Preparing for a spirit circle is easier than you might think.
Your first stop could be Spectrum-India, the “metaphysical supply store” straddling the corner of Thayer and Olive Street. Step under its deep blue awning, pass through the glass door, and enter a land of plenty: red and gold bangles, purple embroidered cushions, statuettes, tarot cards, jewelry, and something called “The Goddess Dress.” Though the dizzying swirl of colors and scents might tempt you to stay forever, focus now—swoop around a corner of self-help books, past a “Remember, Stealing is Bad Karma” sign, and onwards to your spiritual weapons of choice: a milky white candle and a box of frankincense. Feel how light they are in your
In my opinion, there’s no worse curse than being able to see the future. Thankfully, chaos theory is here to save us from that even being a possibility—it’s fascinating to think that because we can never know all the initial conditions of a system in perfect detail, we cannot hope to predict the ultimate unfolding of fate. Even slight errors in measuring the current state of a system will be amplified dramatically, rendering any prediction useless. So isn’t it curious that the future is almost certainly unknowable? A program would have to account for infinite factors, working on a computer with infinite storage for an accurate prediction of the aftermath of the flap of a butterfly’s wing…
One thing is for sure: No language prediction model could’ve anticipated what we have prepared for our
hands, how heavy their purpose.
Not that you need them, really. “How to Form Spirit Circles” from the November 15th, 1872 issue of The Spiritualist, a publication for all things spiritual, makes no mention of them. In fact, a group of “four, five, or six individuals, about the same number of each sex” and an “uncovered wooden table” are the only requirements the article specifies. But if your spiritual organs aren’t feeling particularly developed, a bit of incense and candlelight can help you get in the right mood.
Outside of the store, your munitions tucked into your bookbag, catch your breath and craft an iMessage for your chosen accomplices. Something casual, yet direct.
post- readers this week. In Feature, in full The Secret History manner, the writer describes encounters in the archives at Brown that led him to attempt a seance.
In Narrative, read vignettes of interesting people our writer meets while hostel-hopping around Europe, and be part of the journey as another writer thinks through her struggles with self-identification with religion, sexual orientation, and negative perception. In Arts & Culture, one writer discusses the Japanese haibun form and uses it as a means to explore the simultaneous discomfort and excitement that comes from departure; another writer takes a look at the growing queer presence in country music and why the image of the West resonates so strongly. In Lifestyle, advice on travel packing and capsule wardrobes, as well as an exciting new C@B themed crossword!
In our search for stability, we tend to work ret-
“Would you be interested in sitting around a wooden table and trying to communicate with the dead?”
The sequence of events that led to me holding a seance on a school night began with a long overdue visit to the John Hay Library. An elegant white marble building, it hosts a number of special collections that interested students can request to view. During my time at Brown I hadn’t taken advantage of what it offered, and as a senior in my last semester, the clock was ticking.
While browsing through the list of archives the library houses, the Damon Occult Collection and the H. Adrian Smith Collection of Conjuring and Magicana caught my eye. Along with many of my third-grade peers,
rospectively from a fixed point in the future, asking ourselves, “Where do I want to be?” and, “What do I have to do to get there?”, all in full denial that we in fact live in a dynamical system that becomes chaotic with as little as two variables! Imagine life as a series of predictable inevitabilities: Sure, you can feel in control by being constantly prepared for what’s to come, but it's fully at the expense of all joy and surprises in life. Or at least this is the spiel I have prepared for my mum when she asks why I still don’t know what I’m doing this summer.
Searching up Tinkerbell map to see if it’s just as pretty as I remember it to be (it is),
Kimberly Liu Editor-in-ChiefI had been an avid Goosebumps reader and dabbled in online spooky-story writing pages like Creepypasta; the collections reminded me of the thrill of reading amateur horror stories beneath the covers, way past my bedtime. A few requests for materials later, I found myself in the Gildor Family Special Collections Reading Room, staring out the window at a plaque dedicated to H.P Lovecraft. To my left: five boxes full of magic paraphernalia. To my right: enough old, yellowed manuscripts on demonology for me to give summoning Ctulhu the old college try.
I decided to save the occult for later and eased into the boxes from the Smith Collection. A deck of faded cards consisting only of the 10 of spades, four interlocked silver rings with a hidden gap, a wooden wand tipped with ivory—the collection included a broad selection of tricks and gadgets employed by magicians, including some belonging to H. Adrian Smith, a practicing magician and collector of magic items himself. One item that stood out in his collection was a prop head simply labeled “Harry Kellar prop head used in ‘Blue Room’ magic trick.” Lifesized and surprisingly lifelike, the prop was painted to reflect the forehead wrinkles, deep gray-blue eyes, and large gray eyebrows that the 19th century magician presumably sported.
Curious about the “Blue Room” illusion that I imagined took the world by storm in the late 19th century, I found a video of it being performed online and was initially disappointed—it showed a man vanishing and reappearing so seamlessly that I dismissed it as digital editing. But further research revealed that the trick, known more popularly as Pepper’s Ghost, really does look that convincing when done professionally. It involves two rooms, one visible to the audience and another one hidden. The hidden room, often blue in color, is where the person to be projected stands, and thanks to a trick involving a particularly angled plate of glass and a light source, the person is then projected onto the visible stage or room. It wasn’t entirely clear to me where the prop head fit into the trick, but I imagined it could be useful as a stand-in for any part where the magician had to pretend they were still in a certain spot.
