HOW TO TRANSCEND A HAPPY MARRIAGE - Lincoln Center Theater Review by Lincoln Center Theater

Winter 2017 Issue No.68

HOW TO Transcend A HAPPY MARRIAGE

Marcel Dzama, The After Party, ink, gouache, and graphite on paper, 2012. Courtesy David Zwirner, New York/London.

Lincoln Center Theater Review A publication of Lincoln Center Theater Winter 2017, Issue Number 68 Alexis Gargagliano, Editor John Guare, Anne Cattaneo, Executive Editors Tamar Cohen, Art Direction, Design David Leopold, Picture Editor Tom Koken, Production Carol Anderson, Copy Editor The Vivian Beaumont Theater, Inc., Board of Directors Eric M. Mindich, Chairman Kewsong Lee, President Marlene Hess, Leonard Tow, and William D. Zabel, Vice Chairmen Jonathan Z. Cohen, Chairman, Executive Committee Jane Lisman Katz, Treasurer John W. Rowe, Secretary André Bishop Producing Artistic Director Annette Tapert Allen Allison M. Blinken James-Keith Brown H. Rodgin Cohen Ida Cole Ide Dangoor David DiDomenico Shari Eberts Curtland E. Fields Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. J. Tomilson Hill, Chairman Emeritus Judith Hiltz Linda LeRoy Janklow, Chairman Emeritus Raymond Joabar

Eric Kuhn Betsy Kenny Lack Memrie M. Lewis Ninah Lynne Phyllis Mailman Ellen R. Marram John Morning Brooke Garber Neidich Elyse Newhouse Augustus K. Oliver Robert Pohly Stephanie Shuman David F. Solomon Tracey Travis David Warren Robert G. Wilmers

John B. Beinecke, Chairman Emeritus, Mrs. Leonard Block, John S. Chalsty, Constance L. Clapp, Ellen Katz, Victor H. Palmieri, Elihu Rose, Daryl Roth, Lowell M. Schulman Honorary Trustees Hon. John V. Lindsay Founding Chairman

The Rosenthal Family Foundation—Jamie Rosenthal Wolf, David Wolf, Rick Rosenthal, and Nancy Stephens Rosenthal, Directors—is the Lincoln Center Theater Review’s founding and sustaining donor. This edition of the Lincoln Center Theater Review is also supported by the David C. Horn Foundation. Our deepest appreciation for the support provided to the Lincoln Center Theater Review by the Christopher Lightfoot Walker Literary Fund at Lincoln Center Theater.

HOW TOTranscend A HAPPY MARRIAGE How to Tolerate Uncertainty Without Becoming Psychotic by Jessica Lamb-Shapiro

God as Loving Many People All at Once by Sophie Lucido Johnson

Walton Ford Portfolio

A Divine Something: Excerpt from American Philosophy: A Love Story by John Kaag

Passion + Harmony by Edward Rothstein A Study of the Negative Effects of the Non-Primal Scene on the Development of the Adolescent Me by Shalom Auslander

The Big Bed by Arlene Heyman

The Animal in Us: Excerpt from Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer

Front cover artwork by Marcel Dzama, Flowers of Romance, ink and watercolor on paper, 6-part drawing, 2005. Courtesy David Zwirner, New York/London. Back cover artwork by Walton Ford, Eothen, watercolor, gouache, ink and pencil on paper, 2001. Courtesy of the artist and Paul Kasmin Gallery.

MARCEL

12 Marcel Dzama, Untitled, 2005. Courtesy David Zwirner, New York/London.

Bernard Gersten Founding Executive Producer

Writing this introduction the day after the Women’s March, I’m struck by the serendipity of Sarah Ruhl’s new play, How to Transcend a Happy Marriage, premiering at Lincoln Center Theater. Ruhl, a MacArthur Genius, examines the inner lives of women in sly, powerful, gorgeous plays. LCT audiences will have seen the evolution of the female experience through Ruhl’s most recent work—a woman’s sexual awakening (In the Next Room or the vibrator play), a young mother grappling with how to release her child into the world (The Oldest Boy), and, in How to Transcend a Happy Marriage, a woman struggling with being a wife, a mother, and a sexual being as she enters her middle years. As one character in the play laments, “It’s no fair, no fair, you have to become an animal in order to have children and then you have a child and you have to disguise your animal nature forever after.” Like Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, How to Transcend a Happy Marriage operates on two levels: on the surface, it is a domestic play, whimsical and titillating, but the issues pulsing beneath the surface are profound—identity, sexuality, and an examination of the clash between civilization and wild, human nature at its most fundamental and urgent. Ruhl’s language shimmers and delights as it excavates the deepest recesses of the human experience. The play’s epigraphs (see below) hint at her rich pool of ideas, from Ovid to E.E. Cummings, from Paul Bowles to the authors of The Ethical Slut. The current Review dives into this pool with an article from Jessica Lamb-Shapiro on Americans’ hunger for self-help and our fear of not being able to guarantee the future. Sophie Lucido Johnson investigates polyamory and our capacity to love many people. John Kaag writes about Socrates, the Romantic poet Coleridge, and how to listen to the small voice within that warns us against making bad decisions. Edward Rothstein deftly breaks down the intersection of geometry and music in this play. In a candid essay, Shalom Auslander writes about his first encounter with his parents’ sexuality, and the psychotherapist Arlene Heyman examines Freud, the formation of the sexual self, and the interplay between sex and family. Exploring Kafka, shame, and vegetarianism, Jonathan Safran Foer provocatively asks us to look at our own animal nature—a concept echoed in the work of two contemporary artists featured in this issue: Marcel Dzama and Walton Ford. Their art examines the most primal, savage, and passionate elements of human nature. Sarah Ruhl’s new play does this, too, when you scratch its elegant surface. —Alexis Gargagliano

