Commencement 2011

ART Emma Banay*, Molly Dektar, Julian Gewirtz, Dana Kase*, Kristie La, Avery Leonard, Rebecca Levitan, Mary Potter, Anna Raginskaya*, Scott Roben, Madeleine Schwartz, Zoe Weinberg.

BUSINESS Ben Berman, Sophie Brooks, Skyler Hicks, Benat Idoyaga, Andrew Karn, Temi Lawoyin, David Manella, Iya Megre*, Jaron Mercer, Anna Raginskaya*, David Tao*, Tobi Tikolo, Emily Xie, Ge Zhang.

DESIGN Charlotte Alter, Lucy Andersen, Isidore Bethel*, Wendy Chang, Hanna Choi, Alejandra Dean, Jessica Henderson*, Dana Kase*, Charleton Lamb*, Joseph Morcos, Lauren Packard*, Sally Scopa, Michael Segel, Lila Strominger.

The Harvard Advocate www.theharvardadvocate.com

EDITORIAL BOARD President Publisher Art Editor Business Manager Design Editors

Features Editor Fiction Editor Poetry Editor Technology Editor Pegasi

Dionysi

Circulation & Publicity Managers Librarian Alumni Relations Manager Community Outreach Director

EMILY CHERTOFF JULIAN GEWIRTZ SCOTT ROBEN ANDREW KARN WENDY CHANG HANNA CHOI MARK CHIUSANO SOFIA GROOPMAN MATT AUCOIN JEREMY FENG MOLLY DEKTAR CHARLOTTE LIEBERMAN MADELEINE SCHWARTZ RICHARD FEGELMAN STEPHANIE NEWMAN DAN COLE MICHAEL SEGEL ERIK FREDERICKSEN JOSHUA WILSON SALLY SCOPA

FEATURES Victoria Baena, Eric Brewster, Spencer Burke*, Emily Chertoff, Mark Chiusano, Eva DeLappe, Sophie Duvernoy*, Molly Fitzpatrick*, Georgina Parfitt, Madeleine Schwartz, Jessica Sequeira*, Georgia Stasinopoulos, My Ngoc To, Alex Wells.

FICTION Emily Chertoff, Molly Dektar, Eva Delappe, Ricky Fegelman, Erik Fredericksen, Carolyn Gaebler*, Sofia Groopman, Seph Kramer*, Charleton Lamb*, Max Larkin*, Patrick Lauppe, Charlotte Lieberman, Ryan Meehan*, Georgia Stasinopoulos, David Wallace*, Scott Zuccarino*.

POETRY Matthew Aucoin, Hana Bajramovic, Samantha Berstler, Anne Marie Creighton, Ricky Fegelman, Erik Frederiksen, Julian Gewirtz, Sarah Hopkinson, Andrew Klein, Jennifer Nicole Kurdyla*, Stephanie Newman, Adam Palay*, Tyler Richard*, David Wallace*, Joshua Wilson, Justin Wymer.

TECHNOLOGY Eric Arzoian, Ben Berman, Dan Cole, Jeff Feldman*, Jeremy Feng, Mark VanMiddlesworth*, Lakshmi Parthasarathy, Michael Segel, Scott Zuccarino*.

*The Harvard Advocate congratulates its graduating seniors.

BOARD OF TRUSTEES Chairman JAMES ATLAS Chairman Emeritus LOUIS BEGLEY Vice-Chairman DOUGLAS MCINTYRE President SUSAN MORRISON Vice-President AUSTIN WILKIE and Treasurer Secretary CHARLES ATKINSON

PETER BROOKS

JOHN DESTEFANO

LESLIE DUNTON-DOWNER

A. WHITNEY ELLSWORTH

JONATHAN GALASSI

LEV GROSSMAN

ANGELA MARIANI

DANIEL MAX

CELIA MCGEE

THOMAS A. STEWART

JEAN STROUSE

The Harvard Advocate will anonymously consider all submissions of art, features, fiction, and poetry. Submissions may be emailed to art@theharvardadvocate.com, features@theharvardadvocate.com, fiction@theharvardadvocate.com, or poetry@theharvardadvocate.com. Submissions may also be mailed to 21 South St., Cambridge MA 02138. All submissions should be original work that has not been previously published. If you wish to have your submission returned to you, please include a self-addressed stamped envelope. Questions about submissions may be directed to the individual emails above or to contact@theharvardadvocate.com.

Founded in 1866, the Harvard Advocate is the nation’s oldest continuously published college literary magazine. It publishes quarterly from 21 South St, Cambridge MA 02138. Published pieces and advertisements represent the opinions of the authors and advertisers, not the Harvard Advocate.

Domestic subscription rates are $35 for one year (4 issues), $60 for two years (8 issues), $90 for three years (12 issues). For institutions and international addresses, the rates are $45 for one year (4 issues), $75 for two years (8 issues), $110 for three years (12 issues). Payable by cash or check made out to the Harvard Advocate and mailed to the above address, Attn: Circulation Manager. Back issues are available for purchase at www. theharvardadvocate.com. No part of this magazine may be reprinted without the permission of the Harvard Advocate. Copyright 2010 by the Editors and Trustees of the Harvard Advocate.

THE HARVARD ADVOCATE

1

CONTEN TS 14 15 16 21 41 42 48 50

ART

Upholster the Pines, Upholster the Pond Untitled I and II (Join or Die) Drawing the Line in Mississippi Child Play, between soviet and american Someone I Love or Someone Who I Want to Be Images from the PA monograph 2010/11 Sweater Girl Repeat Viewings

FEATURES

Interview with Sheila Heti With Chinese Characteristics Climbing Flying Mountain Naturaleza Muerta 57 From Deep to Dark 4 10 17 32

FICTION

24 Above Ground 37 An Understanding 52 Havahart

8 22 31 46 49

POETRY

The Snare (I & II) Kore [The sunset-red boy] The Clew March

Cover Design by Jessica Henderson, Dana Kase, Charleton Lamb, and Lauren Packard.

Dana Kase Dana Kase Dana Kase Lauren Ianni Isidore Bethel Katarina Burin Rebecca Levitan Dan Ashwood

Madeleine Schwartz Julian Gewirtz Sophie Duvernoy Jessica Sequeira Spencer Burke

Carolyn Gaebler Emily Chertoff James Maxwell Larkin

David Wallace Erik Fredericksen Stephanie Newman Julian Gewirtz Charlotte Lieberman

NOTES FROM 21 SOUTH STREET

Interview with Sheila Heti MADELEINE SCHWARTZ

In 2007, The New York Times Magazine asked a group of young writers for essays about their college experiences. Most of the responses were predictable—addictions to good grades, new horizons abroad, the pleasures and terrors of youth activism. Then there was the piece by Sheila Heti, a Canadian writer who studied playwriting at the National Theatre School of Canada before attending the University of Toronto to study art history and philosophy.

Heti wrote about how she had come to the University ready “to uncover the great mystery beneath the surface of everything,” and had spent her first few months confident in her ability to do so without talking to anyone on campus. “That summer I ended a relationship with a guy who was more charismatic than I was, and he kept all our friends. Well, to hell with them.” This, it turned out, was a pretty lonely way of going about things, so instead she began to interview other students for a project, which, she explained, had no purpose. “Suddenly, the yellow-brick road to friendship seemed to unravel before me. I hurried home to the room I was living in near campus and came up with a long list of questions: What lies do you tell yourself over and over? For whom are you performing?”

I remember reading this as a senior in high school and gulping. If college was going to make me a new person, this was the kind of person I wanted to be.

4

COMMENCEMENT 2011

Young writers are often told to craft a “voice” or develop a “personal brand” (an oxymoron if I ever heard one) in order to be more attractive to readers. But the most exciting writing gives you a sense of all the contours of a person, not just a well-defined identity. Sheila Heti writes that way.

Her work is bold and daring, but it never sounds pushed—as if writing were just another extension of her self .

Heti’s first book, The Middle Stories, was published in 2001; Ticknor, a first person narrative based on the relationship between the historian William Prescott and his biographer George Ticknor, came out in 2006. Her most recent book, How Should A Person Be?, is a novel and was published in Canada last year. The Chairs Are Where the People Go, a collaboration with the improvisation artist Misha Glouberman, will come out this summer.

This conversation took place over the phone in two parts. It has been condensed and edited. *** How did you write The Chairs Are Where the People Go? I had wanted to write a book about my friend Misha for a long time. I had written part of a book about him but it was bad. So instead we talked.

He talked and I typed. Before that, we had asked

friends of ours about things Misha was good at. We came up with a long list. Then we talked about every single one of them. Mostly he just spoke in a monologue and then I edited the book.

Much of your work is very collaborative. For How Should A Person Be?, for example, you interviewed your friends and transcribed interactions with them.

I come from the theater world. I missed theater. I missed the part when you do a play with somebody. I missed how close you get—what happens when they become family. I wanted to think of writing the book in this way.

That must have been a change from writing your novel Ticknor.

I don’t even think I talked to anybody about the book when I was writing it. Writing the book was more like writing about a relationship. All conversations just with myself and I was stuck all alone with my problems. I had to be stuck in my head.

That’s something I want to get away from. It was like writing a biography. I had to become Ticknor.

My brain became a book’s brain.

When you are writing about yourself or your friend group, as you do in How Should A Person Be?, how do you distinguish between real Sheila and fictional Sheila?

When I was writing How Should A Person Be? there was a lot of bleeding between myself and the person in the book. A lot of things that were in my personality and in my point of view were only there for the duration of writing the book. I felt like I had to be a certain way. Asking people for advice, for example. I didn’t know what to do, so I would ask people for advice. I wrote about it in the book. That was a part of myself that I thought was a turn off. But it was a temporary thing. When I finished the book, it was gone. There are parts of yourself, when, if you are writing, you feed that part. If I didn’t feel that way, they wouldn’t have been so exaggerated in the book.

What about writing things that were very personal, like people around you? Or like sex?

One is an artist in part to train oneself to see

more clearly. If you write about fictional people, you don’t have to account to them. You do have to account to real people. If I write about my friend Margaux [heavily featured in How Should A Person Be?] and I get something really wrong, she can say something about it and be hurt by it.

Doing this kind of work tricks you to be a little more conscientious. I don’t have to account to Ticknor. But I do have to account to Margaux.

For sex: I didn’t have it in an earlier draft of the book. But something about the book felt wrong.

When I put the stuff about sex in, the book suddenly became whole. I wanted the book to be about the human experience. A person is also sexuality. This is obviously not a new idea. But I think it made the Sheila character more real and the questions in the book more real.

But that’s still just writing. It’s a work of art, it’s not my journal or anything. I don’t feel like anyone knows anything more about me. I don’t feel shame. And I haven’t gotten creepy emails.

Your books often play with the idea of handbooks, or self-help. Is that a genre you know well? Do you think it is more “useful” than the novel?

It’s not that I read them any more than the average person. I read the Alan Carr book on how to quit smoking. And books by relationship experts.

I think that the idea of self-help as a genre—it exists in order to change your life. But the novel is something more active. There is also truth and beauty. And there’s also a certain desperation to it.

I like that desperation.

This book that I am reading now is called The Master and His Emissary. It’s about hemispheres of the brain. There are lots of books about hemispheres of the brain. This one is the most convincing. [Because of it,] I am now trying to use my brain in a different way that’s more effective and more suited to the tasks.

Your writing plays on these ideas of self-help and practical philosophy. The Chairs Are Where the People Go is subtitled “How to Live, Work, and Play in the City,” and it’s structured as short thoughts on various topics, much like a handbook.

Yes, I was interested in applied philosophy, and really tried to answer questions about life in that language. Down on the ground. Do you give

THE HARVARD ADVOCATE

5

up your seat on the subway, for example? How do you make friends? Maybe there can be small answers [to big questions]. The thing about the hemispheres, for example. Maybe that can be useful.

When I was younger, I always really wanted to abstract life. More and more as I get older I realize that this abstraction is totally devoid of life. It’s missing something true about life. Every situation is different from every other situation. There is always the temptation to have some big abstract answer, but life is not abstract. That is inaccurate.

We come from the century of big ideas and we’ve all seen how that turned out. Communism and fascism and all the modernisms, with their manifestos—those were big and wide-ranging. I used to love reading those manifestos, the futurist manifestos. I can’t imagine anyone trying to speak in that way anymore. It seems so dangerous.

The first book that is thought to be of the self-help genre, Self Help by Samuel Smiles, was published in the mid-19th century, a time that is generally associated with the novel.

Well, the thing about Self Help is that it is not really like a contemporary self-help book, where you are given instruction. There are ten different men, great men, and you are meant to be inspired to be more like them—to be more loyal or more brave. So to a certain extent, it’s a bit more like the novel in format, and the idea that you can be better by imitation. But it is not that complex emotionally. Everything is so complicated now.

These great men never seemed to struggle to be great.

When I wrote Ticknor, I read the biography he had written of Prescott. He made Prescott seem so great. That doesn’t make sense to our sensibility. It is impossible for one man to look at another man and see only valor. It’s a prejudice of ours to think that darkness adds complexity. I think there are probably other kinds of depth besides perversion and so on. Like bad luck—that could be a form of character depth.

Do you see your work following in any traditions?

There are artists that I have been inspired by and excited by. But I feel that the idea of traditions happens in retrospect, so I wouldn’t put myself in one. And I think those narratives are fantasies

6

COMMENCEMENT 2011

anyway. I don’t see histories where there is this line of tradition.

There are people I have been inspired by: Jean Cocteau, Radiguet. I respond to people who are very much doing their thing. Andy Warhol. The Chris Kraus book I Love Dick. The Paris Review interviews. Delacroix’s “Portraits of the Insane.”

Wow, Radiguet. When I was little, my family would go on car trips and listen to audio books.

One of them, I remember, was Le Diable Au Corps.

I think I was about eight, and I don’t remember understanding much of what was going on, but his strength of person is so forceful in his books, even though he was so young when he wrote and when he died.

What I like about him is that he said that great works of art are great in their failure. That their greatness lies in imitating heroes and failing. So that all great works of art are failures at being great.

I’ve thought a lot about that in my own work. I am interested in the idea of the novel, the idea of the short story. But I have never been able to do either of those very closely—not because I try to do something so different from them. I just don’t think that I am so interested in telling stories. I am interested in structures.

Have there been things that you have tried to do that you have not been able to?

I have written short stories that were plain bad.

There are certain things that I try to do that just suck. But that’s not interesting failure. You know it in your bones. I don’t put that stuff in the world.

The other day I was giving a talk and I had a girl come up and say to me, “Everyone wants me to write a blog. I am not good at writing a blog.”

I told her not to write a blog. I don’t understand why we so often feel a need to do things we are not good at.

So you have always known that you were good at writing.

I’ve always had people respond to it. I remember being a kid and having to write a short story, thinking, this [story] is the worst possible thing. I did not understand why it was so bad. I was trying to write a story like the ones I had read, but there was nothing of myself in it. I only felt confident

about my writing when I was able to write in my own way. It takes a while to get to that point.

You started out writing plays, and you’ve done collaborations with visual artists and filmmakers.

Are there ways of art-making that you prefer? Some that you think are more effective than others?

What I like about plays is that there’s not a lot of time spent describing what something looks like. I am not a fan of writing description because I don’t notice things. If you don’t write descriptions, you are relying on the reader.

For me, I have a pretty strong imagination, so it’s kind of stressful to read description. I feel like I am undoing what I already imagined. I like leaving that part to the reader. It’s like a pact with the audience, and the reader has some work to do too.

It’s like: there are some people with whom you can never get a word in. They just talk and talk and talk. They are very ungenerous. There is no room for the other person. There are books that are ungenerous in that way. If I see a book that is 1,000 pages, I think it is not very generous to the reader. They just want to tell you everything.

I read in a Paris Review interview with Jean Rhys that she could never write when she was happy, which struck me as a sad fact considering how much she wrote. Is that the same kind of necessity that you are referring to?

No, it’s not about feeling bad. Someone can be writing in a state of great joy. What I mean is that it can’t be like a writing exercise. It has to be more than that. It has to be connected to the writer’s living. I don’t care to be shown off to. I don’t find people impressive because they show me an impressive skill.

Making art is an instinct. As much as sex or wanting to eat. I think it’s a real drive, and it should look like that.

You mentioned that you like writing that seems to come out of desperation. Is that something you apply to your own work?

I am not in a very desperate situation right now.

I am actually figuring out: how do you write when there is not this desperation? How do you write from a place of conscious calmness? Writing needs to be meaningful to the author. There needs to be a reason to write the book—the kind of situation where you need to write the book or you won’t be able to live as well. So much of what I read— it could be written or it could not be written. It doesn’t have that necessity. Some writers have that. Henry Miller—I get the sense that writing is part of living for him. If he doesn’t write, he will not be living fully. I like seeing that in art.

THE HARVARD ADVOCATE

7

The Snare (I) DAVID WALLACE

Please shut up. When I emerge wild, the golden lake over my shoulder, I will take into account the promise you entangled me in.

