post- 10/25/19

In This Issue More Treats than Tricks POST- TRICK-OR-TREATERS 5

Warnings of the Dark

DANIELLE EMERSON 4

Stone Walls and Complicated Spaces

COLLEEN CRONIN 2 GRIFFIN PLAAG 6

Two Writers

postCover by Gaby Treviño

OCT 25

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VOL 24 —

ISSUE 7

FEATURE

Stone Walls and Complicated Spaces A History of the Dexter Asylum

BY COLLEEN CRONIN ILLUSTRATED BY RÉMY POISSON

W

hen thinking of scary spots on Brown’s campus, the Nelson Fitness Center and its surrounding sports complex probably aren’t the first places that come to mind.

Sure, the Nelson’s barre and spin classes can be harrowing, and most would agree the disappearing weights are particularly spooky, but at least there is a sound explanation for that—selfish patrons.

However, the history of the property tells a darker story. Where the Nelson and other sports buildings now stand, there was once an asylum.

According to the Rhode Island Historical Society Archives, the Dexter Asylum was completed in 1828 after the land was gifted to the city of Providence by a wealthy resident, Ebenezer Knight Dexter, upon his death. Originally meant to be a facility to care for Providence’s most vulnerable (both those with mental illness and those living in poverty), the Dexter Asylum provided a service absent in the city.

It was built with good intentions, but the Dexter Asylum, like many similar institutions of the time, faced periods of overcrowding and maintained

spartan conditions (brutal by today’s standards).

According to the Rhode Island Historical Society documentation, visitors were only permitted once every three weeks, and evening meals often consisted of only bread and tea. Fraternizing between men and women was forbidden, and if residents missed a meal, they didn’t eat. Most of Dexter’s residents were destitute and would have otherwise been living on the street, so it was Ebenezer Dexter’s trust, along with city money, that covered the majority of the facility’s costs. Still, residents had to work for their food at the

Letter from the Editor Dear Readers, The spooky season is ~upon us~, which means cinnamon sugar sweets, pumpkin spice drinks, and perhaps some not-so-nice tricks (though I much prefer treats). As we get through the thick of midterms, I hope you all can step out of the woods for at least a moment and breathe in the crisp fall air, crunch through a pile of red-orange-yellow leaves— maybe even cuddle up with a hot beverage of choice and eat some candy.

For those of us planning to dress up for Halloween, what are we thinking? I, for one, am deciding between wearing my blue koala onesie (warm, comfortable, vaguely resembling my one true love on this campus—Blueno) or channeling some book character no one knows. (Last year, I dressed up as Lara Jean from To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before.

Not that obscure, but most people just thought I had put slightly more effort into my outfit than usual.)

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In celebration of the upcoming holiday, post- is bringing spooky (and spoopy) vibes to you. Dare to delve into the Feature and explore the athletic complex’s history as Dexter Asylum. In Narrative, journey down memory lane with post-’s trick-ortreaters, and learn about one writer’s experience growing up with warnings, rooted in cultural beliefs, about the dark. For those who couldn’t care less about Halloween—we have content for that, too: Check out A&C’s reflection on Bob Dylan.

Wishing you all treats and no tricks (especially on your midterms) in these upcoming weeks!

Celina

Narrative Managing Editor

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EmWool Basement The Rock's Absolute Quiet Zone RISD The SciLi basement during first-year pre-registration The bus tunnel on Thayer Street The glowing yellow room in B&H The Andrew's pasta line The weights section of the Nelson Wherever you are when you see “Assignment Unmuted” The husk of Tealuxe

asylum’s farm. In 1843, one observer noted that about a quarter of the asylum’s population was “insane,” but treatments for mental illness were lacking. Instead, the asylum compensated by confining people living with mental illness to “maniac cells.”

Over time, the asylum became outdated, but the property it sat on became more valuable. After years of litigation, the city reneged on Ebenezer Dexter’s wishes and sought alternative uses for the land. The asylum was finally closed in 1957 after 129 years of operation when Brown University bought the land to build a gymnasium.

