to more voices; he believes scientific credentials are really just markers of hegemonic authority, and he further believes that creating a more just society would demand a commitment that no one be excluded from the debate for a lack of expertise.

As immediately apparent as the problems with this perspective are, the really scary thing is that The Fierce Controversy applies this conception of evidence not only to Chagnon’s anthropological field work, but to his and Neel’s culpability as well. And this is where it’s easiest to see how disastrous postmodern ideas would be if they were used as legal or governing principles. Borofsky writes,

in the jury trial model followed in part 2, it is not necessary to recognize (or remember) each and every citation, each and every detail, but rather to note how participants reply to one another’s criticisms [sic]. The six participants, as noted, must respond to critiques of their positions. Readers may not be able to assess—simply by reading certain statements—which assertions are closer to what we might term “the truth.” But readers can evaluate how well a particular participant responds to another’s criticisms as a way of assessing the credibility of that person’s argument. (110)

These instructions betray a frightening obliviousness of the dangers of moral panics and witch hunts. It’s all well and good to put the truth in scare quotes—until you stand falsely accused of some horrible offense and the exculpatory evidence is deemed inadmissible. Imagine if our legal system were set up this way; if you wanted to have someone convicted of a crime, all you’d have to do is stage a successful campaign against this person. Imagine if other prominent social issues were handled this way: climate change, early childhood vaccination, genetically modified foods.

            By essentially coaching readers to attend only to the contributors’ rhetoric and not to worry about the evidence they cite, Borofsky could reasonably be understood as conceding that the evidence simply doesn’t support the case he’s trying to make with the book. But the members of the anti-Chagnon camp seem to believe that the “issues” they want to discuss are completely separable from the question of whether the accusations against Chagnon are true. Kim Hill does a good job of highlighting just how insane this position is, writing,

Turner further observes that some people seem to feel that “if the critical allegations against Neel and Chagnon can be refuted on scientific grounds, then the ethical questions raised…about the effects of their actions on the Yanomami can be made to go away.” In fact, those of us who have criticized Tierney have refuted his allegations on factual and scientific grounds, and those allegations refuted are specifically about the actions of the two accused and their effects. There are no ethical issues to “dismiss” when the actions presented never took place and the effects on the Yanomamö were never experienced as described. Thus, the facts of the book are indeed central to some ethical discussions, and factual findings can indeed “obviate ethical issues” by rendering the discussions moot. But the discussion of facts reported by Tierney have been placed outside this forum of debate (we are to consider only ethical issues raised by the book, not evaluate each factual claim in the book). (180)

One wonders whether Hill knew that evaluations of factual claims would be out of bounds when he agreed to participate in the exchange. Turner, it should be noted, violates this proscription in the final round of the exchange when he takes advantage of his essays’ privileged place as the last contribution by listing the accusations in Tierney’s book he feels are independently supported. Reading this final essay, it’s hard not to think the debate is ending just where it ought to have begun. 

            Hill’s and Hames’s contributions in each round are sandwiched in between those of the three anti-Chagnon campaigners, but whatever value the book has as anything other than an illustration of how paranoid and bizarre postmodern rhetoric can be is to be found in their essays. These sections are like little pockets of sanity in a maelstrom of deranged moralizing. In scoring the back-and-forth, most readers will inevitably favor the side most closely aligned with their own convictions, but two moments really stand out as particularly embarrassing for the prosecution. One of them has Hames catching Martins doing some pretty egregious cherry-picking to give a misleading impression. He explains,

Martins in her second-round contribution cites a specific example of a highly visible and allegedly unflattering image of the Yanomamö created by Chagnon. In the much-discussed Veja interview (entitled “Indians Are Also People”), she notes that “When asked in Veja to define the ‘real Indians,’ Chagnon said, ‘The real Indians get dirty, smell bad, use drugs, belch after they eat, covet and sometimes steal each other’s women, fornicate and make war.’” This quote is accurate. However, in the next sentence after that quote she cites, Chagnon states: “They are normal human beings. And that is sufficient reason for them to merit care and attention.” This tactic of partial quotation mirrors a technique used by Tierney. The context of the statement and most of the interview was Chagnon’s observation that some NGOs and missionaries characterized the Yanomamö as “angelic beings without faults.” His goal was to simply state that the Yanomamö and other native peoples are human beings and deserve our support and sympathy. He was concerned that false portrayals could harm native peoples when later they were discovered to be just like us. (236)

Such deliberate misrepresentations raise the question of whether postmodern thinking justifies, and even encourages, playing fast and loose with the truth—since all writing is just political rhetoric without any basis in reality anyway. What’s clear either way is that an ideology that scants the importance of evidence simply can’t support a moral framework that recognizes individual human rights, because it makes every individual vulnerable to being falsely maligned for the sake of some political cause.   

            The other supremely embarrassing moment for the anti-Chagnon crowd comes in an exchange between Hill and Turner. Hill insists in his first essay that Tierney’s book and the ensuing controversy were borne of ideological opposition to sociobiology, the theoretical framework Chagnon uses to interpret his data on the Yanomamö. On first encountering phrases like “ideological terrorism” (127) and “holy war of ideology” (135), you can’t help thinking that Hill has succumbed to hyperbole, but Turner’s response lends a great deal of credence to Hill’s characterization. Turner’s defense is the logical equivalent of a dangerously underweight teenager saying, “I’m not anorexic—I just need to lose about fifteen pounds.” He first claims his campaign against Chagnon has nothing to do with sociobiology, but then he tries to explain sociobiology as an outgrowth of eugenics, even going so far as to suggest that the theoretical framework somehow inspires adherents to undermine indigenous activists. Even Chagnon’s characterization of the Yanomamö as warlike, which the activists trying to paint a less unsavory picture of them take such issue with, is, according to Turner, more a requirement of sociobiological thinking than an observed reality. He writes,

“Fierceness” and the high level of violent conflict with which it is putatively associated are for Chagnon and like-minded sociobiologists the primary indexes of the evolutionary priority of the Yanomami as an earlier, and supposedly therefore more violent, phase of the development of human society. Most of the critics of Chagnon’s fixation on “fierceness” have had little idea of this integral connection of “fierceness” as a Yanomami trait and the deep structure of sociobiological-selectionist theory. (202)

Turner isn’t by any stretch making a good faith effort to explain the theory and its origins according to how it’s explicitly discussed in the relevant literature. He’s reading between the lines in precisely the way prescribed by his postmodernism, treating the theory as a covert effort at justifying the lower status of indigenous peoples. But his analysis is so far off-base that it not only casts doubt on his credibility on the topic of sociobiology; it calls into question his credibility as a scholarly researcher in general. As Hames points out,

Anyone who has basic knowledge of the origins of sociobiology in anthropology will quickly realize that Turner’s attempt to show a connection between Neel’s allegedly eugenic ideas and Chagnon’s analysis of the Yanomamö to be far-fetched. (238)

            Turner’s method of uncovering secret threads supposedly connecting scientific theories to abhorrent political philosophies is closer to the practices of internet conspiracy theorists than to those of academic researchers. He constructs a scary story with some prominent villains, and then he retrofits the facts to support it. The only problem is that anyone familiar with the theories and the people in the story he tells will recognize it as pure fantasy. As Hames attests,

I don’t know of any “sociobiologists” who regard the Yanomamö as any more or less representative of an “earlier, and supposedly therefore more violent, phase of the development of human society” than any other relatively isolated indigenous society. Some sociobiologists are interested in indigenous populations because they live under social and technological conditions that more closely resemble humanity for most of its history as a species than conditions found in urban population centers. (238)

And Hill, after pointing out how Turner rejects the claim that his campaign against Chagnon is motivated by his paranoid opposition to sociobiology only to turn around and try to explain why attacking the reputations of sociobiologists is justified, takes on the charge that sociobiology somehow prohibits working with indigenous activists, writing,

Indeed he concludes by suggesting that sociobiological theory leads its adherents to reject legitimate modern indigenous leaders. This suggestion is malicious slander that has no basis in reality (where most sociobiologists not only accept modern indigenous leaders but work together with them to help solve modern indigenous problems). (250)

These are people Hill happens to work with and know personally. Unfortunately, Turner himself has yet to be put on trial for these arrant misrepresentations the way he and Borofsky put Chagnon on trial for the charges they’ve so clearly played a role in trumping up.

In explaining why a book like The Fierce Controversy is necessary, Borofsky repeatedly accuses the American Anthropological Association of using a few examples of sloppy reporting on Tierney’s part as an excuse to “sidestep” the ethical issues raised by Darkness in El Dorado. As we’ve seen, however, Tierney’s misrepresentations are far too extensive, and far too conveniently selective, to have resulted from anything but an intentional effort to deceive readers. In Borofsky’s telling, the issues Tierney raises were so important that pressure from several AAA members, along with hundreds of students who commented on the organization’s website, forced the leadership to commission the El Dorado Task Force to investigate. It turns out, though, that on this critical element of the story too Borofsky is completely mistaken. The Task Force wasn’t responding to pressure from inside its own ranks; its members were instead concerned about the reputation of American anthropologists, whose ability to do future work in Latin American was threatened by the scandal. In a 2002 email uncovered by Alice Dreger, the Chair of the Task Force, former AAA President Jane Hill, wrote of Darkness in El Dorado,

Burn this message. The book is just a piece of sleaze, that’s all there is to it (some cosmetic language will be used in the report, but we all agree on that). But I think the AAA had to do something because I really think that the future of work by anthropologists with indigenous peoples in Latin America—with a high potential to do good—was put seriously at risk by its accusations, and silence on the part of the AAA would have been interpreted as either assent or cowardice. Whether we’re doing the right thing will have to be judged by posterity.

Far from the overdue examination of anthropological ethics he wants his book to be seen as, all Borofsky has offered us with The Fierce Controversy is another piece of sleaze, a sequel of sorts meant to rescue the original from its fatal, and highly unethical, distortions and wholesale fabrications. What Borofsky’s book is more than anything else, though, is a portrait of postmodernism’s powers of moral perversion. As such, and only as such, it is of some historical value.

            In a debate over teaching intelligent design in public schools, Richard Dawkins once called attention to what should have been an obvious truth. “When two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity,” he said, “the truth does not necessarily lie exactly halfway between them. It is possible for one side to be simply wrong.” This line came to mind again and again as I read The Fierce Controversy. If we take presumption of innocence at all seriously, we can’t avoid concluding that the case brought by the anti-Chagnon crowd is simply wrong. The entire scandal began with a campaign of character assassination, which then blew up into a media frenzy, which subsequently induced a moral panic. It seems even some of Chagnon’s old enemies were taken aback by the mushrooming scale of the allegations. And yet many of the participants whose unscrupulous or outright dishonest scholarship and reporting originally caused the hysteria saw fit years later to continue stoking the controversy. Since they don’t appear to feel any shame, all we can do is agree that they’ve forfeited any right to be heard on the topic of Napoleon Chagnon and the Yanomamö. 

            Still, the inquisitorial zealotry of the anti-Chagnon contributors notwithstanding, the most repugnant thing about Borofsky’s book is how the proclamations of concern first and foremost for the Yanomamö begin to seem pro forma through repetition, as each side tries to paint itself as more focused on the well-being of indigenous peoples than the other. You know a book that’s supposed to address ethical issues has gone terribly awry when references to an endangered people start to seem like mere rhetorical maneuvers. 

Other popular posts like this:

NAPOLEON CHAGNON'S CRUCIBLE AND THE ONGOING EPIDEMIC OF MORALIZING HYSTERIA IN ACADEMIA

THE WORLD UNTIL YESTERDAY” AND THE GREAT ANTHROPOLOGY DIVIDE: WADE DAVIS’S AND JAMES C. SCOTT’S BIZARRE AND DISHONEST REVIEWS OF JARED DIAMOND’S WORK

SCIENCE’S DIFFERENCE PROBLEM: NICHOLAS WADE’S TROUBLESOME INHERITANCE AND THE MISSING MORAL FRAMEWORK FOR DISCUSSING THE BIOLOGY OF BEHAVIOR

You can also watch "Secrets of the Tribe," Jose Padiha's documentary about the controversy, online. 

Oliver Sacks’s Graphophilia and Other Compensations for a Life Lived “On the Move”

            Near the midway point of his recently published autobiography, On the Move: a Life, neurologist and author Oliver Sacks recounts a time in 2000 when he was busy writing an earlier book, a memoir about his childhood love of chemistry called Uncle Tungsten. In his late 60s at the time, Sacks was working on a chapter about spectroscopy and found himself roaming the streets of New York with a miniature spectroscope, an instrument that allows you to see the unique spectral light patterns emitted by each of the elements. Peering in through the window of a gay bar, he was dazzled by the display of light, but then he realized that the people inside were disturbed by the apparition of this eccentric old man looking at them through a strange device. Instead of withdrawing, though, Sacks went to the door and “strode in boldly,” shouting, “Stop talking about sex, everyone! Have a look at something interesting.” As it turned out, some of the patrons did stop to take a look. Sacks writes that after a span of “dumbfounded silence,”

my childish, ingenuous enthusiasm won the day, and everyone started passing the spectroscope from hand to hand, making comments like, “Wow—cool!” After everyone had had a turn with the spectroscope, it was handed back, with thanks. Then they all resumed talking about sex again. (238)

This episode encapsulates in microcosm the poignancy that pervades Sacks’s entire autobiography, standing out even amid the multitude of likewise humorous and quietly touching scenes. Sacks has for years been telling us to stop and have a look at something interesting, whether it be the case histories of his tragically, yet fascinatingly, afflicted patients, some pivotal discovery in the history of neuroscience, or the story behind one of his own personal epiphanies. What you wouldn’t know from reading this story apart from the rest of the book, though, is that Sacks didn’t wander onto that particular scene by sheer coincidence. 

Read in its context, this anecdote says a lot about what has afflicted Sacks himself for almost his entire life, leaving us to wonder if perhaps some of his infectious enthusiasm for science and literature and history—or at least the solitary proclivities that support it—came about through his efforts at compensating for those afflictions. Indeed, one of the pleasures of reading On the Move is learning about the origins of what would become his abiding preoccupations, the central themes that shine through in his writing, the ones that, along with his gracefully meticulous prose style and his unmistakable compassion, have earned his essays and books such widespread acclaim. But at times it’s somewhat of a shock to discover just how much Sacks himself was struggling—and continues to struggle—with impediments both physical and social. Just before going into the story about the spectroscope, for instance, he writes,

I am shy in ordinary social contexts; I am not able to “chat” with any ease; I have difficulty recognizing people (this is lifelong, though worse now that my eyesight is impaired); I have little knowledge of and little interest in current affairs, whether political, social, or sexual. Now, additionally, I am hard of hearing, a polite term for deepening deafness. Given all this, I tend to retreat into a corner, to look invisible, to hope I am passed over. This was incapacitating in the 1960s, when I went to gay bars to meet people; I would agonize, wedged into a corner, and leave after an hour, alone, sad, but somehow relieved. But if I find someone, at a party or elsewhere, who shares some of my own (usually scientific) interests—volcanoes, jellyfish, gravitational waves, whatever—then I am immediately drawn into animated conversation (though I may still fail to recognize the person I’m talking to a moment later). (236-7)

Sacks only recently began talking about his own prosopagnosia, or face blindness, the topic of an essay that gave one of his earliest books its provocative title, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat—though Sacks’s own condition is much milder than the man whose case he explored in the essay (or at least it was until his vision began failing). After reading On the Move, though, that title, along with the one for his next collection, An Anthropologist on Mars, which took its name from an essay about Temple Grandin and Asperger’s syndrome, both seem like they reveal as much about Sacks’s own alienation as about the unique lives of his patients.

            Sacks’s homosexuality is also something he only recently began discussing, but it comes up early in his autobiography. One of the central themes of Sacks’s writing has been that what most of us are tempted to look at as disorders or diseases are often just different ways of perceiving and living in the world. When his parents found out about his homosexuality, his mother in particular responded with unforgivable harshness: “‘You are an abomination,’ she said. ‘I wish you had never been born.’ Then she left and did not speak to me for several days” (10). Sacks, however, does forgive her, or at least comes to understand her motives:

When, in 1951, my mother learned of my homosexuality and said, “I wish you had never been born,” she was speaking, though I am not sure I realized this at the time, out of anguish as much as accusation—the anguish of a mother who, feeling she had lost one son to schizophrenia, now feared she was losing another son to homosexuality, a “condition” which was regarded then as shameful and stigmatizing and with a deep power to mark and spoil a life. (61)

Today, it’s easy for most of us to think of homosexuality as just another aspect of healthy human diversity, not as a mental condition, certainly not as anything shameful; if anything, we recognize now, it was probably that stigma, and his mother’s inability to see past it, that threatened to spoil Sacks’s life. Remarkably, though, Sacks was by then questioning whether even his brother’s schizophrenia was best understood, and best treated, as a medical condition.

Two of his three older brothers were already on their way to becoming doctors by the time Oliver and the third brother, Michael, began entering into a type of conspiracy against anyone who sought, by some crude chemical means, to cure him. Michael was an avid reader of communist pamphlets and enjoyed his job as a messenger because he saw it as serving a heroic cause. Oliver writes,

             He once told me that the seemingly humdrum messages he delivered might have hidden, secret meanings, apparent only to the designated recipient; this was why they could not be entrusted to anyone else. Though he might appear to be an ordinary messenger with ordinary messages, Michael said, this was by no means the case. He never said this to anyone else—he knew it would sound bizarre, if not mad—and he had begun to think of our parents, his older brothers, and the entire medical profession as determined to devalue or “medicalize” everything he thought and did, especially if it had any hint of mysticism, for they would see it as an intimation of psychosis. But I was still his little brother, just twelve years old, not yet a medicalizer, and able to listen sensitively and sympathetically to anything he said, even if I could not fully understand it. (60)

When Michael began taking Largactil (or Thorazine, as it’s called in the U.S.) in the early 1950s, this blending together of the real world with his fantasy life came to an end. Michael became dull and lazy. The drug is, after all, a tranquilizer.

The treatment wasn’t altogether sinister, however, as Michael’s schizophrenia was often truly debilitating, and his delusions and violent mood swings were not only dangerous at times—they were a nerve-rackingly constant source of anxiety for anyone close to him, including his little brother. As Oliver writes,           

When I left England on my twenty-seventh birthday, it was, among many other reasons, partly to get away from my tragic, hopeless, mismanaged brother. But perhaps, in another sense, it would become an attempt to explore schizophrenia and allied brain-mind disorders in my own patients and in my own way. (65)

Thus equipped with the insight that neurological patients often see their own conditions much differently from the way doctors see them—not merely as problems needing to be fixed but as rare if onerous gifts intricately tied up with their sense of who they are and what their place is in the world—while at the same time still tormented by the condemnation of his mother and forever ill-at-ease in casual social exchanges, Sacks came to America, to explore, to see where he might fit in, to stay on the move so as to outpace some ultimate reckoning the nature of which he couldn’t begin to anticipate.

On the Move reads briskly. The chapters are broken into mostly light-hearted and often quite funny anecdotes, vignettes, and mini-essays, while the overarching structure of the autobiography builds on the themes introduced in the earliest pages. When Sacks’s father, wondering why his son never seemed to be interested in any girls, asked him if he might prefer boys, the young Oliver responded, “Yes, I do—but it’s just a feeling—I have never ‘done’ anything” (10). While he would eventually get around to doing something with a handful of lovers, all these relationships were remarkable either for their brevity or for their lack of intimacy. In London in 1973, Sacks, celebrating his 40th birthday, met a young man from Harvard and spent the following week with him. Though it’s a little heartbreaking, it’s not exactly surprising when Sacks reveals that “after that sweet birthday fling I was to have no sex for the next thirty-five years” (203). It would have been under thirty years into this unenforced sentence of celibacy when Sacks burst into that gay bar in 2000 and shouted at the patrons to stop talking about sex so they could have a look at something interesting.  

            The multiple sections of each chapter are connected thematically, so they jump around in time to some degree, even as the overall temporal direction is forward from Sacks’s early childhood into the present. The descriptions tend to come as though from a distance, as Sacks resists the temptation to fill in details lost to the void of normal forgetfulness—though several of his quoted letters, journal entries, and unpublished narrative essays do intermittently lend some enticing texture to many of episodes he recounts. As effortlessly engaging as each section is on its own, the rapid-fire cascade of what appear at first glance like loosely connected, even somewhat shallowly rendered reminiscences could easily detract from any sense of progression, blunting any compulsion toward further reading. What saves On the Move from being submerged in tedious and chatty meandering is the general picture that incrementally emerges through the reprisal of themes harking back to Sacks’s childhood and the earliest pages of the book. Considered collectively, the individual sections come to seem like tiles comprising an intricate mosaic, a portrait of a man on a quest that’s part scientific expedition and part something much more personal, a search for a manageable form of human connection, and for a viable reconciliation of his two professional roles, each of whose objectives are frequently at odds with the other’s. 

When you consider the difficulty of arranging all the heartbreaks, triumphs, turning points, and tragedies that make up several decades of memories—along with all the scattered impressions and one-off encounters that have left their indelible marks—all into a book of under four hundred pages, you begin to appreciate the near impossibility of writing an autobiography that captures at all suitably the essence of a life. Most works in the genre rely heavily on the author’s celebrity for whatever modicum of interest they manage to pique. A man with an oeuvre as impressive as Sacks’s could also have coasted along on the promise of delivering the dish about what went on behind the scenes of his earlier works, all of which foregrounded the patients rather than the good doctor himself. With all those previous books, too, Sacks had the luxury of focusing closely in on the individuals, events, and relationships that he felt best illuminated whatever neuropsychological phenomenon he was then exploring—the memoirist’s advantage of a narrow scope. Approaching On the Move, Sacks faced the formidable challenge of composing an entire autobiography, which meant having to condense a long and extraordinarily rich life into a dozen or so chapters. The style and structure he adopted to meet this challenge, while much different from the methods on display in past books, serve as one more testament to his literary ingenuity.

On the Move does feature its fair share of celebrities, both Hollywood types like Robert De Niro and Robin Williams and scientific types like Stephen Jay Gould and Francis Crick. You also get plenty of background to the stories told in Sacks’s groundbreaking books. A vital theme recurring throughout the book, however, is Sacks’s seemingly endless struggle to find the best way to represent his experiences, and the characters at the center of them, in a prose register that does justice to the real lives, the real dignity and spirit of his subjects, while at the same time casting light on the neurological phenomena that so fascinate him. What has always made Sacks’s books so wonderfully engrossing, and what makes Sacks himself such a treasure, is his dual identity as a profoundly compassionate doctor and a consummate artist, one in constant search of the ideal form to convey his stories. His essays and books aren’t just cogent explorations of scientific mysteries; they consistently achieve the status of true literature. And now, with On the Move, Sacks has bequeathed to us a masterpiece of the autobiographical form.

            As with all artistic masterpieces, though, you don’t close this book with any unalloyed feeling of uplift. Oliver Sacks’s life and his career raise some troubling questions about the driving impulse behind scientific and literary achievement. Again and again throughout his life, Sacks has played the role of outsider, either by force or by choice. The early chapters of On the Move in which he recounts his days as a motorcycling aficionado give a sense of what it took for him to quell his fears of isolation and unworthiness. He writes,

There is a direct union of oneself with a motorcycle, for it is so geared to one’s proprioception, one’s movements and postures, that it responds almost like a part of one’s own body. Bike and rider become a single, indivisible entity; it is very much like riding a horse. A car cannot become part of one in quite the same way. (96)

Sacks would usually experience this union of man and machine over the course of long journeys he embarked on by himself. He would thus spend hour after hour, alone but connected with a near-living machine that responded intimately to his bidding, and forever moving toward something, away from certain other things—this is Sacks in his element. But the motorcycling that gave him such joy wasn’t completely without a social dimension:

America, I imagined, was a classless society, a place where everyone, irrespective of birth, color, religion, education, or profession, could meet each other as fellow human beings, brother animals, a place where a professor could talk to a truck driver, without the categories coming between them.

I had had a taste, a glimpse, of such a democracy, an equality, when I roved about England on my motorcycle in the 1950s. Motorcycles seemed, even in stiff England, to bypass the barriers, to open a sort of social ease and good nature in everyone. “That’s a nice bike,” someone would say, and the conversation would go from there. Motorcyclists were a friendly lot; we waved to one another when we passed on the road, made conversation easily if we met at a café. We formed a sort of romantic classless society within society at large. (72-3)

Sacks could, in such a society, avoid being forced to answer for his difficulty recognizing faces. He could escape questions about his sexual preferences. Even within this ideal society, though, Sacks was given to withdrawing. He writes of being accepted by the Hells Angels, for instance, who were charmed by the notion of a biker with an MD, but he never actually got around to going on any rides with them.

            Another obsession that took hold of Sacks as a young man, and that takes up a significant portion of the first half of his autobiography, was weightlifting. This endeavor too brought Sacks into a community of sorts, and yet he participated in this loose-knit society in just as marginal a way as he did that of his biker comrades. Sacks’s descriptions of motorcycling suggest that for him riding was a way of settling the paradox of a fiercely guarded man quietly yearning to connect and belong, in union with a machine that could create the illusion of sentience, even acceptance. With weightlifting too, we see him engaged in solitary exercises that nonetheless take place in, and derive their significance from, a group of likeminded fellow practitioners. But Sacks reveals later in the book that what he was after with bodybuilding was much more straightforward.

I sometimes wonder why I pushed myself so relentlessly in weight lifting. My motive, I think, was not an uncommon one; I was not the ninety-eight-pound weakling of bodybuilding advertisements, but I was timid, diffident, insecure, submissive. I became strong—very strong—with all my weight lifting but found that this did nothing for my character, which remained exactly the same. And, like many excesses, weight lifting exacted a price. (122)

If motorcycling was for Sacks an attempt to square the circle of his competing needs for solitude and companionship, weightlifting seems to have been more about wanting to make himself powerful to compensate for feelings of powerlessness. Both obsessions, crucially, could be indulged in solitude, but both likewise attracted a circle of fellow enthusiasts. If there’s a single thread that ties the diverse episodes of Sacks’s autobiography together, it would be this theme of lonely intimacy, connection at a distance, roaming the far reaches in search of home.

            Sacks, it becomes clear, is not only perfectly aware of the repetition of these notes throughout the book; he’s using them quite deliberately and to striking effect. The title of the book derives from a poem by Thom Gunn, one of Sacks’s many close friends living at a distance. The two routinely shared lessons learned from their lives as writers, as well as insights gleaned from their experiences with hallucinogens and other drugs. Sacks writes,

We had launched on journeys, evolutions, developments, that could not be entirely predicted or controlled; we were constantly in motion. In “On the Move,” which Thom wrote in his twenties, are the lines

            At worst, one is in motion; and at best,

            Reaching no absolute, in which to rest,

            One is always nearer by not keeping still. (278)

“Reaching no absolute” captures much of the essence of Sacks’s identity. Over the course of the autobiography, the stage on which he struggles with the many nuances and contradictions of his life shifts from the road and the gym to the hospitals housing his patients and the pages containing his prose. In his professional life, his obsessions have made him just as unplaceable as he is in his personal life. He’s had all the practical difficulties of balancing his patients’ needs with his readers’ desires, his desire to maintain his scientific professionalism with his graciousness toward his audience (a comment he once received from an editor: “The book is too easy to read. This will make people suspicious—professionalize it” [151]), and his role as a doctor with his role as a writer. But his stake in each of these struggles has always been deeply personal.

            Despite the theme of never-ending motion, On the Move does offer a gratifying sense of direction as we see how Oliver Sacks became the great figure we recognize today by that name. This evolution was as much personal as it was scientific, since to write his breakthrough work Awakenings, the inspiration for a movie of that title starring Robin Williams as a stand-in for Sacks, he not only had to do experimental drug treatments with catatonic patients, but he also had to arrive at an understanding of what his role could be as a doctor and a friend to his subjects, and as a writer turning them into semi-fictional characters. He then had to figure out how to convey something of the essence of that relationship to his readers. One of his favorite responses to the finished book came from none other than Thom Gunn, one of his partners in constant motion. Comparing Awakenings to some of Sacks’s earlier writing, Gunn admits he saw those initial works as deficient and despaired of his friend’s prospects for overcoming the underlying shortcoming. In a letter, Gunn explained,

What I didn’t know was that the growth of sympathies is something frequently delayed till one’s thirties. What was deficient in these writings is now the supreme organizer of Awakenings, and wonderfully so. It is literally the organizer of your style, too, and is what enables it to be so inclusive, so receptive, and so varied…. I wonder if you know what happened. Simply working with the patients over so long, or the opening up helped by acid, or really falling in love with someone (as opposed to being infatuated). Or all three… (276).

Sacks doesn’t have any fully resolved answer to the question of what precipitated the transformation, but he suggests that both his own and Gunn’s development had much to do with “the sense of history, of predecessors” (277).

Sacks’s coming into his own with the publication and success of Awakenings does place him in an easily recognizable position among the scientists and explorers of yore, so much so that it makes you wonder if his alienation could be attributed to him having been born some hundred-odd years too late. His essays often read like dispatches from exotic regions, messages home about how much stranger, how much scarier, and how much more wonderful the world is once you step beyond the bounds of your own personal known world. This element to his writing didn’t come about through chance. He writes,  

I used to delight in the natural history journals of the nineteenth century, all of them blends of the personal and the scientific—especially Wallace’s Malay Archipelago, Bate’s Naturalist on the River Amazons, and Spruce’s Notes of a Botanist, and the work which inspired them all (and Darwin too), Alexander von Humbolt’s Personal Narrative. It pleased me to think that Wallace, Bates, and Spruce were all crisscrossing one another’s paths, leapfrogging, on the same stretch of the Amazon during the selfsame months of 1849 and to think that all of them were good friends. (They continued to correspond throughout their lives, and Wallace was to publish Spruce’s Notes after his death.)

            They were all, in a sense, amateurs—self-educated, self-motivated, not part of an institution—and they lived, it sometimes seemed to me, in a halcyon world, a sort of Eden, not yet turbulent and troubled by the almost murderous rivalries which were soon to mark an increasingly professionalized world. (330)

All these great friends, traveling far and wide, corresponding at a distance, fueled by an insatiable wonder, and all writing unforgettable tales of their adventures—how could Oliver Sacks not love these stories? How could he not feel perfectly at home as his own career began to take on a shape resembling this lost ideal, even if the resemblances were only superficial?

On the Move, as the autobiography of a scientist, is as much about the author’s evolution as an intellectual as it is about his personal development. The penultimate chapter is primarily focused on Gerald Edelman’s theory of neural Darwinism. The idea strikes Sacks as so compelling and far-reaching in its implications that he remembers feeling grateful when the full realization of its import sank in. “I thought, ‘Thank God I have lived to hear this theory.’ I felt as I imagined many people must have felt in 1859 when the Origin came out” (365). It’s not the least bit surprising that Sacks felt this way about a theory of neurological and mental development, especially one that could explain the quintessential uniqueness of each individual. What’s remarkable—genius really—is how the discussion of neural Darwinism ties so many of the book’s themes so neatly together.

What is the theory? The idea is that the mind emerges from the communication of a variety of distantly located regions of the brain. Sacks explains,

            Such correlation and synchronization of neuronal firing in widely separated areas of the brain is made possible by very rich connections between the brain’s maps—connections which are reciprocal and may contain millions of fibers. Stimuli from, say, touching a chair may affect one set of maps; stimuli from seeing it may affect another set. Reentrant signaling takes place between these sets of maps as part of the process of perceiving a chair. (363)

This reentrant signaling is a type of real-time updating of maps based on information coming in from various sensory inputs, as it gets channeled through and incorporated into still other maps. It wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to use as a metaphor for reentrance the rich correspondences of nineteenth century explorers and scientists, all collaborating to generate a more comprehensive and accurate view of the natural world. “And in its broadest sense,” Sacks writes, “neural Darwinism implies that we are destined, whether we wish it or not, to a life of particularity and self-development, to make our own individual paths through life” (369).

            Sacks’s endorsement notwithstanding, the scientific community is far from reaching a final verdict on Edelman’s theory. It may however receive quite a boost from Sacks’s treatment in his book (especially considering that Edelman’s own writing is significantly less reader-friendly). But what I was left wondering when I turned over the last page of On the Move was how much Sacks’s love of writing owed to his need to correspond at a distance, a need that very likely arose from the insecurity and rejection he experienced as a young man. You can’t be a great writer until you’ve found your great subject. For Sacks, this was neurology. But you can’t be either a great writer or a great doctor unless you’re driven by a mad passion to explore, understand, tinker, and improve. When Sacks writes about being shy and hiding out in a corner of some bar, we know he was probably busy either filling a notebook or marking up some text written any time in the last three centuries. While he’s sitting there failing to connect with his fellow humans, in other words, he’s working to produce the very pieces of writing that make him such a treasure to all of us. If he’d had a choice to begin with, would Sacks have considered this a good trade? Would any of us?

            Even if the obsession that underlies successful scientific and literary careers doesn’t originate as a compensation for some social debility, then that same obsession, once developed, is likely to become a social debility in its own right. I think about this now that Sacks is gone and any opportunity I had to write to him about how much his work has delighted, fascinated, influenced, and inspired me over the past two decades is gone with him. After his New York Times essay in February, in which he revealed that he had terminal cancer, I, along with probably thousands of other readers, felt a tiny panicked urge to write and express our gratitude before it was too late. Thinking of those thousands of others, I decided writing would be pointless. But that’s the paradox I’m left with: a man who touched countless lives but who remained unreachable, often despite himself, in his own life. The chief solace we have is that while Sacks’s personal struggles may not have ever been resolved, the scientific and literary work those struggles made way for remain for still more countless others to be touched by in the future. 

Also read: 

NAPOLEON CHAGNON'S CRUCIBLE AND THE ONGOING EPIDEMIC OF MORALIZING HYSTERIA IN ACADEMIA

THE FEMINIST SOCIOBIOLOGIST: AN APPRECIATION OF SARAH BLAFFER HRDY DISGUISED AS A REVIEW OF “MOTHERS AND OTHERS: THE EVOLUTIONARY ORIGINS OF MUTUAL UNDERSTANDING”

REBECCA MEAD’S MIDDLEMARCH PILGRIMAGE AND THE 3 WRONG WAYS TO READ A NOVEL

And:

THE SOUL OF THE SKEPTIC: WHAT PRECISELY IS Sam Harris WAKING UP FROM?

The Issue with Jurassic World No One Has the Balls to Talk about

            We all know who the real stars of Jurassic World are—actress Bryce Dallas Howard’s deftness at running from myriad dinos over diverse terrains in posh heels (without messing up her ruler-straight hair), and actor Chris Pratt’s ability to find a miraculously smooth path for his motorcycle as he speeds through the tangled jungle alongside the raptors he’s trained as bloodhounds. So maybe the mosasaur was a bit too big, and maybe the denouement’s interspecies melee was a little too reminiscent of Godzilla vs Mothra vs Ghidorah, and of course the dinos were altogether too featherless. But these are quibbles. The movie is supposed to be fun. And it works. There is, however, one serious issue with the movie no one has the courage or moral clarity to discuss (except me of course).

            First a confession: until seeing Jurassic World, I hated hipsters as much as any red-blooded American male who came of age in the 90s. The ironically overgrown or overly manicured facial hair, the freakishly tight pants, the conspicuously conspicuous three-pounds of corrective eyewear, the fan boy nostalgia for the most annoying pop culture era in history, the contra-scientific certainty that vinyl sounds better, the bitter beer, the way talking to them makes you feel like you’re being interviewed by a dimwitted stand-in for Stephen Colbert on the Colbert Report. It’s all just awful. But as I was watching Jake Johnson’s nerdy character in the movie being ruthlessly juxtaposed with the ultra-masculine Chris Pratt, my repulsion began to give way to pity.

Maybe it was because earlier in the day I’d read about some poor bastard who’d written a letter seeking advice from the hosts of a literary blog. The letter writer, who fashioned himself a poet, had been all but talked out of ever writing poetry again. Here’s how he describes his crisis:

I am a white, male poet—a white, male poet who is aware of his privilege and sensitive to inequalities facing women, POC, and LGBTQ individuals, but despite this awareness and sensitivity, I am still white and still male. Sometimes I feel like the time to write from my experience has passed, that the need for poems from a white, male perspective just isn’t there anymore.

You can picture this guilt-ridden sad sack scrunching his face and balling his fists in an attempt to will himself out of existence. But much to his consternation, no matter how hard he tries to erase the reality, there he is, white and male as ever. He goes on:

Sometimes I write from other perspectives via persona poems in order to understand and empathize with the so-called “other”; but I fear that this could be construed as yet another example of my privilege—that I am appropriating another person’s experience. Write what you know and risk denying voices whose stories are more urgent; write to learn what you don’t know and risk colonizing someone else’s story.

What a little bitch, right? On the one hand, he’s paralyzed with the fear of being seen as someone who exercises his supposed privilege; on the other, he’s egocentric enough to think any of those scare-quoted others give a shit about his poetry. “I feel terrible about feeling terrible about this,” he whines, “since I also know that for so long, white men made other people feel terrible about who they were.” I mean, modern poetry is pretty horrific, but come on—it’s not slavery.

            I admit, my first thought after reading the letter was of how much I’d like to slap the shit out of this loser. Then I settled for a good laugh at how pathetic he is. But then I got to thinking. And while I was thinking I was halfheartedly scrolling through my Facebook feed. Apparently, some dude named Bruce Jenner very publicly decided to become Caitlyn Jenner. And all Jon Stewart, a guy I admire, could think to joke about with regard to the story was how sexist the coverage was. Then there’s this Rachel Dolezal character, who was head of an NAACP chapter in Spokane Washington—until her parents revealed that she’s not even a little black (though I guess we can assume she’s still a woman). The consensus seems to be that it’s cool to switch genders, but not cool to switch races. I honestly can’t make myself care enough to learn what the reasoning behind this distinction might be—though I am a big fan of that awesome ice cream swirl braid. And of course there's already a controversy about just how sexist Jurassic World is. This was as predictable as the plot of a Hollywood blockbuster; every majorly successful movie and every majorly successful book gets accused of being sexist sooner or later. I defy you to find one that isn't. (Chris Pratt, well aware of the inevitability of this type of controversy, actually wrote a preemptive apology on Facebook.)

            As I was watching the bespectacled and mustachioed Jake Johnson in Jurassic World play with the toy dinosaurs lining his computerized workstation, recounting the story of how he purchased his vintage Jurassic Park t-shirt on e-Bay, it occurred to me: these pseudo-dudes are a product of all the insanity surrounding issues of racial and gender identity suffusing social media (where it has trickled in from college campuses). The hipsters present themselves as these parodies of manhood because they’ve been made to feel ashamed of their status as male. They bury their opinions and predilections layers deep in the cheapest irony because they’re insecure about being tourists in the regions and cultures they’ve stolen from other people. And, damn, it’s no wonder they’re nostalgic for the simpler, more innocent days when dudes could watch Star Wars without wondering if the boner they get from Carrie Fisher in a slave bikini is proof of an inherently oppressive nature.

[TRIGGER WARNING: The following paragraph contains empirically well-substantiated conclusions that are nonetheless considered by identity activists to be thought crimes--er, um, I mean, microaggressions.]

            Maybe it’s just the circles I run in, but my email and Facebook feeds—not to mention the magazines and news shows I watch—are lousy with click-baity bullshit toeing the line of the most brain dead identity politics theories. Don’t get me wrong, we as a society really do need to do a lot more about racial inequality. But guilt tripping really nice geeky white dudes isn’t going to accomplish a damn thing. And I understand that women really are systematically abused and oppressed and discriminated against—in the fucking Middle East and parts of Africa and Asia. I appreciate that all the Facebook feminists genuinely believe they’re working to make the world a better place, but the facts they like to cite are completely wrong, almost to a one. They scream about how women are paid less than men, but they leave out the fact that it’s because women make different career and lifestyle choices—and that they make those same choices cross-culturally. The Twitter activists vent their outrage about how many college girls are assaulted, but they studiously cover up the fact that the numbers they’re citing are based on surveys designed to produce exaggerated incidence rates. Using similar methods, you can actually show that just as many men are raped in the U.S. as women. Clear evidence of discrimination in science and technology fields, where so many hipsters dwell, dried up over a decade ago. And yet the activists have only grown more insistent, more outraged, and more numerous. (It should be noted, the very stupid idea of trigger warnings is based on misconceptions about trauma.) 

            I sat in the movie theater watching the scene where Johnson’s character gets rebuffed when he goes in for a kiss with his geeky coworker, and I wondered what it would be like to be a young man or young woman today, working out your ideas about who you are and what role you might play in the world, forming your identity, amid this never-ending caravan of Quixotes tilting at their postmodern windmills. Race doesn’t really exist, we read again and again. Really? Then why is it so fucked up that Rachel Dolezal has decided to be black? But the more important question is, why do we think it makes you racist to believe that race actually does exist? Can’t someone who believes in race also believe that everyone should enjoy the same rights and freedoms regardless of it? And can’t someone who accepts the evidence that biology plays a large role in gender hold that same view of the universality of rights and freedoms without being sexist?

            It’s easy for me to wade through all the identity activists’ bullshit, because I think it’s all bullshit. If we want to remedy racial inequality in America, we’re going to have to do a lot more than address those implicit biases people are always talking about. It’s going to take reforms to our economy and education systems. (Those biases, incidentally, tend to be based on social reality, rather than social reality being based on them.) And though I know the case for sexism in the western world is sketchy, I certainly don’t envy young women, many of whom we can predict are going to have stereotypical tastes and stereotypical desires, even though they’re being taught that stereotypes are evil and anyone who reinforces them is complicit in all kinds of horrific crimes. Let’s face it, for most women, hipsters just aren’t sexy. But we have to ask, who do young people have that they can turn to for straight answers these days? They can’t go to their teachers because their teachers are probably drinking the same Kool-Aid as the activists. And they can’t go to scientists because they keep hearing how scientists are all white male oppressors.  

             So I decided to rein in my contempt for the hipster character toward the end of the movie. After all, Chris Pratt’s character is almost too perfectly manly a man—he’s a bit of a parody himself. Instead of making fun of and brutalizing hipsters, we should start trying to help these gender-confused race-shamed little cowards. The only reason they’re trying so hard to be trendy dressers is because it distracts them from their perceived role as natural oppressors. The only reason they look so ridiculous is because they believe the only role they deserve at this point in history is the one of providing comic relief. And though they may take their one-punch knockout ironically, I’d be willing to bet they'll still go home and cry about it.

            What do you all say? Let’s do something useful on social media for a change and use it to end hipster abuse. Join the movement! Write about all the other stereotypical and discriminatory portrayals of hipsters in movies and literature. Maybe we can even do some surveys to get some quasi-evidence of all the tragic tribulations hipsters face in their daily lives. I mean, how horrible must it be to let the activists neuter you only to discover that everyone just hates you more afterward? Oh, and maybe boycott Jurassic World… nah, on second thought, go see Jurassic World. It’s a really fun movie.

Other popular posts like this:

ARE 1 IN 5 WOMEN REALLY SEXUALLY ASSAULTED ON COLLEGE CAMPUSES?