1.

Similar to the negative torso holding up the tree roots I ask you to be gentle.

Everything will wobble otherwise When you’re not here something crawls into the hole and doesn’t think.

Patience is expendable.

Go deeper with me.

Break any final symmetry.

2.

I think this body is an instrument.

I grow like a graft.

It might be useless to try to place what stucco home sprung me fully formed.

How often I thought of my network of parts.

And I thought of yours.

Wheeling we get married and I use my new mechanisms.

8

COMMENCEMENT 2011

The Snare (II)

How do we know how to send the codes from one end to the other of the last sunken terminal?

If I were to lie down and go to pieces I could imitate the echo in the marl. *** A lord’s hand made me whole again, my corpse the fledgling map of the new world.

A lord smiles like a turning wing and hovers over noon churning.

All the parts were plain to see, the parish, the barnyards, veins and ligatures.

They cover me with hay until I am gone.

These locusts buried in the riverbank. They hatch and fly further. They cluster with force, they eddy and course into my yawn.

THE HARVARD ADVOCATE

9

With Chinese Characteristics JULIAN GEWIRTZ

In the fall of 2010, Fudan University in Shanghai announced that its Chinese department was about to revitalize the country’s literature. Creative writing was getting “a new face.” But rather than announcing a new faculty member or the winner of a literary prize, Fudan was planning the establishment of mainland China’s first MFA program in creative writing.

One might wonder what took them so long.

The graduate creative writing program—and its attendant phenomena, from the undergraduate workshop to the small-press book deal to the degree-carrying poet who lives off untenured teaching jobs—has become a central feature of a contemporary American literary education. The idea of a degree in creative writing is less than a century old; the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, which is the oldest and most prestigious MFA program in the country, began in 1936. To reverse the national seal’s dictum: from one, many. Today it’s nearly impossible to find a major U.S. research university that doesn’t teach creative writing.

Chinese universities have been openly emulating American universities at least since the Reform and Opening in the late 1970s.

Coinciding with Deng Xiaoping’s promulgation of a more liberal national political ideology, socalled “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics,” this series of policies increased China’s economic and political openness to the outside world. Law schools, business schools, courses

10

COMMENCEMENT 2011

teaching leadership skills—the Chinese academy now has it all. But an MFA degree in creative writing is something different. Certainly, Fudan sees it that way: the program’s detailed and somewhat extravagant syllabus describes the university’s ambitions as nothing less than transforming contemporary Chinese literature into a thoroughly “international and scientific” practice.

But all is not quite as it seems. The syllabus, even with its vague goals like “expanding students’ artistic consciousness,” mirrors in almost every way what one might see at Iowa or another American MFA program. Novel writing, the art of the essay, rediscovering the classics, interdisciplinary film studies—it’s all there, with one glaring exception. Fudan has completely omitted poetry from its scheme to revolutionize contemporary Chinese literature.

Of course, the Chinese are writing poems, and have been for thousands of years. Tradition credits Confucius with compiling hundreds of Chinese folk songs and poems into the Shijing or Classic of Poetry. This text forms the core of a canon—parts of which are memorized by every elementary school student—that also includes Tang poets like Li Bai and Du Fu, as well as latter-day literati like the founding father of the People’s Republic of China, Mao Zedong. Mao, a prolific writer in the classical style, is perhaps

the bestselling poet-politician in world history— and certainly the only poet whose image watches over his nation’s capital, as Mao’s portrait hangs above Tiananmen Square.

In many ways, Mao the Poet can coexist with Mao the Chairman because of a long Chinese tradition of the scholar-official (the shi class).

Many canonical poets, like Qu Yuan, Wang Wei, and Su Shi, served in government. The imperial examination, a requirement from the Sui to the Qing dynasties for those who wished to join the national bureaucracy, focused on literary skills.

Academic, poetic, and political success often intertwined.

But the tumult of twentieth century Chinese history created deep discontinuities between present and past. Poetry in China today is no longer a province of the ministry or the academy.

China has not taken the path of the West, where the poète maudit, outside of society or outcast from it, dominates our cultural image of the literary artist. Instead, as poetry has dissociated itself from its historic affiliations, it has found a new territory to colonize: the Internet.

In a way that may be difficult for Americans to imagine, for young Chinese writers the poetry world now largely centers on decentralized online communities of non-professional, often anonymous writers. Forums like bbs.chinapoesy. com and poem100.cn allow poets to publish themselves, reaching large virtual audiences.

There is no one authoritative site, no sole locus for this activity. Xiaofei Tian, a Harvard professor and scholar of Chinese poetry, calls these websites the “real world” in contemporary Chinese literature, in contrast to traditional venues like the universities and the publishing houses. Of course, as in any democratic literary model, quality varies widely. But, Tian argues, “Many of these online communities are actually very good.”

Some respond more critically to the content of the sites. Chinese poet Wang Ao acknowledges the creation of “more channels” and “more opportunities for readers to have access to more new poems,” in a country where book numbers (shuhao, like ISBN) and publication opportunities are closely controlled. But he criticizes the tone of complete egalitarianism that dominates these sites, where “everybody can post their poems online and call themselves poets.” The Internet, he stresses, cannot itself

produce a new Li Bai or Du Fu—the poems will have to speak for themselves.

At the least, contributions to these open poetry websites are remarkably dynamic and diverse.

They range from strict classical exercises to elliptical free verse. Some poets, especially frequent contributors, gain large followings.

Others respond to the work of their peers on these sites—a virtual reenactment of the idea that poetic history is a kind of conversation among poets. Indeed, perhaps it would be most accurate to say that a great deal of the most vital activity in Chinese poetry today closely resembles a web chat, a blog.

The diffusive effect of the Internet seems designed to compete with what still exists of a Chinese literary establishment. The new “old guard”—popular middle-aged poets like Xi Chuan and Yu Jian—belong to national writers’ associations, publish with official presses, and win state-sponsored literary awards. And they fight their own battles: the schism between classical and vernacular styles, for example, remains a contentious topic.

These poets are unabashedly internationalized, even as they remain committed to writing for and about China. Robert Hass, the former U.S. poet laureate, recounts a recent trip to Beijing, where he met with a range of established Chinese poets. He asked them about their influences. “Yu Jian said that it was Walt Whitman, presumably in Chinese translation, who opened up poetry for him,” Hass remembers. Xi Chuan, meanwhile, reported that he had studied Borges, Pound, Milosz, and others. “It does look like this is a poetry that’s in conversation with the rest of twentieth and twenty-first century poetry around the world,” Hass says.

Wang Ao, who has won several major Chinese literary awards, agrees: “We all read foreign poetry, in all different languages, not just the major Western languages.” He remembers, “When I was in college we had some poets meeting with each other to discuss foreign poetry and also, at the same time, discussing classical Chinese poetry.” These multiple, multivalent influences have formed China’s establishment poets.

These figures, despite their success, often use their poems to express dissatisfaction with contemporary Chinese poetry. Xi Chuan, in his

THE HARVARD ADVOCATE

11

poem “Nightfall” (mu’se), writes, You the dead, appear All the living have shut their mouths You the dead, where are you?

Nightfall invites you to speak Then, in the final stanza of the same poem: And nightfall spreads over the earth Extends its grasping hand Nightfall windowlight, and always someone Taps gently at my door The poem enacts many of the concerns of China’s establishment poets. The voice and imagery show the influence of the Latin American tradition, while at moments evoking W. S. Merwin’s early writing (the poem “The Hydra” comes to mind with Xi Chuan’s address to the “dead” and the “names”). The speaker critiques the present—“all the living have shut their mouths”—but understands that even the invitations of nightfall cannot resurrect poetry’s past. The ambiguous “someone” of the poem’s last stanza exists in a state that is not only liminal but also temporally dislocated: is this one of “the dead” or “the living”? The poem’s achievement is to make nightfall itself atemporal and nonlocational. Xi Chuan expresses a dissatisfaction that is both local and global; he combines Chinese and international approaches in a poem that addresses both the past and the present.

“Internationalization,” then, means many things as a priority of Fudan’s MFA program.

Tian argues that “this creative writing program is almost reactionary” in light of literary developments on the Internet. She adds, “They claim they want to train writers in not only Chinese but also international perspectives, which makes it seem like they are trying to train writers who will produce Nobel Prizes for China.”

Indeed, establishment writers in China cannot be happy that the only person writing in Chinese to have won the Nobel Prize in Literature is Gao Xingjian, a French citizen who has lived in Paris for over twenty years. When Gao won the Nobel, China’s then-premier Zhu Rongji responded firmly: “I trust that in the future there will be other Chinese works to win the Prize.”

12

COMMENCEMENT 2011

Online poetry communities, despite their inherent openness to the world, are inwardlooking in many ways. “The writers hardly care about what’s going on in the United States,” Tian says. Many of these writers, particularly those who write poems in classical forms or with dense, obscure classical allusions, are certainly nostalgic and perhaps even implicitly nationalistic. In a way, their attitude toward poetry—their faith in the Chinese language and tradition and their desire to stake a broad claim on the future direction of their art—mirrors larger social trends in China today. A wide variety of important reformist, critical, and experimental subject matter finds its favored home in Chinese cyberspace. For example, much has been written in the Western media about China’s “angry youth” or fenqing, whom the New Yorker’s Evan Osnos describes as “the new generation’s neocon nationalists.” The fenqing use the Internet—in particular, online forums and other communal digital spaces—to find each other and promote their views. Perhaps some of China’s online poets are this population’s literary analogue.

In any case, online poetry communities occupy an important political position. Wang Ao observes, “There are many things on the Internet in China now—political protests and poetry and music. It’s part of the character of our times.” As the “angry youth” phenomenon has demonstrated, the Internet in China allows public dialogue on controversial topics to occur before the government can catch up. “Poets now do not need to rely on the traditional venues, which have been censored,” Ao says. “‘Online police’ often do not understand poetry, so poets can write political protest in a metaphorical way.” Even though the establishment of an MFA program could be thought of as a step forward, legitimating and strengthening creative writing in China, these broader developments indicate a more problematic possibility: Fudan’s program opens up opportunities for control by bringing art within the purview of the academy.

Chinese universities certainly do not yet have the traditions of academic freedom of their American counterparts. In a setting where successful professors are very careful about departing from the party line, and every school has a both a dean and a party secretary, an MFA program could potentially subvert the political and literary openness that online literary communities foster.

To Tian, Fudan’s aims are problematic, even “illusory.” She says, “I don’t think the university matters all that much” for the future of creative writing in China. Even Fudan seems to understand, reluctantly, some of its limitations.

A founder of the program, a Chinese literature professor named Chen Sihe, offers one reason for Fudan’s lack of poetry offerings: “We don’t know how to teach poetry,” he says. “It’s too complicated.” As strange as this may seem to someone from a country where poetry workshops are a staple of the MFA diet, perhaps it makes sense for Fudan. Perhaps the academy will never be able to provide a meaningful alternative to the freewheeling dynamism of the online poetry world.

And perhaps this is not China’s loss. In the United States, poetry’s longevity as a medium seems, at present, to be inextricably tied to the patronage of universities. But China may offer another model. Xi Chuan expresses his dissatisfaction with contemporary Chinese poetry by suggesting that today’s writers “have shut their mouths.” But even now, above Beijing’s noisy streets or in the hush of a college library, China’s poets are opening their laptops.

THE HARVARD ADVOCATE

13

Upholster the Pines, Upholster the Pond, 2011 Dana Kase Installation view Dimensions variable 14

COMMENCEMENT 2011

Untitled I and II (Join or Die), 2011 Dana Kase Watercolor on paper 14” x 11” THE HARVARD ADVOCATE

15

Drawing the Line in Mississippi, 2011 (After Dead Crane, 1745. Jean-Baptiste Oudry. Oil on canvas. Staatliches Museum, Schwerin, Germany. 63.8” x 50.2”) Dana Kase Muslin, cotton, quilt batting, stuffing 104” x 83” x 11” 16

COMMENCEMENT 2011

Climbing Flying Mountain SOPHIE DUVERNOY

Reinhold Messner and his brother Günther reached the summit of Nanga Parbat in June 1970. They were the third mountaineering team ever to do so. Nanga Parbat, located in Northern Pakistan, is the ninth-highest mountain in the world, and the deadliest after Annapurna. On their ascent, the brothers climbed up the Rupal face, one of the highest mountain faces on earth.

It rises 4,600 meters above its base, and its peak fades into cold, distant clouds. Reinhold Messner later wrote a novel about their fateful ascent, which he called The Naked Mountain. The title is a literal translation of Nanga Parbat, but it resonates on other levels, too—the climber is always defenseless, at the mercy of 8,000 meters.

Nanga Parbat wasn’t merciful to the two brothers. Reinhold and Günther’s climb was tough and rushed. The Naked Mountain is taut, like traditional climbing narratives, but with one difference. Messner’s story ends with the loss of his brother.

Messner would go on to become one of the world’s most prolific climbers—arguably, the best climber of all time. In 1978, he was the first man to successfully reach Mount Everest’s summit without bottled oxygen. By 1986, he had scaled all of the world’s eight-thousanders. He is an advocate of climbing “by fair means,” that is, using minimal tools and equipment on extraordinarily dangerous climbs. This also means that Messner frequently faces death, yet has somehow emerged with only

a few lost toes (six, frostbitten during his delirious descent of Nanga Parbat).

Many years after climbing Nanga Parbat, Messner became friends with an Austrian named Christoph Ransmayr, and they began traveling and climbing together. Also an adventurer, Ransmayr harbors an inexplicable fascination for ice. He organizes expeditions to the Arctic Circle, as a leader for a company called Poseidon Arctic Voyages. He is also one of Austria’s greatest living writers. Our path not only leads into foreign territory, but into the interior of the world itself, in a language that knows both the real and the possible, he writes. Storytelling is much like exploring. Ransmayr and Messner make a good team. They inhabit the realms of the real and the possible at once—Messner through climbing, Ransmayr through writing. They find foreign territory, then claim and change it through their journey.

Being from Austria means a couple of things— you are in a country so close to the Alps that mountains are inevitably on your mind. But Austria is also a nexus of European culture, a country marked by Enlightenment thinking and still pining for its lost empire. Ransmayr writes about the two side by side—what happens when exploration and conquest merge. Messner, who is from South Tyrol (technically a part of Italy), is a cultural Austrian. He climbs and conquers

THE HARVARD ADVOCATE

17

intuitively.

The two men recognize that mountaineering is a blatantly symbolic act. The ascent to the summit is a sign of triumph over the impassive world through reason and will. Alexander von Humboldt, the Enlightenment explorer who founded the field of biogeography, thought that “other laws of a more mysterious nature rule the higher spheres of the organic world. A physical delineation of nature terminates at the point where the sphere of intellect begins, and a new world of mind is opened to our view.” Mountain climbers struggle against nature, not for the sake of a world of mind, but to create a world of will. Yet this is not always a process of rational conquest. As the mountaineer climbs higher, moving away from the topography of the mountain and into his inner landscape, something surreal and indefinable happens to human and world. The climber passes into an intermediate space—neither wholly real nor imagined—in which man and nature are no longer at each other’s mercy. Each suspends the other in order to examine it, and in doing so, the boundaries of mind and world extend beyond the real, into the poetic.

This poetic process is something Ransmayr intuitively grasps—he doesn’t put much stock in understanding the world through Enlightenment rationality. When Alexander von Humboldt traveled through South America, he did not expect to fully explain the world he was discovering, but allowed himself to be overwhelmed by forests, meteor showers, electric eels. Nature has to be given the opportunity to unfold to the explorer on its own terms.

Messner believes in giving nature its due. In 1971, he wrote a manifesto on bare climbing entitled “The Murder of the Impossible.” In it, he rails against people who rely completely on their equipment to climb by drilling holes and rigging hooks into the mountainside. He flippantly writes, “‘Impossible’: it doesn’t exist anymore. The dragon is dead, poisoned, and the hero Siegfried is unemployed.” Others have killed the mythology of the mountain through technology—it is Messner’s job to return the impossible to the mountain.

Yet because Messner believes that he alone can shoulder this task, he denies nature its necessary autonomy. He has instead distorted a philosophy into an ego-driven project of conquest. The moments of poetry that unfold in The Naked

18

COMMENCEMENT 2011

Mountain happen in spite of his intentions, not because of them. And there is no humanism in Messner’s thought. His brother Günther becomes a figure who trudges doggedly behind him, suffering from fever and delirium. When they reach the summit, the two men are stranded, and huddle together at the top of the mountain for the night. Messner does not speak to his brother, but retreats further into himself.

In his manifesto, Messner angrily writes, “the courage of those who still climb ‘free’ is derided as a manifestation of lack of conscientiousness.”

These words come a few months after he has lost Günther to an avalanche, during their unplanned descent of Nanga Parbat without tools or rope.

Ransmayr must have heard the story of Günther’s death from Messner several times— maybe even while climbing the Himalayas with him. He probably read The Naked Mountain.