There’s not much left of the asylum, which, based on photos in the Library of Congress, looked like a drab version of a French chateau. All that remains is the large wall that used to enclose the complex.

Made of stone and no longer surrounding the whole complex, the barrier once kept those living in the asylum apart from the outside world. Although the closure of asylums like Dexter may have signaled a positive change in society’s perception of mental health, asylums and mental hospitals are still the backdrops of scary movies. They serve as places of cultural horror, and many of those still existing today, such as conversion centers, provide no legitimate psychiatric help. However, when mental hospitals were first constructed in the United States, they were some of the most expensive buildings in the country.

They were often built to mimic mansions in an effort to make their residents feel more at home, according to Southern Connecticut State University History Professor Troy Rondinone, author of Nightmare Factories: Asylums in the American Imagination.

In addition to being well-constructed, many asylums were the only places offering a living space for people who were poor or mentally ill, people who otherwise might have had nowhere else to live.

Despite the asylum being a theoretical place of safety, in practice it was often something very different. Asylums “have always had a scary element,” Rondinone says. “‘Asylum’ is a good word, it means a place of refuge; but by the end of the 1800s, doctors started calling asylums ‘hospitals’ simply because the word asylum had so many negative connotations by then that they were seen as places where people were unfairly locked up and tortured.”

By the 20th century, a majority of asylums were overcrowded and underfunded.

Undercover reporting by journalist Nellie Bly revealed conditions much worse than those at Dexter. In some asylums, attendants were abusive, treatments were extreme, and, at times, harmful to those whom they were supposed to help. The American mental hospital population ultimately peaked in 1955 with over half a million individuals institutionalized.

After this point, there was a swift downturn.

The invention of more antipsychotic drugs, the acknowledgement that institutions were too great of a public expense to sustain, and media coverage of some of the asylums’ atrocities finally catalyzed deinstitutionalization.

Pushback from pop culture resisted this mid20th century outcry against the horrors of asylums.

Two of the most popular media depictions of the asylum are One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and the original Halloween, released in 1975 and 1978 respectively. They show asylums as places people went to go mad and paint mental patients as people to be feared.

“When [Halloween] came out . . . people were expressing concern that released mental hospital patients were going to wreak havoc, they’re going to commit violent crimes on the streets. And so, kind of at the height of that fear we get a movie about a mental patient wreaking havoc on the streets in his own community,” Rondinone says.

Since the 1970s, the asylum has continued to be the backdrop for scary tales in literature, in movies, and on television. The Fox TV show American Horror Story created a whole season set in a malevolent asylum, where the devil himself presides.

A significant portion of haunted tourism has also stemmed from and perpetuated the fear of asylums. Teenagers have long been exploring abandoned buildings to scare themselves—more recently for macabre Instagram shoots. Even

against asylums. Both of Lovecraft’s parents died in Butler Mental Hospital in Providence. (Before Butler was constructed, the burden of mental health care in Providence fell solely on Dexter.)

Lovecraft’s novel, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, tells the story of a wealthy young man from Providence gone missing from an asylum. Dexter was a common name, but its use could be linked to the Dexter Asylum he must have been acquainted with.

Although “the pop cultural asylum is in dialogue with real places," and there are parts of asylums that were indeed horrific, “it says more about us as a society that asylums are now a part of our scary stories,” according to Rondinone.

“When we think about mental hospitals as being scary places, we should look at our own hang-ups and prejudices about mental illness and the people that suffer from it,” Rondinone says. After all, the horrible descriptions of asylums are often equally critical and diminutive towards the people inside them. Rondinone also points out that while asylums and mental hospitals are places where abuses and terrible things occurred, these things happen in nursing homes too. Why don’t we have more scary stories set in nursing homes? (And no, The Visit, a

“When we think about mental hospitals as being scary places, we should look at our own hang-ups and prejudices about mental illness and the people that suffer from it,” Rondinone says.

After all, the horrible descriptions of asylums are often equally critical and diminutive towards the people inside them. adults can partake in the “fun” and rationalize this asylum-interest by visiting museums and sites of the paranormal. During his research, Rondinone says he stayed in the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in West Virginia for a night, and unsurprisingly, found exactly zero ghosts.