SCIENCE’S DIFFERENCE PROBLEM: NICHOLAS WADE’S TROUBLESOME INHERITANCE AND THE MISSING MORAL FRAMEWORK FOR DISCUSSING THE BIOLOGY OF BEHAVIOR

THE SPIDER-MAN STARS' DUST-UP OVER PSEUDO-SEXISM

WHY I WON'T BE ATTENDING THE GENDER-FLIPPED SHAKESPEARE PLAY

The Idiocy of Outrage: Sam Harris's Run-ins with Ben Affleck and Noam Chomsky

        Every time Sam Harris engages in a public exchange of ideas, be it a casual back-and-forth or a formal debate, he has to contend with an invisible third party whose obnoxious blubbering dispels, distorts, or simply drowns out nearly every word he says. You probably wouldn’t be able to infer the presence of this third party from Harris’s own remarks or demeanor. What you’ll notice, though, is that fellow participants in the discussion, be they celebrities like Ben Affleck or eminent scholars like Noam Chomsky, respond to his comments—even to his mere presence—with a level of rancor easily mistakable for blind contempt. This reaction will baffle many in the audience. But it will quickly dawn on anyone familiar with Harris’s ongoing struggle to correct pernicious mischaracterizations of his views that these people aren’t responding to Harris at all, but rather to the dimwitted and evil caricature of him promulgated by unscrupulous journalists and intellectuals.

In his books on religion and philosophy, Harris plies his unique gift for cutting through unnecessary complications to shine a direct light on the crux of the issue at hand. Topics that other writers seem to go out of their way to make abstruse he manages to explore with jolting clarity and refreshing concision. But this same quality to his writing which so captivates his readers often infuriates academics, who feel he’s cheating by breezily refusing to represent an issue in all its grand complexity while neglecting to acknowledge his indebtedness to past scholars. That he would proceed in such a manner to draw actual conclusions—and unorthodox ones at that—these scholars see as hubris, made doubly infuriating by the fact that his books enjoy such a wide readership outside of academia. So, whether Harris is arguing on behalf of a scientific approach to morality or insisting we recognize that violent Islamic extremism is motivated not solely by geopolitical factors but also by straightforward readings of passages in Islamic holy texts, he can count on a central thread of the campaign against him consisting of the notion that he’s a journeyman hack who has no business weighing in on such weighty matters.

Sam Harris

Philosophers and religious scholars are of course free to challenge Harris’s conclusions, and it’s even possible for them to voice their distaste for his style of argumentation without necessarily violating any principles of reasoned debate. However, whenever these critics resort to moralizing, we must recognize that by doing so they’re effectively signaling the end of any truly rational exchange. For Harris, this often means a substantive argument never even gets a chance to begin. The distinction between debating morally charged topics on the one hand, and condemning an opponent as immoral on the other, may seem subtle, or academic even. But it’s one thing to argue that a position with moral and political implications is wrong; it’s an entirely different thing to become enraged and attempt to shout down anyone expressing an opinion you deem morally objectionable. Moral reasoning, in other words, can and must be distinguished from moralizing. Since the underlying moral implications of the issue are precisely what are under debate, giving way to angry indignation amounts to a pulling of rank—an effort to silence an opponent through the exercise of one’s own moral authority, which reveals a rather embarrassing sense of one’s own superior moral standing.

Unfortunately, it’s far too rarely appreciated that a debate participant who gets angry and starts wagging a finger is thereby demonstrating an unwillingness or an inability to challenge a rival’s points on logical or evidentiary grounds. As entertaining as it is for some to root on their favorite dueling demagogue in cable news-style venues, anyone truly committed to reason and practiced in its application realizes that in a debate the one who loses her cool loses the argument. This isn’t to say we should never be outraged by an opponent’s position. Some issues have been settled long enough, their underlying moral calculus sufficiently worked through, that a signal of disgust or contempt is about the only imaginable response. For instance, if someone were to argue, as Aristotle did, that slavery is excusable because some races are naturally subservient, you could be forgiven for lacking the patience to thoughtfully scrutinize the underlying premises. The problem, however, is that prematurely declaring an end to the controversy and then moving on to blanket moral condemnation of anyone who disagrees has become a worryingly common rhetorical tactic. And in this age of increasingly segmented and polarized political factions it’s more important than ever that we check our impulse toward sanctimony—even though it’s perhaps also harder than ever to do so.

Once a proponent of some unpopular idea starts to be seen as not merely mistaken but dishonest, corrupt, or bigoted, then playing fair begins to seem less obligatory for anyone wishing to challenge that idea. You can learn from casual Twitter browsing or from reading any number of posts on Salon.com that Sam Harris advocates a nuclear first strike against radical Muslims, supported the Bush administration’s use of torture, and carries within his heart an abiding hatred of Muslim people, all billion and a half of whom he believes are virtually indistinguishable from the roughly 20,000 militants making up ISIS. You can learn these things, none of which is true, because some people dislike Harris’s ideas so much they feel it’s justifiable, even imperative, to misrepresent his views, lest the true, more reasonable-sounding versions reach a wider receptive audience. And it’s not just casual bloggers and social media mavens who feel no qualms about spreading what they know to be distortions of Harris’s views; religious scholar Reza Aslan and journalist Glenn Greenwald both saw fit to retweet the verdict that he is a “genocidal fascist maniac,” accompanied by an egregiously misleading quote as evidence—even though Harris had by then discussed his views at length with both of these men.

  It’s easy to imagine Ben Affleck doing some cursory online research to prep for his appearance on Real Time with Bill Maher and finding plenty of savory tidbits to prejudice him against Harris before either of them stepped in front of the cameras. But we might hope that a scholar of Noam Chomsky’s caliber wouldn’t be so quick to form an opinion of someone based on hearsay. Nonetheless, Chomsky responded to Harris’s recent overture to begin an email exchange to help them clear up their misconceptions about each other’s ideas by writing: “Perhaps I have some misconceptions about you. Most of what I’ve read of yours is material that has been sent to me about my alleged views, which is completely false”—this despite Harris having just quoted Chomsky calling him a “religious fanatic.” We must wonder, where might that characterization have come from if he’d read so little of Harris’s work?

  Political and scholarly discourse would benefit immensely from a more widespread recognition of our natural temptation to recast points of intellectual disagreement as moral offenses, a temptation which makes it difficult to resist the suspicion that anyone espousing rival beliefs is not merely mistaken but contemptibly venal and untrustworthy. In philosophy and science, personal or so-called ad hominem accusations and criticisms are considered irrelevant and thus deemed out of bounds—at least in principle. But plenty of scientists and academics of every stripe routinely succumb to the urge to moralize in the midst of controversy. Thus begins the lamentable process by which reasoned arguments are all but inevitably overtaken by competing campaigns of character assassination. In service to these campaigns, we have an ever growing repertoire of incendiary labels with ever lengthening lists of criteria thought to reasonably warrant their application, so if you want to discredit an opponent all that’s necessary is a little creative interpretation, and maybe some selective quoting.

The really tragic aspect of this process is that as scrupulous and fair-minded as any given interlocutor may be, it’s only ever a matter of time before an unpopular message broadcast to a wider audience is taken up by someone who feels duty-bound to kill the messenger—or at least to besmirch the messenger’s reputation. And efforts at turning thoughtful people away from troublesome ideas before they ever even have a chance to consider them all too often meet with success, to everyone’s detriment. Only a small percentage of unpopular ideas may merit acceptance, but societies can’t progress without them.

Once we appreciate that we’re all susceptible to this temptation to moralize, the next most important thing for us to be aware of is that it becomes more powerful the moment we begin to realize ours are the weaker arguments. People in individualist cultures already tend to more readily rate themselves as exceptionally moral than as exceptionally intelligent. Psychologists call this tendency the Muhammed Ali effect (because the famous boxer once responded to a journalist’s suggestion that he’d purposely failed an Army intelligence test by quipping, “I only said I was the greatest, not the smartest”). But when researchers Jens Möller and Karel Savyon had study participants rate themselves after performing poorly on an intellectual task, they found that the effect was even more pronounced. Subjects in studies of the Muhammed Ali effect report believing that moral traits like fairness and honesty are more socially desirable than intelligence. They also report believing these traits are easier for an individual to control, while at the same time being more difficult to measure. Möller and Savyon theorize that participants in their study were inflating their already inflated sense of their own moral worth to compensate for their diminished sense of intellectual worth. While researchers have yet to examine whether this amplification of the effect makes people more likely to condemn intellectual rivals on moral grounds, the idea that a heightened estimation of moral worth could make us more likely to assert our moral authority seems a plausible enough extrapolation from the findings. 

            That Ben Affleck felt intimated by the prospect of having to intelligently articulate his reasons for rejecting Harris’s positions, however, seems less likely than that he was prejudiced to the point of outrage against Harris sometime before encountering him in person. At one point in the interview he says, “You’re making a career out of ISIS, ISIS, ISIS,” a charge of pandering that suggests he knows something about Harris’s work (though Harris doesn't discuss ISIS in any of his books). Unfortunately, Affleck’s passion and the sneering tone of his accusations were probably more persuasive for many in the audience than any of the substantive points made on either side. But, amid Affleck’s high dudgeon, it’s easy to sift out views that are mainstream among liberals. The argument Harris makes at the outset of the segment that first sets Affleck off—though it seemed he’d already been set off by something—is in fact a critique of those same views. He says,

When you want to talk about the treatment of women and homosexuals and freethinkers and public intellectuals in the Muslim world, I would argue that liberals have failed us. [Affleck breaks in here to say, “Thank God you’re here.”] And the crucial point of confusion is that we have been sold this meme of Islamophobia, where every criticism of the doctrine of Islam gets conflated with bigotry toward Muslims as people.

This is what Affleck says is “gross” and “racist.” The ensuing debate, such as it is, focuses on the appropriateness—and morality—of criticizing the Muslim world for crimes only a subset of Muslims are guilty of. But how large is that subset?

Harris (along with Maher) makes two important points: first, he states over and over that it’s Muslim beliefs he’s criticizing, not the Muslim people, so if a particular Muslim doesn’t hold to the belief in question he or she is exempt from the criticism. Harris is ready to cite chapter and verse of Islamic holy texts to show that the attitudes toward women and homosexuals he objects to aren’t based on the idiosyncratic characters of a few sadistic individuals but are rather exactly what’s prescribed by religious doctrine. A passage from his book The End of Faith makes the point eloquently.

It is not merely that we are war with an otherwise peaceful religion that has been “hijacked” by extremists. We are at war with precisely the vision of life that is prescribed to all Muslims in the Koran, and further elaborated in the literature of the hadith, which recounts the sayings and actions of the Prophet. A future in which Islam and the West do not stand on the brink of mutual annihilation is a future in which most Muslims have learned to ignore most of their canon, just as most Christians have learned to do. (109-10)

But most secularists and moderate Christians in the U.S. have a hard time appreciating how seriously most Muslims take their Koran. There are of course passages in the Bible that are simply obscene, and Christians have certainly committed their share of atrocities at least in part because they believed their God commanded them to. But, whereas almost no Christians today advocate stoning their brothers, sisters, or spouses to death for coaxing them to worship other gods (Deuteronomy 13:6 8-15), a significant number of people in Islamic populations believe apostates and “innovators” deserve to have their heads lopped off.

            The second point Harris makes is that, while Affleck is correct in stressing how few Muslims make up or support the worst of the worst groups like Al Qaeda and ISIS, the numbers who believe women are essentially the property of their fathers and husbands, that homosexuals are vile sinners, or that atheist bloggers deserve to be killed are much higher. “We have to empower the true reformers in the Muslim world to change it,” as Harris insists. The journalist Nicholas Kristof says this is a mere “caricature” of the Muslim world. But Harris’s goal has never been to promote a negative view of Muslims, and he at no point suggests his criticisms apply to all Muslims, all over the world. His point, as he stresses multiple times, is that Islamic doctrine is inspiring large numbers of people to behave in appalling ways, and this is precisely why he’s so vocal in his criticisms of those doctrines.

Part of the difficulty here is that liberals (including this one) face a dilemma anytime they’re forced to account for the crimes of non-whites in non-Western cultures. In these cases, their central mission of standing up for the disadvantaged and the downtrodden runs headlong into their core principle of multiculturalism, which makes it taboo for them to speak out against another society’s beliefs and values. Guys like Harris are permitted to criticize Christianity when it’s used to justify interference in women’s sexual decisions or discrimination against homosexuals, because a white Westerner challenging white Western culture is just the system attempting to correct itself. But when Harris speaks out against Islam and the far worse treatment of women and homosexuals—and infidels and apostates—it prescribes, his position is denounced as “gross” and “racist” by the likes of Ben Affleck, with the encouragement of guys like Reza Aslan and Glenn Greenwald. A white American male casting his judgment on a non-Western belief system strikes them as the first step along the path to oppression that ends in armed invasion and possibly genocide. (Though, it should be noted, multiculturalists even attempt to silence female critics of Islam from the Muslim world.)

The biggest problem with this type of slippery-slope presumption isn’t just that it’s sloppy thinking—rejecting arguments because of alleged similarities to other, more loathsome ideas, or because of some imagined consequence should those ideas fall into the wrong hands. The biggest problem is that it time and again provides a rationale for opponents of an idea to silence and defame anyone advocating it. Unless someone is explicitly calling for mistreatment or aggression toward innocents who pose no threat, there’s simply no way to justify violating anyone’s rights to free inquiry and free expression—principles that should supersede multiculturalism because they’re the foundation and guarantors of so many other rights. Instead of using our own delusive moral authority in an attempt to limit discourse within the bounds we deem acceptable, we have a responsibility to allow our intellectual and political rivals the space to voice their positions, trusting in our fellow citizens’ ability to weigh the merits of competing arguments. 

But few intellectuals are willing to admit that they place multiculturalism before truth and the right to seek and express it. And, for those who are reluctant to fly publically into a rage or to haphazardly apply any of the growing assortment of labels for the myriad varieties of bigotry, there are now a host of theories that serve to reconcile competing political values. The multicultural dilemma probably makes all of us liberals too quick to accept explanations of violence or extremism—or any other bad behavior—emphasizing the role of external forces, whether it’s external to the individual or external to the culture. Accordingly, to combat Harris’s arguments about Islam, many intellectuals insist that religion simply does not cause violence. They argue instead that the real cause is something like resource scarcity, a history of oppression, or the prolonged occupation of Muslim regions by Western powers.

            If the arguments in support of the view that religion plays a negligible role in violence were as compelling as proponents insist they are, then it’s odd that they should so readily resort to mischaracterizing Harris’s positions when he challenges them. Glenn Greenwald, a journalist who believes religion is such a small factor that anyone who criticizes Islam is suspect, argues his case against Harris within an almost exclusively moral framework—not is Harris right, but is he an anti-Muslim? The religious scholar Reza Aslan quotes Harris out of context to give the appearance that he advocates preemptive strikes against Muslim groups. But Aslan’s real point of disagreement with Harris is impossible to pin down. He writes,

After all, there’s no question that a person’s religious beliefs can and often do influence his or her behavior. The mistake lies in assuming there is a necessary and distinct causal connection between belief and behavior.

Since he doesn’t explain what he means by “necessary and distinct,” we’re left with little more than the vague objection that religion’s role in motivating violence is more complex than some people seem to imagine. To make this criticism apply to Harris, however, Aslan is forced to erect a straw man—and to double down on the tactic after Harris has pointed out his error, suggesting that his misrepresentation is deliberate.

Few commenters on this debate appreciate just how radical Aslan’s and Greenwald’s (and Karen Armstrong’s) positions are. The straw men notwithstanding, Harris readily admits that religion is but one of many factors that play a role in religious violence. But this doesn’t go far enough for Aslan and Greenwald. While they acknowledge religion must fit somewhere in the mix, they insist its role is so mediated and mixed up with other factors that its influence is all but impossible to discern. Religion in their minds is a pure social construct, so intricately woven into the fabric of a culture that it could never be untangled. As evidence of this irreducible complexity, they point to the diverse interpretations of the Koran made by the wide variety of Muslim groups all over the world. There’s an undeniable kernel of truth in this line of thinking. But is religion really reconstructed from scratch in every culture?

One of the corollaries of this view is that all religions are essentially equal in their propensity to inspire violence, and therefore, if adherents of one particular faith happen to engage in disproportionate levels of violence, we must look to other cultural and political factors to explain it. That would also mean that what any given holy text actually says in its pages is completely immaterial. (This from a scholar who sticks to a literal interpretation of a truncated section of a book even though the author assures him he’s misreading it.) To highlight the absurdity of this idea, Harris likes to cite the Jains as an example. Mahavira, a Jain patriarch, gave this commandment: “Do not injure, abuse, oppress, enslave, insult, torment, or kill any creature or living being.” How plausible is the notion that adherents of this faith are no more and no less likely to commit acts of violence than those whose holy texts explicitly call for them to murder apostates? “Imagine how different our world might be if the Bible contained this as its central precept” (23), Harris writes in Letter to a Christian Nation.

            Since the U.S. is in fact a Christian nation, and since it has throughout its history displaced, massacred, invaded, occupied, and enslaved people from nearly every corner of the globe, many raise the question of what grounds Harris, or any other American, has for judging other cultures. And this is where the curious email exchange Harris began with the linguist and critic of American foreign policy Noam Chomsky takes up. Harris reached out to Chomsky hoping to begin an exchange that might help to clear up their differences, since he figured they have a large number of readers in common. Harris had written critically of Chomsky’s book about 9/11 in End of Faith, his own book on the topic of religious extremism written some time later. Chomsky’s argument seems to have been that the U.S. routinely commits atrocities on a scale similar to that of 9/11, and that the Al Qaeda attacks were an expectable consequence of our nation’s bullying presence in global affairs. Instead of dealing with foreign threats then, we should be concentrating our efforts on reforming our own foreign policy. But Harris points out that, while it’s true the U.S. has caused the deaths of countless innocents, the intention of our leaders wasn’t to kill as many people as possible to send a message of terror, making such actions fundamentally different from those of the Al Qaeda terrorists.

The first thing to note in the email exchange is that Harris proceeds on the assumption that any misunderstanding of his views by Chomsky is based on an honest mistake, while Chomsky immediately takes for granted that Harris’s alleged misrepresentations are deliberate (even though, since Harris sends him the excerpt from his book, that would mean he’s presenting the damning evidence of his own dishonesty). In other words, Chomsky switches into moralizing mode at the very outset of the exchange. The substance of the disagreement mainly concerns the U.S.’s 1998 bombing of the al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Sudan. According to Harris’s book, Chomsky argues this attack was morally equivalent to the attacks by Al Qaeda on 9/11. But in focusing merely on body counts, Harris charges that Chomsky is neglecting the far more important matter of intention.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky insists after reading the excerpt, however, that he never claimed the two attacks were morally equivalent, and that furthermore he in fact did consider, and write at length about, the intentions of the Clinton administration officials who decided to bomb al-Shifa—just not in the book cited by Harris. In this other book, which Chomsky insists Harris is irresponsible for not having referenced, he argues that the administration’s claim that it received intelligence about the factory manufacturing chemical weapons was a lie and that the bombing was actually meant as retaliation for an earlier attack on the U.S. Embassy. Already at this point in the exchange Chomsky is writing to Harris as if he were guilty of dishonesty, unscholarly conduct, and collusion in covering up the crimes of the American government. 

But which is it? Is Harris being dishonest when he says Chomsky is claiming moral equivalence? Or is he being dishonest when he fails to cite an earlier source arguing that in fact what the U.S. did was morally worse? The more important question, however, is why does Chomsky assume Harris is being dishonest, especially in light of how complicated his position is? Here’s what Chomsky writes in response to Harris pressing him to answer directly the question about moral equivalence:

Clinton bombed al-Shifa in reaction to the Embassy bombings, having discovered no credible evidence in the brief interim of course, and knowing full well that there would be enormous casualties. Apologists may appeal to undetectable humanitarian intentions, but the fact is that the bombing was taken in exactly the way I described in the earlier publication which dealt the question of intentions in this case, the question that you claimed falsely that I ignored: to repeat, it just didn’t matter if lots of people are killed in a poor African country, just as we don’t care if we kill ants when we walk down the street. On moral grounds, that is arguably even worse than murder, which at least recognizes that the victim is human. That is exactly the situation.

Most of the rest of the exchange consists of Harris trying to figure out Chomsky’s views on the role of intention in moral judgment, and Chomsky accusing Harris of dishonesty and evasion for not acknowledging and exploring the implications of the U.S.’s culpability in the al-Shifa atrocity. When Harris tries to explain his view on the bombing by describing a hypothetical scenario in which one group stages an attack with the intention of killing as many people as possible, comparing it to another scenario in which a second group stages an attack with the intention of preventing another, larger attack, killing as few people as possible in the process, Chomsky will have none it. He insists Harris’s descriptions are “so ludicrous as to be embarrassing,” because they’re nothing like what actually happened. We know Chomsky is an intelligent enough man to understand perfectly well how a thought experiment works. So we’re left asking, what accounts for his mindless pounding on the drum of the U.S.’s greater culpability? And, again, why is he so convinced Harris is carrying on in bad faith?

What seems to be going on here is that Chomsky, a long-time critic of American foreign policy, actually began with the conclusion he sought to arrive at. After arguing for decades that the U.S. was the ultimate bad guy in the geopolitical sphere, his first impulse after the attacks of 9/11 was to salvage his efforts at casting the U.S. as the true villain. Toward that end, he lighted on al-Shifa as the ideal crime to offset any claim to innocent victimhood. He’s actually been making this case for quite some time, and Harris is by no means the first to insist that the intentions behind the two attacks should make us judge them very differently. Either Chomsky felt he knew enough about Harris to treat him like a villain himself, or he has simply learned to bully and level accusations against anyone pursuing a line of questions that will expose the weakness of his idea—he likens Harris’s arguments at one point to “apologetics for atrocities”—a tactic he keeps getting away with because he has a large following of liberal academics who accept his moral authority.

Harris saw clear to the end-game of his debate with Chomsky, and it’s quite possible Chomsky in some murky way did as well. The reason he was so sneeringly dismissive of Harris’s attempts to bring the discussion around to intentions, the reason he kept harping on how evil America had been in bombing al-Shifa, is that by focusing on this one particular crime he was avoiding the larger issue of competing ideologies. Chomsky’s account of the bombing is not as certain as he makes out, to say the least. An earlier claim he made about a Human Rights Watch report on the death toll, for instance, turned out to be completely fictitious. But even if the administration really was lying about its motives, it’s noteworthy that a lie was necessary. When Bin Laden announced his goals, he did so loudly and proudly. 

Chomsky’s one defense of his discounting of the attackers’ intentions (yes, he defends it, even though he accused Harris of being dishonest for pointing it out) is that everyone claims to have good intentions, so intentions simply don’t matter. This is shockingly facile coming from such a renowned intellectual—it would be shockingly facile coming from anyone. Of course Harris isn’t arguing that we should take someone’s own word for whether their intentions are good or bad. What Harris is arguing is that we should examine someone’s intentions in detail and make our own judgment about them. Al Qaeda’s plan to maximize terror by maximizing the death count of their attacks can only be seen as a good intention in the context of the group’s extreme religious ideology. That’s precisely why we should be discussing and criticizing that ideology, criticism which should extend to the more mainstream versions of Islam it grew out of.

Taking a step back from the particulars, we see that Chomsky believes the U.S. is guilty of far more and far graver acts of terror than any of the groups or nations officially designated as terrorist sponsors, and he seems unwilling to even begin a conversation with anyone who doesn’t accept this premise. Had he made some iron-clad case that the U.S. really did treat the pharmaceutical plant, and the thousands of lives that depended on its products, as pawns in some amoral game of geopolitical chess, he could have simply directed Harris to the proper source, or he could have reiterated key elements of that case. Regardless of what really happened with al-Shifa, we know full well what Al Qaeda’s intentions were, and Chomsky could have easily indulged Harris in discussing hypotheticals had he not feared that doing so would force him to undermine his own case. Is Harris an apologist for American imperialism? Here’s a quote from the section of his book discussing Chomsky's ideas:

We have surely done some terrible things in the past. Undoubtedly, we are poised to do terrible things in the future. Nothing I have written in this book should be construed as a denial of these facts, or as defense of state practices that are manifestly abhorrent. There may be much that Western powers, and the United States in particular, should pay reparations for. And our failure to acknowledge our misdeeds over the years has undermined our credibility in the international community. We can concede all of this, and even share Chomsky’s acute sense of outrage, while recognizing that his analysis of our current situation in the world is a masterpiece of moral blindness.

To be fair, lines like this last one are inflammatory, so it was understandable that Chomsky was miffed, up to a point. But Harris is right to point to his moral blindness, the same blindness that makes Aslan, Affleck, and Greenwald unable to see that the specific nature of beliefs and doctrines and governing principles actually matters. If we believe it’s evil to subjugate women, abuse homosexuals, and murder freethinkers, the fact that our country does lots of horrible things shouldn’t stop us from speaking out against these practices to people of every skin color, in every culture, on every part of the globe.

            Sam Harris is no passive target in all of this. In a debate, he gives as good or better than he gets, and he has a penchant for finding the most provocative way to phrase his points—like calling Islam “the motherlode of bad ideas.” He doesn’t hesitate to call people out for misrepresenting his views and defaming him as a person, but I’ve yet to see him try to win an argument by going after the person making it. And I’ve never seen him try to sabotage an intellectual dispute with a cheap performance of moral outrage, or discredit opponents by fixing them with labels they don't deserve. Reading his writings and seeing him lecture or debate, you get the sense that he genuinely wants to test the strength of ideas against each other and see what new insight such exchanges may bring. That’s why it’s frustrating to see these discussions again and again go off the rails because his opponent feels justified in dismissing and condemning him based on inaccurate portrayals, from an overweening and unaccountable sense of self-righteousness.

Ironically, honoring the type of limits to calls for greater social justice that Aslan and Chomsky take as sacrosanct—where the West forebears to condescend to the rest—serves more than anything else to bolster the sense of division and otherness that makes many in the U.S. care so little about things like what happened in al-Shifa. As technology pushes on the transformation of our far-flung societies and diverse cultures into a global community, we ought naturally to start seeing people from Northern Africa and the Middle East—and anywhere else—not as scary and exotic ciphers, but as fellow citizens of the world, as neighbors even. This same feeling of connection that makes us all see each other as more human, more worthy of each other’s compassion and protection, simultaneously opens us up to each other’s criticisms and moral judgments. Chomsky is right that we Americans are far too complacent about our country’s many crimes. But opening the discussion up to our own crimes opens it likewise to other crimes that cannot be tolerated anywhere on the globe, regardless of the culture, regardless of any history of oppression, and regardless too of any sanction delivered from the diverse landscape of supposedly sacred realms. 

Other popular posts like this:

THE SOUL OF THE SKEPTIC: WHAT PRECISELY IS SAM HARRIS WAKING UP FROM?

MEDIEVAL VS ENLIGHTENED: SORRY, MEDIEVALISTS, DAN SAVAGE WAS RIGHT

Capuchin-22: A Review of “The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism among the Primates” by Frans De Waal

THE SELF-RIGHTEOUSNESS INSTINCT: STEVEN PINKER ON THE BETTER ANGELS OF MODERNITY AND THE EVILS OF MORALITY

Medieval vs Enlightened: Sorry, Medievalists, Dan Savage Was Right

            A letter from an anonymous scholar of the medieval period to the sex columnist Dan Savage has been making the rounds of social media lately. Responding to a letter from a young woman asking how she should handle sex for the first time with her Muslim boyfriend, who happened to be a virgin, Savage wrote, “If he’s still struggling with the sex-negative, woman-phobic zap that his upbringing (and a medieval version of his faith) put on his head, he needs to work through that crap before he gets naked with you.” The anonymous writer bristles in bold lettering at Savage’s terminology: “I’m a medievalist, and this is one of the things about our current discourse on religion that drives me nuts. Contemporary radical Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are all terrible, but none of them are medieval, especially in terms of sexuality.” Oddly, however, the letter, published under the title, “A Medievalist Schools Dan on Medieval Attitudes toward Sex,” isn’t really as much about correcting popular misconceptions about sex in the Middle Ages as it is about promoting a currently fashionable but highly dubious way of understanding radical religion in the various manifestations we see today.

            While the medievalist’s overall argument is based far more on ideology than actual evidence, the letter does make one important and valid point. As citizens of a technologically advanced secular democracy, it’s tempting for us to judge other cultures by the standards of our own. Just as each of us expects every young person we encounter to follow a path to maturity roughly identical to the one we’ve taken ourselves, people in advanced civilizations tend to think of less developed societies as occupying one or another of the stages that brought us to our own current level of progress. This not only inspires a condescending attitude toward other cultures; it also often leads to an overly simplified understanding of our own culture’s history. The letter to Savage explains:

I’m not saying that the Middle Ages was a great period of freedom (sexual or otherwise), but the sexual culture of 12th-century France, Iraq, Jerusalem, or Minsk did not involve the degree of self-loathing brought about by modern approaches to sexuality. Modern sexual purity has become a marker of faith, which it wasn’t in the Middle Ages. (For instance, the Bishop of Winchester ran the brothels in South London—for real, it was a primary and publicly acknowledged source of his revenue—and one particularly powerful Bishop of Winchester was both the product of adultery and the father of a bastard, which didn’t stop him from being a cardinal and papal legate.) And faith, especially in modern radical religion, is a marker of social identity in a way it rarely was in the Middle Ages.

If we imagine the past as a bad dream of sexual repression from which our civilization has only recently awoken, historical tidbits about the prevalence and public acceptance of prostitution may come as a surprise. But do these revelations really undermine any characterization of the period as marked by religious suppression of sexual freedom?

            Obviously, the letter writer’s understanding of the Middle Ages is more nuanced than most of ours, but the argument reduces to pointing out a couple of random details to distract us from the bigger picture. The passage quoted above begins with an acknowledgement that the Middle Ages was not a time of sexual freedom, and isn’t it primarily that lack of freedom that Savage was referring to when he used the term medieval? The point about self-loathing is purely speculative if taken to apply to the devout generally, and simply wrong with regard to ascetics who wore hairshirts, flagellated themselves, or practiced other forms of mortification of the flesh. In addition, we must wonder how much those prostitutes enjoyed the status conferred on them by the society that was supposedly so accepting of their profession; we must also wonder if this medievalist is aware of what medieval Islamic scholars like Imam Malik (711-795) and Imam Shafi (767-820) wrote about homosexuality. The letter writer is on shaky ground yet again with regard to the claim that sexual purity wasn’t a marker of faith (though it’s hard to know precisely what the phrase even means). There were all kinds of strange prohibitions in Christendom against sex on certain days of the week, certain times of the year, and in any position outside of missionary. Anyone watching the BBC’s adaptation of Wolf Hall knows how much virginity was prized in women—as King Henry VIII could only be wed to a woman who’d never had sex with another man. And there’s obviously an Islamic tradition of favoring virgins, or else why would so many of them be promised to martyrs? Finally, of course faith wasn’t a marker of social identity—nearly everyone in every community was of the same faith. If you decided to take up another set of beliefs, chances are you’d have been burned as a heretic or beheaded as an apostate.

            The letter writer is eager to make the point that the sexual mores espoused by modern religious radicals are not strictly identical to the ones people lived according to in the Middle Ages. Of course, the varieties of religion in any one time aren’t ever identical to those in another, or even to others in the same era. Does anyone really believe otherwise? The important question is whether there’s enough similarity between modern religious beliefs on the one hand and medieval religious beliefs on the other for the use of the term to be apposite. And the answer is a definitive yes. So what is the medievalist’s goal in writing to correct Savage? The letter goes on,

The Middle Eastern boyfriend wasn’t taught a medieval version of his faith, and radical religion in the West isn’t a retreat into the past—it is a very modern way of conceiving identity. Even something like ISIS is really just interested in the medieval borders of their caliphate; their ideology developed out of 18th- and 19th-century anticolonial sentiment. The reason why this matters (beyond medievalists just being like, OMG no one gets us) is that the common response in the West to religious radicalism is to urge enlightenment, and to believe that enlightenment is a progressive narrative that is ever more inclusive. But these religions are responses to enlightenment, in fact often to The Enlightenment.

The Enlightenment, or Age of Reason, is popularly thought to have been the end of the Middle or so-called Dark Ages. The story goes that the medieval period was a time of Catholic oppression, feudal inequality, stunted innovation, and rampant violence. Then some brilliant philosophers woke the West up to the power of reason, science, and democracy, thus marking the dawn of the modern world. Historians and academics of various stripes like to sneer at this story of straightforward scientific and moral progress. It’s too simplistic. It ignores countless atrocities perpetrated by those supposedly enlightened societies. And it undergirds an ugly contemptuousness toward less advanced cultures. But is the story of the Enlightenment completely wrong?

            The medievalist letter writer makes no bones about the source of his ideas, writing in a parenthetical, “Michel Foucault does a great job of talking about these developments, and modern sexuality, including homosexual and heterosexual identity, as well—and I’m stealing and watering down his thoughts here.” Foucault, though he eschewed the label, is a leading figure in poststructuralist and postmodern schools of thought. His abiding interest throughout his career was with the underlying dynamics of social power as they manifested themselves in the construction of knowledge. He was one of those French philosophers who don’t believe in things like objective truth, human nature, or historical progress of any kind.

Foucault and the scores of scholars inspired by his work take it as their mission to expose all the hidden justifications for oppression in our culture’s various media for disseminating information. Why they would bother taking on this mission in the first place, though, is a mystery, beginning as they do from the premise that any notion of moral progress can only be yet another manifestation of one group’s power over another. If you don’t believe in social justice, why pursue it? If you don’t believe in truth, why seek it out? And what are Foucault’s ideas about the relationship between knowledge and power but theories of human nature? Despite this fundamental incoherence, many postmodern academics today zealously pounce on any opportunity to chastise scientists, artists, and other academics for alleged undercurrents in their work of sexism, racism, homophobia, Islamophobia, or some other oppressive ideology. Few sectors of academia remain untouched by this tradition, and its influence leads legions of intellectuals to unselfconsciously substitute sanctimony for real scholarship.

            So how do Foucault and the medievalist letter writer view the Enlightenment? The letter refers vaguely to “concepts of mass culture and population.” Already, it seems we’re getting far afield of how most historians and philosophers characterize the Enlightenment, not to mention how most Enlightenment figures themselves described their objectives. The letter continues,

Its narrative depends upon centralized control: It gave us the modern army, the modern prison, the mental asylum, genocide, and totalitarianism as well as modern science and democracy. Again, I’m not saying that I’d prefer to live in the 12th century (I wouldn’t), but that’s because I can imagine myself as part of that center. Educated, well-off Westerners generally assume that they are part of the center, that they can affect the government and contribute to the progress of enlightenment. This means that their identity is invested in the social form of modernity.

It’s true that the terms Enlightenment and Dark Ages were first used by Western scholars in the nineteenth century as an exercise in self-congratulation, and it’s also true that any moral progress that was made over the period occurred alongside untold atrocities. But neither of these complications to the oversimplified version of the narrative establishes in any way that the Enlightenment never really occurred—as the letter writer’s repeated assurances that it’s preferable to be alive today ought to make clear. What’s also clear is that this medievalist is deliberately conflating enlightenment with modernity, so that all the tragedies and outrages of the modern world can be laid at the feet of enlightenment thinking. How else could he describe the enlightenment as being simultaneously about both totalitarianism and democracy? But not everything that happened after the Enlightenment was necessarily caused by it, and nor should every social institution that arose from the late 19th to the early 20th century be seen as representative of enlightenment thinking.

            The medievalist letter writer claims that being “part of the center” is what makes living in the enlightened West preferable to living in the 12th century. But there’s simply no way whoever wrote the letter actually believes this. If you happen to be poor, female, a racial or religious minority, a homosexual, or a member of any other marginalized group, you’d be far more loath to return to the Middle Ages than those of us comfortably ensconced in this notional center, just as you’d be loath to relocate to any society not governed by Enlightenment principles today.

The medievalist insists that groups like ISIS follow an ideology that dates to the 18th and 19th centuries and arose in response to colonialism, implying that Islamic extremism would be just another consequence of the inherently oppressive nature of the West and its supposedly enlightened ideas. “Radical religion,” from this Foucauldian perspective, offers a social identity to those excluded (or who feel excluded) from the dominant system of Western enlightenment capitalism. It is a modern response to a modern problem, and by making it seem like some medieval holdover, we cover up the way in which our own social power produces the conditions for this kind of identity, thus making violence appear to be the only response for these recalcitrant “holdouts.”

This is the position of scholars and journalists like Reza Aslan and Glenn Greenwald as well. It’s emblematic of the same postmodern ideology that forces on us the conclusion that if chimpanzees are violent to one another, it must be the result of contact with primatologists and other humans; if indigenous people in traditionalist cultures go to war with their neighbors, it must be owing to contact with missionaries and anthropologists; and if radical Islamists are killing their moderate co-religionists, kidnapping women, or throwing homosexuals from rooftops, well, it can only be the fault of Western colonialism. Never mind that these things are prescribed by holy texts dating from—you guessed it—the Middle Ages. The West, to postmodernists, is the source of all evil, because the West has all the power.

Directionality in Societal Development

But the letter writer’s fear that thinking of radical religion as a historical holdover will inevitably lead us to conclude military action is the only solution is based on an obvious non sequitur. There’s simply no reason someone who sees religious radicalism as medieval must advocate further violence to stamp it out. And that brings up another vital question: what solution do the postmodernists propose for things like religious violence in the Middle East and Africa? They seem to think that if they can only convince enough people that Western culture is inherently sexist, racist, violent, and so on—basically a gargantuan engine of oppression—then every geopolitical problem will take care of itself somehow.

            If it’s absurd to believe that everything that comes from the West is good and pure and true just because it comes from the West, it’s just as absurd to believe that everything that comes from the West is evil and tainted and false for the same reason. Had the medievalist spent some time reading the webpage on the Enlightenment so helpfully hyperlinked to in the letter, whoever it is may have realized how off-the-mark Foucault’s formulation was. The letter writer gets it exactly wrong in the part about mass culture and population, since the movement is actually associated with individualism, including individual rights. But what best distinguishes enlightenment thinking from medieval thinking, in any region or era, is the conviction that knowledge, justice, and better lives for everyone in the society are achievable through the application of reason, science, and skepticism, while medieval cultures rely instead on faith, scriptural or hierarchical authority, and tradition. The two central symbols of the Enlightenment are Galileo declaring that the church was wrong to dismiss the idea of a heliocentric cosmos and the Founding Fathers appending the Bill of Rights to the U.S. Constitution. You can argue that it’s only owing to a history of colonialism that Western democracies today enjoy the highest standard of living among all the nations of the globe. But even the medievalist letter writer attests to how much better it is to live in enlightened countries today than in the same countries in the Middle Ages.

            The postmodernism of Foucault and his kindred academics is not now, and has not ever been, compelling on intellectual grounds, which leaves open the question of why so many scholars have turned against the humanist and Enlightenment ideals that once gave them their raison d’être. I can’t help suspecting that the appeal of postmodernism stems from certain religious qualities of the worldview, qualities that ironically make it resemble certain aspects of medieval thought: the bowing to the authority of celebrity scholars (mostly white males), the cloistered obsession with esoteric texts, rituals of expiation and self-abasement, and competitive finger-wagging. There’s even a core belief in something very like original sin; only in this case it consists of being born into the ranks of a privileged group whose past members were guilty of some unspeakable crime. Postmodern identity politics seems to appeal most strongly to whites with an overpowering desire for acceptance by those less fortunate, as if they were looking for some kind of forgiveness or redemption only the oppressed have the power to grant. That’s why these academics are so quick to be persuaded they should never speak up unless it’s on behalf of some marginalized group, as if good intentions were proof against absurdity. As safe and accommodating and well-intentioned as this stance sounds, though, in practice it amounts to little more than moral and intellectual cowardice.

Life really has gotten much better since the Enlightenment, and it really does continue to get better for an increasing number of formerly oppressed groups of people today. All this progress has been made, and continues being made, precisely because there are facts and ideas—scientific theories, human rights, justice, and equality—that transcend the social conditions surrounding their origins. Accepting this reality doesn’t in any way mean seeing violence as the only option for combatting religious extremism, despite many academics’ insistence to the contrary. Nor does it mean abandoning the cause of political, cultural, and religious pluralism. But, if we continue disavowing the very ideals that have driven this progress, however fitfully and haltingly it has occurred, if we continue denying that it can even be said to have occurred at all, then what hope can we possibly have of pushing it even further along in the future?   

Also read:

THE IDIOCY OF OUTRAGE: SAM HARRIS'S RUN-INS WITH BEN AFFLECK AND NOAM CHOMSKY

And:

THE SELF-RIGHTEOUSNESS INSTINCT: STEVEN PINKER ON THE BETTER ANGELS OF MODERNITY AND THE EVILS OF MORALITY

And: 

“THE WORLD UNTIL YESTERDAY” AND THE GREAT ANTHROPOLOGY DIVIDE: WADE DAVIS’S AND JAMES C. SCOTT’S BIZARRE AND DISHONEST REVIEWS OF JARED DIAMOND’S WORK

And: 

NAPOLEON CHAGNON'S CRUCIBLE AND THE ONGOING EPIDEMIC OF MORALIZING HYSTERIA IN ACADEMIA

On ISIS's explicit avowal of adherence to medieval texts: “What ISIS Really Wants" by Graeme Wood of the Atlantic

Notional Bodies, Angels' Wings, and Poet's Truths: The Exquisite Discomfort of "Bring up the Bodies" by Hilary Mantel

            The choice of death over compromise is the surest proof against any charge of hypocrisy. Whatever your feelings about the underlying creed, anyone willing to die for a principle is going to make an indelible impression on you, especially if you happen to be the executioner. In addition to the role he played in England’s break with the Catholic church and King Henry VIII’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon, Thomas Cromwell is known historically for two dubious accomplishments: securing the conviction of Thomas More for treason after he refused to swear an oath endorsing the king’s supremacy over the pope, and confiscating the lands and holdings of England’s monasteries to fill the country’s royal coffers. As imagined by Hilary Mantel in her ingeniously textured and darkly captivating novel Wolf Hall, Cromwell despises monastics, “that parasitic class of men” (41), as he refers to them in the sequel, along with ascetic theologians like More—whose habit of wearing a horse hair undershirt to irritate his flesh does as much to irritate Cromwell—for their unworldliness and cruelty, but most of all for their corruption and hypocrisy. It’s no wonder then that, in Mantel’s telling, it’s having to condemn More to martyrdom that ultimately undoes Cromwell, or rather further propels him along a path toward undoing himself.

            In Bring up the Bodies, the second of three projected novels about Cromwell, Mantel lets us listen in on the thoughts of this man who can’t escape what he’s done, who in a sense was made by the crimes he’s committed, lifted from the lowliest origins to serve as the king’s chief secretary, and thus unable to extricate himself from the position that will make it necessary for him to commit still more and still more horrific crimes. Tellingly, we find that what preoccupies him most in his rare moments of solitude is the nature of the relationship between words and the reality they’re meant to represent. Early on, we see him at his daily tasks.

He returns to his dispatches. Plague in town and city … the king is always fearful of infection … Letters from foreign rulers, wishing to know if it is true that Henry is planning to cut off the heads of all his bishops. Certainly not, he notes, we have excellent bishops now, all of them comfortable to the king’s wishes, all of them recognizing him as head of the church in England; besides, what an uncivil question! How dare they imply that the King of England should account for himself to any foreign power? How dare they impugn his sovereign judgment? Bishop Fisher, it is true, is dead, and Thomas More, but Henry’s treatment of them, before they drove him to an extremity, was mild to a fault; if they had not evinced a traitorous stubbornness, they would be alive now, alive like you and me.