Dzama, COVER ARTIST Born in 1974, Marcel Dzama is best known for his ink and watercolor paintings. His childhood in the remote Canadian wilds is evident in his dark and delicate drawings filled with chimerical trees, mythical creatures, and beautiful people who look, at first, as if they belong in a children’s book. But Dzama bends his innocent-seeming style to capture the primal impulses of our contemporary world. His drawings seem to leap from the hidden recesses of his mind, his dreams, and his fantasies. Perhaps they do: he used to keep a flashlight and a pad by his bed so that he could draw anything that came to him during the night.

EPIGRAPHS from “HOW TO TRANSCEND A HAPPY MARRIAGE” “Now I am ready to tell how bodies are changed into different bodies.”—Ovid “She…changed from hour to hour like mercury. She was an odd bird; but she was a woman, she wasn’t a man, and I arrived at the conclusion that a woman can change from one minute to the next without anyone saying anything about it.” —Paul Bowles on Jane Bowles “A lot of people ‘love’ because, and a lot of people ‘love’ although, and a few individuals love. Love is something illimitable and a lot of people spend their limited lives trying to prevent anything illimitable from happening to them.”—E.E. Cummings “Great sluts are made, not born.”—The Ethical Slut: A Practical Guide to Polyamory, Open Relationships & Other Adventures, by Dossie Easton and Janet W. Hardy 3

Marcel Dzama, The After Party, ink, gouache, and graphite on paper, 2012. Courtesy David Zwirner, New York/London.

HOW TOTranscend A HAPPY MARRIAGE How to Tolerate Uncertainty Without Becoming Psychotic by Jessica Lamb-Shapiro

God as Loving Many People All at Once by Sophie Lucido Johnson

Walton Ford Portfolio

A Divine Something: Excerpt from American Philosophy: A Love Story by John Kaag

Passion + Harmony by Edward Rothstein A Study of the Negative Effects of the Non-Primal Scene on the Development of the Adolescent Me by Shalom Auslander

The Big Bed by Arlene Heyman

The Animal in Us: Excerpt from Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer

MARCEL

12 Marcel Dzama, Untitled, 2005. Courtesy David Zwirner, New York/London.

Bernard Gersten Founding Executive Producer

HOW TO Tolerate UNCERTAINTY WITHOUT Becoming Psychotic by Jessica Lamb-Shapiro

Elijah Gowin, Falling in Trees 6, 2007. © Elijah Gowin, courtesy Robert Mann Gallery.

