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Author: musickmorley0814

The Green Woman

Posted on by musickmorley0814

Filed with the papers of Dr Bridget Ann Weber.

Undated letter, addressed to Bridget Weber c/o Weber Investigative Services in New York City, from a Mrs. Edgar Alexakas.

My dear Birdie,

Even as I begin to compose this letter I know that writing to you is a fool’s errand. It will be a series of miracles if this letter is finished at all, if I post it to you, if it finds its way. And of course you must read it too, another miracle. I’m trying to imagine what you must have thought when you first saw the envelope. Initially, I am sure, a profound lack of recognition at the sender’s name, which I will admit I have done purposely so as to prevent your immediately burning the whole thing unread— tell me, Birdie, do you still find such satisfaction in burning those letters and writings you don’t want to look at any more? I remember sitting around your mother’s stove as you fed your old poetry into it, like feeding table scraps to a begging dog and laughing as his fiery tongue lapped them up. You said you had woken up at night and seen the poems peeking out at you from the trash can and you had known that you must destroy them entirely.

Well by now I’m sure you must know which little old woman is writing you. That is, if you did not from the first line. Or if you did not from some distant thing you felt as you weighed the unopened letter so carefully in your hand. Oh, Birdie! You must believe me that the promise I made to you was made in earnest, and I had no intention to break it the way that I now must. But how could I have known all those years ago about what would happen now? I can see you standing up and crossing to the fire even now, but please, if you could just finish reading, and give a patient minute to my desperation. You must allow me these few pages, at least, to explain myself.

I have moved out to the country after all. I live in a small pretty house with a garden and whitewashed walls and dishes that match each other, all of which I find quite terrible, but I think it makes Hester happy. The house is wreathed in a ludicrous bounty of hydrangeas, and is built on the top of a hill, though not much of one. It’s a rise, I suppose, because the nearest town is called Tamanee Rise and it’s on one too. My rise is very bare except for the house and the garden and then, a long ways off, the forest and the road that cuts through it, which are the only things around for miles. It’s very quiet and peaceful at night here, so it’s hard for me to fall asleep, but I can get by most of the time.

I bought the house with the money that my husband left me. I guess you don’t know about him, though you’re probably wondering why I’ve put his name on this letter. There’s too much to say here, and it doesn’t have much to do with what’s happened, but I suppose you should know that I was indeed married and he’s dead now about ten years. At any rate the money he left me was enough for me to buy this little house on the rise and to pay for someone to buy all the furniture and pans and wallpaper and things which I thought I wouldn’t care about but looking back I wish I could have chosen for myself. I hate the little silverware organizer in the kitchen drawer because I can never find anything, and when the moonlight comes in the rooms at night all the furniture looks like animals, and of course there’s Hester’s cold spots and hot spots and the broken things. But I think I really could have been happy here. Maybe I still can be.

We are on the verso already, and I must come to the point. Last night, I woke up at close to three. I sleep with my covers untucked like I always have, even though it means I usually wake up to the sheets strangling me and the bedspread kicked down onto my room’s beautiful hardwood floor. I don’t particularly like the floor because the boards are always so cold against my feet in the morning.

Last night when I woke up, however, it was very warm, and I was tucked into my bed as tightly as a baby swaddled by an overzealous mother. With a huge effort I managed to extract my arms, and one of them touched a wall close by, as if my bed had been pushed to the side of the room while I was sleeping. And then I reached out my other arm and it touched a wall on the other side, and I realized the room I was in was far too small to be my normal bedroom, even though the horrible wallpaper with its tasteful blue flower pattern was still there on the walls.

The window at my feet was the same shape as the sash windows in my room but in the wrong place, and as I managed to sit up and push the blankets down to my waist I suddenly couldn’t look at it any more because it seemed like the sun itself was right outside. I turned my head away and watched the rectangle of light falling on the bedspread grow brighter and brighter and the shadow of the sash bar slowly thin away as the light grew so bright that no shadow could withstand it. The air of the room was getting very, very hot, so hot that my skin hurt and I was surprised it didn’t burn, and I called out once for Hester but she didn’t hear me or couldn’t answer. All the colors of the things in my room were turned very strange. It was not my room. It was my room. It was my room. I let out my breath and could see my exhalation as if it were a cold winter day, the terrible light catching in the cloud of my breath, and then after a few seconds even the reflected light as it hit the bedspread was too much and I had to close my eyes entirely and cover my face so that the light would not shine red through my eyelids, and I heard sounds but could not determine what their origins were, and I called out again but this time it was you I called for, Birdie— and then I woke up. My sheets were tangled around my waist, the bedspread on the hardwood floor.

I’m not embarrassed to admit that it was the first time I had spoken your name in more than ten years. I wonder, Birdie, do you ever say my name?

Perhaps you feel no glimmer of recognition, reading this description of what anyone else would think to be a dream. But as I sat there, paralyzed by light, I must have been filled with certainty and apperception. I can think of no explanation for calling out your name but that I knew that once again you could help me, and I can think of no explanation for my conviction that there was someone standing between my bed and the window, shadowless in the intensity of the light, breathing so hot that her breath didn’t condense in the boiling air, but that somehow we didn’t kill the Green Woman after all.

Please, Birdie. I kept my promise for thirty years. But I’m breaking it now.

                            Yours,

                            Patience Jane

Undated letter addressed to B. Weber c/o Weber Investigative Services, from P. J. Alexakas.

Dear Birdie,

I have written and discarded several opening paragraphs to this letter. Maybe this time I will start with an apology. Birdie, I’m sorry. Sorry I had to write to you in the first place, but even sorrier you couldn’t dissuade me from writing again.

That will have to do, though it’s not very good and I imagine you won’t like it. I don’t think there’s anything I could write that would spare me your anger. But I’m quite willing to take whatever acrimonious something you send in reply— I can only assume part of the intent of your letter was to shout me into shame, but the more I reread it the more I feel a happiness that I’m certain you will take as condescending. God, Birdie, how I’ve missed you! You haven’t changed at all, have you? This house is so quiet, and Hester has grown quieter, too, over the years. It’s been a while since I’ve had someone levy a good shout at me, through paper or otherwise.

As for the matter of my imagining this whole encounter— do you think that after a lifetime of being haunted I don’t know when a ghost is looking at me? And I don’t have your expertise, but I would say that over the past week I’ve managed to scrounge up enough additional evidence to turn a doubting mind. The scorch marks on the top half of my nightgown, the sun-bleached wallpaper of my bedroom wall, the houseplants all withered away except for the African violets, which are the same, and the potted Meyer lemon tree, which has produced six fat lemons out of season. And this morning the sugar from the cupboard was spilled on the kitchen floor in a careful star. All in all, enough to convince, I’d say, provided my audience has already passed the first hurdle of complete disbelief on their own. I suppose that type of profound rebuttal is something you have to deal with in your business, and I don’t envy you.

I’ve been oddly calm about this whole thing, as I’ve walked around the house documenting. Some of it is habit, I suppose — don’t tell me all of this is Hester, by the way, you know she was never one for precision work — but some of it is a sense of inevitability. I realize now that I never quite believed the Green Woman was gone. 

I find myself doing all the regular things just the same: cooking, cleaning, and so on. All those little habits that grow like moss over the place you call home. Even sitting at my little table and carefully writing out this letter, just like how I write down my grocery lists. The scent of the hydrangeas pours in through the window, not quite as objectionable to me as it used to be when I first moved here. I’ve grown even fond of it, in a way, since my dislike is a part of my daily routine, essential and mild and even sweet, just like the scent itself. Hester, the hydrangeas, the monotony of dishwashing and laundry— you’d be curious at me, I think. I’m now a patient person in many ways. I can’t imagine but my mother would be happy to hear me living up to my name.

Even your hatred isn’t enough to stir me out of my calm path. I wrote the first letter to you: that’s done. The charm is broken, and revealed to have no protective magic after all, I think. I spent many years dreading contact with you, but in the end, all you could really do was hate me, and I suspect you’ve done so all along. Not actively, of course. I imagine you’ve packed your hate for me up in a box, the same box where you’ve packed Kathy up, somewhere in your brain. Now the box is opened and we’re both out: that’s done, too. Maybe I envy you, I can’t tell. Maybe I pity you. She has been in my thoughts for so long that my pain has faded to placidity, like the shadow of a bruise. It makes me happy to imagine us both there, me and Kathy in the box in your brain, hated and loved respectively, both to the point of pain, but together.

It’s hard to imagine you grown up. I woke up today and brushed out my graying hair and peered into my aging face in the mirror and then sat down in the scent of hydrangeas to write to a woman that I’m still picturing as a little fifteen-year-old girl. At the very oldest, twenty, looking like you did when I saw you by chance on that train platform in New York, with Christmas holly in your hair. I suppose it would be too much to ask you to enclose a current picture. Ha! God, you must be furious with me. I will admit I am stoking your hate a little. I used to do that when I was young, too, and you were even younger. Little Birdie, the spitfire, balling up her fists as if to pummel me. And Kath would laugh and laugh.

I know it’s strange and simple of me to write this letter as if you hadn’t expressly forbidden it. But know that I don’t expect our friendship to be rekindled. I don’t expect you to abandon your business, or to leave behind your daughter (“little fifteen-year-old Birdie a mother?” I think, before I can stop myself, and, “even at twenty that seems a bit much”). Heaven knows I wouldn’t ask you to brave the bus from the Lewis train station to Tamanee Rise, or the walk from Tamanee Rise to here. You may not believe me, but I’d really prefer if you didn’t come at all. Perhaps my whole calm about this thing arises from the fact that no matter how badly I deal with this, I am the only living thing in my house on its bare-headed rise. There’s no one to die from my mistakes this time but me.

One thing I do regret is that you’ve never gotten to know Hester, know her like I know her now. I wish you could know what it’s like to wake in the morning and think what will she do today? and be both scared and glad. She’s gotten so much better at communicating. Not just a word shouted in the middle of the night or a handprint in the steam on the bathroom mirror. We have whole whispered conversations at the breakfast table, and sometimes I fall asleep in my armchair reading in the evenings and when I wake up, before I open my eyes, I can hear her singing to herself. The other day I saw a bird lifting from a branch, and its springing flight shook the morning dew from the leaves, and as I watched the droplets shower down I thought— “there’s Hester”. Was that true? Sometimes at night I can feel her lying next to me, and her weight on the mattress is so definite and solid I almost turn to embrace her.

I do admit I worry about what will happen to my sweet little ghost after I’m gone. I suppose I must at least try not dying, then. Do you think you could help me in that regard?

                            Love,

                            Patience Jane

Post-script. 

Woke up last night to the light again, more intense than before — both ceramic vases in my room cracked into six pieces when I returned — presence definitely a woman, saw her feet and skirt — more in my next letter — PJA

Undated letter addressed to B. Weber c/o Weber Investigative Services, from P. J. Alexakas.

Birdie,

Tuesday night. I woke up this morning and it was raining outside, a good clean summer rain. Over the course of the day a smell stayed with me, the smell of rain drying on hair, maybe? The smell of things thawing? But they had already thawed. The smell of fall? But fall wasn’t here yet. I asked Hester what the smell was, but she didn’t want to say or didn’t know or couldn’t smell it. It followed me all day, through the house, though it didn’t come from me or my clothes. It smelled like taking the train out of the city when the rain beats down against the roof and all the green blades of the rushes shake their fists at you. It smelled like Florida or laundry steam or the primordial soup of the earth. I kept thinking it would fade after the rain had stopped, but if anything it grew stronger. By the end of the day I was heaving in great gulps of it, starving for it. I hated the second between each breath.

At one point I woke up on the ground. I must have hyperventilated and passed out. The smell was kissing my face. I was sunburned on the back of my neck and arms. I still am— it is beginning to peel. I left the house and buried my head in the hydrangeas until I felt myself returning to the world.