I had briefly ventured into the world of magic before, learning card tricks well enough to try a few in front of friends, but not well enough to have them succeed, and I had forgotten just how powerful a trick can be. When done well enough, it can make you believe that even disappearing into thin air is possible.
If the Smith collection reminded me how powerful the suspension of disbelief could be, the Damon collection made me realize how far it could extend.
It started with the oldest and greenest book I’d ever seen.
Roughly the size of my hand, its lime green cover was partially torn. I could still make out the faded
illustration on the front showing a general standing by a forest campfire with a bicorne hat atop his head. Above both man and hat hovered a title: “Bonaparte’s Oraculum.” The book, from 1830, was a transcription of the nearly 700 year old oraculum, or Book of Fate, that was consulted by Napoleon Bonaparte for important occasions and apparently held as one of his most sacred prizes.
I was once again struck by the idea that anyone, even someone as powerful as Napoleon, could be sucked into the thrilling world of magic if they let themselves believe in it. The collection also included guides on communicating with spirits, detecting elementals, and conjuring the astral projections of plants, among other activities you might get up to on the weekend. For me, the pieces served as a reminder of our morbid curiosity about forces we don’t understand and yet draw us together.
Even though I didn’t really believe in the content of the occult manuscripts any more than I did in Smith’s magic, I still found myself getting tangled up in the worlds they were selling to me, if only for a moment. A bit of research on how to hold a seance, which in my mind represented the ultimate suspension of disbelief, led me to the Spiritualist article that set the stage for my Wednesday night plans. I wanted to craft the same brief scent, the barely detectable taste, the whisper you fail to tell yourself wasn’t there — the split second where you think to yourself, “What if?”
Ivery mixed the drinks and UV ordered the dessert. Sam shared his own ghost stories while we made our way through chocolate puffs and sugared churros. Evangeline explained why Annie referred to her as her most haunted friend, and Maia poked fun at me while I used a screwdriver to burrow a hole for an incense stick into an old candle.
While the mood seemed more well suited for a party than a seance, we were actually following “How To Form Spirit Circles” to a T. One of the first rules that the article outlines is that “people who do not like each other should not sit in the same circle,” and unless some well-hidden grudges reared their heads tonight, it looked like we were in the clear.
I had been supplementing the older article with a Wikihow article on the same topic, in case any advancements had arisen in spirit communication since 1872. It was the more contemporary article that encouraged the candles and frankincense, and suggested that we find a particular spirit to focus our summoning efforts on. Thus, I’d researched and discovered a man by the name Fayette P. Brown to serve as our spirit of choice. He had lived in our house in the middle of the 19th century, fought in the Civil War, and died in 1890. Our method of communication with Fayette, if all things went well, would be through rapping on the table. We
would ask to communicate with him, then ask him to rap once for Yes, twice for No, and thrice for Doubtful
To get in the proper receptive mood, we held hands and agreed to meditate in silence for a little while, eyes closed. A few things entered my mind the second the world went black. First, how loud the sound of me swallowing my spit was. Second, the absurdity of the scene we were building, and an intrusive urge to laugh. But after a little while, it hit me—we were going to try to communicate with the dead. I dared to open my eyes and took in the scene around me.
I’d brought a notebook with the incantations written in it in case I forgot any during the seance, but I could barely make out the scribbles through the flickering of candlelight. Oddly enough, I felt a bit of pressure begin to set in. Would I get the words right? What tone do I use to convincingly talk to the dead? I had stepped over the precipice and let myself believe, and with that mindshift came a bit of weight. I looked around at my fellow occultists, and although it might’ve been the ghastly candlelight dancing atop their faces, I sensed that they had felt a similar change. The sound of rain and wind outside and the dark, quiet room consumed us. Deep in thought, hand in hand, the “What If?” moment had reached us all.
I called us back and began the seance, invoking the spirit of Fayette P. Brown and asking that only good spirits visit us. I asked if any spirits were with us, and we waited for the rapping. A floorboard creaked and we exchanged glances. We were creating this world together; how deep would we let ourselves sink into it? Annie heard a howl behind her, but UV swore he wasn’t pranking her. We waited long enough for rain to patter on the window— should we have counted it as one rap? Two? None?
The spaces between potential raps got wider, and soon the moment faded. I began the closing incantations. Afterwards, while chatting about how we felt, a few of the others also mentioned really considering the possibility of making contact during the few minutes we were meditating. Even though we had entertained that feeling for only a moment, I was glad we had gone through with the seance.
Once everyone had left, I double checked the register where I’d gotten Fayette’s name from and realized I had misread it — our house had been owned not by Mr. Fayette P. Brown, but by Mrs. Fayette. Would the raps have been stronger if we had addressed her instead? Was the howl Annie heard one of indignation, of outrage at being mistaken for her husband? What if we had waited longer before ending the seance? Would the spiritual world have better service on a weekend?