While not a household name like Trans Allegheny, the Dexter Asylum may have its own connection to the transformation of the asylum from haven to hell. One of the horror genre’s most prominent authors—H.P. Lovecraft—lived just blocks away from its walls. Perhaps inspired by his experience with Dexter, he had a large role in the inclusion of asylums in the genre.

Lovecraft is a horror and science fiction icon today, although he was not widely known in his time, and his legacy permeates modern pop culture (having influenced works like The Shining and Batman, according to the The New York Times).

Lovecraft was born and raised in Providence and often frequented Brown’s campus to use its libraries, despite never attending college himself.

Beyond simply living physically near the Dexter Asylum, Lovecraft had his own vendetta

movie about possessed grandparents, doesn’t count).

"We kind of create our own monsters in America,” Rondinone says, and the asylum has become one of them.

For me, a scary movie and book buff, I find Rondinone’s theory realistic, but hard to swallow.

Why is the thing we are scared of always “the other”?

And how can we reconcile that our feelings about what we are scared of often say more about us than the “scary” things and people themselves?

I can confess that I love haunted stories about things that go bump in the dark, magic and murders, and yes, even asylums. American Horror Story is one of my favorite shows, and Asylum was a pretty great season; it even had its own Nellie Bly character (played by Sarah Paulsen) who sneaks into the asylum and reveals its deepest secrets to ultimately shut it down.

While it’s fun to be scared, it’s also important to think critically about the scary stories we hear, and, truthfully, about all the stories in our lives.

In that sense, maybe it’s a good thing that only Dexter’s walls exist: an unsuitable relic for a ghost story but a strong reminder of our past.

*Motorcycle revs* “Man, I love the sound of global warming at 7 p.m.”

“Have you heard that ‘Hollaback Girl’ parody about the plague?”

october 25, 2019 3

NARRATIVE

Warnings of the Dark

Late Night Adventures on the Rez

BY DANIELLE EMERSON ILLUSTRATED BY IRIS XIE

The dogs at my aunt's house always started barking around 3 a.m. I’d pull the window curtains shut and warn my younger siblings to avoid looking out at night. You never know who might be staring back.

As an adult, I still follow a series of similar rules. These lessons, rooted in cultural beliefs and understandings, continue to live within me. Most Diné youth from the rez know not to mess with certain traditions. But every now and then, overcome with an irrational desire for recklessness, a friend and I will take it upon ourselves to challenge tradition. *** “Let’s take the back roads.”

I shook my head.

“Come on!” Mykel pleaded.

“Why?” He curled his lip. “You scared?”

I rolled my eyes. “No.” *** There’s a sense of finality in the onslaught of black after a vivid sunset. Growing up, I reveled in the presence of the falling sun, watching as bright pinks and oranges smeared across the sky. Though the sunsets offered beauty, they also came with stark warnings for children.

My cousins, siblings, and I all learned to abide by these rules. You can watch the sunset, but beware of the darkness that comes afterward. When we were between the ages of seven and eleven, my shímasaní, or maternal grandmother, always made sure we were indoors as soon as the stars began to dot the sky.

Stories of wandering night-beings that lured little children with little feet like ours into the dark kept us behind closed windows. These shape-shifters prefer

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the form of animals over two-legged humans, and we were taught to never say their actual names. In doing so, we would be calling their presence, calling bad omens. The term yanni became their universal name. But even speaking this name into existence, especially from deep within the rez, could have horrifying consequences. My cousins, siblings, and I knew this. So when our shímasaní hushed our rowdy behavior with warnings of four-legged creatures that would steal us away into their caves, we’d lock eyes before returning silently to bed, cuddling close on our shared mattress for security.

Only on nights designated for prayer and celebration were we allowed outside on our own. But even then, adults kept a watchful eye, counting on the dogs to provide salient alerts. Our young ages kept us naive but cautious. We knew the phrase: Watch out for the “things that go bump in the night.” *** Mykel nudged my arm. “Let’s spray paint that sign.” He gestured vaguely to the stop sign from the driver’s seat.