I hope when this is all over these letters are of some use to you. Perhaps your Services girls can use it as a case study for how not to proceed. Tell me, do they wear dark suits, and do they brandish sage and sticks of rowan when encountering a spirit? Knowing nothing about your business either first or second-hand, I have been forced to extrapolate from novels and my own imagination. 

In response to your questions: I have now lined the doorways and windows with salt, despite the fact that I doubt very much the effectiveness of this strategy. I refuse to burn herbs, however. Though it was not very effective in removing Hester the first time Kathy and I tried it, I have a fear that it would now be enough to expel her from me forever.

And no, Birdie. All this is not Hester. I know that you cannot comprehend living with a ghost in relative harmony, having no experience with it yourself. In understanding Hester, your childhood memories of her must be all you have to go on— the horror stories I told you when Kathy and I were both young and you were just a child. The terror I felt walking through the cold spot at the kitchen door, the strange mists that would envelop me and then pull away to leave me in a new and less real place. These things have not gone away exactly, though Hester is weaker now, and older, like me. But my feelings have changed entirely. You should know that I have lived my odd, unsettled life with no small measure of joy. I am not trapped with Hester. She is no longer even trapped with me. We struggled with each other until our struggle turned to something softer.

You say that you’re glad that a lover of ghosts is now plagued by one. But it cannot be because of my own ghost that the Green Woman has come. When the Green Woman came to you and Kathy, when she put those burns on Kathy’s cheek and your hand— Birdie, do you think that was because of anything you’d done?

Thursday morning. Your anecdote about the drifting feather in your letter gave me an idea last night, which I have begun to test with encouraging results. After supper, I tied a thread around my wrist, left the other end loose, and waited. I waited so long that I drifted off to sleep on top of my covers, still dressed. When I woke in the middle of the night, my eyes blurry and my waist and armpits complaining where my gray dress pinches me, I tried to turn over but found the thread around my wrist was tethered to something heavy and human. I closed my eyes and pulled my arm again. Hester’s hand did not touch my skin, but it came so close that the hairs on my arm, standing on end, could feel it near me.

When I woke fully and opened my eyes, the thread was loose again, though with a loop where it had wrapped around another wrist. It is an ordinary thread, and I do not think it has any power other than being convenient, and delicate. Hester has been a little standoffish, but mostly the same.

Saturday. I think it is 1 or 2 AM. All the clocks stopped last night. She wants me to come with her, Birdie. The Green Woman, she didn’t speak but she let me know. The smell, that smell of rain. It has to end soon.

                            Patience Jane

Undated letter addressed to B. Weber c/o Weber Investigative Services, from P. J. Alexakas.

Dear Bridget,

I have news, but I do not know how best to begin.

These are the things I know about you: you were right-handed, but write now with your left. You are a failed poet. You are a mother, with a business in debt and a dislike of automobiles. You are cruel, and angry, and give your love only to those things that you can understand. When you were twelve years old, you watched me watch your sister die.

Are these things enough for me to understand you? Do I love who you are, or only who you were? Or only who you loved, who loved you and cared for you and called you her little bird? How can I know how to tell you what has happened?

Last night I was ready, or thought I was. I woke up just as my back hit the floor of my room— my bed had disappeared, though the cover was still spread under me. Already the light and heat were both climbing. The window in front of and above me was clear again, even though last week I painted over the glass. More than clear, it was as if there was no window at all, as if there was just an empty rectangle of hissing light in the wall.

The thread around my wrist was taut, and Hester was on the end of it. Her breath did not mist in the air, because she doesn’t breathe, but she was there, I had kept her with me. She was not banished. I was not summoned alone.

The Green Woman entered through the bright rectangle that was the window, crumpling and tearing the paper wall with her feet as she stepped through. She was a wavering dark shape against the light, and I tilted my head back and looked up at the ceiling. The sun was shining so bright outside that sunlight was squeezing between the roof tiles and condensing on the boards of the ceiling in fat golden drops, which fell down and struck my cheeks like tears.

I still had the two pieces of iron in my pocket, and I retrieved one and tried to throw it at the Green Woman. My arm was so weak in my dizziness that I dropped it on the floor.

As the light grew brighter, Hester grew more and more visible, first just a blur, then sharpening, a pristine shadow against my bedcover. In the unrealness of this room, I felt her put her hand solidly in mine. I turned toward her and kept my eyes open so I could keep watching her, wanting to see more.

I’ll admit I thought you might burst in again, just like last time. Maybe even with a weapon, brandishing the old sword, or some kind of ghost-killing gun. Surely you must be a good shot, even with your left hand. But you wouldn’t be able to truly kill her this time, any more than you did last time. Another thirty years and I might be dead, but what if you aren’t? I can’t bear the thought of you facing her alone.

The Green Woman leaned down close over me. I really felt for the first time the terrible damp humidity of her heat, her breath hissing over my face like steam and turning my skin boiled-red. The plain green of her dowdy dress was close to me. It was an everyday factory linen, but occasionally it was something else. She leaned in even closer. The green of her dress was visibly alive, made up of hundreds of tiny glossy leaves and the shining iridescence of an insect’s wings. I finally dared to look up at her face, which had a palm leaf folded modestly over it. All of this thought and observation passed through my mind in an instant as she leaned over me. I could not stop thinking and guessing even as I believed that I was about to die. But I did not die.

A hand entered the Green Woman’s chest. It was not a normal hand, because I could not see it outside of her chest, but as it entered her chest it became entirely visible, a precisely-edged shadow which I could see as well as if the Green Woman were transparent. She made no sound, but she shuddered as the hand entered her. She tried to back away but the hand had wrapped around some ghostly organ inside her and held her fast. The palm leaf in front of her face quivered.

Hester moved the hand upwards, up through her throat into her head. The Green Woman jerked her head around but could not escape. Again, she made no sounds, and I wondered if she could make sound.

I reached up and pulled the leaf away, and stared into Kathy’s panicked face.

Bridget, I don’t pretend to know how these things work. Not ghosts, and not people. I don’t know what died in that hotel room thirty years ago, or what faced me in my bedroom last night. 

I wonder sometimes if the Green Woman frightened her too— Hester, I mean. You keep talking about the four of us in that terrible final confrontation, you, Kathy, me, and the Green Woman. But Hester was there too. Paralyzed, like us. Afraid? It’s hard to know.

But I like to think she feels things, the same as we do. I think she hated the Green Woman. And I think she loves me. What she thought of Kathy, I’m not sure. And you, Bridget, who she only met the once, would she love you or hate you? Would you love her or hate her if I tell you what she’s done?

I wrote to you first for your help, but also for the simple pleasure of awaiting your reply. I have been lucky for these two letters from you that sit here on my little desk, and will likely revisit them often. After the silence following my previous, I do not expect any more. I write this last not to give you pain, or to taunt you, but in the hope that, now that you have opened up the box of your heart’s love and hatred, and observed what is within, you can know them now for their true forms. Tough, tender, variegated.

I must go now. It’s time for our dinner.

Love,

                            Patience Jane

Note from Ann Weber Li, executor for the estate of Bridget Ann Weber

To the Acquisitions Board:

I’m in a difficult position, because my mother always drilled two things into our heads, above all others. First, that her work was the most important thing she’d ever do, and second, that you shouldn’t talk about your personal family business to strangers (or to family, for that matter). But if you’ve read these letters, you know that this bit of personal family business has to be talked about if we’re keeping the proper record of what she’d call a “unique supernatural phenomenon”. So I’m sending these on with the rest of her papers. I don’t mind you knowing our business, myself. Over the years I’ve cultivated a habit of emotional honesty, likely as a reaction to my mother’s parenting style, actually. You can imagine my dismay when it manifests itself as a brusqueness that sounds just like Dr. Weber herself. Oh well, too late to change now!

So let’s see what I can put on the record that might make this story more complete. I got these four letters from the hospice worker after my mother’s death, along with the rest of her things, and I was very interested to read them, since as I’ve said, my mother didn’t talk much about her “emotions” or “childhood”. The first time we even learned she had a sister named Katherine was when our rarely-seen grandfather was visiting and mentioned it off-hand.  She wasn’t in the room, of course, since whenever family visited the house she always made herself busy with chores or urgent issues at the office. Only once the friendly intruder had left would she suddenly have time for meals and conversation again (mostly stuff she thought was good for our “academic development”). If we asked any impertinent questions or brought up dead siblings, after all, she could silence us with a single, well-practiced look.

All this of course is why it’s so weird that I even had any idea about the Green Woman as a kid, though I can promise I did. I suppose there’s an outside chance she might have said something as we went past the old hotel, now derelict. Or maybe she used some part of it in a lesson plan and I overheard it while hanging out in the back of the old classroom. I did definitely read through all her diaries, though to my disappointment they only had birthdays and appointments in them. 

 But I think the most likely thing is either that I just picked up on it, psychically or whatever (unfortunately I never listened very closely when my mother discussed supernatural heredity of memory​​), or that, just maybe, she did say something about it once when talking about her hand. When I was a kid I would hold her messed-up burned-up hand in mine and run my fingers along the roads of her pink puckered skin. That hand both scared and fascinated me.

But anyway, however I learned, when I was about eight I knew enough to have bad dreams featuring the Green Woman almost every night. And here’s the real purpose of this letter. I don’t have my mother’s responses to Patience Jane to give you, but I do have the story from my childhood nightmares.

They always started with me walking along the edge of that street in Midtown. I can still picture the fancy doors and the long front of the building ahead of me. The lights are all lit up, it’s dark outside. Then I’m in the hotel, going up the red stairs to the room. And here’s a grain of salt, the inside of the building always looked a lot like the Omni Parker House Hotel we’d stayed at once in Boston when I was a kid. This may be a hint that a lot of the dream was just made up by my brain. On the other hand, hotels honestly all look a bit the same.

I’d get to the room door. Sometimes it would be open, and sometimes I’d open it myself, and there was that strange and horrible image that always stood out most vividly. The three of them in the room, totally still in the hot air, like a painting.

Everything is going so slow that I can see the heat rolling off of her, waves on the shore. The Green Woman is hanging in the air. I remember the embroidered bedspreads. Two girls are there and I don’t recognize them, but I see one of them is falling backwards away from the Green Woman with a sword in her hand, and she has two shadows. The other girl’s leg is stopped mid-kick against a green dress, and her hands are frozen mid-clutch at the green hand that lifts her by the throat. I am very scared by her face, molasses-slow in a mask of agony.

So you can see the main problem here, that the surrealism of a dream can be very close to the surrealism of a powerful ghost, right? Could that scene have been real? Maybe it really did look like a painting when it actually happened, and maybe it did feel like a dream.

Remember, I’m still in the door at this point. Sometimes now I look down at my black shoes and white stockings. My mother always bought the same type of practical shoes for us, and it’s easy to imagine that her mother made her wear them too. They could be my childhood shoes or hers.

“Oh look, it’s Bridget.” This is what the Green Woman says when she sees me, so casually that the room around her suddenly seems comedic. Her voice is very normal. The molecules of the air in the room move so slowly that I can hear them sigh like an accordion breathing in. Then she lets go of the strangled girl’s throat, and there are ridges in that throat where her fingers were. Even the skin can’t spring back. The Green Woman steps down from where she’d been floating and walks over to me, grabs me by my right hand and pulls me into the hot sauna of the room

“Don’t look, child,” is what she says next, and she moves me so that I can only see the other girl where she’s falling, each of her shadows as still as pools of ink on the carpet. I can only assume that at this point the Green Woman climbs back up into the air and fits her fingers back into the grooves in my Aunt Katherine’s neck, but I’m not looking in that direction, and at any rate, that’s where the dream would end, with me waking screaming in my bed and shaking out my right hand like it was on fire, and someone clumsily comforting me and shushing me and wiping my sweaty hair off my face. If we’re including everything, I’d often wet the bed too.

So, what was that all about?

Obviously there’s a lot there that I can’t have known about on my own. But there are also some things that don’t match with what Patience Jane says in her letters. I don’t have a head for this kind of analysis myself, so hopefully I’ve written down the dream well enough that someone can look at all these things together and know what it all means.