Messner’s novel is an attempt to settle accounts with the leader of the expedition, Karl Maria Herrligkoffer. Herrligkoffer accused Reinhold of causing his brother’s death by attempting a climb that was foolhardy and dangerous, acting against explicit orders. But Herrligkoffer’s story is one of many different stories surrounding the Messners’ climb.

The narratives tend to splinter around one central event: the rocket flare that Herrligkoffer sent up from base camp. Messner and Herrligkoffer had come to a tacit understanding that Messner would be the first to reach the peak.

The rocket was the signal to start the climb. It was to indicate the weather forecast—red for bad, blue for good. Messner was to set out immediately if a storm was approaching, for fear of wasting time. Herrligkoffer received the weather report, and ordered a blue flare to be sent up. Someone grabbed a flare wrapped in blue cloth and set it off, but it was red. Messner saw the signal, and knew that the time had come for him to begin the final push to the top. There were no more blue flares at base camp that could signal the mistake— according to Herrligkoffer, at least—so Messner set out on his own with minimal equipment, early in the morning. He crunched through the snow quickly, spiking the mountain’s side with his crampons. Günther followed him around midday, also without rope—he didn’t want his brother to attempt the climb alone.

Messner claims that this was how he and

Günther found themselves on the summit with no means of climbing down the crevasse they had scaled on their ascent. Instead, they were forced into descending on the Diamir face—a route which they had memorized but were unprepared to take. Günther and Messner climbed down, their paths separating farther and farther, until they lost sight of each other. Günther never reappeared.

Ransmayr added his story, “The Flying Mountain,” to the collection of tales about the Messners. But it is a completely fictional retelling of their climb of Nanga Parbat. Liam and Pàdraic are two Irish brothers who set out to climb a mountain in Tibet known as Phur-Ri. Messner, the stronger brother who lived, becomes Liam, the determined climber who dies. Pàdraic writes the novel as a prose poem that chronicles their journey to the summit, into blank space and suffocating whiteness. Ransmayr, who does not share Messner’s extreme drive or ego, realized that exploring demands humanism. And so his account of their climb is not a chronicle of challenging crevasses and strategies, but a story about the brothers themselves. When Liam and Pàdraic climb Nanga Parbat, they choose to climb with each other and in each other’s company. In

this way, Ransmayr humanized Messner’s story, tempered and redeemed it through his writing. *** Liam and Pàdraic are quite close to the top.

But Pàdraic has been feeling sick since the afternoon. They pitch their small tent in their final encampment and curl up for the night. But snow comes with darkness. Sheets of white pile themselves around the tent, on its roof, over its sides. Pàdraic is delirious, dizzy from the thin air and weak with fever. Liam makes him tea and sprinkles white powder into it. His brother daydreams until dusk, lulled by the opium. At night, he curls up, mistakes Liam for his Tibetan lover, and reaches towards his brother for an embrace. Liam pulls away, giggling sleepily.

Pàdraic is embarrassed—he turns away, fervently hoping that Liam is still asleep. The two brothers stay in the tent for several days. Pàdraic moves in and out of delirium. Sometimes shapes become clearer in his mind, only to blur again. The snow continues to fall gently, trapping them in their fragile nylon canopy.

The two brothers have made it to Nanga Parbat’s summit. They have conquered the mountain, and are awash in triumph. But now, Reinhold and Günther can’t find their way downward.

They can’t climb down the crevasse they scaled on their way up—it’s too dangerous to attempt without rope. It’s getting dark quickly—the sky is bleeding into a deep, ink-stained indigo.

Reinhold finds a sheltered hollow in which they can rest overnight. The two men’s limbs are already bloodless and stiff. They take off their shoes. Reinhold unfolds a length of silver astronaut foil. It crinkles with the false promise of insulation. He wraps it around their aching, frozen feet. They huddle together on the ice shelf, immobile. They pick up the ends of the foil and wrap their entire bodies in it, spinning together a thin cocoon of silver. It reflects the stars back at the sky, small silver pinpricks on a fragile blanket. It is too cold to think now. The two brothers hug each other. They can feel their bodies freezing to death. They are together, but this does nothing to prevent them from slipping into hallucinations. Their heads poke out of the astronaut foil, exposed to the wind. They don’t speak, don’t move, simply endure. They wait for the grey of the morning sky.

THE HARVARD ADVOCATE

19

Günther and Reinhold have no choice but to take the Diamir face downward. They are weak.

At least they know the topography of the area— they can map out its terrain in their minds. They are at the top of an enormous flank of ice and rock, and must move towards a ground they can’t see. The two brothers have almost no equipment with them apart from a few crampons, hooks and grips. They need to make their way mostly using bare hands and frozen feet.

They move towards an invisible abyss, flattening themselves against the snowy mountainside.

As they descend, they look downwards at dark, seething clouds crackling with electricity. The clouds writhe, spitting out light that illuminates the path to the still-invisible ground.

It suddenly begins to hail. Bullets of ice pelt the brothers. The hail falls further into the turmoil of the thunderstorm. Reinhold looks up.

The sky above him has thickened and grown as black as the roiling clouds below. He can barely see his hands and feet. Günther is close behind him, a presence in the dark. They move onward, hands and feet moving in tandem.

They climb downward, tracing a zigzag track on the shimmering blue slope. Reinhold leads, Günther follows. The rock they grip is barely visible beneath a thick layer of cloud. They trek onward wearily, signaling to each other. The air is very thin. Reinhold suddenly becomes aware of a third climber who is right next to him. The third climber is climbing alongside Reinhold, following his every move. He hears the ice crack beside him, feels certain that there is someone next to him. He later describes it as a ghost, or a palpable presence. “Its being is a returning of my being,” he writes.

20

COMMENCEMENT 2011

This is another account of the climb—both Messner and Ransmayr’s, and yet neither. It seems to belong to the mountain, but it doesn’t.

It belongs to the climb itself, which demands poeticism and expansiveness of its explorers.

Towards the end of this account, Pàdraic is lying on the ground, surrounded by shallow snow-banks. His body carves out an icy hollow in the tightly packed ground. He can’t move, and feels incredibly tired. He wants nothing but to drift away in sleep and separate his fuzzy mind from the frozen, immobile body that traps it. A shape moves above him. He hears a murmur, a sound, finally a voice coming from the pale oval floating over his head. It’s Liam. He reels off a list of names, places, people they have traveled with, reciting their entire journey back at Pàdraic.

“Try to remember! What do you remember?

Remember the truck in China that drove us to Tibet? Remember the pass we just crossed?”

His story hangs in the frozen air like a thread that pulls Pàdraic back towards consciousness.

Names summon up faces that had been submerged in the crystallizing webs of his mind.

He opens his eyes again, and shapes suddenly sharpen—he can see Liam’s face now.

Then, he feels something fall from the sky.

Many things. They hit his breast and spring apart. Liam stares upward. “They’re butterflies!

Frozen butterflies.” Butterflies had been caught in a storm cloud during their flight over the mountain, and had frozen solid in mid-flight.

They rain down on the brothers in a fragile shower of brilliant white wings encased in ice.

Pàdraic feels sensation return to his limbs with every tap of a fresh butterfly shattering on his own body.

Child Play, between soviet and american, 2010 Lauren Ianni Video on 16mm black and white 7 minutes, 9 seconds THE HARVARD ADVOCATE

21

Kore ERIK FREDERICKSEN

I didn’t realize there was no grass.

There was dirt to be swept up to chant dirt. I have seen her in the glance (glass) of a sun, in the light up on the dock.

Under the dirt, she calls the salt rock she forgot: it’s time for the ground to be beaten by my foot and the more it happens the more I want it to. I didn’t realize how dry it could be next to the sea (we say ocean).

How she has returned, rejecting water for the gravel our feet make, how it is time for us to smile, to break the rock in two, to pull up the roots, and kick the hill as acorns have stormed the ground (I mean oak).

22

COMMENCEMENT 2011

I know nothing of this, I grasp the dirt I thought was rock.

I didn’t realize how much I would want the water in the olive grove, how much the tree-tops make a field that is raised, how salt pervades, how I may have forgot how much was one.

THE HARVARD ADVOCATE

23

Above Ground CAROLYN GAEBLER

Aunt Sophie broke her hip tying back the peonies. There is a big vegetable garden out back, now mostly overgrown, that my great-grandmother planted with asparagus for her exacting husband during the lean years between the wars. Out front, she also trained wisteria vines up the porch and planted peony bushes at the top of the hill. Aunt Sophie felt responsible for keeping the front of the house, if nothing else, looking neat. And when the peonies bloomed in May, like they do every year, too big and heavy for their stems, she went in with a ball of twine to restrain them and tripped on a root and fell.

Aunt Sophie is my grandfather’s second cousin, but they were both the only children of only children and so each other’s childhood playmates by adult decree. Aunt Sophie is six years older, which compensated some for her being a girl. She moved into the house on the hill before my greatgrandmother died; Aunt Sophie moved in to take care of her. Grandpa and his children lived more than an hour away by car, and they could not drive to Baraboo each time Grandpa’s mother felt dizzy, so Aunt Sophie came in their stead, and she stayed because she didn’t have anywhere else to go.

She managed to flag down a mailman from where she lay, supine in the garden. The mailman called an ambulance, which took her to the hospital, and the hospital called my mom. I suppose they must first have telephoned some nearer kin. Aunt Sophie has a daughter, who I met once when I was very small but I don’t remember, who ran away to California in the sixties, and ultimately received a doctorate in something called intergenerational psychology from an unaccredited university, but who, as far as anyone knows, has always had a minimal relationship with her mom. Cousin Elsa might have told them to call Grandpa, who would have told them to call the daughters-in-law.

My mom arrived as soon as she could. She said Aunt Sophie had already said something racist to one of the nurses when she got there, but the nurse explained that it happens a lot when you gave the elderly strong drugs. Aunt Sophie was in a lot of pain. They said she might not walk again, or if she did, she might need a walker from now on, and that things like going to the bathroom, or tying her shoes, anything that involved bending, would be very difficult. They screwed a metal pin into her hip that night.

The daughters-in-law, my mother and my four aunts, worked out a schedule where they would take turns visiting Aunt Sophie in the hospital and cleaning out the house. They kept her in the regular hospital for ten days after the surgery, because she was slow to wake up and she kept fainting when they tried to get her out of bed, or else trying to sit up straight and then growing suddenly weak. She had a hard time breathing and swallowing, so for a while they put her on an all-purée meal plan, which she found both insulting and gross. On the tenth day, they told her blood pressure was stable, and she

24

COMMENCEMENT 2011

demanded to go home. But she couldn’t get out of bed yet without help, or walk more than a few steps when she did stand up, so they sent her to a rehabilitation hospital in Verona, a nursing home, where she could stay for up to one hundred days, or longer if we paid.

Meanwhile, I was released from another hospital in Chicago. Aunt Sophie and I were discharged on the same day. It was clear that I would not finish the semester, and possible that I would not finish medical school. I didn’t want to go home. My mother, who had been driving round trip from Baraboo to Chicago, and only stopping in Milwaukee to change clothes for the past four days, didn’t much believe in therapy, but she believed in helpfulness and frugality, and she was not about to rent an apartment for me while I looked for work, if that was what I was getting at. She thought I should take a job at a hospital in Milwaukee, preferably something menial, like nurse’s assistant, until I got myself pulled together and decided if I wanted to finish school. And I could help the boys study for their SATs and help her with laundry and grocery shopping and trips to the dump, which she was behind on, God knows, between poor drugged up Aunt Sophie, who called her hospital gown “this ignominy” and kept trying to sneak out of her room, catheters and all, to attend to her toilette, and nervous wreck me. My mother, on some level, I think, felt that medical school was a selfish choice, and that pride goeth before a fall. I was so embarrassed that my hands had gone numb. Look, I said, if you take me home, I am going to have a panic attack.

Eventually, like Aunt Sophie, I would cease to notice the intractable, thin layer of grease that seemed to seep outward from all cracks and crevices of the kitchen, or the damp state of the carpets, or the dust that, because I have a mild form of asthma, sometimes, just before I went to bed, would make me double over and wheeze. But in those first days I, along with my mother and aunts, was appalled.

They had cleaned the house from top to bottom with vacuums, sponges, brooms and mops, and nothing seemed to make a difference, they said, except the finger bowls full of baking soda that Aunt Mary had placed in all the corners, which helped absorb the close, organic smell of the downstairs rooms.

My mother said I was taking some time off, but the aunts were sharp enough, and they didn’t ask me any questions, they just kept saying I was a real saint to look after Aunt Sophie and told me about their own children’s lives. Sam was going to astronomy camp, and Silas was lifeguarding, and Janet was going to Mexico for the summer months. My mother and father got married and then had me—those things happened in very rapid succession, I believe—while they were still in law school, and I am the oldest cousin by half a generation.

We set up a bedroom for her in my great-grandfather’s, study, so that she wouldn’t have to negotiate the stairs. The aunts made casseroles and put them in the freezer. My mother made arrangements to drive out to Baraboo with Peter, my oldest little brother, who just got his license, in separate cars, and then drive back in one car, so that I could use her old van. Aunt Hattie and my mom were there on the day we brought her home, flanking her and supporting her from underneath the elbows as she made her way gingerly up the front steps. Thank you, girls, she said, and then promptly fell asleep. *** If Aunt Sophie was surprised that I had moved into one of the upstairs bedrooms, she didn’t let on.

She was selfish in that funny, childish way; she was pleased that I had moved in, would be unsurprised if I stayed, and equally unsurprised if I moved away. I drove her to and from physical therapy and heated meals for her that the aunts had frozen. She could shower alone, sitting on a chair, but she could not get in and out of the tub, so she would call me once she had undressed, and I would steady her as she climbed in, politely averting my eyes, and help her climb out again when she called to say she was done, and then we would both pretend to forget that part of our routine. They say that most people who break a hip over the age eighty do not regain full mobility, and most people over eighty-five die from complications within a year. Aunt Sophie was eighty-nine—actually, we believed Aunt Sophie was ninety, but she believed, and so the hospital believed, that she was eighty-nine—but she appeared to be rapidly recovering her strength. It must have brightened her life some, to see so many people, to have so many appointments marked in green ink on the calendar over the kitchen sink. She went from leading a solitary, intermittently extremely solitary, existence to having a live-in niece and six physical therapy classes a week.

“The instructor said something very flattering today,” she told me the second day driving back from

THE HARVARD ADVOCATE

25

Verona. “He said—he is a charming young man, Elizabeth, you would like him—he said I was naturally very limber and graceful in my movements. I said to myself, heaven knows I am not anymore, but once in my life I was, very limber. When I lived in Turkey I was the best dancer of all the secretaries, and I spoke the best French, which made me very useful—to the embassy, you know—and also popular with the diplomats and military men.”

She was a liar. Some held that the lies had grown more elaborate and implausible with age, were evidence of the slow onset of dementia. Others held Aunt Sophie had told outrageous lies since she was a little girl; the quirk had only grown more pronounced as her social inhibitions withered away.

She had, through family connections, briefly worked at the American military base in Wiesbaden after the war. She might have once lived in Turkey, who could say? There was a sad story about a British officer and a broken engagement, which Grandpa sometimes told when Aunt Sophie was not there.

She wrote her mother to say that the British officer was going to divorce his wife and marry her, and her mother announced Aunt Sophie’s engagement to all of Baraboo. Her father, by way of his wife’s family, owned the First Bank. They planned a large wedding. But then she came home, still Sophie Mann, and her mother had to find another husband for her. That was how she married Chip, Grandpa says, and produced her one daughter, Elsa. Chip died young, and Aunt Sophie didn’t talk about him. When she was married, Grandpa must have been just old enough to understand what was going on.

“Very limber,” I agreed.

It was very hot in July, and the whole dusty house seemed to stick to you when walked through it.

Neither of us slept very much. I started serving dinner late. She would nibble birdlike at English muffins if I made them for her before her therapy, and then in the afternoon we would drink coffee from tiny cups and eat store bought cookies on the porch in the heat. She had heavy, anthropomorphic silver coffee service from her mother, whose pots poured from pursed lips and stood on garland-ringed human legs. She also had an unmatched set of tiny coffee cups, ceramic sheaths without handles that sat in copper sleeves whose handles one could grasp only with a pincer-like thumb and index finger. From Turkey, she said.

She was very interested in my love life. I had had the same boyfriend all of college, a dependable, chubby poet named Jake, with whom I had had a sad but not too sad break-up in the winter of our senior year. We still talked on the phone sometimes, but we both knew all along, I think, that we didn’t like each other enough for more than that. That is in itself sad, I suppose, the idea of lukewarm romance.