He has written a lot of these letters, since July. He doesn’t sound wholly convincing, even to himself; he finds himself repeating the same points, rather than advancing the argument into new territory. He needs new phrases. (28)

Cromwell is not one to persecute himself for past deeds—“Once you have chosen a course, you should not apologize for it” (401), he later admonishes one of his protégés—but he’s also a decent enough man to be disturbed—“alive like you and me”—by his complicity in the horrors he’s being made to answer for so unconvincingly.

           The most basic way to approach reading a work of fiction is to concentrate on actions and events. This is reading simply to see what happens. You get a sense of what kind of characters you’re dealing with early on and henceforth take them for granted, like so many chess pieces the author moves about the board that is the plot. Accounting for diverging perspectives and processing the nuances of what each plot development means for individual characters is a more demanding exercise than simply reading for what happens, but such shifting among various points of view is often necessary if we’re to keep up with more complex works. To fully appreciate the Cromwell novels, however, we have to go still further in exerting our imaginative faculties, drawing on even greater stores of working memory. Nearly everyone who writes about these books points to how successfully Mantel makes the historical events seem unsettled and immediate. A lot goes into producing this effect, to be sure, but the sense of pulsing vitality arises primarily because we don’t just see what happens as Cromwell would see it; we get telling glimpses along the way of how what’s happening—what he witnesses and what he actually does—is affecting him.

Beleaguered by the demands of his position, anxious over the affairs of state, harried by the king’s hangers on, and, only months after More’s beheading, beginning to feel his age—“That’s the bleat of the man of fifty,” he chastises himself at one point, “I used to. I can’t now” (68)—Cromwell in the opening chapters of Bring up the Bodies struggles with a weary fatalism that would have been foreign to the man he was just a season prior: “It will always be like this, he thinks. It will go on being like this. Advent, Lent, Whitsuntide” (134). On an early fall morning at Wolf Hall, the home of the Seymours, he reflects on how,

The months run away from you like a flurry of autumn leaves bowling and skittering towards the winter; the summer has gone, Thomas More’s daughter has got his head back off London Bridge and is keeping it, God knows, in a dish or a bowl, and saying her prayers to it. He is not the same man he was last year, and he doesn’t acknowledge that man’s feelings; he is starting afresh, always new thoughts, new feelings. (29-30)

Those new thoughts often hinge on how he might remove certain men from the king’s privy chamber, the ones who frequently impede to his access and thwart his agendas. For reasons that remain obscure for some time, Cromwell also confides in Edward Seymour (the older brother of the future queen Jane) that he fears he’s losing favor with the present queen, Anne Boleyn. “I feel my head wobble on my shoulders when she stares at me hard,” he says (21). Before long, however, the king will be giving him a directive that affords him an opportunity to address both of these issues. But pursuing that opportunity will exact a heavy toll.

            With ever more to lose as his wealth accumulates and his status increases, Cromwell is keenly aware of his dependence on the king, not just for his continuing ascent, but for his survival. As he says to his nephew Richard, “How many men can say, as I must, ‘I am a man whose only friend is the King of England’? I have everything, you would think. And yet take Henry away and I have nothing” (176). “You fear he will turn on you?” his friend Chapuy, the ambassador from Spain, puts to him some time later. Cromwell responds, “He will, I suppose. One day.”

Sometimes he wakes in the night and thinks of it. There are courtiers who have honourably retired. He can think of instances. Of course, it is the other kind that loom larger, if you are wakeful around midnight. (223)

The stakes thus set, we watch as this man who’s far from squeamish reveals himself capable of going through with deeds that make even him queasy—and we can’t help being sickened both with him and alongside him. Henry, we learn, has already grown tired of Anne, who seems as incapable as Catherine of producing a male heir, and it will fall to Cromwell to find some way to once more get an official sanction for a divorce.

As he continues to serve as accountant, lawyer, diplomat, enforcer, and sometimes friend to the king, while at the same time investigating rumors of the queen’s adultery in the hope of using it as grounds for pushing her aside, he keeps being reminded of a scene described in Wolf Hall, one that features what will become a haunting symbol, a touchstone marking the distance from his former self. Sometime after his daughter Grace followed her mother Lizzie and her older sister Anne in succumbing to the sweating sickness that was ravaging England at the time, Cromwell remembers a Christmas pageant she performed in.

The year that Grace was an angel, she had wings made of peacock feathers. He himself had contrived it. The other little girls were dowdy goose creatures, and their wings fell off if they caught them on the corners of the stable. But Grace stood glittering, her hair entwined with silver threads; her shoulders were trussed with a spreading, shivering glory, and the rustling air was perfumed as she breathed. Lizzie said, Thomas, there’s no end to you, is there? She has the best wings the city has ever seen. (161)

Those angel wings, which he keeps in a closet along with all the Christmas decorations, including a silver star one of his adopted boys once mistook for a torture device, appear again in Bring up the Bodies, only this time it’s a different little girl donning them. Having gathered all his loved ones to celebrate at his home,

he turns his eyes to the child dressed as an angel: it is Rafe’s step-daughter, the elder child of his wife Helen. She is wearing the peacock wings he made long ago for Grace.

Long ago? It is not ten years, not nearly ten. The feathers’ eyes gleam; the day is dark, but banks of candles pick out threads of gold, the scarlet splash of holly berries bound on the wall, the points of the silver star. (118)

Just as when his daughter was wearing the wings, we see that Cromwell can’t look at them without being dazzled by some play of light. Rafe, whom Cromwell took on as a ward at age seven and mentored into adulthood, is one of many beneficiaries of his big-heartedness. When he married Helen in secret, for love, dashing any hope of a more financially advantageous match, Cromwell was initially exasperated with him, but he eventually came around, showing that he cared for his surrogate son’s happiness above all else. Now, though he’s allowing Rafe’s own adopted child to play the role of granddaughter, the wings still speak to him of the family he’s lost.

He takes the child to a looking glass so she can see her wings. Her steps are tentative, she is in awe at herself. Mirrored, the peacock eyes speak to him. Do not forget us. As the year turns, we are here: a whisper, a touch, a feather’s breath from you. (119)

And you can hear the whisper of those wings beating throughout the novel, as again and again Cromwell lights on feathers and wings as the apt metaphor to convey his thoughts.

In Wolf Hall, we saw Cromwell first threatened with ruin alongside his own mentor Cardinal Wolsey, only to be thrust into a position of still greater power as a councilor to the king. To secure that position and further avoid ruin, he had no choice but to act against his own sense of what was just and decent by arranging Thomas More’s execution, a deed to which there was also an element of betrayal, since he and More for years had carried on a reciprocally exasperating intellectual back-and-forth that was its own breed of friendship. But before More is arrested and charged, we see that Cromwell has a signature way of dealing with questions of conscience. Bedridden and delirious with fever, he is encouraged to confess and offer up his sins.

But my sins are my strength, he thinks; the sins I have done, that others have not even found the opportunity of committing. I hug them close; they’re mine. Besides, when I come to judgment I mean to come with a memorandum in my hand: I shall say to my Maker, I have fifty items here, possibly more. (568)

Once he’s found an opportunity to sin, Cromwell’s modus operandi is to seal his advantage by acting quickly. In the midst of the proceedings in Bring up the Bodies to end the king’s second marriage, he reminisces about an earlier time in his life: “In those days he did things suddenly: not without calculation, not without care, but once his mind was made up he was swift to move. And he is still the same man. As his opponents will find” (367). And so he forges ahead with what he’s determined is necessary based on his inveterately pragmatic and worldly principles. “You pick your prince,” as he once explained to his son Gregory. You pursue your interests. Whatever you can justify through argument or accounting you should be able to live with.

The king having declared his desire to be rid of Anne, Cromwell moves forward with his plans, going back to settle the books, as it were, only after each successive stage has been accomplished. Along the way, he’s shocked to find that those books are getting harder and harder to balance. “I did not know what I would find, when I began,” he says to his friend Thomas Cranmer. “That is the only reason I could do it, because I was surprised at every turn” (385). The opening to free the king from his marriage comes when Mark, a pompous young courtier, boasts too publicly of his special relationship with the queen. Cromwell interrogates him, setting in motion a scandal that results in the conviction for adultery and treason of not only Mark but four other men as well, including the two members of the privy chamber most troublesome to Cromwell, along with the queen’s own brother. All these men's lives, along with Anne’s reign as queen, end on the executioner’s block.

At no point during the interrogations that ensue after Mark’s do any of the men either confess their own guilt or name any other guilty parties. In the wake of the trials, Cromwell’s household is understandably shaken; there were already rumors among the populace about how Cromwell tampered with the jury that convicted More. When his son voices his doubts about whether justice was actually served, he thinks:

When Gregory says, “Are they guilty?” he means, “Did they do it?” But when he says, “Are they guilty?” he means, “Did the court find them so?” The lawyer’s world is entire unto itself, the human pared away. It was a triumph, in a small way, to unknot the entanglement of thighs and tongues, to take that mass of heaving flesh and smooth it on to white paper: as the body, after the climax, lies back on white linen. He has seen beautiful indictments, not a word wasted. This was not one: the phrases jostled and frotted, nudged and spilled, ugly in content and ugly in form. The design against Anne is unhallowed in its gestation, untimely in its delivery, a mass of tissue born shapeless; it waited to be licked into shape as a bear cub is licked by its mother. You nourished it, but you did not know what you fed: who would have thought of Mark confessing, or of Anne acting in every respect like an oppressed and guilty woman with a weight of sin upon her? (369)

So Cromwell is left with another argument in need of better phrases. There is an intense, complicated compulsion that overtakes you about midway through Bring up the Bodies, sweeping you vertiginously along with the action, until finally leaving you with the same sense it does Cromwell, that all the important developments are faits accompli long before you know quite what to make of them. It is a mark of Mantel’s mastery that the tide of interrogations, washed over truths, and blotted out lives, as abruptly as it forms, as devastatingly as it crashes, never outpaces the sense of felt reality, never strains the structure of the plot to the point of forming faults in the nightmarish edifice of her fictional world.

            If we weren’t privy to Cromwell’s private thoughts, if we weren’t gestured toward feelings he himself refuses to acknowledge, or even if his story simply picked up closer to the interrogations he permeates with threats of torture and a more drawn out execution, closer to the trial that turns on the quickness of men to imagine into reality their darkest fears about women—if we’d never, for instance, learned about the angel wings—our view of him would be much closer to the one handed down through history: Henry VIII’s mercenary pit bull. Standing in judgement of him would be a much simpler, much more comfortable matter. So what are we to make of this narrative that so closely tracks the compromising of a decent but morally complicated man, whose philosophy we approve, but only up to a point, a brilliant strategist and savvy fixer whose rise from obscurity we cheer, a conniving opportunist but also a generous and fiercely loyal patron—how are we to respond to witnessing him ruining men’s lives, bringing down the queen, consigning them all to death, all in the service of a capriciously cruel and demoniacally narcissistic king? Is it a mere cautionary tale about the subtle and stepwise descent into the darkness all men—all humans—feel drawn to as they struggle to balance morality against necessity, truth against self-preservation?

            Mantel is peerlessly astute when it comes to the ratchet of backward reasoning, the justifications after the fact that travel back in time to erase from memory the scruples we talk ourselves into believing we never should have felt, an adjustment which ensures we feel those scruples with less force when next we face a similar dilemma in a process that pulls us a dubious deed at a time toward ever greater inhumanity. (The theme has resonances with the events at the prison in Abu Ghraib, though the novel’s interrogation scenes featuring promises of leniency in exchange for the naming of other guilty parties recalls more directly Arthur Miller’s vision of the witch panic in Salem.) When Cromwell does eventually have time to reflect on what he’s done, the object of his thoughts is telling.

He finds he cannot think of the dying men at all. Into his mind instead strays the picture of More on the scaffold, seen through the veil of rain: his body, already dead, folding back neatly from the impact of the axe. The cardinal when he fell had no persecutor more relentless than Thomas More. Yet, he thinks, I did not hate him. I exercised my skills to the utmost to persuade him to reconcile with the king. And I thought I would win him, I really thought I would, for he was tenacious of the world, tenacious of his person, and had a good deal to live for. In the end, he was his own murderer. He wrote and wrote and he talked and talked, then suddenly at a stroke he cancelled himself. If ever a man came close to beheading himself, Thomas More was that man. (371)

In other words, More may have deserved to die for what he did to Wolsey, but Cromwell tried to save him anyway, a feat he thought he might be able to accomplish because More was full of himself, but in the end he decided he wanted to die; the responsibility lies not with Cromwell but with More himself. He needs new phrases indeed.

            In the days leading up to More’s conviction, though, we saw that Cromwell, far from being content to lay responsibility at the feet of his favorite foil, agonized over what he ultimately decided had to be done. He even tried to tell Henry that prosecuting More might not be a good idea because the case would not be easy to win. “Do I retain you for what is easy?” the king responds in a fury (585). Henry retains Cromwell because he’s adept at formulating strategies, and just as adept at implementing them. Cromwell comes up with words and plans, and then he turns them into reality. There’s an amazing passage that comes before More’s trial in Wolf Hall, when Cromwell is laid up with fever, listening to the priests and doctors milling about his house, and it lays bare what his mind can’t help but busy itself doing:

They talk about his heart; he overhears them. He feels they should not: the book of my heart is a private book, it is not an order book left on the counter for any passing clerk to scrawl in. They give him a draft to swallow. Shortly afterward he returns to his ledgers. The lines keep slipping and the figures intermingling and as soon as he has totaled up one column the total unmakes itself and all sense is subtracted. But he keeps trying and trying and adding and adding, until the poison or the healing draft loosens its grip on him and he wakes. The pages of the ledgers are still before his eyes. Butts thinks he is resting as ordered, but in the privacy of his mind little stick figures with arms and legs of ink climb out of the ledgers and walk about. They are carrying firewood in for the kitchen range, but the venison that is trussed to butcher turns back into deer, who rub themselves in innocence on the bark of trees. The songbirds for the fricassee refeather themselves, hopping back onto the branches not yet cut for firewood, and the honey for basting has gone back to the bee, and the bee has gone back to the hive. (568-9)

In his delirium, he goes on balancing the books, breathing life into words, and guarding the book of his own heart. Near the end of Bring up the Bodies, Cromwell contemplates how rumors and innuendos about the queen’s myriad and incestuous infidelities brought her down, and concludes, “Anne, it appears, was a book left open on a desk for anyone to write on the pages, where only her husband should inscribe” (383).

            The magic taking place in Cromwell’s fever dream undergoes an ominous reversal in one of the interrogation scenes in Bring up the Bodies. Francis Weston already knows he will be found guilty of adultery with the queen, and he laments to Cromwell that he’ll never have the chance to go through with his plan to change his ways and make amends for his sins when he is older. Then, just when he seems on the verge of saying something that would irrevocably seal his conviction, Cromwell abruptly stands up and leaves the room, suffering from what we assume is an attack of conscience.

He does not know what caused him to break off from Weston and walk out. Perhaps it was when the boy said “forty-five or fifty.” As if, past mid-life, there is a second childhood, a new phase of innocence. It touched him, perhaps, the simplicity of it. Or perhaps he just needed air. Let us say you are in a chamber, the windows sealed, you are conscious of the proximity of other bodies, of the declining light. In the room you put cases, you play games, you move your personnel around each other: notional bodies, hard as ivory, black as ebony, pushed on their paths across the squares. Then you say, I can’t endure this any more, I must breathe: you burst out of the room and into a wild garden where the guilty are hanging from trees, no longer ivory, no longer ebony, but flesh; and their wild lamenting tongues proclaim their guilt as they die. In this matter, cause has been preceded by effect. What you dreamed has enacted itself. You reach for a blade but the blood is already shed. The lambs have butchered and eaten themselves. They have brought knives to the table, carved themselves, and picked their own bones clean. (341)

Cromwell is himself fifty when the action of the plot takes place, and far from entering a new phase of innocence he’s seeing how the magic of his words, which once brought dead things to life, is being used again and again to snuff living things bloodily out of existence.

            There is one character accused of carrying on an affair with the queen whom Cromwell manages to save. Thomas Wyatt’s father Henry, a man Cromwell held in high regard, gave him a special charge to watch over his son, to serve as a second father to him. But Cromwell has a profound admiration for Wyatt that goes well beyond any promise made to his father. In particular, Cromwell is in awe of Wyatt’s facility with what he calls “poet’s truth,” whereby what he writes is neither true, in the sense of corresponding to actual events, or false, because it gestures toward some greater principle. As Cromwell thinks to himself,

When Wyatt writes, his lines fledge feathers, and unfolding this plumage they dive below their meaning and skim above it. They tell us that the rules of power and the rules of war are the same, the art is to deceive; and you will deceive, and be deceived in your turn, whether you are an ambassador or a suitor. Now, if a man’s subject is deception, you are deceived if you think you grasp his meaning. You close your hand as it flies away. A statute is written to entrap meaning, a poem to escape it. A quill, sharpened, can stir and rustle like the pinions of angels. Angels are messengers. They are creatures with a mind and a will. (348)

This passage, an intensely revealing if also enigmatic stream of thought, shows Cromwell momentarily incapable of understanding what poet’s truth could mean. He can’t avoid thinking of it as a species of deception, a trick like the ones used in political or romantic competition. But he begins with feathers and ends with the metaphor of an angel. The scene ends with him ruminating about supposedly true stories of angels visiting men; he never rounds back to finish the idea.

            It’s when he undertakes his perfunctory interrogation of Wyatt in the Tower that we get the least evasive accounting of what Cromwell currently thinks of himself—including a chapter in the book of his heart that will go unwritten (at least until Mantel comes around). After Wyatt jokingly responds to his question about whether he’s comfortable by asking if he means in body or soul, Cromwell, not missing a beat, says “I only answer for bodies.”

“Nothing makes you falter,” Wyatt says. He says it with a reluctant admiration that is close to dread. But he, Cromwell, thinks, I did falter but no one knows it, reports have not gone abroad. Wyatt did not see me walk away from Weston’s interrogation. Wyatt did not see me when Anne asked me what I believed in my heart.

He rests his eyes on the prisoner, he takes his seat. He says softly, “I think I have been training all my years for this. I have served an apprenticeship to myself.” His whole career has been an education in hypocrisy. Eyes that once skewered him now kindle with simulated regard. Hands that would like to knock his hat off now reach out to shake his hand, sometimes in a crushing grip. He has spun his enemies to face him, to join him: as in a dance. He means to spin them away again, so they look down the long cold vista of their years: so they feel the wind, the wind of exposed places, that cuts to the bone: so they bed down in ruins, and wake up cold. (352)

This passage gives us an interesting twist on Cromwell’s habit of saying something and then thinking the opposite. Perhaps uncomfortable himself in the presence of a more sincere if equally clever man, he embraces the very sin he so loathes in the monastics he’s been such a great scourge to—but is it his sin or only his enemy’s?—before going on to steel himself so he can persevere in spite of his misgivings. It’s noteworthy too that, while many of Cromwell’s closest aides recognize the four men under investigation as the same ones who performed in a play mocking his mentor Cardinal Wolsey soon after his death, only two of them have really been causing him any problems. And Mark certainly isn’t a threat. You can’t help wondering whenever Cromwell dwells on these men’s past insults if he’s really being driven by vengeance or if he’s just trying to quiet his conscience.

            In the book’s final passages, we see that exacting his revenge hasn’t brought him any closer to his old master. Going through his papers, he recalls how when he first came across a piece of writing from the cardinal after his death “his heart had clenched small and he had to put down his pen till the spasm of grief passed.” After that initial shock, though, he seems to have gotten some solace from coming across these vestiges.

He has grown used to these encounters, but tonight, as he flicks over the leaf and sees the cardinal’s writing, it is strange to him, as if some trick, perhaps a trick of the light, has altered the letter forms. The hand could be that of a stranger, of a creditor or a debtor you have dealt with just this quarter and don’t know well; it could be that of some humble clerk, taking dictation from his master. (406)

Of course, it’s not the letters that have altered.

The most viciously ironic development in the plot is that Mark only begins to name names after being locked in the closet where all Cromwell’s Christmas decorations are stored. Terrified at first by the sight of the silver star, he later mistakes the brush of the peacock feathers as the touch of a ghost. He screams, and when he’s released he can’t get the names out quickly enough, fearing he may be locked in with the ghost again. “I shall have to burn the peacock wings,” Cromwell thinks after he’s heard what happened (289). But, in the wake of the trials and executions, his view of them is altered.

When the wings are shaken out of their linen bag he stretches the fabric, holds it up to the light and sees that the bag is slit. He understands how the feathers crept out and stroked the dead man’s face. He sees that the wings are shabby, as if nibbled, and the glowing eyes dulled. They are tawdry things after all, not worth setting store by.

Having forced himself to believe the worst of the accusations against Anne, and having acted on his belief, the way he views his own past undergoes a tragic transformation as well. Now he fears that Grace, given the plainness of his wife and his own rough features, was suspiciously pretty.

He says to Johane, his wife’s sister, “Do you think Lizzie ever had to do with another man? I mean, while we were married?”

Johane is shocked. “Whatever put that into your head? Put it right out again.”

He tries to do that. Be he cannot escape the feeling that Grace has slipped further from him. She was dead before she could be painted or drawn. She lived and left no trace. Her clothes and her cloth ball and her wooden baby in a smock are long ago passed to other children. (405)

His wife had said “there’s no end to you, is there?” But Cromwell has in fact written in his own hand the ending for the story of the man he was then.

            This theme of compromised morality woven together with the mystery of language’s transformative ties to the world may suggest to some that the power of Bring up the Bodies comes from some embedded lesson about our imperiled integrity or lost humanity. But it’s a mistake to treat a narrative solely, or even predominantly, as a matter of meaning. “A statute is written to entrap meaning,” as Cromwell reasons, “a poem to escape it.” And so it is with stories, or else why would we ever want to read them again after first arriving at the point? It’s not the lesson of a story that pulls us in, but the texture of lived experience, the compelling illusions of a life’s myriad moral dilemmas, and the expert evocations of a human presence that provokes us toward some feeling, be it sympathy and admiration, or disappointment and disgust—or some fiendish farrago of all four. At the points where Cromwell’s story is most disturbing, the hardest to bear reading, we continue on, not to mark out the mistakes we should ourselves avoid, but out of loyalty, a fierce partisanship, the sense that of all these competing persons he’s the one we want to see through to the end, if only because we know him best, if only because we remain ever hopeful that somehow he will be redeemed, taken back in hand by his better angels, delivered back into grace.

Also read: 

WHAT MAKES "WOLF HALL" SO GREAT?

And: 

SABBATH SAYS: PHILIP ROTH AND THE DILEMMAS OF IDEOLOGICAL CASTRATION

And: 

IS "THE MIRROR AND THE LIGHT" AS GOOD AS "WOLF HALL" AND "BRING UP THE BODIES"?

And:

Lab Flies: Joshua Greene’s Moral Tribes and the Contamination of Walter White

What Makes "Wolf Hall" so Great?

The most natural way to interpret fictional narration is as a direct communication from the author. We understand full well that the characters and events being described are fabricated, more or less whole-cloth, for the purpose of entertaining us. Yet we trust the author to relate all the details of the story, as she’s conceived of it, in a straightforward and accurate manner. If the rhythm and diction of the prose achieve a pleasing balance of artful evocation and easy comprehension, we ascribe the gracefulness to the author herself, and often feel a sense of gratitude that predisposes us to look favorably upon the prospect of reading other works in her oeuvre. This inclination to hear the author’s voice in fictional narration serves us well enough when we’re reading commercial fiction. As we move closer to the literary end of the spectrum, though, we must assimilate a more sophisticated linguistic convention. Only by grasping this technique can we fully experience the fruits of the author’s imaginative efforts and fully appreciate the depth of her psychological insights into the dynamic workings of her characters’ minds.

Everything a work of literary fiction is supposed to do, Hilary Mantel does masterfully in her historical novel Wolf Hall, including the creation of scenes so vividly immersive and the construction of plots so arresting that you all but forget you’re reading a work of fiction at all. Critics unanimously celebrate the way Mantel makes settled history feel ominously immediate. But the effect goes well beyond the abundance of intricately imagined details in her scenes. What distinguishes most historical writing from most narrative writing—and most nonfiction from most fiction more generally—is the move from summary to simulation. As if to illustrate this distinction, Mantel at a critical juncture in the plot makes use of a style closer to factual history, writing, 

On November 1, 1530, a commission for the cardinal’s arrest is given to Harry Percy, the young Earl of Northumberland. The earl arrives at Cawood to arrest him, forty-eight hours before his planned arrival in York for his investiture. He is taken to Pontefract Castle under guard, from there to Doncaster, and from there to Sheffield Park, the home of the Earl of Shrewsbury. Here at Talbot’s house he falls ill. On November 26 the constable of the Tower arrives, with twenty-four men at arms, to escort him south. From there he travels to Leicester Abbey. Three days later he dies.

What was England, before Wolsey? A little offshore island, poor and cold. (240)

This passage refers to the death of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, whose official crime was to assert a foreign ruler’s dominion in England, even though we know his real offense was his failure to procure for King Henry VIII the pope’s blessing for the annulment of his first marriage. The facts provide a clear enough record. But the final sentiment may seem out of place in its context. Who is it, we may wonder, giving the cardinal all this credit for the glory of Albion?

            After a section break, Mantel returns to her scene-making mode to show us how Thomas Cromwell, the cardinal’s erstwhile protégé and “man of business,” takes the news from George Cavendish, the gentleman usher who has been attending Wolsey since his fall from the king’s favor. The shift between the sections, of course, isn’t intended to highlight the differences in writing styles, but it does offer an opportunity to explore the author’s general approach to the story. She writes,

George Cavendish comes to Austin Friars. He cries as he talks. Sometimes he dries his tears and moralizes. But mostly he cries. “We had not even finished our dinner,” he says. “My lord was taking his dessert when young Harry Percy walked in. He was spattered with mud from the road, and he had the keys in his hands, he had taken them from the porter already, and set sentries on the stairs. My lord rose to his feet, he said, Harry, if I’d known, I’d have waited dinner for you. I fear we’ve almost finished the fish. Shall I pray for a miracle?

“I whispered to him, my lord, do not blaspheme. Then Harry Percy came forward: my lord, I arrest you for high treason.”

Cavendish waits. He waits for him to erupt in fury? But he puts his fingers together, joined as if he were praying. He thinks, Anne arranged this, and it must have given her an intense and secret pleasure; vengeance deferred, for herself, for her old lover, once berated by the cardinal and sent packing from the court. (240)

The narration slows the pace of storytelling to encourage us to imagine the events and the dialogue occurring in close to real time—we get a taste of this effect even within Cavendish’s own report. In place of dates and locations, we see mud-spattered coats and hear the jangle of keys. This effect is the most basic element of narrative prose. But Mantel is doing something far more subtle here than merely relaying details to portray scenes. Who, for instance, is posing that question in the last paragraph about what Cavendish is waiting for? Shouldn’t Mantel already know the answer?

             This passage shows in microcosm the narrational game underlying the entire novel. Mantel is not simply displaying her characters and their surroundings as if from an outside observer’s perspective, the way an attendee of a theatrical performance would describe them. Rather, she’s imagining her way into Cromwell’s own mind, making his perceptions and his thoughts the focal point of not only the individual scenes but the story as a whole.

Wolf Hall isn’t a novel about Henry VIII’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon and subsequent remarriage to Anne Boleyn; it’s a novel about Thomas Cromwell, the role he plays behind the scenes of these historical events, and, most compellingly, the materially exalting but psychologically devastating impact the playing of such a role has on him. This is the key to understanding those questions about what England was before the cardinal and what Cavendish is waiting for. We are not to attribute these thoughts to Mantel but to her protagonist, the man whose consciousness her narration is inviting us to share. And this sharing of the character’s experiences, the blending of our thoughts with his, is one of the pleasures unique to written stories, one that can make reading more exquisitely engrossing than any other way of experiencing a narrative. 

            Authors customarily use this narrational technique, known as free indirect style—as opposed to simple first person narration—because in addition to allowing them to occupy the mind of the main character it also affords them the freedom to draw back and describe that same character in a way he wouldn’t have cause to describe himself. So we can learn about things like facial expressions, vocal tonalities, or unconscious gestures. Or we may simply learn about habits or aspects of the character’s appearance he takes for granted and hence would be unlikely to contemplate. Early in Wolf Hall, we learn about the man at the heart of the story from a more straightforward third person perspective.

Thomas Cromwell is now a little over forty years old. He is a man of strong build, not tall. Various expressions are available to his face, and one is readable: an expression of stifled amusement. His hair is dark, heavy and waving, and his small eyes, which are of very strong sight, light up in conversation: so the Spanish ambassador will tell us, quite soon. It is said he knows by heart the entire New Testament in Latin, and so as a servant of the cardinal is apt—ready with a text if abbots flounder. His speech is low and rapid, his manner assured; he can draft a contract, train a falcon, draw a map, stop a street fight, furnish a house and fix a jury. He will quote you a nice point in the old authors, from Plato to Plautus and back again. He knows new poetry, and can say it in Italian. He works all hours, first up and last to bed. He makes money and spends it. He will take a bet on anything. (29)

The line about how Cromwell can fix a jury, treated as an almost innocuous afterthought here but foreshadowing an important event later in the novel, is typical of Mantel’s coyness, a subtle tactic to unsettle the settled, as if she were saying, “Think you know the story?—well, here it hasn’t happened yet.” (The title, referring to the home of the queen who succeeds Anne, is another of these coy gestures toward yet to occur future history.) But the passage as a whole is actually anomalous, as Mantel hews quite closely to Cromwell’s thoughts throughout the novel, representing unedited and unburnished the mental meanderings of a mind disciplined in the art of diplomatic withholding. Her use of free indirect style is in fact exceptional in how reliably it issues from her character’s perspective, and, though many readers got tripped up by seemingly ambiguous pronouns, this intense engagement with Cromwell is one of the reasons Wolf Hall is so thoroughly absorbing, and so profoundly moving. 

Image by Canva’s Magic Media

           The effect of Mantel’s uncannily close indirect narration is to make us feel like we’re moving behind the scenes of a mind belonging to a man who himself is privy to all the goings on behind the scenes of some of the most powerful people in the world at an important turning point in history. Wolf Hall succeeds on many levels, but it is most of all a masterwork of characterization. It is Mantel’s vivid and thoroughly wrought characters, Cromwell foremost among them, who bring the scenes to life. It is their competing ambitions and commingling prejudices—as perceived by Cromwell’s witheringly attentive eye—that ratchet up the stakes of even seemingly trivial encounters, creating both the novel’s pervasive air of menace and the volatile tension fueling its dark humor. In the scene where Cavendish recounts the cardinal’s final days, we get a glimpse of how Mantel integrates characterization into the unfolding of the plot. By this point in the novel, we know Wolsey would make just such a joke about the fish, we know Cavendish would object to it in just the way he does, and we know he’s aware of Cromwell’s predilection for dialogue quoted verbatim—all of this works to make us feel the full brunt of the scene’s plausibility, to experience it, unquestioningly, as real.

            Cromwell silently scoffs at the idea that he may erupt into fury, and if we were in Cavendish’s shoes we my come away with a view of Cromwell in keeping with the image of him passed down in hagiographic accounts of the life of Thomas More: a cold, calculating, and opportunistic yes-man about court—though Cavendish himself has good reason to be suspicious of Cromwell’s cold exterior, having once come across him crying over his dead wife’s prayer book. By the time Cavendish arrives with the news about Wolsey’s death, we too have had plenty of chances to see what’s really going on beneath the surface. We get another chance later in the scene, as Cavendish continues his account of the cardinal’s arrest:

“When they took him from the house, the townspeople were assembled outside. They knelt in the road and wept. They asked God to send vengeance on Harry Percy.”

God need not trouble, he thinks: I shall take it in hand. (241)

Some critics see Wolf Hall as an attempt to rehabilitate the reputation of the historical Cromwell. What’s more likely is that Mantel simply recognized the opportunity he represented for her to develop a provocative character, a figure she could flesh out as a man whose reputation and disciplined comportment are at odds with an inner life far richer, and far more decent, than even most of his closest associates ever fully realize. But, before she could adequately convey this pulsing tension between Cromwell’s public image and his hidden soul, Mantel first had to invent the unique version of close narration we’re introduced to in the earliest pages.

Wolf Hall garnered critical accolades galore for the liveliness of the characters and the verisimilitude of the scenes. But I’ve yet to come across any mention even of what seems to me the novel’s most soaring achievement. Though plenty of the reviews give a sense of Cromwell as a canny observer whose background and talents make him interesting in his own right, a man whose perspective lends new texture and a hint of color to the worn and faded events he hovers around the margins of, none of them ever touches on the moral and emotional stakes of the dilemmas he faces. But Cromwell is no passive observer, no static presence. That ingeniously represented tension at the core of Cromwell’s character never reaches any sort of stable equilibrium. From the opening pages when we see him as a young boy being ruthlessly beaten by his drunk and low-born father, to his first days in the service of the cardinal, right up until the coronation of Anne Boleyn and the execution of Thomas More for refusing to sanction it, we see a man driven by ambition, loyalty, revenge, and love, one who rises from lowly origins to the highest eminence, only to find himself forced to subvert his human decency to satisfy his murderously capricious king’s all-consuming passion. All these changes in his circumstances, and all these changes in the fates of those around him, many of which he has a hand in bringing about, work to change him in return, so it’s never sufficient to ask, who is Cromwell?—we’re always wondering too, what is he becoming? In other words, Cromwell’s is a soul in peril.

            His response early in the novel to hearing that his wife Liz has died makes for one of the most devastating lines in all of literature. “I suppose, he says, she will want to be buried with her first husband… Because I came more lately” (95). Thanks in large part to the nuanced revelations made possible through Mantel’s innovative narration, we already understand him well enough by this point to know that this is exactly how he would respond: pragmatic, self-effacing, doggedly restrained. And knowing all this about him transforms the line from an off-hand, seemingly heartless comment into something expressive of the bottomless heartbreak he’s standing on the brink of. And we’re standing right there with him. Mantel’s trick is to imply depths to her character’s feelings that he himself doesn’t acknowledge, and this at times throughout the novel only makes us experience them more intensely on his behalf—a sort of amplification through muting.

            With Mantel’s narration, we at times have to tolerate some slight disorientation, reading over pronouns whose antecedents won’t announce themselves until we’ve read the next few lines. Balancing this minor exertion, however, is the invariably short distance our eyes must travel to reach one or another form of punctuation signaling the end of a phrase. In another writer’s hands, this could make the pace feel clipped or stilted. But Mantel’s intimate involvement with her characters and her scenes allows her to make each clause emerge naturally from its predecessors, even while anticipating its successors, to create an effect that mimics simultaneity. Each line flows along like a flotilla of tiny treasure-laden ships, delivering images and meanings at the pace of precisely measured thought. This effect, too, is inseparably intertwined with the characterization. In the scene when Cromwell is sworn in as a member of the king’s council, Thomas More arrives in tears because his father has died the night before. Cromwell attempts to comfort him:  

“You know, after Elizabeth died, my wife…” And then, he wants to say, my daughters, my sister, my household decimated, my people never out of black, and now my cardinal lost… But he will not admit, for even a moment, that sorrow has sapped his will. You cannot get another father, but he would hardly want to; as for wives, they are two-a-penny with Thomas More. “You do not believe it now, but feeling will come back. For the world and all you must do in it.” (259)

We see here a hint of how complicated Cromwell’s feelings are about More, a man he grudgingly admires, one whose scholarship and literally self-flagellating devoutness, along with his casual misogyny and murderous conviction, inspires in him a mixture of wariness, disgust, and strenuously disavowed awe. We also see evidence of the layered meanings occupying the medium of Cromwell’s mind. He’s not only a man whose words are often at odds with his thoughts, but one whose thoughts are frequently at odds with his feelings (“I have got over Liz, he says to himself. Surely?” [463]), as though he’s trying—with a modicum of success—to manage his emotions by directing his thoughts. 

And this is the key to deciphering that initial passage about Cardinal Wolsey’s demise, because we know Cromwell would seek to reduce this overwhelmingly tragic news to its stark factuality. We know, too, that one of the most painful things about what’s happened is that he wasn’t there when his friend died—even though Wolsey had expressed his desire that he be there with him at the end. When Cavendish happened upon Cromwell in tears early in the novel, he doesn’t know it’s Liz’s prayer book in his hands. “I am going to lose everything,” is how Cromwell explains his tears, “everything I have worked for, all my life, because I will go down with the cardinal” (144). But, as he goes to court more frequently to plead Wolsey’s case, something unexpected happens: the king and his would-be queen recognize his talents and gradually end up recruiting him to their cause. In one of the scenes leading up to the cardinal’s death, Cromwell uncharacteristically lets his guard down and confides in a scholar and cleric named Thomas Cranmer—after discovering he too is a widower—about his concerns regarding Wolsey:

He has a wish to speak, to express the bottled rage and pain he feels. He says, “People have worked to make misunderstandings between us. To persuade the cardinal that I am no longer working for his interests, only for my own, that I have been bought out, that I see Anne every day—”

         “Of course, you do see her…”

         “How else can I know how to move next? My lord cannot know, he cannot understand, what it’s like to be here now.”

Cranmer says gently, “Should you not go to him? Your presence would dispel any doubt.”

        “There is no time. The snare is set for him and I dare not move.” (232)

Indeed, Cromwell has overheard his own protégé Rafe Sadler saying to his nephew, “Look, there was no profit for him, ever, in deserting the old man—what would he get but the name of deserter? Perhaps something is to be got by sticking fast. For all of us” (198). The nephew, Richard, doesn’t believe his uncle’s loyalty to the cardinal is a mere ploy, but there’s no denying by this point that Cromwell’s fate is no longer tied to Wolsey’s.

          Mantel’s image of Cromwell as both intimidatingly savvy and startlingly versatile in his competences seems to have conspired with the traditional view of him as a coldblooded opportunist to make it difficult for some readers to see him as anything other than a Machiavellian mastermind. But, while he’s certainly no victim of circumstance, Mantel shows clearly throughout Wolf Hall that he’s as driven by necessity as he is by his own prescient and strategic calculations. As cool as he plays his myriad roles, Cromwell often has no idea what he’s getting himself into. From one of his earliest encounters with the cardinal—when he reflexively, and quite conspicuously, draws away from an imaginary blow (“I really would like the London gossip,” Wolsey says. “But I wasn’t planning to beat it out of you” [66])—to his first days at court, he’s frequently far from certain where he stands with the powerful men he’s surrounded by. After an attempt to convince Queen Katherine to relocate to Hertfordshire by suggesting that if she doesn’t go quietly she may be separated from her daughter, Princess Mary, Cromwell explains his position to his protégés. (First, he pretends he already knew Katherine and Mary were to be separated anyway when informed of it by one of his men.)

Rafe says, “It is harsh. To use the little girl against her mother.”

“Harsh, yes…but the question is, have you picked your prince? Because that is what you do, you choose him, and you know what he is. And then, when you have chosen, you say yes to him—yes, that is possible, yes, that can be done.”

Cromwell feels he’s chosen a prince—though in fact a prince has chosen him—far less ruthless than others he knows of. When his son Gregory, wondering just how far he would go with his yeses, asks, “You would not work her death, would you?” (270), Cromwell tries to reassure him:

“I said, you give way to the king’s requests. You open the way to his desires. That is what a courtier does. Now, understand this: it is impossible that Henry should require me or any other person to harm the queen. What is he, a monster?” (271)

Here again Mantel is playing her devious game with future history, since we know Anne will be only the second of Henry’s six wives—and the first of two who are beheaded. But, once Cromwell has chosen his prince, there’s no turning back for him.

            Unsurprisingly, Cromwell’s campaign to give the king what he wants meets with success, but that leads to a further complication. Thomas More, until recently a high church official, refuses to swear an oath in support of an act declaring Henry head of the church in England and free to marry Anne Boleyn. And so Thomas Cromwell has no choice but to say yes to his king’s command to either persuade More to reconsider or, failing that, find grounds to convict him of treason, so that he can be executed. More, as we knew he would, prefers martyrdom to the prospect of undermining his life’s work on behalf of the Catholic faith. The closing chapters of Wolf Hall have Cromwell struggling against both his conscience and More’s refusal to make any damning statements that would secure his conviction. The final scenes between the two men expose each of them down to the last raw nerve of their souls as they wade through the moral complexity of their predicament, weighed down by the undeniable futility of their efforts. “Will you think me sentimental, if I say I do not want to see you butchered?” (588) Cromwell asks at one point. Later he says, “I would have left you, you know. To live out your life. To repent your butcheries. If I were king” (590). As for the actual king, Cromwell has already tried to get him to allow More to live on in silence, since getting a jury—even the one he’s fixed—to convict him of treason won’t be easy. The king is incensed.

Henry stirs to life. “Do I retain you for what is easy? Jesus pity my simplicity, I have promoted you to a place in this kingdom that no one, no one of your breeding has ever held in the whole of the history of this realm.” He drops his voice. “Do you think it is for your personal beauty? The charm of your presence? I keep you, Master Cromwell, because you are as cunning as a bag of serpents. But do not be a viper in my bosom. You know my decision. Execute it.” (585)

In other words, find a way to execute Thomas More. Now there can no longer be any question in Cromwell’s mind of where he stands with the king, or of what kind of prince he has chosen.

            You can read Wolf Hall as an allegory about the transfer of power from the church to the state, taking Cromwell as a representative of a more modern, less spiritual, more skeptical way of thinking, with More, for all his courage, as a bloodthirsty hypocrite, even a type of terrorist. “When you interrogated men you called heretics,” Cromwell points out to More, “you did not allow evasion. You compelled them to speak and racked them if they would not” (582). But such a reading results in a gross failure to honor Mantel’s accomplishment in infusing real life-blood into her characters. Making them serve as mere symbols for anything is like scorching an entire forest of complexity to make way for some more orderly construction. Indeed, one of the recurring themes in the novel is the poor fit between required roles and the real humans made to play them—the constant need to “arrange your face” before entering a scene. This is best captured in another of the rare moments when Cromwell lets his guard down to speak openly and sincerely, this time to his nemesis and friend Thomas More as he sits in a cell: “I am glad I am not like you,” he says.

“Undoubtedly. Or you would be sitting here.”

“I mean, my mind fixed on the next world. I realize you see no prospect of improving this one.”

“And do you?”

…“I once had every hope,” he says. “The world corrupts me, I think. Or perhaps it’s just the weather. It pulls me down and makes me think like you, that one should shrink inside, down and down to a little point of light, preserving one’s solitary soul like a flame under a glass. The spectacles of pain and disgrace I see around me, the ignorance, the unthinking vice, the poverty and the lack of hope, and oh, the rain—the rain that falls on England and rots the grain, puts out the light in a man’s eye and the light of learning too, for who can reason if Oxford is a giant puddle and Cambridge is washing downstream, and who will enforce the laws if judges are swimming for their lives? Last week the people were rioting in York. Why would they not, with wheat so scarce, and twice the price of last year? I must stir up the justices to make examples, I suppose, otherwise the whole of the north will be out with billhooks and pikes, and who will they slaughter but each other? I truly believe I should be a better man if the weather were better. I should be a better man if I lived in a commonwealth where the sun shone and the citizens were rich and free. If only that were true, Master More, you wouldn’t have to pray for me nearly as hard as you do.” (588-9)

And so we learn that our symbol for the emergence of modern statecraft and realpolitik fears for his own soul, just as we do. “I do, of course, pray for you,” More assures him. “When we meet in Heaven, as I hope we will, all our differences will be forgot.”