The nightmares stopped eventually, of course. I’d almost forgotten about them by the time I was fifteen, when one day my mother got up in the morning and made breakfast and got the mail as usual and then just went kind of crazy. She stayed home from work and spent the morning papering over the windows, and then sat and talked with us in the living room all afternoon, and even slept in our room that night. By that time I was (all teenagers think this!) quite grown up at fifteen, and resented the intrusion. But even my self-absorption was punctured by the fact that my mother seemed actually afraid. It’s an understatement to say that fear is not like her.

I remember asking her, as I turned down the bed and she settled into the chair where she’d spend the night, what she was frightened of. And she said, just like that, “the Green Woman”. It must have been five years since I’d had one of the nightmares, and I’d almost forgotten them, but as soon as she said that, I thought “oh, the ghost I used to dream about”. Of course, what bothers me now is that this must have been the first time I’d actually heard that name spoken, but I certainly knew exactly who she meant, and I think that’s how I’d always thought of her. It could, of course, just be because it’s an obvious name.

By the next morning she’d changed her mind. She tore down the paper from the windows again. We had a few more bad scenes over the next few weeks, which must have been the next three letters, but nothing that drastic again. And then nothing about it came up again for more than thirty years.

If I’d read these letters before my mother died, I think that I would have had a lot of questions for her, and maybe they’d even be good questions that meant something. But then, if she were alive, she’d probably just give me that steely look, and hold her hand out for the return of her four letters from Patience Jane.

I’ll have to comfort myself with the fact that this letter, though it’s written by a purposeful amateur who only ever met one of the people concerned, might be some useful data in that great Project that was my mother’s favorite child. And also with the fact that I let my own daughter wear pink sparkly tennis shoes.

                            Best,

Ann Weber Li

Minutes from The Forum, Fall 2020

Posted on by musickmorley0814

Rolling tubes of grass 
To light on fire 
Tired from class (zoom university, a subsidiary of The Great University) 
Showing a new friend 
The “little university on the green sod” where hundreds gathered then tens, then a handful
To debate and gesticulate, banter and bash, shoot the shit, pontificate, proliferate, organize, mourn, entertain, enthrall, just pass through, or pass the time. 
Dance, laugh, play jazz, play games.

I’m sure they did other stuff we haven’t even learned about yet. 
The stage has a hole, precariously patched—be careful, don’t fall in—we’re cautious compulsives
We sit in silence and try to summon the spirits.
A man walks up, “hey, what’s this place?” “it’s The Forum,” we say (excitedly)
“It’s a place where people have been getting together for discussion and debate, counter-cultural social life, and political organizing for many years!”

“But you’re just smoking weed?” he asks, with a smile, “…I’ll keep an eye out for the cops”
[Did he not understand what we meant by “free, democratic, and counter-cultural”?]
Perhaps we said too much. Or maybe he did understand—he did say he’d look out for the cops [‘we keep us safe’—echoes of summer]

How to show, not tell? We want this neighbor, and his neighbors, to join us when we return to hold court proper. 

Not too far away, there’s a playground where a young dad was shot by the cops. His mom has been trying to get it re-named in his honor for years. The jungle gym and swings are shabby compared to the fancy German playgrounds on the other side of the park (though none compare to ein echter Deutscher Spielplatz, of course)

In any case. Our neighbor clears out, and we pass the grass (or actually, we don’t and say we did, pandemic) 
We share some cookies—a little snack  
A streak of sunshine, a crooked tree
A tattered flag (which we prefer, if there must be a flag—it’s more honest)
And then
A bird of prey swoops down (from out of nowhere) and snatches a squirrel 
Magnificent! It only takes a second. 
Wild applause!
Is it a Hawk? A Falcon? Probably a Hawk. Red tailed? Cooper? Regrettably, we don’t know our birds. (Something The Forum should teach, so we can learn, of course.) 

We spot Monsieur Bird with his little snack 
Perched in the tree
We whoop and holler, warm and giddy.
The photo does it no justice. 
“Fucking amazing.” “Better than TV.” “More real than school.” “Enlivening, Invigorating.” “Sublime.” “Unheimlich.” “High On Life.”
I say I hate poetry, but it was poetic.
Nibble another cookie from the pack. 

“Where two or more are gathered, I’m there with them” 
-Studs Terkel
Dear Mr. Chronicler, thou art in heaven, please grant us strength, 
Or, at least, some ease—better calibration
[To think and speak less of the illiterarti and the artsy fartsies, 

with less neurotic concern for the posts at Great Universities (that, for us, will not exist)]
And instead, to know and concern for our neighbors, the workers
With whom we SOON hope to gather 
Under the banner of democratic education and spirited recreation
With intimacy, and warmth, good humour, and sovereign disagreement
in more than twos, or threes, 
(or four, if you count the Hawk) 
With the Mice and the Bugs 
The babies and elders
At our little university, under the trees.

At our little university, under the trees.

Observations and Inferences Regarding the Curious Residents of Animal Crossing: New Horizons

Posted on by musickmorley0814

Before I ever set foot on this island, I knew it was probably not the place for me. But all my friends play Animal Crossing. All my friends love Animal Crossing. I had to see for myself. 

The following are my field notes on the residents of Guantanamo. (None of them complained when I christened our island that, so it’s fine.)

Tom Nook — I consider his presence neither an enhancement nor a detraction. He is simply a function of the island. Now much has already been said by politically aware gamers of Tom Nook the Landlord, Tom Nook the Colonizer. I think we should all relax. Tom Nook does not charge me a late fee when I don’t make a payment on my house for three months. Tom Nook does not tell me I cannot use nails to hang art on my walls. Tom Nook may encourage my capture and study of the local fauna, but no self-aware species is indigenous here. If you wanted to live in a blameless utopia free from the sins of ownership and expansion, you should have found your own island  to name after Kropotkin and populate with tattoo artists and bicycle mechanics.

I do not believe Tom Nook is some great oppressor. He is well-meaning enough and only does things in the way he knows how to. However, this does not change the fact that I cannot respect a man with no discernible personality. He serves his function, nothing more. He drops precious few hints as to what kind of man he really is, probably because he doesn’t know. I weep for what the archetype of the modern salesman has done to masculinity, but I do not hate its victims.

The Young Nooks — They each are certainly on the way towards repeating their father’s mistakes, further extending a cycle of generational karma. Perhaps their own sons will find the strength of will to end it. 

Am I not concerned that these small boys have been entrusted with sole responsibility for running the town’s general store? Well, we have no established child labor laws here, and—being their father’s sons—the Nooks junior like their work. They like it much better than going to school, anyway, where they’d be of no practical use to us at all. So please hold respect for our community’s culture, as strange as it may seem to you.

Teddy — My lone jock anchor in a town populated by dweebs and weaklings. Myself, I am not in good shape. It’s been at least six months since I’ve intentionally exercised. So to me, Teddy seems disciplined and aspirational. I look up to him. Still I must admit his monomaniacal focus on his workout routine worries me at times. I wonder if I am enabling a destructive addiction simply because it is cool and therefore makes me cooler by association. If Teddy were to give up being jacked, would I still consider him my best friend here? And do I really know and care for Teddy, or do I just want everyone to believe that I do?

Early in our friendship he gifted me a hideous pair of purple sunglasses with star-shaped lenses. I wear them every day in hopes that someone will ask about them. Then I can say, “They were a gift. From my dear friend Teddy. You know, the absolutely ripped gentleman who lives in the southeast corner of the island? Yes, him. We’re quite close, actually.”

Fuchsia — A woman in so much disarray I often wonder how she got herself this far. Still, I find myself warming a tad to her constant, easygoing friendliness. The annoyances she brings along with her bohemian lifestyle are ultimately harmless. For example, she nicknamed me “Reverb” without impetus and for no discernible reason. I suppose I’ve been called worse. Once I found her staring out at the sea and belting an unintelligible song at a frankly impressive volume. The song wasn’t so bad. Fuchsia is unhinged, but she is happy. Isn’t that what we want? Isn’t that why we moved to this island?

Nate — Nate is an unholy product of post-Buzzfeed culture, frozen in the moment of his birth. He speaks like a Redditor from 2008. He repurposes insights that were trite even a decade ago as though he edifies his listener by doing so. Men like Nate make me think the Internet was a mistake. Now every hack turn of phrase that some Doctor Who fan deemed clever when his own eroding mind shat it out must be spread to baby-brained computer addicts all over the globe. I hate Nate with my life. I go into his house while he is busy, crank up every burner on his gas stove and then slip away; almost every day I do this, but he has neither died from gas poisoning nor house fire yet. Oh, well. Tomorrow I will try again.

Freckles — She reminds me of some of the other homeschooled girls I grew up with who never ventured beyond the bubbles their families raised them in and now pursue status as wholesome Instagram micro-influencers. Nothing presents itself to Freckles on a level deeper than the aesthetic. Nothing comes to Freckles that she does not seek to use to build her following or improve her image. At another time in my life I may have been repulsed by her. Sometimes a person’s lack of depth or self-awareness triggers an avalanche of fury because you secretly fear that you might be the same way. However, once you have recognized this fear, you will mostly find yourself charmed by the oblivion of others. I like Freckles well enough. She has left her bubble, and that is the first step.

Norma — To be a woman and a cow… I am ashamed to say my impulse is to pity her. And yet she seems more than content to cheerfully live a humble life. Of the villagers here, she is the only one who seems to understand that to move to Guantanamo is to disappear into obscurity. Such a small, remote locale is not a place where one can become famous or popular or well-connected. Many perfectly unremarkable women still doggedly pursue the world’s approving attention. The rare one who neither fears nor craves being seen carries a certain grace.

I went to call on Norma earlier today. Turned out it’s her birthday. I didn’t even know. I rifled through the miscellanea cluttering my pockets for the least objectionable item I could pass off as a gift. I handed her a clay pitcher. She told me this is something she already owns and has no need of, which is good because it means I’d judged her taste correctly. I am mortified that she is not more mortified. She should not let me treat her like an afterthought in her own home. But she never becomes agitated. Nothing sweeps her off her senses. The humble she-cow knows and accepts exactly who she is. I am grateful to be a human woman and not a cow, but I envy Norma’s surety. I wonder if pity and respect can reside in the same place after all.

The Sisters Able —  Unlike the rotating cast of traveling merchants who visit us from time to time, Mabel and her near-silent sister Sable commute daily to and from this island where they run a boutique clothing shop that caters to a community with a single-digit population. What does this tell us? Trust funds, of course.

It turns my stomach to walk into the Ables’ shop. Mabel aggressively stalks me as I browse, eager to ironically cast herself as servant to the in fact penniless settler. She has to know I can’t afford any of this, what with the nauseating debt I still owe Tom Nook. Able Sisters is not a place to shop for clothing, not in earnest. It is the artificial Versailles village where Mabel plays glamorous peasant for the day before returning via seaplane to whatever palace she takes her dinners and spends her nights in. 

Sable toils away in the corner of the shop at her machine, sweating and nervous. I have never seen her but furiously employed in the labor that provides her entrepreneurial sister with a commodity to market. She begs not to be spoken to. She does nothing but sew. What does Mabel do to her when I am not looking? I’d ask her, but Mabel stays on me more like a prison guard than a pushy saleswoman. Her clumsy performance may have the other islanders fooled, but I am not so easily misled. I will have my eye on Mabel.

Isabelle — I know she has family she cares about elsewhere, so why does she want to live here? The others I get—some fish need the small pond in order to feel big. But Isabelle is driven and capable. Surely she could get a job as an executive assistant in any city, yet she chose a village whose entire diameter can be run in less than half a minute. There must be someone she wishes to avoid or something she wishes to forget. I find her preternatural good cheer suspicious, anyway. It’s uncommon for someone with a desk job to be so relentlessly upbeat.