“I’m not getting out of the truck.” I eyed the pitchblack stretch of farmland, growing anxious.

“Come on!” Mykel tugged at my sleeve.

I slapped his hand away. “How do you even spray paint?”

“I’ll show you.” *** Ironically, though my aunts and shímasaní were adamant in their decision to keep us younguns within four walls during the night, they had no problem with sending us to the outhouse at 2 a.m. if the bathroom in the house wasn't an option. Occasionally, one of my cousins would walk into the bathroom and emerge five minutes later declaring that the toilet wouldn’t flush. Our cheii, or maternal grandfather, would follow to inspect the situation, then return, puffing an irritated sigh, and share the news—the water had been shut off. All of my siblings and cousins would groan.

Some months my shímasaní and aunt couldn’t pay the water bill. We all knew this meant the outhouse was again open for business. We hated it.

During the day, the outhouse was manageable.

Rancid, gross, and muggy, but nonetheless manageable. All of my cousins and siblings agreed: better a day outhouse visit than a night outhouse visit. But visiting the outhouse at night, no matter your preparation against it, was inevitable— especially for elementary school students with weak bladders.

You don’t need the experience of visiting an outhouse late at night to understand the sinkingpit-in-your-stomach reaction I’m describing. You’ve most likely felt it whenever you’ve had to enter a dark room because the light switch was far away from the door, or walked outside to feed the dog only to find that the porch light needed replacing, or braved the basement late at night because you left your cell phone charger plugged into the outlet down there. We all have childhood fears centered around similar experiences. Places tied to memories of dread and panic. Landscapes and stories that haunt our dreams, turning a simple set of basement stairs into a nightmare. The fear of what exists in the unknown constantly creeping at the back of our minds, breathing down our necks. Mine just happens to include an outhouse. *** “You hear that?”

Mykel shook his head. “Shut up.”

I struggled to remain serious. “You see that?” I pointed to a dip in the road.

“Fuck you.”

I nearly choked laughing. *** At the age of twenty, I now understand what my shímasaní was protecting us from. I now know what exists out there, what wanders the mesas surrounding our farmland. When I was younger, I knew there were things that simply weren’t right. People who went evil, becoming beings that took shelter under the night’s blanket. No one liked to talk about it, but yannis once had human origins. Their minds and spirits became one with the evil that can exist within spiritual power, their stories a mixture of tragedy and horror.

Though my friend Mykel and I joke about seeing a night-being running alongside the road or wandering

ARTS & CULTURE through the cornfields, we know when to be serious and when to avoid crossing lines that should never be crossed. Reader, you might consider the stories I’ve shared as simply that—stories. And you’re free to do so. But I believe there are things in this world that exist despite being inexplicable. Whether those things live in your closet or hide under your bed or are spotted along the highway at night, I suggest you keep my shímasaní’s words in mind: Don’t seek out what you know you can never understand. *** My shímasaní is a wise woman. I know I should listen to her more often. But every now and then, I swallow cultural fears for the sake of friendship. And that’s how Mykel and I found ourselves in the middle of nowhere, clutching our iPhones and pointing out shadows in the distance, pretending the quavering in our voices is from laughter—which it is. It’s just also laced with something resembling unease.

“Why are we doing this again?” I eyed my reflection in the window, then looked down at my phone in my lap. No service. Not surprising, but also not comforting.

“Because it’s fun.” His tone was nonchalant. I could almost believe he did this regularly on his own, without friends.

I turned to look at him, smiling. “And if we die?”

Mykel just shrugged.

“Dude, I gotta get home.” I checked the time— 2:43 a.m.

“I knew it.” He glanced at me. “You’re scared.”

I shook my head. “And you’re not?”

Mykel just shrugged again. “Just getting our spooks.”

More Treats than Tricks Halloween Memories

BY POST- TRICK-OR-TREATERS ILLUSTRATED BY HANNA RASHIDI

The House Unvisited

By Jennifer Osborne My first time trick-or-treating was also my mother’s first. Having just moved to Singapore from my mother’s home country, China, where I spent the first eight years of my life, we attended every schoolsponsored event in an effort to meet other expat families. My mother received notice at one Coffee Morning that there would be “trick-or-treating” in the neighborhood surrounding my school, so she promptly outfitted me and my sister with matching Cleopatra costumes and pumpkin-shaped buckets.