None of this satisfied Aunt Sophie. She would question me about Jake, what kind of people did he admire? Was he a romantic or a pragmatic character? I often said I didn’t know. It becomes harder to describe someone, the more time you have spent with them; he was a pragmatic romantic, I said. I sometimes wore a necklace he had given me, two rough silver beads he had made in a metal working class on a sliver chain he had bought. I wore it as a little memorial to my little sadness, and as a reminder of our friendship. Mostly I wore it out of habit. It was the one ornament that I had brought with me, the holes in my ears having suddenly grown very tender last winter and closed up, and it dressed up my jean shorts and tank tops, which I wore most days. Aunt Sophie was convinced that the necklace meant that hearts had been broken, that Jake and I would cherish tragic flames for each other for the rest of our lives.

Both of Aunt Sophie’s husbands were, my dad says, losers, and she didn’t like to talk about them.

But she saw great loves thwarted, smoldering in the breasts of almost everyone she knew. Grandpa, for example, was supposed to have been in love with a Japanese woman when he was part of the occupying forces after World War II. According to Aunt Sophie his mother prevented the match, insisting he marry Grammy instead.

I lost the little silver necklace one Saturday at the laundromat. I was wearing it when I left the house in the morning, and not wearing it when I got back, and I went back to the laundromat and looked all over the floor and the benches where I had been sitting, and even looked in the washers and dryers I had used. I felt sad but relieved to have lost it, to have let it so unceremoniously disappear. But when I told Aunt Sophie she screwed up her wrinkled face in sympathy and cried. There is something sadder even about the little talismans that other people invest with power than the little talismans that belong to you.

After coffee she, with her old bones, would nap, carefully arranging herself on her back, but not

26

COMMENCEMENT 2011

letting her toes point in, as not to disturb the bolt in her still painful hip. In the evenings I would run, and at nine or ten I would shower, and then at ten or eleven I would make a real dinner. Aunt Sophie showed me where I could still find asparagus in the garden. She pointed out the kitchen window because she couldn’t get down the back steps. My father, and the other uncles with him, I assume, had set up a bank account for my use while I looked after Aunt Sophie. Our combined allowances far exceeded the meager pension checks she was used to living on, and, once she had been made to understand the new financial arrangements, she loaded the grocery cart with lamb chops and steak. Aunt Sophie could come grocery shopping with me because she was willing to push the grocery cart—she was not willing to use her walker in public. I would grill on the front porch, and we would eat on the wicker furniture, our plates in our laps, mosquito candles burning. After dinner, we would make milkshakes, sometimes two rounds a night. Aunt Sophie seemed to have forgotten at some point how properly to feed herself, or lost the will to do it, and had starved in the gentle way of the unattended elderly. That summer she was making up for lost time. I have to keep up my strength, she would say.

Aunt Sophie had been distributing her worldly possessions among the young and vital, as she put it, for many years. For my eighteenth birthday she had given me two pairs of gloves, because we both have small hands, and one egg-shaped, Jungendstil brooch that she said was set with emeralds. I doubted the emeralds part, but I did wear the broach in college a lot. It is the size of a sand dollar, with heavy, globular hands of soft metal holding the green stones. In August she gave me twenty-seven mohair sweaters. Before she went to college, from whence, as the only daughter of the owner of the only bank in Baraboo, she was expected to return with an eligible bank-president-to-be, her mother had taken her on a shopping trip to Chicago. There they purchased twenty-seven mohair sweaters, one of every shade.

She returned in the spring of her freshman year, for reasons that remain obscure, and all the sweaters came home too. She said they were in the attic somewhere, and that they might not fit me because I was bigger in the chest than she had been, but that I was welcome to take them if I liked. I might need them, she said. She observed at the hospital that the lady doctors dressed very well, just like doctors’ wives, under their white coats, and that, as they kept the whole hospital the temperature as cold as an ice box, they wore some very nice sweaters, even in August.

There would be a big family party on Labor Day Weekend. We believed she would be turning ninetyone, but the cake would say Happy 90th Birthday, Sophie! According to Grandpa, Aunt Sophie’s mother had disappeared for six months just after the United States entered the War, but she wasn’t married until the following June. And Aunt Sophie, according to my great grandmother, by way of Grandpa, was much too tall until about third grade. This information was already second hand, though; Grandpa wouldn’t enter the world until six years after Aunt Sophie’s birth, or seven years, depending on the date you used. And now there was none left among the living who could verify the story or deny—except, perhaps, for Aunt Sophie herself, but she, of course, one was not allowed to ask. Grandpa and the five uncles and all of their wives and kids would drive out. The daughters-in-law would bring potato salad, and the small children would be given balloons.

Aunt Sophie’s fantasies about my future were as difficult to deflate as her fantasies about her own past. Sometimes she thought I should be an opera singer. I do not know why she thought this; perhaps it was an end toward which she herself had once aspired. She told me I would have to go back to Germany for my musical training. Those were her words, back to Germany. It was the only place in the world where they still took opera seriously. Aunt Sophie’s forbearers had, after an abortive revolution in the spring of 1848, arrived here, in the wilderness. They taught their children to read Latin. They did not know how to farm. Aunt Sophie grew up seeped in the lore of the enclave, of Weimar and of wolves.

Grandpa’s mother made her take dictation in Sütterlin. She thought opera was perhaps a higher path than medicine, all in all.

“My Mother, you know, was a student of Liszt.” She would say “I had a very good music teacher when I was a girl, too, Mr. Pratt. He told me with training I might have been a concert pianist, can you imagine that! Right up until, well, let’s see, right up until the bank failed. A concert pianist!”

The unselfconscious lies Aunt Sophie told about herself did not needle me, as I know they needled some of the other members, the patriarchs in particular, of our exactingly honest clan. In my home children were neither permitted to lie nor were they lied to; belief in Santa was discouraged at an early

THE HARVARD ADVOCATE

27

age. Aunt Sophie was unconcerned, though, about the real possibilities, the causal relationships, and the plans laid for my future, and for that I was grateful.

I didn’t like when she lied about me, though. It felt invasive and too easy. Once we had a neighbor come in, a woman who made something called “twig furniture” in her garage next door, to see if she smelled gas—she didn’t—and Aunt Sophie told her that I was spending the summer in Baraboo to rest my voice. I stiffened but did not correct her. Then another time, in late August, shortly before her birthday, I had a piano tuner come in from Pipersville to look at my great grandmother’s piano.

Regardless of whether or not Aunt Sophie would play it, I thought it would give her pleasure to have the instrument in good repair, and that my father and uncles, whose patrimony it was, would not object if I sent them a bill after the fact. It had been raining for two days, chilly, unseasonal rain. The piano tuner was a barrel-shaped man with a perfectly round bald spot, almost like a tonsure, on the back of his head. He was attractive, in that unexpected way of short, muscular men. Aunt Sophie sat in an armchair behind him and watched as he worked.

“My niece, you know—actually she is my second cousin’s granddaughter but she calls me Aunt and I call her Niece—my niece is a doctor. She is an orthopedist but has taken a leave of absence to look after her Aunt—I took a fall in May, you see—to help me recuperate.”

I felt compromised. I was reading a murder mystery in a window seat, where I could watch the rivulets of water run down the outside of the glass and then seep through and pool around the unused ash trays on the sill. My hair was wet from a trip to the drug store. I had worn sandals and they had raised big wet blisters between my big and second toes. I ignored Aunt Sophie’s chatter, but after the man left I told her it embarrassed me when she said things about me to other people that weren’t true. *** I can’t blush. In the pseudo-sciences of earlier centuries the inability to blush was sometimes linked to criminal behavior. Dark skinned people, they thought, incorrectly, did not blush, ergo they felt no shame or remorse, ergo they posed a threat to the larger society. Actually, blushing is not linked to skin color but only people’s varying sensitivity to those chemicals, which trigger the dilation of blood vessels and capillaries in the face; plenty of black people do blush and plenty of white people can’t. But my body has a fierce and varied arsenal for announcing physiologically, anxiety, embarrassment, and shame. My hands get clammy, my stomach hurts, and sometimes I get short of breath or hear a highpitched buzzing in my ears. Sometimes I have to hide in bathroom stalls and count until an episode is past. I was embarrassed at Aunt Sophie’s birthday, first for her, then for myself, then for all of us there.

We had the party in a park at the foot of the hill, Union Park, where we always do. The park has a bandstand and half of an Indian mound, the wing and body of what would have once looked like a bird in flight if viewed from an airplane; though, the mound predates air travel by many centuries, the signs say. Perhaps it was an image meant for other birds. The picture is too low and too wide to comprehend from the ground. At eye level it looks like a septic bump or low earthen wall, and in the fifties they ran a county highway through the bird’s left wing and part of his head. In one of my earliest memories I am walking the perimeter, and my father is holding my hand. I was embarrassed first for Aunt Sophie, who wore a shiny choral sheath and jacket that she had worn for her second wedding in 1964. She wore also a large hat and orthopedic shoes. She was delighted with the party, and she took too much potato salad. She was telling my father about the compliments her physical therapist had recently paid. She was thinking of having him over for dinner. He said she was very limber for her age. My father’s face gave nothing away, but I could imagine his mounting contempt—not the kind of contempt one reflects on or airs, the kind so natural it does not merit attention, not even the attention of the person inside of whom it grows. I was embarrassed for myself, too, Aunt Sophie’s ally and special friend.

Then the cake came out, white cake with whipped cream frosting and strawberries. It was actually four cakes cemented together with two long seams of cream. My mother had driven out with the individual cakes in the back seat of her car and assembled them at the house on the hill. She was worried there would not be enough to go around; there were twenty-four of us in all. In slices of strawberry arranged like scales or fallen dominos she had drawn a boarder and written across the center a large “90.” In the upper left-hand corner she used red frosting and a zip lock bag to scrawl, “Happy Birthday, Sophie!”

The smallest of the cousins were collected back to the table, and we sang as my mother and Aunt Hattie

28

COMMENCEMENT 2011

processed the cake to the table from the car.

“Elizabeth has a real voice,” Aunt Sophie told my father, once we were all seated again, passing paper plates around. “I have encouraged her to study music. I have an ear for these things. Mr. Pratt believed I could be a pianist, and, as you know, my mother was a student of Liszt.”

Aunt Sophie’s mother was born in 1900. “Franz Liszt died in 1876,” I said. As soon as I said it I knew it was wrong, not factually wrong, but the wrong thing to do. Around the table the aunts and uncles looked taken aback, embarrassed for me, and my father looked particularly severe. My mother changed the subject, asking if Aunt Sophie ever got a chance to practice, now that the piano in the house on the hill was again in tune.

Oh, she said, oh not really. Aunt Sophie, too, seemed embarrassed, much to my surprise. One of the smaller cousins, Eric, age ten, full of promise, popped a balloon.

Aunt Sophie said she was worn out and repaired to her bedroom, my great-grandfather’s sometimes study, even before the last guests left. I suggested that we take a walk around the bird, allowing my mother to drive Aunt Sophie up the hill and help her mount the front steps, cane in hand, unobserved.

After everyone left, and I had taken out the white bags full of paper plates and the plastic bin of soda cans, and the cool of the evening had set in, I knocked on Aunt Sophie’s door. Did she want her Vogues? She had accumulated many decades worth of ladies magazines which she had me move about the house in stacks five or ten years thick. Or a cup of mint tea? Mint had taken over a large swath of our largely untended garden, choking back vines that I believe, from the their flowers, may have once produced squash. I tried to prune it back, collecting rubber banded bundles in the fridge, but we never used them fast enough. She said no, but some half hour later she called from her bedroom and said, yes, please she would like her current stack of Vogues.

There is a family tree in my great-grandfather’s study, framed and mounted on the wall. In his long years of able-bodied unemployment, after the table slide factory his father left him went out of business, my grandfather’s father took up genealogy, along with astronomy, violin making, and the rugged life.

He was a great admirer of Teddy Roosevelt. The male branches are complete, back to Johann the rope maker, father to Johann the physician, born in seventeen twenty-five. The wives’ names are missing, until “Gräfin Agnes van Boist, Duchess, 1826-1888” who had the misfortune to marry beneath her and flee to America the following night. Aunt Sophie referred to her with a doubled title, “my great-great grandmother, the Duchess Gräfin van Boist.” Under the weight of her two titles, Duchess Gräfin Agnes van Boist learned to kill her own chickens and pull a plow.

The tree tapers to a point at my grandfather, the only son of an only son. A facsimile of this family tree was given to Grandpa for his birthday last year, with his five sons and their families, like roots of a plant in a too small pot, appended. I imagine it must have been stifling for him, this house. What it was like for Aunt Sophie, I cannot say.

Grandpa’s mother and Aunt Sophie’s mother didn’t get along, but my great-grandfather insisted that his wife include Aunt Sophie in the after school lessons she prepared for Grandpa. Grandpa’s mother studied English and Classics, and provided for her husband and son by teaching correspondence courses from the kitchen table. It was Grandpa’s mother who, as Aunt Sophie says, kept the larder full. Her Phi Beta Kappa key is still in the silverware drawer. I believe Aunt Sophie spent a great deal of her childhood in this house, under the stern and perhaps unwelcoming tutelage of her mother’s cousin’s wife.

My own mother has speculated that Aunt Sophie could be the natural daughter of my greatgrandfather and his then unmarried cousin, heiress to the First Bank. That would explain the conflicting birthdays. Aunt Sophie’s grandparents, who were also my great-grandfather’s grandparents, would have turned up a groom for their already delivered daughter. My great-grandfather was already married to my great-grandmother then. They too may have colluded to turn up a smart young man, interested in banking, not overly nice. That would make Aunt Sophie Grandpa’s half-sister, and an illegitimate stepdaughter of sorts to his mother, for whom Aunt Sophie cared in the last years of her life. Perhaps they both understood the secret and convoluted relationship by which they were bound. My mother believes Aunt Sophie knows that she is Grandpa’s half-sister, but that Grandpa does not know. My father, my mother says, would also not know, and it would only antagonize him to ask.

There Aunt Sophie lay, in what may have been her father’s study, may have been weighted, viscous

THE HARVARD ADVOCATE

29

with meaning. Or maybe not. I was solicitous and she was quite cold, but she let me help her change out of her wedding dress and into her bathrobe.

She would forgive me my indiscretion; though I couldn’t have said that with certainty then. We would arrive at an uneasy truce, but then in November she would fall again. The piano tuner would be back, adjusted the very lowest octave. He would strike the octave then the fifth then the thirds then the octave again. I would be upstairs in my bedroom folding mohair sweaters. I would have decided to fly by night. And there she would come, hurrying up the walk, a small figure in a large hat, and she would wipe out on the front-stairs, and I would have to stay. She would recover more slowly from the second hip replacement, spending many weeks in the hospital, and refusing sometimes for days at a time to leave her bed. She would become belligerent with the hospital staff, mildly paranoid, and come to depend ever more completely on me. I would bring her treats in the hospital, venison sausage, for which she would develop an insatiable appetite, and a kind of current bread. I would begin an affair with the piano tuner, whom I would ultimately marry. I, too, would develop an interest in furniture made of “twigs.”

When Aunt Sophie died, she was back in her own home, the house on the hill, reading Vogues from the nineteen seventies. In the real seventies, her daughter was already grown and gone, and she was about to marry her second husband, the mailman, whose mail route she would inherit at his death.

I was Easter time. She had only been home from the hospital for a few weeks. I had started sleeping through the night again, suddenly and without explanation, so I was asleep when she went. When I woke up the next morning, the television was still on, and she was cold in her chair. They buried her in the family plot, on a day when the ground was newly soft, and all the lady’s heels sank down into the sod.

They buried her between her parents and my great grandparents and, a few rows behind, the Duchess Gräfin Agnes von Boist.

At night, in the rolling farmland around the Rock River, you don’t see the blights of rural poverty or urban sprawl, but only the dark contours of the ground. I went for a run late, after Aunt Sophie’s birthday, once the air had cooled and she had turned out her light. She claimed that she slept little, but assumed on principle the form of sleep, eyes closed, breathing even, lights out, for a few hours every night. It could be true; the very old sometimes shed their need for sleep. I wore a reflective vest, a birthday gift from my oldest little brother, and, like a disenchanted Hermes, reflective stickers at my feet. Out on the dark county highways the shadows of the corn, early feed corn, with thick, broad leaves, stood half again as tall as me, undulating with the low hills on either side. The air carried the scent of silage, and of dirt. There is something old and reassuring about the smell fertile land. We are safe when the fields are full.

30

COMMENCEMENT 2011

[The sunset-red boy] STEPHANIE NEWMAN

The sunset-red boy in his little canoe can only cast his line out so far as his father stands grimacing on an opposite island: an aging man in Crete who spat at me once, then peered into his little salty pool with contempt that I turned my head away from— if only to find the next blind peasant lonely with his stories of St. Anthony (he overheard them from the nuns who passed through the island like clouds last July) and his open palms, expecting me to hand him the visible sun like a hot coin from his youth spent wandering into and out of cathedrals and brothels, not understanding the tombs he was kissing or the marble faces that watched him pleasantly in his boyhood sleep, humming quietly to themselves about the price of light in the current market, where the man who sells grapes charges one-euro-eighty for every basket and leaves their seeds to float in the sea like miniature boats towards Alexandria.