            The title Wolf Hall doesn’t merely refer to the home of Jane Seymour, the young girl Henry will turn to when Anne fails to give him a male heir. In a scene late in the novel, when Christophe, one of Cromwell’s servants, hears what sounds like howling, he asks “Is there loups? In this kingdom?” Cromwell answers, “I think the wolves all died when the great forests were cut down. That howling you hear is only the Londoners” (463). In a later scene, when his head cook Thurston explains that he wants to stay in the kitchen instead of delegating from afar because things may “take a downturn”—as they did for the cardinal—Cromwell recalls a threat the Duke of Norfolk, Anne’s uncle, made to Wolsey: “Tell him to go north, or I will come where he is and tear him with my teeth.” At the time, Cromwell had joked dismissively, “May I substitute the word ‘bite’?” But years later, when the cardinal is long dead, the duke’s words still resonate: “The saying comes to him, homo homini lupus, man is wolf to man” (531).

Now, Cromwell must realize, part of his role is to answer to this same man who had a hand in his friend’s downfall, just as he must cater to Anne’s every whim despite her being the main force behind Wolsey’s ruin, just as he must invariably say yes to the king who stood by allowing it to happen. He does what he must in this world. Yet, for all his brilliance and competence and wit and cunning, despite his intimidating demeanor and his discipline in keeping his eye at all times fixed on his interests, Cromwell is a man with real heart. His soul, as revealed to us through Mantel’s singular virtuosity and ever so complicatedly human voice, is a flame that could never be captured under any glass, one that she alone could set alight on the page. And all the heart that she gives to her character is the reason why every page of Wolf Hall pulses with its heat. 

Also read: 

NOTIONAL BODIES, ANGELS' WINGS, AND POET'S TRUTHS: THE EXQUISITE DISCOMFORT OF "BRING UP THE BODIES" BY HILARY MANTEL

IS "THE MIRROR AND THE LIGHT" AS GOOD AS "WOLF HALL" AND "BRING UP THE BODIES"?

PUTTING DOWN THE PEN: HOW SCHOOL TEACHES US THE WORST POSSIBLE WAY TO READ LITERATURE

Putting Down the Pen: How School Teaches Us the Worst Possible Way to Read Literature

Storytelling comes naturally to humans. But there is a special category of narratives that we’re taught from an early age to approach in the most strained and unnatural of ways. The label we apply to this category is literature. While we demand of movies and television shows that they envelop us in the seamlessly imagined worlds of their creators’ visions, not only whisking us away from our own concerns, but rendering us oblivious as well, however fleetingly, to the artificiality of the dramas playing out before us, we split the spines of literary works expecting some real effort at heightened awareness to be demanded of us—which is why many of us seldom read this type of fiction at all.

Some of the difficulty is intrinsic to the literary endeavor, reflecting the authors’ intention to engage our intellect as well as our emotions. But many academics seem to believe that literature exists for the sole purpose of supporting a superstructure of scholarly discourse. Rather than treating it as an art form occupying a region where intuitive aesthetic experience overlaps with cerebral philosophical musing, these scholars take it as their duty to impress upon us the importance of approaching literature as a purely intellectual exercise. In other words, if you allow yourself to become absorbed in the story, especially to the point where you forget, however briefly, that it is just a story, then you’re breaking faith with the very institutions that support literary scholarship—and that to some degree support literature as an art form.    

The unremarked scandal of modern literary scholarship is that the tension between reading as an aesthetic experience and reading as a purely intellectual pursuit is never even acknowledged. Many students seeking a deeper and more indelible involvement with great works come away instead with instructions on how to take on a mindset and apply a set of methods designed specifically to preclude just the type of experience they’re hoping to achieve. For instance, when novelist and translator Tim Parks wrote an essay called “A Weapon for Readers” for The New York Review of Books, in which he opined on the critical importance of having a pen in hand while reading, he received several emails from disappointed readers who “even thus armed felt the text was passing them by.” In a response titled “How I Read,” Parks begins with an assurance that he will resist being “prescriptive” as he shares his own reading methods, and yet he goes on to profess, “I do believe reading is an active skill, an art even, certainly not a question of passive absorption.” But, we might ask, could there also be such a state as active absorption? And isn’t that what most of us are hoping for when we read a story?

For Parks, and nearly every academic literary scholar writing or teaching today, stories are vehicles for the transmission of culture and hence reducible to the propositional information contained within them. The task of the scholar and the responsible reader alike therefore is to penetrate the surface effects of the story—the characters, the drama, the music of the prose—so we can scrutinize the underlying assumptions that hold them all together and make them come to life. As author David Shields explains in his widely celebrated manifesto Reality Hunger, “I always read the book as an allegory, as a disguised philosophical argument.” Parks demonstrates more precisely what this style of reading entails, writing, “As I dive into the opening pages, the first question I’m asking is, what are the qualities or values that matter most to this author, or at least in this novel?” Instead of pausing to focus on character descriptions or to take any special note of the setting, he aims his pen at clues to the author’s unspoken preoccupations:

I start a novel by Hemingway and at once I find people taking risks, forcing themselves toward acts of courage, acts of independence, in a world described as dangerous and indifferent to human destiny. I wonder if being courageous is considered more important than being just or good, more important than coming out a winner, more important than comradeship. Is it the dominant value? I’m on the lookout for how each character positions himself in relation to courage.

We can forget for a moment that Parks’ claim is impossible—how could he start a novel with so much foreknowledge of what it contains? The important point revealed in this description is that from the opening pages Parks is searching for ways to leap from the particular to the abstract, from specific incidents of the plot to general propositions about the world and the people in it. He goes on,

After that the next step is to wonder what is the connection between these force fields—fear/courage, belonging/exclusion, domination/submission—and the style of the book, the way the plot unfolds. How is the writer trying to draw me into the mental world of his characters through his writing, through his conversation with me?

While this process of putting the characters in some relation to each other and the author in relation to the reader is going on, another crucial question is hammering away in my head. Is this a convincing vision of the world?

Like Shields, Parks is reducing stories to philosophical arguments. And he proceeds to weigh them according to how well they mesh with his own beliefs.

Parks addresses the objection that his brand of critical reading, which he refers to as “alert resistance,” will make us much less likely to experience “those wonderful moments when we might fall under a writer’s spell” by insisting that there will be time enough for that after we’ve thoroughly examined the text for dangerous hidden assumptions, and by further suggesting that many writers will have worked hard enough on their texts to survive our scrutiny. For Parks and other postmodern scholars, there’s simply too much at stake for us to allow ourselves to be taken in by a good story until it’s been properly scanned for contraband ideas. “Sometimes it seems the whole of society languishes in the stupor of the fictions it has swallowed,” he writes. Because it’s a central tenet of postmodernism, the ascendant philosophy in English departments across the country, Parks fails to appreciate just how extraordinary a claim he’s making when he suggests that writers of literary texts are responsible, at least to some degree, for all the worst ills of society.

The sickening irony is that postmodern scholars are guilty of the very crime they accuse literary authors of committing. Critics like Parks and Shields charge that writers dazzle us with stories so they can secretly inculcate us with their ideologies. Parks feels he needs to teach readers “to protect themselves from all those underlying messages that can shift one’s attitude without one’s being aware of it.” And yet when his own readers come to him looking for advice on how to experience literature more deeply he offers them his own ideology disguised as the only proper way to approach a text (politely, of course, since he wouldn’t want to be prescriptive). Consider the young booklover attending her first college lit courses and being taught the importance of putting literary works and their authors on trial for their complicity in societal evils: she comes believing she’s going to read more broadly and learn to experience more fully what she reads, only to be tricked into thinking what she loves most about books are the very things that must be resisted.

Parks is probably right in his belief that reading with a pen and looking for hidden messages makes us more attentive to the texts and increases our engagement with them. But at what cost? The majority of people in our society avoid literary fiction altogether once they’re out of school precisely because it’s too difficult to get caught up in the stories the way we all do when we’re reading commercial fiction or watching movies. Instead of seeing their role as helping students experience this absorption with more complex works, scholars like Parks instruct us on ways to avoid becoming absorbed at all. While at first the suspicion of hidden messages that underpins this oddly counterproductive approach to stories may seem like paranoia, the alleged crimes of authors often serve to justify an attitude toward texts that’s aggressively narcissistic—even sadistic. Here’s how Parks describes the outcome of his instructions to his students:

There is something predatory, cruel even, about a pen suspended over a text. Like a hawk over a field, it is on the lookout for something vulnerable. Then it is a pleasure to swoop and skewer the victim with the nib’s sharp point. The mere fact of holding the hand poised for action changes our attitude to the text. We are no longer passive consumers of a monologue but active participants in a dialogue. Students would report that their reading slowed down when they had a pen in their hand, but at the same time the text became more dense, more interesting, if only because a certain pleasure could now be taken in their own response to the writing when they didn’t feel it was up to scratch, or worthy only of being scratched.

It’s as if the author’s first crime, the original sin, as it were, was to attempt to communicate in a medium that doesn’t allow anyone to interject or participate. By essentially shouting writers down by marking up their works, Parks would have us believe we’re not simply being like the pompous idiot who annoys everyone by trying to point out all the holes in movie plots so he can appear smarter than the screenwriters—no, we’re actually making the world a better place. He even begins his essay on reading with a pen with this invitation: “Imagine you are asked what single alteration in people’s behavior might best improve the lot of mankind.”

            The question postmodern literary scholars never get around to answering is, given that they believe books and stories are so far-reaching in their insidious effects, and given that they believe the main task in reading is to resist the author’s secret agenda, why should we bother reading in the first place? Of course, we should probably first ask if it’s even true that stories have such profound powers of persuasion. Jonathan Gottschall, a scholar who seeks to understand storytelling in the context of human evolution, may seem like one of the last people you’d expect to endorse the notion that every cultural artifact emerging out of so-called Western civilization must be contaminated with hidden reinforcements of oppressive ideas. But in an essay that seemingly echoes Parks’ most paranoid pronouncements about literature, one that even relies on similarly martial metaphors, Gottschall reports,

Results repeatedly show that our attitudes, fears, hopes, and values are strongly influenced by story. In fact, fiction seems to be more effective at changing beliefs than writing that is specifically designed to persuade through argument and evidence.

What is going on here? Why are we putty in a storyteller’s hands? The psychologists Melanie Green and Tim Brock argue that entering fictional worlds “radically alters the way information is processed.” Green and Brock’s studies show that the more absorbed readers are in a story, the more the story changes them. Highly absorbed readers also detected significantly fewer “false notes” in stories—inaccuracies, missteps—than less transported readers. Importantly, it is not just that highly absorbed readers detected the false notes and didn’t care about them (as when we watch a pleasurably idiotic action film). They were unable to detect the false notes in the first place.

Gottschall’s essay is titled “Why Storytelling Is the Ultimate Weapon,” and one of his main conclusions seems to corroborate postmodern claims about the dangers lurking in literature. “Master storytellers,” he writes, “want us drunk on emotion so we will lose track of rational considerations, relax our skepticism, and yield to their agenda.”

            Should we just accept Shields’ point then that stories are no more than disguised attempts at persuasion? Should we take Parks’ advice and start scouring our books for potentially nefarious messages? It’s important to note that Gottschall isn’t writing about literature in his essay; rather, he’s discussing storytelling in the context of business and marketing. And this brings up another important point: as Gottschall writes, “story is a tool that can be used for good or ill.” Just because there’s a hidden message doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a bad one. Indeed, if literature really were some kind of engine driving the perpetuation of all the most oppressive aspects of our culture, then we would expect the most literate societies, and the most literate sectors within each society, to be the most oppressive. Instead, some scholars, from Lynn Hunt to Steven Pinker, have traced liberal ideas like universal human rights to the late eighteenth century, when novels were first being widely read. The nature of the relationship is nearly impossible to pin down with any precision, but it’s clear that our civilization’s thinking about human rights evolved right alongside its growing appreciation for literature.

            A growing body of research demonstrates that people who read literary fiction tend to be more empathetic—and less racist even. If literature has hidden messages, they seem to be nudging us in a direction not many would consider cause for alarm. It is empathy after all that allows us to enter into narratives in the first place, so it’s hardly a surprise that one of the effects of reading is a strengthening of this virtue. And that gets at the fundamental misconception at the heart of postmodern theories of narrative. For Shields and Parks, stories are just clever ways to package an argument, but their theories leave unanswered why we enjoy all those elements of narratives that so distract us from the author’s supposed agenda. What this means is that postmodern scholars are confused about what a story even is. They don’t understand that the whole reason narratives have such persuasive clout is that reading them brings us close to actual experiences, simulating what it would be like to go through the incidents of the plots alongside the characters. And, naturally, experiences tend to be more persuasive than arguments. When we’re absorbed in a story, we fail to notice incongruities or false notes because in a very real sense we see them work just fine right before our mind’s eye. Parks worries that readers will passively absorb arguments, so he fails to realize that the whole point of narratives is to help us become actively absorbed in their simulated experiences.

            So what is literature? Is it pure rhetoric, pure art, or something in between? Do novelists begin conceiving of their works when they have some philosophical point to make and realize they need a story to cloak it in? Or are any aspects of their stories that influence readers toward one position or another merely incidental to the true purpose of writing fiction? Consider these questions in the light of your own story consuming habits. Do you go to a movie to have your favorite beliefs reinforced? Or do you go to have a moving experience? Or we can think of it in relation to other art forms. Does the painter arrange colors on a canvas to convince us of some point? Are we likely to vote differently after attending a symphony? The best art really does impact the way we think and feel, but that’s because it creates a moving experience, and—perhaps the most important point here—that experience can seldom be reduced to a single articulable proposition. Think about your favorite novel and try to pare it down to a single philosophical statement, or even ten statements. Now compare that list of statements to the actual work.

            Another fatal irony for postmodernism is that literary fiction, precisely because it requires special effort to appreciate, is a terribly ineffective medium for propaganda. And exploring why this is the case will start getting us into the types of lessons professors might be offering their students if they were less committed to their bizarre ideology than they were to celebrating literature as an art form. If we compare literary fiction to commercial fiction, we see that the prior has at least two disadvantages when it comes to absorbing our attention. First, literary writers are usually committed to realism, so the events of the plot have to seem like they may possibly occur in the real world, and the characters have to seem like people you could actually meet. Second, literary prose often relies on a technique known as estrangement, whereby writers describe scenes and experiences in a way that makes readers think about them differently than they ever have before, usually in the same way the character guiding the narration thinks of them. The effect of these two distinguishing qualities of literature is that you have less remarkable plots recounted in remarkably unfamiliar language, whereas with commercial fiction you have outrageous plots rendered in the plainest of terms.

            Since it’s already a challenge to get into literary stories, the notion that readers need to be taught how to resist their lures is simply perverse. And the notion that an art form that demands so much thought and empathy to be appreciated should be treated as some kind of delivery package for oppressive ideas is just plain silly—or rather it would be if nearly the entirety of American academia weren’t sold on it. I wonder if Parks sits in movie theaters violently scribbling in notebooks lest he succumb to the dangerous messages hidden in Pixar movies (like that friends are really great!). Our lives are pervaded by stories—why focus our paranoia on the least likely source of unacceptable opinions? Why assume our minds are pristinely in the right before being influenced? Of course, one of the biggest influences on our attitudes and beliefs, surely far bigger than any single reading of a book, is our choice of friends. Does Parks vet candidates for entrance into his social circle according to some standard of political correctness? For that matter, does he resist savoring his meals by jotting down notes about suspect ingredients, all the while remaining vigilant lest one of his dining partners slip in some indefensible opinion while he’s distracted with chewing?

            Probably the worst part of Parks’ advice to readers on how to get more out of literature is that he could hardly find a better way to ensure that their experiences will be blunted than by encouraging them to move as quickly as possible from the particular to the abstract and from the emotional to the intellectual. Emotionally charged experiences are the easiest to remember, dry abstractions the most difficult. If you want to get more out of literature, if you want to become actively absorbed in it, then you’ll need to forget about looking past the words on the page in search of confirmation for some pet theory. There’s enough ambiguity in good fiction to support just about any theory you’re determined to apply. But do you really want to go to literature intent on finding what you already think you know? Or would you rather go in search of undiscovered perspectives and new experiences?

            I personally stopped reading fiction with a pen in my hand—and even stopped using bookmarks—after reading Moonwalking with Einstein, a book on memory and competitive mnemonics by science writer Joshua Foer. A classic of participatory journalism, the book recounts Foer's preparation for the U.S. Memory Championships, and along the way it explores the implications of our culture’s continued shift toward more external forms of memory, from notes and books, to recorders and smartphones. Since one of the major findings in the field of memory research is that you can increase your capacity with the right kind of training, Foer began looking for opportunities to memorize things. He writes,

I started trying to use my memory in everyday life, even when I wasn’t practicing for the handful of arcane events that would be featured in the championship. Strolls around the neighborhood became an excuse to memorize license plates. I began to pay a creepy amount of attention to name tags. I memorized my shopping lists. I kept a calendar on paper, and also in my mind. Whenever someone gave me a phone number, I installed it in a special memory palace. (163-4)

Foer even got rid of all the sticky notes around his computer monitor, except for one which read, “Don’t forget to remember.”

            The most basic technique in mnemonics is what cognitive scientists call “elaborative encoding,” which means you tag otherwise insignificant items like numbers or common names with more salient associations, usually some kind of emotionally provocative imagery. After reading Foer’s book, it occurred to me that while the mnemonics masters went about turning abstractions into solid objects and people, literary scholars are busy insisting that we treat fictional characters as abstractions. Authors, in applying the principle of estrangement to their descriptions, are already doing most of the work of elaborately encoding pertinent information for us. We just to have to accept their invitations to us and put the effort into imagining what they describe.

             A study I came across sometime after reading Foer’s book illustrates the tradeoff between external and internal memories. Psychologist Linda Henkel compared the memories of museum visitors who were instructed to take pictures to those of people who simply viewed the various displays, and she found that taking pictures had a deleterious effect on recall. What seems to be occurring here is that museum visitors who don’t take pictures are either more motivated to get the full experience by mentally taking in all the details or simply less distracted by the mechanics of picture-taking. People with photos know they can rely on them as external memories, so they’re quicker to shift their attention to other things. In other words, because they’re storing parts of the present moment for the future, they have less incentive to occupy the present moment—to fully experience it—with the result that they don’t remember it as well.

            If I’m reading nonfiction, or if I’m reading a work of fiction I’ve already read before in preparation for an essay or book discussion, I’ll still pull out a pen once in a while. But the first time I read a work of literature I opt to follow Foer’s dictum, “Don’t forget to remember,” instead of relying on external markers. I make an effort to cast myself into the story, doing my best to think of the events as though they were actually happening before my eyes and think of the characters as though they were real people—if an author is skilled enough and generous enough to give a character a heartbeat, who are we to drain them of blood? Another important principle of cognitive psychology is that “Memory is the residue of thought.” So when I’m reading I take time—usually at section breaks—to think over what’s already happened and wonder at what may happen next.

I do eventually get around to thinking about abstractions like the author’s treatment of various themes and what the broader societal implications might be of the particular worldview represented in the story, insofar as there is a discernable one. But I usually save those topics for the times when I don’t actually have the book in my hands. It’s much more important to focus on the particulars, on the individual words and lines, so you can make the most of the writer’s magic and transform the marks on the page into images in your mind. I personally think it’s difficult to do that when you’re busy making your own marks on the pages. And I also believe we ought to have the courage and openheartedness to give ourselves over to great authors—at least for a while—confident in our ability to return from where they take us if we deem it necessary. Once in a while, the best thing to do is just shut up and listen.

Also read: 

HOW VIOLENT FICTION WORKS: ROHAN WILSON’S “THE ROVING PARTY” AND JAMES WOOD’S SANGUINARY SUBLIME FROM CONRAD TO MCCARTHY

And: 

REBECCA MEAD’S MIDDLEMARCH PILGRIMAGE AND THE 3 WRONG WAYS TO READ A NOVEL

And: 

Sabbath Says: Philip Roth and the Dilemmas of Ideological Castration

An Analysis of Junk: Guest Post by Meghann Bassett

           In a recent entry on the well-known blog, Reading Subtly, author Dennis J. Junk laments the seemingly inevitable comparison between him and the protagonists of his short stories. He describes an unfortunate incident in which a former classmate read one of his early stories and mistook Junk for a character in the plot. Junk writes, “The next day I opened my inbox to find a two-page response to the story which treated everything described in it as purely factual and attempted to account for the emotional emptiness I’d demonstrated …” Though Junk does concede that “the events in the story … were almost all true,” he rails against the injustice of readers who have “drawn conclusions about me based on it.”

Critic Jane Doe contends that Junk needs “to get over it” (3) She points to the numerous places in his stories in which Junk ostensibly leads the reader to confuse the author with one of his characters. “The similarities are more than evident; they are obvious to even the most obtuse reader” she writes in her dissertation “Junksonian Fiction” (4). According to Doe, “one may sluggishly sit in bed, skim Junk’s ‘fiction,’ and still be able to see the correlations” (4). Doe argues that Jim Conway of “Encounters, Inc” resembles Junk in that he is a recent graduate of Indiana University, Purdue University-Fort Wayne, works as a copywriter at a software company while aspiring to publish novels and short stories, and “has an ear for noticing things like residue being a poor choice of word” to describe a coffee house (16). Doe also compares Tom of this same story to Junk, citing the nearly identical childhoods of “both men who grew up on Union Chapel Road and routinely ran the previously undeveloped roads north of Fort Wayne” (29). She gives special attention to the character of Russell Arden in “The Fire Hoarder” who, Doe asserts, is “a carbon-copy of the author” (58). “Both men have brothers, run the Bicentennial Trails, and read without ceasing. And Russell like Junk is magnetic, elusive, and determined” (59). Though some readers may deny any semblance of similarity between Junk, Jim, Tom or Russell, Doe insists that Zack of “Smoking Buddha” bears “irrefutable likeness to Junk” (59). “For pity’s sake,” she writes, “it is as if the author has written a memoir, not a work of short fiction. The very apartment in which Zack lives is identical to Junk’s current home. One can envision the fireplace and claw-foot tub in Junk’s bathroom when reading how Zack cloisters himself in this space following the mysterious disappearance of the satyr statue” (62).

While Doe’s arguments are not without merit, it is easy to fully disagree with her explorations of Junk’s fiction, which, to a large degree, rely upon dichotomized concepts of author and character, whereby narrow constructions of one often replace the other. In Doe’s mind, the author who does not wish to be judged according to the strengths and weakness of his or her characters should remain wholly separate, lending no real trait or quality to the fictive individuals. Sadly, Doe’s analysis overlooks the host of canonical authors, including the Father of English Poetry, who have recreated themselves into quasi-fictional characters. Though, in life, Chaucer was a shrewd man with a cunning eye for human drama, he presents himself in The Canterbury Tales as a humble pilgrim and a doughy, mediocre poet. One might argue, therefore, that Junk’s characters are but shadows of the author—perhaps nobler or darker, more cynical manifestations of the real man.

Olivia Roberts holds to this opinion, arguing that critics like Doe, who vainly undertake needle-in-the-haystack quests to discern fact from fiction, too often explore correlations between author and character identities in reductive and deterministic ways (3). She suggests that the brilliance of “Encounters, Inc” or “The Fire Hoarder” is that they do not treat pure fiction as superior to fact; rather, the enduring brilliance of Junk’s work is that it elicits questions of reality but offers no answers. “The characters are provocative in that they may be real; more importantly, however, his stories simply provide complex depictions of male characters without judgment” (89). Like any creature that can never be wholly understood through an examination of its mere parts, Junk presents his characters as unknowable, mysterious entities that cannot be defined via any single analysis. The same may be said of Junk himself who defies definitive identification with any isolated character.

The beauty of Junk’s work is that he offers enough of himself to his characters to give them life, but rather than constrain those characters to conform to him, he lets them evolve into non-Junksonian individuals. Russell of ‘The Fire Hoarder’ may be Junk, the guy next door, or Heathcliff; the important thing is that he is a credible character—one for whom the reader, true to life, simultaneously feels sympathy and revulsion (Roberts 36).

As Roberts has noted, Junk’s stories frequently have an inscrutable quality that defies easy classification. Many have argued that Junk’s stories are too long to be categorized as short fiction. In fact, because of the seemingly tangential digressions in the form of dialogues dealing with evil and freedom and capitalism that pervade Junk’s fiction, his stories have been described as less fiction than a handbook or treatise (Queequeg 106). These long philosophical sections have rendered Junk’s stories unpopular among certain audiences. One anonymous blogger writes, “I’d rather suffer through War and Peace for the third time than read one of Junk’s lengthy ‘West Central Stories.’” Discerning readers, however, have recognized such digressions as central to understanding Junk’s art. In his assessment of “The Fire Hoarder,” Michael Franklin contends that these “digressions” reveal Junk’s technical skill as an author and his determination to expose audiences to more than mere entertainment. More significantly, they illuminate Junk’s attempts to understand that which is spiritual via analysis of the physical world (Franklin 204). Eliza Ghann, however, more insightfully argues that Junk’s characters question all things in order that the reader, not the author, may be the one to undergo self-exploration (39). In her second of three essays analyzing the works of Junk, Ghann writes:

Junk’s stories are quite thought-provoking. Many of Junk’s characters appear to go mad: they abandon themselves to endless, overpowering sex, fits of horrific violence, and Thoreauvian reclusiveness in the woods. Initially, the reader is disinclined to like these defectors of society. Slowly, however, Junk induces his readers to begrudgingly sympathize with each protagonist as he undergoes transformation from a conforming adult to a mad, but free, man. In so doing, the reader begins to question cultural concepts of conformity and reality (40).

Ghann points to a particular passage in “The Fire Hoarder” in which Russell, dissatisfied with the dull contentment of those around him as well as their narrow misconceptions of who he is, ponders what it would mean to have the freedom to “live [his] days on [his] own terms,” to throw off the imposed role others have given him (41). Because Russell has a tendency to speak his mind, loudly and without reservation, he is labeled insensitive. Yet he imagines a life in which he does not have to prove or disprove such judgments, a life in which he could with comfort and acceptance “do anything—even die—and people would barely notice.” Following his conversation with Ray, Russell appears to grow more calloused and self-absorbed. Though “madness” has been slowly creeping upon him, the turning point occurs in the old junkyard. Once he commits murder, Russell entirely cuts himself off from family and friends without a word of explanation. But as he exits one world, he slips into another—a hazy place of effigies and hallucinations where he imagines his ex-girlfriend loves him still. According to Ghann, Russell’s story is a tragedy of love, yet she acknowledges that “tragedy isn’t quite the right word” (42). “His story appears a tragedy only to those left behind. To Russell, his death is a triumph. As the decrepit house is engulfed in flames, Russell is reunited with his heart’s desire: Vicki. It matters not whether that union is real or imagined” (45). It is certainly a curiosity that many have futilely sought to distinguish the real Junk from the fictional Junk in a story in which the author urges his readers to recognize that reality is often a mere construction, that past and present can strangely fuse, that no one fully knows Russell, not even Russell himself.  

It may be argued that Zack, unlike Russell, may not be appropriately called free, at least not free in the traditional sense of the word. By the end of the story, he has been shackled by a new burden—be it an oppressive ghost or the natural consequences of unkind thoughts and actions; nevertheless, he has also been liberated. Like the woman who lived in the carriage house before him, he is no longer bound to perform according to the man-made schedule of an eight-to-five job. Furthermore, he has been set free from his body; as Zack succumbs to the curse of hypothyroidism, the maintenance of his body ceases to be of primary concern. Roberts notes a common theme in Junk’s fiction: the ‘villains’ are often overweight (42).  The woman who annoyingly coughs “ehuh-ehuhm” in “The Smoking Buddha” is described as “terribly obese” and pillowed by her own fat. Tom is hounded by a “walking barrel,” and Russell is attacked by a man who is “massive in a way that less intimidating than pitiable.” Though some scholars have argued that Junk is arrogantly insensitive in his criticisms of the misfortunates of others, Roberts claims that Junk’s fiction reveals the opposite: that Junk is highly sensitive and attune to the fact that no man is perfect. “The beautiful and the ugly are seen to plummet in the same vortex of uncertainty” (43). According to Roberts, Junk’s fiction does not pit villain against hero; rather “all of the characters are stunningly vile” (43). Roberts likens Junk’s characters to Sherwood Anderson’s “Book of the Grotesque” wherein some figures are “amusing, some almost beautiful” (Anderson qtd. by Roberts 44).  Like these grotesques, Roberts argues that readers “cannot help but like Junk’s characters, even ‘the barrel’” (45). While Roberts’ claims concerning ‘the barrel’ are questionable, her assessment of Zack, Tom, or Russell is accurate; one does, indeed, feel a degree of compassion for each.

Libby Tessab takes Roberts’ analysis one step further. She equates Russell Arden to Philip Roth’s Mickey Sabbath, noting how both men have known love, yet have chosen to cope with the loss through a seemingly endless cycle of booze and sex. “There’s something pathetically horrifying about Sabbath who expresses his grief through masturbation and the fondling of women’s undergarments. It lacks dignity” (Tessab 99). One might argue that Russell is equally undignified when he shouts “Expecto Patronus” and then crudely comes in the face of a random partner. In fact, of all the characters in Junk’s short fiction, Russell is arguably the most intriguing. Long have critics puzzled over Russell and his undefined madness. Some see a despicable, callous hermit whose miserable death is well deserved; others an “innocent imbecile” who unwittingly murders his own heart. In Tessab’s estimation, Arden is an intellectual junkie, and his quest for the next hit leads him to over the ‘cliffs of insanity’ (nod to The Princess Bride). It may be argued, however, that this seemingly unsavory character has been deftly crafted by Junk to illuminate Roth’s elusive Sabbath.

            At the onset, Russell appears chauvinistic and concerned solely with maintaining his youthful vigor. He expresses his disappointment in close friends and family who have slipped into the mundane and resolves to resist such complacency through intellectual and physical pursuits like learning to identify the trees in the woods where he runs each Saturday morning. As the story progresses, Russell appears to selfishly value such self-advancement over time spent with others. Like Sabbath whose circle of friends increasingly shrinks as a result of his offensive behavior, Russell, who supposedly “has book smarts but … doesn’t have people smarts,” ultimately determines to cut himself off from others. “I piss a lot of people off because I don’t think like them, and because I speak my mind,” he reflects and so he disconnects from the world, letting the angry text messages of girlfriends and his friend, Jason, go unanswered. Slowly the reader begins to understand that sorrow as well as disappointment in himself and others has caused Russell check out long before he willfully (or unwillfully) determines to go off the grid. As he gradually slips into a grief-induced madness, he begins to leave bundles of sticks in the trees at Bicentennial Woods and becomes more obsessed with ritualistically lapping the forest trails in a perfect figure-eight loop, hallucinating on his beloved Vicki as he does so. His efforts to bring back what he himself threw away eerily reflect Sabbath’s ceremonial ejaculations over Drenka’s grave. Like a shaman calling forth spirits, Russell’s and Sabbath’s seemingly undignified actions may be interpreted as the vain incantations of lonely men who seek to conjure up the pleasure of former days. As Roth and Junk teach us, grief knows no limits; it can reduce the strongest and cleverest of men to shriveled masses crying in the mud. And often those who appear most soulless are those who have the greatest capacity to feel. Herein lies the brilliance of Junk’s work and his careful development of the Russell’s dubious character.

            Beyond his talent for creating riveting characters, Junk also excels at weaving together intricate yet thrilling plots. In fact, the story of “The Fire Hoarder” is ultimately revealed to exist within the larger story of “Encounters, Inc.” As Jason explains, Russell’s story has been made available to readers through Jim Conway. In a superb twist of plot, the reader is suddenly transformed from a mere spectator of events to one of Tom’s and Monster-Face’s customers, reading what is exposed to be the fear-building prelude to an excursion to some haunted site, presumably the charred foundations where Russell died. Not only does Junk effectively layer the plots of “Encounters, Inc” and “The Fire Hoarder,” he embellishes the ghost legends of rural Indiana. Whereas such stories tend to be one-dimensional histories of madmen and witches burned alone in their houses by terrified townsfolk, Junk gives flesh to such lore, recasting mythic madmen into compelling protagonists.

While analyses of Junk’s characters abound, less has been written about his prose and style. Thomas Hood writes that "Bedtime Ghost Story for Adults" and "The Smoking Buddha" have several lovely lines, but the conversational style in which the tales are narrated necessitates a more clipped and colloquial syntax. “They are designed to sound like stories told around a camp fire, which Junk effectively achieves. However, in ‘Encounter, Inc’ Junk begins to branch out, and in ‘The Fire Hoarder’ he comes into his own as an unparalleled wordsmith” (Hood 65-66). Hood is not entirely correct in his analysis of Junk’s development. Prior to “Encounters, Inc,” Junk wrote “The Tree Climber,” a story inspired by W.S. Merwin. The poetic impetus behind the story is apparent, for Junk gracefully straddles the boundary between poetry and prose with evocative lines such as “As she rested at last, the breeze blew against her light wash of sweat, setting her skin aglow with the dissipating pulsing heat, like soundless music emanating from her blood into the air, even as she felt her strained limbs shimmer with life, discovered anew through the dancing ache.”

The gorgeous elegance that flows so naturally throughout “The Tree Climber” and “The Fire Hoarder” is slightly more stilted in “Encounters, Inc.” The following sentence, for example, sounds strained:

Here he learned from a diminutive blue-collar, country-music American with an amateur kickboxing record of 40-2 who’d learned karate from a grand master while stationed with the air force in Japan and Wing Chun from a Chinese man he’d partnered with in the states so they could open their own school.

A reader of Junk’s blog pointed out the awkwardness of the sentence and the difficulty for the reader in comprehending its meaning. To this reader, Junk replied that in “narratives the goal is to simulate an experience in real-time ... You want people to read really consequential details more slowly, so you put commas in to get them to pause. With the country-music karate teacher, I wanted to provide a textured background for the main character, but I also wanted that background to be read quickly, because the karate teacher plays a very small role in the story.” What Junk’s defense fails to take into account is how a discordant sentence such as this one is distracting in the otherwise crystalline prose. In other words, his sentences are so well written that a weak sentence stands out like a sore thumb. Junk’s goal of conveying information without lingering over unimportant details backfires. The sentence forces the reader to pause to reread it, thereby exiting the story entirely. Critics have also noted the periodic use of unnecessary adjectives or adverbs that cause some sentences to sound contrived. For example, in “Encounters, Inc” Junk writes, “Finding himself in the middle of the room, his hands held out to check the advance of any attacker, he glared down at the bed with its twisted sheets and undecipherable chaos of mounded folds…” Later in this same paragraph Junk writes, “He stood there long enough to calm his breathing before stepping forward and smoothing the comically disheveled sheets with his palms.” Undecipherable is repetitive of chaos, and comically contradicts the tense emotions and events of the scene.

Such cumbersome interruptions are not found in “The Fire Hoarder.”  In this respect, Thomas Hood is right; the true genius of Junk is revealed in his most recent story. The syntactical dexterity with which Junk has written this tale provides the reader with an experience akin to reading a book of poems. The reader is led through vivid scenery that is “at once hectic and peaceful,” to forests where the holocaust of trees stand in an “infinite twilit intricacy of living greens and browns” and the “bereaved relatives still aloft in the branches perform their trembling dirge” for leaves that have fallen. In this regard, Junk’s tales, in particular “The Fire Hoarder,” resemble.

“All Hallows” by Walter de la Mere. “One can almost hear the stones moving in Junk’s stories” (Roberts 45). His tales are not frightening—although the pitter-patter of little satyr feet is unnerving—rather, the reader is often too captivated by the prose to register fear. This story, more than any other, makes this reader crave the next story from Junk.

It is likely that Junk will continue to perplex audiences with characters patterned after himself, and that scholars, like Jane Doe, will continue their mission to understand this mysterious author through his works. Regardless of the analyses of opposing critics, Junk is an author of extraordinary talent. There is something profoundly lyrical in the cadence of Junk’s prose. His characters, his plots, his brilliant depictions, and his command of language leave him well poised to become the next beloved American author of short stories. 

The Soul of the Skeptic: What Precisely Is Sam Harris Waking Up from?

             Sam Harris believes that we can derive many of the benefits people cite as reasons for subscribing to one religion or another from non-religious practices and modes of thinking, ones that don’t invoke bizarre scriptures replete with supernatural absurdities. In The Moral Landscape,for instance, he attempted to show that we don’t need a divine arbiter to settle our ethical and political disputes because reason alone should suffice. Now, with Waking Up, Harris is taking on an issue that many defenders of Christianity, or religion more generally, have long insisted he is completely oblivious to. By focusing on the truth or verifiability of religious propositions, Harris’s critics charge, he misses the more important point: religion isn’t fundamentally about the beliefs themselves so much as the effects those beliefs have on a community, including the psychological impact on individuals of collective enactments of the associated rituals—feelings of connectedness, higher purpose, and loving concern for all one’s neighbors.

            Harris likes to point out that his scholarly critics simply have a hard time appreciating just how fundamentalist most religious believers really are, and so they turn a blind eye toward the myriad atrocities religion sanctions, or even calls for explicitly. There’s a view currently fashionable among the more politically correct scientists and academics that makes criticizing religious beliefs seem peevish, even misanthropic, because religion is merely something people do, like reading stories or playing games, to imbue their lives with texture and meaning, or to heighten their sense of belonging to a community. According to this view, the particular religion in question—Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, Christianity—isn’t as important as the people who subscribe to it, nor do any specific tenets of a given faith have any consequence. That’s why Harris so frequently comes under fire—and is even accused of bigotry—for suggesting things like that the passages in the Koran calling for violence actually matter and that Islam is much more likely to inspire violence because of them.

We can forgive Harris his impatience with this line of reasoning, which leads his critics to insist that violence is in every case politically and never religiously motivated. This argument can only be stated with varying levels of rancor, never empirically supported, and is hence dismissible as a mere article of faith in its own right, one that can’t survive any encounter with the reality of religious violence. Harris knows how important a role politics plays and that it’s often only the fundamentalist subset of the population of believers who are dangerous. But, as he points out, “Fundamentalism is only a problem when the fundamentals are a problem” (2:30:09). It’s only by the lights of postmodern identity politics that an observation this banal could strike so many as so outrageous.

            But what will undoubtedly come as a disappointment to Harris’s more ardently anti-religious readers, and as a surprise to fault-seeking religious apologists, is that from the premise that not all religions are equally destructive and equally absurd follows the conclusion that some religious ideas or practices may actually be beneficial or point the way toward valid truths. Harris has discussed his experiences with spiritual retreats and various forms of  meditation in past works, but now with Waking Up he goes so far as to advocate certain of the ancient contemplative practices he’s experimented with. Has he abandoned his scientific skepticism? Not by any means; near the end of the book, he writes, “As a general matter, I believe we should be very slow to draw conclusions about the nature of the cosmos on the basis of inner experiences—no matter how profound they seem” (192). What he’s doing here, and with the book as a whole, is underscoring the distinction between religious belief on the one hand and religious experience on the other.

Acknowledging that some practices which are nominally religious can be of real value, Harris goes on to argue that we need not accept absurd religious doctrines to fully appreciate them. And this is where the subtitle of his book, A Guide to Spirituality without Religion, comes from. As paradoxical as this concept may seem to people of faith, Harris cites a survey finding that 20% of Americans describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious” (6). And he argues that separating the two terms isn’t just acceptable; it’s logically necessary.

Spirituality must be distinguished from religion—because people of every faith, and of none, have the same sorts of spiritual experiences. While these states of mind are usually interpreted through the lens of one or another religious doctrine, we know this is a mistake. Nothing that a Christian, a Muslim, and a Hindu can experience—self-transcending love, ecstasy, bliss, inner light—constitutes evidence in support of their traditional beliefs, because their beliefs are logically incompatible with one another. A deeper principle must be at work. (9)

People of faith frequently respond to the criticism that their beliefs fly in the face of logic and evidence by claiming they simply know God is real because they have experiences that can only be attributed to a divine presence. Any failure on the part of skeptics to acknowledge the lived reality of such experiences makes their arguments all the more easily dismissible as overly literal or pedantic, and it makes the skeptics themselves come across as closed-minded and out-of-touch.

            On the other hand, Harris’s suggestion of a “deeper principle” underlying religious experiences smacks of New Age thinking at its most wooly. For one thing, church authorities often condemn, excommunicate, or execute congregants with mystical leanings for their heresy. (Harris cites a few examples.) But the deeper principle Harris is referring to isn’t an otherworldly one. And he’s perfectly aware of the unfortunate connotations the words he uses often carry:

I share the concern, expressed by many atheists, that the terms spiritual and mystical are often used to make claims not merely about the quality of certain experiences but about reality at large. Far too often, these words are invoked in support of religious beliefs that are morally and intellectually grotesque. Consequently, many of my fellow atheists consider all talk of spirituality to be a sign of mental illness, conscious imposture, or self-deception. This is a problem, because millions of people have had experiences for which spiritual and mystical seem the only terms available. (11)

You can’t expect people to be convinced their religious beliefs are invalid when your case rests on a denial of something as perfectly real to them as their own experiences. And it’s difficult to make the case that these experiences must be separated from the religious claims they’re usually tied to while refusing to apply the most familiar labels to them, because that comes awfully close to denying their legitimacy.

*****

            Throughout Waking Up, Harris focuses on one spiritual practice in particular, a variety of meditation that seeks to separate consciousness from any sense of self, and he argues that the insights one can glean from experiencing this rift are both personally beneficial and neuroscientifically sound. Certain Hindu and Buddhist traditions hold that the self is an illusion, a trick of the mind, and our modern scientific understanding of the mind, Harris argues, corroborates this view. By default, most of us think of the connection between our minds and our bodies dualistically; we believe we have a spirit, a soul, or some other immaterial essence that occupies and commands our physical bodies. Even those of us who profess not to believe in any such thing as a soul have a hard time avoiding a conception of the self as a unified center of consciousness, a homunculus sitting at the controls. Accordingly, we attach ourselves to our own thoughts and perceptions—we identify with them. Since it seems we’re programmed to agonize over past mistakes and worry about impending catastrophes, we can’t help feeling the full brunt of a constant barrage of negative thoughts. Most of us recognize the sentiment Harris expresses in writing that “It seems to me that I spend much of my life in a neurotic trance” (11). And this is precisely the trance we need to wake up from.

            To end the spiraling chain reaction of negative thoughts and foul feelings, we must detach ourselves from our thinking, and to do this, Harris suggests, we must recognize that there is no us doing the thinking. The “I” in the conventional phrasing “I think” or “I feel” is nowhere to be found. Is it in our brains? Which part? Harris describes the work of the Nobel laureate neuroscientist Roger Sperry, who in the 1950s did a series a fascinating experiments with split-brain patients, so called because the corpus callosum, the bundle of fibers connecting the two hemispheres of their brains, had been surgically severed to reduce the severity of epileptic seizures. Sperry found that he could present instructions to the patients’ left visual fields—which would only be perceived by the right hemisphere—and induce responses that the patients themselves couldn’t explain, because language resides predominantly in the left hemisphere. When asked to justify their behavior, though, the split-brain patients gave no indication that they had no idea why they were doing what they’d been instructed to do. Instead, they confabulated answers. For instance, if the right hemisphere is instructed to pick up an egg from among an assortment of objects on a table, the left hemisphere may explain the choice by saying something like, “Oh, I picked it because I had eggs for breakfast yesterday.”