My adoptive mother once gave me some relationship advice: “Write your name in all your books so you’ll know who they belong to.” She grabbed a handful of books off the shelf and packed them in a box. She was divorcing my father, and they were in the process of dividing, and arguing over, their assets and belongings. My books were more than precious to me; they were my sole means of escape, and reading was the only time I wasn’t anxious and afraid. Her words resonated and taxed my nervous system. I quickly went and wrote my name in all my books. I liked writing my name in things, because I was six years old. I have heard that it is common for little girls to fantasize about their future wedding, and that by the time they get married they have spent many years mentally preparing. I was not one of those little girls. I didn’t think about marriage, because it seemed impossible. This was a comfortable mind-set for me; there was nothing to lose. Then I met someone. Everything about our relationship seemed improbable: we met online, and a year and a heart surgery later were engaged. I’m in a relationship that seems healthy, fun, and rewarding, but I’ve never been more terrified. Like me, my fiancé had never witnessed a happy or successful marriage firsthand. Without positive examples, my fiancé and I face an information deficit. None of our parents have even tried to give us advice. My father, who has been married three times, occasionally offers some general opinions on relationships, then backtracks and says, “But don’t listen to me.” Much of the time he’ll follow up by muttering, “Three strikes, you’re out.” Ironically, he makes his living writing self-help books, albeit on the topic of parenting. Humans are mirroring creatures—watching and imitating is how we learn. It’s how we learn basic skills like walking and talking, and, theoretically, how we learn more complex, higher-functioning skills, like empathy, negotiating the needs of the self and the needs of a relationship, and even the self within the context of a larger community. We learn from our parents, lessons both good and bad. We learn from our friends, from television and movies, from books, from plays. We also learn from gurus and talk-show hosts and self-help books. (This last cohort purports to be more qualified than the others, but, as my father would tell you, that is a matter for debate.) Recently, I’ve found myself drawn to books and plays about marriage, consuming them with a hunger that I didn’t have before: the need for information. It seems like hubris to think that we’ll be able to make it up as we go along. It feels urgent that I know more than I do, but the urgency hasn’t yielded anything soothing. As I contemplate what to include in my vows, I’m irritated by how impossible it seems to make promises for a future that I can’t know, within the confines of an institution I’ve never experienced. When I buy a DVD player, I read the whole booklet before I take the thing out of the box. Twice. I’ve read the manual for every appliance in my household—even the toaster—and I keep them all in a binder. Occasionally, something will come without a manual, and this leads to confusion and panic. Without instructions, I’m dealing with an inscrutable, expensive box. Relationships are more complicated than electronics, which accounts for why there are so many self-help books on the topic, some of them contradictory, none of them definitively scientific or reliable. A quick search on Amazon.com shows 45,368 self-help titles on love and marriage. That’s more than anyone could, or should, read on the subject in a lifetime. The sheer volume of these books—which are only a fraction of the overall $11-billion-a-year self-help publishing industry—speaks to a sense of helplessness about a very important aspect of our lives. But why are relationships so mysterious? Why are other people so inscrutable? Why do we seem to have so little information, and so few examples, of emulatable love? I recently wrote a book about growing up as the child of a self-help writer and about America’s obsession with selfhelp. What I learned from researching and writing on the topic is that no one agrees on whether or not self-help works. It’s a divisive topic: people either love it or hate it. When people in the publishing world heard what I was writing about, they tended to wrinkle their noses and then tell me about a very annoying cousin who was into sweat lodges and Tony Robbins and the words “personal power.” Everyone seemed to have the same cousin. I also learned that our hunger for knowledge about how to live our lives is ancient. The earliest self-help books took the form of parents writing to their children—no different from any parent passing knowledge on to her offspring, except that the advice was copied and disseminated to non-relatives. The ancient Egyptians had a form of literature called Sebayt, meaning “teachings,” which offered life lessons to readers. Stoic philosophers’ musings on how best to live endure in the self-help sections of today’s bookstores. From the early Middle Ages through the Renaissance, “mirror-of-princes” literature told inspirational stories about kings and princes that were fit to be imitated. The Victorians were obsessed with self-help, and Samuel Smiles’s Self Help, a collection of inspirational tales similar to Chicken Soup for the Soul, published in 1859, outsold Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. The only book that sold more copies was the Holy Bible (itself, one might argue, a kind of self-help book).

HOW TO Tolerate UNCERTAINTY WITHOUT Becoming Psychotic by Jessica Lamb-Shapiro

Elijah Gowin, Falling in Trees 6, 2007. © Elijah Gowin, courtesy Robert Mann Gallery.

Jessica Lamb-Shapiro is the author of Promise Land: My Journey Through America’s Self-Help Culture. She has been interviewed on NPR’s Fresh Air, hosted by Terry Gross, and on MSNBC and The Leonard Lopate Show. The New York Times Book Review said of her, “Her talent as a storyteller is undeniable.” She has written for the New York Times Magazine and the New York Times Opinion pages. She lives in upstate New York with her fiancé and a puggle.

GOD AS Marlene McCarty, GROUP 1.3 (Lititz, Pennsylvania, Sunday, November 13, 2005, 11:25 am), 2007. Ballpoint pen and graphite on paper © Marlene McCarty, courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York.