The answers to all these seemed within our grasp. All it would take were a couple more candles, a healthy dose of belief, and another rainy, dark Wednesday night.
“Acceptance, you know? It’s one of the stages of something.”
“I need a pelvis in front of me, otherwise it's too hard.”
It was not long after we met Valentina that we learned about the Coldplay dollar.
We bumped into her right after checking into Carpe Noctem, an affordable, highly-rated hostel in the heart of Budapest. It was the first stop that me, Amit, and Box had mapped out in our plan to hostelhop around Europe. Carpe Noctem is a youth party hostel, with a strict upper age limit of 36 and a massive drinking culture, located on the top floor of a five-story, austere-white 19th century heritage building. We were halfway up the many wide stone steps to the hostel when the motion-activated lights turned off, leaving us to make the rest of the journey by aid of our flashlights like torch-wielding monks.
Any pious feelings we had vanished the moment we reached the door on the top flight, which advertised our arrival in bright signs and neon lights. We were greeted by one of the hostel workers, a laid back, beer-clenching man I’ll call Adam. Adam wore a tank top, black earring gauges slightly larger than a quarter, and a tattoo sleeve on each arm. He checked us in and showed us to our room. On the way over, we made small talk with a group of young adults playing a game of “Never Have I Ever” and passing vodka around liberally in the living room.
While we were unpacking, we met Valentina, who had checked in earlier that day after touring the city. She had blonde hair, dyed a slightly darker brown, and sported a butterfly tattoo halfway down her arm. She was from Argentina, where she was in her last year of university studying Visual Effects. At that time, she was taking time off to solo travel around Europe. One of the first things we asked her was whether she had worked on any explosion VFX—to which she said yes, much to our wide-eyed delight.
We grabbed dinner with Valentina and, like the adults we were, traded notes on the party scene in our respective home continents. Valentina regaled us with stories of parties with pre-games starting at 7 p.m. and post-games starting at 4 a.m., making a very solid case for Latin America’s supremacy on the party front. She also soberly added that visiting her home country would be pretty cheap, given the general economic
circumstances—inflation had gotten so bad that instead of getting change at the store, you got to choose between items of candy.
And then she told us about the Coldplay dollar. Argentina’s wild inflation has led it to adopt a number of different currencies (up to 17) with different exchange rates designed to discourage the purchase of foreign currencies. One of such currencies is the Coldplay dollar, used for Coldplay concerts and other international artists’ concerts. The name stems from Coldplay’s frequent performances in Argentina and the love the two have for each other—frontman Chris Martin proudly dons a tattoo commemorating a concert the band played there.
During our stay in the hostel I noticed Valentina struggling to operate the in-house washing machine. Hiding behind a sheepish smile, she admitted she’d never used one before—at home there were others paid to do it for her. I imagine she’s at least doing fine when it comes to her own economy.
We met Rose soon after Valentina, and it turned out that the two had met before at a different hostel in Bratislava. Rose is somewhat tall, blonde, with a sharp face, and—despite her inexplicable Australian accent—comes from Maryland, where she works at a recreational swimming pool center. While we brushed our teeth in the communal bathroom, eyeing a makeshift sign with the words “Don’t Fuck On The Sink Or Mary Will Hate You” written on it in Sharpie, Rose gushed about a fellow traveler she had met in a previous hostel. They’d gotten engaged after a week, and Rose poured out their plans to hop around France, Sweden, and finally, as a glimmer set into her eyes, to John’s home in Australia to get married. I wondered if this might explain her accent.
The hostel the two had met at, the White Elephant, had a reputation as one of the rowdiest hostels in Europe, and by far the rowdiest in Bratislava. A large part of John and Rose’s brief honeymoon period thus far had consisted of party games at the White Elephant, which involved different challenges for which guests could be rewarded with shots of vodka. These included: letting others write on you in Sharpie, getting makeshift piercings, finishing a bowl of mac and cheese, or getting an eyebrow slit. Rose had three eyebrow slits.
Rose and John broke up during our first night at Carpe Noctem during a bar crawl to one of Budapest’s many “ruin bars.” Ruin bars are located in old or rundown buildings, often abandoned, part of the aesthetic
being the presence of graffiti and decrepit things: broken mannequins, ancient vending machines, and damaged TVs. We comforted her beneath old graffiti, crumbling white walls, and neon lights as we planned a trip to one of Budapest’s thermal spas to help get her mind off of John.
We didn’t quite succeed. While Box, Amit, and I alternated between sitting in a sauna and getting ice cold water dumped on us, Rose vanished for a bit to take a call from John. After a few minutes, she returned and filled us in while we sat in the rooftop hot tub overlooking the Danube. Apparently John had been jumped by seven men with machetes and fought them off semi-successfully with his black belt skills, but still sustained a gash to the neck and chest that she had to go over and stitch up.
So the impression arose between our traveling troupe that Rose was a bit of a compulsive liar. If what she said was true, on top of the gang and her surgical skills, she had connections to the Turkish mafia and the C.I.A.