My guess is that Isabelle comes to her joke of a workplace every day with a smile on her face because she believes that if she just commits to this life, if she can tell herself she chose it, then she could be happy here. Maybe she’s already tallied everything ambition ever got her: dashed hopes, lost friends, end of list. Maybe it’s time for her to find peace in a world that is small and in a life that crawls level across the graph. Not everyone was made to chase a dream. Not everyone was meant to find great love. So why not show up to work with a smile? Stop returning to old haunts and let the ones who got away be away. Just pick a place and be there and be real and try to do a good job. 

She is rather young to have given up on fate, but it was wise of her to see to it early. Now she won’t have to spend a decade trying gracelessly to postpone the ordeal.

K.K. Slider — Seems all the citizens speak to me about these days is attracting this pop star to our island. I do not understand. He cannot care about any of the losers who live here. Their existence can be of no import to him. It disgusts me how ardently they idolize him. He may be an undeniably talented vocalist, but he is still just a dog-man. Come on.

Look at you, citizens of Guantanamo! You have abandoned your friends and families and communities to be here. Now you hinge your self-respect on whether some bland celebrity wants to hang out in your vicinity. You should be ashamed. Did you think that if you defected from society at large and molded a new one in your own image that you could finally terraform a world in which you are the Cool Ones? Fools. You do not break unjust cycles by replicating them. You sought to build a paradise, but no place can be paradise without love. K.K. does not love you, yet you yearn for him. I do not love you, yet you throw yourselves at me. Island of nerds and simps. I fear you will never break the cycles you came here to escape.

Teddy, you are obviously exempt from all of this. Did you still want to tell me about your new dumbbells later?

Attention: A Visual Essay

Posted on by musickmorley0814

A Great Piece of Turf (1503) by Albrecht Dürer: before I saw this painting, grassy areas just looked like cluttered, messy greenness. It wasn’t until this picture pointed me towards the variety hidden in the weeds that I began to notice it–or, actually, to rediscover it, since I certainly paid close attention to the weeds when I was a kid.

Here is some of that variety–pineapple weed, dandelion, broadleaf plantain, clover, daisy fleabane, bull thistle, and many others I don’t recognize–all from the same three feet square in front of my house. Each photograph allows one character to stand forth and take the stage, but there is something missing. They don’t express the feeling of peering into a tangled patch of weeds the way Dürer’s painting does. They don’t capture what Dürer’s painting invites me to see. 

There is a certain kind of attention we offer to works of art. We need to be invited to turn that kind of attention on other sights. The object above is a tool for evoking this attention. It’s called a Claude Glass; 18th century tourists brought them on trips to picturesque places. Turning their backs to the scenery, they would hold up the dark mirror and view the scene’s reflection in it. The effect was to even out the hues of the scenery, making more subdued and painterly. By suppressing something of the real scene’s vibrancy and contrast, the tourists were enabled to view it as a work of art.

Drawing from life is the best tool I know of for evoking attention. A photograph is taken in an instant, but a drawing is an amalgam of many moments of close observation. Using my pencil to follow the slump and curve of these dry leaves and branches required me to attend to them more closely than I could by just looking. In the process, I became aware of just how much I had to leave out. A three-dimensional object cannot live on a page; drawing is a process of painstakingly selecting which details to suppress. It is this suppression that makes the image more legible than the object.

This painting is undeniably cluttered. It’s an explosion of details. Yet the suppression is there: the dragonfly landing on the tulip is nothing but a series of glints, the faintest suggestion of an outline disappearing into the shadow, and pools of darkness threaten to swallow up the stems and leaves.

No matter how realistic an image seems, something is being omitted. 

Artists sometimes use grids to break up the scene they’re depicting. Making the object less legible–chunks of color, simple curves within a square–helps to render it legibly.

To recreate something with depth and texture on a flat plane, you have to take it apart with your eyes and reassemble it with your hands; destroy the object to create the image.

The artist who made this platter, Bernard Palissy, cast his ceramics from life, using critters that he caught in the ponds around his house–meaning he had to kill his subjects, literally, in order to represent them. I find his work enthrallingly ugly. The art I like best is messy, profuse, overflowing with detail. A work of art like this has a different relationship with detail. Nothing is suppressed; there is so much complexity that the eye gets lost; looking at it demands a different kind of attention.

But there is another strain of art in which the substrate provides the impetus for the image–as in this painting on marble, in which the variegation of the stone have provided the suggestion of the cloud filled with cherubim.

The subtle variegation in the stone suggests a scene; the artist follows it–like finding shapes in clouds.

There is a point at which the virtuosity of the artist defeats itself, and the detail becomes so overwhelming that it collapses into clutter; to me, looking at this carving by the master boxwood miniaturist Ottaviano Janella just feels like looking at a clump of weeds, without Dürer’s hand guiding my eye.

These are the eyeglasses Janella used when carving his miniatures. Wearing these, he could whittle wood to such a thinness that it would flutter like a leaf when you breathed on it. Maybe if I could wear his spectacles and examine his carving as closely as he did, my breath would everything tremble and the clutter would resolve itself into fine legible details.

Then again, attention itself magnifies. This is another boxwood carving, a prayer bead about the size of a ping-pong ball.

But when you stare at the scene inside, it feels like you could fall into it.

Janella’s box makes me think of this reliquary shrine. The enamel glows, the gold robes hang in elegant folds, but the source of the reliquary’s power are the two boxes of illegible clutter, the relics themselves.    

The Dawn of Time

Posted on by musickmorley0814

It was the dawn of time. All through the land, there was a feeling in all things that something was going to happen after time dawned. Time itself felt very strongly that it was about time for some kind of thing to dawn, and this feeling led time to think that maybe it should be the thing to dawn, instead of some other lesser thing like a pigeon or Mardi Gras. If a pigeon or Mardi Gras had dawned back then, you wouldn’t have heard about it. Time dawning was so important that still today we talk about it. We always say “the dawn of time” whenever we want to make sure that we sound lovely and unstoppable. We say, don’t stop us or stop loving us, for we have invoked the dawn of time. We all care about the dawn of time because it is fun to mention, of course, but we also like the dawn of time because it was the start of time. Many people like time more than I, but I won’t be too proud to admit that time is important and should be in history books, that is to say, in books of a historical nature — books that keep track of all there is to keep track of. In those books, there isn’t infinite space. If you get mentioned in there, you can be assured it’s not just a formality, like it is whenever you put your own name on the internet, as I have done (and now I can’t take it down. I think it’s illegal to. Can you help me?), and time should feel good about itself that it’s in the history books simply because it dawned. That’s all time did, was dawn; nothing very complex, only dawning. No more, and it made the whole period of time that we enjoy possible at all!

We are talking about the dawn of time. Who cares when I dawned or you dawned? We’re just you and me. We could dawn or start a war and nobody’d give a rat’s ass. But if time did it, why that’d be news, and it is news, and so this story is concerned with a piece of news: time dawned, and it was the dawn of time. Extra, extra, read all about it! It was the dawn of time over at the land where this all happened. All through that land everything had a feeling. I say even the rocks had a feeling. Even the air had a feeling. If it was a rock or a piece of air in or close by the land where time was dawning, in it there was a feeling that something was going to happen after time dawned. And along with this feeling that something was going to happen after the dawning, there was inextricably an intuition that in order for things to happen after the dawning, things would have to happen during the dawning, while it was happening, to set the stage in a sense, so that all the things that were to happen after the dawn of time would, when the time came, find that the stage had been set for them to do their thing. If rocks and shards of air existing and feeling during the dawning of time were to set the stage for things after the dawning of time, then things after the dawning could feel confident in their moment and not be nervous to take the stage so set. They (the post-dawning entities) would not have any cause at all to suddenly get cold feet and up and not happen.

All of this was felt and understood by every rock and piece of air in the land, and there was also water that burbled that it felt pretty much like something was likely going to start happening any minute and if you had asked the water whether or not it thought what was going to happen would be cool or not, it would say your question was beside the point, so let’s take heed and all agree that whether what happened during and after the dawn of time was cool or not is not what we’re gonna care about. We’re just gonna care about that anything of whatever nature happened at all; incidentally we will care that anything in the land felt that anything was going to happen. Dismiss what the water says, or might say; that’s all conjecture and we care more about the rocks and the air than the water after all. For a fish it’s the other way around, of course, but there were no fishes at the dawn of time. Quite possibly it is that the water thought of what it was going to do with all its allotment of time once it got it, for time was dawning, and what it likely hoped to do with the time it was given via dawning was to fill itself with fish after fish, to be choked with fishes. That’s right; maybe the water was in fact thinking things like “I’ve had a good run and now I know that time’s dawning (for I heard its alarm sound) I’m gonna fill me up with fish like a good Catholic gets full up of children, and maybe that’ll be the end of me because I’ll have too many fish in me to flow anymore… but it certainly won’t be the end of me because — make no mistake — they’ve been trying to contrive the end of water for billions of years and nobody’s ever been able to pull it off — we’re too bleedin’ tough. Thinking of it now, if you put a fish in me, I’d probably just get that much more stagnant — one fish stagnanter — and I hope my hope is strong enough to assure that stagnant water survives just as well as water that flows…” and such.

But forget the water. it was the dawn of time. Things then felt things I could never feel now because, why, I’m not a thing then; I’m a bloody thing now! Is that so wrong? If that’s wrong then I may end up being the best person to write this piece of news about the dawn of time after all, if my feelings as a thing now can be directly mapped onto the feelings of things then. I’m a thing now, but I’m firstly a thing, period. So put aside your notion you have of me as a thing now and just try to look at me as a thing at all so that you and I can better accept that after all I may be able to convince you and me I have some understanding of how things felt when it was the dawn of time and it was big news — big news in the making. For big news is never big news right when it happens. I don’t care what it is, murder or whatever, assassination or whatever; or whoever you are, whether you’re George Costanza, Morley Musick or whoever; the fact is that the person who comes after the event and wasn’t part of the event but is the one to whom it falls to say the event happened in a certain big way is a device we’ve always gotta have in place in order for an event to become news big or little. Even in the case of the dawning of time I only know it was news because people before me, who lived in decades like the 1660s and the 1950s, and in years like 1662 and 1959, talked about the event of the dawn of time enough and in the right way to make it news, which thank heavens they did, otherwise I’d be the person making the dawn of time into news, before your very eyes, and would you trust me enough to make an event you’d never once thought about into canonized news, especially if it was your first time reading my writing in any context, as I assume is the case for you right now? And hello! I don’t need you to trust me to be a newsmaker. Not one who takes a more or less new event and does the paperwork that turns it into news. That ain’t me. I’m no guy for paperwork. My mom can be, sure, if she has to, and my dad, well, sorta, but I never. Only trust that I am a thing generally much more than I am a thing now, and once you do that trusting, we can begin, in a collegial bantering, to discuss the subject of the piece at hand, which is currently: exactly which feelings were in the things all through the land where time dawned, back when time first dawned and thus created the dawn of time.

Zeus in the Accusative. Jazz in Silhouette.

Posted on by musickmorley0814

The following are selections from the editors’ diaries.

Well it’s not a farmhouse but a church, children running around, fat Georgian men taking selfies, a bride walking with difficulty followed by photographers and her mother holding up her dress. Horses, a rooster tied to a garbage can. Phrases I can catch: a little girl says “Ar minda.” Signs requesting we dress modestly in the church. Women and girls, though not required to, put on headscarves before going in. Some of them look very pretty under their kerchiefs. Candles and incense and icons and rays of white sunlight piercing clearly through openings in the stone walls. Outside: the sun makes me squint and blink. Inside: a guy wearing a Students for Ben Carson 2016 T-shirt. We have dramatically changed the network structure of humanity starting from the globalization era. 

My job is to describe zeitgeisty experiences. I’m on the Don dellilo beat. People love my column —- but I don’t. We talk occasionally around here about ‘everything is securities fraud’ as a sort of alternative to democratic governance…But in the long run, if something is a way around politics, eventually politics will creep into it. A solid footing depends on water, you know. A buff shirtless man in white jeans sitting in a jacuzzi talks to his girlfriend. She says, “I think we should listen to Afonja. He’s the father of mastery.”