Today, it’s impossible to live in America and avoid self-help. You need not crack the spine of a self-help book to be bombarded with inspirational cat posters (“Hang in There!”); affirmation-a-day calendars (“My efforts are being supported by the universe”); affirmation-a-day friends on Facebook (“Everything happens for a reason!”); magazine articles telling you how to be thinner, healthier, more successful, and just an all-around better person than you apparently are (“8 Things Healthy People Do Every Single Day”); or aphorisms that seem to float in the cultural ether and become lodged in your consciousness (“Today is the first day of the rest of your life”). We reach for self-help books to get an edge, to explain relationships, with others or with ourselves, as though discrete knowables existed for sale. If only we had more information, then we would know. The unpleasant truth is that knowing oneself or another is nearly impossible; and even if this were achievable for a moment, people change, and then we have to decipher them all over again. Still, we want so badly for there to be a manual for dealing with other people, because dealing with other people is hard. People are hard to read. Take, for example, someone who’s ambivalent about relationships. Is he really “just not that into you”? Or is he working toward a feeling of greater comfort with commitment? Does he even know himself? The idea that a book could answer these questions for about twenty dollars is irresistible. So much mystery could be cleared up with a bit of honesty. If I’m to believe what I’ve read in relationship self-help books, people are constantly deceiving one another. The Rules, a wildly popular self-help book in the 1990s, advocated a system known most kindly as “playing hard to get.” (Note the word “playing”—the person in question is assumed not to actually be hard to get but to be eminently gettable. In this scenario, however, we must playact feeling less in order to, essentially, trick another person into caring for us.) The Rules posits biological reasons—something about hunting and being hunted as the natural state of affairs—to explain why this is necessary and not simply depressing. I resist this notion, yet I recognize that in a world where some people lie (about affairs, about their true feelings, about how they really feel about your mother), those who tell the truth are automatically at a disadvantage. So we all lie—to protect ourselves, to protect one another. But in doing so we create an emotional quagmire that we spend an excessive amount of energy trying to parse. It’s no wonder that people feel desperate for guidance. Is the state of being a human being and doing your best moment to moment really so unbearable? Fear drives the need for instruction. We live in an information age, and we believe religiously in information. Information makes life feel manageable, ordered. Information is, or feels like, control. After her husband died, Joan Didion wrote in The Year of Magical Thinking that her first response was to “read, learn, work it up, go to the literature. Information is control.” People fail all the time, in minor and major capacities. When it comes to marriage and parenthood, the stakes are high. The higher the stakes, the more terrifying; the more terrifying, the more rabid the desire for control. This state of affairs would drive anyone paying attention into a panic. Shortly after I got engaged, I bought a wedding magazine for the first time. It seemed to be a kind of manual. According to the magazine, I am already failing. I don’t have colors. I don’t have wedding favors. I’m probably not going to download and cut out templates of Chinese takeout boxes with our initials potato-stamped on them, so our guests can take home leftovers. I’m getting married in June. We’ve figured out the basics for the wedding: guests, food, music. But I’m not sure how to solve the problem of not knowing how to have a marriage. I don’t want to fail—no one does—yet the statistics are bleak. A third to a half of marriages end in divorce. Who knows how many more survive in quiet despair. It’s difficult to tolerate the uncertainty without becoming psychotic. I’ve been mostly successful, with the exception of the spreadsheet I made comparing and contrasting the pros and cons of various wedding dresses (important considerations included “Will it be difficult to pee in this dress?” and “Could this dress be mistaken for a child’s Halloween costume?”). The other day I saw a sweet elderly couple at the post office holding hands and smiling at each other. I was riveted. Not only did they seem happy; they seemed happy at the post office. I followed them down the street, quickening my pace, hoping to get close enough to observe something. I thought about stopping them and asking for guidance, but I didn’t have the nerve. When I told my fiancé about seeing them, he pointed out that they might not even be married, at least not to each other. This week I bought a novel that had nothing to do with marriage or self-help. I considered writing my name in it—it’s habit at this point—but decided not to. At least not yet. A favorite writer of mine, William James, known to some as “the father of psychology,” wrote, “No fact in human nature is more characteristic than its willingness to live on a chance.” I am not particularly willing to live on a chance, but what choice do I have? To live on a chance means to live with hope. Without guarantees, hope is all we have.

Loving MANY People ALL AT ONCE

When I told my mom that I was polyamorous, she cocked her head to the side as if she was trying to understand. “What’s ‘polyamorous’?” she wanted to know. I was prepared for this question; it’s the one people over the age of thirty-five typically ask. I rattled off the definition I’d memorized for moments like this: The practice, state or ability of having more than one sexual loving relationship at the same time, with the full knowledge and consent of all partners involved. This is the definition found in the Oxford English Dictionary; it’s been there since 2006, although Morning Glory Zell-Ravenheart composed the definition itself in 1999. My mom looked worried. “So…you live in a commune?” I explained that no, I did not live in a commune; my partner and I had just decided to date other people while staying in a committed relationship with each other. Mom’s worry transformed to a sort of incredulity. “Well, that’s not different from the way every relationship is,” she said. “It’s just that most of us have the decency to hide our affairs from our partners.” My mom isn’t a far cry from George, Paul, Jane, and Michael in Sarah Ruhl’s How to Transcend a Happy Marriage. Mom got married when she was just twenty years old, and she and my dad are now getting ready to celebrate their forty-seventh wedding anniversary. When I pushed her on the subject of affairs, she didn’t want to go into it; she grew up in an era of discretion and propriety, when you might have had sex but you never talked about it. She even had a euphemism for it in her college diary (“Dan and I went to