She had also mentioned earlier that one of her friends was writing a book with Rose as the inspiration for one of the characters because of how crazy her life was. I felt this gave some insight into her mindset: Tell a crazy story at all costs, and if that fails, make one up. This was somewhat confirmed when we ran into John shaving the next morning, having recovered remarkably well from his neck gash.
Later, we saw what looked like a trail of blood— or maybe red wax—near where Rose said the machete attack had happened, which made us wonder.
Aman
We set out from our hostel to try what was rumored to be the “fanciest McDonald’s in the world,” one set in an old chandelier-clad 19th century train station, but some wrong turns ended with us settling for a less celebrated McDonald’s. It was 2 or 3 a.m. and we were sitting at a table waiting for an embarrassingly large order of chicken nuggets and fries when Aman came and sat with us. While he played with his scruffy black hair and we made our way through the barbecue sauce, we exchanged our stories—Aman was a serial traveler, having visited over 70 countries since graduating from university in India. He planned to visit 80 more.
Aman’s travels came about as a mix of personal travel and travel for his job, which he explained as helping developing nations implement their educational plans. He matter-of-factly described working in a terrorist-occupied nation, where an attempt to transport textbooks in a forbidden language led to burned textbooks and murdered drivers. It then came down to Aman to hop in another truck to drive down to, and negotiate with, said terrorists. I imagined looking through his dark brown eyes, in a country I didn’t know well, trying to keep my eyes off of the guns that had been fatally leveled at others not long ago.
Not all of Aman’s work trips ended bulletless. Throughout our conversation he massaged the middle finger on his right hand, which had a dull white scar toward the tip separating the two fleshier-colored segments. He was secretive about where it had happened, but he explained that he’d been shot once during his work, when a bullet severed his finger. On instinct he’d held onto his finger to put it in an ice box so it could be surgically reattached.
We waved Aman off outside the McDonald’s and saw him merge into, and become one with, the crowd of other nighttime travelers. I knew his stories wouldn’t leave me for a while, and I wondered if there was any part of our lives that he’d hold onto and remember, too, once in a while, as a part of the exchanges that happen when lives collide briefly in an ever-shifting world.
We are born into clumsy bodies. We flail around with fat fingers as we learn to make sense of the fuzzy shapes around us, and to assert important truths like “ba” and “ga.” As we grow, we are given a fuller set of words to wrap our hands around, including words that are supposed to describe who we are. But what happens when we can’t quite grasp them?
Consider this. The dorm basement is dim and chaotic. A group of college freshmen sit cross-legged in a circle playing “Never Have I Ever.” In between my own legs is a red Solo cup, which has been filled with two ounces of overpowering cinnamon-flavored alcohol for the past hour. I dislike this game. It often makes people say grosser things than they would otherwise. It also makes me confront something—that against my will, I assign most people in basement circles to a higher social standing than me, since they’ve tried cool things like recreational drugs, which I haven’t.
I play to win. When my turn comes, I recite my sentence, inserting a premeditated pause: “Never have I ever...had a Christmas tree in my house.” Almost everyone groans and takes a sip, except for a figure with long dark brown hair. She leans forward and asks me across the circle, “Are you Jewish?”
I blush. “Well, half, technically.”
Not satisfied, she probes: “What’s your last name?”
I answer (wondering if I should also provide my date of birth). “Oh, okay,” she nods. “NOT JEWISH!” I get the impression that I have failed some kind of pop quiz. I’d like to go back and retake it—maybe this time knowing to brace myself—or explain why it wasn’t a fair test to begin with. But I don’t have a chance, and the game continues around me.
A few months later, I am sitting across the table from an acquaintance. Having placed our food-smeared plates off to the side, we are lingering. Religion comes up, and he asks me the question, and I respond, with learned ambiguity, “My dad’s Jewish.”
“I could tell,” he says confidently.
“You could?”
“Yeah, you have that look.” Part of me wants to ask, “What’s that supposed to mean?” But most of me feels reaffirmed: Take that, basement circle challenger!
Often, I feel like an empty vessel into which others pour their conceptions of me—conceptions that are sometimes intermingled with communion wine, and sometimes Manischewitz. Why am I so receptive to judgment? Growing up in the Midwest, I had only a few Jewish and Jew-ish classmates. Then, what I called myself—and what I meant by it—seemed more or less up to me.
In college, I realized how different it must be for people who weren’t alone in bringing eclectic Passover lunches to their middle school cafeterias. Once, as I was standing with potential friends around a metal table in the Hillel kitchen, our hands floury from braiding challah, they began listing Jewish names at random until one of them knew someone with that name. This was apparently an established game among some people from large Jewish communities—a game I was almost as thrilled to participate in as “Never Have I Ever.” “Jewish” seemed to mean something particular to them. I felt these people to be the true arbiters of Jewish identity, even though I knew this wasn’t right, nor did I particularly want to care what they thought of me.
But if other people are the authorities, what am I supposed to do when their opinions contradict each other? Even if I don’t feel the need to choose a category for myself, these contradictions tell me that labels matter to others, so I think carefully about how to phrase the revelation of my religious identity depending on who my audience is. Am I staring at an intimidating empty checkbox on a demographics survey? Checkboxes require thought: I could say Jewish since I’ve never eaten a pig, but maybe I’m an atheist, or agnostic. Am I passing by one of the mysterious white huts that springs up in the fall? I had to Google what this structure was (a sukkah, apparently); my family never celebrated any holidays that we couldn’t do at home. So I won’t pretend to share its heritage—and I’ll feel just the tiniest sense of loss. Or am I in front of an unthreatening non-Jewish friend? Them I can invite to Passover.