TODO:

  1. Buy kn95
  2. Buy Gerson gift
  3. Send money order
  4. Meet Afonja at Waldorf Astoria
  5. Edit three pieces
  6. Call at ten and call at two (prep Q’s for both)
  7. Votes
  8. Lack of time and budget and clarity
  9. Opacity of subcommittees
  10. learn who Endymion is
  11. read “The Fixer” by Joe Sacco
  12. Carol Berge – 2 for the photographs of dorothea lange
  13. Go write your mustard mayonnaise poem
  14. Enbridge going at “breakneck speed” new to building in winter
  15. A worker died
  16. Play up fears about implementation 
  17. Biofuels
  18. Green hydrogen
  19. Low carbon standard 
  20. Direct action: “create an economic and political crisis”
  21. Israel acts as part of a global system of imperialism
  22. Israel acts as a sordid little gang
  23. Israel is the lab for “war against the people” – Jeff Halper

Strange that we use the word “driven” to describe the strong-willed. An attempt to diminish their enviable self-mastery. They are really subject to something (their own will). Driven is a participle. A horse is driven. What if instead we called such people “riven”? 

Imagine you were a castaway, floating on the open sea. Imagine your prior learning informed you your odds of survival were next to nothing. What would this calculation of probability mean to you? Surely nothing. You know you will either die or survive; the supposed “likelihood” of one or the other is an abstraction so vague and remote it is simply meaningless. A process from post-WWI Vienna up to founding of WTO as a rearguard (?) action, a second line of defense against democracy and national populism. But just read something in “Liberal Currents” about Israel as too nationalist and socialist, low trust etc. So which is it? 

Phone notes from wandering the docks after a bunch of weed-infused lao gan ma: “A few years ago, I went to a solo piano gig at one of London’s trendiest jazz clubs. At the tail end of the evening, the pianist announced that his last number was ‘about regret.’ The audience laughed. ‘It’s about losing the love of your life and it never coming back,’ he continued. The audience laughed again. ‘It’s the only serious regret I have, but it’s a big one,’ he concluded. The audience laughed once more.”

Zeus in the accusative. Jazz in Silhouette. 

tfw there’s nobody in the propane cage

You will always be tired and thirsty, and there will always only be water. Or you may construct imaginary futures simply from the elements of your present: castles, systems, whole cosmos built from water, salt, sun, wind, arranged in layers and moving in unspeakable patterns, inventing new schemes of physics (or intuiting their possibility) and biology which may not even include yourself, your thoughts, your respirations as necessary components. Perhaps in your final moments you begin to enter awareness of the dizzying (or are they steadying, comforting, reassuring?) intricacies of the world you exit, despite its ridiculously simple appearance to the semantically trained (inner) eye, which names the situation in a seven-word sentence and believes it to have been thus encapsulated, as in a snowglobe: “A castaway, floating on the open sea.” 

Money Jungle. Genius of Modern Music. Misterioso. 

Striking faces and fear and fantasy. Lights
Wetly strummed guitars.
Friendless People with interesting clothes
France                     Memories
Fashion                    Drink
Charles Mingus      presents Charles Mingus

How did they gain entry? How did they know about the [location of nuclear warheads]? Was there a leak? Was there inside information? In ‘Swords Into Plowshares’ Dan wrote ‘Of course we had inside information; of course there was a leak. Our informant is otherwise known in the New Testament as Advocate, Friend, Spirit. We had been at prayer for days.’ 

“I have been jailed, prosecuted, and confined. Now that I’m a refugee, I have completed the full résumé of an anti-imperialist, of a leftist who doesn’t give up. These are the consequences [of what such a person does].” 

Don’t erase the undertone of productive aggression that characterizes our relationship in favor of a cloying chumminess that I really oppose. “Let’s all re-assert our humanity by turniing off all ‘autocorrect program! – Richard and Anne”

Management seminars. Of course there’s nothing to teach on management, as with ethics more generally – but in teaching people insane things, thing like compliment sandwiches, we equip them with an alien manner that can become a source of power. In speaking to people who employ management speak, one experiences the fear of encountering another language.

Newspaper poetry is heavy on metonymy (Beijing, Silicon Valley) and avoids the passive voice. This is a kind of modernism or secularism—people do things, they are free. *gestures right* That’s a pipe! *gestures left* And that’s an educated pipe? To be forgiven or saved: phrasings imbued with epistemological humility. 

Pound – Cavalcanti – Guido’s figure (w/ meaning) vs. Petrarch’s ornament. (Pro-body – beyond “athleticism”) We imagine energies now as formless (i.e. waves and currents) “perhaps algebra has queered our geometry” 

She wears bright lipstick and smokes a small red vape, covertly filling the room with the dense scent of strawberries. A life. As charming and self-contained as a goose tucked into its own breast. I’m flattered to be a destination from which my friends may post flirtations. 

Set both my eyes on yours

Incline the hand 

Prop open the window

Come into animal presence 

you are contributing to a struggle to protect the sacred

Today is less conspicuous than yesterday

Don’t be bossed around

Don’t take dumb orders

And if your reading list is normie, keep it to yourself!

Branko

Posted on by musickmorley0814

Branko was a plump young man of average height and appearance who worked as an entry level coder at a small consulting firm called “Stax” in New Jersey. On Saturdays and casual Fridays he wore T-shirts displaying LEGO versions of the protagonists of Star Wars, Pulp Fiction, and The Sand Lot. His other clothes had been purchased in fits of necessity from a discounter two blocks from his apartment. On these short outings he made sure to buy everything he needed, because the thought of using his free time to purchase clothes was extremely painful. 

“If I just buy clothes while I’m out, I’m basically throwing my life down the toilet,” he once said to his mother. “Every time we go into Ross, I’m throwing away something precious that will never be returned to me.” In the stores the weight of all his concerns—the Pokémon, the LEGO towers, and the experiments with candy, everything he was interested in—would gather around him and shout “Move! Move! Move!” so that he ran through the aisles, pushing his cart like a flaming chariot, in order to satisfy his needs. 

“Okay! Necessities time!” he would say inside outlet stores, while buying toothpaste at the edge of its expiration date, along with shampoo in gaudy seasonal scents. He often smelled like novelty egg-nog and peppermint bodywash that had failed to sell during Christmastime. After getting his clothes, he made sure to buy those things he jokingly called “food items” in bulk: frozen pizzas, Pepsi, jars of peanut butter, and loaves of bread.

One summer evening Branko went home to tend to his bare life. His body supported his dreams in a way he wished to deny. He halved a frozen pizza with a steak knife and baked one half in his toaster oven. While waiting for it to finish, he replied to comments from three children who watched his YouTube LEGO channel. They asked where they might source pieces in order to recreate his LEGO construction “The Hairy Spider.” The fortress combined four ship wings from the Death Star with two sixteen-wheeler trucks and the garden walls from a Versailles-replica LEGO set. 

“EPIC LEGO SMASH: THE HAIRY SPIDER,” his making-of video, had received 300 views. Branko smiled, as he had expected it to do this well. He ate Jack’s Pizza with cheese crust and poured a shot of Caramel-flavored Bailey’s Irish Cream into a little cup once used to hold scented candles. A worthless Pokémon appeared outside his window, waving up at him and beckoning him to put on gym shorts in order to capture it and train it to be ready for war. 

“I’m ready, I’m ready,” it seemed to say, “I’m ready for war!” 

Branko played an immersive online game in which players hunted for digital creatures using maps of the cities in which they lived. They could capture the monsters by going to physical locations indicated on the digital maps and pointing their phone camera at the real world, where the creatures appeared overlaid on their phone screens. The player pointed their phone at synagogues and saw banana-shaped birds with knives for feet hiding in Moses’ head. The game encouraged players to collect thousands of creatures, plan their growth through tiers of development, and then fight other players with their collection. Players met each other looking for creatures and sometimes married one another. 

Branko maintained a spreadsheet with his entire collection of Pokémon, listing the name, quantity, developmental stage, and species of each of his thousands of animals. It was backed up on a server at his uncle’s home outside Sarajevo. The spreadsheet indicated that he already had more than four hundred replicas of the little animal. Still, he could feel its presence in his legs, heart, and brain as a friendly exhortation, to move and to live. If added to his stable, it could grow and realize its true potential.

Farther to the south, past the row of discounters and the rotisserie, Branko noticed, on his digital map, a somewhat more valuable creature called a Serbox. It was extracting and retracting wagging tongues from its hands. It was dancing like a Cossack outside the entranceway of a destroyed public housing project. 

Just as he was about to leave to go and get both creatures, a message arrived from a friend.

“sdgkljlkdsdfl;kkl;sdjfl;ksdfgklsdjgsdlk;g sldkjg lks;dj l;ksjdg PEACE DRAGON IN UR AREA PEACE DRAGON IN UR AREA ALERT ALERT ALERT ALERT” it began.

It explained that the most valuable Pokémon in the world, Peace Dragon, of which only two had ever been found, had appeared last night in the Atlantic Ocean about 120 miles off the Jersey coast. Not believing his luck, Branko scanned the water, found nothing, then re-synced his Pokémon map with his Google map, and found Peace Dragon. It was asleep in the dark water (the maps darkened at night, and the creatures fell asleep). Sensing his thumb passing over its wings, the dragon awoke, lifted its sleeping head, and looked up at him, blinking. Branko felt his heartbeat as it looked up from the middle of the ocean.

“She’s beautiful,” he said. 

She had soft features, soft hooves, a soft tail, soft, unscaled skin; her tail had no spikes, her head no horns, her chest no plates, and her legs, face, and demeanor were entirely without the aggression or zaniness of the thousands of lesser Pokémon. Rather, with her capacity to throw energy, and to enclose herself within a ball of light, she seemed to rest in self-assurance, needing neither the crude and merely material defenses of the Serbox outside his window, nor its desperate dances. Her expression of restfulness promised a different life: no work, on demand television from Korea, no time wasting trips to the store, the promise of love, free pretzels, and a country populated by other people interested in certain aspects of popular games and hobbies that consumed Branko’s life and “on the whole, really interested” him.

Branko felt such excitement and such gratitude that he cried onto his rainbow keyboard. He leaned backwards in his computer chair and looked at his ceiling with squinting, joyous, watering eyes. Above him he saw, dangling from a piece of scotch tape, a plush Jigglypuff keychain that this same friend had taped to the ceiling more than a year ago, when she had come to visit. The sight of it sent him into laughing ecstasy. Branko smashed out a reply thanking her profusely.

There was a chance monied collectors might rent a helicopter to fly out to get Peace Dragon, so Branko emailed several charter boat companies to arrange a trip. After an hour, one company responded, saying they would take him out this weekend, pending payment, and that they would depart from a pier in Brick Township. In his excitement, Branko forgot about the Serbox down the street. Later a young girl found it on her way home.

*****

The day of Branko’s departure was overcast and warm. At intervals the bright sun shone into his two windows. He had dreamed of sailing and red dragons. The dragons undulated, as if made from crêpe, alongside a frail and leaking ship in which he was interned. He sat between two creaking wooden boxes in front of a small window, the only source of light in the hull, while the dragons whispered in each other’s ears, saying malicious things about him. Several times they began to open the window, only to close it again and laugh to themselves. Then at last they opened the window and sang in unison: “Dreams aren’t real! Dreams aren’t real! Dreams aren’t real!”

At that point Branko woke up, feeling sick and afraid. He tried to displace the nightmare feeling by eating cereal. The cereal box showed smiling foxes eating cupcakes and stirred in him painful memories.

He displaced this feeling by riding his electric wheel at high speed to the marina and playing “nightcore” remixes of Toto’s “Africa” and Nicki Minaj’s “Anaconda” from the speakers attached to the sides. They were remixes only in the sense of being sped-up versions of the original song. Passing by the docks, Branko imagined himself running across the water like a fast Christ. Healthy financiers jogging beside him resented his loud music. If they could have seen them, they would also have resented his dreams. They were absorbing knowledge at high rates by listening to podcasts about trading strategies. 