THE HARVARD ADVOCATE

31

Naturaleza Muerta JESSICA SEQUEIRA

There are two. The blue house in Coyoacán is Frida’s; the hacienda in Xochimilco—the one I think magnificent and the critics outrageous— that one is mine. On paper, of course, I own them both. Diego asked me to manage the museums there years ago. But in their essence, the way they rest within their spaces, it is clear one belongs to her and the other to me. A great deal of care was necessary to produce the elegance of my house, you know: the layers chiseled from stone, the surround of lush green tended by vigilant gardeners. And yet it’s hers I find myself wandering through again and again, blown through those passageways, drifting blind down that axis…

I have to stop. Already I feel my accuracy slipping. It would be nice if one could move oneself through rooms like that, fastening each door shut tightly behind. The truth is that my memory remains caught in places inhabited before, so that even now, for instance, I see various crews carrying out my instructions. A man with a face covered in sweat tugs at my sleeve: “Doña Lola, Doña Lola, this way, yes?” The statue’s feet are sticking up in the air; its head is buried in dirt.

I’m not surprised at these people’s incompetence; for most of the population, getting things wrong is the natural condition. It is very difficult to make oneself understood by others. To most people I am simply Diego’s curator, and Frida is the woman who shaped his life; she and I hardly exchanged two words. But Diego and I had a friendship

32

COMMENCEMENT 2011

existing beyond the surfaces of our lives, one inevitably reduced by any attempt at description.

The only thing a person can trust is her own mind, though even that gets turned wrong side up much of the time. Well, then: It may be true that in the end my own attempt will be no good either, this effort to explain how things are. Or—precision— how they were.

We first met at the Ministry of Education when I was sixteen, my hair done up in bright new ribbons. My mother, a schoolteacher, had come to process papers; leaning against the second level balcony, I waited, looking down at the courtyard hemmed in by walls. Blank then, those walls, though later covered by the famous murals. In the center below was the wide basin of a fountain, and I was trying to understand the water, how it tumbled over itself. I didn’t see him watching me, though I suppose he had been for some time. But my mother sensed it, hurrying back round the corner, opening her mouth to say something in protective alarm.

“Señora,” he said, by way of apology. “I would like to ask just one question.” Since he was Señor Rivera, of course, there was just one answer.

Anyway, over the next few weeks, I came to his room as he asked, where with a vast sense of seriousness and cool ceremony, I posed. Head bent over the paper, looking up every so often, he worked away at his sketches. Thirty drawings were

the result, of which he sent two lithographs to my house: one of himself and one of me, keeping the rest as models for his work. After dinner that night, as I rubbed soap against my hands in the sink, my husband—from England, already I was married then—came in and said he wanted to talk. Say what you want to say, I said. He gestured with his hands at some invisible rectangle. I publish an art magazine, he said, I’m familiar with the nude as form, but this gaze is not the gaze of the artist, there is more in it. What are you accusing me of, I asked, drying my hands on the cloth and looping it back on its hook. All I’m saying is that I’ve returned the drawings, he said coolly, and then all my rage was useless because that was in fact what he’d done, along with a note in bad Spanish explaining he was “not convinced they were offered in good faith.”

You must understand I loved my husband then very much. At the best moments we even felt like copies of one other: anyway, the mental terrain was largely the same. But Diego was a different matter. I called him “Maestro,” the only one I ever would call that; there was never another to whom I gave that respect. The truth is that it would not be wrong to say I felt a secret contempt for most people, that I was more confident and intelligent than they ever could be. With him, though, I was still always nervous, acting young and saying the simplest things. In my mind, God knew, there were edifices, whole architectures of thought, I simply could not express; sometimes the thoughts were formed completely but didn’t come out as I meant, other times they weren’t really verbal, were more like the curve of fruit or timbre of music than something I could write down. I thought then how inane the transcript would seem if someone did write down all the words we exchanged, overlooking how every word was linked with every other. The best thing most of the time was just to be quiet. We had other means: he could at least control color and texture, and I was coming to know the business venture, its strange energy and animal-like possibility.

La Tehuana hangs here in my old office. How amusing the colored fabric in my hair looks, the basket of rolls under my arm—and those ruffles!

Just think of the starch that you would need. No wonder I’m smiling like that. But Diego chose to paint me in the traditional Tehuantepec skirts for a reason. Mexico was growing at that time,

recovered finally from the devastation of the war years; there was a sense of it testing out its limits, building, expanding, carving itself into overpasses and skylines. But while it was growing outward it was also putting down roots; artists were trying to give it a sense of its own depths, its own history.

He was working on traditional paintings of her at the same time, of course: the other one was always there, with her dark eyes and the firm line of her lips. Slimmer and more knife-like than I ever could be. She met him in the halls of the Ministry of Education too; but on top of that she painted, a source of great calm and a deep link to him. Summoning up all my strength, I made myself leave them to each other, turning my own interests in other directions. I can’t even call it jealousy now: she lives in the past, even if she hasn’t quite ever disappeared. In the cool second room of the gallery I keep copies of all their letters under glass, and there I could drive myself to endless distraction if I wished. “Carissimo Diego,” she wrote, in black ink on cream paper, the lines well spaced. “Mi querida amiga,” he would reply, or sometimes simply, “amor.” I can’t think too long about what lives on in history; it makes my stomach hurt and my head ache with dull pain, so that I wish every day really were a day reborn.

But as I was saying, at that moment it was true that for me, and my country, time did seem only to contain the future. When an old-fashioned handoperated brickworks went up for sale, I snapped it up with a loan from the Tacubaya branch of the Banco Nacional, going into business with Heriberto Pagelson. Pagelson was a German Jewish refugee, a veteran of the French army in North Africa, who with no passport or identity papers somehow managed to wash up on the shores of Mexico and travel inland. I met him at one of those endless parties at which I was host; even before I knew who he was I was interested, since he was the only stranger there. With great deliberation and the utmost delicacy I struck up a conversation, tapping him on the shoulder lightly and handing him a glass of champagne. That was the beginning of a thirty-year association, one which despite all expectations persevered, even while my marriage crumbled. My other partnership was with Bernardo Quintana, who ran Industria Cerámica Armada. Quintana had somehow laid his hands on the plans for a building block, lighter and more maneuverable than standard baked brick, based on a model just

THE HARVARD ADVOCATE

33

developed in Europe. It was a good thing and both of us knew it; we just weren’t sure what it could be used for quite yet. We had the product but not the application, and were just waiting for the winds to shift.

When President Alemán announced his plans to build, we jumped. He insisted on a grand new edifice, to be named after him, with construction using only the most advanced technical materials on the market: the sleekest and most western products around. Everyday Quintana’s black car would move through the narrow streets to the Zócalo; most days he would be granted an audience, if not with Alemán himself, then with one of his men in those offices, the hundreds in that palace all tucked away. There were others who wanted the consignment too, and they would pass in the halls on their way to Alemán, flitting past each other like giant fish, darting each other meaningful blank looks. When Quintana met me in the afternoons to report on his progress, he would stagger through the door into the thin air, saying his elbow kept twitching, and that his lungs hurt: all the classic symptoms of an instantaneous decompression. In the end, though, he was awarded the contract, greasing by effort and luck all the right palms; as it turned out it was the cook’s brother-in-law who was the key, in some obscure chain of connections.

The upshot is that my own company, Materiales Asociados S.A., a subsidiary of Quintana’s, had work. We were all struck then by the mad desire to build, filled suddenly with giddy exhilaration, like when you see, exiting air space, city lights in the dark. Sometimes I would even drive a truck myself, ferrying planks and steel, tired of the abstractions of scheduling, budgeting, planning, infrastructure. My children would pass out soft drinks, sandwiches, steaming thermoses of coffee to the workers bent beneath the sun. Their backs were curved like the workers in Diego’s murals, but they weren’t so glorious; they didn’t hearken back to some primeval past. Most of them swore more than they should, and probably could have stood a few more baths. If I had any criticism of Diego, it was that: that with him everything remained a model, a romanticized likeness of an imperfect truth, when sometimes truth just meant these people laying down one block, then another.

Meanwhile Diego and Frida were setting up their life together in their little blue house, and working for the communism they thought was the answer.

34

COMMENCEMENT 2011

They fought and made up; my firm kept growing.

And in that way time passed.

It was 1954; Frida had died the year before.

Some friends had invited me to take a boat out with them to the island of Janitzio, in the middle of Lake Pátzcuaro, to visit the famous cemetery.

That day the sunlight was playing on the water, and everything was dazzlingly bright, so that all the colors seemed to fit in their contours just so.

Looking up then, shading my eyes, all at once I glimpsed Diego. He was taking something out of a black case, or putting something back in. Does it matter? It had been twenty years. Washed up in that land beyond space and time, all logical thinking dissolved. Before I looked at him for too long, I deliberately reviewed how he’d made me feel when I was younger, because it could be what moved me was just those memories, or that light, that pure Janitzio light playing on the water. It took some time before I assured myself that what affected me was still his actual presence itself.

Should I regret how easy it was to fall back into old patterns, even after that long absence? But he had a surprise in store. When the boat docked and we were back in the city, he told me to wait a

dry cleaning - tailoring - shoe repair (617) 547-1595 47 Mt. Auburn St Cambridge, MA 02138

M-F: 9am - 7pm Sa: 9am - 6pm Closed Sunday

moment; I stood outside his studio door, twirling my bracelet round my wrist, wondering. With a proud smile, he emerged, holding a box of carved mahogany: inside were the drawings he’d made so long ago, kept tucked away all of those years. Very seriously, he said then that I was the one he had chosen to manage his trust, which would pass on not only his legacy but the legacy of all Mexico, captured within each one of his works. That was the year I started to buy up his best paintings, meeting with collectors in Paris and catching early flights to auction houses in New York, tracking them down in private residences one by one. The Mathematician, The Picador, Dancer in Repose, Portrait of Pita Amor, The Boats, A Flower Vendor, A Mexican Child, The Family, The Flower-Draped Canoe… All of it was only ever a pleasure. I had infinite faith in his work; there was something in it, something intangible, that made me unable to stop looking, and more than that, to stop living with it within me.

Now that we were back together I wouldn’t let him leave again so easily. I asked him to come with me to La Pinzona, the house of mine in Acapulco overlooking a sea cliff. There he could watch the wide sea watched over by gulls, composed of the shadows of their long low flight. Concentration became impossible without him there; without him I became only a mind, all my entrepreneurial ambitions lacking something essential. The cries of the children coming to me from the other room seemed a comfort when Diego played with them, preferring the juegos de pelota based on the old games. Much of the time, though, it was quiet, and that would mean he was at work. How well we knew that little room—I’d bring out oranges and hot coffee in a clay pot to where he was sitting, sugar but no milk the way he liked. He always kept his back to the door: just the shock of his dark hair and his big body, a little clumsy, between that statue and that yellow vase. All day long he’d sit and paint as the afternoon sun climbed, tracing mad shadows against the walls.

Sometimes he would stop his work and drink his coffee while reading me the newspaper headlines; other times when I put my hand on his shoulder he would pretend I wasn’t there and keep working.

Then I’d leave silently, understanding. That’s the kind of man he was: the kind who would, as they say, wound himself against his own bones, the kind who instead of the final judgment worries about the final dream. And this is one truth, the

greater of them. But if I want to capture this exactly, I’ll have to tell you an equal truth, the other reason I brought him to La Pinzona. I fully realized how ill he was becoming: how hard he’d driven himself on his visits to the Soviet Union, how grave the disease eating away at him was even then. Despite the private doctors I brought in, the cobalt radiation treatments I arranged, he only kept on getting worse. And at some point I knew there was nothing more I could do, except keep bringing him that coffee, those oranges.

In the unfathomable distance, a vulture turns against the sun. Here, now, looking up at its intense clarity and deceptive transparency, I find all of it, somehow, deeply disappointing. My need for a kind of understanding that goes beyond particulars overwhelms me, so that often I wonder just what it all meant. In June the wide streets in this part of the city suffer from the prickly heat, and so I move to the house, which seems like a refuge. There I run my finger across the titles on the shelf: Chase’s The Tyranny of Words, Wyer’s The Disappearance, a volume on Lucretia Borgia, the 1931 Bliss Collection, La Linterna Mágica, Red Virtue, La Hija del Coronel. How carefully I chose them all, how carefully I laid out the floor plan for the foreign visitors whom I knew would pass through. As I watch, a woman begins laughing softly, pressed against a man who seems self-consciously serious; together they move slowly through the exhibit, remarking in American accents on the phrase used in the Spanish labels.

“Naturaleza muerta”—how infinitely more visceral that seems than “still life,” not just frozen but dead, dead nature, dead like the human body even as meaningless words like these remain. The year after Diego left me, on the Day of the Dead, I placed his picture on the altar, surrounding it with his favorite dishes of mole, tamales, atole, and fruit; with sweets made of squash, traditional sugar skulls, special bread adorned with crossed bones; with masses of marigold blossoms and Mexican crafts. And then, somehow, I moved on. I got married again, to the bullfighter Hugo Olvera, founded a bullfighting company, doubled and doubled again my wealth, allowed the memory of Diego to fade.

I’ve never written these things down before.

I’ve waited until he was gone, because I didn’t know how to say them and because in the way he praised the few things I wrote his distaste was

THE HARVARD ADVOCATE

35

clear. Let me be the first to say that his work wasn’t perfect either: it glorified primitivism, its politics were too overt, it elevated manual work into a dignified realm that for today’s factory workers does not, and cannot, exist. But as one of the writers I liked to read said, the truth may not be beauty, but the hunger for it is. Meanwhile the collection of Diego’s paintings in my museum continues to grow, covering the walls, spreading out from the first room to dozens of others.

Plans for new wings are made, then executed.

A special gallery at one of the entrances houses a collection of miniatures by Angelina Beloff, a Russian painter and Diego’s first wife. She is the one he met in Europe and nobody remembers, because her life seems so shadelike next to Frida’s and, I’ll admit it, my own. Nevertheless I have set out her woodcuts and engravings carefully, as a kind of tribute. When I look around, I am proud. With these museums, all the beautiful thoughts dancing in my head—which were never really thoughts at all but more like colors, or the spaces found between movements—all of them can now be turned outward, made at last external and real. They can say what perhaps I never once said aloud. Because thoughts aren’t enough; you

36

COMMENCEMENT 2011

need something you can see, or touch, something like the note that arrived with a painting dated 16 August 1955: “To Lola Olmedo, with the love and admiration of twenty-five years (now she will believe it). I am sure she knows that her great love has returned to her.”

Finally I should mention that I began collecting Frida’s paintings too: at first viciously, because I was happy to see the broken columns mourning her barren body, which a trolley accident had made unable to bring a child to term; then because I thought I might somehow see in her work traces of his love, love linked in some mysterious way to what he’d had for me. With him it had always been a game of connections anyway: the way names repeated, the syntax of phrases, the choice and arrangement of certain images. Soon it all became too much. But even then I kept collecting her work, and his—out of habit, out of the desire for completion, out of the pure act of repetition— and finally, out of the simple knowledge it was good, it was art, and ultimately it would be what remained.

Dolores Olmedo Patiño died in Mexico City in 2002.

An Understanding EMILY CHERTOFF

Something is floating in the pool, the Missus realizes on Tuesday, as she sips the coffee Concepción always brews for her when she starts work. (Fresh coffee is not worth the shame of having to ask for it brewed around noon.) She can’t make out the shape from the kitchen window, but a quick inspection reveals it to be a dead fawn, lying on its side, its front hooves idly playing in the jet of a water filter. “It would be good if they could pick it up before my husband comes home,” she tells Concepción. But when Concepción calls Animal Control, the rude voice that answers, put off by an accent she can’t identify, tells her to call back in the afternoon when a Spanish-speaking operator will be on duty, and so Concepción decides to wash every single one of his shirts instead and leaves the deer in the capable hands of God. She winds her way through the big house, kneeling periodically to gather clothes strewn in the hallways and across the floors of rooms. Seen from above, her little figure could be that of a penitent monk as he winds his way through a cloister, stopping periodically to touch the ground and mumble a few words of self-abnegation. It’s difficult to keep track of what she has and hasn’t done, in this house.

There are so many rooms, and when the husband isn’t home—which is most weekdays and even some weekends at this point—the Missus somehow manages to spread her waking and sleeping hours, her dressing, eating, and undressing, evenly throughout the rooms, so that no room is ever unused.

Concepción doubts she’d get a reprimand if she missed one. But her conscience won’t permit her to be like her friend Gloria, who sometimes runs the same load of laundry three times to look busy, and spends most of her workday standing in the kitchen watching soap operas and adding hot water to the cubes of instant mocha that she brings from home.

Each room is very, very elaborately decorated, but Concepción, with her girlhood spent in QuezÓn, can’t see a meaningful difference between the Baroque Revival moldings in the third guest bedroom and the rococo panelling in the ground-floor study. She does have a special fondness for the delicate curves in the gleaming wallpaper of the Art Nouveau room, although she couldn’t tell you why. Today there is a mess in what she doesn’t know is the Victorian room. The sheets on the wrought-iron Murphy bed are in disarray, and a bottle of Pastek that had been sitting open on the floor has been overturned.

The whitish, viscous substance oozes across the floor in a two-foot-long slick.

Only a professional-grade solvent, or paint thinner, will remove the Pastek from the floor, but Concepción can’t drive and doesn’t want to walk to the hardware store in the midday heat. Still, feeling compelled to do something, she fills a bucket with wood soap and water and scrubs meditatively at the stain for the next hour. She knows her efforts will not be rewarded; this is not the first time she’s

THE HARVARD ADVOCATE

37

had to clean up a spilled bottle of this paste. The new wallpaper—an ugly paper, she thinks, imported from a heritage manufacturer in Britain, printed with big fat cabbage roses spilling across a pink and green background—still smells like the store-room and the packages it was shipped in. The shadows of branches and the early afternoon light play across it, and out the window Concepción can see the Missus sitting by the pool, staring out across the lawn and drinking something out of her coffee mug with a straw, while the deer bobs gently in the pool next to her.

Although Concepción is paid a good bit more than Gloria, and probably much more than the other women in her carpool, she sometimes daydreams about leaving this job because the house is so lonely during the day. Other women have houses with children, sometimes little children who don’t go to school yet and need to be fed and bathed. She has a green card, is young and pretty, and could probably find other work. She might even be able to marry an American. The reason she stays is something obscure relating to the Missus. There is something about her mania for decorating that makes Concepción uneasy, and she wonders if the poor woman can’t have children.

If Concepción had the consciousness to ask the right questions, she might also ask why her employer isn’t working, despite a prestigious Ph.D. that hangs on the wall of the third-floor study next to an equally prestigious B.A. When the Missus is in a black mood, she likes to berate herself by telling herself she’s lazy. (She esteems herself too highly to call herself stupid.) The half-written manuscript of her first and last monograph has been locked in her 19th-century Shaker writing desk since she bought it online six months ago. When she isn’t torturing herself by thinking up possible extensions of the book’s argument—which are always of ambiguous value and which she therefore never makes—she puts her art history background to use. She has planned the interior décor of her house, sourced materials from American and European antique dealers, rearranged and altered furniture, and generally wasted time.

She realizes sometimes, with a laugh, that she is worse than one of the future wives she used to make fun of in college.

One came to her senior tutorial and announced, “My boyfriend and I are engaged. We leave for Paris on Friday.” Another, who used to wear her right ring finger the largest emerald the Missus has ever seen on, never spoke but always spent the whole two hours braiding and rebraiding her long golden hair. On warm days these long-legged beauties spilled across the portico and steps of the department’s Italianate building, swapping sticks of gum, painting their nails, and sunning themselves. The professors were grumpy old men with hair coming out of their ears. She wrote a thesis subtly insinuating that one of the most prominent of them was sexist and racist and was awarded summa cum laude. When she went to New York for her Ph.D., she fell in love with a very tall and broad-shouldered young associate who swore and talked very loudly and had a habit in conversation of slapping nearby surfaces for emphasis.

They saw each other on weekends and went for walks in Prospect Park and then to the bar next to her building to get drunk. In her second year, after each was deeply in the other’s confidence, he told her that he had been seeing a dancer—a man—behind his wife’s back, and that, in celebration of their first anniversary, they were going to look at summer shares in Montauk together. When, six months later, she told him she was suspending her studies to marry and move to the suburbs of Washington, D.C., he asked her to explain herself. When she wouldn’t, he got angry and called her a mercenary. You think you’re so fucking clever, he told her, but if you leave one day you’ll find yourself knee-deep in shitty diapers and you’ll be so deeply fucked that you’ll wish you were dead. She called him a coward, a fag, and a misogynist loud enough for the people in the adjacent offices to hear her.

Their friendship—probably the deepest she has ever had—was an unfortunate mistake and she doesn’t like to think about it. Most days, while she sits by the pool drinking her coffee, she remembers all of the tricks (intellectual and social) that she learned in her six years in higher education. She thinks about the apartment she shared with three other female grad students, all of whom were starved for sexual attention and coped with it by dieting perpetually, denying themselves food so they could forget they were being denied the other thing. She used to pick up men sometimes at the bar next to her building and take them to her room. When they came to the next day they would see the shelves full of books with names like Representation and Suppression and WHO SPEAKS? and the nude photographs of local women—found at her neighborhood flea market—that she had pasted above her bed. More than one of them pulled up his pants and snuck out of the room as quietly as he could. She would have

38

COMMENCEMENT 2011

a good laugh later recounting her night to the roommates, who were always nonplussed by the vulgarity she employed but secretly fiercely jealous and also a little cranky from hunger.

Concepción is more or less the only woman she has had regular contact with in her two years since moving to Potomac. The Missus likes to tease her by asking her about her men, and Concepción evades her by blushing and acting as if she doesn’t completely understand the question, even though the Missus knows she didn’t use an interpreter when she was interviewing for her green card and has been picked up several times in the afternoon by a boy in a pickup truck.

Later that summer, when Concepción visits her family in the Philippines, she will be kidnapped along with an aunt when they are walking in the street in Lucena City. The kidnappers are three day laborers, one of whom has a pregnant wife and one of whom wants to replace his Geo van (where they will be held until nightfall) with a flashy yellow sports car. As the kidnappers hustle them down to the humid basement where they will pass the final 36 hours of their captivity, Concepción slips on the stairs and loses the baby she has been carrying for the past ten weeks. She won’t have known she is pregnant, and as a small trickle of blood collects at the hem of her skirt, she will only fret for herself and for the green silk dress she has borrowed from the Missus without asking. After her extended family has scraped together the money for the ransom and the kidnappers have delivered her back to the two-story cinderblock building where they live, she will tear the rich garment to shreds in a fit of anger, supposing it the reason that the kidnappers plucked her and her aunt off the street.

Was it the pills she is using? They’re an herbal fertility aid that you can find in drugstores in the Philippines. The married women in her family have taken them for decades. Before that, they would make a tea from the same plants. Concepción isn’t married, at least not yet, but she would like to have a baby. Some mornings, when she’s the only one awake in the house, and she looks out the kitchen window to see the lawn with its pool so empty, and there isn’t a sound to be heard and no one who could possibly observe her, she crushes up one of these pills to slip into the Missus’s morning coffee, where it dissolves over the hours, its peculiar herbal bitterness dissolving into the bitterness of the coffee, and by the time the Missus finally rouses herself and comes down to the kitchen, she could not possibly suspect that the mug she holds contains a sweet loam, a sprinkling of tropical soil.

On Tuesday night, Concepción dreams that she is sitting cross-legged in a field as the fawn decomposes in her lap. When she comes to work the next morning, it is gone. The Missus has brewed her own coffee.

There’s a mess of grounds scattered across the countertop, but Concepción feels obscurely proud of her anyway. She puts some pretzels on a plate, and cuts up some nice cheese to go with it, and brings it down to the pool, where the Missus reclines in a deck chair in her pink robe and sunglasses reading Architectural Digest.

“Good morning, mam. Did the town come and pick it up?”

“I called Animal Control first thing in the morning,” says the Missus.

“I’m sorry, mam. I called them yesterday when it happened!”

“Oh, they had a record of your call,” says the Missus. “You have nothing to apologize for—they were rude to you. Someone will be calling for you around 11, go ahead and pick up the phone yourself.”

“Thank you, mam! I brought you some food, mam. It’s early. You never eat breakfast because you always wake up at lunch time!” In Concepción’s warm throat there is a rising feeling of devotion to this funny woman-child who treats the work of making her home like a game but always looks so horribly sad.

While she is waiting, she sees the Missus take off her sunglasses and then stand up and slide off her bathrobe. She is wearing a floppy pink bikini that can barely cover the jiggling of her firm little breasts.

A deep voice calls her name. She squints up at the third floor of the house and waves slowly, broadly, as if she’s waving at a passenger on the deck of a departing ship.

Later that night, when the Missus searches frantically in the chest of drawers in her bathroom for the diaphragm that her husband doesn’t know she wears, it will be rattling around the floor of Gloria’s car in its pink plastic case. They are coming back from a dance in Virgina along MacArthur Boulevard in Gloria’s RAV4. Concepción reclines against the floral neoprene seat cover and watches the passing day

THE HARVARD ADVOCATE

39

laborers fish in the polluted waters of the Potomac. They do it at night with flashlights so the police won’t see them.

The diaphragm is wet and floppy like a rubber jellyfish, and this makes her think of an old fertility ritual that her grandmother once explained to her. When they get to the Chain Bridge she tells Gloria to pull over. They get out of the car and walk partway across the bridge. “What’s that?” Gloria asks.

Concepción opens the pink case to show her the glistening dome. “It’s a giant condom!”

“It’s for women, you put it into your vagina and it seals it up so the sperm can’t get in.”

Gloria makes a vulgar joke and they laugh. “Where did you get it?”

A secret smile spreads across Concepción’s face and she doesn’t answer Gloria’s question. Instead she hurls the diaphragm, case and all, into the river. It bobs on the surface for a moment, propelled by the surf hitting its concavity, and is swept downstream onto the waiting hooks of the fishermen.

40

COMMENCEMENT 2011

Someone I Love or Someone Who I Want to Be, 2011 Isidore Bethel, with Emma Banay, Kyle Dancewicz, and Oliver Strand HD video 39 minutes THE HARVARD ADVOCATE

41

Images from the PA monograph 2010/11 Katarina Burin The work of the architect known only as PA will soon come to light with the publication of her monograph. Influenced by many of her contemporaries, the modernist tendencies of such architects as Eileen Gray and Robert Mallet-Stevens shine through in her plans, models, and completed projects.

Emigrating from Eastern Europe to America in the middle of the last century, PA left a legacy of striking designs across two continents, yet many projects were never realised and she remained largely obscure. The monograph looks set to redress that oversight, placing PA within the narrative of Twentieth Century visionaries.

Katarina Burin’s PA Project presents her own drawings and plans as the work of PA, an invented architect and designer.

42

COMMENCEMENT 2011

(clockwise, from top left) Project for a small urban apartment building, elevation and model, Vienna III, 1935; Sketch for a façade design for a six-story building, date unknown, never realized;

Model, House for an Engineer; Design for Business cards with PA logo, ink on tracing paper, ca.

1938; Design sketch for Weekend House– South façade, ca 1933

THE HARVARD ADVOCATE

43

44

COMMENCEMENT 2011

THE HARVARD ADVOCATE

45

The Clew JULIAN GEWIRTZ

In the ninth year, a high, bright room received the secret wheel.

Outside, near the sky, a tangle of trees, the sound of sea.

The spinster, her hands showing wet, bloody with light, shuddered.

Beneath her weight, the stool was still.

She dressed the distaff, hairs hanging off like cornsilk, unspun— a pale, worsted pistil, which she twisted into tufts of fiber, pinned to the spindle: speed made a swatch of her fingers, braided, unbraided— almost touching the warming thread.

Being lulled, I looked below to her naked feet: to where they beat time against the treadle— patter-pattern without sound.

46

COMMENCEMENT 2011

The wooden machine sloughed off the skein.

I bore it to the basin: crushed cochineal, incarnadine.

Dripping, it dried, caked with color like bloodcrust in hair— I evened the line.

Slowly the twine whispered and wound: a sphere.

In this way I gave you a light burden to carry unclothed into the tunnel— you will want to find your way back.

THE HARVARD ADVOCATE

47

Sweater Girl, 2010 Rebecca Levitan Animation, oil on plexiglass 1 minute, 34 seconds 48

COMMENCEMENT 2011

March CHARLOTTE LIEBERMAN

How many steps does it take to reach the low green narrowleaves which in a dream were slowly being devoured by cows and just a few sheep.

The animals are not hungry grazing beside the wickerchair porch, you reading and eating a nectarine almost ripe.

If we could use any of it our skulls would perforate, would feel filamental light braid itself through.

The pasture is a lawn.

Closely mowed it is a household linen, cushioned by sod, made toxic by rain, peppered by the wings of many insects.

THE HARVARD ADVOCATE

49

Repeat Viewings, 2010 Dan Ashwood Animation 11 minutes, 52 seconds 50

COMMENCEMENT 2011

THE HARVARD ADVOCATE

51

Havahart JAMES MAXWELL LARKIN

Know going in that I hardly knew the girl, that I remember the look of her more than anything else.

If you’re trying to understand this thing, you’re brushing the bottom of the barrel with me. I’d like to understand it, too. But I just have the one day with Helen. Lucky for you, it was memorable, unlike the days around it. I can’t think that it will be of interest to the investigation, but then I’ll leave those decisions to professionals.

She was, as far as I know, friends with this guy Bedugnis, Dan Bedugnis, who used to deal a little grass up and down the Pioneer Valley. Have you run any of this by Dan yet? I might give a call, if I were you.

I myself am not hurrying to catch up with him, at the moment, if there’s any hope of avoiding that. I wouldn’t know what to do. I spent a lot of time with Bedugnis, but he was never an easy guy, at least not then. You knew it to look at him, I hate to say. He had these yellowy jowls — at twenty-six, or seven — and scuffed blonde hair stringing down the back of his head. He kept tobacco in his lip, almost always, sometimes when he was smoking, which kept him dazed around the clock and quieter, even, than he might’ve been. Imagine being nauseous all the time. The statute of limitations having lapsed, I can tell you that I mainly dealt with him to score that grass, which was fine by me, being on a budget.

Maybe it’s me, though. I never could get anything good going with a dealer. I don’t know why. You’re about the same age, usually, spend a lot of time together around a common interest. But then there’s something about the nature of the relationship, or maybe the nature of drug dealers, that wrecks it.

Take for instance Bedugnis, who once bowled me over, deck-chair and all, for just beginning to compliment his grass, out on his stoop. We were smoking his grass, in a pretty dense stretch of homes, too, near the corner of Fearing and North Pleasant in Amherst, near the frat row on campus. It was a calmer time, in a lot of ways, you know, for better or worse. He insisted that he was trying to screen me out of photographs, potential photographs, or something. The kid had zero understanding of law enforcement. Anyway, I never felt welcome at his house from then forward, but we’d managed to patch it up before I met Helen. He ended up calling me to pick him up from the mechanic — the first time I’d picked up and heard that old-engine voice of his, so low and bored you could hardly make out words.

He said nothing on the ride home, if I remember right, just kept up spitting in the old glass Coke bottle he kept with him, which he’d been known to spill. It had this awful, crisp smell of mud, or mint, but looked just like Coke from across the car. After that we generally met around town in his big-block ‘71 Dodge Dart Swinger, which might be important. It was painted off-green, a stemmy sort of green, with a darker green racing stripe down the side — kind of forest-color. My mother, who visited one week, hated Bedugnis just on account of how much noise that car made, not knowing what he was. Just inferred it,

52

COMMENCEMENT 2011

from the car. I agreed with almost everything she said.

But I saw him almost every day that summer. He’d roll up in the late morning or the early evening, and I’d score some grass, and we’d drive around smoking it for a half hour, an hour, not saying much— just watch the fields turn green, then yellow, and listen to the Moody Blues. I was taking a break at the time, from my job breaking bottles at the recycling plant. Putting the English major to work, you know.

We’d work with a hammer and then with a press, and sort all the time by color. I’ve moved up in the world since then, by the way. Could you make a note? And my girlfriend at the time would go through at night, and pick the little chips out of my hair. It was actually hard to get it all, but it felt nice, her trying. My hair was long back then.

On the day I met Helen I was trying to move quickly: a friend and I were considering driving to the Quabbin reservoir in the afternoon, and I was trying to smoke before he picked me up. It didn’t play out. I mean, I got caught up, ran late across the board. It was probably four-thirty or five when I saw that Dart roll up in front of where I was living at the time, out in Sunderland. Sunderland was great because it was closed in out there by all these tobacco farms. It stayed real quiet and you could run around at night without running into anyone. The rents have probably stayed low, I imagine.

But there were three or four people already in the back, with Bedugnis’ big bag not moving to free up a place for a person in the passenger seat. Bedugnis somehow sold me on taking a ride with them, the afternoon sales run, and even sort of gestured this tiny kid in the middle seat out of my way. He had a unibrow. A few of the passengers had dropped that morning, he added, just to let me know. Not the rarest thing, at the time, and an everyday activity for a few, way out there. This was early on in August, and it was already hot as hell in the way that Western Mass. can be that time of year, you know, with the heavy air. And the Dart was a two-door hardtop, so whoever was up front had to step out for me to get in.

Ducking into the back seat I had to step over the little one, who had chosen to cradle himself between the seats on the floor, craning forward to keep his head off the other guy’s feet and to stare me down under that long brow. And as I took my seat I saw this other head lolling back so that its top touched the back window, with long black hair combed every way off it, tilting away from me toward the outside.

The hair looked like a velvet bag over her head and the tops of her chest. And that was Helen. You could see her nose poke out and turn up; looking at the picture in the paper I noticed that’s just how her face is shaped. And so I looked to her body, which is very long for a girl’s and very thin. She was, around a short skirt and a cornflower tank top, a mess of elbows and knees. Even when she was young she looked like a knot that had healed together, like some kind of amputee. Just gangly, I thought, but she must already have been on the needle at that point. I learnt from the paper about the hepatitis concerns, her health prospects. Anyway, we sat there packed together a while before I even saw her face, or heard her.

Bedugnis drove on, our five lives in his hands, changing the radio off “Take It Easy” when that came on—probably for my benefit, come to think of it, because I’d have made my feelings known about the Eagles. He’d hung his left hand out the window because he said it felt good, calmed his eczema, a detail I remember very clearly. Put that in your files. Maybe it’s critical.

At some point we pulled into the parking lot of the gas station and farmer’s market, next to Warner Farm, with the big corn maze going. Sitting on the ground out there was a guy Eduardo — an old white guy, from upstate; I can’t explain the name—who Bedugnis would sell to. Picture a cartoon hippie granddad, with white hair, and a beard, and three or four rotating bandannas. Sort of the local color —I’m sure he’s gone by now. But you’d see him around then, on the PVTA and at bars sometimes.

Bedugnis waved him over to the window. They settled up quickly—the old guy gave him a big “thanks, man,” though I realized at that moment I was getting the discount this guy needed. Eduardo was headed back to his seat on the ground against the station when a voice came out, next to me, clear but turned away. It was a shock, Helen saying: “Hello Duardo! Did you find that skunk?” And this ancient vagrant guy leant down and grinned like an idiot when he saw it was her, and told her, yes, that he’d chased the skunk around his tent all night, and that it hadn’t come back for a week. And Helen told him congrats, that something was gobbling up the vegetable patch where she lived now, and that she’d let him know how it turned out when she saw him next. She was in one of the commune-type situations out in Shutesbury at the time. You’ll know for sure.

Eduardo was only blocking the sun in part, and the rest brought out the red-brown in Helen’s hair. I

THE HARVARD ADVOCATE

53

still had hardly seen her face. Meanwhile, Bedugnis began thrumming on the wheel, in time to music he’d made a little fuss over turning down. He caught my eye in the rearview, agitated, and I gave him a reassuring nod, which was what I always did, whenever we made eye contact. She said goodbye, and reminded herself and the rest of the car that she was on duty to check the traps, and that she was especially sorry, but could we go back her way at some point before the sun went down. That wall of hair finally fell back as she turned forward and we moved, and I saw her whole face, the one you boys have probably been staring at since they dug this case up again. No one’d call her a pretty girl, Helen, with that heavy brow. Bedugnis told me later on that she looked like one of the ones from Creedence.

He was laughing, and maybe he wasn’t wrong. But there’s something about it all together, though, something not nameable. Maybe you know. You’d have seen her moving around, right? Heard her talk in courtrooms?

The afternoon must have just crept on in that way; the two boys to our left — the one now given up to lying down against the other’s shins—closed their eyes, preferring whatever they were seeing in there to the cramped car and my unwelcome face and the scratched-red skin of the driver. And at a certain point Helen started chatting with me the way I only ever would with a close friend, carrying on about her life, very quietly at times, as if parts of it were still secret. I can’t really think why she would’ve done that, just choose discretion from time to time, a sense of discomfort very near to her heart, that’d crop up. She told me about Gary, this ex-boyfriend of hers who wore green fatigues and who I thought I’d seen around, and she said that they were broken up for good and that it didn’t bother her, and that she’d found some really kind people to live with, but that they’d expect her to pull her weight with these “poor pests,” she said, for starters. She reminded Dan to go over there again, where he was already heading, but through all these sales stops. Business was booming, I guess. I’m sure he groused a little. But she seemed so fragile and forgetful that you had to forgive her things. Bedugnis definitely gave a little. But anyway Gary, she said, had become a bit of a pig when they were together. He was a little older than she — maybe a lot older, I thought. A real chauvinist, angry at the world, she called him. She didn’t mind the other girls a bit, but she was done being hurt, she said, and I believed her, though I know I was wrong to do that. Gary would sell her in a second, she thought, without even thinking about it, like livestock. The grasses and plants rolled on and on down Route 116, back toward school, with the two tripping teens sighing in front of the window, feeling calm enough, I guess. You do get used to the feeling of your skin being plastered to the piped white vinyl seats, and to others’, by the heat. It can put you to sleep. Anyway, when the trees came up I knew we were in Shutesbury and getting close. Helen’d fallen quiet again, leaning her head against the window and one of those toothpick arms.

Eventually Bedugnis pulled down a long driveway, using that twitching eye he used on me sometimes on the dust getting kicked up on the windshield and wheels of his Dart. Eventually the branches stopped slapping the side windows, and the track opened onto a field overhung by those prayer-flags, from Asia. Just what you’d expect. Behind a row of shrunken sunflowers, you could see one guy working the field here and there, in a bathrobe, reddish. Helen got out of the car running, saying she’d be back.

The rest of us sat there.

It’s going to bug me—I thought about it all last night, trying to prepare — but that was when Bedugnis started talking: about how people and maybe police—he wouldn’t have said police—placed that guy Gary at the scene of the stabbings in Holyoke that winter, that it wasn’t a political crime like they said, just a failed robbery straight up; that he was a junkie; that she—and he would’ve nodded out into the fields—was one, too; that her old housemates had seen her throwing clothes onto one night’s bonfire soon after; that she had moved out. He was sweating to get it out, running his mouth. Who isn’t happy to speculate? They said she’d worn black the day of the funeral, that she was mourning the pregnant woman who’d died, and that maybe she’d been there, waiting in the car or something.

People just said things, too, of course. But you’ve heard all this before, and to tell the truth, I don’t remember it that well. We could have been talking about anything. And it wasn’t half an hour until I heard a thump to my right and and saw a rabbit in shadow, trapped, almost biting at the window. Helen had crept up and pressed the cage, a kind of Havahart trap against my window. The trap looked heavily used; it must have worked by balance. The animal would go in and it’d tip, and the gate’d fall. But so Helen was holding it and smiling nervously above and behind the big brown rabbit inside, her face dark,

54

COMMENCEMENT 2011

the sun pretty much behind her. I smiled back, and so the conversation stopped right there, and I don’t think I have any clearer memory of it than that. I’m sorry to say it.

But the night carried on a little, and so I ought to finish, I think. Helen held the rabbit on her lap and waved her finger at it as we pulled out of the driveway again, looking for somewhere to go, to bring it. It was a fat little thing; the cooperative spirit had been good for it. It looked content, even as Bedugnis sped through the hollows in the road, the car lurching, the two kids still chilled out. A few times he’d start to pull off the road and tell Helen he didn’t want that thing shitting in his car. Helen was insistent: “Oh no,” she’d say, “it has to be ten miles or more, at least,” rocking this thing back and forth gently, through the cage. “Otherwise, it’ll find its way right back in a couple of days. They’ll blame me.” She added, totally calm, that if the rabbit had to shit, it would be on her lap for sure. And she brushed her hair back to her ear, again and again, watching the road and the back of Dan’s head, and after a while I suggested that we take it back to Sunderland, where I had to go anyway to get in touch with my friend, and where the rabbit could bother some other sucker for a while. And that’d be at least ten miles. Bedugnis gave in once we’d agreed on that plan in back, when the sun was coming down.

I remember, when it was right about gone behind the tops of the barns and the tips of the fields, Bedugnis started a swing through the channels. He was spinning past classical—WFCR, probably, public radio—when Helen shouts “No!” The fat rabbit knocked softly against the cage’s side, and she gasped a little, and saw to it for a second. But leave that on, she said. That’s Chopin, a nocturne, in F minor, she thought. I never forgot the song, either; I wrote it down right as soon as I got home. Opus 55, if you’re curious. Anyway, her voice got very timid after shouting: she was sorry, sorry to the rabbit and to us. But she loved this song. She used to be able to play it, she remembered. Bedugnis and I were on the same page for once, I could see him in the rearview. But she was looking, too, and she carried on.

Her father, who was in the Navy, loved Chopin, all this type of music. “I wish I could go home for the day,” she said, combing her hair with her fingers, “and play our old piano, and see my mom for a little.

Do either of you have pianos?” Neither of us did.

The song’s short. It played out and Helen seemed to rest, the rabbit still nibbling in her lap, the stars coming out. I told her I thought it was nice when it was over and one of their DJs with the sexless sleepy voices came on and proved her right, and she smiled at me, like she just woke up.

When we were getting close she asked me whether or not I knew a good place for a bunny to stay. She was only eighteen, at the oldest, you know. I told her one place seemed as good as another, that a tobacco field should work, and I think I made some lame line, like after a beat, asked if the bunny was a smoker. She laughed, though, and I was glad. I swear to God, I was never at my best with this teenage girl next to me, all day long. I’ve tried to figure that out. Obviously I didn’t see how well she kept quiet, in her way, at the time. Anyway, Bedugnis said he didn’t care where the rabbit went, and couldn’t we just pull over at the biggest farm by the river. He said it seemed like the best one for rabbits.

The strangers were half-asleep and seeing things; Dan had either lost his reasons for trying to impress, or could play along. That seemed fine, so he pulled over there on a little tuft of grass where you can hear the sound of the Connecticut River drain through the rows of tobacco plants. It was too flat and dark to see it, and we’d have had to head up a mile or so, to the Sunderland bridge, to be reminded that the river was even there. But you could hear it. So first Helen got out, then me, and Dan even came out and leant on the hood. He didn’t walk around the car. She lifted the cage with effort. I helped her set it down and open it. But the rabbit wouldn’t go, just gnawed on the rust-brown wires of the trap, even turned around, afraid of the sound of the gate in its hinge, which could have used oil. Dan told us just to tip it or something, from across his car. I ended up holding the top down, reaching in and trying to corral the little thing by its back end out of the cage, and eventually that worked. Once it got used to the outdoors, the thing took off in a little set of hops, then paused, and started up again. It didn’t turn around, that I could see, but then it was dark. Helen stood there for a while, talking to it, telling it to head on through the plants as fast as it could, because it would like the river best. Her arms were folded around themselves, and I could feel her shaking a little, though it wasn’t cold. She was probably feeling sick.

We got back in the car, Helen and I trading places so I could get out quickly when it was time.

We were nearly back at my place; Dan took a hard right, and all of us keeled the other way like we’d

THE HARVARD ADVOCATE

55

been doing all day, even the two of them sleeping. But Helen, when she leant, sort of turned into me and kissed me, actually—just for a second, but really. Her cheeks were wet. She mumbled something, that she was worried that the farmers might catch the rabbit after all, that maybe we ought to have crossed the river. I didn’t know what to say. I told her that rabbits are hard to catch, and that big tobacco farmers probably aren’t that interested in a single one of them, that was unlikely to do too much harm by itself. She said she didn’t know. When she tipped over she had wrapped her fingers around the fat part of my wrist, and she didn’t let go for the rest of the ride, tightening sometimes, when I’d look over. And the moon was out and the roads in Sunderland weren’t street-lit, so her skin looked pale blue, shining a little, and she would put on a smile. You could tell from the way she was breathing that she hadn’t stopped crying, but Bedugnis had turned up the radio again, and I don’t think anyone else noticed.

We got back, finally. After I got out, I knelt down and touched Helen’s shoulder through the open window, just for a second. She might as well have been dead then. She hardly moved, and really was cold, even then. It was 9 o’clock on a summer night, only starting to cool off. Anyway, she said good-bye without looking me in the eye, and then something else I couldn’t make out. Bedugnis waited, flicked his hand like he was throwing a cigarette up and out, and practically floored it off. I remember that the tail-lights on that particular model Dart were flat and square, and made red dot-dots on either side, so that the old white-and-green license plate seemed to interrupt another interruption.

Then I walked inside. I’m sorry not to have more for you. These types of things get harder after a long period of time. But I can say that I would trust that Helen the most, the one that’s crying. She’s being honest, whatever she’s saying then.

56

COMMENCEMENT 2011

ENVOY

From Deep to Dark SPENCER BURKE

Hidden away from view behind unassuming doors, under humming fluorescent lights and encased in corrugated steel, rest most of the six million objects in the collection of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. The place is deliberately hard to find. If you’re lucky enough to be taken inside, it’s hard not to be reminded of the last scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark. After two hours of fisticuffs and truck chases, Indy rescues the Ark of the Covenant from nefarious Nazis and hands it over to the government. The relic is crated and wheeled through a vast storage facility, eventually disappearing into anonymity among thousands of identical boxes containing whoknows-what other priceless treasures.

The Peabody Museum was founded in 1866, the first anthropology museum in the Americas.

This was just as archaeology was beginning its transformation, from what had been a hobby for gentleman antiquarians into a regimented systematic science, and the Peabody helped pioneer excavation techniques and methodology.

The museum dispatched expeditions around the globe to collect archaeological and ethnographic artifacts.

At this time museums served two essential functions: to save things and show them. In its first half century, the Peabody focused on exhibiting.

As the collection grew, new wings were added to the stately red-brick museum on Divinity Avenue, north of Harvard Yard. Eventually the

rate of acquisition outpaced the availability of space and funds for new construction, and the museum’s focus shifted, from display to study and interpretation. Objects were gradually put away. Today, less than half of one percent of the museum’s collection is on public display. The most valuable objects are never exhibited. The museum’s security isn’t good enough. So they stay in the vault, protected from curious eyes as much as loose fingers.

Among the objects in the Peabody’s storerooms are approximately thirty thousand artifacts from the Sacred Cenote at Chichén Itzá, collected by the American archaeologist Edward Herbert Thompson at the turn of the 20th century. These objects are among the most storied—famous and infamous—in the Peabody’s collections. Mexico alleges they were removed from the country illegally, and the artifacts have since been the subject of a lengthy legal battle and long-standing antipathy.

I entered this story in the spring of 2008 when William L. Fash, the Peabody Museum’s current Director, hired me to investigate the questions at the heart of the dispute over the ownership of the artifacts from the Sacred Cenote. I searched the archives to determine the legal status of the artifacts at the time, the conditions under which they were removed from Mexico, and the basis and extent of the Peabody’s proprietary claims on the collection.

THE HARVARD ADVOCATE

57

*** Edward Thompson’s zeal for archaeology was born from his childhood rambles hunting arrowheads around Lake Quinsigamond, near his home in Worcester, Massachusetts. Thompson eagerly devoured accounts of adventures in distant lands and took a particular interest in investigating historical riddles. While studying engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Thompson published an essay in Popular Science Magazine titled “Atlantis Not a Myth,” in which he suggested that refugees from the lost island had come to the New World and constructed the pyramids of Mesoamerica. It caught the eye of several prominent archaeologists, and six years later, in 1885, Thompson received an invitation to a dinner party with members of the Peabody Museum and the American Antiquarian Society.

They confronted Thompson with a proposal: travel to Mexico, investigate Maya ruins there, and send specimens back to the United States for study. Massachusetts Senator George Hoar arranged to have Thompson appointed US Consul to Yucatán, a post that provided some financial stability, as well as cover for his real objective.

With his wife and infant daughter in tow, Thompson arrived in Mexico in the spring of 1885. He set up shop in Mérida, the drowsy capital of Yucatán Province. The place was stickyhot, thick with dust in the dry season, bogged with mud in the wet. He took his time before setting out to the ruins in the interior: learned to speak Spanish and Mayan, attended to his consular duties, and studied the customs of the local Maya, the descendants of the people who built the ruined cities he was meant to explore.

Thompson completed several surveys for the Peabody and made plaster casts of Maya architecture to be reproduced for the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago. That same year, he stumbled on the chance to purchase a moribund old hacienda estate east of Mérida, one hundred acres that happened to contain the ruins of Chichén Itzá. It was a unique opportunity—to actually own the remains of one of the most important Classic Maya cities—and Thompson pounced on it. Chichén Itzá would be Thompson’s home for the next three decades, and the site of his most momentous work. The old plantation house, the casa grande, was itself several centuries old, built of stone taken from the ruins, its walls encrusted with statues and carvings.

58

COMMENCEMENT 2011

“Can you imagine a more ideal habitation for me while engaging in my work?” Thompson enthused in one letter home.

Chichén Itzá stands amid the flat plain of subtropical scrubland in the north of the Yucatán Peninsula, about one hundred miles southwest of the modern resort city of Cancún. The city flourished as one of the centers of the Maya world, reaching its height around 800 CE. When Thompson arrived, the city sat crumbling, slowly dissolving back into jungle. Trees sprouted from buildings. The iconic Pyramid of Kukulkan could easily have been mistaken for a wooded hill, and not something made by the hands of men. From the city’s nexus at the Pyramid, a stone-paved causeway strays a quarter mile south into the forest.

At the end of this path is the Sacred Cenote, an immense hole in the earth, 180 feet around, with sheer chalky cliffs and a perpendicular eighty-foot drop to the turbid green waters below. A collapsed stone shrine stands sentinel on the rim. More than one early visitor remarked on the mysterious influence that seems to pervade the place.

Cenote is a Spanish corruption of the Mayan word tzonot, “fresh water well.” They are sinkholes, created when rainwater erodes the topsoil and limestone bedrock until they collapse to form a natural well. As the only permanent source of surface water in the region, cenotes were critical resources to the Maya, and took on enormous spiritual resonance. Cenotes were regarded as portals between the earth and the underworld, Xibalba. These openings in the earth served as prime points of contact with the gods, and were important pilgrimage sites. There are several thousand cenotes in Yucatán, but this one is the largest and most sacred. From the ruined shrine at its edge, sacrificial offerings were thrown into the Cenote in hopes of appeasing the rain god Chaac.

Over a period of about eight hundred years, the Maya cast precious objects and human sacrifices alike into the waters below.

An old Spanish account from shortly after the Conquest told of how, “if this country possessed gold, it would be this well that would have the greater part of it, so great was the devotion which the Indians showed for it.” Thompson set out to test this story, and chose the Sacred Cenote as the subject of his most ambitious archaeological project. In 1904, Thompson and his team of Maya workers constructed a derrick on the Cenote’s south shore, lowered a steel clam-shell dredge

more than one hundred feet down, and hauled up pail-fulls of the creamy yellow silt that lined the Cenote floor.

Eventually artifacts began to show up in the muck—exquisitely carved jades, embossed gold discs, clumps of copal incense, wooden weapons, and human remains (including an incense burner made from a child’s skull). The thick muck at the bottom of the Cenote helped to preserve artifacts from decomposing, providing some of the only surviving wood and cloth objects from the preHispanic Maya world. The high quality and craftsmanship of many of the recovered sacrificial objects, and the discovery of materials from as far away as Panama and central Mexico are a testament to the importance of Chichén Itzá’s Sacred Cenote as a center of pilgrimage. Together they represent one of the finest collections of Maya artifacts in the world.

Over the next five years, the team continued the tedious work of dredging the Cenote floor and sifting carefully through the sediment for artifacts. When returns from the dredge slowed, Thompson returned to the United States and learned how to deep-sea dive in Boston harbor. He came back to Mexico with a Greek sponge diver and two primitive globular cast-iron diving suits, and descended into the Cenote’s murky waters to search by hand for objects the dredge missed.

A diving accident left his hearing permanently damaged. Two years later, Thompson declared his work at the Cenote done.

The Peabody Museum sponsored Thompson’s work, indirectly, through remittances from Frederic Ward Putnam, the museum’s director, and Charles Pickering Bowditch, a businessman and patron of the museum. The exportation of artifacts was patently illegal under an 1897 Mexican law, which decreed that all “archaeological monuments existing in the National Territory are the property of the Nation,” and outlawed the removal of antiquities from Mexico. In order to ship his finds back to his benefactors in Cambridge, Thompson presented “quite a sum of money” to Santiago Bolio, the Inspector of Ruins responsible for enforcement. “To obtain this money cost me many sleepless nights and unhappy days,” wrote Thompson, “but I knew that it was the chance of my life to put him under such obligation that he would hold fast to my interests.” The artifacts recovered from the Cenote were smuggled out of Mexico in the luggage of friends and colleagues.

Thompson even employed his wife as a courier.

This amenable political status quo was upended by the overthrow of President Porfirio Diáz’s regime and the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution.

Thompson scaled back his archaeological work and focused on managing the plantation. Maya peasants, angered by the slow pace of land reform promised by the Revolution, torched the hacienda house in 1921. Thompson’s records went up in flame. This was only the beginning of Thompson’s troubles. The post-revolutionary government did not look kindly on foreigners digging out Mexico’s past, and initiated an investigation into his activities at Chichén Itzá. In 1926, the Mexican government seized the hacienda and charged Thompson with the theft and illegal exportation of archaeological patrimony. Thompson fled via sailboat to Havana and returned to the United States. Mexico sued Thompson in absentia for more than a million pesos in damages. The Peabody Museum and Harvard University were named accomplices in the suit.

The case of the purloined Cenote treasure ignited the press in both nations. Thompson was vilified in Mexico and defended in America. The Mérida weekly Revista de Yucatán denounced “the diving ducks [who] took out innumerable ancient objects, among them many of gold ... the treasures, stolen from Tlaloc [a name for the rain god] … were sold to the millionaires of New York … which constitutes a great shame.” Back in Massachusetts, Thompson justified himself in The Boston Globe. “I should have been false to my duty as an archaeologist,“ he maintains, “had I, believing that the scientific treasures were at the bottom of the sacred well, failed to improve the opportunity and attempt to bring them to light and thus make them available for scientific study instead of lying imbedded in the mud and useless to the world.” *** Thompson spent his last years in relative poverty, living with his son in New Jersey, delivering occasional lectures, and drafting a memoir titled People of the Serpent, in which he wrote, “I have squandered my substance in riotous explorations and I am altogether satisfied.” He died in 1935, at the age of seventy-seven. Thompson was audacious, even to the point of recklessness, and was prone to being swept away by romanticized notions of adventure. He seemed to take a certain pleasure in risking bodily harm in the name of

THE HARVARD ADVOCATE

59

archaeological inquiry, such as when he insisted on diving the Sacred Cenote himself. Though his methods were unorthodox, sometimes brazen, the depiction of him as a grave robber is not quite fair. Looters do not bother to take such copious field notes. He was driven by an expansive thirst to uncover the mysteries of an ancient people then unknown to history.

The criminal case against Thompson was dismissed when he died, but the civil suit dragged on for nine more years until the Mexican Supreme Court declared Thompson not guilty, on a technicality. But the affair left the Peabody’s reputation bruised. An internal Peabody memorandum from the late 1940s acknowledged that the court’s decision still “leaves [the Peabody] as the ultimate recipient of objects exported illegally.” The continued possession of the Cenote artifacts left many at the museum discomfited.

One director remarked that the museum now had a “considerable black eye in Mexico.” No Peabody excavations had been allowed in the country since.

Over the next few decades, the Peabody hosted an exhibition and published several studies and catalogues of the artifacts. In the 1960s and 70s the museum returned several sets of jade and gold artifacts in exchanges with Mexico. Several Cenote jades can be seen at the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City, and a few more in the Peabody’s third-floor Mesoamerica gallery. But the bulk of the thirty thousand objects Thompson sent back to Cambridge remain in the dark of the Peabody Museum’s storerooms. *** Neither the battle lines nor arguments have shifted much in the intervening eighty years.

Edward Thompson is not well liked in Mexico.

He is considered a grave robber, a common thief who stole a significant piece of Mexican history.

The clamshell dredge Thompson used to plumb the depths of the Sacred Cenote is now displayed in the expansive commercial complex that welcomes busloads of tourists to Chichén Itzá.

The dredge sits across from the restrooms, next to a bilingual sign explaining its significance. The Spanish text is longer and more scathing than the English. Thompson, it reads, “purchased the Hacienda Chichén and made unscientific excavations throughout the site, beginning with the exploration of the Cenote ... the majority of these he removed illegally from the country and donated to the Peabody Museum of Harvard. It’s a

60

COMMENCEMENT 2011

disgrace that many materials were damaged at the time of extraction and there are almost no records of what was obtained.” *** While many countries enacted laws protecting archaeological remains, starting with Greece in 1827, no international law governed the trade, export, or import of antiquities until the UNESCO Convention of 1970. The laws that now regulate archaeology in this country are among the strictest in the world. In 1990, the US Congress passed the North American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), which legally mandated repatriation of archaeological and human remains belonging to existing Native American tribes. The Peabody Museum is considered a star of honoring repatriation requests.

But NAGPRA applies only within the US, and so Harvard’s legal obligation for repatriation ends at America’s borders.

But as Rubie Watson, a former director of the Peabody, writes, “NAGPRA is not a temporary, passing affair. It has ushered in dramatic and, many would argue, long-overdue changes in museums, establishing an atmosphere of openness that one trusts will be a lasting NAGPRA legacy.”

A growing conviction, slowly spreading among archaeologists and museum administrators in the West, holds that sacred objects and objects of cultural patrimony should not be hoarded away in storage, where they cannot be accessed by the public (let alone by the descendants of those who created them).

Though Harvard is under no obligation to repatriate the Peabody’s Sacred Cenote collection, there is a strong ethical case for repatriation. The records are clear: by removing the artifacts from Mexico, Thompson violated Mexican law, and did so knowingly. The Peabody’s reputation continues to be stained by its possession of these artifacts.

And for what? What purpose do they serve hidden away in the Peabody’s vaults? They were brought to the Peabody to be studied, and studied they have been. Volumes have been published on the jades, metals, and lithic tools from the Sacred Cenote, but now they are accessed only by the occasional grad student. They are simply preserved, and this is no longer a persuasive justification for their extended stay in America.

In the end, the decision to repatriate rests with the Harvard Corporation: the President and Fellows of Harvard University. The Corporation,

however, is in the business of growing Harvard’s assets, not reducing them. In 2002, Dumbarton Oaks—Harvard’s research library in Washington, D.C.—came to suspect that two Byzantine silver pieces in their collection were forgeries. They sent the pieces to the Oxford Archaeological Laboratory for testing. The lab confirmed that the objects were indeed fakes, and asked if they might be allowed to exhibit them in their museum of forged antiquities. Ned Keenan, Dumbarton Oaks’ Director at the time, recognized that the fakes had no real value to the museum and determined that they might as well be given to an institution that could use them. The Corporation refused.

Generally speaking, the Corporation doesn’t want to enable any precedents for the repatriation of university property. If the Corporation were to approve the de-acquisition of even a single object (even a fake!) in a Harvard collection, they would risk a deluge of similar requests that could empty the university’s museums, and coffers. Requests from Native American tribes are fulfilled to the extent the law demands, but other appeals are usually rejected categorically. Two recent case studies of successful repatriation could be helpful in laying such a groundwork: Harvard’s return of the Lowell bells to Russia and Yale’s repatriation agreement with Peru. *** Stalin shuttered Russia’s churches and monasteries in 1929 and outlawed the ringing of bells. Many thousands were melted down. The American philanthropist Charles Crane rescued eighteen brass bells from Danilov Monastery, on the right bank of the Moskva in Moscow. The largest, called the Mother Earth Bell, weighed thirteen tons with a 700-pound clapper. Crane gave them to Harvard, and seventeen were installed in the just-completed tower of Lowell House (the last went to the Business School’s Baker Library). Here they remained, rung at 1pm each Sunday and after every Harvard-Yale football game (Harvard’s score was announced on the Mother Earth Bell; Yale’s on the Bell of Famine, Pestilence and Despair). With the loosening of religious restrictions under perestroika, the Russian Orthodox Church began to press for their return.

Eventually, a Russian oil magnate named Viktor Vekselberg agreed to foot the ten million dollar bill necessary to commission replacements and transport the bells back to Russia. In September 2008 Harvard’s replacement replicas were blessed

by the Patriarch Alexei II in a ceremony attended

by President Medvedev, and on March 17 of the following year the bells tolled in their old belfry for the first time in nearly eight decades.

In the fall of 2010, Yale University’s Peabody Museum of Natural History (endowed by the same Peabody) concluded a model agreement in a similar dispute. In 1911, the American explorer Hiram Bingham arrived in Peru and re-discovered Machu Pichu, the misty redoubt of the terminal Inka. Bingham secured permission to conduct excavations at the site and remove objects for study. The objects remained in New Haven for a century, despite public pressure from Peruvian intellectuals and officials.

The two disputes bear a striking resemblance to each other: both involve collections of preHispanic artifacts removed from Latin American countries at the beginning of the 20th century and retained by Ivy League universities in their respective Peabody Museums.

After Peru brought a case against Yale in Connecticut court, the two sides began negotiations, mediated by outgoing Senator Chris Dodd. The result was “a very civilized agreement,” that Dodd says he hopes will serve as a model in resolving similar disputes. Yale agreed to return the objects to a university in Cuzco, the ancient Inka capital, which in turn committed to make the collection freely accessible to all scholars.

In Dodd’s words, “Going back to the university in Cuzco, establishing a joint relationship, acknowledging Yale’s treatment of these artifacts over the last hundred years: I think sets a precedent that will allow for other such collections to be able to be moved and to be preserved and to be celebrated in ways that people haven’t thought of in the past.”

Perhaps such precedents will spur administrative headway on other deadlocked repatriation cases.

Perhaps Harvard will hurry to avoid the Ivy League indignity of being one-upped by Yale. Or perhaps Indiana had it right with the Ark, “Fools, bureaucratic fools. They don’t know what they’re dealing with.” *** Thompson’s self-defense in The Boston Globe echoes the existential mission statement employed by museums today. By what authority do museums possess the past? While the first museums grew out of the collecting tradition of curiosity cabinets and were conceived as instruments of experiential

THE HARVARD ADVOCATE

61

diversion, their focus shifted in the 20th century to embrace the project of research and education.

Museums emphasize their responsibility as custodians of the past, stewards of the sacred debris from the shipwreck of time. Thompson conveys this vision of archaeology as a duty and a burden. In order to reconstruct the puzzle of the past, to unravel the mysteries of our ancestors and confront history head-on, it was first necessary to retrieve all of the pieces.

Thompson articulates an archaeologist’s imperative, a responsibility to make these remnants of the past “available for scientific study instead of lying imbedded in the mud and useless to the world.” It is a sad irony of history that Thompson recovered these objects from the darkness of the Cenote’s deep, only to have them returned back to the bowels of the earth, beneath the green pastures of Harvard University.

62

COMMENCEMENT 2011

SPECIAL THANKS The Harvard Advocate wishes to thank the following generous individuals for their support of our activities during the 2010-2011 academic year. They have made possible the Advocate’s commitment to publishing the best literature and art that the Harvard campus offers, four times each year. The contributions of the following individuals have not only supported the printing of our magazine, but also our mission to promote the arts on campus. Last year, our building at 21 South Street hosted a wide array of literary and artistic events. Jeffrey Eugenides, Denis Johnson, Alex Ross, and several members of Wilco--to name only a few--visited, spoke, and read; local musicians played to a packed house. Our new Community Outreach Program has helped expand the Advocate’s presence in our neighborhood and the broader Cambridge and Boston area. Our members have offered a creative writing workshop at a local homeless shelter and continue to facilitate the creative writing curriculum of a second and third grade classroom at the William Blackstone Elementary School in the South End in Boston.

Your contributions have supported the creation of our new website (www.theharvardadvocate.com), including features like video hosting and online subscribing. We are dedicated to improving and extending our web presence by expanding the breadth of the back catalog of issues available for purchasing and viewing online. However, digital development can be costly and, as we pursue this project of digital expansion, your contributions to the Harvard Advocate are more valuable than ever.

Please consider supporting the Harvard Advocate!

PATRONS David L. Klein Foundation, Andrew B. Cogan, John Ebey, David Self, Anonymous BENEFACTORS The Meehan Family, H. Greg Moore, Glenn Schwetz, Anonymous DONORS Anonymous FRIENDS Mary Ellen Burns, Ann Eldridge, Jamie and Bobbie Gates, Walt Hunter, Robert Johnston, Taro Kuriyama, Markus Law, Anthony Pino, Gregory Scruggs, Emery Younger All gifts to the Harvard Advocate endowment fund are fully tax deductible according to 501(c)(3) non-profit donation guidelines. Gifts will be acknowledged in the four issues following receipt according to the giving categories of Patron ($1000 and over), Benefactor ($500 and over), Donor ($200 and over), and Friend ($50-$199). Contributors will receive a complimentary year’s subscription to the magazine.

Checks should be made out to “Trustees of the Harvard Advocate.” Envelopes may be mailed to 21 South Street, Cambridge, MA 02138. Please email contact@theharvardadvocate.com with any inquiries regarding gifts to the Harvard Advocate. Thank you for helping support Mother Advocate.

CO NTRIB U TO R S ’ NOTE S

ISIDORE BETHEL: 5’8”, 140lbs. KATARINA BURIN received her MFA from Yale and has lived and worked as an artist in Berlin for the last 8 years. She is currently a visiting lecturer at the VES department teaching Drawing. SPENCER BURKE always practices safe self-censorship.

EMILY CHERTOFF is a little guy. SOPHIE DUVERNOY supports jurassic technology and salt. ERIK FREDERICKSEN prefers green olives.

CAROLYN GAEBLER is shaking her tail feather. JULIAN GEWIRTZ meets apart. LAUREN IANNI is a junior in the College. JAMES MAXWELL LARKIN is very glad to have met you. Also, Andrew, sorry about your bike. REBECCA LEVITAN thinks you should look up sweater girl in the dictionary. CHARLOTTE LIEBERMAN may be a plant. STEPHANIE NEWMAN left a note for you in the footbridge. MADELEINE SCHWARTZ just got back from a walk. JESSICA SEQUEIRA fell in love with accident and missed the essence. DAVID WALLACE is no fun at all.