Consider something else entirely: I am in high
school—a big city school where pro-life posters get torn down from the walls by noon, and all my friends go to Pride together to see Lizzo. To pinpoint my location more exactly, I am sitting in the hallway with my friend during lunch, as always. This friend wears huge gold glasses that, upon inspection, have empty frames. We are as far away as we can get from the overflowing cafeteria without being yelled at by security guards. My legs are stretched out on the endless grimy linoleum, and I am leaning against a mysteriously carpeted wall, enveloped in pizza smells and sneaker squeaks.
Today, an acquaintance has joined the two of us. I know her mostly by her capacity to talk for long intervals in a voice that sounds like a stretched rubber band. At one point in the conversation, I mention that several people have assumed I am dating another female friend. My friend starts laughing uproariously: “YOU? I couldn’t picture that!” The acquaintance asks, “Wait, Sophie, but are you gay?” This has the same inquisitive nature as, “Are you Jewish?,” so I pretend it wasn’t asked. I get away with it too, since the school bell is loud and long enough to drown out most unanswered things.
Two years later, now safely ensconced in a seemingly disambiguating heterosexual relationship at college, I talk to the long-winded acquaintance from high school about this confusion. She laughs and says, “I mean, yeah, you guys did wear matching suspenders and bowties to senior recognition night.”
I reply, “But still, people just assumed.”
If you ask me what I am now, I’ll probably still ignore you, because if my answer affects how you think of me, I don’t feel the need to provide one. But when there’s a religious affiliation box to check on a demographic survey, there’s usually also a sexual orientation box. As I rove the list of options on a survey before me, I know that many people find these words useful, even lifesaving— and yet none of them particularly compels me.
Many of us almost don’t know how to manage without the words we’ve been given. We use them to pull ourselves up when we first learn to take unsteady steps, and to point at and call “ball,” and to hold in our fists as we draw lopsided faces on big pieces of paper. Grown-up reality, I think, tends to be more like this.
He took to the road before dawn, the moon still visible through the early March mist. The night before, he had patched his torn trousers and fixed a new strap to his hat. He was approaching fifty, gray hairs frosting his head, and applied mugwort to his legs to strengthen them for the journey.
It was early spring of 1689 when the Japanese poet Matsuo Bashō left Edo on the third of his major travels. He sold his house, meaning that this time, he expected not to return. He took an unfamiliar path toward the deep North: a strange territory that represented the unknown.
By then, he was an experienced traveler, a regular man in motion. Years ago, he recorded his first major journey to his hometown of Ueno, where his mother had died, in The Record of a Weather-exposed Skeleton, a melancholy travel diary. Other subsequent records of his travels include A Visit to the Kashima Shrine, The Records of a Travel-worn Satchel, and A Visit to Sarashina Village. These journals were experimentations with form that combined haiku and prose in a style Bashō called “haibun.”
A simple principle for understanding many genres of haikai (linked verse)—among which are haibun, haiku, renku, and tanka—is “link and shift.” A haiku evokes a close-up image that “links” to the haibun’s prose and then “shifts” away from it. Thus, haiku and prose are connected intuitively. By the time he wrote The Narrow Road to the Deep North detailing his last and most famous journey, Bashō had developed his haibun to the point that his prose and haiku reflected one another like shifting mirrors.
An excerpt of haibun, from when Bashō arrived at Hiraizumi:
The ruins of the main gate greeted my eyes a mile before I came upon Lord Hidehira’s mansion, which had been utterly reduced to rice-paddies…When a country is defeated, there remain only mountains and rivers, and on a ruined castle in spring only grasses thrive. I sat down on my hat and wept bitterly till I almost forgot time.
Ah! Summer grasses!
There are myriad reasons to take to the road. To write a new chapter. To leave your home, return, and wonder at everything that’s changed—all odysseys are, after all, attempts at traveling home. The allure of being the same person with the same feelings in a slightly different town across an ocean. Sometimes not so much to arrive at a
new place as to flee an old one.
The way I’ve encountered the idea of the road in (mainly American) mythos and, by consequence, my own imagination, is as an endless realm of possibility. The natural landscape sprawls out and spatially dominates, taking on a grandeur that outpaces the physical reality. “The open road” quickly becomes a signifier of salvation and reinvention, more romanticization than truth. The road symbolizes freedom while home represents stagnancy. Will a new location make me happier, less selfabsorbed, more fulfilled?
The hard truth is that we may believe these things to be true, but we can never fully escape ourselves. But it’s a comfort to know that Bashō believed in the same mythology of the road, felt a similar agitation thousands of miles away and hundreds of years ago and sought out the road for solace.
***
By 1680, Bashō’s followers had built a small hut for him in Edo; he famously took his pen name from a bashō (banana) tree outside it. He grew restless in stagnancy, however, and many of his haikus from the period reflect his internal agitation and discontent with the enclosure made of the world around him. In 1684, he left his hut and chronicled his travels through haibun.