            As weird as this type of confabulation may seem, it has still weirder implications. At any given moment, it’s easy enough for us to form intentions and execute plans for behavior. But where do those intentions really come from? And how can we be sure our behaviors reflect the intentions we believe they reflect? We are only ever aware of a tiny fraction of our minds’ operations, so it would be all too easy for us to conclude we are the ones in charge of everything we do even though it’s really someone—or something else behind the scenes pulling the strings. The reason split-brain patients so naturally confabulate about their motives is that the language centers of our brains probably do it all the time, even when our corpus callosa are intact. We are only ever dimly aware of our true motivations, and likely completely in the dark about them as often as not. Whenever we attempt to explain ourselves, we’re really just trying to make up a plausible story that incorporates all the given details, one that makes sense both to us and to anyone listening.

            If you’re still not convinced that the self is an illusion, try to come up with a valid justification for locating the self in either the left or the right hemisphere of split-brain patients. You may be tempted to attribute consciousness, and hence selfhood, to the hemisphere with the capacity for language. But you can see for yourself how easy it is to direct your attention away from words and fill your consciousness solely with images or wordless sounds. Some people actually rely on their right hemispheres for much of their linguistic processing, and after split-brain surgery these people can speak for the right hemisphere with things like cards that have written words on them. We’re forced to conclude that both sides of the split brain are conscious. And, since the corpus callosum channels a limited amount of information back and forth in the brain, we probably all have at least two independent centers of consciousness in our minds, even those of us whose hemispheres communicate.

What this means is that just because your actions and intentions seem to align, you still can’t be sure there isn’t another conscious mind housed in your brain who is also assured its own actions and intentions are aligned. There have even been cases where the two sides of a split-brain patient’s mind have expressed conflicting beliefs and desires. For some, phenomena like these sound the death knell for any dualistic religious belief. Harris writes,

Consider what this says about the dogma—widely held under Christianity and Islam—that a person’s salvation depends upon her believing the right doctrine about God. If a split-brain patient’s left hemisphere accepts the divinity of Jesus, but the right doesn’t, are we to imagine that she now harbors two immortal souls, one destined for the company of angels and the other for an eternity of hellfire? (67-8)

Indeed, the soul, the immaterial inhabitant of the body, can be divided more than once. Harris makes this point using a thought experiment originally devised by philosopher Derek Parfit. Imagine you are teleported Star Trek-style to Mars. The teleporter creates a replica of your body, including your brain and its contents, faithful all the way down to the orientation of the atoms. So everything goes black here on Earth, and then you wake up on Mars exactly as you left. But now imagine something went wrong on Earth and the original you wasn’t destroyed before the replica was created. In that case, there would be two of you left whole and alive. Which one is the real you? There’s no good basis for settling the question one way or the other.

            Harris uses the split-brain experiments and Parfit’s thought experiment to establish the main insight that lies at the core of the spiritual practices he goes on to describe: that the self, as we are programmed to think of and experience it, doesn’t really exist. Of course, this is only true in a limited sense. In many contexts, it’s still perfectly legitimate to speak of the self. As Harris explains,

The self that does not survive scrutiny is the subject of experience in each present moment—the feeling of being a thinker of thoughts inside one’s head, the sense of being an owner or inhabitant of a physical body, which this false self seems to appropriate as a kind of vehicle. Even if you don’t believe such a homunculus exists—perhaps because you believe, on the basis of science, that you are identical to your body and brain rather than a ghostly resident therein—you almost certainly feel like an internal self in almost every waking moment. And yet, however one looks for it, this self is nowhere to be found. It cannot be seen amid the particulars of experience, and it cannot be seen when experience itself is viewed as a totality. However, its absence can be found—and when it is, the feeling of being a self disappears. (92)

The implication is that even if you come to believe as a matter of fact that the self is an illusion you nevertheless continue to experience that illusion. It’s only under certain circumstances, or as a result of engaging in certain practices, that you’ll be able to experience consciousness in the absence of self.

****

            Harris briefly discusses avenues apart from meditation that move us toward what he calls “self-transcendence”: we often lose ourselves in our work, or in a good book or movie; we may feel a diminishing of self before the immensities of nature and the universe, or as part of a drug-induced hallucination; or it could be attendance at a musical performance where you’re just one tiny part of a vast pulsing crowd of exuberant fans. It could be during intense sex. Or you may of course also experience some fading away of your individuality through participation in religious ceremonies. But Harris’s sights are set on one specific method for achieving self-transcendence. As he writes in his introduction,

This book is by turns a seeker’s memoir, an introduction to the brain, a manual of contemplative instruction, and a philosophical unraveling of what most people consider to be the center of their inner lives: the feeling of self we call “I.” I have not set out to describe all the traditional approaches to spirituality and to weigh their strengths and weaknesses. Rather, my goal is to pluck the diamond from the dunghill of esoteric religion. There is a diamond there, and I have devoted a fair amount of my life to contemplating it, but getting it in hand requires that we remain true to the deepest principles of scientific skepticism and make no obeisance to tradition. (10)

This is music to the ears of many skeptics who have long suspected that there may actually be something to meditative techniques but are overcome with fits of eye-rolling every time they try to investigate the topic. If someone with skeptical bona fides as impressive as Harris’s has taken the time to wade through all the nonsense to see if there are any worthwhile takeaways, then I imagine I’m far from alone in being eager to find out what he’s discovered.

            So how does one achieve a state of consciousness divorced from any sense of self? And how does this experience help us escape the neurotic trance most of us are locked in? Harris describes some of the basic principles of Advaita, a Hindu practice, and Dzogchen, a Tibetan Buddhist one. According to Advaita, one can achieve “cessation”—an end to thinking, and hence to the self—at any stage of practice. But Dzogchen practitioners insist it comes only after much intense practice. In one of several inset passages with direct instructions to readers, Harris invites us to experiment with the Dzogchen technique of imagining a moment in our lives when we felt positive emotions, like the last time we accomplished something we’re proud of. After concentrating on the thoughts and feelings for some time, we are then encouraged to think of a time when we felt something negative, like embarrassment or fear. The goal here is to be aware of the ideas and feelings as they come into being. “In the teachings of Dzogchen,” Harris writes, “it is often said that thoughts and emotions arise in consciousness the way that images appear on the surface of the mirror.” Most of the time, though, we are tricked into mistaking the mirror for what’s reflected in it.

In subjective terms, you are consciousness itself—you are not the next, evanescent image or string of words that appears in your mind. Not seeing it arise, however, the next thought will seem to become what you are. (139)

This is what Harris means when he speaks of separating your consciousness from your thoughts. And he believes it’s a state of mind you can achieve with sufficient practice calling forth and observing different thoughts and emotions, until eventually you experience—for moments at a time—a feeling of transcending the self, which entails a ceasing of thought, a type of formless and empty awareness that has us sensing a pleasant unburdening of the weight of our identities.

            Harris also describes a more expeditious route to selflessness, one discovered by a British Architect named Douglas Harding, who went on to be renowned among New Agers for his insight. His technique, which was first inspired by a drawing made by physicist Ernst Mach that was a literal rendition of his first-person viewpoint, including the side of his nose and the ridge of his eyebrow, consists simply of trying to imagine you have no head. Harris quotes at length from Harding’s description of what happened when he originally succeeded:

What actually happened was something absurdly simply and unspectacular: I stopped thinking. A peculiar quiet, an odd kind of alert limpness or numbness, came over me. Reason and imagination and all mental chatter died down. For once, words really failed me. Past and future dropped away. I forgot who and what I was, my name, manhood, animal-hood, all that could be called mine. It was as if I had been born that instant, brand new, mindless, innocent of all memories. There existed only the Now, the present moment and what was clearly given it. (143) 

Harris recommends a slight twist to this approach—one that involves looking out at the world and simply trying to reverse your perspective to look for your head. One way to do this is to imagine you’re talking to another person and then “let your attention travel in the direction of the other person’s gaze” (145). It’s not about trying to picture what you look like to another person; it’s about recognizing that your face is absent from the encounter—because obviously you can’t see it. “But looking for yourself in this way can precipitate a sudden change in perspective, of the sort Harding describes” (146). It’s a sort of out-of-body experience.

            If you pull off the feat of seeing through the illusion of self, either through disciplined practice at observing the contents of your own consciousness or through shortcuts like imagining you have no head, you will experience a pronounced transformation. Even if for only a few moments, you will have reached enlightenment. As a reward for your efforts, you will enjoy a temporary cessation of the omnipresent hum of anxiety-inducing thoughts that you hardly even notice drowning out so much of the other elements of your consciousness. “There arose no questions,” Harding writes of his experiments in headlessness, “no reference beyond the experience itself, but only peace and a quiet joy, and the sensation of having dropped an intolerable burden” (143). Skeptics reading these descriptions will have to overcome the temptation to joke about practitioners without a thought in their head.

            Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are all based on dualistic conceptions of the self, and the devout are enjoined to engage in ritual practices in service to God, an entirely separate being. The more non-dualistic philosophies of the East are much more amenable to attempts to reconcile them with science. Practices like meditation aren’t directed at any supernatural entity but are engaged in for their own sake, because they are somehow inherently rewarding. Unfortunately, this leads to a catch-22. Harris explains,

As we have seen, there are good reasons to believe that adopting a practice like meditation can lead to positive changes in one’s life. But the deepest goal of spirituality is freedom from the illusion of the self—and to seek such freedom, as though it were a future state to be attained through effort, is to reinforce the chains of one’s apparent bondage in each moment. (123)

This paradox seems at first like a good recommendation for the quicker routes to self-transcendence like Harding’s. But, according to Harris, “Harding confessed that many of his students recognized the state of ‘headlessness’ only to say, ‘So what?’” To Harris, the problem here is that the transformation was so easily achieved that its true value couldn’t be appreciated:

Unless a person has spent some time seeking self-transcendence dualistically, she is unlikely to recognize that the brief glimpse of selflessness is actually the answer to her search. Having then said, ‘So what?’ in the face of the highest teachings, there is nothing for her to do but persist in her confusion. (148)

We have to wonder, though, if maybe Harding’s underwhelmed students aren’t the ones who are confused. It’s entirely possible that Harris, who has devoted so much time and effort to his quest for enlightenment, is overvaluing the experience to assuage his own cognitive dissonance.

****

             The penultimate chapter of Waking Up gives Harris’s more skeptical fans plenty to sink their teeth into, including a thorough takedown of neurosurgeon Eben Alexander’s so-called Proof of Heaven and several cases of supposedly enlightened gurus taking advantage of their followers by, among other exploits, sleeping with their wives. But Harris claims his own experiences with gurus have been almost entirely positive, and he goes as far as recommending that anyone hoping to achieve self-transcendence seek out the services of one. 

            This is where I began to have issues with the larger project behind Harris’s book. If meditation were a set of skills like those required to play tennis, it would seem more reasonable to claim that the guidance of an expert coach is necessary to develop them. But what is a meditation guru supposed to do if he (I presume they’re mostly male) has no way to measure, or even see, your performance? Harris suggests they can answer questions that arise during practice, but apart from basic instructions like the ones Harris himself provides it seems unlikely an expert could be of much help. If a guru has a useful technique, he shouldn’t need to be present in the room to share it. Harding passed his technique on to Harris through writing for instance. And if self-transcendence is as dramatic a transformation as it’s made out to be, you shouldn’t have any trouble recognizing it when you experience it.

            Harris’s valuation of the teachings he’s received from his own gurus really can’t be sifted from his impression of how rewarding his overall efforts at exploring spirituality have been, nor can it be separated from his personal feelings toward those gurus. This a problem that plagues much of the research on the effectiveness of various forms of psychotherapy; essentially, a patient’s report that the therapeutic treatment was successful means little else but that the patient had a positive relationship with the therapist administering it. Similarly, it may be the case that Harris’s sense of how worthwhile those moments of self-transcendence are has more than he's himself aware of to do with his personal retrospective assessment of how fulfilling his own journey to reach them has been. The view from Everest must be far more sublime to those who’ve made the climb than to those who were airlifted to the top.

            More troublingly, there’s an unmistakable resemblance between, on the one hand, Harris’s efforts to locate convergences between science and contemplative religious practices and, on the other, the tendency of New Age philosophers to draw specious comparisons between ancient Eastern doctrines and modern theories in physics. Zen koans are paradoxical and counterintuitive, this line of reasoning goes, and so are the results of the double-slit experiment in quantum mechanics—the Buddhists must have intuited something about the quantum world centuries ago. Dzogchen Buddhists have believed the self is an illusion and have been seeking a cessation of thinking for centuries, and modern neuroscience demonstrates that the self is something quite different from what most of us think it is. Therefore, the Buddhists must have long ago discovered something essential about the mind. In both of these examples, it seems like you have to do a lot of fudging to make the ancient doctrines line up with the modern scientific findings.

            It’s not nearly as evident as Harris makes out that what the Buddhists mean by the doctrine that the self is an illusion is the same thing neuroscientists mean when they point out that consciousness is divisible, or that we’re often unaware of our own motivations. (Douglas Hofstadter refers to the self as an epiphenomenon, which he does characterize as a type of illusion, but only because the overall experience bears so little resemblance to any of the individual processes that go in to producing it.) I’ve never heard a cognitive scientist discuss the fallacy of identifying with your own thoughts or recommend that we try to stop thinking. Indeed, I don’t think most people really do identify with their thoughts. I for one don’t believe I am my thoughts; I definitely feel like I have my thoughts, or that I do my thinking. To point out that thoughts sometimes arise in my mind independent of my volition does nothing to undermine this belief. And Harris never explains exactly why seeing through the illusion of the self should bring about relief from all the anxiety produced by negative thinking. Cessation sounds a little like simply rendering yourself insensate.

The problem that brings about the neurotic trance so many of us find ourselves trapped in doesn’t seem to be that people fall for the trick of selfhood; it’s that they mistake their most neurotic thinking at any given moment for unquestionable and unchangeable reality. Clinical techniques like cognitive behavioral therapy involve challenging your own thinking, and there’s relief to be had in that—but it has nothing to do with disowning your thoughts or seeing your self as illusory. From this modern cognitive perspective, Dzogchen practices that have us focusing our attention on the effects of different lines of thinking are probably still hugely beneficial. But what’s that got to do with self-transcendence?

            For that matter, is the self really an illusion? Insofar as we think of it as a single object or as something that can be frozen in time and examined, it is indeed illusory. But calling the self an illusion is a bit like calling music an illusion. It’s impossible to point to music as existing in any specific location. You can separate a song into constituent elements that all on their own still constitute music. And of course you can create exact replicas of songs and play them on other planets. But it’s pretty silly to conclude from all these observations that music isn’t real. Rather, music, like the self, is a confluence of many diverse processes that can only be experienced in real time. In claiming that neuroscience corroborates the doctrine that the self is an illusion, Harris may be failing at the central task he set for himself by making too much obeisance to tradition. 

            What about all those reports from people like Harding who have had life-changing experiences while meditating or imagining they have no head? I can attest that I immediately recognized what Harding was describing in the sections Harris quotes. For me, it happened about twenty minutes into a walk I’d gone on through my neighborhood to help me come up with an idea for a short story. I tried to imagine myself as an unformed character at the outset of an as-yet-undeveloped plot. After only a few moments of this, I had a profound sense of stepping away from my own identity, and the attendant feeling of liberation from the disappointments and heartbreaks of my past, from the stresses of the present, and from my habitual forebodings about the future was both revelatory and exhilarating. Since reading Waking Up, I’ve tried both Harding’s and Harris’s approaches to reaching this state again quite a few times. But, though the results have been more impactful than the “So what?” response of Harding’s least impressed students, I haven’t experienced anything as seemingly life-altering as I did on that walk, forcing me to suspect it had as much to do with my state of mind prior to the experiment as it did with the technique itself.

            For me, the experience was of stepping away from my identity—or of seeing the details of that identity from a much broader perspective—than it was of seeing through some illusion of self. I became something like a stem cell version of myself, drastically more pluripotent, more free. It felt much more like disconnecting from my own biography than like disconnecting from the center of my consciousness. This may seem like a finicky distinction. But it goes to the core of Harris’s project—the notion that there’s a convergence between ancient meditative practices and our modern scientific understanding of consciousness. And it bears on just how much of that ancient philosophy we really need to get into if we want to have these kinds of spiritual experiences.

            Personally, I’m not at all convinced by Harris’s case on behalf of pared down Buddhist philosophy and the efficacy of guru guidance—though I probably will continue to experiment with the meditation techniques he lays out. Waking Up, it must be noted, is really less of a guide to spirituality without religion than it is a guide to one particular, particularly esoteric, spiritual practice. But, despite these quibbles, I give the book my highest recommendation, and that’s because its greatest failure is also its greatest success. Harris didn’t even come close to helping me stop thinking—or even persuading me that I should try—because I haven’t been able to stop thinking about his book ever since I started reading it. Perhaps what I appreciate most about Waking Up, though, is that it puts the lie to so many idiotic ideas people tend to have about skeptics and atheists. Just as recognizing that to do what’s right we must sometimes resist the urgings of our hearts in no way makes us heartless, neither does understanding that to be steadfast in pursuit of truth we must admit there’s no such thing as an immortal soul in any way make us soulless. And, while many associate skepticism with closed-mindedness, most of the skeptics I know of are true seekers, just like Harris. The crucial difference, which Harris calls “the sine qua non of the scientific attitude,” is “between demanding good reasons for what one believes and being satisfied with bad ones” (199).  

Also read: 

Capuchin-22: A Review of “The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism among the Primates” by Frans De Waal

And: 

Too Psyched for Sherlock: A Review of Maria Konnikova’s “Mastermind: How to Think like Sherlock Holmes”—with Some Thoughts on Science Education

And:

The Self-Transcendence Price Tag: A Review of Alex Stone's Fooling Houdini

The Creepy King Effect: Why We Can't Help Confusing Writers with Their Characters

          Every writer faces this conundrum: your success hinges on your ability to create impressions that provoke emotions in the people who read your work, so you need feedback from a large sample of readers to gauge the effect of your writing. Without feedback, you have no way to calibrate the impact of your efforts and thus no way to hone your skills. This is why writers’ workshops are so popular; they bring a bunch of budding authors together to serve as one another’s practice audience. The major drawback to this solution is that a sample composed of fellow authorly aspirants may not be representative of the audience you ultimately hope your work will appeal to.

Whether or not they attend a workshop, all writers avail themselves of the ready-made trial audience comprised of their family and friends, a method which inevitably presents them with yet another conundrum: anyone who knows the author won’t be able to help mixing her up with her protagonists. The danger isn’t just that the feedback you get will be contaminated with moral judgments and psychological assessments; you also risk offending people you care about who will have a tough time not assuming identify with characters who bear even the most superficial resemblance to them. And of course you risk giving everyone the wrong idea about the type of person you are and the type of things you get up to.  

My first experience of being mistaken for one of my characters occurred soon after I graduated from college. A classmate and fellow double-major in psychology and anthropology asked to read a story I’d mentioned I was working on. Desperate for feedback, I emailed it to her right away. The next day I opened my inbox to find a two-page response to the story which treated everything described in it as purely factual and attempted to account for the emotional emptiness I’d demonstrated in my behavior and commentary. I began typing my own response explaining I hadn’t meant the piece to be taken as a memoir—hence the fictional name—and pointing to sections she’d missed that were meant to explain why the character was emotionally empty (I had deliberately portrayed him that way), but as I composed the message I found myself getting angry. As a writer of fiction, you trust your readers to understand that what you’re writing is, well, fiction, regardless of whether real people and real events figure into it to some degree. I felt like that trust had been betrayed. I was being held personally responsible for behaviors and comments that for all she knew I had invented whole-cloth for the sake of telling a good story.

To complicate matters, the events in the story my classmate was responding to were almost all true. And yet it still seemed tremendously unfair for anyone to have drawn conclusions about me based on it. The simplest way to explain this is to point out that you have an entirely different set of goals if you’re telling a story about yourself to a friend than you do if you’re telling a story about a fictional character to anyone who might read it—even if they’re essentially the same story. And your goals affect your choice of not only which events to include, but which aspects of the situation and which traits of the characters to focus on. Add in even a few purely fabricated elements and you can dramatically alter the readers’ impression of the characters.

Another way to think about this is to imagine how boring fiction would be if all authors knew they would be associated with and held accountable for everything their protagonists do or say. This is precisely why it’s so important to avoid mistaking writers for their characters, and why writers feel betrayed when that courtesy isn’t afforded to them. Unfortunately, that courtesy is almost never afforded to them. Indeed, if you call readers out for conflating you with your characters, many of them will double down on their mistake. As writers who feel our good names should be protected under the cover of the fiction label, we have to accept that human psychology is constantly operating to poke giant holes in that cover.

Let’s try an experiment: close your eyes for a moment and try to picture Jay Gatsby’s face in your mind’s eye. If you’re like me, you imagined one of two actors who played Gatsby in the movie versions, either Leonardo DiCaprio or Robert Redford. The reason these actors come so readily to mind is that imagining a character’s face from scratch is really difficult. What does Queequeq look like? Melville describes him in some detail; various illustrators have given us their renditions; a few actors have portrayed him, albeit never in a film you’d bother watching a second time. Since none of these movies is easily recallable, I personally have to struggle a bit to call an image of him to mind. What’s true of characters’ physical appearances is also true of nearly everything else about them. Going from words on a page to holistic mental representations of human beings takes effort, and even if you put forth that effort the product tends to be less than perfectly vivid and stable.

In lieu of a well-casted film, the easiest shortcut to a solid impression is to substitute the author you know for the character you don’t. Actors are also mistaken for their characters with disturbing frequency, or at least assumed to possess similar qualities. (“I’m not a doctor, but I play one on TV.”) To be fair, actors are chosen for roles they can convincingly pull off, and authors, wittingly or otherwise, infuse their characters with tinctures of their own personalities. So it’s not like you won’t ever find real correspondences.

You can nonetheless count on your perception of the similarities being skewed toward gross exaggeration. This is owing to a phenomenon social psychologists call the fundamental attribution error. The basic idea is that, at least in individualist cultures, people tend to attribute behavior to the regular inclinations of the person behaving as opposed to more ephemeral aspects of the situation: the driver who cut you off is inconsiderate and hasty, not rushing to work because her husband’s car broke down and she had to drop him off first. One of the classic experiments on this attribution bias had subjects estimate people’s support for Fidel Castro based on an essay they’d written about him. The study, conducted by Edward Jones and Victor Harris at the height of the Cold War, found that even if people were told that the author was assigned a position either for or against Castro based on a coin toss they still assumed more often than not that the argument reflected the author’s true beliefs.

The implication of Jones and Harris’s findings is that even if an author tries to assure everyone that she was writing on behalf of a character for the purpose of telling a story, and not in any way trying to use that character as a mouthpiece to voice some argument or express some sentiment, readers are still going to assume she agrees with everything her character thinks and says. As readers, we can’t help giving too little weight to the demands of the story and too much weight to the personality of the author. And writers can’t even count on other writers not to be biased in this way. In 2001, Eric Hansen, Charles Kimble, and David Biers conducted a series of experiments that instructed people to treat a fellow study participant in either a friendly or unfriendly way and then asked them to rate each other on friendliness. Even though they all got the same type of instructions, and hence should have appreciated the nature of the situational influences, they still attributed unfriendliness in someone else to that person’s disposition. Of course, their own unfriendliness they attributed to the instructions.

One of the theories for why we Westerners fall prey to the fundamental attribution error is that creating dual impressions of someone’s character takes a great deal of effort. Against the immediate and compelling evidence of actual behavior, we have nothing but an abstract awareness of the possibility that the person may behave differently in different circumstances. The ease of imagining a person behaving similarly even without situational factors like explicit instructions makes it seem more plausible, thus creating the illusion that we can somehow tell whether someone following instructions, performing a scene, or writing on behalf of a fictional character is being sincere—and naturally enough we nearly always think they are.

The underlying principle here—that we’re all miserly with our cognition—is bad news for writers for yet another reason. Another classic study, this one conducted by Daniel Gilbert and his colleagues, was reported in an article titled “You Can’t Not Believe Everything You Read,” which for a fiction writer sounds rather heartening at first. The experiment asked participants to determine prison sentences for defendants in imaginary court cases based on statements that were color-coded to signal they were either true or false. Even though some of the statements were marked as false, they still affected the length of the sentences, and the effect grew even more pronounced when the participants were distracted or pressed for time.

The researchers interpret these findings to mean that believing a statement is true is crucial to comprehending it. To understand the injunction against thinking of a pink elephant, you have to imagine the very pink elephant you’re not supposed to think about. Only after comprehension is achieved can you then go back and tag a statement as false. In other words, we automatically believe what we hear or read and only afterward, with much cognitive effort, go back and revise any conclusions we arrived at based on the faulty information. That’s why sentences based on rushed assessments were more severe—participants didn’t have enough time to go back and discount the damning statements that were marked as false.

If those of us who write fiction assume that our readers rely on the cognitive shortcut of substituting us for our narrators or protagonists, Hansen et al’s and Gilbert’s findings suggest yet another horrifying conundrum. The more the details of our stories immerse readers in the plot, the more difficulty they’re going to have taking into account the fictional nature of the behaviors being enacted in each of the scenes. So the more successful you are in writing your story, the harder it’s going to be to convince anyone you didn’t do the things you so expertly led them to envision you doing. And I suspect, even if readers know as a matter of fact you probably didn’t enact some of the behaviors described in the story, their impressions of you will still be influenced by a sort of abstract association between you and the character. When a reader seems to be confusing me with my characters, I like to pose the question, “Did you think Stephen King wanted to kill his family when you read The Shining?” A common answer I get is, “No, but he is definitely creepy.” (After reading King’s nonfiction book On Writing, I personally no longer believe he’s creepy.)

            When people talk to me about stories of mine they’ve read, they almost invariably use “you” as a shorthand for the protagonist. At least, that’s what I hope they’re doing—in many cases, though, they betray no awareness of the story as a story. To them, it’s just a straightforward description of some real events. Of course, when you press them they allow for some creative license; they’ll acknowledge that maybe it didn’t all happen exactly as it’s described. But that meager allowance still tends to leave me pretty mortified. Once, I even had a family member point to some aspects of a character that were recognizably me and suggest that they undermined the entire story because they made it impossible for her to imagine the character as anyone but me. In her mind, my goal in writing was to disguise myself behind the character, but I’d failed to suppress my true feelings. I tried to explain that I hadn’t tried to hide anything; I’d included elements of my own life deliberately because they served what were my actual goals. I don’t think she was convinced. At any rate, I never got any good feedback from her because she simply didn’t understand what I was really trying to do with the story. And ever since I’ve been taking a reader’s use of “you” to refer to the protagonist as an indication that I’ll need to go elsewhere for any useful commentary.

I’m pretty sure all fiction writers incorporate parts of their own life stories into their work. I’d even go so far as to posit that, at least for literary writers, creating plots and characters is more a matter of rearranging bits and pieces of real events and real people’s sayings and personalities into a coherent sequence with a beginning, middle, and end—a dilemma, resolution, and outcome—than it is of conjuring scenes and actors out of the void. But even a little of this type of rearranging is enough to make any judgments about the author seem pretty silly to anyone who can put the true details back together in their original order. The problem is the author is often the only one who knows what parts are true and how they actually happened, so you’re left having to simply ask her what she really thinks, what she really feels, and what she’s really done. For everyone else, the story only seems like it can tell them something when they already know whatever it is it might tell them. So they end up being tricked into making the leap from bits and pieces of recognizable realities to an assumption of general truthiness.

Even the greatest authors get mixed up in people’s minds with their characters. People think Rabbit Angstrom and John Updike are the same person—or at least that the character is some kind of distillation of the author. Philip Roth gets mistaken for both Nathan Zuckerman (though Roth seems to have wanted that to happen) and Mickey Sabbath, two very different characters. I even wonder if readers assume some kinship between Hilary Mantel and her fictional version of Thomas Cromwell. So I have to accept that my goal with this essay is ridiculously ambitious. As long as I write, people are going to associate me with my narrators and protagonists to one degree or another.

 ********

Nevertheless, I’m going to do something that most writers are loath to do. I’m going to retrace the steps that went into the development of my latest story so everyone can see what I mean when I say I’m responding to the demands of the story or making characters serve the goals of the story. By doing so, I hope to show how quickly real life character models and real life events get muddled, and why there could never be anything like a straightforward method for drawing conclusions about the author based on his or her characters.

The story is titled The Fire Hoarder and it follows a software engineer nearing forty who decides to swear off his family and friends for an indefinite amount of time because he’s impatient with their complacent mediocrity and feels beset by their criticisms, which he perceives as expressions of envy and insecurity. My main inspirations were a series of conversations with a recently divorced friend about the detrimental effects of marriage and parenthood on a man’s identity, a beautiful but somehow eerie nature preserve in my hometown where I fell into the habit of taking weekly runs, and the HBO series True Detective.

The newly divorced friend, whom I’ve known for almost twenty years, became a bit of a fitness maniac over this past summer. Mainly through grueling bike rides, he lost all the weight he’d put on since what he considered his physical prime, going from something like 235 to 190 pounds in the span of few months. Once, in the midst of a night of drinking, he began apologizing for all the time he’d been locked away, gaining weight, doing nothing with his life. He said he felt like he’d let me down, but I have to say it hadn’t ever occurred to me to take it personally. Months later, in the process of writing my story, I realized I needed some kind of personal drama in the protagonist’s life, something he would already be struggling with when the instigating events of the plot occurred. 

So my divorced friend, who turned 39 this summer (I’m just turning 37 myself), ended up serving as a partial model for two characters, the protagonist who is determined to get in better shape, and the friend who betrays him by being too comfortable and lazy in his family life. He shows up again in the words of yet another character, a police detective and tattoo artist who tries to convince the protagonist that single life is better than married life. Though, as one of the other models for that character, an actual police detective and tattoo artist, was quick to notice, the cop in the story is based on a few other people as well.

My own true detective meets the protagonist at a bar after the initial scene. The problem I faced with this chapter was that the main character had already decided to forswear socializing. I handled this by describing the relationship between the characters as one that didn’t include any kind of intimate revelations or profound exchanges—except when it did (like in this particular scene). “Oh man,” read the text I got from the real detective, “I hope I am not as shallow of a friend as Ray is to Russell?” And this is a really good example of how responding to the demands of the story can give the wrong impression to anyone looking for clues about the author’s true thoughts and feelings. (He later assured me he was just busting my balls.)

            Russell’s name was originally Steve; I changed it late in the writing process to serve as an homage to Rustin Cohle, one of the lead characters in True Detective. Before I ever even began watching the show, one of my brothers, the model for Russell’s brother Nick, compared me to Rust. He meant it as a compliment, but a complicated one. Like all brothers, our relationship is complimentary, but complicated. A few of the things my brother has said that have annoyed me over the past few years show up in the story, but whereas this type of commentary is subsumed in our continuing banter, which is almost invariably good-humored, it really gets under Russell’s skin. In a story, one of the goals is to give texture to the characters’ backgrounds, and another goal is often to crank up the tension. So I often include more serious versions of petty and not-so-memorable spats I have with friends, lovers, and family members in my plots and character bios. And when those same friends, lovers, and family members read the resulting story I have to explain that it doesn’t mean what they think it means. (I haven’t gotten any texts from my brother about the story yet.) I won't go into the details of my love life here; suffice it to say writers pretty much have to be prepared for their wives or girlfriends to flip out whenever they read one of their stories featuring fictional wives or girlfriends. 

I was initially put off by True Detective for the same reasons I have a hard time stomaching any hardboiled fiction. The characters use the general foulness of the human race to justify their own appalling behavior. “The world needs bad men,” Rust says to his partner. “They keep the other bad men from the door.” The conceit is that life is so ugly and people are so evil that we should all just walk around taking ourselves far too seriously as we bemoan the tragedy of existence. At one point, Rust tells some fellow detectives about M-theory, an outgrowth of superstring theory. The show tries to make it sound tragic and horrifying. But the tone of the scene is perfectly nonsensical. Why should thinking about extra dimensions be like rubbing salt in our existential wounds? The view of the world that emerges is as embarrassingly adolescent as it is screwball.

But much of the dialogue in the show is magnificent, and the scene-by-scene progression of the story is virtuoso. When I first watched it, the conversations about marriage and family life resonated with the discussions I’d been having with my divorced friend over the summer. And Rust in particular forces us to ask what becomes of a man who finds the common rituals and diversions to be resoundingly devoid of meaning. The entire mystery of the secret cult at the center of the plot, with all its crude artifacts made of sticks, really only succeeds as a prop for Rust’s struggle with his own character. He needs something to obsess over. But the bad guy at the end, the monster at the end of the dream, is destined to disappoint. I included my own true detective in The Fire Hoarder so there would be someone who could explain why not finding such monsters is worse than finding them. And I went on to explore what a character like Rust, obsessive, brilliant, skeptical, curious, and haunted would do in the absence of a bad guy to hunt down. But my guy wouldn’t take himself so seriously.

If you add in the free indirect style of narration I enjoy in the works of Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Ian McEwan, Hilary Mantel, and others, along with some of the humor you find in their novels, you have the technique I used, the tone I tried to strike, and my approach to dealing with the themes. (The revelation at the end that one of the characters is acting as the narrator is a trick I’m most familiar with from McEwan’s Sweet Tooth.) The ideal reader response to my story would focus on these issues of style and technique, and insofar as the comments took on topics like the vividness of the characters or the feelings they inspired it would do so as if they were entities entirely separate from me and the people I know and care about.

But I know that would be asking a lot. The urge to read stories, the pleasure we take in them, is a product of the same instincts that make us fascinated with gossip. And we have a nasty tendency to try to find hidden messages in what we read, as though we were straining to hear the whispers we can’t help suspecting are about us--and not exactly flattering. So, as frustrated as I get with people who get the wrong idea, I usually come around to just being happy there are some people out there who are interested enough in what I’m doing to read my fiction.  

Also read: 

THE FIRE HOARDER

And:

SABBATH SAYS: PHILIP ROTH AND THE DILEMMAS OF IDEOLOGICAL CASTRATION

The Fire Hoarder

When the song filling the space of his thoughts cuts out mid-verse, Russell Arden is approaching the incline toward the part of the nature preserve he calls the Orchard. Maintaining his stride, he lifts his arm to check the device strapped to his shoulder and sees nothing but the undulating reflective glare on the clear plastic case, so he reaches across with his other arm to activate the touch screen. But the surface of the device remains blank. “God dammit,” he huffs, charging up the rise, aiming his steps into the winding groove along the side of this otherwise grass-covered section of the trail. The ankle-twisting cant of the track and the backward curve up the hill make this the second least pleasant part of the path for him to run—along with his having to traverse it twice every lap to complete the figure-eight route he takes to cover all the most scenic stretches of the park.

Pulling the buds from his ears and letting the cords drape over the front of his chest, he curses himself for not plugging his phone in to charge as he listened to an audiobook the whole drive from his apartment downtown to Bicentennial Woods, a good twenty-five minutes north on the highway. Nothing to do, he determines, but finish these last two laps in silence. Right away, though, the commotion of his erratic breathing jolts him out of this resignation, momentarily forcing him to work at reconciling his stride with his intakes of air. And no sooner has he reached the top of the rise, just as his breathing fades once more from his attention, than he’s surrounded by the echoes of an argument he’d been carrying on with himself earlier, making him wonder if it’s been continuing in some part of his mind beneath awareness even as he’s been busy concentrating on other matters. It’s stupid, he insists to himself—not worth obsessing over like this. If he’s known me for going on twenty years and still doesn’t understand me, if he’s going to take what I say so completely wrong, well, then, that’s his fault not mine. And what does he contribute to my life anymore at this point anyway?

The grassy trail winds down from the first rise through clusters of tall weeds and slender trees with duck-under branches before lifting up again still higher to a section along the boundary between the nature preserve and some neighboring farmland where the sky opens up and you have a westward view over the Orchard to the billowing tops of the more aged trees of the forest in the distance. Aware now of diffuse aches in his left calf and right hip, Russell looks over the vista backlit by the lowering sun and thinks how running these trails is such an intense, complicated variety of bliss, a Saturday ritual he looks forward to all week, even more than the nights out with his friends that usually ensue later in the evening. Returning his gaze to the trail, he realizes that the app he uses to monitor his average speed and total distance will have ceased functioning along with his MP3 player, and annoyance briefly chokes off his enjoyment of the experience, until he consoles himself that he can probably go in and record the stats by hand on his laptop at home. 

For the past two weeks, he’s been completing the figure-eight through the park three times instead of two—for a total of seven point four miles—in fulfillment of a resolution he made to resist any temptation toward physical and intellectual complacency as he approaches his thirty-ninth birthday, a month and half from now in November. Maintaining an even pace along the curve back toward the shaded paths beneath the forest canopy, he can’t avoid thinking of Jason and how his old friend, back when they were in their late teens and into their twenties, used to do five-mile runs along the stretch of road by his house twice a week—this in addition to the individual regimens they were always comparing notes on and boasting about to each other. Then just last month Jason comes to him asking what he should do about his suspicions that his wife is having an affair. I tried to hedge and be polite, Russell thinks as he plunges into the palpably distinct atmosphere of the woods—cooler, the air thicker, heavier scents of wood and soil and green flesh of plants—but he kept pressing me: We’ve been friends for twenty years and I know there’s something you’re not saying and You’re the one person I count on most to be straight with me. So I tell him what I think. And he promptly forgets that’s exactly what he just asked me to do.

For one moment, Russell doesn’t remember if he should go down the long wooden staircase into the Willow Creek ravine or veer off to complete the top of the figure-eight, but he only has to recall where he was just before his phone battery died and he’s off along the stretch of trail atop the steep embankment. Massive trunks bulwarked with bark in curling, corrugated slabs or peeling flakes or twisting strands stretching brokenly upward into the canopy stand separated by distances of forest floor abounding with plants like tiny neon trees aspiring to the darkly looming heights of their impregnably encased neighbors. He watches the scene pass before him, glancing between the trees and the startling carnage of countless felled limbs and the rotting mushroom-infested wreckage of ill-fated boughs littering the trailside. He calls this part the Graveyard of Trees. This wooden holocaust and the infinite twilit intricacy of living greens and browns speckled with bursts of sunlight in a tableau that stretches out before him up the rise to one side and out over the sheer drop to the creek into the far-off treetops lends to this area of the park an air of dreamlike enchantment, at once hectic and peaceful, and he struggles to absorb it as deeply and lastingly as he can.

Bristling out from behind a smaller tree to the right of the trail at just about head-height, a bundle of straw comes into view, tucked between branch and trunk. He’s passed these bundles—he counts three over a span of twenty or so yards—a few times already today, but until now he’s taken little notice. His first thought is they’re part of some Wiccan incantation. But, he reasons, it’s probably something more prosaic than that. He scans all the trees for more bundles or other artifacts until he’s struck by the oddity of a lone sycamore surrounded by what he assumes are oaks and maples and walnuts. More than once over the past few years, he’s resolved to learn how to identify all the most common species of tree. He went as far as buying a pocket guide from Amazon. He downloaded an app. He even discovered a walkway on the campus of the community college he attended for his software engineering degree that actually has labeled specimens of dozens of trees along it. And yet, to date, he’s never managed to make it a priority.

The trail arcs out over a promontory along a slight downward gradient near the sharpest curve, a gentle prod for him to lengthen his stride before digging his shoes in to make the turn, a practice he calls Tempting the Cliff. Every time he enacts this ritual he smilingly imagines slipping in the loose dirt and tumbling down the stone and branch-strewn slope. As he runs back up the rise away from the drop-off he’s once more successfully avoided, he wonders why no one ever does bother to learn the names of trees. With all the mental energy expended on deciding who deserves to win Dancing with the Stars, or what the quarterback for the Seahawks should have done in the fourth quarter of last night’s game—with the hours upon hours of pointless prattling about indignities suffered at work or at the hands of uncouth spouses, why does nobody put even a miniscule bit of effort into learning about something that’s not exactly the same shit everybody else thinks is so important they simply can’t shut up about it?

The rise he’s on now takes him up over a fold of land that drops back down onto the stretch of trail that will take him once more into the Orchard. Only this time he’ll turn left instead of right once inside, bringing him back into the forest, onto the strip with the straw bundles in the trees, and back to the top of the stairs down to the creek and the bridge taking him across. Years ago, Russell brought Jason to Bicentennial Woods, and he even talked to him about his plan to learn the names of trees. Jason responded by recalling a time when they were teenagers, how they used to go on about all the places they wanted to travel to, all the languages they were sure they would someday learn, all the books, all the women, all the adventures. They were going to learn everything, sample the whole world—or all the really good parts of it anyway. But now whenever he hears about someone doing something that takes some level of discipline and achieves no practical end, Jason said, a category encompassing efforts at things like learning the names of trees, “I just imagine all the things it would take time away from if I actually did it. Time with Kate and Ian. Time to relax and catch up with all the stuff I have to do around the house. Time to relax and just watch some Netflix.”

Two years on, Russell still winces at this. He ponders all the people he knows who used to impress him, people he was sure would go on to do great things, however vague his conception of greatness happened to be. Somehow, to a one, they’d all let life just happen to them. Shamefully out of shape and overweight. Confined to their nearly identical offices all day, their disturbingly similar homes in the evening, prizing the precious moments of silence afforded by their commutes, their chief joys coming from the meager accomplishments and developmentally appropriate discoveries of their kids and the victories of the sports teams they unaccountably identify with. In response to Jason’s pleading for his true take on his marriage problems last month, Russell decided to indulge him.

“Well, here’s what I see. When you guys first met, you were this interesting guy who did things like going on impromptu trips to the Grand Canyon, filming amateur documentaries about truck drivers and lot lizards, and trying to read every book by Philip Roth. You worked out all the time, went out to bars and parties and mingled with all kinds of other interesting people. But then you got married, had a kid, and that interesting guy up and vanished. You were the cool high school teacher who bartended on weekends and summers. You got your dream job teaching literature. But then you just stopped moving. You settled in. You’ve become Typical Small Town Middle Class Guy, putting on another ten pounds every year. Now, I don’t know what Kate is or isn’t getting up to—but can you blame her if her eye is wandering?”

Gathering momentum from the downward slope of the trail until he’s at a full sprint over the tract where his music cut out, Russell lets his mind ride the fierce urgency of its own defenses—he asked me to give it to him straight, I’d gone so long without saying a word, and if he thought he heard a note of disdain in what I said maybe it arose from his unacknowledged betrayal. He had no idea how he’d let me down these past years, because I never said a word. The motion of his legs fades into a blur, a wave of energy like a canon burst propelling him up the hill along the uneven groove through the grass.

“Ouch—tell me what you really think,” Jason had said, forcing a laugh, as if by doing so he could retroactively turn what had passed between them into a joke. Then he stoically withstood Russell’s advice—stop worrying about what Kate’s doing and start doing something yourself, get back in shape, take up some kind of project, go back to being that interesting guy again, insofar as you can manage it anymore, and the relationship issues will work themselves out, either in reconciliation or divorce. It won’t matter either way, Russell insisted, because at least by then you’ll have your own life back. You’ll be yourself again.