Branko arrived at the charter boat company office, a green, faded hut at the edge of the marina. Inside was a short red-faced man sitting between plastic roses.

“Good morning Mister Branko! I’m Mr. Gianaris,” the owner called out as Branko walked inside, in a loud and overpowering voice. “Good day to ride a boat!” Branko said, “yes it is” and shook the man’s hand. He sat down. 

Then he stood up and sat down again many times, all the while composing under his breath a medieval sounding poem for Peace Dragon: “Is it for me that my lady waits, resplendent in the emerald waves? Or is it her pleasure to remain open for all who might ask her… who might seek her pleasure hand… who might wish to…”

“Please her fancy,” he concluded.

The owner went outside and shouted “Hurry up!” at his employee. 

The employee had been putting rope and metal hooks into a box. A moment later the thin young man walked into the building to greet Branko and take him out to the boat. “Paul,” he said, shaking Branko’s hand. He had a soft, weak handshake, and sad, vacant eyes. He worked seasonally on oyster boats in Connecticut and New Hampshire. He played guitar and used different psychedelic drugs recreationally because he suffered from depression like other fishermen and workers in extractive industries. In the summer he worked for Mr. Gianaris helping retired longshoremen catch fish that they called “retirement fish.”

Though Branko had never been on a boat, never met a fishermen, and never left the shoreline, he respected and took as a promising sign Paul’s ragged face and rubber wading boots. He respected Paul’s instinctive glances for sea traffic as they left the marina. 

For Paul the ocean felt like a large workplace, but to Branko it felt like a grand and familiar element. Its size scaled with the sense of his mission, and its smell was robust and meaty, like his favorite food: the California sushi roll. 

Standing out on the bow, with the wind in his long, thick, hair, Branko decided that the ocean could, in the future, be the best and most powerful “spawn spot” in the world. For, in addition to being home to the most valuable Pokémon, it also contained hundreds of species of fish and birds with interesting powers. Furthermore, the ocean also required people to risk what was most precious to them, which is something Branko was interested in.

“It smells like sushi,” Branko said aloud.

When Branko returned to the deckhouse, Paul was thinking of nothing. He asked his captain, “Have you ever played Pokémon Go?” 

Paul replied, “Uh, yeah a homie played it, and he showed me, yeah.”

“And what did you think?” Branko asked.

“Oh, I mean it was cool. It was cool to see them out in real life like that. You know you point it and it looks likes it’s out in the world.” 

“I’m glad you enjoyed it, because it’s an extremely unique platform in that way. And in 2017 it won the Global Immersive Gaming Award.” 

“Yeah, huh,” said Paul. 

“That means it was the top world in the world. That’s one way I like to think about it. There were many virtual worlds to explore in 2017, but out of all of them, the Pokémon Go world was found to be the best of the worlds.”

Branko then continued, “There’s no reason it hasn’t been voted the best immersive world in every year since then, and fans have unanimously voted it as the best world. It’s just that the prize committee feels the need to give the award to someone different every year for some dumbass reason.”

“If you were to design a virtual world,” Branko asked after a moment of silence, “what would you put in it?”

“Like a video game? Like what would my ideal video game be?” said Paul.

“No it’s not exactly the same thing,” replied Branko. “If you were to design an entire virtual world that people could navigate and do things in, that was synced up to the real world, like Pokémon Go. Like in Pokémon Go, you can find Pokémon in the real world, projected into it via the game, and meet lots of people that way.”

“Right, right, I know how it works.”

“Yeah, so if you were to design an immersive platform like that.”

“Well, hmm, that’s an intense question man,” said Paul. “Let me think about it.”

He scratched his beard and looked down through the port window at a pile of rope. A gull had landed on the side of the ship and shat on a metal box. It was crying at the vanished sun. 

Under normal circumstances Paul would have said that he had no ideas for a world like that, but he sensed behind Branko’s blank expression, his face that seemed to say nothing at all, a hidden generousness trying to make itself known. He ransacked his soul in search of his interests, and found guitars and romantic love lying inside. 

“Basically what I think I want is like the opportunity to design a world where you can meet women easily by searching for guitars together. Like, they put real guitars out in the world, or even animated ones, I don’t know, like, and then basically you go out and search for them. And you meet other people who are into guitars and stuff, and talk about it,” he said.

“That’s a great idea for a game Paul. You must have a creative mind.”

“Yeah, and the point is I would just know the chicks who were around were into music because we would be out hunting for guitars. And that’d be a cool way to meet women and discover new music and shit.”

Branko asked, “What kind of guitars would be available to discover?”

“Oh, maybe, Fenders, Gibson, Yamaha, like there could be rare Stratocasters, like Lennie from Motorhead placed this one, Van Halen, he played this one. Maybe other rare drumsticks and shit like that as well.”

“Cool man. Maybe there could also be one of those guitars with piano keyboards at the top.”

“Yeah, maybe, haha.”

“And would the point of your game to bring guitar players together?” asked Branko.

“Yeah, or really anyone who’s interested in music.”

“It’s important to include everyone,” said Branko. “It’s important to invite everyone into any world you build, that way it promotes understanding.”

Then Branko checked his phone, confirmed that the dragon was where she had been, and said, “There are many ways in which people don’t understand each other despite having fundamental similarities that cross national boundaries, age, race, and sex.”

 “How many guitars would there be?” he asked.

“Shit, I don’t know man. I hadn’t thought of it.”

“Well you should make a calculation based off of how many people you expect to play.”

“Yeah, I don’t know man. Maybe two thousand.”

“Well anyway Paul, I’d say you have a great idea for a world. And it’s vital that we all have a dream for a world because our world causes people unnecessary pain.”

“What personal problems would your world solve?” asked Branko, after a long silence.

“Wow, haha. That’s pretty personal. I don’t know. I…”

“I’ll tell you mine,” said Branko. “A lot of people didn’t respect me growing up because I was a nerd and I was extremely good at school—even though in reality I was just okay, and when I went to college I realized that I sucked. But they knew I was a hardcore gamer and stuff and that I was well known in the LEGO community and they held that against me. And I also witnessed violence in my home country. That was something that affected me. And looking back on it, I also think that people resented me because I was never bored and I found ways to live life to the fullest in my hometown even when everyone else was using extreme drugs. All that made me consider myself to be really not good at socializing. Then I played Pokémon Go. And when I did that, I realized that if you bring people together around shared interests, anyone in the world can get along. So for example, I live nearby a ghetto neighborhood, but even gangsters respect me there because I’ve gone out looking for Pokémon with kids in the neighborhood and taught them how to train them and make them evolve. I also became friends with an old woman who’s a highly ranked Pokémon Go player and we sometimes video chat to talk about different tactics and stuff, as well as our lives.”

“Yeah, that’s cool,” said Paul. “Yeah, that makes a lot of sense actually. I could use that kind of thing. I would say my problem is I could use more friends and romance, in my life, because I’m out here on this boat driving alone with old dudes with mental problems.”

“But that’s cool, it’s good to know a lot of people,” Paul added.

Then he reclined in his deckchair, and looked at Branko as he searched through his phone. Branko noticed flying fish depositing green eggs on American Samoa. Paul looked at Branko’s face. 

Wanting to humor Branko, Paul asked him to hold the steering wheel in place. Then he went into the hull to check on the bilge pumps and the engine. He scraped green mold from the side of the hull. Then he went out to the water and watched as it changed from blue to green. The sky darkened somewhat. He swallowed an amount measured to microdose from the shroom he had brought in his pocket. After a few minutes it allowed him to see pregnant and sad things.

The rows of waves succeeded one another as if running on fixed, intersecting tracks in a train repair yard.  

Upon his return to the deckhouse, Paul said, “Yeah man, there’s a lot of pain in the world.”

*****

The orderly rows of waves began to jostle and whip up white foam. Seagulls flying above the trawler saw black clouds in the distance. They passed over Paul and Branko traveling in the opposite direction crying out warnings.

So many miles from the shore, Branko sometimes lost sight of Peace Dragon. When he did, a strong trainer in a beige vest would appear on his screen to say: “Master Trainer! You may wish to enter an area with better cell phone service!” Paul insisted that the GPS would work far out into the ocean. 

Having thought about it for some time, Paul finally said, “I wanted to say you, like, I don’t think you can just make a game and escape all the shit that people have to deal with. I’d still be at work with people I don’t really fuck with, doing something I just landed in instead of playing guitar, which is what I should be doing. Like even if I was meeting people what would it change. I’d just be out on my free time collecting these fake guitars,”

Branco interrupted, “They won’t be fake, if you assign value to them.” 

“What?”

“If you allow them to create value, then they will not be just fake guitars to you, but real guitars,” said Branko.

“Maybe,” Paul said. 

“Damn,” he said after a time.

Just as it had started to rain, Paul had begun to see pleasant motions in Branko’s hair, and, in the clouds, a row of gray cherubs that he could will in and out of existence. 

Branko continued: “There’s all kinds of things that I assign value to just as if it were physically real. I can name them and tell you why they’re valuable,” and then he began a long discourse on the merits of many different Pokémon: their relative strengths and weaknesses, their species and genders, their essential element “gold, water, fire, earth, diamond, ice, coal,” their rarity and fitness for competition. Images of each one washed over Paul in procession so that, as he looked out at the water, and his map and the changing skies, and the growing waves, he saw not only cherubs, but many little animals and dragons Branko described, which were shaped like hearts, flowers, potatoes, teeth, and computers, as well as guns, smiling dice, eels, and porcupines, all benevolent, defanged, round, and holding hands just over the water. Seeing them all together like that made him feel like one of God’s children. He remembered an afternoon he had spent his grandmother’s apartment.

She had maintained a menagerie of angels and saints on her windowsill. Paul had been fighting with the cherubs, making them wrangle with one another, and had broken one with red and yellow wings. When he apologized, his grandmother forgave him and made him black tea. But then, as a kind of payment, she had talked and talked at him, about which kinds of angels she liked, and why, and what she imagined heaven was like, and Branko was like her in this way, talking so much about how he wanted things to be.

Branko described several utopian scenes that Paul barely understood involving The Hairy Spider, and a kind of green mountain where people played Pokémon Go. The rain began to fall in huge violent sheets and waves rocked the boat.

Branko stopped his discourse and asked if they would they be safe. The hull began to fill with water.

Paul then said loudly over the sound of the rain and waves, “I wanted to say one more thing man, I been thinking about your question, and I wanted to add this. I wanted to say that in addition to the game being like that, like you’d also be able to put on the map the venues of open mic nights. Like, even in places where there’s no open mic, it would create them. Like it would just say, yo, you can go play here. And then musicians who would be doing whatever, like myself, maybe we can’t book a gig, the game would just say ‘Just go here’ and there you go.”

The skies grew very dark, taking on an almost purple color. The boat ripped up the waves. Branko vomited all over his detective Pikachu T-shirt and then ran to vomit more into the water. 

As the rain soaked his long black hair, Branko thought he would die—but the feeling was not how he thought it would be. It was the worst feeling imaginable, like a robbery.

From the safety of the deckhouse, the young man seemed unreal to Paul, a phantom that had visited him during his workday and told him many strange things. But then a wave tossed Branko into the air and he landed on his stomach. Paul ran outside clutching his head. He lifted up Branko from his armpits, saying to himself “That’s really fucked! Fuck!”

There was vomit all over the proud detective Pikachu with his detective’s ballcap and Charizard and Squirtle. Branko was crying because of the pain in his chest and because he saw Peace Dragon less and less frequently on his phone, now wrapped in an almost opaque plastic bag so as to stay dry. Many times Paul considered turning back and said so—Branko raised no objection, feeling himself weak and on the brink of death.