In the introduction to Nobuyuki Yuasa’s translation of The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches, Yuasa writes that “Bashō had been going through agonizing stages of self-scrutiny in the years immediately preceding the travels, so that it was quite certain that, when he left his house, he thought there was no other alternative before him…Bashō had been casting away his earthly attachments, one by one, in the years preceding the journey, and now he had nothing else to cast away but his own self...”
In casting off himself and the rest of the world— and by staying perpetually in motion—Bashō learned to see things as they are. That every moment is only one moment followed by another. And it is in those one moments that the self can be relinquished, and experience can be brought into full clarity. A tree passed by on the roadside is just one tree, not to be seen again.
Among Japan’s four great haiku masters—a cohort that joins Bashō with Buson, Issa, and Shiki—Issa stands out mainly due to his focus on and compassionate treatment of small creatures, the oft-neglected and detested.
I first encountered Kobayashi Issa several years ago on a long drive to an apple orchard. Issa is at his best outside, surrounded by long grasses, midsummer heat, the buzzing of mosquitoes, warbling birds, and the laughter and games of children. His verse is tender, wry, and humorous, meeting all manner of creatures, pests, and plants with the same humility.
In falling spring mist the cat learns festival dance— taught by a small girl
New Year greeting-time:
I feel about average, welcoming my spring
Issa’s life was marked by tragedy. His mother died when he was three, and he was sent away by a cruel stepmother when he was fifteen. His adulthood was impoverished, and he wandered from place to place calling himself Issa the Beggar.
While Bashō’s travel haibuns were borne out of his agitation at staying in one place, Issa set onto the road because home had long been denied to him. His most famous work, The Spring of My Life, is a series of haibun written in 1819 chronicling what he considered the most important year of his life. From the new year to year’s end, Issa’s sketches detail visits with friends, festival celebrations, his taking to the north like Bashō did a century earlier, parables and individual histories—and, most of all, studies of nature and chronicles of the daily joys and sorrows of life.
He writes of raising his two-year-old daughter, who “beams like clear moonlight, far more entertaining than the best stage act.” And upon her death to smallpox, he dutifully records in haibun:
I knew heartbreak but also knew that tears were useless, that water under the bridge never returns, that scattered flowers are gone forever. And yet nothing I could do would cut the bonds of human love.
This dewdrop world—
Is a dewdrop world, And yet, and yet . . .
And,
On losing my traveling companion:
At sunset this fall evening, I wrote on a wall:
“I’ve gone on ahead”
For Issa, perhaps putting his griefs to paper made them easier to bear. ***
Contemporary haibuns take many forms— travel journals, diaries, nature studies—but, like their predecessors, are most commonly concerned with a search for place, literal or figurative pilgrimages for belonging when home and stability seem distant.
In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, Jennifer Hambrick wrote haibun about anxious pilgrimages to the grocery store, describing the “sweaty mask / sweaty shirt / breathing fast.” Many other haibun written under the shadow of the pandemic reflect distance, hunger for contact, and a slow suffocation. In that first year, I remember writing my own anxious Notes app journal entries, bullet-listing what I did on a day-to-day basis to keep a grip on time. By January 2021, I found myself pacing in and out in the same circles around my neighborhood, often going out to repeat the ritual at one or two in the morning to feel calm.
There is an urgent claustrophobia in Issa’s travel sketches too, the suffocating anxiety of not being able to escape calamity. Though he may be physically in motion, his writing paces in cramped circles. Among recollections of life and summer creatures are dense moments of grief. However, just as present as Issa’s recollections of his sorrows are his ultimately hopeful celebrations of life, the sanctity of which he empathetically extends to snakes and fleas and humans alike. Perhaps that’s what he ultimately discovered: what it means to live linearly, perpetually in motion, with the necessity to take it all as it is.
As Bashō wrote of writing and observing, “You can learn about the pine only from the pine, about the bamboo only from the bamboo. Observing an object you must leave aside preoccupation with self, for if you do not, you impose yourself, hence do not learn from it.” The idea of being able to leave home but not ourselves is difficult to internalize. But maybe in the end it’s enough to experience the journey as it is, rather than as an allegory of the self. Maybe it’s enough that a tree by the road is just one tree.
I used to tell people I hated country music. Growing up in the conservative suburbs of the Deep South, hating country music was a quiet rebellion against a culture that intrinsically did not align with my values. Throughout high school, I walked a wide berth around the Morgan Wallen tours that passed through my hometown every year and was careful to clearly enunciate my “you guys,” lest a shameful “y’all” slip through my anti-Southern vocabulary. This counter-culture gut hatred of modern country music seemed only natural as a queer woman existing in an environment that didn’t accept either of those identities. After all, it was the same people blaring twangy banjos that were freely saying in their deep southern drawls that they would disown their child if they were gay or posting online after Roe v. Wade was overturned that “babies shouldn’t be punished for women being whores.”