by Sophie Lucido Johnson

the canyon and we didn’t sit and talk the whole time”). But one thing is for sure: you don’t arrive at a forty-seventh wedding anniversary without committing a few indiscretions. Polyamory isn’t really anything new. The word itself has gained popularity in the past ten years, especially among the young and unmarried—it is a lifestyle that fits with the rapidly changing American family. An unprecedented number of women are choosing not to have children at all; last year the U.S. saw the lowest recorded birth rate in its history. Between 2014 and 2015, the gap in deaths over births was more than 600,000; since 2008 it has increased to 3.4 million. Marriage, too, is on the decline. Polyamory meshes with the lifestyle of the modern American adult: someone who isn’t looking to settle into a Norman Rockwell painting. The concept of loving more than one person, though, has been around since the dawn of sexuality—or, at the very least, since the dawn of the written word. In fact, if you are a romantically active adult chances are that you are polyamorous. To be monogamous, according to the original definition, is to have just one sexual partner over the duration of a life span. Before divorce was culturally normalized, remarrying was referred to as “serial polygamy.” If you carry a torch for an ex who moved away or you experienced a monthlong fling with that local kid during your semester abroad, then congratulations! You may declare yourself technically a card-carrying polyamorist. Of course, that’s not what comes to mind when we hear the word “polyamory.” (Apparently, if you are my mother the word

Loving MANY People ALL AT ONCE

by Sophie Lucido Johnson

practice of complex marriage, wherein all the men and women within the community were considered married to one another. Men and women did not sleep in the same bed; sex, however, was frequent, and men were required to withhold ejaculation unless conception was intended. Sex was considered an important spiritual practice. Noyes declared, “The new commandment is that we love one another, not by pairs, as in the world, but en masse.” Noyes, incidentally, is the person credited with coining the term “free love.” Conceptually, free love was adopted by other small utopian communities of the nineteenth century, particularly during the transcendental movement. The concept of free love became attached to both abolitionist and feminist movements. Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to run for president (in 1872), openly engaged in the philosophical practice of free love; so did her contemporary, the feminist writer and orator Emma Goldman. Goldman, in a 1914 essay titled “Marriage and Love,” denounced all systemic relationship structures. On the subject of free love she wrote, “Yes, love is free; it can dwell in no other atmosphere.

Marlene McCarty, GROUP 7 (Tampa, Florida, January 28, 2005), 2007. Ballpoint pen and graphite on paper. © Marlene McCarty, courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York.

“polyamory” conjures up images of people living in communes, which isn’t totally off the mark.) Many people conflate the words “polyamory” and “swinging.” Swinging—sometimes referred to as couple-swapping—became a part of the popular vernacular in the 1970s (remember Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice?), but to understand its sudden rise in prevalence, it’s worth backtracking more than a hundred years, into the earliest chapters of American history. Swinging was born directly from the Free Love movement, which became increasingly popular in the 1960s. Free Love was technically a libertarian movement, rejecting state-sanctioned early American utopian Christian (I know! Christian!) communities. The most significant and well-documented of these communities is the Oneida Community. (Yes, Oneida like the silverware company. They’re actually one and the same.) The Oneida Community, founded by John Humphrey Noyes in 1848, was constructed around the early Christian principle that all property was communal; the community famously adopted the