But then they saw in the distance, Branko through his burning tears, Paul through the deckhouse window, a city in the ocean, its shape suggested by red blinking lights. Only a faint outline emerged—but as they went forward, it became clear that Peace Dragon lived on a deep-sea oil rig.

The two men began to see bare outlines of pipes entering into and out of the ocean, huge swinging machines on top of a platform, men running in yellow rain coats, watching green and white lights, climbing ladders and pipes, hammering things, tying blue tarps over metal scaffolding, and hastening to short cranes. The partial and shaking illumination increased the platforms’ black expanse. And Branko and Paul’s imaginations, running wild with suggestion, filled in the dark patches with unknown threats. 

Quiet shouting and a quiet horn, either from the platform itself, or from a different ship, sounded in the distance. A coast guard ship shone its flood light into their cramped deckhouse. Paul tried to squeeze cogency into his brain but all around him saw furry waves. The remnants of the procession of animals had been tossed in the air, landing broken on the deck of his own boat, not breathing, and flapping around like captured fish. Not knowing what else to do, he guided the boat under the platform. Above him he saw men spraying crude oil from a hose. 

Whipping around like a tortured animal, crushed generations came roaring through the huge black tube. They had been disturbed from rest they merely thought everlasting. The souls of worms, clams, snails, and flat fish were forced back to life, to fire dangerous journeys, not just in boats, not just in cars, trains, and airplanes, but also on screens where children rode magic dogs and rockets, trucks and motorbikes, on endless roads, on mountaintops, in space, in order to capture, train, and assassinate imagined soldiers, bugs, dead people, and thousands upon thousands of imagined beings based in part on worms, clams, and other things that once had lived and now were dreaming. 

After so many years inside the earth, asleep and wandering in their worlds of sleep, these disturbed creatures, awake yet again—could they not most rightfully say “DREAMS AREN’T REAL!!!”?

But then Branko discovered Peace Dragon at last, projected on a stairway attached to one of the black columns. 

She was asleep. 

Against the waves she had pitched a tent of light. 

Paul went towards her on Branko’s command and then, while high on the crest of a wave, Branko jumped from the bow of the ship onto a step about halfway up the staircase. He heard the horn and loud voices.

Paul saw water entering the boat and flooding the bow. He would lose the boat and then be arrested. He communicated with the Coast Guard ship to ask for help and meanwhile gathered his memories around him. His lover told him to clean his boots. He saw the cherub repaired. 

Branko held his phone out in the rain, its faint light shone on nothing. The screen did not register the weight of his fingers. He collapsed onto his knees.

But as waves reached up to his pantlegs, and his phone began to flicker out and die, Peace Dragon walked into the open Pokéball freely, the first Pokémon who had ever done so. She settled into the ball as if it were her nest. 

Branko looked at her. 

Her placid eyes contained many long miles. They shone like lanterns through the mist of the world.

Up above were hoses, lights, and men —below were stairs leading into the ocean.

Standing in the open Pokéball, Peace Dragon said, “Hearty congratulations, BRANK0B0SS! It is our fate to assure world peace!” 

Material Truth

Posted on by musickmorley0814

Over Easter ham dinners when I was growing up, my father liked to read John Updike’s early poem “Seven Stanzas at Easter,” which begins like this: 

Make no mistake: if He rose at all
It was as His body;
If the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules,
Reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
The Church will fall.

The rest is in the same vein, elegantly decked out with technical jargon that fixes the empty tomb and the folded grave-clothes in the realm of laboratory science. On the basis of this poem, I held in my teens a vague idea of Updike as an obscure religious poet possessed of a passionate and un-Enlightened faith and a fiercely countercultural devotion to the Church. 

This turned out not to be exactly right, since Updike was some way from orthodoxy for almost all his life, but his lavishly lustful novels do reflect an essential understanding that we human beings are not wandering spirits but unities of body and soul, appetite and intellection. That conviction alone was apparently enough to make him a great Easter poet for one day in 1960.

The view of the resurrection expressed in Updike’s “Seven Stanzas” was the standard one for seventeen centuries of Church history. The earliest Christians whose writings we possess evidently believed it was important that Christ had been raised materially and not metaphorically; that a particular large rock on a particular spot outside Jerusalem had been shifted six feet to the side by divine power, and that Christianity’s metaphysical and ethical teachings had their warrant in the mysterious movements of physical bodies. In 1 Corinthians, the apostle Paul declares that “If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain … If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in the midst of your sins.” John begins his first epistle by calling the Gospel account 

That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we looked upon and have touched with our hands, concerning the word of life—the life was made manifest, and we have seen it, and testify to it and proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the father and was made manifest to us—that which we have seen and heard …

This passage returns rhythmically again and again to materiality and sense-perception: Christ had a body; the Gospel begins with bodies. And Jesus himself makes the same point when he offers to let Thomas put his hand in the wounds in his wrists and side, giving him tactile certainty of a material resurrection—touch being the most intimate of senses, a proof that satisfies when sight and hearing are too ambiguous to be trusted.

But there is a basic tension in Christianity: on the one side, the materiality of the shifted stone, the pierced side, the bleeding wrists and ankles; on the other, the Christian turn away from outward ritual and toward the primacy of inward belief. When Jesus offers his wrists to Thomas, the disciple cries out in wonder, but he does not actually touch the wounds. Seeing the risen Christ is evidently enough for him. In Jesus’s words:  “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”

The movement in this passage from touch to sight to sheer inward belief foreshadows what might be called the immaterial strand in Christianity—its tendency to displace religious life and work from the world of bodies into the world of spirit. Compared to the highly ritual and material forms of paganism it supplanted in the ancient Mediterranean and later across Europe, Christianity is indeed a very ethereal faith. The Homeric gods, for example, are subject to bodily desires, pleasures, and afflictions: they lap up smoke from burnt offerings, lust after human beings and one another, and suffer wounds from human heroes. 

The movement toward the immaterial begins with Judaism: the Israelites of the Hebrew Bible, surrounded by believers in material gods, seem to have alternated between mocking their polytheist neighbors and imitating them. One of Israel’s great besetting sins, in the eyes of the writers of the Hebrew scriptures, was setting up physical images to worship, defying a god who had commanded them not to worship graven images. To the writers, Yahweh’s immateriality was clearly a source of superiority over the embodied pagan gods, even if it made his worship more difficult for ordinary people. In 1 Kings, after the wicked Ahab has led Israel into polytheism, the prophet Elijah offers a vivid demonstration of the contrast. When the Baal worshiped by Ahab’s priests fails to set his own altar on fire, Elijah ridicules him for his materiality: “Cry aloud, for he is a god. Either he is musing, or he is relieving himself, or he is on a journey, or perhaps he is asleep and must be awakened.” 

Though the religion of the Hebrews did involve physical acts of sacrifice, one of God’s recurring complaints against his people is that they perform the material rituals perfectly while neglecting inward devotion. “For you will not delight in sacrifice, or I would give it,” prays the author of Psalm 51; “you will not be pleased with a burnt offering. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.”

Contrast the sentiment of that passage with Glaucon and Adeimantus’s fear, in Republic II, that the unjust man’s wealth will allow him to excel in sacrifices and so become a friend to the gods. This passage suggests that to conventionally pious Greeks, service to the gods consisted largely in ritual observances—so much so that a bad man’s wealth could quite literally purchase their friendship. And in light of Homer’s depictions of the gods reveling in the smoke of burnt offerings, this attitude made sense. The Hebrew prophets labored to make it clear that the true god was different.

The contrast is even more pronounced in the Christian Gospels, where Christ teaches about a kingdom not of this world and a perfect God who summons human beings to internal perfection. The service this God demands begins with the conversion of the heart. Jesus carries forward the immaterial tendency of the prophets by rejecting religious authorities’ attempts to enforce ritual laws that would prevent him from performing acts of mercy. He makes the distinction between the inner and the outer explicit: 

Now you Pharisees cleanse the outside of the cup and of the dish, but inside you are full of greed and wickedness. You fools! Did not he who made the outside make the inside also? But give as alms the things that are within, and behold, everything is clean for you.

Admittedly, both Yahweh and Jesus replace ritual action not only with internal conversion but with a new kind of work in the external, material world: showing mercy to the poor and doing justice to the wronged. But as Jesus’s inside/outside language shows, these new assignments differ categorically from older religions’ emphasis on winning the gods’ favor through actions specifically designed to please them. The Christian God calls his followers to change their hearts in the expectation that good works will follow as natural consequences. Jesus finds a metaphor for this process in another recurring image: the tree and its fruit. A good tree will produce good fruit, the external sign of its internal soundness; a bad tree’s fruit is fit only to be burned.

†

The modern denial of supernatural agency in the world is an extremely unusual view. That it prevails in our culture is arguably an unintended consequence of this ethereal strand in Christianity. Most medieval Christians seem to have regarded the divinity as governing both the spiritual and the material spheres. By the time of the European Enlightenment, however, a combination of changing scientific frameworks, flowering philosophical humanism, and the inward turn of the Reformation made belief in direct material supernatural action increasingly unfashionable. The deist Western intelligentsia took Jesus’s inwardness discourse to new lengths: their God asks for nothing from human beings other than a simple and rational morality, and he never intervenes in the material world he has made. Kant takes this position in Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, declaring, amazingly, that “whatever [the] historical standing” of Christ’s resurrection from the dead, it should not be talked about except in metaphorical terms, since it implies that rational personality (for Kant the site of all goodness) is material rather than spiritual. If miracles do happen, they should be hushed up.

Kant’s view has basically persisted, even as Kantian rationalism went out of fashion in its turn; his deism was the faith of most of the American founders, and today it appears to be the dominant opinion about God in both opinion polling and the public square. A plurality of Americans between 2003 and 2013 said they believe God “observes but does not control what happens on Earth.” 

Updike’s “Seven Stanzas,” with its ecstatic insistence on the reality of the resurrection, thus reflects a doctrine that is no longer self-evident to American Christians, if it ever was. Many self-identified Christians see miracles and the supernatural as superstitious distractions from the moral and internal revolution that Jesus proclaimed. To them, as to Kant and the great 20th-century theologians of the American mainline, the dissolution of flesh-and-blood resurrections into the vapor of metaphor is the logical consequence of Christianity’s original departure from pagan blood sacrifice and ritual purification. The true Christian, in this view, rejects the Christian account of the miraculous.

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Here at the end of history, then, a Christian who reads cannot avoid the question: does it matter to me whether or not the Gospel accounts of Jesus Christ’s life, death, resurrection, and ascension are materially true? Most evangelicals trying to make a life among the American intelligentsia learn early on to reinterpret the Genesis account of creation as a beautiful (we always make sure to specify that it’s beautiful) metaphor intended to communicate a cosmological doctrine concerning God’s relation to nature that in no way conflicts with Darwin’s teaching on the origin and progress of life, or with modern geology’s proofs that the Earth is substantially more than six thousand years old. 

If we can so easily dispense with sacred scripture’s account of the beginnings of things—even as our less couth coreligionists expend huge amounts of time, intelligence, and money to explain away modern science’s challenges to a literal interpretation of Genesis—then why are we still hung up on the equally strange, if less easily falsifiable, claims of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John? Jesus himself, liberal theology claims, has shown us the way by turning away from the old blood-and-guts morality and toward an ethic of neighbor-love and inward holiness. Christians (and probably monotheists in general) can sidestep the blows of modern natural science in a way that pagans never could. In fact, a fully ethereal, interior Christianity is immune to any disproof whatsoever by means of science or the senses. It can only be disputed on remote philosophical grounds, and those debates, as everyone knows, are never really settled. Such a Christianity seems well positioned to conquer the world: armed with a compelling moral teaching, preaching love, grace, and kindness, universal in outlook, and materially unfalsifiable, since it makes no material claims.