So you can imagine my hesitation when several friends and family members told me I would love Kacey Musgraves’ Golden Hour after it won Album of the Year at the 2019 Grammy Awards. After years of subliminal brainwashing from every song on the Country Hot 100, I thought I had heard it all, but Kacey Musgraves’ name did not ring a bell. It wasn’t until I was driving through the countryside with my grandpa on our way to ride horses and help his friend wrangle a baby cow on his friend’s farm that I thought if there were ever a time to try out some country music, it was then. The album opened with the peaceful, soft guitar strumming of “Slow Burn,” filled with simple lines about Tennessee sunsets, her grandma crying over her nose piercing, and doing things your own way regardless of what people say. The song oozed warmth. From latenight firefly sunsets, walks through boutique-lined streets on the South Carolina coast, humid Sunday morning farmer’s markets, and skipping rocks off the lake dock, the sound and lyrics of Golden Hour conjured images of a South I understood as my home. The lyrics portrayed both the innate comforting mellowness of the Southern atmosphere as well as the nuanced conflicts of self-exploration and experimentation as a girl growing up in a generationally rooted misogynistic, conservative, yet tightly-bound familial culture.
I listened to Golden Hour on repeat for the rest of the summer, and when Musgraves’ following album star-crossed came out, I dove right in. When I watched the music video for “simple times,” I was shocked to see the drag queen Symone strutting alongside Kacey. It blew my mind that a mainstream country artist would not only be allowed by her record label to have a drag queen in a music video, but also would include one in a way that drew no special attention to her identity. The video features Kacey Musgraves strutting through a mall with Symone as well as You actress Victoria Pedretti and rapper Princess Nokia. The golden rule in country music, especially for women, has always been to stray away from “political” or controversial stances ever since The Chicks, a once beloved country band, all but ended their career after receiving death threats for their public criticism of President
George W. Bush in 2003.
Upon research, I discovered that Kacey has always been a supporter of the LGBTQ community, and suddenly it made sense why I had never heard her songs on the country radio in a Publix grocery store. I learned one of her earliest hits, “Follow Your Arrow,” was a song about self-love and the individual pursuit of happiness that urges listeners to “kiss lots of boys or kiss lots of girls if that’s something you’re into.” The message to “follow your arrow wherever it points” got her blacklisted from country music radio stations, and her radio career never recovered, even after her Grammy wins. My hopeful portrait of a more progressive American country music culture quickly crumbled, but Golden Hour and Kacey Musgraves’ defiant success completely changed my opinion of the genre and heightened my awareness of the growing queer movement in both the country and pop industry.
In 2018, indie pop singer Mitski released her fifth studio album titled Be The Cowboy, featuring a fusion of pop and Western country motifs. During an interview on The Daily Show, Mitski says the idea of this “arrogant” Clint Eastwood cowboy American mythos, and the freedom that comes along with this hyper-emasculated white man “walking into town, wrecking shit, and then walking out like he’s the hero,” was inspirational to her, particularly as an Asian American woman. Be The Cowboy was a message for both her and her fans, a large portion of whom are queer, to never apologize for existing and, essentially, to “have all the confidence of a mediocre white man.” It was a triumphant reclamation of the Western cowboy that listeners, and other artists, readily embraced.
In December, I went to Rina Sawayama’s Hold the Girl tour in Boston with a friend. On the train ride there, other concert-goers were easily identifiable by their cowboy hats, a nod to the album's country-pop lead single “This Hell,” a tongue-in-cheek anthem about overcoming homophobia through the power of community with the hook “This hell is better with you.” The music video features Sawayama in a three person marriage with masculine- and feminine-presenting people, at a cowboy-themed wedding, and line dancing at a country bar. She opened the concert in a cowboyinspired mini skirt and hat and later covered “The Story” by country artist Brandi Carlile. For an album like Hold the Girl, which explores themes of childhood and identity, country motifs may have
broader appeal beyond Western or conservativeraised queer people because the idea of the cowboy as a “lone ranger” in itself draws upon acute feelings of isolation that many queer people experience as children and teenagers. Rina Sawayama expands upon the reclamation of the cowboy as a selfsufficient anti-hero with a flippant disregard for the judgment of others—a persona appealing to anyone who grew up with an identity that was villainized by their community.
Within country music, other artists besides Kacey Musgraves have been making waves. Orville Peck, a new country artist known for hiding his face behind a mask to conceal his identity, shot to fame with his album Show Pony, which explores similar motifs of a “lone ranger” character and yearning for connection as a young queer person. In 2020, Lil Nas X’s country rap fusion “Old Town Road” remained at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 for a record-breaking 19 weeks. Although he faced backlash in both the rap and country communities when he came out as gay shortly after, he asserted that part of the reason he did it was that he would be “opening doors for more people,” likely given the size of his platform and influence on both genres. Grammy-winning singer Maren Morris has been an outspoken ally of the transgender community and raised $100,000 for transgender youth organizations selling merchandise after Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson called her a “lunatic.” Innovative country artists are redefining the face and values of the country music industry, and it is this representation that is so important in changing the hearts and minds of the typical country music demographic while uniting polarized Southern and Midwestern communities. Although there is still rampant bigotry in the country music industry, the reclamation of the American cowboy by minority communities, trends of country-pop fusions, and the capacity to rethink American traditionalist themes through its own sonic medium have proven country music can be more than just guns, trucks, and beer.