Instead of taking the rising path up to the stretch of trail along the edge of the park again, Russell cuts through the short section of the Orchard back into the woods. Jason had listened to what he had to say, protesting limply that things were more complicated than Russell made out because they had Ian, his four-year-old, to consider. Russell was satisfied that he’d served his role as friend and honest observer, feeling no need to press the issue. The next he heard of the matter was at Dupont Bar, where the two of them had gone to have drinks with Russell’s older brother Nick. Russell likes Dupont because he has a longstanding friendship with one of the bartenders, a charming young woman named Amanda who is perennially mired in an endless series of unsatisfying relationships. “She’s been in the process of breaking up with her boyfriend ever since I met her,” Russell told them, “and that was five boyfriends and seven years ago.”  This “in the process” status of hers afforded him certain opportunities. “Still,” he explained, “we’re mostly just friends.”

Whatever Russell and Amanda are to each other, Nick apparently saw being in the presence of one his younger brother’s mystery women—seldom talks about them, never brings them around to meet the family, gets touchy whenever anyone else brings them up—as a chance to get some answers to questions he found pressing. “How do you stand this guy?” he boomed drunkenly over the bar. Amanda responded cutely, “Oh, I can’t really—I just like to have him around because he’s pretty.” Nick, his arms folded on the bar, his impressive middle class paunch protruding into his lap, his blurred features registering scant awareness of his surroundings, proceeded as if she hadn’t spoken. “I mean, he seems really interesting at first, right? Really smart.” “Scary smart,” Amanda agreed. “But then the more you get to know him it’s like the more impossible he is to get along with. He has to tell everyone how wrong they are about everything. And he’ll tell you what book or study he read that proves it. Like he has book smarts but he doesn’t have people smarts. That’s why almost everyone who really gets to know him ends up totally hating his ass. Don’t get me wrong. He’s my brother and I love the bastard. But he really pisses a lot of people off. And even for me, sometimes he’s tough to get along with.”

The annoyance of that night resurfaces undiminished as he reenters the woods overlooking the ravine, prompting him to make an effort at casting his attention out into the surrounding scene. He reminds himself to look out for clues as to the provenance and meaning of the straw bundles tucked into the trees. But he’s already replaying the memory of Jason chiming in after his brother. “Oh man, you should hear what he said to me when I was trying to talk to him about my marriage troubles.” He was addressing Amanda more than Nick, feeling the need to reduce Russell in her eyes, either in retribution or because he couldn’t resist the opportunity to be top guy, if even for a moment. “You come to him for a friendly ear and he breaks it down automatically to the brass tacks, like ‘Here’s what you’re doing wrong.’ I mean, no compassion, no emotion at all. I know he writes software for a living, but I swear that’s how he lives his life too. He treats problems like software bugs, like the answer to everything is some kind of reprogramming.”

Russell knows this is the rap on him, according, he thought, to family members who found it difficult to grant that he could possess any truly useful form of intelligence. Nick is fond of flipping it around though; it’s the people who know him best who know him to be book smart but not people smart—an assessment easily dismissible as the compensatory rationalizing of an older brother. Except now Jason, who really should know better than just about anyone, decides to reinforce this self-protective fantasy of Nick’s. Amanda alone seemed appropriately skeptical. She drew back with a squinting expression that said, “This guy?” Russell, seeing her response, reviewed in his mind his series of successes with women over the past few years, along with the time when one of Amanda’s boyfriends showed up ready to kill him and ended up buying him shots. He looked from Nick to Jason, shaking his head all the while, smiling viciously. “If either of you two especially are thinking that I’m the one here who lacks social skills, you’re in some serious trouble.” He thinks now of the other two women he’s dating, besides Amanda, and how baffled they too would be by his brother’s decades-outdated characterization, newly endorsed by his nominal best friend.

The truth, Russell thinks approaching the head of the wooden staircase, catching a glimpse over his shoulder of a girl standing on the bridge spanning the creek below, the truth is that I piss a lot of people off because I don’t think like them, and because I speak my mind, but there was only ever one person who really hated me the way they’re talking about. And she got pretty much every true thing about me perfectly wrong. He rounds the top of the handrail and starts the halting forward bounce of his descent down the stairs, looking out carefully at every juncture for the next step and trying to keep some semblance of a pace. Why do I bother, he poses to himself. Why continue making the effort to find time for Jason when he no longer does or says anything that interests me? Why go out of my way to spend time with my brother when he clearly has some unspoken beef with me?

He fantasizes about what his life would be like were he to swear off all this pointless sociality. He would still have to attend meetings at work, but he almost never has any interaction with clients. Most of his exchanges are with his managers, as they plan and monitor the progress of development projects. He does peer coding too, but that’s so task-focused that it hardly counts as being social. Besides, he thinks, it’s not shooting the shit with the guys at work that I want to avoid. It’s all the time I squander driving through town to meet friends who either bore me half to death or want me to play some stupid game I have no interest in playing—Boost My Ego, it would be called. Tell Me Everything I Do Is Right and Brilliant. Try Your Hardest to Outshine Me But Fail Every Time. He laughs, leaping from the bottommost stair, remembering how one of his brother’s favorite boasts when he’s winning at cards, or at a board game, or at corn hole, or at any of the other colossal time sucks people around here love, is to say, “It’s called ‘I Win, Bitches.’”

            After the ten or so paces that separate the last flight of stairs from the bridge, he rounds the handrail and thrusts himself up the first three steps up onto the wooden planks. Exerting his beleaguered but still sturdy legs into a full stride once more, he looks ahead to the tree that grows midway between the handrails on either side of the bridge, one of the two-hundred-year-old oaks that give the reserve its name. Russell calls this one the Ghost Tree because its gray trunk stands out against the green foliage and darker bark of the other trees. His lips stretch into a lazy grin because this ancient apparition and the more recent man-made structure that point the way toward it—like some elaborately constructed slingshot hurling you at an elevator into eternity—signal his nearness to the trailhead atop the rise beyond it and the parking lot it opens onto. Only—he has one more lap before returning to it.

He’s over the stream and stepping down off the bridge before it occurs to him that the girl he saw from the top of the stairs—dark hoodie, gray sweat pants, light blonde hair—is nowhere to be seen. “Odd,” he mumbles, turning in either direction to look for her. He finally decides she must also be running and already around the bend a ways down along the bank. He figures he’ll probably cross paths with her on his way back toward the stream.

After leaping down onto an island of gravel and mud in the middle of a tributary of the creek, he launches himself up on the slippery clay bank on the facing side, a maneuver that extends his circuit around the park by maybe twenty yards, giving him the pleasing sense that he’s getting as much out of the trail as he possibly can. Plus, it’s fun. Can’t let a little jump over a stream stop you, now can you?

Savoring the thudding noise of his feet against the dry dirt as he takes to the rise back up toward the park entrance he’ll pass by in stride, he considers how every time he comes here, no matter how long he has to wait in traffic on the way, no matter how sore his muscles are afterward, no matter how muddy his Nikes get, he never feels like he’s wasted his time. Unlike so many other occasions he feels obligated to attend, so many other gatherings he goes out of his way to join. How often, he silently laments, do I leave thinking I didn’t really have to devote those precious moments of this brief window of existence allotted to me to something so dull, something almost physically painful to endure? 

He checks the little parking lot through the stand of trees separating it from this part of the trail and sees his red pickup, bought from his dad after he retired, stretched in its manly, versatile crouch, as if beamingly happy to have the sylvan nook beside the road all to itself. Russell is deep into the woods, hurtling with long, liquid strides down a descending curve toward another, much shorter wooden bridge over a nearly dry brook when it dawns on him the girl on the bridge must have either left already or come here on foot—because there were no vehicles in the lot besides his truck.

He starts the climb up the hill on the other side of the muddy brook, feeling the strain in the backs of his thighs. The third lap brings with it a sense of relief tinged with a reluctance borne of having to overcome the accumulation of fatigue. The second lap used to be when he would really find his rhythm, forget his legs, and let his mind soar. But losing concentration on the final lap, with the exhaustion setting in, could mean catching a toe on an exposed root, or rolling an ankle over an unseen rock. He recognizes though that with increasing physical weariness it also becomes more difficult to deliberately control what you focus your attention on. And his mind seems to want to return to the topic of programs, how the operation of his mind and the exertion of his will themselves depend on a substrate of programs—programs pondering programs, a wearying line of thought for a weary mind.

Leaping forward in bounding strides down another hill, absorbing the impact with the balls of his feet and the muscles of his calves, he does manage to stay vigilant lest he trip or take a misstep. Still, he can’t help reserving space in his consciousness for a lecture serving to set Jason straight on the finer points of his philosophy, which isn’t even his philosophy. It isn’t like some t-shirt he dons because it suits his tastes—it’s his understanding of the work of countless scientists and intellectuals pushing toward ever more refined approximations of the truth. Everyone else, it seems, chooses their beliefs based on what’s in fashion. That doesn’t mean he has to. An image of the girl on the bridge comes to his mind, standing there in her oversized sweat shirt and loose sweat pants. You never see women in sweat pants like that anymore, he thinks. It’s always yoga pants, or those tighter fitting sweats without the elastic around the waistband and the ankles. And where the hell is she?

On an uncustomary whim, Russell begins silently weaving a tale about the girl he saw standing in her outsized, outdated sweats, who only appeared to him because he had unwittingly performed a ritual by running first one way and then the other along the strip of trail atop the steep embankment, the stretch demarcated by the three bundles of straw in the trees. The bundles were put there by the girl’s aunt, a strange woman, one for whom the standard Christian rites held no meaning, one content to live on the margins, no matter how lonely she was there. The ritual of running along the top of the embankment calls the girl back from the realm of the dead because it’s a reenactment of her flight from the man who eventually caught up to and murdered her. And the aunt cast the enchantment with the straw bundles so the mourning mother, her sister, could see her daughter once more.

Russell laughs at himself, at how he managed to go from formulating the perfect response to Jason, one that would get through to him once and for all, clear up all the confusion about whether his beliefs disqualify him from recognition as a human, to whipping up a story starring some girl he barely glimpsed. The thread that unites them, he realizes, is the theme of the outcast, the person who doesn’t think, and who doesn’t live the way most people do—and then he laughs again because that means he’s something of a witch himself. He remembers an occasion when he was getting head from a certain young woman who loved all things Harry Potter—at the last moment he pulled away from her mouth and shouted “Expecto Patronum!” just before coming in her face. “Sorry, I learned Latin in a Catholic school.” She hadn’t found it as amusing as he did. Though of course Jason got a good laugh when he told him.

As he continues his run and his mind sets to roaming as predicted, Russell’s thoughts range from his most memorable sexual encounters of late to the nature and causes of human consciousness, and from who he feels like hanging out with tonight to what he should set as some goals for the next five years. He pumps his legs like a pair of derricks thrusting him up the longest staircase on the opposite side of the park from the one that brings him down toward the bridge, and recovering his breath he glides happily along, marking the absence from his mind of any of the piffling idiocy that’s been preoccupying him. And on he runs as if on the wings of a light-hearted dream, hardly even aware anymore that he’s being forced to do without the music that usually helps maintain his pace. 

He’s already completed the first pass along the embankment and into the Graveyard of Trees to complete the figure eight. So when he returns to the top of the stairs and sees the blonde girl in sweat shirt and sweat pants leaning on the handrail near the far end of the bridge he senses that something strange is going on. He keeps an eye on her as he bounces down the stairs, half expecting her to disappear again as soon as he looks away. She remains in place, resting her elbows atop the rail, as long as it takes him to clear the bottommost stairs and jog over to the steps leading up to the bridge. It’s not until he’s only a few paces from her that she turns to face him. Russell almost draws to a stop, so closely does she resemble someone he knew more than twenty years ago, but he retains the presence of mind to realize the intensity of his gaze may frighten her. The last thing he notices before she turns back to the creek and he passes behind her is her swiping a hand across her cheek, her outstretched fingers dragging under her eye, to wipe away the tears wetting her face. He’s several yards away from the bridge and taking mincing steps to position himself for the leap over the smaller brook before it occurs to him that he needs to talk to her, to tell her about the girl she reminds him of, to ask her what’s wrong, why she’s crying, if there’s anything he can do.

But he struggles up the muddy bank after jumping across the stream and continues up the final rise to the parking lot. An adult male simply can’t walk up to a teenage girl alone in the woods without the gesture being construed as a threat. So he finishes his silent run, emerges from the woods into the gravel of the parking lot, gasping, his heartbeat throbbing in his temples, his legs at once aching and numb, sweat soaking his shirt and the sides of his face. If she walked here, he wonders, will she walk back out through the parking lot?

—————————

Jason was right about Russell believing that if you’re unhappy with your life you really do have to debug your coding somehow. Or else create an entirely new program. Where he goes wrong is in thinking that programming leaves no room for compassion or emotion. Those are just as much a part of your program as anything else. Some people’s genetic coding primes them to be more compassionate than others. Some people pick up habits of thinking and behaving that make them more attuned to other people’s feelings. The mistake most people make is to think of coding as mechanical or mathematic, like logic, and of logic as antithetical to feeling, while emotions are what? Uncaused? Unexplainable? Spontaneous? Supernatural? The reality is that one isn’t either human or machine; rather, humans are a complex breed of organic machine.

Okay, so I could have been more sensitive in my phrasing, Russell decides as he paces across the parking lot after his run, letting his muscles cool down gradually before climbing into his truck for the long drive back to his apartment downtown. But if I sugarcoated it he would’ve dismissed it even more readily than he did. It seemed like a time for some tough love.

            Russell looks at the lifeless gizmo strapped to his arm and feels uneasy about being disconnected for so long—and maybe uneasy too because of the girl on the bridge. He goes over to open the door of his truck and turns on the engine so he can plug in the phone to charge while he finishes his cool-down routine. Jason will likely have texted him, as will have Susanne. Her, he’ll be happy to hear from. Jason, though—ever since that night at Dupont Bar Jason has been especially anxious to get together, as if he wants to make sure everything is copacetic between them. The problem is that he seems to think he offended Russell and so feels it necessary to make amends—but Russell wasn’t offended that night so much as he’s just fed up in general. And not just with Jason, but with his brother, along with most of his other friends. He keeps giving the people in his life the benefit of the doubt, only to see them wallowing in their own shameful mediocrity, and trying to make him feel guilty for not being content to do the same. 

            The wind picks up and whirls some leaves about the lot. Russell tilts back his head to watch their bereaved relatives still aloft in the branches perform their trembling dirge. It’s warm for a late September evening, but he’s sure he can detect a shift, something in the texture of the air that foretells the full ripening of fall, and he imagines the transformation that will take place in the woods. He’s run these trails more this summer than ever before, finding that the ritual sustains him, restores some part of his system that operates in an inaccessible portion of his mind. So even as he looks forward to the splendor of the coming season he can’t help dreading the cold that will eventually make running more unpleasant than it’s worth. Will I still make it out here, he wonders, even if it’s just to hike through the snow?

The previous winter had everyone in the region holed up indoors for longer than they were accustomed, locked away for endless days of record-low temperatures and record volumes of snowfall. By the time the last of the white patches in people’s muddy lawns were trickling away into the blasted unmown grass and down the filthy storm drains, everyone was out of sorts. Even Russell, for all his self-sufficiency, was thrilled to feel himself recharged by his forays into the belated warmth of the approaching summer, only appreciating how depleted he’d been—how much extra difficulty he’d had waking up, moving from any sitting or recumbent position, mustering any enthusiasm for his life or his future—until being granted the welcome reminder of what it was to feel normal.

The difficulty of the past winter, along with the approach of his last birthday before turning forty, was what inspired him to recommit to a proactive way of living. Over the past five years or so it seems, any time he’s succumbed to one or another form of inanition he couldn’t help attributing it to a permanent shift in what it was like—what it would be like from now on—to live life as a man at his current age. It was the same with all the aches and illnesses he suffered. When you’re young, pain and disappointment and listlessness are temporary setbacks. Annoyances. Pull a muscle in your back in your late thirties or beyond, though, and you feel a jolt of terror at the prospect of living with this twanging nerve forever—well, until you die anyway, or until other, more excruciating pains drown it out.

“Ugh,” he groans aloud, turning at the edge of the lot back toward the truck. This is exactly the type of thinking that prompted him to conclude he could either settle complacently into his life, waiting for the next bad thing to happen—and oh they were coming for us all, those bad things—or he could set himself to a series of projects and undertakings to give himself something to occupy his mind and his time, something to look forward to, a sense of progress and improvement—or at least of arrested decline—so he could feel that he was living life instead of recoiling from it. Reprogram? Why not? If you’re not happy with your life or with yourself, you have to change. And about the only things that are really within your power to change are your own habits. Unfortunately for Russell, he seems to have been determining he needed to reprogram himself to be more active and deliberate at about the same time everybody else he knows was deciding they were going to stand up for their right to be lazy and content with their own mediocrity, with all their already meager faculties on the wane.

Still pacing, he thinks of the girl on the bridge, and the old girlfriend she reminds him of. He doesn’t want to get in his truck because he fears the sooner he stops moving his legs, the more the inflammation will set in to his muscles, and the more likely the aches will be to keep him awake later tonight. So he keeps walking back and forth across the lot, thinking back to when he was in high school, when Vicki seemed the point from which all his joys radiated, all his feeling of living a charmed life, all his plans to wring the last drop of life’s piquant elixir from the rind of daily existence at its most banal and disappointing. This beauty, this empathic soul, drunk on the ambrosia of innocence and youthful promise, aglow with the radiance of starlight in his sleeping and waking dreams, glittering night and day. Anybody could see she was someone important, and she recognized in him some fire, some quality of roaring, relentless insatiability. In her adoring gaze he felt the touch of destiny. And since the day he first felt that touch he’s been stoking and protecting his fire like an acolyte in some long-forgotten pagan temple built to house it.

It was Russell who decided to break it off with Vicki the summer before they both started college, not because he loved her any less, not because he feared the effects of distance, but simply because she was his first, first love, first girlfriend, first everything adult and sexual, first taste of what was in store for him—or so he thought. What he couldn’t have anticipated was that he would go on to dream about her for the next twenty years, that he would go through months of heartache, overcome at random moments with bouts of sobbing, gasping. This is life, he told himself, life at its most excruciatingly, exquisitely real. Learn to master these feelings and the world will yield up all its most refined pleasures and mysteries. Succumb to them and be mired in middling miseries for all your days, consoled only by the dullest of commonplace gratifications. Today’s reminder of her brings him no gladness.

He returns to the truck and reaches in over the driver’s seat. His phone shows no messages at first, but as he begins sliding back off the seat he hears the indicator. After typing in his code, he sees three messages, one from Jason, and two from Susanne. “I met ur friend Hallie last night,” the first one reads. The second says, “U r a lying scumbag.” Russell throws the phone in the passenger seat, not bothering to read Jason’s message. He rests his head against the steering wheel between his two hands, and before long he feels himself clenching the wheel in tightened fists, the muscles on the sides of his jaw doing a motionless dance. Finally, he leans back into the seat, exhaling, shaking his head. It was bound to happen, he thinks. We all hang out in the same bars and restaurants. And you knew, he tells himself, Susanne would react this way. You knew not telling her about the others, as far as she would be concerned, is the same as telling her they don’t exist. “But I never fucking lied to anyone,” he says aloud. He leans over to grab his phone again but doesn’t get past the first two digits of his code before he starts imagining how the conversation with her will go. He tosses the phone back into the seat beside him.

Stepping down from his truck, he lifts his hands up to the sides of his face, presses his fingertips into his temples, and begins walking again across the leaf-strewn gravel parking lot. Okay, he thinks, I’ve been having a shit-ton of fun with Susanne, but this isn’t the end of the world. It’s not worth a bunch of fucking drama to try to get her back—especially since I’m not even remotely interested in a serious relationship with her. Hallie I’ve only been out with a few times, so that’s no big deal either. If I decide to go out tonight, I’ll just go to Dupont. Or hell—I’ll go somewhere I don’t usually go and meet someone new.

He stops his pacing in the middle of the lot and looks up to the overcast sky. He doesn’t want to admit it, doesn’t even want to think it, but he’s exhausted. Part of the reason he went out with Hallie was that he wanted an excuse not to answer Susanne’s texts. Part of the reason he tries to keep three or more women at outstretched-arm’s reach but no closer is that aside from a few drinks and a good laugh or two, aside from some make-out sessions and blow jobs in his truck, and every once in a while sex in an actual bed (or on a couch like the last time) he found them each wearisome to be around. As he recently said to Jason, “You know, I don’t think there’s anything sexier than a woman who barely has time for me.” They both got a good laugh out of it.

Russell walks back over to his truck, braces his hands against the back gate of the pickup bed, and leans down as if stretching his calves. But he isn’t stretching. He has no choice but to admit that he’s not happy with his life, not just at the moment but for the past few weeks at least. He’s not sure what the core problem is, but he doesn’t see the trajectory of his life into the near future—autumn, the holidays, another hard winter, and another calendar year—as promising anything worth looking forward to. So what’s keeping you from doing something about it, he asks himself. With that thought, Susanne’s text starts to look like a blessing. Why? Because I feel harried. Because I’ve got so many schedules and routines that by the time I might pause to reflect and plan I’m too mentally exhausted. And lately any time I have reserved for myself to decompress I end up spending at a bar, sustaining a relationship that has no business being sustained.

“I’m done,” he says aloud as he lifts himself up from where he was leaning. I’m done with Susanne, done with Hallie. I can put things on hold with Amanda—that’s one of the great things about her. I’m done with my brother. Russell turns and begins crossing the lot again, feeling a renewed sense of purpose and vitality welling up. Most of all, he thinks, I’m done with Jason.

The plan starts taking shape in his mind. He’s been considering taking some time off from work lately anyway. He imagines what it could be like if he takes all that time for himself, to take stock of his life, to assess the effectiveness of his routines, to reevaluate his goals. He could take on a few short-term projects, catch up on some reading, and most of all do some house cleaning, the figurative kind, to clear away all the time sucks that contribute nothing. From the far corner of the lot, close to the entrance from the road, he marches back to his truck, galvanized, giddy even. This is a perfect fucking idea, he sings silently, a smile stretching over his unwatched face. Yeah, on Monday I’m going to put in for the time off. He figures he can put in for vacation time beginning the second half of October, the week after he’s supposed to visit his dad in Ohio for his birthday. In the meantime, he tells himself, stepping up and sliding into the truck, pulling the door closed beside him, there’s no need to bother with Susanne. You’ll see plenty of Nick in Ohio in a couple weeks. There’s no reason to bother with anyone—at least until, when? The middle of November?

            As he’s pulling out of the lot onto the road, trees on either side reaching up as if to clasp hands with those on the other, his text indicator sounds again, and he can’t help glancing over to see the name on the screen. Ray. He remembers he talked to Ray about possibly meeting out tonight at Mad Anthony Brewery, a bar close to both of their houses. For several moments as he drives through the arched corridor of trees with leaves on the cusp of their fiery celebration of their own departure from life, he wonders whether he should ignore Ray too. The forest passing by through the side windows entrances him, empties his mind. Then abruptly he knows his answer. Ray’s a bit different from my other friends, he thinks. I’ll hang out with him as one last farewell to my nightlife before retreating to my hideaway.  

—————————

The wretched irony of realizing that you’re unfulfilled is that it’s your lack of energy and enthusiasm that makes you realize it, which means you don’t have the energy or enthusiasm it would take to make any lasting change. This may be especially true of people past a certain point in their thirties. Whether you plan to or not, you fall into routines in every area of your life, and even if those routines are physically or cognitively or emotionally demanding you still do them automatically, without deciding, without any exertion of will. But to change your routines, to transition to a new career, to relocate to a new city, to get divorced and start dating again—it all takes an appalling amount of thought and energy and discipline.

Russell often reflects on this and prides himself on having made a drastic change at thirty-two. His entire dating life up till then he had spent looking for women he would have some deep intellectual connection with—women much like him. After the breakup with Sheila, though, he decided the only condition that needed to be met before he would be open to dating a woman was that he feel some physical attraction for her.

“I was shocked to find out how easy it is to get along with most women, and the fact that I was so shocked told me just how disagreeable all the women I had been dating must’ve been—which means I must be really disagreeable too. Now my relationships aren’t all crazy-intense like they used to be. They’re lighter, more fun. I don’t go rolling in the deep nearly as often anymore, and there’s actually something profoundly reassuring in the discovery that I don’t have to reveal my most troubled and my most troubling thoughts to make a connection with another human being. I can get by solely on charm and wit.” He and his friend laugh at this.

Russell’s sitting at the rail in Mad Anthony Brewery next to his friend Ray. They’ve known each other long enough that it wouldn’t be quite right to call them drinking buddies. But Russell also knows his friend tends to lose interest somewhere in the middle of his longer stories or rants. They seldom talk about their childhoods, and when they do they don’t go rummaging around for deeper insights into each other’s personalities. There’s not much back-and-forth between them about their respective philosophies. Sometimes Russell will go on—the way he will with just about anyone—and it’s not like Ray interrupts him or tells him to shut up. He just gets distracted, looks at his phone. Or he dons this expression like, “Whoa! Where did all that come from?”

Russell is never offended by it; he understands rather that it’s he who has breached the tacit agreement between them. He actually finds the limited scope of their conversations to be a great comfort. Nice having a friend who likes being around you when you’re not being impressive, when you’re not talking that much, a friend who likes who you are when you’re quiet. Most people get a taste of Russell and become intrigued. They start asking questions. At some point they start to get the wrong idea about him from what he says. It’s all so strange and unsettling. Lately, he’s had this sense that if someone spends time with him when he’s not talking much, or not answering too many questions, that person will get a truer feel for who he really is—even though the deeper stuff is closer to where lives day-to-day. He realizes now that what he’s saying to Ray verges on violating their contract, but his friend in quietude, the one who’s never been misled by his seemingly inhuman thoughts, doesn’t mind much.

“Yeah,” Ray says, “you start off thinking girls are just around for fun and you just want to sample a big variety. Then you mature and start wanting some kind of deeper connection. And then you have a couple of deeper connections—find out how fucking annoying they are—and you realize you had the right attitude when you were young and stupid.” They share another laugh. Despite the limited nature of their conversations, Russell appreciates Ray’s off-kilter take on things. He’s a man with his own ideas.

When they met seven years ago, Ray was a vice narcotics officer, and they would often hang out when he was on the clock. (“Just don’t bust any of my friends,” Russell often joked.) He was suited to the job because, as a tall rangy guy sporting a mess of light-streaked brown hair and taking his fashion cue from the grunge movement of twenty years ago, he didn’t give off anything remotely resembling a cop vibe. He’s been married most of the time Russell’s known him, but he and his wife enjoy an unconventional arrangement, not exactly an open marriage but one in which free passes are exchanged on rare occasions. Originally educated to be a graphic designer, Ray began a second career in tattooing when he was in his late thirties. A detective now, he plans to retire early from the force to tattoo full-time. Even in his dress clothes, though, you would never peg him for a cop, especially now that he’s nearly sleeved.

“I don’t think men and women were ever meant to live as close as most married couples do,” Ray says. “They didn’t evolve that way. It’s kind of like you can either be best friends with a woman or you can have some torrid romance with her. But if you try to do both with the same woman it’s a recipe for disappointment and frustration on both sides. All married couples learn that. Most of them settle into best-friends situations and pretty much give up on the all-consuming passion stuff. For me, though, I think you have make room for that somehow. Or you’re going to end up resenting the shit out of each other. Your situation is great, though. If I were you, I’d be hooking up with someone different every weekend.”

Russell laughs at this suggestion before saying, “But even with my relaxed requirements it’s not so easy to find women who are cool—and who I’m attracted to. I do alright though. The thing that’s worrying me now is that all my life I sort of assumed I’d settle in to one of those best-friends situations too. I never got around to thinking about how I’d deal with the missing torridity, of course. But over the past two years or so I’ve almost always had multiple casual partners—fuck buddies. I made a point of arranging things so that I wasn’t ever obligated to be anywhere, or do anything, or fucking check in all the time. But whenever I want to do something, whenever I want to have some drinks and get laid, I can call someone. And if she’s not available I can call someone else.”

“Like I said, dude, that’s fucking awesome. I think if I were you I’d be broadening my horizons even more. I see tons of girls you could go talk to. That waitress over there has been checking us out—you should flag her down.”

“I may still. But what I was saying is that I’m worried that having all my base needs met without having to invest anything emotionally, you know, I’m worried I might be spoiling myself. I mean, I don’t feel guilty or anything—I don’t owe any of them anything. I make a point not to make any promises. I’m just worried about the effect it’s going to have on me in the long-term, like if I actually decide at some point that I want something more serious.”

“I think you’re worrying way too much. And this may just be me, but I think you’re deluding yourself about those serious relationships being the most desirable end-point.”

Ray goes on, telling him about how dull the grass is on his side of the marriage divide, but Russell is thinking how all the great fun with fuck buddies is well and good—until you get ass cancer that eats you from the inside out. Or until you simply get to an age when you’re no longer as motivated to chase after the hot young waitresses, or the dolled up nurses out for girls’ night. Or until coming home every day to an empty apartment, with no one to share your life with, no one to tell about your day, no one to make anything that happens to you seem at all significant—or even real—until it makes your life seem so utterly pointless you wonder how you don’t just fade out of existence. Russell won’t go in to any of this, not with Ray.

To keep things light, Russell tells him instead about what happened with Susanne. “The funny thing is, my last committed relationship ended because she was convinced I was screwing around when I wasn’t. Now my casual, uncommitted partner is breaking up with me because she suspects I’m fooling around—and she’s totally right.”

What Russell isn’t telling Ray is how betrayed he felt back then, not just by Sheila, but by his whole family, by almost everyone he knew. Everyone except Jason. She had accused him of something he found loathsome, something he didn’t do—couldn’t do—and yet everyone assumed she had some valid grievance. Even if he hadn’t done what she accused him of precisely, he still deserved whatever punishment she had cooked up for him. His brother Nick had said outright that he was being stupid, that he should just shut up and do whatever it took to earn her forgiveness. As if the accusation weren’t its own offense against him. Because no one wanted to sift through all the he-said-she-said, all the gory details of their competing narratives, but they knew, because everybody who knows Russell knows, that there’s just something off about him. “I don’t know what happened or didn’t happen, but Russell is Russell after all”—bullheaded, stingy with his time, withholding of his affections, always right, a bit superior, book smart, and condescending as hell. Just like his dad, the kind of surly sixth-grade math teacher kids still hate decades later, and before him his grandfather. A family curse—is there a shittier type of guilt by association?

So Russell decided to keep the best of himself to himself—and fuck everyone else. If women bristle because they care more about the social value of beliefs, the value to their own identities, than whether or how much they correspond with reality, then fine, he thought. I can tell some stories, have some laughs, make some wisecracks. You don’t need to know what I really believe.

But Jason knows. Jason of all people should understand why he thinks the way he does and that his thinking that way doesn’t mean what everyone else seems to think it means about him. Russell has always thought the test of a true friend was whether you could be really bad with him without him ever suspecting you’re really bad. Now Jason is toeing Nick’s line. And so fuck him too. Casual, high-turnover hookups and friends like Ray—that should be sufficient, he thinks. That should leave me free.

“Oh, and I wanted to ask you about something,” Russell says to Ray. “Before I got the texts from Susanne, I was running the trails at Bicentennial Woods, and I saw these bundles of straw stuck in the trees. I think they’ve been there for a long time, but I’ve never thought much about them.” He cups his hands in front of him to indicate the dimensions. “There were three of them along about a twenty-yard stretch at the top of an embankment. You ever seen anything like that? It just looked so deliberate—I thought it might be some kind of pagan symbol, or some girls doing witchcraft. I don’t know why, but the first thing that came to mind were those stick effigies hanging from the trees in The Blair Witch Project.”

“Straw bundles in trees? I’ve never heard of anything like that. I’ve gone to some—I don’t even know what to call them—gatherings for neopagans, though, and it’s all pretty improvisational. That’s kind of the appeal. They don’t like the rigidity of the major religions. They like the freedom and open-endedness. A lot of stuff they just make up as they go along.”

“Do you guys ever see much occult stuff? It seems like when I was a kid I was always hearing stories about how the FBI was tracking some satanic cult that did blood rituals with babies or some shit.”

“You’re talking about the Satanic Panic of the 80s,” Ray says leaning back. “It was sparked by all the movies about possession and devil worship—there was also some big thing with recovered memories. Turns out, with hypnotism you can trick people into remembering just about anything, from satanic rituals to alien abductions. There were never any verified cases of a group sacrificing or ritually abusing children. It was all nonsense. The funny thing is, I know of all kinds of cases where kids were abused by Christians who were trying to rid them of demons.

“The real Satanists,” he goes on, “are just inverse Christians, followers of Anton LeVey, you know, angry teenage outcast types who grow up thinking Christianity is corrupt or oppressive or conformist. For them, Satan isn’t a symbol of evil; he’s a symbol of rebellion. The others, the witches, the wiccans, the neopagans, they’re reviving practices deemed satanic by the church as part of a propaganda campaign, to win converts. Those stick figures in Blair Witch, which everyone thought were so creepy—they’re actually for fertility as far as I understand it. Which, when you think about it, actually is pretty creepy, since they were made by a ghost who kills children. But the point is, no matter who you worship you believe you’re right and good. People don’t wake up and decide to be evil one day and then start worshipping Satan.”

“But might people start worshipping Satan and then turn evil?”

“That’s probably closer to how it works. But it depends on how you define evil. People get all worked up about this cult, or that serial killer. But really not much excites people more than the idea of real evil—they love it. Everybody says they want to do something with their lives that helps other people, makes the world a better place. That’s not a terrible thing. That’s admirable. Look at the turnover rates at the jobs that actually do help people, though—the helping jobs like homes for kids who come from fucked up backgrounds, nursing homes, schools in dangerous neighborhoods. And that’s the people who actually try it for a while. Most people, when you get down to it, just want to do whatever they feel like doing and pretend it’s serving some lofty purpose. Even rat fuck Wall Street types, you ask them and they’ll tell you all about how they make as much money as they do because they perform some great service to the economy.

“Evil is pretty much just a fantasy for everybody to ooh and ahh about. When you see the horrible shit that goes on close up, in real life, you know—that’s almost the worst part—how stupid it is, how senseless. You don’t need any grand metaphysical idea like evil to understand it. I mean, it’s usually just sad. But all over TV you see how the solution to the mystery, the criminal at the end of the trail of breadcrumbs, he’s always some mastermind. It’s always some big agenda. The horrible shit cops see—hell, some of these people’s lives are so fucked up you can’t help thinking stray cats live better. The people who hurt kids, they’re not leaders of some criminal syndicate. They don’t have grand schemes. They’re the most pathetic people you’ve ever seen. Guys who hate black people. Guys who hate women. Women who hurt their kids. Nine times out of ten you can tell right away they’re either half retarded or there’s just something wrong with their brains.

“That’s the extreme, though. Most of us hurt people all the time in some minor or indirect way. But we manage to rationalize it, convince ourselves we’re still good people. Honest fucking truth—most people are if you give them the chance. Good people, I mean. That’s the norm. But there’s so much shit that can go wrong. And people latch on to the idea of evil because it makes it easier for them to think they’re the good, worthwhile humans. It gives them a sense of awe, like it’s this cosmic force only they can resist. And it proves that there’s more to existence than genes and shitty parents and teenage boys trying to prove how tough they are. Tell people a story about an honest-to-God evil person, and watch their faces light up. Look at how obsessed people are with Hitler. Whenever people hear about an evil person, they’re like, ‘Let’s all get together and be heroes.’ You’ve seen it. You’ve seen how rabid they can get. Look at all these new Facebook activists. They totally believe they’re battling evil and working to make the world a better place, when most of the time they’re really just adding to the noise. But, no, let’s cut off the balls of some child molester, let’s bring this politician’s cheating to light and publically humiliate him—so we can all feel like heroes. Being a Facebook feminist is way more fun than teaching troubled kids or cleaning bed pans.

“And, dude, I know I’m being cynical right now. I know it’s actually a good thing that people want to believe they’re good, that they want to have some sense of purpose in their lives. But a lot of times to play the role of hero they have to distort their perceptions. They have to exaggerate, or invent, some offense so they can stand up against it. Wanting to be good like that actually inspires people to be evil. Hitler thought he was battling evil. Bin Laden believed he was a great martyr for the holiest of causes. To me, evil isn’t all that scary. To me, it’s people who believe most strongly in evil who are scary. Especially when they can look around and see hundreds of other people believing just like they do.”

Ray falls silent as they simultaneously lift their beer glasses to their mouths. This time, Russell thinks, it’s Ray going off on the rant. I must have hit on a sore spot. He feels his lips pulling tight over the rim of his glass, and he wishes his friend would continue. Of course, Russell doesn’t believe in evil as any kind of cosmic force either. What thrills and delights him about Ray going on like he just did was that he was saying exactly the kind of stuff he says himself that ends up pissing off so many people. And that Ray began at a moderate trickle before releasing the torrent meant that he’d been holding back, probably because he knew the feeling all too well of having thoughts and not being able to share them without giving the wrong impression.

As Ray goes on to say he’ll ask another guy he knows at work who’s a bit of an expert on occult stuff about the straw bundles, Russell is ruminating on those teenage outcasts, the ones attracted to symbols of rebellion and nonconformity. He supposes he’s acquainted with the grownup version of many of these guys from his work. And there must be a female variety too, the ones who balk when everyone else is rushing off to church on Sundays, the ones who make up their own rituals in the woods. Their beliefs, their ideas, their thinking, it doesn’t mesh with the culture for whatever reason, and so they find themselves on the outside of it. Russell has never really identified with the geeks and outcasts before. But there are definitely certain similarities in their situations.

—————————

Taking to the trail which leads over the old wooden bridge into the woods behind his parents’ house in Clarksville, Ohio, as the maniac dog that’s been harassing his nieces and nephews bolts past him with enviable abandon, Russell imagines the relay race of generations, his grandpa in the hospital with the incision down his sternum that looked as though the edge of skin on either side had been folded back under itself before the sewing began, then his dad in the same room almost exactly a year later—and no one noticed until he woke from the quintuple bypass surgery to point it out. “We thought he was doing this,” Russell remembers his dad saying of his grandpa, as he traced an upward trajectory on an invisible graph, “but he was actually doing this”—steep decline. So despite the doctor’s assurances the following year of his own surgery’s success, he felt a dread he couldn’t hide. Someday, it would be Russell’s turn, not from smoking or poor diet or a sedentary lifestyle, but from something, eventually. Then it will be the whole to-do: everyone talking about how he has to fight; everyone acting like it’s some cosmic injustice; everyone going through the motions, as if the outcome, the ultimate outcome, could be altered. His dad has already had almost ten good years since his heart attack. It’s not always a bad idea to hang on. But it is a bad idea more often than people acknowledge.

Us outsiders, he thinks, closing his eyes and lifting his face to the broken beams of light seeping through the countless fizzling pixels of yellow and green and orange, us introverts, for people like us who don’t thrill to the presence of other people, all those visits, all that being trapped in a room, strapped to a bed for doctors and nurses—strangers—to poke and prod you, well, there are worse things than dying a week earlier than you otherwise would. Or a month. Or a year. Where do you draw the line, though? If I’m being honest with myself, Russell thinks, I have to admit that if my life was considerably less pleasant, or considerably more difficult, for a significantly lengthy amount of time, I would consider checking out. That’s the thing about people like us, we’re not as tied in to the world. We don’t feel obligated to live through misery and pain because our kids need us, or our spouses need us, or anyone needs us. We are free to drift away into nonexistence, knowing our family may go through the motions, knowing our few true friends will be genuinely, albeit temporarily, grief-stricken. But jump ahead six months or so and the world keeps turning. You’re nothing but a bunch of fond memories.

For a lot of people, he knows, this attitude of his would sound terrible, but it’s the flipside of true freedom, the freedom to live your days on your own terms, the freedom not to have to fulfill some role, not to have to support your contribution to the next generation, to live however you decide you want to live. Jason can complain all he wants about how I look at life as nothing but the output of so many programs—at least I’m free to change my programming whenever I want. All those other people, the extroverts, the family types, the ones tied in to the world, their programs are set for them, set for good. Sure, it’s easier not to have to decide what you’re supposed to be doing every day, not to wonder why you bother doing anything at all, to have all those questions answered for you once and for all. But is it worth it to never have a day in your life when you’re truly free? So free you could do anything—even die—and people would barely notice?

The rocky trench dividing the hill he’s climbing in two slopes down for maybe a couple of miles. Once, a couple of years ago, he clambered down to the bottom to find that it curves off anticlimactically into grooved channels that run along the border of some farmer’s fields. Now he decides to cross it and climb up the other side to see if anything but more forest lies over the top of the second rise. The air is chillier than he’d reckoned, making him wish he’d worn that jacket his sister-in-law tried to push on him. His nose is running. But the farther he gets into the woods the less the cold bothers him. The chill feels to him like a type of emptiness, a space where he can float freely, where he can let the contours of his mind and his disembodied essence stretch outward and blur into the vacuum of airy nonexistence. He breathes it in, this release from the pressure cooker of the house full of kids and animals and small talk and pointless screams and crying and petty dramas. Even my family, he thinks, has become too constrictive. They can no longer manage to leave enough space among them for me to be myself in their presence—if they ever could manage it. No, he thinks, I simply decided to be myself despite their poorly suppressed suspicions and not-so-subtle condemnations and self-protective snidery; it wasn’t like they ever allowed for me, sought to understand and accept me on my own terms, because those are the very terms that threaten them. But that’s just how families are. I should’ve known there was no point in coming here this weekend.

Rushing across the hill ahead of him, the rambunctious pit bull-border collie mutt startles him to the point of making him lurch backward on the shale slabs in the trench, nearly tripping over a storm-sheered branch lying in a mess of orange leaves. He’s taken to calling the dog Spaz, or Psycho. It’s another of his stepmom’s rescues, one his dad isn’t particularly fond of. “If you can find a way to make sure he doesn’t come back from the woods with you,” he said to Russell as he was setting out, “it’ll probably keep him from taking a few years off of my life.” Thinking how the dog had bowled over his niece, not just the once but three times so far this weekend, Russell wonders now how he might actually do it—how he would kill this damn dog rampaging obliviously through the woods with him, disappearing for long stretches only to reappear and scare the hell out of him.

The leaves rasping and crunching overhead and underfoot, as well as the wayward falling loners sashaying lazily through the air, put him in the holiday mood like none of the kitschy decorations—inflatable ghosts and pumpkins, green-skinned witches astride their brooms on houses—he passed on the drive through Ohio. Halloween is the one holiday he still enjoys. He remembers a shift occurring every year in his dad about the middle of October when they were kids, in the weeks after his birthday. All summer, as he set about keeping himself busy with lawn care, home maintenance and improvement schemes he had no business taking up, and taking advantage of the luxury of pursuing a few of his own scholarly interests, like biographies of famous explorers or inventors. Toward the middle of August, though, he would start to get sullen and irritable. Russell and Nick simply avoided him for those couple months, insofar as it was possible for people living in the same three-bedroom house to avoid each other. Then as Halloween approached he would undergo another inexplicable change. His spirits would lift. He’d take them on trips to parks to take long hikes along the myriad trails. And they’d all go to The Haunted Castle on some Friday night. More than anything else about that place, an old church done up to provide some starts and scares, Russell remembers waiting in line to get in, and the pleasurable warmth of anticipation. His grandma had hated what they did to that church; she always reminded the grandkids that it was where she had been married to their grandpa. 