On Halloween night, we arrived to an utterly transformed version of our usual playdate surroundings: Houses were swallowed by mounds of cobwebs, porches were laden with lanterns, and, most importantly, parents were in ridiculous getups with 5-kg bags of candy. My mom was charmed by the festive decorations and the sight of little kids running around in costumes. As soon as we were old enough to go trick-or-treating unsupervised, she began preparing our house to receive young Halloween visitors.

There was just one problem—we lived 30 minutes away from the school and any other significant population of Americans. Since moving to the States, my mother has persevered despite the fact that the door to our side of the duplex isn’t visible from the street. No kids ever came trick-or-treating, and year after year, we wound up with enough Snickers bars and M&M’s to last us through Christmas. At most, the children of the downstairs neighbors would visit us.

It’s been years since I’ve been at home on

Halloween evening, but I’m comforted by the knowledge that, no matter what, my mom will be waiting by the door next Thursday night in a house bedecked with witches and ghosts, hoping that some wayward child will see our lights and come calling.

Wish upon a Starfish

By Sydney Lo When I was younger, Halloween was Cinderella’s Ball: an opportunity to become someone magical, heroic, special. What did it matter that I already wore a princess gown to my kindergarten class three days of the week? Or that I already had a foam sword I regularly used to fight “dragons” (the pine trees in my front yard)? Halloween was my moment to truly embody a storybook character. And, more than anything, that year, I wanted to be the Little Mermaid when I went trick-or-treating.

I had circled the costume in all the ad magazines my family got in the mail: a purple bikini top and a long green skirt that mimicked a tail. “It’s too cold,” my father stated when I gave him my sales pitch. He had a point; we lived in Minnesota, so each year there would already be piles of snow on the ground and belowfreezing temperatures well before October 31. Still, I badgered him, pointing out that since we already drove the car from house to house anyway, I would just be taking quick walks up and down driveways.

“Well, can you even walk in it?” he asked, halfjoking. I probably couldn’t, so I told him to roll me in our red wagon. He was even less entertained by this idea.

In the end, I didn’t get the costume. I don’t recall what I ended up dressing up as, or which houses we visited, or the kind of candy I got. I am left with the memory of an unfulfilled Halloween wish—one I can perhaps rectify now that I’m an adult. Then again, I doubt Providence will be much warmer than Minnesota this October.

The Costume Rival

By Julian Towers What didn’t they understand? It was I who was the chosen one, the boy who lived. The lightning bolt scar, the glasses with white tape on the bridge, the Quidditch gloves—these were all the intellectual property of J.K. Rowling, sure. But tonight, this special Halloween night, Harry Potter had been reserved just for me. So who was this fucker in the Gryffindor sweater two houses ahead?

As my family bounded from house to house, I

thought I overhead some cries of “Expelliarmus!” from the group further along our route. But it wasn’t until I received two mini Twix and a cherry Tootsie Roll Pop at Mrs. Tropp’s house that the dark truth revealed itself to me completely. As she beamed down at me from behind her goblin face paint (dealings with girls in intervening years have informed me that this was actually a “face mask”), I learned that I was “the second young wizard of the night!”

At age seven, my identity wasn’t yet secure enough to withstand such dissociative trauma. My parents tried to get me to continue down the street, but I wouldn’t budge. Instead, in protest, I began to eat one of the peanut candies I was supposed to turn in to our parents out of respect to my mortally allergic brother.

The EpiPen came swinging out, and I thought to myself that it resembled a wand.

A Picturesque Scare

By Amanda Ngo It started off as an uneventful Halloween night.

While one of my friends went all out, most of us were traditional, last-minute costumers. I, for one, put on a squid hat and called it a look.

The allure of the holiday was starting to fade for us; the only reason to go trick-or-treating was the free candy. Rejoicing in this time of year was left to the younger kids whose eyes lit up at the flashy lights and inflatable characters decorating the houses, and to the college kids who saw Halloween as a reason to throw some of the best themed parties of the year.