In freedom it gives itself unreservedly, abundantly, completely.” After Goldman’s death in 1940, Noyes’s philosophy of free love fell into relative obscurity. Then in 1961 the science-fiction writer Robert Heinlein published his cult classic novel “Stranger in a Strange Land,” about an alien human so deeply put off by the concept of sexual possessiveness that he founds a religion based on sharing all things (lovers included). In my personal research around the modern practice of polyamory, I talked to a number of people who have been self-described “ethical non-monogamists” for decades; the vast majority cite “Stranger in a Strange Land” as their introduction to alternative relationship models. The protagonist in the book begins a religious movement called the Church of All Worlds, which blends paganism and revivalism. In 1968, Oberon Zell-Ravenheart actualized the Church of All Worlds; he founded a religious sect of the same name and labeled it a neo-pagan organization. The Church of All Worlds is still in operation. It was the church’s magazine, Green Egg, that originally published an essay containing what became the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of “polyamory.” In Sarah Ruhl’s How to Transcend a Happy Marriage, the characters Pip, David, and Freddie pique the curiosity of a pair of monogamous couples with their open practice of polyamory. They might be described as being of the next generation of polyamorists—the first group of people whose alternative relationship style fits neatly inside a single socially recognizable word. Characters in the play reference The Ethical Slut, written by sexual advocates Dossie Easton and Janet W. Hardy—the veritable relationship bible for this new generation. The Ethical Slut, which has multiple editions and has sold more than 200,000 copies, is the sexual primer for anyone entering into a non-monogamous relationship. Easton and Hardy outline various techniques around disclosure and the possible manifestations a non-monogamous relationship might have. I’m personally partnered and living with a man. It’s serious— we have cats together, and we’ve mixed up our book collections— but he has another girlfriend whom he sees about once a month or so, and we are both casually dating another couple. I recently had dinner with my partner and his other girlfriend; I even made corn bread. If you’re thinking that this sounds hard, you’re right. I was crazy-jealous. When they left to go to a concert, I cried bitterly and watched reruns of The Office. But to me it’s worth it. My partner and I talked about the jealousy the next morning; I messaged his girlfriend on Facebook to try to get to know her better. I appreciate the ability to examine this tricky emotion and to observe how it changes over time. Also, I have never—not ever—lied to my partner, and I have total trust that he has never lied to me. Polyamory encourages radical honesty; it suggests that real commitment is telling the people you love the truth, even when it’s painful. Ours isn’t the only polyamorous relationship model. As the sexual activist Dan Savage often says on his Savage Love podcast, every monogamous relationship observes the same rules, while every polyamorous relationship is its own snowflake with

its own complicated set of guidelines. In my research for a book on polyamory, I talked to a man in his sixties who was married to one woman but lived with his wife and another couple; they all shared a bed. I talked to a woman in her seventies who lives in a three-person household with a man and a woman who are both in their fifties. They’re raising twins. At the moment, polyamory doesn’t really have a go-to model; the whole premise is that you constantly examine your life and your relationships and follow the flow of whatever might happen. I declared myself a polyamorist in 2010—just as the movement was about to take the world by storm. That was the year Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá published Sex at Dawn—an evolutionary exploration of monogamy that rejected what they describe as “the standard narrative” around love: one man and one woman exclusively together forever. Sex at Dawn reached No. 24 on the New York Times best-seller list. Dan Savage called it “the single most important book about human sexuality” since Alfred Kinsey’s findings were published; the NPR host Peter Sagal said that it was his favorite book of the year. The book received some backlash, particularly in the scholarly community (The Chronicle of Higher Education published a rebuttal called Sex at Dusk), but the damage had been done. Polyamory had entered the vernacular; just six years later, it became a common OkCupid option under “Relationship Status.” Alan M., who has maintained the blog Polyamory in the News since 2005, told me that over the past ten years he has been unable to post everything that gets published on the subject of polyamory—the sheer number of articles that go up each week has extended beyond his capacity to read them all. Alan M. has his doubts about this recent onslaught, though. Alan’s one of those people who have been practicing polyamory on and off since he read Stranger in a Strange Land, when he was in high school. (He’s now in his sixties.) He’s noticed this next generation of polyamorists hopping on the bandwagon, and he’s also noted the enthusiasm inside the long-standing polyamorous community. In a speech delivered during Poly Pride Week in 2008, Alan said, “Unless the people with the original vision stop just shoving the rear bumper and grab the steering wheel, pretty soon the bandwagon outruns them and leaves them behind. And their elation turns to horror as they watch it careen downhill out of control, in disastrous unintended directions.” He worries that too many people are declaring themselves polyamorous without doing their research. Without ample communication and careful planning, polyamory can end up looking a lot like hookup culture; that is, it could become synonymous with misogyny and sex without emotional connection. The point is not to have lots of sex with lots of people; it’s to find the kind of love that is honest and inclusive enough to be downright spiritual. As David says in How to Transcend a Happy Marriage, “God and love are illimitable and you better get used to it.” If humans have the capacity to love more than one person, why shouldn’t they? Sophie Lucido Johnson is a writer and illustrator who lives in Chicago. She has published her work in The Guardian, Jezebel, and Vice, and has a forthcoming graphic memoir on polyamory with Regan Arts.

Marlene McCarty, GROUP 7 (Tampa, Florida, January 28, 2005), 2007. Ballpoint pen and graphite on paper. © Marlene McCarty, courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York.

WALTON Ford Walton Ford’s colossal watercolors explode the nineteenth-century tradition of natural-history painting. Whether it be flora or fauna, feathers or fur, Ford renders nature in meticulous and vibrant detail. In his paintings, the quiet beauty of Audubon collides with the violence of David Cronenberg—the animals are often engaged in evisceration, fornication, or both. The complex beauty of Ford’s work captures the savageness not of nature but of humanity; his paintings examine the intersection of human culture and the natural world. “What I’m doing, I think, is a sort of cultural history of the way animals live in the human imagination,” Ford told The New Yorker.