Cresting the rise on the opposite side of the trench, Russell looks out over a gradual descent and sees nothing but more trees, promising little else but more leaf-strewn forest for the cost of an hour’s hiking. He turns and starts to climb up toward the source of the rocky trench, and comes after a few minutes to a line of pine trees, beyond which he finds an overgrown grassy trail separated from a stagnant, algae-covered pond by head-high brush. As he picks his way through the line of trees into the tall grass, he shouts loudly for the dog but hears no panting, no crunch of leaves in response. Maybe he’ll just get lost out here, he thinks—because I don’t see any good way to kill the bastard. Before rounding a sharp curve in the track around the pond, Russell sees the back end of a rusted car. His dad had mentioned a junkyard back here.

A half dozen cars hunched atop sagging or absent tires and exhausted suspension, grown over with vines and weeds, giving the illusion of melting into the ground, sit eternally parked along either side of the trail. Imagining how readily his dad would be able to identify the makes from the 60s, 70s, and 80s, Russell weaves a path among them, as more come into view the farther along he goes. When he hears someone advancing toward him at a frenzied clip through the weeds and grass, he’s only alarmed for a couple of seconds before remembering Psycho. Sure enough, no sooner does Russell look back than he sees the dog bursting out from the brush along the pond to come hurtling, elated by his own freedom and surging energy, across the trail and back into the woods on the other side of the curve, where he collides—with comical abruptness—against an unseen wire fence, bounces backward into an upright, unmoving, almost chastened stance, a look of bafflement on his piebald, bullet-shaped face. Russell doubles over with laughter. The dog turns toward him, still wearing the high-eared, tilted-head quizzical expression, and Russell knows he won’t kill him. “Psycho, you idiot!” The dog runs off up the trail in the opposite direction, quickly disappearing into the desiccated grass, and before long is out of earshot. 

Looking back toward the woods and the cars he’s passed, he becomes aware of how spooky this place is. The sound of the leaves is muted to an eerie hush. The cars seem like newly lifeless things that at any moment could spring back into motion. And it would be really easy for someone to camp out here—plenty of places to hide and escape the elements. The thought comes unbidden that he could be having a lot of fun in this junkyard if someone else were around to share the experience with. He walks over to push apart a thin spot in the brush separating him from the pond. That’s the whole problem with Halloween, he thinks. That’s the whole problem with any holiday. It’s like they’re designed to force you to hang out with other people, especially kids. You carve pumpkins together. You go trick-or-treating together. Even for adults, it’s parties, pumpkin spice everything, huddling around fires. If ever there were a holiday for us loners and outsiders, he thinks, it should be Halloween. This year, he determines, I’m going to make a point of celebrating it on my own, in my own way.

Turning to continue down the path as it becomes ever more crowded with the carcasses of automobiles, Russell sees something in the trees on the side across from the pond. About head height, bristling out from the trunk, is a bundle of straw folded over one of the branches in the lowermost row. The chills spreading on the back of his neck surprise him, arriving before he’s had a chance to consider what this discovery might imply. He hasn’t, until now, thought of the possibility that other people may actually be in the vicinity. But who would come out here? He approaches the bundle, reaches up to examine it, feel how solid it is so he can get an idea how long it’s been hanging here. It comes apart with the gentlest tug. Russell’s mind goes back to all the searching he did to learn about the bundles, all of which came to naught. Here he is, though, in Clarksville, a good three hours’ drive from Fort Wayne and Bicentennial Woods—and he finds another bundle of straw bound the same way, braced over a branch in the same way. Could there be some cult, or just some group of people, who use this as their symbol?

Continuing along the path, scanning the trees for more bundles, he thinks of what Ray had been saying about all the boys who never manage to assimilate into any of the recognized institutions, the ones who come together around their symbols of rebellion and celebrate, however resentfully, their status as outsiders. Russell’s never really felt like that himself, never really felt excluded or ostracized. For him, it’s always felt like a choice—like please come to church because if you come it’ll be better for all of us. But I just couldn’t bring myself to take it seriously after a certain point, he thinks. So am I a different kind of outsider? And do all those thoughts about how outsiders have the freedom to drift away, to wander off unceremoniously and die, does that apply to the geeky kids who never get laid, who have to marry the first woman who’ll accept them, however horribly she treats them? They have their tight-knit little groups, though, their Dungeons & Dragons gatherings, their network of rivals and teammates for first-person shooter games. They have their own cultures even, like tiny tribes. And what about the survivalist types, the ones who hate the government, hate civilization, choose to live off the grid in their generator-powered, woodstove-heated shacks and lean-tos? So many people the main programs don’t accommodate, who have to, or choose to, make their own way, live by their own lights, play their own games, either because they’re sure to lose the officially sanctioned games or because those official games just don’t mean anything to them.

He spots the second straw bundle, and quickly afterward the third. So again there are three. Who the fuck is putting these here? He wonders first if it could be his brother playing a trick on him. Then he decides that’s too unlikely, that it must just be a common practice that for whatever reason isn’t discussed much online. There’s got to be all kinds of stuff like that. Up ahead, around the curve on the far side of the pond is a large, rusted-out bus, and beyond that he sees what looks like an old tool shed. He stops moving and pricks up his ears for any sound that may indicate the presence of another human being. “Hello,” he calls, without deciding to, following some impulse he catches himself trying to justify after he’s done it—even though he has no idea why he’s done it. He braces himself to receive some punishment for his mistake. But nothing happens. All he hears is the wind soughing through the leaves in the treetops.

“Hello,” he calls again, his actions following some set of actuating principles disconnected from the silent monologue in his mind. He takes a step forward, wondering if the best idea now may be to heed the “No Trespassing” signs he’s been so wantonly disregarding. Still, nothing around him, not the overgrown weeds, not the ruins of the bus, certainly not the barely standing shack with clouded-over windows, none of it suggests any recent visit by a living person. He listens for another beat, and then he continues along the path around the pond as it becomes ever more cluttered with the remains of cars and vans, until he passes a final one, after which there’s nothing to see but more overgrown grass, weeds, and the trees with leaves alight in the middle stages of their resplendent death throes. His steps have become more deliberate, his progress furtive. If he finishes the circuit around the pond, he’ll be far away from the bundles and the shack, emerging on the far side of the rocky trench in the woods, which must, he realizes, together with the pond, form some kind of long-forgotten drainage system. But he decides to overmaster his silly foreboding and turns to head back through the junkyard so he can reenter the woods closer to the trail that leads to his parents’ backyard.

Russell inhales sharply before turning. Amid the cars once again, he reflects on the permanence of their desuetude. They’ll sit here, inert, forgotten, until it comes time for someone to build a neighborhood here, or a city, or a parking lot. Or maybe they’ll be here forever, until they sink into the ground and dissolve into their constituent minerals. Like old, abandoned houses, you can barely begin to imagine the stories—where they’ve been, who’s driven them, the fights, the moves to new cities, the sex in the back seat, the singing, the crying, the near misses, someone’s first car, someone else’s last. Behind the glass grown opaque with grime, you see the driver’s seat, and its emptiness is unconvincing. The headless space before the headrest seems startlingly alive, so much so you almost can’t accept, when you look closer, that the figure you glimpsed hasn’t simply ducked beneath the window. Passing before the shack again, Russell can’t help holding his breath, veering toward the pond to cross in front of the weathered door at as great a distance as he can manage while still retaining an air of nonchalance.

He’s around the bend, on the stretch with the straw bundles in the trees, when his mind finally moves beyond his surroundings to the house he’ll be returning to and some possible methods for coping with its inhabitants. “Hey,” someone behind him calls. Russell’s mind remains divided from his actions as he responds inwardly with an eerie sense of alarm and outwardly with a casual sociability.

“Oh, hey,” he says, turning around.

“Lookin’ for something?” the man behind him asks. Russell sees he’s massive in a way that’s less intimidating than pitiable. But he’s still imposing enough, his posture insistent, his tone unmistakably aggressive.

“I’m actually just exploring,” Russell replies.

“What the fuck are you exploring here for?” he demands.

Russell sees that here is an example of the type of person he’s been thinking about, a grownup version of those kids we all know from high school, the ones who fit no role but that of spectator and bitter outcast, the ones you find at the edge of the party limply criticizing and enviously ridiculing their more engaged classmates. The guy is wearing a black rock-and-roll hoodie with vaguely satanic red etchings that looks like it’s never been washed. His gray jeans, straining at the seams and threadbare in patches near the point of bursting, fray at the bottom in filthy tentacles about a pair of boots that look like lumpy mounds of petrified dough.

“I already told your friends,” he says, stepping toward Russell, “this place happens to currently be occupied by someone who doesn’t give a fuck. I also told them if I ever catch any of you fucks creeping around back here again I was going to fuck ‘em up.”

As much as this man wants to intimidate him, Russell’s fear is concentrated elsewhere, not on any particular danger but arising from a sense that he’s on the verge of uncovering some long-held secret it may be better to leave undisturbed. “I don’t have any friends,” Russell says stupidly. “None that have been out here anyway.” The man steps toward him, raising his right arm. He’s holding what Russell at first thought was a stick or a short club but now sees is an oddly shaped blade. Even as the man shouts a series of curses at him and Russell takes several steps backward through the tall grass, he remains unpanicked, somehow assured that the threats are mere bluffs. “Dude,” Russell calls over the shouts, his hands raised before his face, “I’m fucking leaving.” But the man, stepping forward with his left foot, cants his right shoulder back slightly, enough to make Russell think he may actually try to bring the blade slashing down across his body—and yet he still can’t accept that such a thing could be possible.

In the middle of another backward step, Russell’s left leg is jostled into his right, sending him toppling sideways into the grass. The growl he hears is enough to finally ground his fear in the present crisis, and he frantically parts the weeds to see Psycho lunging up to seize the man’s arm in his jaws, the now lowered arm wielding the machete. Having latched on, the dog swings about and begins jerking violently, so much like a game of tug-o-war with a sock, except there’s nothing playful about it. The man’s screams go from outraged to desperate in the span of seconds. And just as Russell gets to his feet and rushes to pull off the dog, he sees that same arm flinging upward in a rapid arc, prompting him to brace himself for the downward slash that Psycho must have interrupted. But the man is spinning, off-balance, and the blade is nowhere to be seen. Russell comes out of his defensive crouch in time to watch the man disappear into the weeds—and then he hears glass shattering.

Psycho barks twice as the man lets flow a stream of obscenities. Russell picks his way toward the man cautiously, calling along the way, “Are you hurt? What happened? Do you need help?” The only answer he gets is “Fucking dog! Motherfucker!” The first thing Russell sees is the broken driver’s side window of what he thinks is a Studebaker—and a spattering of blood running down the outside of the door. His own blood goes cold. “Oh shit,” he mutters. “Where are you?” he calls again. “Don’t fucking cut me—I’m coming to help you.” No curses or obscenities come in response, certainly no assurances.

Russell follows the blood along a trail out of the weeds and back into the tall grass and sees where the man has fallen. Approaching him, Russell looks first for his hands—finding them immediately, slimy red beneath his chin, his right clutching his left, his left clutching the side of his neck. “Oh fuck.” The man tries to talk but only manages to get out “Mmaaugh.” Russell reaches into his jeans pocket for his phone as pulsing gouts of blood seep out between the man’s fingers. He’ll be dead for sure by the time anyone gets here, he thinks. Standing there, his thumb hovering over the touchscreen, he stares into the man’s eyes. They register no panic. Has he lost too much blood to feel terror? What his expression seems to speak of, though, is not exhaustion or delirium so much as resignation. Russell glances up to see one of the straw bundles in the trees along the trail, and he says aloud, “We’re free, you and I, to simply drift away.”

He slides his phone back into his pocket and looks back to the man’s face as his exiguous splashes of breath turn to ice and scrape and crunch into the air. Russell considers, for a mere few seconds, whether anyone will be able to trace his presence here. He hasn’t touched anything, save for the straw in the tree to gauge how old it was. The broken chunks of breath flow from the man’s gaping mouth at widening intervals, until he chokes out what seems the last—until two more come, one abruptly after the other. Then he lies still and silent. Russell continues watching him. His eyes look the same, like a living person’s eyes, until they don’t. And then Russell has to wonder if they looked this way—uncommunicative, withholding, detached—all along, if he only imaged them conveying some message of vitality from within, that light that people talk about going out.

When he turns to continue back to his parents’ house, he notices blurred splotches along the edges of his vision and a ringing hum suffusing the silence. He immediately realizes that his mind is slipping into a perturbed state, and he wills himself to monitor it. The shock. Is that what it is? He imagines the information processed by each of the modules in his brain leaking into all the others occupying the surrounding tissue. Time begins to progress by lurches, not in its customary smooth unfurling, so he steps into the woods one moment only to find himself twenty feet farther into them the next. Worrying he may lose his balance and fall once more, not from vertigo but because the forest floor itself won’t rest even, he braces himself with an outstretched arm against a tree and holds his eyes steady over what he recognizes as the rocky trench and the hill beyond, meaning he’s somehow gotten himself turned around, facing the direction opposite the house. Holding his gaze in place, the blurred patches moving in ripples along his periphery, he exerts his focus to settle whatever inner turmoil of conscience or shock of fright is bringing about this queasy nightmarish confusion of his senses.

Steadying his breath with deliberate effort, he succeeds after several minutes in calibrating his vision and his feeling for level ground. He stands upright, turning to head back to the house, but before taking a step forward he sees something that holds him in place. It looks at first like a thin, leafless tree, its upper branches twisting around, as if moved by the wind. Russell blinks, squeezing his eyes tight before reopening them to see it standing, human-like. The rotation was its turning to face him. The legs, the arms, even the torso, the entire body is composed of sticks, branches, the living appendages of trees, making it freakishly thin. The joints of the legs are angled backward, like those of a bird, and stretching out from its back are the gnarled arching frames of a pair of wings. Russell squints, struggling to bring the head into focus, seeing only a blur of white—which he thinks may be the skull of some long-snouted animal, like a deer or a horse. It appears to be looking directly back at him. When after several moments it fails to resolve into something more tree-like, more mundane and dismissible, Russell feels a welling up of sickening revulsion and fear which erupts from him in laughter at the sheer preposterousness of what he’s seeing.

He falls to his knees, thinking he must’ve hit his head when he fell back in the junkyard. Lifting his hands to feel for a wound or a swollen lump, he sees that they’re both covered in blood. He reaches frantically for the leaves on the ground in front of him and drags his hands over them top and bottom. “What the fuck? I didn’t touch him,” he says in a whimper. When he squeezes shut his eyes again, though, an image flashes through his mind of his own hands tearing the machete away from the bleeding man’s hands. “No, no, no—what the fuck?” He remembers his right hand, shining with blood now, bringing the machete down on the side of the man’s neck opposite the wound from the broken car window. “It’s not right. It’s a hallucination.” The next memory that surfaces is of the sound the machete made plunking into the middle of the stagnant pond. He laughs again, hunching forward. When he sits back on his heels, he looks up to where the stick monster, the wood demon, that preposterous thing stood, but it’s no longer there. Scanning the trees, he sees that it’s no longer anywhere. “Ha ha ha. What the fuck!”

He makes a plan to get into the house—or better the garage—to wash his hands before anyone can see them. He needs to find the dog too to make sure he has no blood around his maw or anywhere on his coat. Filled now with the urgency of his predicament, he stands up and feels his legs sturdy beneath him. He considers going back to see if the dead man really does have two neck wounds or just the one—so he can be sure. But he’s anxious to be out of these woods, far away from where the wood demon had stood turning to face him, to gaze at him, to look into him, testing him, tricking him. Russell sets off at a pace toward the house, giving wide berth to the spot where it stood. Before long he’s stepping into the grass and moving quickly toward the garage—and the sink inside—calling out for the dog. He stops midway through the yard to look back toward the trail into the woods, scanning the line of trees. The wind picks up just as he’s looking, setting the millions of leaves aflutter. Russell shudders. Then he turns and heads for the garage. 

—————————

Not interested. The mantra of the age. No one is interested in anything. You either like a thing, or you don’t like it. If the slightest effort is involved in learning to appreciate a thing, no one bothers trying to marshal the discipline; no one possesses an adequate flicker of curiosity. Will it make me feel good? Will it make me look good? Will it be fun? Will it be entertaining? If not at first, then too late. We’re not interested. Whether it’s a way to pass the time, a body of knowledge to master, or even a method for coming to the truth, we only evaluate it according to the strictest consumerist and hedonistic principles. You can’t blame us. Life is short. These days there are so many things competing to fill our days. We have so much to choose from. Why choose anything that doesn’t drip succulently down our chins when we bite into it? Tell me of some exquisite pleasure to be had as the culmination of some long struggle and I’ll show you some other way to get a shot of dopamine straight into the reward center of your brain at a fraction of the effort.

The only people who ever take interest thereby alienate themselves. The very interest they take marks them, not as interesting themselves, but as geeky, as if by learning or putting forth effort you can’t help but render yourself awkward, unsexy. Or rather it’s assumed that if you have the time or the inclination to engage in demanding endeavors it must be because you’re incapable of getting laid. And, to be fair, Russell thinks, that’s true enough in many cases. Plenty of guys at work like that.

He sits with his legs folded on the hardwood floor of his apartment, books and magazines strewn around on the floor, the coffee table, the couch. Presently, though, he’s burying a razor through the outer rind and into the moist spongy flesh of a pumpkin. His cut follows a path established earlier by a pencil as part of an intricately detailed monster face—a demon with wizened skin, mirthful malevolence in its eyes, horns, and a mouthful of spiked fangs. The eyes promise to be the most exacting, so he resists an impulse to save them for last—for when he’s had a little practice at wielding his scalpel with the requisite fine precision—and instead goes right for them, on the principle that a pristine surrounding surface will give him more degrees of freedom to make the toughest incisions. This decision occurs in a mind space seeded with ideas about how minds go about making decisions.

On the floor next to the couch are books by “computational neuroscientist” Douglas Hofstadter, philosopher of science Patricia Churchland, and renowned neurologist Oliver Sacks, whose contribution to Russell’s latest research obsession is surprisingly off-topic. This particular work by Sacks isn’t about how neurons create consciousness—not directly anyway. It’s about the causes and meanings of hallucinations, a topic he’s developed a newfound fascination with in the wake of his trip to Clarksville. Russell decided that as part of his swearing off of people he would give up all his social media activity as well, including his blog, where he routinely posts reviews of whatever books he reads on software engineering and various fields of science. So instead of a quick thousand-word post he’s working on a lengthier essay, though what he’ll do with it once he’s finished is a question he’s given little thought to.

Rounding off the first cut to shape the top of the demon’s left eye, Russell marvels at the power of the most subtle alterations in the lineaments of a face to signal such powerful nuances of expression. He fears he’s not capturing the playful sadism he found so appealing in the pattern. But he has no choice but to proceed, hoping if it doesn’t convey the same state of the creature’s mind then it at least gets at another one, equally creepy, equally fun. One the books that brought Sacks to fame was The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, a collection of essays about patients with rare brain afflictions, minds that by going awry illuminate some incredible facet of the brain’s normal functioning. The title essay is about a man with damage to his fusiform gyrus that has led to a condition called prosopagnosia, which means he doesn’t recognize faces as faces—and therefore often can’t distinguish between people and inanimate objects. Sacks later revealed that he suffers from a much milder form of prosopagnosia himself. The perception of faces, down to the minutest details of individual visages and the dynamic signaling of emotion and intention, is something we take so much for granted it’s hard to wrap our minds around how even a severely malfunctioning brain could possibly fail at it. So much of what we perceive as occurring out there, in the world, is actually a function of what’s going on in here, within our own minds—a theme Sacks reprises in the book Russell is currently reading.

On the TV is a movie called V/H/S, a found-footage horror flick Amazon recommended after he ordered The Blair Witch Project. Aside from the unwatchably obnoxious framing scene, the individual vignettes that make up the movie are each pretty decent. Hanging over the TV is a stick effigy he made after watching Blair Witch for the first time in over ten years. You simply lash a straight horizontal twig to a vertical one that wishbones at the bottom. Then you drape a piece of burlap over the shoulders—with a tiny hole cut for the head—and fold it down like a poncho. Viola. Russell had already made three of them before leaving for Clarksville, and he’d planned to make several more. But what he saw in the woods drove him to Sacks’s book, and from there he was compelled to move onto Hofstadter and Churchland, so he hasn’t had a chance yet to turn back to the stick dolls.

He was surprised to discover, upon arriving home, that he wasn’t frightened or disturbed. Partly, he’s excited, thinking what happened was a good thing—a genuinely mysterious experience. Already it’s pushing him to read books he hasn’t felt like he’s has a good opportunity to read, explore some he hasn’t read in years, and put together disparate ideas to form a more holistic vision, a more comprehensive understanding of things he’s only ever nibbled around the edges of in the past. As for the Death Metaller, what scares Russell most about the incident is how little it scares him. Even when he exerts himself to ruminate on the murky and conflicting images in his memory, he’s protected from guilt and fear of detection by a bizarre and almost cumbersome sense of the appropriateness of his actions. The man had threatened him. He’d played no part in the fall through the window. As for what happened afterward, if anything happened afterward, that could be justified too—would it be better to let him slowly bleed to death?

Still, he couldn’t say he’s completely unfazed. The scary movies and the horror stories in the anthology he’s reading—they’re not bothering him at all, with the minor exception of Hawthorne’s “The Man of Adamant,” about a guy fed up with society who goes to live in a cave. But he feels himself being watchful, like he doesn’t trust the information coming in from the periphery, like he has to constantly check and recheck the static nature of his surroundings. And there’s a bug in his mind driving him to explore the very nature of his mind with all its other bugs. It’s a topic he’s been fascinated with at times in the past, but never with such intensity. He wakes up in the night perturbed, thoughts chasing each other with hectic urgency, as if some danger loomed on the other side of his failure to grasp the mystery. But when he dreams it isn’t about the Death Metaller or the Wood Demon or the nature of conscious experience—all three times he’s woke with a memory of his dreams they’ve been about Vicki.

Completing the last cut for the second eye, Russell sets the razor aside and holds the pumpkin at a distance from his face. The eyes look convincingly eye-ish, he thinks. But the expression—not so much mirthful malevolence as smiling through the pain. He smiles lopsidedly himself. Jason’s voice sounds from somewhere in his mind, making a joke about how looking at your pumpkin shouldn’t be like looking into a mirror. Though Russell is perfectly able to reject his absent friend’s premises, he has to admit his demon—at this stage—is looking a little lonely.

The only people who are trapped by their programs, he takes up arguing again, despite himself, are the ones who aren’t aware of following them. Neurons firing together creates an association, the basic unit of physical reactions and the first stage in forming mental concepts. Crosstalk between different kinds of association in different locales forms the basis of analogical thinking. Hot tempers are like hot kettles. One level of connection bootstraps connections at a separate level. Each layer of abstraction brings us closer to the abstracted self, and having a dynamically updated self-concept makes possible an ongoing awareness of self. And isn’t that consciousness? Once you have a self-concept, moment by moment experience begins to have an ever-ready reference point. You no longer simply look out and wonder what is happening—you wonder what is happening to you.

Nested abstractions, masses of neurons contemplating the nature of neurons underlying the contemplation of neurons, minds imagining themselves, all localized functions, all emerging from a physical, electrochemical substrate operating on the binary logic of to fire or not to fire. Russell sets his pumpkin down and reaches for the remote so he can turn the movie off. He’s exasperated by his inability to fully grasp the theories—or of the theories’ inability to fully account for the phenomenon. Switching to a higher layer of abstraction, he reasons that being aware that you exist is the basic requirement for the sense of having free will, the illusion that our disembodied essence operates independently of the infrastructure that supports it to make choices. The “I” in “I decided.” In the same way, being aware of your routines, which aren’t merely behavioral but perceptual as well—with attendant emotions too of course—being aware of your habits of perception, which to everyone else must seem like delusion, is the first step toward recalibrating your perceptions, escaping your personal demons.

In his book I Am a Strange Loop Hofstadter writes about the intellectual journey he took in the aftermath of his wife Carol’s losing battle with brain cancer—what bitter irony in that, Russell can’t help thinking. He writes about how similar he and Carol were, about how if consciousness, the soul, resides in the brain, if it’s the illusion rendered real through all those self-reflective loops, then there’s no reason one person’s soul can’t reside in another person’s brain, albeit with poorer resolution than the original. Russell, perhaps because he’s been reading about Hofstadter’s loops alongside classic ghost stories, keeps wondering if he’s not reading a scientific description of hauntings and demonic possessions. For someone to become possessed, the locus of control, the will, the executive loop would have to transfer from one reference to another. But for a haunting all that would need to happen would be a transfer of attribution from the inner chambers of the mind to the outside world. He looks over at the drawer under the table by the door—where he stashed his phone so he wouldn’t be tempted to check it, since checking it is one step away from staying connected. He feels uneasy at certain moments thinking so intently at such lengths of time about things like other people in your head—or outside your head—as lonely as he is.

Russell sits up from a reclining position on the carpet next to his lonesome-eyed demon pumpkin. I’m going to keep at this, he thinks, at least until after Halloween. But I’ve definitely learned that my insatiable hunger for solitude isn’t really insatiable. He hasn’t made any more of the stick dolls since returning from Ohio because, for one, he was distracted, but also because it seemed somehow inappropriate, a scanting of his encounter in the woods. But now he feels impelled to continue making them—and he has a new idea. What if I flesh them out with the straw from those trees? He considers the problem of clothes. A toy store. He’ll buy some doll’s clothes. They’ll be like little scarecrows. Maybe I could even find some tiny pumpkins to fix atop the sticks for heads, or some plastic skulls.

He’s been back to Bicentennial Woods already once, but he passed the entrance when he saw that it was overcrowded with vehicles. Now that it’s the height of the season and the trees are mimicking some operatic lament with all the splendor of gold and fire and blood, the forest is drawing its audience—and Russell’s sanctuary is being overrun.

 —————————

Russell is in the Orchard when the sky sounds its first low rumbling growl, gently shaking his insides. Emerging from the forest he felt a shock of deeper cold tightening his skin, but he dismissed it because the air of the Orchard is usually more rarefied, as he’d dismissed the sudden dimming of the sunlight owing to the later hour of his visit, meant to avoid the throngs of autumn-leaf tourists, those representatives of lowest humanity, whose mental processing has slowed to a rate essentially bovine—“Whaa? You’re running? You’d like to get by? I have to move out of your way? I have to pull in my dog’s leash? That’s a lot to deal with.” There’s still a chance, he thinks, that the rumble emanated from a large truck, but it’s an outside one. It vibrated down through the trees and reverberated up from the ground. Yet with his intact stream of music how could he be sure? Several paces in among the worryingly denuded trees of the Orchard, with their bare skeletal branches, and he’s already being pelted with tiny droplets, not much more than a mist. But the view of the sky that opens to him tells him all he needs to know about the impending storm. He’s on the third lap. His only choice is between forgoing the turn back to complete the figure eight and heading directly back to his truck.

The sudden darkness reminds him of the first time he visited Bicentennial Woods, all those years ago, with Vicki. They’d passed the parking lot on their bikes earlier and decided to come back with the car because the sun would be setting in a couple of hours. Once on the trails they were enchanted, and couldn’t believe a place like this existed so close to where they lived without them even knowing it was there. Following the trails in the opposite direction Russell always takes on his runs now, they made their way across the big bridge, the Slingshot to Eternity. After getting themselves turned around in the Orchard, they wandered past all the signs reading Private Property and No Trespassing to check out the large storage shed you could see on the old farmland, and beyond it the two-story house. The kids had long since christened the peak-roofed shed with their graffiti—“Death Shed”—and broken a first-story window in the house to provide ready entry. Ducking through the frame and tip-toeing through the rooms of the long-abandoned house, he and Vicki were drunk on the thrill of transgression and the promise of discovery. They felt like a couple of raiders casing a workaday palace, a couple of almost grownup kids up to no good.

“We should come back and decorate this place for Halloween,” Vicki had said. “Then we can have everyone come and tell stories about all the ghosts that live here.” She tugged him by the hand to pull him to her for a mashing together of lips. And now Russell marvels at his own obliviousness, not recognizing how magnificent and precious that moment and countless others like it were.

As dark as the Orchard has become beneath the looming clouds, Russell still isn’t prepared for how difficult it is back in the darker woods to make out the lineaments of the trail under the layers of leaves fresh from their final journey, piling up in shredded papery stacks of glorious carnage. The gleaming of the yellows radiates as if it were its own source of light, the only one under the still seamless canopy, so he can at least anticipate when his steps will collide with the ground. He’s already turned to complete the full figure eight, even though he suspects it’s a bad idea. Only by completing the same pattern of passes along the embankment where the straw bundles still hang can he know if doing so will produce the same effect as last time.

He’s nearing the curve out to the promontory and the Graveyard of Trees when the sound of a footfall on the leaves up ahead of him sets his eyes darting up from the trail. He digs in with his feet and has to draw back to stop. Before him, not ten feet away, is a moving, living shadow, its contours tinged with a glow of silver light. Russell’s heart jolts as if his sudden halt has caused it to crash into his sternum, and tingling spikes shoot through his hands and feet as he retreats a step before realizing what it is rushing across the trail in front of him. No sooner is he watching it safely off than another comes shattering the silence around him, this one passing behind him. Two more pass in front. He turns to watch their stampede down the impossibly steep bank, a heard of deer, their upthrust white tails bouncing erratically, like bursting puffs of popcorn spotlit against a curtain of black. As he watches them, a sky-splitting wedge of thunder cuts off what would’ve been the beginning of a peel of laughter and sends him running at full stride to complete his ritual circuit through this bewitched forest.

While running along the embankment for the first two laps, Russell had looked down at the ravine and thought how it no longer looked full to bursting with the colors of the season. It was looking less like a giant bowl, he thought, overflowing with fruit and sweets, a symbol of the sleepy abundance we associate with the approach of the holidays and all their gustatory temptations, and more like a blast crater, the site of some calamitous impact that spelled doom for every living thing within the radius of its fiery shock wave. But now, turning back into the Graveyard of Trees, the yellow of the leaves on the ground glows like the molten surface of some alien world. As the wind rends the darkness overhead, cascades of the slow falling bits of yellow light, like raining ash, further lend to the otherworldliness of this ominous dreamscape. He trudges up the rise with unflagging urgency, even as the space beneath the trees fills with some medium that lulls the passage of time. 

Intently monitoring the ground before him as he careens in bounding leaps down the opposite side of the fold of land, he hears more diffuse rumbling and tries to gauge the true amount of danger he’s in. Might lightning strike a tree nearby and conduct the charge into his body? Or sheer off a limb that falls on him? His legs pump indefatigably on, powered by the fear and exhilaration, scarcely slowing at all as he climbs the rise into the Orchard. The clouds have yet to break open, but the wind is stirring the creaking and groaning treetops with a fury. The first lightning flashes as he’s entering the woods again, near where he spooked the deer just minutes earlier, and it shows him, right off to the side of the trail, the same wood demon he saw in the woods in Clarksville, turning at the waist to regard him, the plane of its wings rotating with the shoulders just as they did before. But Russell hasn’t even come to a halt when another lightning flash reveals it to be a slender tree, its trunk snapped as if at the neck, so all the complicated outward branchings of its upper limbs dangle upside-down and swaying in the wind.

He watches it as he passes, craning his neck. But it keeps to its amended version of itself until he’s forced to turn back once more and continue picking out the trail through the dark. He’s nearing the head of the stairs down into the ravine when the storm takes up in earnest. The flashes and the obscene bone-splitting cracks make the forest dance and cry as Russell learns firsthand why so many of the trees in Bicentennial Woods stand amputated or lay dismembered. Trundling awkwardly down the stars, all but blind, he drags his hands along the banisters as his feet probe and slide. Both feet on the uneven earth again, he finally thinks to look up toward the bridge to see if the ritual has recalled the apparition of the blonde girl. The rain rattling on the leaves both aground and aloft suddenly becomes deafening, and Russell has to reach up and wipe the drops from his eyes before he can make out anything.

Jumping at the stairs, he manages to miss the last one and tumbles forward, rolling over his shoulder into a supine position a short ways from the middle of the bridge. From here he can see a tiny undulating strip of electrified sky. In the violent whoosh and cracking and rattle and bone-crunch of the storm, he’s found a pocket of peace and feels no need to do anything other than dwell there, alone as he saw he clearly is, indefinitely. He doesn’t even realize he’s laughing until the laughter has nearly bent him in half. And then he doesn’t realize he’s sobbing until he nearly chokes, and rolls over on his side coughing. Rolling onto his back again, he continues looking up, minutes, an hour, until the storm is passed and night falls on his furiously shivering body.

—————————

How many loops can any one mind handle? It must depend to some extent on the individual’s working memory capacity. Maybe too it’s something that can be exercised. We all have countless people’s minds stored in our own minds. Are the actors who do great impressions capturing other minds with greater resolution? Man, just think, if someone were to tell you to do an impression of one of your friends, or of a celebrity, or of your significant other—you may not be able to pull it off all that well, but it’s not like you couldn’t do it well enough for other people to know who you were impersonating. We have bits and pieces of so many people’s habits of thinking and behaving in our minds. And they don’t even have to be real people. They can be fictional people. Or we can make them up ourselves. How often do you have imaginary conversations in your mind with people you know? How often do you wish you could grab some character in a movie by the lapels and tell him to quit being so damn stupid? Writers—fiction writers, screenwriters—must be the most expert at hosting other minds.

Russell is sitting on the wasted wood floor of the abandoned house tucked in behind Bicentennial Woods in the back corner of the vast but fallow fields that expand along the west side of Highway 327 along a stretch the locals know as Coldwater Road. It’s Halloween night, and after waiting around his apartment for an hour for a single trick-or-treater, he’s come to this spooky house which he’s been visiting almost nightly for the past week to prepare for his lonely celebration of the holiday. Along the trail through the park, Russell has hung straw figures from the trees at intervals of a few paces. Anyone following them would come to the house, which was likewise peopled, not with the stick figures, but with tiny scarecrows made from dolls’ clothes and stuffed with straw. Outside in the woods, the figures are meant to be scary. Their heads are demon-faced pumpkins or little plastic skulls. But inside Russell is working on a veritable family of straw children with more traditional dolls’ heads. And there’s also a much larger figure, a life-sized one with features drawn onto a burlap face, propped on a gouged and half-disintegrated couch. This one sits with feet tucked daintily under the legs, in imitation of someone Russell actually used to know. And it wears a hoodie he found at a Goodwill store that closely resembles one routinely worn by this character from his past.

The room is lit by over a dozen jack-o-lanterns and twice as many short white candles. Russell is also making use of the old fireplace, but since the chimney is stopped up he’s restricted his efforts there to a few handfuls of kindling and three larger sticks. The smoky haze hangs in the air, carrying the orange glow of the pumpkin light throughout the room. From a lone speaker wired to a diminutive device in the corner emanates airily distorted alternative rock music from the 90s, back when he was in high school and still coming of age. Just now Russell is taking Snickers and Milky Ways and Twizzlers and stuffing them into the pinned-together arms of the doll-faced scarecrows. His idea is that in the coming days adventurous kids and curious adults will discover the bizarre and mysterious and creepy effigies of stick and straw hanging from the trees, follow them, and then find this unsettling tableau of a frighteningly uncanny family offering Halloween goodies to them as reward for their interest taking.

“Of course,” he says to the figure on the couch, “they’d have to be pretty crazy to eat any of it.” He imagines her laughter, and he laughs along with it. Then he stands up and walks over to a window, one that has yet to experience any cracks and thus provides a murky but still intact view out over the dark and barren fields. He’s been trying to come up with names for all his straw children, but now he begins to try to imagine his way back into his own real life, back into work, back into hanging out with his brother and visiting his dad and talking to his mom on the phone, back into going out to bars with Ray and his other arm’s-reach friends, maybe even back into those endlessly meandering conversations he used to have with his best friend Jason, back before everything go so stupidly and pointlessly complicated between them.

At least that’s what I like to imagine went through his mind then. I imagine him then turning around to consider his handiwork, his entire straw family, a gathering of burlap and plastic and sticks and tiny clothes—and one life-sized figure in an old-fashioned sweat suit watching over them all from the couch. In that final moment I imagine him being fully aware of the irony, maybe even muttering aloud something like, “If there was ever a guy who didn’t need to spend a bunch of time in self-imposed solitude…” Finally, I imagine his laughter, because whenever I think of him I hear his laughter peeling through my mind, wicked, contagious, masking his pain, transforming it into something he could live with—until he couldn’t. I imagine him looking one last time out of the window at the barren fields before turning around, and, almost as if on a whim, kicking over several of the candles. It’s impossible to tell which one first ignited one of the straw figures. By the time anyone even noticed the old house was alight it was already almost burned entirely to the ground.

The words you have been reading about Russell Arden’s last days were written by me, though many of them were either inspired by or directly transferred from the many notebooks-full of writing he left behind. I am the Jason of the story, but that’s not my real name, nor is Russell the real name of the man you’ve been reading about. I wanted to honor my friend without violating either his trust or his privacy. All the names and identifying details have been duly changed. Certain strange circumstances surrounded his death and its discovery, so no news crew ever showed up on the scene to interview the fire marshal or the police detective. No one ever read about it in a newspaper. But I was contacted at one point as part of a police investigation. That’s how I learned what had happened.

I won’t go into how things turned out between my wife and me because that’s not what this is about. Nor can I shed any light on the events he describes in the junkyard in Clarksville. All I can say is if there was a body found or an investigation undertaken I was never informed. (My suspicion is that the detectives never made it that far into his notebooks before turning them over to me, which he made clear was his wish on the inside covers of several of them—the closest thing he left to a will.)

I began writing this story two months after I learned of his death and began reading the contents of all those notebooks. This is the project I undertook to honor my friend, in acknowledgement of how right he was about how I had betrayed him. I truly did let life just happen to me. I justified it to myself by grasping onto the idea that it’s what happens to all adults, especially those with kids. When he punctured that bubble I’d been living in, I lashed out at him the worst way I knew how. He poked at my insecurities with such surgical precision I assumed it had to be deliberate, so I retaliated in kind. But the truth is that behind my insecurities lay the heart of my troubles, not just with my wife, but with a lot of things.

I should have been there for him. Whatever the nature of our falling out, I should have done more than send a few text messages to inquire about his absence. We really do forget how easy it is for these people who live alone to just disappear one day, with no one realizing they’re gone until it’s too late. However intense his preoccupations, however strange his beliefs, he shouldn’t have had any reason to doubt how important he was to me, to his family, to his other friends. We all let him down. So I’ve written this story as the beginning of a larger project to work toward some measure of atonement. I’m going to live a life of my own alongside the life that just happens. I’m going to expend the effort to take interest instead of waiting for it to take me. Most importantly, I’m going to make a point of taking interest in my friends and loved ones. Oh, and I’m going to learn to identify the species of trees—even if it kills me.

This account was already well-underway when I was first contacted by Jim Conway, who was working on his own telling of the story as part of a larger project of collecting strange stories. To him, Russell’s story was of a man who went crazy and made thousands of dolls out of straw to hang in the trees and all through the abandoned house he retreated to, the place where he died under mysterious circumstances. The “urban legend,” as he called it, came to his attention because a bunch of kids he’d surveyed told him about how they were finding newly made straw bundles and straw people hanging from the trees in Bicentennial Woods as recently as this past summer—three years after the fire. (You can still see the house’s foundation today.) Mr. Conway informed me the story was probably as much inspired by the legend that grew up around some Island of the Dolls in Mexico as it was by the real events. (It’s hard to know how many dolls Russell made, but I’m guessing it was closer to a hundred than a thousand.) Still, he was interested in what I had to say. I told him, as much of a kick as Russell would’ve gotten out of being the center of a local ghost story, there were some points I needed to clear up and some other points I needed to add. When I let him know I was writing my own version of the story, he was delighted, and it’s thanks to him that you’re able to read it here. 

Also read: 

Encounters, Inc.

And:

THE CREEPY KING EFFECT: WHY WE CAN'T HELP CONFUSING WRITERS WITH THEIR CHARACTERS

And:

CANNONBALL: A HALLOWEEN STORY

The Rowling Effect: The Uses and Abuses of Storytelling in Literary Fiction

It’s in school that almost everyone first experiences both the joys and the difficulties of reading stories. And almost everyone quickly learns to associate reading fiction with all the other abstract, impersonal, and cognitively demanding tasks forced on them by their teachers. One of the rewards of graduation, indeed of adulthood, is that you no longer have to read boring stories and novels you have to work hard to understand, all those lengthy texts that repay the effort with little else besides the bragging rights for having finished. (So, on top of being a waste of time, reading books makes normal people hate you.) One of the worst fates for an author, meanwhile, is to have your work assigned in one of those excruciating lit courses students treat as way stations on their way to gainful employment, an honor all but guaranteed to inspire lifelong loathing.

As a lonely endeavor, reading is most enticing—for many it’s only enticing—when viewed as an act of rebellion. (It’s no accident that the Harry Potter books begin with scenes of life with the Dursley family, caricaturizing as it does conformity and harsh, arbitrary discipline.) So, if students’ sole motivation to read comes from on-high, with the promise of quizzes and essays to follow, the natural defiance of adolescence ensures a deep-seated suspicion of the true purpose of the assignment and a stubborn resistance to any emotional connection with the characters. This is why all but the tamest, most credulous of students get filtered out on the way to advanced literature courses at universities, the kids neediest of praise from teachers and least capable of independent thought, which is in turn why so many cockamamie ideas proliferate in English departments. As arcane theories about the “indeterminacy of meaning” or “the author function” trickle down into high schools and grade schools, it becomes ever more difficult to imagine, let alone test, possible reforms to the methods teachers use to introduce kids to written stories.

Miraculously, reading persists at the margins of society, far removed from the bloodless academic exercises students are programmed to dread. The books you’re most likely to read after graduation are the type you read when you’re supposed to be reading something else, the comics tucked inside textbooks, the unassigned or outright banned books featuring characters struggling with sex, religious doubt, violence, abortion, or corrupt authorities. One of the reasons the market for books written for young adults is currently so vibrant and successful is that literature teachers haven’t gotten around to including any of the most recent novels in their syllabuses. And, if teachers take to heart the admonitions of critics like Ruth Graham, who insists that “the emotional and moral ambiguity of adult fiction—of the real world—is nowhere in evidence in YA fiction,” they never will. YA books' biggest success is making reading its own reward, not an exercise in the service of developing knowledge or character or maturity—whatever any of those are supposed to be. And what naysayers like Graham fear is that such enjoyment might be coming at the expense of those same budding virtues, and it may even forestall the reader’s graduation to the more refined gratifications that come from reading more ambiguous and complex—or more difficult, or less fantastical—fiction. 

Harry Potter became a cultural phenomenon at a time when authors, publishers, and critics were busy breaking the news of the dismal prognosis for the novel, beset as it was by the rise of the internet, the new golden age of television, and a growing impatience with texts extending more than a few paragraphs. The impact may not have been felt in the wider literary world if the popularity of Rowling’s books had been limited to children and young adults, but British and American grownups seem to have reasoned that if the youngsters think it’s cool it’s probably worth it for the rest of us young-at-hearts to take a look. Now not only are adults reading fiction written for teens, but authors—even renowned literary authors—are taking their cue from the YA world. Marquee writers like Donna Tartt and David Mitchell are spinning out elaborate yarns teeming with teen-tested genre tropes they hope to make respectable with a liberal heaping of highly polished literary prose. Predictably, the laments and jeremiads from old-school connoisseurs are beginning to show up in high-end periodicals. Here’s James Wood’s opening to a review of Mitchell’s latest novel:

As the novel’s cultural centrality dims, so storytelling—J.K. Rowling’s magical Owl of Minerva, equipped for a thousand tricks and turns—flies up and fills the air. Meaning is a bit of a bore, but storytelling is alive. The novel form can be difficult, cumbrously serious; storytelling is all pleasure, fantastical in its fertility, its ceaseless inventiveness. Easy to consume, too, because it excites hunger while simultaneously satisfying it: we continuously want more. The novel now aspires to the regality of the boxed DVD set: the throne is a game of them. And the purer the storytelling the better—where purity is the embrace of sheer occurrence, unburdened by deeper meaning. Publishers, readers, booksellers, even critics, acclaim the novel that one can deliciously sink into, forget oneself in, the novel that returns us to the innocence of childhood or the dream of the cartoon, the novel of a thousand confections and no unwanted significance. What becomes harder to find, and lonelier to defend, is the idea of the novel as—in Ford Maddox Ford’s words—a “medium of profoundly serious investigation into the human case.”