With our bags full, my friends and I were ready to call it a night when we heard metal scraping against the pavement. A little ways down the road, a masked man in a raggedy tee paced up and down the street, dragging a baseball bat behind him. The villain from Friday the 13th come alive. Alone.

Rational kids would have bolted in the other direction. Social media vultures like us, however, were actively drawn to morbid situations for the sake of getting that perfect photo.

After one of our friends egged us on, we approached the lone Jason Voorhees for a picture. I’ve never been one to scare easily, but in that moment, I was paralyzed. In the photo, my smile is forced on my face, overcompensating for my intense fear of this strange, silent man, whose only communication with us came in the form of heavy breathing.

I guess it’s a beautiful thing that some people never grow out of their love for Halloween. I guess it’s a terrifyingly beautiful thing. october 25, 2019 5

ARTS&CULTURE

Two Writers

"All Along the Watchtower" and the Beauty of Creating

BY GRIFFIN PLAAG ILLUSTRATED BY RÉMY POISSON

Let’s start simple: Bob Dylan is a Nobel Prize winner. Bob Dylan, with the flip of an amp switch, changed the course of popular music forever by merging folk and rock at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. Bob Dylan is also a strange religious zealot who has expressed less-than-savory views about women and once portrayed an n-word spouting racist in a song about boxing without batting an eye.

He’s complex, he’s talented, he’s revolutionary, and, according to my neighbor (who claims to be the granddaughter of Pete Seeger and to have met most of the ’60s folk vanguard along the way), he’s a pompous jerk.

I mention all of this to make it clear that I know exactly what kind of a person I’m reckoning with when I talk about Bob Dylan. Simply put, he’s kind of a bad dude. But he’s also, in my estimation, the most talented artist of the last hundred years—and I say artist as opposed to musician very intentionally, because, yes, Bob Dylan deserved his Nobel Prize in Literature. He’s responsible for what is probably my favorite song of all time, a song remembered not as his but as Jimi Hendrix’s: “All Along the Watchtower,” a 12-line folk ballad that’s uncharacteristically brief by Dylan’s standards.

I’m not the first person to speculate over the meaning of Dylan’s lyrics; YouTube is filled to the brim with speculative takes on what “All Along the Watchtower” is really about. Some people think its central characters—“the joker” and “the thief”—are Dylan and Elvis. Some people think the entire story is a Biblical parable. Personally, I believe the verses are Dylan talking to himself—an internal dialogue focused on the creative process. As an aspiring writer and poet (as well as a songwriter by moonlight), the song’s message—at least as I’ve interpreted it— extends far beyond its political foresight and becomes a kind of guidebook, a road map to being a creator.

Pull up a lyric sheet and follow along.

The song’s first verse is spoken primarily by the imprisoned “joker,” who more or less uses his allotted time to a) perpetuate an escape fantasy, b) complain about being beaten down by the world, and c) call everyone else a bunch of ignorant, sightless fools for not realizing the value of living. Yikes. As a person who too often expresses worldly cynicism myself, though, I recognize a lot of familiar ideas in the joker’s words—a desire to write off existence as pointless, to accuse other people of being less than me, to spend my time poking fun at them because finding real fulfillment is impossible. It’s an unhealthy mindset, but sometimes life gets to feeling brutally torpid and the act of creating (whether it’s writing, painting, or chemical synthesis) can seem pointless, futile.

This is Dylan’s lazy side, Dylan the cynic, Dylan the narcissist. It’s a sad way to open a song.

The second verse is sung from the perspective of a “thief”—an occupational choice that is not made lightly. Over the years, Dylan has been accused of plagiarizing the work of other artists, both from within the folk tradition and outside of it. And, of course, we would do well to remember that more or less all white artists since the early 20th century (if not earlier) have been creating within genres appropriated from black traditions. Pearl Jam stole from black people. Bon Iver stole from black people.