I would no longer say I hate country music as a whole. Artists like these are paving the way for country music to mean everyone—for “y’all” to mean all. Now when I’m home on my sunset walks, I put on Golden Hour, breathe in the red Georgia clay, and listen to the modern sonic visions of a more inclusive South, celebrating queer artists and listeners.
The Alps presented a problem. The mountains, spotted with white provincial houses angled on the slopes, flanked our train car. This day of travel was an opportunity to experience rustic clothing and an aestheticization of mountain life so extreme I’m surprised we didn’t go looking for edelweiss— lederhosen and all. But for such dreaming, we hit the concrete wall of practicality early into our journey, up there is country living, thunderous valleys and shadowed peaks—and staring deep into an empty backpack before my fateful trip, the question arises: What to pack?
The freedom of style today has made travel wardrobes much more of a personal statement, an experimental setting to reduce your style to its bare essentials. But that can be confusing, and even daunting. So today, I’m going to try to give a broad runthrough on packing for a weekend trip, adjustable for any length of stay.
One Jacket:
A good jacket will always elevate your traveling outfits, bringing everything tastefully together, as well as providing an extra layer for warmth. There are multiple options to choose from here, all of which can be modified on the basis of your personal style. My choice would be a nice sports jacket or blazer, something tweed or woolen in a solid color. On my recent trip to the Alps I wore a slouchy brown threebutton wool blazer (my desire for comfort is nonstop) to provide both country airs as well as a warm and comfortable addition for long days of travel. On the more casual end, leather jackets in both the café racer and double rider styles work well with waxed cotton and oilskin jackets, L.L. Bean-style barn coats, and all your denim varieties. Also, fun jackets have equally
fun pockets that you can fill to the brim with all your little knick knacks and travel items. Currently, I use mine for sandwiches.
One Sweater:
A sweater’s necessity may vary depending on the climate, but can work well as a layering piece or replace the jacket entirely. I would recommend something that goes with all the other items you bring. The standard crewneck Shetlands, chunky shawl collar cardigans, and fair isle sweater vests are all good choices. This is dad-style: a treasure trove for the irony-poisoned minds of our generation or a depressing glimpse into your fast-approaching future.
Two Shirts:
Having two shirts will provide you with the excitement of options while making sure you’re not left hanging if your airplane meal falls onto you during a bout of heavy turbulence. The sky's the limit for options, but I think the versatility of a button up shirt benefits any travel wardrobe. I would recommend a more casual and comfortable shirt like an oxford cloth or linen button down to project a refined air, but can also be as casual as you would like it to be. Solid colors—white and blue—and some university stripes for the Oxford shirts work for pretty much any wardrobe, but feel free to take risks on more diverse patterns if your style demands it. For linen shirts, the leisurely fit allows one to take some more risks in color and pattern; I would recommend fun summer pastels and inventive designs to echo the general easy air of the spring and summer seasons. If you are looking for something more formal, I would recommend shirts in a heavier broadcloth and to stick to solid colors. A blue shirt and a white shirt with a moderate spread collar
will serve you for all non-event wear.
Two Pairs Of Pants:
You might be asking whether having two pairs of pants is overpacking: “Why can’t I just wear my one trusty pair of jeans?” Firstly, travel can be a messy experience and you might want to change out of your skin-tight low-waisted jeans into your skin-tight high-waisted jeans when you get to your destination. Secondly, wearing only jeans gives ‘70s serial killer vibes—very Martin Sheen in Badlands type beat. If jeans are a must, I recommend bringing an alternate pair of casual slacks that’ll fit nicely with the rest of the items you packed. A good pair of chinos in pretty much any color will work here, preferably in a more relaxed fit that’ll be more comfortable to wear during travel over long distances.
Optional: One Topcoat (it's a coat but more fun to say):
Depending on the season this can be an optional requirement, especially in the summer months where this would be the sartorial equivalent of bringing your own bat to your T-Ball game. The most versatile option here would be an all-weather trench coat or Mac coat to keep you protected from all the elements as well as be adjustable to most temperatures. If the climate requires something stiffer, a sturdy Harris tweed balmacaan will keep you cozy and provide the English country peerage vibes all you dark academia kids are going for. If more formality is required, a camel hair polo coat will suffice, which can also be worn casually.
For everything else, it’s your prerogative. Have fun on spring break everybody!
post- mini crossword 6
by Will Hassett“I’d like to believe that endings do not erase beginnings. I’d like to believe in a world that, despite blustery winters, turns snow into sunlight. So I’ll just live as if those things are true.”
—Liza Kolbasov, “Stitched in Ink” 03.18.22
“And that’s the beauty of it—colors are not discrete or static, but can flow and mix and transform just like emotions can.”
—Moe Levandosky, “The Many-Colored Cure” 03.05.21
What arabic and archaic have in common? A group of interviewers or interviewees
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
Kimberly Liu
FEATURE
Managing Editor
Alice Bai
Section Editors
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Klara David -
son-Schmich
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Section Editors
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LIFESTYLE
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