Divine SOMETHING

by John Kaag

Clockwise from top left: Walton Ford, The Sensorium, watercolor, gouache, ink, and pencil on paper, 2003. Nantes, etching, aquatint, and drypoint on paper, 2009. Au Revoir Zaire, watercolor, gouache, ink, and pencil on paper, 1998. The Island, watercolor, gouache, pencil, and ink on paper, 2009. Courtesy of the artist and Paul Kasmin Gallery.

Excerpt from An American Philosophy: A Love Story [Samuel Taylor] Coleridge—following a long line of Platonic thinkers—believed that Truth was realized through a sort of inner calling that granted each person partial access to the reality of the Divine. Every person could attend to this individual calling if he or she had the courage to take heed. For Coleridge, Socrates was courage personified; in the Apology, the Greek says that he pursues the Good and the True with the help of a daimonion—a “divine something”—that warned him against making bad decisions. Socrates listened to this daimon and therefore ended up living and dying nobly. The implication for Coleridge was clear: Those who fail to listen to the voices in their heads screw up royally. Listening to your daimon isn’t necessarily easy. Coleridge gave it a go as a young adult. He had great plans to start what he called a “pantisocracy,” a coed agrarian commune based on principles of equality, of which his daimon silently approved. With one of his Cambridge buddies, Robert Southey, Coleridge spent months laying the groundwork for a utopian community in the Susquehanna Valley, Pennsylvania. It would not be unlike the Transcendentalist commune that sprang up at Brook Farm, outside of Boston, in the 1840s. But Coleridge’s idea was more than a little insane—he had no experience farming and wouldn’t have survived a week on the eighteenth-century frontier. In preparation for the trip he married Sarah Fricker, the sister of Southey’s fiancée, in the belief that the foursome would form the core of their new community. On this point, his daimon screamed at him to stop, but he didn’t have the guts to listen. After the wedding, things quickly turned sour. Southey backed out of the pantisocracy, having decided that the simple life was untenable in the modern world. Coleridge’s idealism had led him to drop out of Cambridge to raise money for this egalitarian society, so he was left without a calling and with a wife he didn’t really care for. In a scathing letter to Southey he wrote, “You are lost to me, because you are lost to Virtue.” It was self-righteous anger born of the frustration of an ill-suited marriage. I thought for a moment about Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” written months after his union to Fricker. Ostensibly it is a poem about an old captain whose ship is lost at sea, but it’s actually a thinly veiled tale of a dismal marriage. It’s no coincidence that the whole ghastly poem is told to a group on their way to a wedding party—it’s a warning about what can happen in such a union. The Mariner makes one really bad decision, and the winds change, set the ship off course, and then fail to blow at all. Motionless in the middle of nowhere: Day after day, day after day, We stuck, nor breath nor motion; As idle as a painted ship Upon a painted ocean. Water, water, every where, And all the boards did shrink; Water, water, every where, Nor any drop to drink. Marriage can be something like this, and the albatross is always there, a sign of regret tied around one’s tired, scrawny neck. Many say divorce is too easy today, but most of these people have never tried it. In my experience it’s very difficult to shake the albatross. In Coleridge’s day it was next to impossible. When he eventually got around to listening to his daimon, it told him to jump ship, and quickly. He did. He left his wife, and European Romantic poetry was born. John Kaag is a professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. He is the author of Idealism, Pragmatism, and Feminism and Thinking Through the Imagination. Excerpt from “Divine Madness,” in American Philosophy: A Love Story, by John Kaag. © 2016 by John Kaag. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

Divine SOMETHING

by John Kaag

had, for Russell, something to do with the ornate rules of the Py-

sound it: the note is the same but an octave higher. Sound a string

thagorean order—rules that required abstention from eating beans

two-thirds of the original length and you hear a higher note as well,

and a refusal to eat an animal’s heart. Generally, these and other

but it is different: it is an interval above the original that we judge

mandates have been homogenized into a judgment that Pythagoras

most pleasing (a “fifth”); if the original note was a C, this one is a

was a vegetarian. Perhaps though, the real significance of his dietary

G. In fact, the most pleasing musical intervals we know correspond

habits is the belief that as you eat, so do you think—a notion that

to string ratios of 4:3 (the fourth) and 3:2 (the fifth). What does this

the character Pip also takes to heart as she slaughters her goats.

mean? It is almost a Pythagorean principle: Beauty (and simplicity)

But the wise aspects of Pythagorean teachings run more along

in ratio corresponds to beauty (and simplicity) in sound. If you can

the lines mentioned by another of Ms. Ruhl’s characters: the as-

discover the numerical essence, you will discover something about

sertion that “all is number.” By this, Pythagoreans meant not that

the beautiful.