Get it through your heads, people. By personifying a part of himself as a thief, Dylan accepts a certain responsibility for his art’s history, acknowledging that even when he is capable of overcoming his cynicism, he’s engaging in creative larceny—an admission which, though clear-sighted, is quite sad in its own right and more or less tells the joker to cut the shit. He “kindly” (sarcastically, I think) reminds the joker that plenty of people are comfortable living as though life is “but a joke” (nice dis, thief ) but goes on

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Anita Sheih FEATURE Managing Editor Sydney Lo

“I thought I was alone, and then Christina Paxson stepped out of the shadows.”

Section Editors Sara Shapiro Erin Walden

– post- scarecrows, “scary sentences” 10.26.18

Staff Writer Anna Harvey

“If we think about the act of information acquisition like arranging furniture to decorate a room, we would not neglect thinking about the room holistically, nor would we neglect cleaning it and purifying it when necessary."

– Karya Sezener, “tidying up” 10.26.17

NARRATIVE Managing Editor Celina Sun Section Editors Liza Edwards-Levin Michelle Liu Jasmine Ngai

to insist that such indolence is “not our fate.” Then he tells the joker to put a sock in it because “the hour is getting late.” Here, Dylan’s Jekyll reminds his Hyde that a person with his creative gifts and a destiny to live up to (and a legacy of theft to make up for) isn’t allowed to simply tap out; Dylan has to give his all as a creator because his success as a white male artist is the ill-begotten product of a broken system and only someone with his command of language can tear that system down.

In what might be the greatest mic drop in lyrical history, Dylan then proceeds to do exactly that in the space of only two lines. “All along the watchtower,” he brays, “Princes kept the view / while all the women came and went / barefoot servants, too.”

If you don’t see why that’s a perfect description of the fucked up patriarchal institutions that have dominated world government for the better part of all historical memory, try listening to it a few thousand more times until it sinks in. Here, Dylan fulfills his purpose as prophet, overcoming his cynicism to circumscribe history in eighteen words—you know, like a badass. Dylan then changes course and tells us that “two riders were approaching,” which most interpreters believe to be a reference to the joker and the thief. I think so too, but there’s a double entendre here—“riders” sounds an awful lot like “writers.”

Apparently, Dylan never intended it to be heard this way—see the lyric sheet—but it’s fun to imagine how this reconfigures the song’s meaning. It’s also fun to imagine the joker and the thief as one man, Dylan himself, riding a steed across a windswept plain like some weird beatnik knight, curly locks thrown out backwards, ready to irrevocably fuck up the royal social order. How’s he going to do it, you ask? Why, by singing “All Along the Watchtower,” of course.

And thus does the circular myth of Dylan’s opus close itself, the joker and the thief conversing in perpetuity, the song’s beginning its end. It’s a deeply egotistical moment, with Dylan figuring himself as messianic, a divine figure. But it’s also an inspiring sentiment, not because it dismantles political history in the space of twelve lines (although it absolutely does that), but because, political overtones aside, it’s a song about what it means to be an artist. It’s an edict, a song about why creators must create. It’s a prophetic reminder, a reason to wake up every day and labor to speak what you believe. Whether you’re a biologist or a poet, and whether or not you think that his Nobel Prize was earned, you have to admit—that’s what all good creation should do.

Staff Writers Kaitlan Bui Siena Capone Danielle Emerson Naomi Kim Anneliese Mair Grace Park ARTS & CULTURE Managing Editor Julian Towers Section Editors Nicole Fegan Griffin Plaag Staff Writers Rob Capron David Kleinman

LIFESTYLE Managing Editor Kahini Mehta

SOCIAL MEDIA Head Editor Camila Pavon

Section Editor Caitlin McCartney

Editor Paola Solano

Staff Writers Eashan Das Lauren Toneatto

HEAD ILLUSTRATOR Rémy Poisson

COPY Copy Chief Amanda Ngo

LAYOUT Co-Chiefs Amy Choi Nina Yuchi

Copy Editors Maddy McGrath Jennifer Osborne Mohima Sattar

Designers Joanne Han Steve Ju Iris Xie WEB MASTER Jeff Demanche

Want to be involved?

Email: anita_sheih@brown.edu!

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