As is customary for Wood, the bracingly eloquent clarifications in this passage serve to misdirect readers from its overall opacity, which is to say he raises more questions than he answers.

              The most remarkable thing in Wood’s advance elegy (an idea right out of Tom Sawyer and reprised in The Fault in Our Stars) is the idea that “the novel” is somehow at odds with storytelling. The charge that a given novel fails to rise above mere kitsch is often a legitimate one: a likable but attractively flawed character meets another likable character whose equally attractive flaws perfectly complement and compensate for those of the first, so that they can together transcend their foibles and live happily ever after. This is the formula for commercial fiction, designed to uplift and delight (and make money). But the best of YA novels are hardly guilty of this kind of pandering. And even if we acknowledge that an author aiming simply to be popular and pleasing is a good formula in its own right—for crappy novels—it doesn’t follow that quality writing precludes pleasurable reading. The questions critics like Graham and Wood fail to answer as they bemoan the decline of ambiguity on the one hand and meaning on the other is what role either one of them naturally plays, either in storytelling or in literature, and what really distinguishes a story from a supposedly more serious and meaningful novel?

Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer-winning novel The Goldfinch has rekindled an old debate about the difference between genre fiction and serious literature. Evgenia Peretz chronicles some earlier iterations of the argument in Vanity Fair, and the popularity of Rowling’s wizards keeps coming up, both as an emblem of the wider problem and a point of evidence proving its existence. As Christopher Beha explains in the New Yorker,

The problem with “The Goldfinch,” its detractors said, was that it was essentially a Y.A. novel. Vanity Fair quoted Wood as saying that “the rapture with which this novel has been received is further proof of the infantilization of our literary culture: a world in which adults go around reading Harry Potter.

For Wood—and he’s hardly alone—fantastical fiction lacks meaning for the very reason so many readers find it enjoyable: it takes place in a world that simply doesn’t exist, with characters like no one you’ll ever really encounter, and the plots resolve in ways that, while offering some modicum of reassurance and uplift, ultimately mislead everyone about what real, adult life is all about. Whatever meaning these simplified and fantastical fictions may have is thus hermetically sealed within the world of the story.

            The terms used in the debates over whether there’s a meaningful difference between commercial and literary fiction and whether adults should be embarrassed to be caught reading Harry Potter are so poorly defined, and the nature of stories so poorly understood, that it seems like nothing will ever be settled. But the fuzziness here is gratuitous. Graham’s cherishing of ambiguity is perfectly arbitrary. Wood is simply wrong in positing a natural tension between storytelling and meaning. And these critics’ gropings after some solid feature of good, serious, complex, adult literature they can hold up to justify their impatience and disappointment in less ambitious readers is symptomatic of the profound vacuity of literary criticism as both a field of inquiry and an artistic, literary form of its own. Even a critic as erudite and perceptive as Wood—and as eminently worth reading, even when he’s completely wrong—relies on fundamental misconceptions about the nature of stories and the nature of art.

            For Wood, the terms story, genre, plot, and occurrence are all but interchangeable. That’s how he can condemn “the embrace of sheer occurrence, unburdened by deeper meaning.” But the type of meaning he seeks in literature sounds a lot like philosophy or science. How does he distinguish between novels and treatises? The problem here is that story is not reducible to sheer occurrence. Plots are not mere sequences of events. If I tell you I got in my car, went to the store, and came home, I’m recalling a series of actions—but it’s hardly a story. However, if I say I went to the store and while I was there I accidentally bumped shoulders with a guy who immediately flew into a rage, then I’ve begun to tell you a real story. Many critics and writing coaches characterize this crucial ingredient as conflict, but that’s only partly right. Conflicts can easily be reduced to a series of incidents. What makes a story a story is that it features some kind of dilemma, some situation in which the protagonist has to make a difficult decision. Do I risk humiliation and apologize profusely to the guy whose shoulder I bumped? Do I risk bodily harm and legal trouble by standing up for myself? There’s no easy answer. That’s why it has the makings of a good story.

            Meaning in stories is not declarative or propositional, just as the point of physical training doesn’t lie in any communicative aspect of the individual exercises. And you wouldn’t judge a training regimen based solely on the exercises’ resemblance to actions people perform in their daily lives. A workout is good if it’s both enjoyable and effective, that is, if going through it offers sufficient gratification to outweigh the difficulty—so you keep doing it—and if you see improvements in the way you look and feel. The pleasure humans get from stories is probably a result of the same evolutionary processes that make play fighting or play stalking fun for cats and dogs. We need to acquire skills for handling our complex social lives just as they need to acquire skills for fighting and hunting. Play is free-style practice made pleasurable by natural selection to ensure we’re rewarded for engaging in it. The form that play takes, as important as it is in preparing for real-life challenges, only needs to resemble real life enough for the skills it hones to be applicable. And there’s no reason reading about Harry Potter working through his suspicions and doubts about Dumbledore couldn’t help to prepare people of any age for a similar experience of having to question the wisdom or trustworthiness of someone they admire—even though they don’t know any wizards. (And isn’t this dilemma similar to the one so many of Saul Bellow’s characters face in dealing with their “reality instructors” in the novels Wood loves most?)

            The rather obvious principle that gets almost completely overlooked in debates about low versus high art is that the more refined and complex a work is the more effort will be necessary to fully experience it and the fewer people will be able to fully appreciate it. The exquisite pleasures of long-distance running, or classical music, or abstract art are reserved for those who have done adequate training and acquired sufficient background knowledge. Apart from this inescapable corollary of aesthetic refinement and sophistication, though, there’s a fetishizing of difficulty for the sake of difficulty apparent in many art forms. In literature, novels celebrated by the supposed authorities, books like Ulysses, Finnegan’s Wake, and Infinite Jest, offer none of the joys of good stories. Is it any wonder so many readers have stopped listening to the authorities? Wood is not so foolish as to equate difficulty with quality, as fans of Finnegan’s Wake must, but he does indeed make the opposite mistake—assuming that lack of difficulty proves lack of quality. There’s also an unmistakable hint of the puritanical, even the masochistic in Wood’s separation of the novel from storytelling and its pleasures. He’s like the hulking power lifter overcome with disappointment at all the dilettantish fitness enthusiasts parading around the gym, smiling, giggling, not even exerting themselves enough to feel any real pain.  

            What the Harry Potter books are telling us is that there still exists a real hunger for stories, not just as flippant and senseless contrivances, but as rigorously imagined moral dilemmas faced by characters who inspire strong feelings, whether positive, negative, or ambivalent. YA fiction isn't necessarily simpler, its characters invariably bland baddies or goodies, its endings always neat and happy. The only things that reliably distinguish it are its predominantly young adult characters and its general accessibility. It's probably true that The Goldfinch's appeal to many people derives from it being both literary and accessible. More interestingly, it probably turns off just as many people, not because it's overplotted, but because the story is mediocre, the central dilemma of the plot too easily resolved, the main character too passive and pathetic. Call me an idealist, but I believe that literary language can be challenging while not being impenetrable, that plots can be both eventful and meaningful, and that there’s a reliable blend of ingredients for mixing this particular magic potion: characters who actually do things, whose actions get them mixed up in high-stakes dilemmas, who are described in language that both captures their personalities and conveys the urgency of their circumstances. This doesn’t mean every novel needs to have dragons and werewolves, but it does mean having them doesn’t necessarily make a novel unworthy of serious attention from adults. And we need not worry about the fate of less fantastical literature because there will always be a small percentage of the population who prefers, at least on occasion, a heavier lift.

Also read: 

HOW VIOLENT FICTION WORKS: ROHAN WILSON’S “THE ROVING PARTY” AND JAMES WOOD’S SANGUINARY SUBLIME FROM CONRAD TO MCCARTHY

And: 

LET'S PLAY KILL YOUR BROTHER: FICTION AS A MORAL DILEMMA GAME

And: 

WHAT'S THE POINT OF DIFFICULT READING?

How Violent Fiction Works: Rohan Wilson’s “The Roving Party” and James Wood’s Sanguinary Sublime from Conrad to McCarthy

            Any acclaimed novel of violence must be cause for alarm to anyone who believes stories encourage the behaviors depicted in them or contaminate the minds of readers with the attitudes of the characters. “I always read the book as an allegory, as a disguised philosophical argument,” writes David Shields in his widely celebrated manifesto Reality Hunger. Suspicious of any such disguised effort at persuasion, Shields bemoans the continuing popularity of traditional novels and agitates on behalf of a revolutionary new form of writing, a type of collage that is neither marked as fiction nor claimed as truth but functions rather as a happy hybrid—or, depending on your tastes, a careless mess—and is in any case completely lacking in narrative structure. This is because to him giving narrative structure to a piece of writing is itself a rhetorical move. “I always try to read form as content, style as meaning,” Shields writes. “The book is always, in some sense, stutteringly, about its own language” (197).

As arcane as Shields’s approach to reading may sound, his attempt to find some underlying message in every novel resonates with the preoccupations popular among academic literary critics. But what would it mean if novels really were primarily concerned with their own language, as so many students in college literature courses are taught? What if there really were some higher-order meaning we absorbed unconsciously through reading, even as we went about distracting ourselves with the details of description, character, and plot? Might a novel like Heart of Darkness, instead of being about Marlowe’s growing awareness of Kurtz’s descent into inhuman barbarity, really be about something that at first seems merely contextual and incidental, like the darkness—the evil—of sub-Saharan Africa and its inhabitants? Might there be a subtle prompt to regard Kurtz’s transformation as some breed of enlightenment, a fatal lesson encapsulated and propagated by Conrad’s fussy and beautifully tantalizing prose, as if the author were wielding the English language like the fastenings of a yoke over the entire continent?

Novels like Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and, more recently, Rohan Wilson’s The Roving Party, take place amid a transition from tribal societies to industrial civilization similar to the one occurring in Conrad’s Congo. Is it in this seeming backdrop that we should seek the true meaning of these tales of violence? Both McCarthy’s and Wilson’s novels, it must be noted, represent conspicuous efforts at undermining the sanitized and Manichean myths that arose to justify the displacement and mass killing of indigenous peoples by Europeans as they spread over the far-flung regions of the globe. The white men hunting “Indians” for the bounties on their scalps in Blood Meridian are as beastly and bloodthirsty as the savages peopling the most lurid colonial propaganda, just as the Europeans making up Wilson’s roving party are only distinguishable by the relative degrees of their moral degradation, all of them, including the protagonist, moving in the shadow of their chief quarry, a native Tasmanian chief.

If these novels are about their own language, their form comprising their true content, all in the service of some allegory or argument, then what pleasure would anyone get from them, suggesting as they do that to partake of the fruit of civilization is to become complicit in the original sin of the massacre that made way for it? “There is no document of civilization,” Walter Benjamin wrote, “that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” It could be that to read these novels is to undergo a sort of rite of expiation, similar to the ritual reenactment of the crucifixion performed by Christians in the lead up to Easter. Alternatively, the real argument hidden in these stories may be still more insidious; what if they’re making the case that violence is both eternal and unavoidable, that it is in our nature to relish it, so there’s no more point in resisting the urge personally than in trying to bring about reform politically?

            Shields intimates that the reason we enjoy stories is that they warrant our complacency when he writes, “To ‘tell a story well’ is to make what one writes resemble the schemes people are used to—in other words, their ready-made idea of reality” (200). Just as we take pleasure in arguments for what we already believe, Shields maintains (explicitly) that we delight in stories that depict familiar scenes and resolve in ways compatible with our convictions. And this equating of the pleasure we take in reading with the pleasure we take in having our beliefs reaffirmed is another practice nearly universal among literary critics. Sophisticated readers know better than to conflate the ideas professed by villainous characters like the judge in Blood Meridian with those of the author, but, as one prominent critic complains,

there is often the disquieting sense that McCarthy’s fiction puts certain fond American myths under pressure merely to replace them with one vaster myth—eternal violence, or [Harold] Bloom’s “universal tragedy of blood.” McCarthy’s fiction seems to say, repeatedly, that this is how it has been and how it always will be.

What’s interesting about this interpretation is that it doesn’t come from anyone normally associated with Shields’s school of thought on literature. Indeed, its author, James Wood, is something of a scourge to postmodern scholars of Shields’s ilk.

Wood takes McCarthy to task for his alleged narrative dissemination of the myth of eternal violence in a 2005 New Yorker piece, Red Planet: The Sanguinary Sublime of Cormac McCarthy, a review of his then latest novel No Country for Old Men. Wood too, it turns out, hungers for reality in his novels, and he faults McCarthy’s book for substituting psychological profundity with the pabulum of standard plot devices. He insists that

the book gestures not toward any recognizable reality but merely toward the narrative codes already established by pulp thrillers and action films. The story is itself cinematically familiar. It is 1980, and a young man, Llewelyn Moss, is out antelope hunting in the Texas desert. He stumbles upon several bodies, three trucks, and a case full of money. He takes the money. We know that he is now a marked man; indeed, a killer named Anton Chigurh—it is he who opens the book by strangling the deputy—is on his trail.

Because McCarthy relies on the tropes of a familiar genre to convey his meaning, Wood suggests, that meaning can only apply to the hermetic universe imagined by that genre. In other words, any meaning conveyed in No Country for Old Men is rendered null in transit to the real world.

When Chigurh tells the blameless Carla Jean that “the shape of your path was visible from the beginning,” most readers, tutored in the rhetoric of pulp, will write it off as so much genre guff. But there is a way in which Chigurh is right: the thriller form knew all along that this was her end.

The acuity of Wood’s perception when it comes to the intricacies of literary language is often staggering, and his grasp of how diction and vocabulary provide clues to the narrator’s character and state of mind is equally prodigious. But, in this dismissal of Chigurh as a mere plot contrivance, as in his estimation of No Country for Old Men in general as a “morally empty book,” Wood is quite simply, quite startlingly, mistaken. And we might even say that the critical form knew all along that he would make this mistake.

           When Chigurh tells Carla Jean her path was visible, he’s not voicing any hardboiled fatalism, as Wood assumes; he’s pointing out that her predicament came about as a result of a decision her husband Llewelyn Moss made with full knowledge of the promised consequences. And we have to ask, could Wood really have known, before Chigurh showed up at the Moss residence, that Carla Jean would be made to pay for her husband’s defiance? It’s easy enough to point out superficial similarities to genre conventions in the novel (many of which it turns inside-out), but it doesn’t follow that anyone who notices them will be able to foretell how the book will end. Wood, despite his reservations, admits that No Country for Old Men is “very gripping.” But how could it be if the end were so predictable? And, if it were truly so morally empty, why would Wood care how it was going to end enough to be gripped? Indeed, it is in the realm of the characters’ moral natures that Wood is the most blinded by his reliance on critical convention. He argues,

Lewelyn Moss, the hunted, ought not to resemble Anton Chigurh, the hunter, but the flattening effect of the plot makes them essentially indistinguishable. The reader, of course, sides with the hunted. But both have been made unfree by the fake determinism of the thriller.

How could the two men’s fates be determined by the genre if in a good many thrillers the good guy, the hunted, prevails?

One glaring omission in Wood’s analysis is that Moss initially escapes undetected with the drug money he discovers at the scene of the shootout he happens upon while hunting, but he is then tormented by his conscience until he decides to return to the trucks with a jug of water for a dying man who begged him for a drink. “I’m fixin to go do somethin dumbern hell but I’m goin anyways,” he says to Carla Jean when she asks what he’s doing. “If I don’t come back tell Mother I love her” (24). Llewelyn, throughout the ensuing chase, is thus being punished for doing the right thing, an injustice that unsettles readers to the point where we can’t look away—we’re gripped—until we’re assured that he ultimately defeats the agents of that injustice. While Moss risks his life to give a man a drink, Chigurh, as Wood points out, is first seen killing a cop. Moreover, it’s hard to imagine Moss showing up to murder an innocent woman to make good on an ultimatum he’d presented to a man who had already been killed in the interim—as Chigurh does in the scene when he explains to Carla Jean that she’s to be killed because Llewelyn made the wrong choice.

Chigurh is in fact strangely principled, in a morally inverted sort of way, but the claim that he’s indistinguishable from Moss bespeaks a failure of attention completely at odds with the uncannily keen-eyed reading we’ve come to expect from Wood. When he revisits McCarthy’s writing in a review of the 2006 post-apocalyptic novel The Road, collected in the book The Fun Stuff, Wood is once again impressed by McCarthy’s “remarkable effects” but thoroughly baffled by “the matter of his meanings” (61). The novel takes us on a journey south to the sea with a father and his son as they scrounge desperately for food in abandoned houses along the way. Wood credits McCarthy for not substituting allegory for the answer to “a simpler question, more taxing to the imagination and far closer to the primary business of fiction making: what would this world without people look like, feel like?” But then he unaccountably struggles to sift out the novel’s hidden philosophical message. He writes,

A post-apocalyptic vision cannot but provoke dilemmas of theodicy, of the justice of fate; and a lament for the Deus absconditus is both implicit in McCarthy’s imagery—the fine simile of the sun that circles the earth “like a grieving mother with a lamp”—and explicit in his dialogue. Early in the book, the father looks at his son and thinks: “If he is not the word of God God never spoke.” There are thieves and murderers and even cannibals on the loose, and the father and son encounter these fearsome envoys of evil every so often. The son needs to think of himself as “one of the good guys,” and his father assures him that this is the side they are indeed on. (62)

We’re left wondering, is there any way to answer the question of what a post-apocalypse would be like in a story that features starving people reduced to cannibalism without providing fodder for genre-leery critics on the lookout for characters they can reduce to mere “envoys of evil”?

As trenchant as Wood is regarding literary narration, and as erudite—or pedantic, depending on your tastes—as he is regarding theology, the author of the excellent book How Fiction Works can’t help but fall afoul of his own, and his discipline’s, thoroughgoing ignorance when it comes to how plots work, what keeps the moral heart of a story beating. The way Wood fails to account for the forest comprised of the trees he takes such thorough inventory of calls to mind a line of his own from a chapter in The Fun Stuff about Edmund Wilson, describing an uncharacteristic failure on part of this other preeminent critic:

Yet the lack of attention to detail, in a writer whose greatness rests supremely on his use of detail, the unwillingness to talk of fiction as if narrative were a special kind of aesthetic experience and not a reducible proposition… is rather scandalous. (72)

To his credit, though, Wood never writes about novels as if they were completely reducible to their propositions; he doesn’t share David Shields’s conviction that stories are nothing but allegories or disguised philosophical arguments. Indeed, few critics are as eloquent as Wood on the capacity of good narration to communicate the texture of experience in a way all literate people can recognize from their own lived existences.

            But Wood isn’t interested in plot. He just doesn’t seem to like them. (There’s no mention of plot in either the table of contents or the index to How Fiction Works.) Worse, he shares Shields’s and other postmodern critics’ impulse to decode plots and their resolutions—though he also searches for ways to reconcile whatever moral he manages to pry from the story with its other elements. This is in fact one of the habits that tends to derail his reviews. Even after lauding The Road’s eschewal of easy allegory in place of the hard work of ground-up realism, Wood can’t help trying to decipher the end of the novel in the context of the religious struggle he sees taking place in it. He writes of the son’s survival,

The boy is indeed a kind of last God, who is “carrying the fire” of belief (the father and son used to speak of themselves, in a kind of familial shorthand, as people who were carrying the fire: it seems to be a version of being “the good guys”.) Since the breath of God passes from man to man, and God cannot die, this boy represents what will survive of humanity, and also points to how life will be rebuilt. (64)

This interpretation underlies Wood’s contemptuous attitude toward other reviewers who found the story uplifting, including Oprah, who used The Road as one of her book club selections. To Wood, the message rings false. He complains that

a paragraph of religious consolation at the end of such a novel is striking, and it throws the book off balance a little, precisely because theology has not seemed exactly central to the book’s inquiry. One has a persistent, uneasy sense that theodicy and the absent God have been merely exploited by the book, engaged with only lightly, without much pressure of interrogation. (64)

Inquiry? Interrogation? Whatever happened to “special kind of aesthetic experience”? Wood first places seemingly inconsequential aspects of the novel at the center of his efforts to read meaning into it, and then he faults the novel for not exploring these aspects at greater length. The more likely conclusion we might draw here is that Wood is simply and woefully mistaken in his interpretation of the book’s meaning. Indeed, Wood’s jump to theology, despite his insistence on its inescapability, is really quite arbitrary, one of countless themes a reader might possibly point to as indicative of the novel’s one true meaning.

Perhaps the problem here is the assumption that a story must have a meaning, some point that can be summed up in a single statement, for it to grip us. Getting beyond the issue of what statement the story is trying to make, we can ask what it is about the aesthetic experience of reading a novel that we find so compelling. For Wood, it’s clear the enjoyment comes from a sort of communion with the narrator, a felt connection forged by language, which effects an estrangement from his own mundane experiences by passing them through the lens of the character’s idiosyncratic vocabulary, phrasings, and metaphors. The sun dimly burning through an overcast sky looks much different after you’ve heard it compared to “a grieving mother with a lamp.” This pleasure in authorial communion and narrative immersion is commonly felt by the more sophisticated of literary readers. But what about less sophisticated readers? Many people who have a hard enough time simply understanding complex sentences, never mind discovering in them clues to the speaker’s personality, nevertheless become absorbed in narratives.

Developmental psychologists Karen Wynn and Paul Bloom, along with then graduate student Kiley Hamlin, serendipitously discovered a major clue to the mystery of why fictional stories engage humans’ intellectual and emotional faculties so powerfully while trying to determine at what age children begin to develop a moral sense. In a series of experiments conducted at the Yale Infant Cognition Center, Wynn and her team found that babies under a year old, even as young as three months, are easily induced to attribute agency to inanimate objects with nothing but a pair of crude eyes to suggest personhood. And, astonishingly, once agency is presumed, these infants begin attending to the behavior of the agents for evidence of their propensities toward being either helpfully social or selfishly aggressive—even when they themselves aren’t the ones to whom the behaviors are directed. 

            In one of the team’s most dramatic demonstrations, the infants watch puppet shows featuring what Bloom, in his book about the research program Just Babies, refers to as “morality plays” (30). Two rabbits respond to a tiger’s overture of rolling a ball toward them in different ways, one by rolling it back playfully, the other by snatching it up and running away with it. When the babies are offered a choice between the two rabbits after the play, they nearly always reach for the “good guy.” However, other versions of the experiment show that babies do favor aggressive rabbits over nice ones—provided that the victim is itself guilty of some previously witnessed act of selfishness or aggression. So the infants prefer cooperation over selfishness and punishment over complacency.

            Wynn and Hamlin didn’t intend to explore the nature of our fascination with fiction, but even the most casual assessment of our most popular stories suggests their appeal to audiences depends on a distinction similar to the one made by the infants in these studies. Indeed, the most basic formula for storytelling could be stated: good guy struggles against bad guy. Our interest is automatically piqued once such a struggle is convincingly presented, and it doesn’t depend on any proposition that can be gleaned from the outcome.

We favor the good guy because his (or her) altruism triggers an emotional response—we like him. And our interest in the ongoing developments of the story—the plot—are both emotional and dynamic. This is what the aesthetic experience of narrative consists of. 

            The beauty in stories comes from the elevation we get from the experience of witnessing altruism, and the higher the cost to the altruist the more elevating the story. The symmetry of plots is the balance of justice. Stories meant to disturb readers disrupt that balance.The crudest stories pit good guys against bad guys. The more sophisticated stories feature what we hope are good characters struggling against temptations or circumstances that make being good difficult, or downright dangerous. In other words, at the heart of any story is a moral dilemma, a situation in which characters must decide who deserves what fate and what they’re willing to pay to ensure they get it. The specific details of that dilemma are what we recognize as the plot.

The most basic moral, lesson, proposition, or philosophical argument inherent in the experience of attending to a story derives then not from some arbitrary decision on the part of the storyteller but from an injunction encoded in our genome. At some point in human evolution, our ancestor’s survival began to depend on mutual cooperation among all the members of the tribe, and so to this day, and from a startlingly young age, we’re on the lookout for anyone who might be given to exploiting the cooperative norms of our group. Literary critics could charge that the appeal of the altruist is merely another theme we might at this particular moment in history want to elevate to the status of most fundamental aspect of narrative. But I would challenge anyone who believes some other theme, message, or dynamic is more crucial to our engagement with stories to subject their theory to the kind of tests the interplay of selfish and altruistic impulses routinely passes in the Yale studies. Do babies care about theodicy? Are Wynn et al.’s morality plays about their own language?

This isn’t to say that other themes or allegories never play a role in our appreciation of novels. But whatever role they do play is in every case ancillary to the emotional involvement we have with the moral dilemmas of the plot. 1984 and Animal Farm are clear examples of allegories—but their greatness as stories is attributable to the appeal of their characters and the convincing difficulty of their dilemmas. Without a good plot, no one would stick around for the lesson. If we didn’t first believe Winston Smith deserved to escape Room 101 and that Boxer deserved a better fate than the knackery, we’d never subsequently be moved to contemplate the evils of totalitarianism. What makes these such powerful allegories is that, if you subtracted the political message, they’d still be great stories because they engage our moral emotions.

            What makes violence so compelling in fiction then is probably not that it sublimates our own violent urges, or that it justifies any civilization’s past crimes; violence simply ups the stakes for the moral dilemmas faced by the characters. The moment by moment drama in The Road, for instance, has nothing to do with whether anyone continues to believe in God. The drama comes from the father and son’s struggles to resist having to succumb to theft and cannibalism to survive. That’s the most obvious theme recurring throughout the novel. And you get the sense that were it not for the boy’s constant pleas for reassurance that they would never kill and eat anyone—the ultimate act of selfish aggression—and that they would never resort to bullying and stealing, the father quite likely would have made use of such expedients. The fire that they’re carrying is not the light of God; it’s the spark of humanity, the refusal to forfeit their human decency. (Wood doesn't catch that the fire was handed off from Sheriff Bell's father at the end of No Country.) The boy may very well be a redeemer, in that he helps his father make it to the end of his life with a clear conscience, but unless you believe morality is exclusively the bailiwick of religion God’s role in the story is marginal at best.

            What the critics given to dismissing plots as pointless fabrications fail to consider is that just as idiosyncratic language and simile estranges readers from their mundane existence so too the high-stakes dilemmas that make up plots can make us see our own choices in a different light, effecting their own breed of estrangement with regard to our moral perceptions and habits. In The Roving Party, set in the early nineteenth century, Black Bill, a native Tasmanian raised by a white family, joins a group of men led by a farmer named John Batman to hunt and kill other native Tasmanians and secure the territory for the colonials. The dilemmas Bill faces are like nothing most readers will ever encounter. But their difficulty is nonetheless universally understandable. In the following scene, Bill, who is also called the Vandemonian, along with a young boy and two native scouts, watches as Batman steps up to a wounded clansman in the aftermath of a raid on his people.

Batman considered the silent man secreted there in the hollow and thumbed back the hammers. He put one foot either side of the clansman’s outstretched legs and showed him the long void of those bores, standing thus prepared through a few creakings of the trees. The warrior was wide-eyed, looking to Bill and to the Dharugs.

The eruption raised the birds squealing from the branches. As the gunsmoke cleared the fellow slumped forward and spilled upon the soil a stream of arterial blood. The hollow behind was peppered with pieces of skull and other matter. John Batman snapped open the locks, cleaned out the pans with his cloth and mopped the blood off the barrels. He looked around at the rovers.

The boy was openmouthed, pale, and he stared at the ruination laid out there at his feet and stepped back as the blood ran near his rags. The Dharugs had by now turned away and did not look back. They began retracing their track through the rainforest, picking among the fallen trunks. But Black Bill alone among that party met Batman’s eye. He resettled his fowling piece across his back and spat on the ferns, watching Batman. Batman pulled out his rum, popped loose the cork, and drank. He held out the vessel to Bill. The Vandemonian looked at him. Then he turned to follow the Parramatta men out among the lemon myrtles and antique pines. (92)

If Rohan Wilson had wanted to expound on the evils of colonialism in Tasmania, he might have written about how Batman, a real figure from history, murdered several men he could easily have taken prisoner. But Wilson wanted to tell a story, and he knew that dilemmas like this one would grip our emotions. He likewise knew he didn’t have to explain that Bill, however much he disapproves of the murder, can’t afford to challenge his white benefactor in any less subtle manner than meeting his eyes and refusing his rum.

            Unfortunately, Batman registers the subtle rebuke all too readily. Instead of killing a native lawman wounded in a later raid himself, Batman leaves the task to Bill, who this time isn’t allowed the option of silently disapproving. But the way Wilson describes Bill’s actions leaves no doubt in the reader’s mind about his feelings, and those feelings have important consequences for how we feel about the character.

Black Bill removed his hat. He worked back the heavy cocks of both barrels and they settled with a dull clunk. Taralta clutched at his swaddled chest and looked Bill in the eyes, as wordless as ground stone. Bill brought up the massive gun and steadied the barrels across his forearm as his broken fingers could not take the weight. The sight of those octagonal bores levelled on him caused the lawman to huddle down behind his hands and cry out, and Bill steadied the gun but there was no clear shot he might take. He waited.

                        See now, he said. Move your hands.

            The lawman crabbed away over the dirt, still with his arms upraised, and Bill followed him and kicked him in the bandaged ribs and kicked at his arms.

                        menenger, Bill said, menenger.

The lawman curled up more tightly. Bill brought the heel of his boot to bear on the wounded man but he kicked in vain while Taralta folded his arms ever tighter around his head.

Black Bill lowered the gun. Wattlebirds made their yac-a-yac coughs in the bush behind and he gazed at the blue hills to the south and the snow clouds forming above them. When Bill looked again at the lawman he was watching through his hands, dirt and ash stuck in the cords of his ochred hair. Bill brought the gun up, balanced it across his arm again and tucked the butt into his shoulder. Then he fired into the lawman’s head.

The almighty concussion rattled the wind in his chest and the gun bucked from his grip and fell. He turned away, holding his shoulder. Blood had spattered his face, his arms, the front of his shirt. For a time he would not look at the body of the lawman where it lay near the fire. He rubbed at the bruising on his shoulder; watched storms amass around the southern peaks. After a while he turned to survey the slaughter he had wrought.

One of the lawman’s arms was gone at the elbow and the teeth seated in the jawbone could be seen through the cheek. There was flesh blown every place. He picked up the Manton gun. The locks were soiled and he fingered out the grime, and then with the corner of his coat cleaned the pan and blew into the latchworks. He brought the weapon up to eye level and peered along its sights for barrel warps or any misalignment then, content, slung the leather on his shoulder. Without a rearward glance he stalked off, his hat replaced, his boots slipping in the blood. Smoke from the fire blew around him in a snarl raised on the wind and dispersed again on the same. (102-4)

Depending on their particular ideological bent, critics may charge that a scene like this simply promotes the type of violence it depicts, or that it encourages a negative view of native Tasmanians—or indigenous peoples generally—as of such weak moral fiber that they can be made to turn against their own countrymen. And pointing out that the aspect of the scene that captures our attention is the process, the experience, of witnessing Bill’s struggle to resolve his dilemma would do little to ease their worries; after all, even if the message is ancillary, its influence could still be pernicious.

            The reason that critics applying their favored political theories to their analyses of fiction so often stray into the realm of the absurd is that the only readers who experience stories the same way as they do will be the ones who share the same ideological preoccupations. You can turn any novel into a Rorschach, pulling out disparate shapes and elements to blur into some devious message. But any reader approaching the writing without your political theories or your critical approach will likely come away with a much more basic and obvious lesson. Black Bill’s dilemma is that he has to kill many of his fellow Tasmanians if he wants to continue living as part of a community of whites. If readers take on his attitude toward killing as it’s demonstrated in the scene when he kills Taralta, they’ll be more reluctant to do it, not less. Bill clearly loathes what he’s forced to do. And if any race comes out looking bad it’s the whites, since they’re the ones whose culture forces Bill to choose between his family’s well-being and the dictates of his conscience.

Readers likely have little awareness of being influenced by the overarching themes in their favorite stories, but upon reflection the meaning of those themes is usually pretty obvious. Recent research into how reading the Harry Potter books has impacted young people’s political views, for instance, shows that fans of the series are more accepting of out-groups, more tolerant, less predisposed to authoritarianism, more supporting of equality, and more opposed to violence and torture. Anthony Gierzynsky, the author of the study, points out, “As Harry Potter fans will have noted, these are major themes repeated throughout the series.” The messages that reach readers are the conspicuous ones, not the supposedly hidden ones critics pride themselves on being able to suss out. 

            It’s an interesting question just how wicked stories could persuade us to be, relying as they do on our instinctual moral sense. Fans could perhaps be biased toward evil by themes about the threat posed by some out-group, or the debased nature of the lower orders, or nonbelievers in the accepted deities—since the salience of these concepts likewise seems to be inborn. But stories told from the perspective of someone belonging to the persecuted group could provide an antidote. At any rate, there’s a solid case to be made that novels have helped the moral of arc of history bend toward greater justice and compassion.

            Even a novel with violence as pervasive and chaotic as it is in Blood Meridian sets up a moral gradient for the characters to occupy—though finding where the judge fits is a quite complicated endeavor—and the one with the most qualms about killing happens to be the protagonist, referred to simply as the kid. “You alone were mutinous,” the judge says to him. “You alone reserved in your soul some corner of clemency for the heathen” (299). The kid’s character is revealed much the way Black Bill’s is in The Roving Party, as readers witness him working through high-stakes dilemmas. After drawing arrows to determine who in the band of scalp hunters will stay behind to kill some of their wounded (to prevent a worse fate at the hands of the men pursuing them), the kid finds himself tasked with euthanizing a man who would otherwise survive.

                        You wont thank me if I let you off, he said.

                        Do it then you son of a bitch.

            The kid sat. A light wind was blowing out of the north and some doves had begun to call in the thicket of greasewood behind them.

                        If you want me just to leave you I will.

                        Shelby didnt answer

                        He pushed a furrow in the sand with the heel of his boot. You’ll have to say.

                        Will you leave me a gun?

                        You know I can’t leave you no gun.

                        You’re no better than him. Are you?

                        The kid didn’t answer. (208)

That “him” is ambiguous; it could either be Glanton, the leader of the gang whose orders the kid is ignoring, or the judge, who engages him throughout the later parts of the novel in a debate about the necessity of violence in history. We know by now that the kid really is better than the judge—at least in the sense that Shelby means. And the kid handles the dilemma, as best he can, by hiding Shelby in some bushes and leaving him with a canteen of water.

These three passages from The Roving Party and Blood Meridian reveal as well something about the language commonly used by authors of violent novels going back to Conrad (perhaps as far back as Tolstoy). Faced with the choice of killing a man—or of standing idly by and allowing him to be killed—the characters hesitate, and the space of their hesitation is filled with details like the type of birdsong that can be heard. This style of “dirty realism,” a turning away from abstraction, away even from thought, to focus intensely on physical objects and the natural world, frustrates critics like James Wood because they prefer their prose to register the characters’ meanderings of mind in the way that only written language can. Writing about No Country for Old Men, Wood complains about all the labeling and descriptions of weapons and vehicles to the exclusion of thought and emotion.

Here is Hemingway’s influence, so popular in male American fiction, of both the pulpy and the highbrow kind. It recalls the language of “A Farewell to Arms”: “He looked very dead. It was raining. I had liked him as well as anyone I ever knew.” What appears to be thought is in fact suppressed thought, the mere ratification of male taciturnity. The attempt to stifle sentimentality—“He looked very dead”—itself comes to seem a sentimental mannerism. McCarthy has never been much interested in consciousness and once declared that as far as he was concerned Henry James wasn’t literature. Alas, his new book, with its gleaming equipment of death, its mindless men and absent (but appropriately sentimentalized) women, its rigid, impacted prose, and its meaningless story, is perhaps the logical result of a literary hostility to Mind.

Here again Wood is relaxing his otherwise razor-keen capacity for gleaning insights from language and relying instead on the anemic conventions of literary criticism—a discipline obsessed with the enactment of gender roles. (I’m sure Suzanne Collins would be amused by this idea of masculine taciturnity.) But Wood is right to recognize the natural tension between a literature of action and a literature of mind. Imagine how much the impact of Black Bill’s struggle with the necessity of killing Taralta would be blunted if we were privy to his thoughts, all of which are implicit in the scene as Wilson has rendered it anyway.

            Fascinatingly, though, it seems that Wood eventually realized the actual purpose of this kind of evasive prose—and it was Cormac McCarthy he learned it from. As much as Wood lusts after some leap into theological lucubration as characters reflect on the lessons of the post-apocalypse or the meanings of violence, the psychological reality is that it is often in the midst of violence or when confronted with imminent death that people are least given to introspection. As Wood explains in writing about the prose style of The Road,

McCarthy writes at one point that the father could not tell the son about life before the apocalypse: “He could not construct for the child’s pleasure the world he’d lost without constructing the loss as well and thought perhaps the child had known this better than he.” It is the same for the book’s prose style: just as the father cannot construct a story for the boy without also constructing the loss, so the novelist cannot construct the loss without the ghost of the departed fullness, the world as it once was. (55)

The rituals of weapon reloading, car repair, and wound wrapping that Wood finds so offputtingly affected in No Country for Old Men are precisely the kind of practicalities people would try to engage their minds with in the aftermath of violence to avoid facing the reality. But this linguistic and attentional coping strategy is not without moral implications of its own.

            In the opening of The Roving Party, Black Bill receives a visit from some of the very clansmen he’s been asked by John Batman to hunt. The headman of the group is a formidable warrior named Manalargena (another real historical figure), who is said to have magical powers. He has come to recruit Bill to help in fighting against the whites, unaware of Bill’s already settled loyalties. When Bill refuses to come fight with Manalargena, the headman’s response is to tell a story about two brothers who live near a river where they catch plenty of crayfish, make fires, and sing songs. Then someone new arrives on the scene:

Hunter come to the river. He is hungry hunter you see. He want crayfish. He see them brother eating crayfish, singing song. He want crayfish too. He bring up spear. Here the headman made as if to raise something. He bring up that spear and he call out: I hungry, you give me that crayfish. He hold that spear and he call out. But them brother they scared you see. They scared and they run. They run and they change. They change to wallaby and they jump. Now they jump and jump and the hunter he follow them.

So hunter he change too. He run and he change to that wallaby and he jump. Now three wallaby jump near river. They eat grass. They forget crayfish. They eat grass and they drink water and they forget crayfish. Three wallaby near the river. Very big river. (7-8)

Bill initially dismisses the story, saying it makes no sense. Indeed, as a story, it’s terrible. The characters have no substance and the transformation seems morally irrelevant. The story is pure allegory. Interestingly, though, by the end of the novel, its meaning is perfectly clear to Bill. Taking on the roles of hunter and hunted leaves no room for songs, no place for what began the hunt in the first place, creating a life closer to that of animals than of humans. There are no more fires.

            Wood counts three registers authors like Conrad and McCarthy—and we can add Wilson—use in their writing. The first is the dirty realism that conveys the characters’ unwillingness to reflect on their circumstances or on the state of their souls. The third is the lofty but oblique discourse on God’s presence or absence in a world of tragedy and carnage Wood finds so ineffectual. For most readers, though, it’s the second register that stands out. Here’s how Wood describes it:

Hard detail and a fine eye is combined with exquisite, gnarled, slightly antique (and even slightly clumsy or heavy) lyricism. It ought not to work, and sometimes it does not. But many of its effects are beautiful—and not only beautiful, but powerfully efficient as poetry. (59)

This description captures what’s both great and frustrating about the best and worst lines in these authors’ novels. But Wood takes the tradition for granted without asking why this haltingly graceful and heavy-handedly subtle language is so well-suited to these violent stories. The writers are compelled to use this kind of language by the very effects of the plot and setting that critics today so often fail to appreciate—though Wood does gesture toward it in the title of his essay on No Country for Old Men. The dream logic of song and simile that goes into the aesthetic experience of bearing witness to the characters sparsely peopling the starkly barren and darkly ominous landscapes of these novels carries within it the breath of the sublime.

            In coming to care about characters whose fates unfold in the aftermath of civilization, or in regions where civilization has yet to take hold, places where bloody aggression and violent death are daily concerns and witnessed realities, we’re forced to adjust emotionally to the worlds they inhabit. Experiencing a single death brings a sense of tragedy, but coming to grips with a thousand deaths has a more curious effect. And it is this effect that the strange tangles of metaphorical prose both gesture toward and help to induce. The sheer immensity of the loss, the casual brushing away of so many bodies and the blotting out of so much unique consciousness, overstresses the capacity of any individual to comprehend it. The result is paradoxical, a fixation on the material objects still remaining, and a sliding off of one’s mind onto a plane of mental existence where the material has scarcely any reality at all because it has scarcely any significance at all. The move toward the sublime is a lifting up toward infinite abstraction, the most distant perspective ever possible on the universe, where every image is a symbol for some essence, where every embrace is a symbol for human connectedness, where every individual human is a symbol for humanity. This isn’t the abstraction of logic, the working out of implications about God or cosmic origins. It’s the abstraction of the dream or the religious experience, an encounter with the sacred and the eternal, a falling and fading away of the world of the material and the particular and the mundane.

            The prevailing assumption among critics and readers alike is that fiction, especially literary fiction, attempts to represent some facet of life, so the nature of a given representation can be interpreted as a comment on whatever is being represented. But what if the representations, the correspondences between the fictional world and the nonfictional one, merely serve to make the story more convincing, more worthy of our precious attention? What if fiction isn’t meant to represent reality so much as to alter our perceptions of it? Critics can fault plots like the one in No Country for Old Men, and characters like Anton Chigurh, for having no counterparts outside the world of the story, mooting any comment about the real world the book may be trying to make. But what if the purpose of drawing readers into fictional worlds is to help them see their own worlds anew by giving them a taste of what it would be like to live a much different existence? Even the novels that hew more closely to the mundane, the unremarkable passage of time, are condensed versions of the characters’ lives, encouraging readers to take a broader perspective on their own. The criteria we should apply to our assessments of novels then would not be how well they represent reality and how accurate or laudable their commentaries are. We should instead judge novels by how effectively they pull us into the worlds they create for themselves and how differently we look at our own world in the wake of the experience. And since high-stakes moral dilemmas are the heart of stories we might wonder what effect the experience of witnessing them will have on our own lower-stakes lives.

Also read:

HUNGER GAME THEORY: Post-Apocalyptic Fiction and the Rebirth of Humanity

Life's White Machine: James Wood and What Doesn't Happen in Fiction

LET'S PLAY KILL YOUR BROTHER: FICTION AS A MORAL DILEMMA GAME