Over the course of the 20th century, the American mainline churches embraced this post-material Christianity. Major theologians imported historical-critical scriptural interpretation from Germany and used it to dismiss the Gospel’s miraculous accounts. The Jesus of Kant and Jefferson—a great teacher, a simple man, willing to give up his life for his beliefs—became the central figure in elite American Christianity. The result, however, was not a third Great Awakenings. Instead, Americans stopped going to church. 

The secularization of the West over the last century is a complicated issue. Attributing it entirely to the shifting theology of the Protestant mainline would be a mistake. But an American Christian who wants to keep up with the times faces a curious paradox: the churches that have accommodated themselves most completely to modern thought have utterly failed to hold Americans’ interest—filling up for encouraging messages on Easter and Christmas, holding skeleton congregations for the rest of the year. The sociologist Elizabeth Drescher, who interviewed hundreds of post-Christian Americans for a book project, told an interviewer in 2013 that many ex-mainliners feel they’ve “graduated from church.” “They got it,” Drescher said. “They get that they’re supposed to be good to people, share what they have, do good in the world.” Evidently the most purely ethereal forms of Christianity tend to go up in smoke.

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Liberal Christianity may not get many people out of bed on Sunday mornings, but it certainly has philosophical appeal. As I worked my way through the familiar adolescent struggle to reconcile thought and belief, I found unexpected guides in a pre-Christian philosopher and one of his post-Christian disciples.

Although Plato is often read—not without justification—as one of the founders of the immaterial turn in Western thought, his ethical teaching is actually grounded in the world of objects. Kant’s ethics require us to delve deeper within ourselves; Plato’s summon us beyond the machinery of human consciousness. Specifically, Plato’s teaching that the good as such is an external object of understanding, rather than an immaterial property of the human will, turns our attention away from ourselves and toward an external world of physical things in which the good is, if not actually present, at least fleetingly imaged. The contemplation of real things, real actions, real people outside our heads becomes a condition for our access to goodness.

In her most famous work, The Sovereignty of Good, the Platonist Iris Murdoch takes Kant as an especially brilliant representative of the characteristic ethical attitude of modernity. Kant situates goodness in the will—the choice to obey reason, which is free, rather than some lesser principle that is ultimately determined by the necessity-bound material world: pleasure, pain, blind faith. This account of the good is founded on a profound truth: under the direction of a bad will, the strongest and most beautiful things can be put to bad ends. Eloquence can sway an audience to good or evil; strength can save or kill. Goodness itself is plainly not located in objects or attributes. So where can we find it? Kant solves the problem by moving it inward, to the will.

Plato moves it outward and upward instead. He locates goodness in the perfections of the objects and actions we encounter every day: what an olive tree or an act of courage is measured up against and striving to become. These perfections he calls the forms; the more perfect the object, the more completely it shares in the attributes of its form. This sharing is what his translators usually call participation—a word that tries to capture the mysterious relation between an imperfect object and its perfection.

The material world, on this account, is a world of shadows; the substance, the true reality, lies beyond the sphere that we know with our senses. Yet the Platonic view also imparts an immense dignity to the material, since the ascent to the forms begins with the contemplation of objects outside ourselves. Murdoch points out that the Republic’s philosopher-kings are after all kings as well as philosophers, compelled to rule in the cave because their contemplation of the good makes them capable of a more perfect attention to particulars than a non-philosopher can manage. And she thinks that ordinary people are called to some version of the same kind of thinking: “The difficulty [in an ethical dilemma] is to keep the attention fixed upon the real situation and to prevent it from returning surreptitiously to the self with consolations of self-pity, resentment, fantasy, and despair.” In short, an ethics of attention to the good broadens for Murdoch (and, in her account, Plato) into an ethics of attention to objects outside the self in light of a good that is also outside the self. Socrates, too—a man continually in quest for the forms—spends his time walking around the city, eating and drinking with other people, rather than doing his most important work alone in his armchair like Descartes.

Murdoch believes that Plato’s account is truer to moral experience than Kant’s. She recognizes the grandeur of Kant’s vision, but she also thinks that his image of the perfect human being is both unrealistic and perhaps a little silly. The brooding solemnity of the upright man who proudly refuses any heteronomous moral instruction and insists on vanquishing his demons through the force of his own will may have seemed right to the highly disciplined and intellectual Sage of Königsberg, but it also defies thousands of years of common sense, which has always laughed at exaggerated claims of self-sufficiency.

Plato, by contrast, saw that a person who wants to be good does so by contemplating something beyond and above herself, attained and understood through great effort. The moment of moral clarity comes not when we fix our gaze most intently on our own inwardness, but when we turn it away from ourselves and toward the good as such.

Murdoch’s embrace of Plato was self-consciously anachronistic; she referred to him, romantically, as “the philosopher under whose banner I am fighting.” She was right to think about her project in those terms, because her ethical thought cuts against the grand progressive movement toward ethical inwardness. For Kant and his liberal Christian heirs, the movement away from paganism entailed a movement toward what reason could grasp: a comprehensive cosmology, a rational ethics, all situated within the human mind. For Murdoch, ethics summons us into a cloud of unknowing, since the good, while accessible to our contemplation, is beyond our comprehension.

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It was on a Thursday night that Jesus, sitting with his disciples at what he knew would be the last meal before his betrayal and execution, took bread; and, when he had given thanks, he broke it, and gave it to his disciples, saying, Take, eat; this is my body which is given for you: do this in remembrance of me. Likewise after supper he took the cup; and, when he had given thanks, he gave it to them, saying, Drink this, all of you; for this is my blood of the new covenant, which is shed for you and for many for the remission of sins: Whenever you drink it, do this in remembrance of me.

I found myself trying to wrap up this piece during the three days between Maundy Thursday, when Christians commemorate the strange and brutally material command to eat Christ’s body and drink his blood, and Easter, when we celebrate his resurrection. It’s a time when we’re supposed to fast and meditate on the bodily agonies Jesus suffered during his trial and death: scourged, stripped, nailed wrist and ankle to a wooden frame, raised skyward and left to hang there, arms stretched out of their sockets by his body’s downward weight and likely elongated, according to one account I read, by six or seven inches. The immediate cause of death was probably asphyxiation; the loud cry he gave at the end would have been the last breath he could manage. Thinking about what happened to Jesus reminds us that we, too, have bodies, and that those bodies can be twisted, smashed, and torn in a thousand different ways, and that even if we manage to keep them more or less out of harm’s way for seventy or eighty years, they will eventually oxidize into uselessness and finally collapse into shapeless masses of bloody pulp.

The contemplation of Christ’s broken body and shed blood does draw us in towards ourselves, then, but not in Kantian contemplation of the moral law within. It shows us that even our very inwardness, in this fallen state of ours, is broken, strange, irrational, and liable to die. So many of the intellectual and practical tendencies of modern life militate against this understanding—from transhumanism, which seeks to replace this mortal body with one that we can truly control, to the overprescription of psychotropic drugs, which desperately attempts to subject the irrational and bodily to a universal reason. Seeing Christ gasping for air on the cross, we see God’s own son, the divine logos, laboring in the same fleshly shackles that bind us.

The gospel of inwardness and immateriality offers a simple and elegant solution to the horrifying paradox of the Cross: Christ died on Golgotha, but he lives on in the hearts of his followers, or perhaps their spirits or consciences, because, after all, the truth he came to preach was far too great to be contained in a fleshly body. Christian orthodoxy offers a less sophisticated and frankly more violent solution to the paradox: that instead of outwitting death, vaporizing out of its grasp into the pure intellectual realm of freedom, Christ beats it down by main force, crushes it, mangles it, and reclaims the physical realm of necessity as a realm of freedom by rising bodily from the tomb in defiance of nature’s laws. 

Paul writes that at the end of all things Christ “delivers the kingdom to God the Father after destroying every rule and every authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death.” This is not an intellectual battle, or even a purely spiritual one: it is a material triumph in the material world. If contemplating Jesus’s death forces us to acknowledge that the basic conditions of our life are beyond our control, contemplating his resurrected body transforms the meaning of bodiliness itself, making materiality into a sphere of radical and miraculous possibility. Of course, nothing like this happens in Plato, for whom material things merely point the way out of materiality. Platonism shares Christianity’s ambivalent but hopeful attitude toward the material world as containing the promise of something better; but only Christianity offers the final consummation within materiality itself.

The Christian who lives within the frame of reference given by the Bible must ask: why does a God who desires the conversion of the heart make the salvation of the world depend on the sacrifice and miraculous resurrection of a material human body? Why does a God who blesses us with the terrible gift of free will insist on working out our salvation in the material realm, the realm of necessity? The problem of material truth turns out to be a problem of theodicy. Why doesn’t the master of time and space perform his works of grace in the immaterial sphere of universal reason, where they would be accessible to every rational mind as Kant demanded?

Murdoch’s distinction between inward and outward reason points the way to an answer. If Christ is not raised materially from the dead, the faith that Paul preached and that Christians today profess is indeed in vain, since Christian faith in his teachings is nothing other than the mind’s faith in its own operation—its own capacity to comprehend the workings of the great Newtonian machine of nature and the greater Kantian machine of rational ethics. If he did not live, die, and rise bodily, that luminous unknown outside the self can and must be absorbed and comprehended by the self, by the humming brain of the rational animal.

Christ’s sayings can be absorbed and systematized; like Socrates in the Phaedrus, he compares his teachings to seeds that he sows in the soul of his hearers but that must grow up on their own. But Christ’s risen body cannot be absorbed or systematized. In its materiality it remains irreducibly external to the self; in its miraculous resurrection it shatters the mind’s mastery of the laws of nature. 

As Jesus walked around and talked with various inhabitants of first-century Palestine, he left behind him immaterial teachings and doctrines that enter the soul of the believer and free it from the arbitrary and amoral material commands of paganism. But he also left behind miracles, culminating in his own emergence from the tomb where he had been laid, dead as a doornail, thirty-six hours before. These miracles cannot enter the soul of the believer. They remain outside, mystical objects of contemplation, beyond our capacity to systematize or explain.

Plato and Murdoch help us not only to accept this strange teaching but to love it. Plato’s doctrine of the good as an object outside the self, grasped through dialectical contemplation of external objects that participate in it, moderates his own repudiation of the reality of the material world. It is also a rebuke to the Christian who wants to rule out any doctrine that doesn’t fit in his system, and a reminder to Platonist and Christian alike that we ascend to the truth not through ever more concentrated self-analysis but through attention: to our cities, to our neighbors, to the person of Christ in the scriptures. 

We live not in a mind-palace of our own construction but in a world of faces—an unsettling world at times, but also one adorned with glories that we could never have discovered in ourselves. Critics of Platonism have scoffed at the longing for an unworldly and inaccessible perfection. But Platonism also bestows an astonishing dignity on the world of things, each of which becomes a promise of a beauty beyond imagination. To look at things as they are and see them straining toward what they might be—to see, as Paul wrote, “the whole creation … groaning together in the pains of childbirth”—is to be freed from the despairing resignation of the inward turn, which seeks perfection in pure thought out of disillusionment with the corruption of the material. And Christ’s bodily resurrection, Paul says, is the beginning of all this, the beginning of the end of the birth of the new life, the redemption of the body. Attending to the reknit molecules and rekindled amino acids of his risen body prepares us to attend to a world that lies just on the verge of bursting into glorious newness.

Simone Weil, Murdoch’s fellow Platonist and a crucial source for her ethics of attention, characterized attention as a kind of self-effacement: “I have to deprive all that I call ‘I’ of the light of my attention and turn it on to that which cannot be conceived.” For Weil as for Murdoch, the attention that draws us toward the truth is not necessarily abstract. “The poet produces the beautiful by fixing his attention on something real,” she wrote. “It is the same with the act of love. To know that this man who is hungry and thirsty really exists as much as I do—that is enough, the rest follows of itself.” Immaterial Christianity makes the man Jesus into a symbol, a metaphor for the teaching that lives in every Christian’s heart, and melts his solid flesh into air. Only to the believer in material truth can the hungry and thirsty Christ become an object of attention, of love that lifts us out of selfishness.