everything can be reduced to a number, but that in some way the

What goes for vibrating strings can be taken even further when

phenomena of the physical world relate to one another the way

applied to the nature of the soul. Pythagoras apparently taught

numbers do, that the cosmos is an elaboration of an underlying

that the soul is immortal but regularly transmigrates into other liv-

mathematical order, and that everything else is accidental or inci-

ing beings—a phenomenon that is evoked in Ms. Ruhl’s play. Just

dental. This doctrine later became known as Platonism.

as number is the essence of varying objects, so are eternal souls the

This is easy enough to understand when it comes to geometric shapes that we encounter in the real world. In the messiness of or-

Ms. Ruhl is playing in these verdant Pythagorean fields. And

dinary life, we come across circle-like objects and triangular-shaped

so are her characters, though not in the usual fashion. Bertrand

things and spheroids like fuzzy tennis balls, which only vaguely re-

Russell suggested that Pythagoras believed that “thought is nobler

semble the perfect diagrammatic figures of the geometer. Yet by

than sense, and the objects of thought are more real than those of

understanding the geometry we come to understand something

sense-perception,” but that is too disembodied an approach for Ms.

about these physical objects. Without such a relationship between

Ruhl or her creations. One of her characters alludes to musical tri-

the real and the ideal, architects would be unable to design build-

ads (three-note chords often associated with particular harmonies),

ings, and architects, like Paul in the play, would be unable to theo-

but there is also much interest here in a more physical kind of triad

rize about them.

(a word meant to be an alternative to the neologism “throuple”).

And, in that world of essence, number reigns. So we understand the world better by seeing the laws of number that lie underneath

Passion + HARMONY

by Edward Rothstein

mathematician specializing in differential geometry gather with

and our spiritual nature, her characters end up mixing abstraction

their spouses for a New Year’s Eve party, as they do in Sarah Ruhl’s

and passion, discussing triangles and geodesic domes and the circle

play How to Transcend a Happy Marriage, you might expect some-

of fifths while circling around one another’s polyamorous imagin-

thing quite formidably cerebral—conversation about structure and

ings. And it is Pythagoras who helps connect these themes.

When an architect, a composer interested in music theory, and a

As Ms. Ruhl explores the relationship between our animal nature

essences of varied creatures.

Certainly none of her characters can be accused of demoting sense perception.

it. The famous Pythagorean theorem (along with the “many cheerful

So she gives us an animistic Pythagoras. But her characters also

facts about the square of the hypotenuse” that Gilbert and Sullivan

talk about their children quite a bit. Where do they come in? How

paid tribute to a couple of millennia later) is about the lengths of the

are they to be inducted into this strange universe of flesh and num-

lines of a triangle. (A gentle reminder: in a triangle with a right angle,

ber? Maybe in a Platonic realm the teaching of such truths can be

if you add the squares of the length of two of the lines you get the

done in a disembodied fashion, but not here. As one character says,

square of the third.) But the theorem’s real genius is that it connects

“You have to become an animal in order to have children...and then

the realm of ideal stick figures (a “right triangle”) to ideas of space

you have to disguise your animal nature forever after.” You pass on

and area and expanse. In the Pythagorean world, the square of a line

that animal nature…and you also pass on the Pythagorean ideals

is not just a number multiplied by itself but an actual square created

that accompany it. Perhaps music is the perfect medium for such

using that line. Adding squares gives us another square. So num-

communication. Is that why Ms. Ruhl imagines cultural transmission

ber now governs two dimensions (squares), not just one dimension

in the guise of music? By the end of the play, we are listening to an

(length). The realm of number expands—and the process continues.

eight-year-old girl play a Bach minuet on a violin. Perhaps we are

A mathematician like the one in the play, who studies “differential

meant to hear intimations of immortality behind the sounds.

geometry,” is not studying just triangles, as the conversation suggests, but elaborately complex curves, spaces, and surfaces.

Edward Rothstein is the Wall Street Journal’s critic at large and the

A more mystical Pythagorean discovery was that number also

author of Emblems of Mind: The Inner Life of Music and Mathe-

lay beneath the sounds created by vibrating strings. Pluck a string.

matics. Previously, he was the critic at large at the New York Times,

Listen to the note produced. Now cut the string precisely in half and

where he had also served as the paper’s chief music critic. He was

harmony and topology, perhaps. But something quite different

The philosopher Bertrand Russell once said of Pythagoras that he

takes place, partly because another member of the company is

was “intellectually one of the most important men that ever lived,

more expert at fleshly forms of combinatorial exercise.

both when he was wise and when he was unwise.” The unwise

elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2013 and

aspects of this Greek philosopher (born around 570 B.C. ) may have

is a fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU.