Commencement 2008

art 14 34 38 39 46 50 54 55 58 62

BOOTHS David Molander I hate you don’t touch me or Bat and Hat Becky James Letter Xiaowei Wang My Parents’ Bed Michael Ellis Ambient Magnetic Dipoles Lewis Z. Liu UNTITLED Marisa S. Williamson Self Portrait at 25 Michael Ellis Happy Lollipop Surprise Zulie Malone Chai shanghai Zhang Yue and Alexandra Hays Celebrity Michael Ellis

poetry 12 35 61

1809 Laura Kolbe directions from bread city Gabriel Rocha bowerbird Ayten Tartıcı

fiction 19 40 52 68

The suicide party David Rice things are not as they seem Brad Baughman hear me, o posterity Courtney Bowman Dead dog story Justin Keenan

features 5 Approaching a Theory of Radio: Glenn gould’s solitude trilogy Kim Gittleson 16 BEDLAM’S HOMELAND Alexandra Gutierrez 48 zombies Alexandra Gutierrez 49 New orleans Greg Scruggs 60 The Short and Dreary Life of Sergei Necháev, Revolutionary Jessica Sequira 63 Creation myths Alexander Fabry 76 envoy: pogonotomy Evan Hanlon

Cover Design: Amy Lien Illustrations: Dana Kase

Art

Emma Banay, Nicole Bass, Ruben Davis, Evan Hanlon, Alexandra Hays, Dana Kase, Paul Katz, Rebecca Lieberman, Amy Lien, Thalassa Raasch, Julia Renaud, Michael Stynes.

business

The Harvard Advocate Editorial Board President ALEXANDRA HAYS Publisher Geraldine Prasuhn Art Editor Nicole Bass Business Manager Eyal Dechter Design Editors Ekaterina Botchkina

Rebecca Lieberman Features Editor Alexander Fabry Fiction Editor Jesse Barron Poetry Editor Margaret Ross Art Pegasi Anna Barnet

LeeAnn Suen Literary Pegasi Sanders Bernstein

April Wang Dionysi Caroline Williams

Millicent Younger Circulation Manager Carolyn Gaebler Publicity Manager Linda Liu Online Editor Logan Pritchard Librarian Olivia Jampol Alumni Relations Manager Alec JoneS

Board of Trustees Chairman Chairman Emeritus Vice-Chairman President Vice-President and Treasurer Secretary

James Atlas Louis Begley Douglas McIntyre Susan Morrison Austin Wilkie Charles Atkinson

Peter Brooks

John DeStefano

A. Whitney Ellsworth jonathan Galassi

Lev Grossman

David Kuhn

Angela Mariani

Daniel Max

Frederick Seidel

Thomas A. Stewart

Jean Strouse

www.theharvardadvocate.com

Sanders Bernstein, Diane Choi, Alwa Cooper, Ruben Davis, Eyal Dechter, Liya Eijvertinya, Natalie Evans, Alexandra Gutierrez, Evan Hanlon, Alexandra Hays, Amy Heberle, Catherine Humphreville, Olivia Jampol, Paul Katz, Taro Kuriyama, Justine Lescroart, Erin Miles, Garrett Morgan, Claire-Marie Murphy, Seth Myers, Geraldine Prasuhn, Logan Pritchard, Gregory Scruggs, Mike Segal, Caroline Williams, Emily Walker, Natalie Wong, Millicent Younger, Lillian Yu.

design

Avis Bohlen, Ekaterina Botchkina, Sabrina Chou, Alexandra Hays, Dana Kase, Charleton Lamb, Rebecca Lieberman, Amy Lien, Lauren Packard, LeeAnn Suen, Rachel Whitaker.

features

Anna Barnet, Richard Beck, Brittany Benjamin, Alexander Fabry, Marta Figlerowicz, Allison Keeley, Kim Gittleson, Alexandra Gutierrez, Evan Hanlon, Ryder Kessler, Anna Polonyi, Gregory Scruggs, Kevin Seitz, Jessica Sequeira, Grace Tiao.

fiction

Aliza Aufrichtig, Jesse Barron, Sanders Bernstein, Britt Caputo, Alexis Deane, Marta Figlerowicz, Carolyn Gaebler, Daniel Howell, Justin Keenan, Laura Kolbe, Charleton Lamb, Max Larkin, Linda Liu, Teddy Martin, Ryan Meehan, Garrett Morgan, Matthew Spellberg, Marya Spence, David Thoreson, April Wang, David Wallace, Scott Zuccarino.

poetry

Nicole Bass, Courtney Bowman, John Davies, Tim Hwang, Carmen James, Olga Kamensky, Jennifer Nicole Kurdyla, James Leaf, Lauren Nikodemos, Adam Palay, Joseph Quinn, Gabriel Rocha, Margaret Ross, Caroline Schopp, Gregory Scruggs, Michael Stynes, Ayten Tartici, David Wallace, Chris Van Buren, Maria Vassileva, Mike Zuckerman.

Founded in 1866, The Harvard Advocate is the nation’s oldest continually published college literary magazine. It publishes quarterly from the Advocate house at 21 South Street, Cambridge, MA 02138. Published pieces and advertisements represent the opinions of the authors and advertisers, not The Harvard Advocate. While primarily an undergraduate publication, The Harvard Advocate will anonymously consider all submissions of art, features, fiction, and poetry. Potential contributors should be aware that submissions policies are set year by year and are subject to change. For current submission policies, please send a query with a self-addressed stamped envelope or consult the website at www.theharvardadvocate.com. 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 foreign 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, but price and availability varies depending on the issue. Please inquire by writing to contact@theharvardadvocate.com. Recent issues and a history of the magazine can be found on our website. No part of this magazine may be reprinted without the permission of The Harvard Advocate. Copyright 2008 by the Editors and Trustees

.

Notes from 21 South Street

Approaching a Theory of Radio:

Glenn Gould’s Solitude Trilogy

Glenn Gould liked to play two radios simultaneously. He told Richard Kostelanetz that he discovered it was easier to learn Schoenberg’s Opus 23 if he listened to “them both at once, the FM to hear music and the AM to hear the news.”

It was just that he could actually hear twice as much as anyone else. When he was recording his second performance of the Goldberg Variations in 1981, Gould amazed the sound engineers with his ability to differentiate between the playbacks from two different digital recording systems. One of the producers, Karen McLaughlin, recalls, “One was a Sony and one was a Mitsubishi, and the technical specifications were identical and yet Glenn could unerringly tell them which was which…Nobody else could hear that kind of thing.” Despite his memory for and mastery over the sounds of a piano, Gould himself never bothered with such narrow dicta as do re mi. It was not so much the individual notes themselves that mattered to him, but rather the way they interacted with each other to isolate certain sounds, certain words even, to give a sense of something beyond mere aural experience.

Although he stunned his global audience in 1964 when he decided, at the height of his career, to stop performing publicly, Gould’s ultimate decision to move into the world of radio actually made a lot of sense. Perhaps best known for his austere, precise interpretations of the Bach keyboard repertoire, Gould nonetheless was concerned first and foremost with how people experience sound, regardless of whether or not that sound was music or speech. As a child, he

kim gittleson

was fascinated by the possibilities of speech as sound, of what a later observer would call “the fugal possibilities of language.” Growing up, Gould loved the radio, not just because it helped him learn complicated atonal piano passages, but also because it held strong personal affiliations for him. Bob Fulford, a childhood friend, remembers that the two of them had a special fondness for radio because it was the medium that had united the country during the early days of World War II. “Radio was an event for him,” said Fulford, noting that Gould rarely bought records since he preferred listening to performances live on the radio. There was something that he found attractive in the simultaneously isolating and comforting presence of the radio. The magic of the medium—the way that the players of the Winnipeg Symphony could be heard all the way in Toronto, the way that the sound could cut through the vast emptiness of the Canadian countryside to create a sense of communal bonding that transcended simple human contact—appealed to Gould.

His work in radio, which occupied the majority of his life and thought after the end of his performing career, has been largely forgotten by the public, reflecting the persistent obsession with the dramatic image of the promising musician who achieved fame at a young age only to give it up seemingly without warning. To trade in packed concert halls for cramped radio studios—to choose solitude over celebrity—seemed unbelievable to his audience and is still somewhat perplexing today. Yet

commencement 2008

5

criteria of the medium.”

But what are the criteria of the medium?

What makes radio…radio? Due to its relatively short lifespan as a communication medium (commercially available in the 1920s, all but obsolete by the 1960s), no prominent theorist has attempted to understand the medium. Gould sensed this vacuum, as his meditation on “Radio as Music” shows, and he attempted to craft a theory of radio through his documentary work.

In his Solitude Trilogy of three hour-long pieces exploring the Canadian North, Newfoundland, and a Mennonite community—all three were recently re-released this past October by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation—Gould sought to literally conjure up a theory of radio through the form itself, to embed within his documentaries the seeds of a larger radio framework. Gould is, in a sense, the theoretical equivalent of Guglielmo Marconi: through his relentless pursuit of the sonic possibilities of the medium, he (re)invented radio.

Glenn Gould in the CBC radio studio.

Gould’s decision, along with his subsequent and somewhat anonymous life as a radio producer, reveals an aspect of his personality and manner of living that goes beyond the simply biographical, approaching, instead, the philosophical. Gould compared the techniques used in the creation of his radio documentaries to cinematic dissolves, dramatis personae stolen from the theatre, and “Webern-like” tone rows. He struggled to define the media within which he worked through the vocabulary and conventions of other art forms— especially music. Gould said in an interview with John Jessop on “Radio as Music” that although he embraced many of the conventions of classical and avant-garde compositional styles, “It’s not just a question of dealing with musical forms.

Sometimes one must try to invent a form which expresses the limitations of form, which takes as its point of departure the terror of formlessness.

After all, there are a limited number of rondos you can exploit in the radio documentary; then you find you have to invent according to the

6

THE HARVARD ADVOCATE

Gould had been involved with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) for the majority of his performing and recording career, often guest hosting classical music programming.

However, it was not until 1960, after the relative failure of his string quartet (what he called his “Opus 1”), that he began to seriously focus his energies on composition for radio. In 1962, he produced “Arnold Schoenberg: The Man Who Changed Music,” the first of two documentaries he would devote to the composer. The show aired on August 8, 1962 to great acclaim. It was so well received that the CBC decided to re-air it several times over the course of the year. This success stood in contrast to Gould’s increasing frustration with his public performances and his inability to compose anything instrumental, despite his selfstyled notions of being a “Renaissance man.” In 1964, after he gave his last public performance in Los Angeles, he was offered an opportunity to join the staff of the illustrious broadcasting corporation by John Roberts, the music director and later head of Radio Music at CBC. Although there were difficulties at first (Gould had never attended university and had very little

practical training in engineering technologies), Gould’s enthusiasm for the spoken word and his unique, highly intellectual approach to the medium helped to win him fans and mentors within the company. In June of 1965, he took a momentous trip to the North of Canada on the Muskeg Express as part of a project that had been commissioned by the new CBC program, “Ideas” (which is still on the airwaves today), to celebrate Canada’s 1967 centennial. This project, “The Idea of North,” would later become the foundation of the Solitude Trilogy. Gould narrates at the beginning of the program, in the only time he ever speaks during the three hours of the trilogy: “I’ve long been intrigued by that incredible tapestry of tundra and taiga which constitutes the arctic and sub-arctic of our country. I’ve read about it, written about it, and even pulled up my parka once and gone there. Yet like all but a very few Canadians I’ve had no real experience of the North. I’ve remained, of necessity, an outsider.

And the North has remained for me, a convenient place to dream about, spin tall tales about, and, in the end, avoid.” Buried here in the subtext is the fact that Gould’s pathological fear of flying meant he could only go as far north as Fort Churchill (Canada’s only port on the Artic ocean and the last stop on the Muskeg express), which was more than three hundred miles below the Artic circle.

By taking the train, Gould hoped he would find one or two people who could continue north and take the journey for him, who could give him an idea of what it was like to live in solitude “up there.” The final product of this quest was “The Idea of North,” an hour-long meditation with four main dramatis personae—Marianne Schroeder, a nurse, Frank Vallee, a sociologist, R.A.J. Phillips, a government official, and James Lotz, a geographer and anthropologist—who each had different experiences with the North and with solitude.

The most traditional of the three documentaries, the show nonetheless incorporated numerous groundbreaking innovations in sound, including what would become Gould’s signature style: the “contrapuntal” radio show. The product of too much tape and not enough time, Gould decided to have moments in the show where several voices are speaking at once, their voices overlapping

like notes in a fugue. Although earlier observers thought the technique muddled the listener’s ability to absorb information, Gould’s skillful splicing—his handiwork with a razor and tape— meant that each voice, because it was originally recorded in a separate sound chamber, has a soothing sonic quality to it that is not obscured when one, or two, or even three voices are simultaneously musing on the same aspects of the North (Eskimos, solitude, the land itself) with wildly different perspectives. Gould would later say, when asked about this choice, that he thought three simultaneous voices could convey more, not less, information: “It is a strange notion—this idea that the respect for the human voice in terms of broadcasting is such that one shuts down all other patterns to an appropriately reverential level…It’s nonsense. The average person can take in and respond to far more information than we allot him on most occasions.”

Yet for all of the innovations Gould implemented in “The Idea of North”—the trio sonata opening with Marianne Schroeder, Frank Vallee, and Robert Phillips recalling when they first came to the North, the “basso continuo” of the Muskeg Express in the background, the explicit manipulation of voice for artistic, not documentary ends, and even the highly existential subject matter itself—the documentary still followed traditional dicta. Gould asked Wally McLean, a surveyor that he met on his train trip, to narrate the documentary in order to give a linear thrust to the somewhat free-associative quality of the piece. McLean is a semi-omniscient narrator, whose profession, according to Gould, “Enabled him to read the signs of that land, to find in the most minute measurement a suggestion of the infinite, to encompass the universal in the particular.” McLean knows the North, and he knows the world, and he can seamlessly relate William James’s A Moral Equivalent of War to the unifying fight to conquer the North. His voice is literally the embodiment of “Northerness:” a crusty, almost monotone sound that can cut through the other voices (what he calls “the noise of civilization and its discontents”) to get to the “true” idea of the North. Gould explicitly prevented McLean’s voice from engaging in

commencement 2008

7

One of Gould’s engineering sketches for “The Idea of North.”

the theatrical juxtapositions he created with the other subjects, instead removing him from any confrontation save that of “his own poetic vision of the North” and the last movement of Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony, which accompanies McLean through the final minutes of the program. McLean becomes the embodiment of tradition in the program, and Gould uses the only conventional “music” heard in the piece to underscore this point. These climactic final minutes of “The Idea of North,” when McLean ruminates for eight minutes over the shimmering violins and expansive horns that were inspired by sixteen swans taking flight simultaneously, are a paean to the limitations of mono technology, a way of demonstrating both the limitations and the beauty of one chamber sound.

Gould began work on his second piece on the people who live on the island of Newfoundland in 1968. Because the trilogy spans a technological revolution, from mono sound, to stereo sound, and finally to the short-lived quadraphonic radio days, each piece is also a meditation on the possibilities of the sound system and the forms that are dictated by the final aural absorption. The pieces are less about the subject matter (which is profound in and of itself) but more about the aural experience—the way that information is absorbed through the weird admixture of sound and language that is the bedrock of any radio piece. Thus, for “The Idea of North,” Gould said he was still confined by the dictates of mono sound, which meant that the listener could only experience the voices in the same sound

8

THE HARVARD ADVOCATE

chamber, either through a speaker or through headphones. This unifying feature dictated a certain conventionality to the progression of the piece, and it also meant that the “contrapuntal” effect was achieved by fading certain voices up while fading other voices down simultaneously.

The engineering sketches for the piece look like sine waves transposed over sheet music, each colored line moving in unison and then splitting away, shooting up into the higher decibel ranges or fading away into silence (see image). Yet by the time he was working on his next piece, “The Latecomers” in 1968, the CBC had decided to switch to stereo sound, which expanded the engineering and “musical” possibilities for the piece.

In order to take advantage of the possibilities offered by stereo, Gould did away with any single narrator and he deliberately removed himself as much as possible from the final product. He was composing the piece this time, not playing it on a stage. Over twelve voices can be heard in “The Latecomers,” voices that exist independent of their owner’s personalities or names. This lends a queer shimmering quality to their thoughts about what it means to be “left behind” on an island that did not fully become a part of Canada until the mid-1940s. Although each voice has a certain sort of argumentative position (Gould readily admits that he identified most with the man who sought a sort of Thoreauvian isolation on the island), each nonetheless functions mostly in relation to the other voices of the piece, like a dialogue between instruments. However, this is a dialogue

that is explicitly false—these people never met each other, and any sort of communication that one hears in the piece is simply the product of effective editing. It is a deliberate rejection of the documentary rule that requires narration or an obvious explication of facts and series of facts—it is a statement about the possibilities of documentary, in particular radio documentary, as an art.

If isolation is the theme of “The Latecomers,” the last part of the trilogy, “The Quiet in the Land,” which was not completed until 1977, represents the complete opposite: a saturation of sounds and voices that weave in and out in their discussion on what it means to be a part of a Mennonite community in the late twentieth century. How is it possible to live in the world but not of it? What does it mean to choose God over modernity? Gould collected over 300 hours of tape for this segment, including one full Mennonite Sunday church service as well as a rock ‘n’ roll performance. He intended the piece to be broadcast in quadraphonic sound (a short lived predecessor to Dolby Surround sound) and he added a slew of new sounds and new weaving techniques in anticipation of the technology, although he recognized that the CBC would probably never be able to broadcast it in its full sonic glory. Unfortunately, the funding and the timing were problematic from the start, so the piece only has around ten minutes of true quadraphonic sound that cannot be heard any more given today’s technology, a cruel ending for Gould’s experiment with sound.

To make up for this, the piece usually incorporates three different sounds at all points in time—snippets from a Bach Suite for unaccompanied cello, Janice Joplin’s “Mercedes Benz,” excerpts from Mennonite services, etc.

This aural saturation is saved from excess by Gould’s skillful editing, the way that he overloads the piece with sound only to offer a thin sliver of coherence to the actual words being spoken by the interviewees. It opens with a church organ, the pre-service chit-chat, the hymns, followed by the “titters” of people leaving the service. There is a deliberate obliqueness to the moment in its refusal to actually allow the listener to hear the

service itself, just the sounds leading up to and after it, heightening the sense of drama and leading to a “Wagnerian” feeling. Gould said: “If you want [people] to be caught up, in the old Wagnerian sense, by a work of art…The way to do it is to keep all of the elements in a state of constant flux, interplay, nervous agitation, so that one is buoyed aloft by the structure and never at any moment has time to sit back and say, ‘Oh, well, that’s going to be the bridge to Act Two.’” Gould fabricates a sense of drama through editing and creates a duality within the piece: the ways that it simultaneously deals with solitude and with community, with the dialogue between voices and their ultimate separateness.

Indeed, it is odd Gould spent the majority of his time in the studio exploring the concept of solitude. For a man who always felt isolated, it is fitting from a biographical standpoint, but as a theoretician of the medium, as a person who embraced the subtle community created by the act of “tuning in,” there is a bit of a paradox in the choice of topic for “The Idea of North,” “The Latecomers,” and “The Quiet and the Land.” A written meditation on solitude is one thing— there’s a sense of isolation inherent in reading a text alone, and very rarely is the act of reading transmuted into anything other than a solitary connection between author and reader. Yet radio, by its very nature, demands a communal experience. When we turn on our favorite Sunday program, we are aware that thousands more, perhaps millions, are tuning in at the exact same moment.

So what does it mean when one of the voices in “The Latecomers” laments that “a man can’t any longer go into the woods with his axe and just make a living by himself”? There’s a sense of reluctance woven into the very fabric of the documentary, a reluctance born of the frustrating spectacle that almost all public media demands.

In a sense, these meditations on solitude, spoken by ordinary people living in isolated communities, contain within their very subject an implicit testing of the boundaries of the medium.

Can radio be something more than a quest for community? Despite his earlier fascination with

commencement 2008

9

10

THE HARVARD ADVOCATE

the idea of radio as an “event,” Gould’s radio work seems instead to push in the other direction. He intended these works to not only be broadcast on CBC, but also to exist as independent art objects—in other words, outside of the strict confines of the medium that demanded a onetime only, ephemeral showing for each and every story.

Gould told Jessop at the end of his interview on “Radio as Music:” “The fact that the documentary is tied, supposedly, to hard information…is an excuse. It’s the most glorious of excuses, really—a passacaglia of fact—and it sets you free, first of all, to deal with art in the factual, assured way in which one customarily deals with pure information. At the same time, it permits you to transform that information into what in the olden days one would have referred to as ‘works of art.’” By incorporating techniques from other disciplines, Gould expanded the possibilities of what could be done in radio and carved out a specific niche for the sound docudrama that is independent of music, theatre, and film, although it certainly borrows conventions from these disciplines.

In a way, the entire conceit of the Solitude Trilogy is just a larger metaphor for radio in general, for an art form that was and continues to feel threatened by the encroachment of other forms of media, perhaps because the foundations of the medium are so tentative. Yet, what Gould says of the Newfoundlanders is equally true of radio as a medium: “The reality is in its separateness.

The very fact—the inconvenience—of distance is its great natural blessing. Through that fact, the Newfoundlander has received a few more years of grace—a few more years in which to calculate the odds for individuality in an increasingly coercive cultural milieu.” The fact that radio has remained separate from all other forms of art and mass communication because of its strange aural irregularity, because it asks people to listen instead of reading or watching or performing any other skill, means that it can function as a medium through which both our interconnectedness and our solitude are given equal priority. They are, in fact, asked to coexist together. The Solitude Trilogy stands above all as an homage to this aspect of radio, to the fundamental paradox of

listening alone together.

commencement 2008

11

1809 laura kolbe

That night frost scored the yellow grass for the last time that year. Child Abraham born, February dyed with bud stipple. State with the name like a clown or a limp.

Nancy Hanks, mother of two lives and one death, hardshell baptist outlawed to Sinking Spring.

“One night Schuyler Colfax left all other business to ask him to respite the son of a constituent, who was sentenced to be shot, at Davenport, for desertion”

Trouble. Their beasts few, borrowing the jenny sometimes from the brethren and sisters. Only when they were past help, we put their cabin in a sweet marble shell, twang of parquet against spalted clapboard.

Postcard-sized magnolia leaf found for writing on: my name, boyfriend’s name.

Parcels. Trochees.

12

No toys but dolls and the trappings of dolls.

Our art must imitate the most wanted.

Yes it does worry my mind that we should make an image and put it on a cake.

And in Kentucky.

THE HARVARD ADVOCATE

Parcels. Trochees. Nancy milksick: Means all failing, total observation running wild but someday baby: you won’t worry, ain’t gon’ worry Worm. My mind. No more.

“I thank you, dear Jesus, that I behold President Linkum!”

Quotations from Speeches and Letters of Abraham Lincoln, 1832-1865, ed. Merwin Roe.

commencement 2008

13

BOOTHS - BRATTLE THEATER David Molander Color photograph

14

THE HARVARD ADVOCATE

BOOTHS - SFMOMA David Molander Color photograph

commencement 2008

15

BEDLAM’S HOMELAND

It may as well have been a joke. It certainly hit like one. The former Government Hospital for the Insane was to be the new headquarters for Homeland Security. Yes, the psychiatric institution that once held would-be assassins and poetic traitors was to become fortress to the nation and office to thousands of bureaucrats.

The plan to convert St. Elizabeths, as the Washington, D.C. mental hospital is now known, started in early 2006. Republicans still held a majority in Congress; Iraq’s constitution had recently been ratified; the sting of Hurricane Katrina had started to dull. These were not quite halcyon days for the Grand Old Party and the Department of Homeland Security, but though President George W. Bush’s approval rating hovered around 40%, it was a far cry from today’s dismal figures.

The purpose of the proposal was the centralization of the many government employees scattered among fifty different office spaces around the capital city. In addition to increasing Homeland Security’s efficiency, the centralization of the Department at St. Elizabeths would contribute a sense of historical continuity to a Cabinet branch that has only existed for half a decade and has yet to issue a terror alert lower than the elevated yellow. While the Department would not have one of those grand neoclassical edifices in the city center, it would at least be unified in a location with landmark status. The Department responsible for promoting America’s “culture of fear,” to use Noam Chomsky’s diagnosis, would finally be able to develop its own “common culture.” That a Department that has

16

THE HARVARD ADVOCATE

alexandra gutierrez

managed to cultivate a climate of paranoia and anxiety through its constant security warnings was to move to a place meant for the treatment of those conditions was fittingly ironic.

St. Elizabeths campus might have been dreamed up by Edgar Allan Poe. Description is doomed to the macabre and sensational. Pillars of steam rise from the various manholes scattered around the site. A cross-shaped portion of the grounds was dedicated for use as a Civil War cemetery; hundreds of Union and Confederate soldiers were buried in the place where their compatriots were treated for the mental trauma of battle.

Decrepit gothic revival buildings are covered in kudzu; the bars that line the windows are eaten by rust. While most of these structures are abandoned and crumbling, a small number are still used. The few patients that remain while away their time in screened conservatories, literally spending their days in the “sunshine sanitarium.” Most of them stare vacantly, as if on display in a red brick menagerie. One shouts “Gomorrah” repeatedly. St. Elizabeths is almost too archetypical, too much the American Bedlam.

Clearly, reformer Dorothea Dix never envisioned this scene of disrepair. She fought for the founding of a large-scale federal mental hospital that could provide the “most humane care and enlightened curative treatment of the insane of the Army, Navy, and District of Columbia.”

Situated on a large tract of land overlooking the Potomac and Anacostia rivers, the hospital was opened in 1855 as a place for enlightened

healing and rigorous research rather than a mere penitentiary for the clinically psychotic.

From its establishment, St. Elizabeths would have a bizarre relationship with the politics of the day. Among the hospital’s first patients was Richard Lawrence, a paranoid schizophrenic who has the distinction of being America’s first attempted presidential assassin. Lawrence, who was convinced he was King Richard III of fifteenth century England, sought to kill the populist and expansionist Andrew Jackson, but his weapon twice misfired. Francis Scott Key, who wrote “The Star-Spangled Banner,” was the prosecuting attorney who had Lawrence committed. Lawrence would remain at St. Elizabeths until his death.

Lawrence was not the only enemy of the state to spend his last days at the Government Hospital for the Insane. In the 1880s, Charles Guiteau was held at St. Elizabeths during his trial for the assassination of President James Garfield.

Guiteau, with delusions of grandeur, believed that he was largely responsible for Garfield’s electoral victory, and then assassinated the president after his requests for an ambassadorship were ignored. Just after shooting the president, Guiteau emphatically declared, “I am a Stalwart of the Stalwarts,” the emblem of the most conservative political faction of the Republican party. In his trial, this assassin was among the first to plead criminal insanity in American courts.

The defense failed, however, and Guiteau was hanged only after a short stay at St. Elizabeths.

The hospital’s proximity to Capitol Hill and its position as a federal institution made it the hospital of choice for not only American assassins, but also cultural icons and political scions. Deranged lexicographers tracked changes in American English while under close watch; Hollywood’s silent film actresses came after breakdowns partially provoked by a growing obsolescence in an evolving medium. Notable among St. Elizabeths’ unincarcerated patients was Rosemary Kennedy, younger sister to John Fitzgerald. Though Rosemary was never fully committed, her treatment at St. Elizabeths has been labeled “the biggest mental health coverup in history.” Her symptoms: moodiness and

a certain slowness. For this, she was given a prefrontal lobotomy in 1941, which left her largely incapacitated for the remainder of her life.

The Kennedy family remained secretive about this failed and overzealous surgery, and some members see it as being the first of the family’s many tragedies.

Five years later, the hospital would be responsible for another political celebrity, this one far more infamous. The poet Ezra Pound spent twelve years of his life at St. Elizabeths, following an insanity plea when faced with charges of treason against the United States. During World War II, the writer aligned himself with the likes of Benito Mussolini, professed admiration for Adolf Hitler, and gave seditious radio broadcasts that condemned America and its politics. He endorsed the fascist project; he produced antiSemitic material. Though he was arrested for the production of un-American propaganda during wartime and displayed no overt signs of psychological instability, his insanity plea held and he was deemed mentally unfit to stand trial.

From 1946 to 1958, Pound resided on the West Campus, where Homeland Security would later concentrate most of its development. At this point, St. Elizabeths was still a fully functional

commencement 2008

17

mental institution and had not yet begun to deteriorate. Gardens were still kept neat and all buildings were put to use. The hospital was home to many thousands as opposed to a few hundred.

While there, Pound worked on translations of Confucius and Sophocles, and he entertained a number of literary figures who visited him in the brick citadel. He had access to manuscripts from the Library of Congress and was able to give speeches to his fellow patients at the hospital’s lecture hall. The treatment that this quisling received seems impossible today.

The greatest project undertaken by Pound during this period was the continuation of his Cantos, a series of oblique poems created over a half-century span. The “Rock Drill Cantos,” as the poems produced at St. Elizabeths are known, are highly political and predictably condemnatory of American policy. While many of Pound’s opinions are rightfully thought to be reprehensible, his poetry still contains a number of insights that are worth repeating. For example, in “Canto LXXXV,” Pound writes, “bellum perenne:” he sings of perpetual war:

And there is, undoubtedly, blood on their sil- ver, Without honour men sink into servitude.

Responsible, or irresponsible government?

Minimum of land without surveillance.

At a later point, Pound includes the fragment, “Encroaching on power of States, monopoly absolute.” Pound had no way of anticipating the perpetual War on Terror. The poem is not a nod to the government’s observational powers over ordinary citizens, as granted by the Protect America Act of 2007. “Canto LXXXV” is a historical reflection rather than a prediction, a look back at the National Bank controversy of the nineteenth century and a study of economic equity’s decline in America. Still, when read today, the poem is capable of illuminating aspects of the contemporary situation—it seems to speak to the constant battle against an idea as opposed to a discrete campaign against a physical enemy, the permissibility of spying on civilians. When the poem’s connection to the space of St. Elizabeths

18

THE HARVARD ADVOCATE

is considered along with the author’s status as a public enemy, the incongruity of a Homeland Security employee occupying the same property as people like Pound, Lawrence, and Guiteau is even more bemusing.

While the War on Terror had its critics at the time Homeland Security’s move to St. Elizabeths was proposed, support for the policy continued to erode over the next two years. The Central Intelligence Agency confirmed that they had a number of secret prisons. Waterboarding remained a media focus. In November, 2006, the electorate delivered a mandate for an anti-war agenda by resoundingly supporting the Democratic party in the Congressional elections. The Department of Homeland Security would not be receiving the same sort of financial and public support.

This winter, renovation plans were finally stalled. The $4 billion project would not even get a tenth of that funding. The renovation budget was drastically slashed—Homeland Security would not receive enough money to move even a single agency. This once top priority was ranked below sewer maintenance, prisoner relocation, and the creation of a Washington, D.C. 25-cent coin. St. Elizabeths would remain a ghost story scene, and Homeland Security would continue on homeless.

The Suicide Party

That night I lingered in the kitchen, rubbing a sponge over and over a delicate cranberry sauce dish. I polished it away, removing glassy slivers until it evaporated in my hands.

The alcohol in the air had thickened into humidity, seeping through my pores, softening tissue into warm fat. But my skin was bone-dry.

The windows were so thickly frosted that I could barely see through, but I could feel the snow falling. It must have started during dinner, snuck in unannounced under the clatter of knives. The places where people had sat were still cold, but the floating liquor made a kind of fire. The room was a gnarl of temperatures, not a blend.

I walked around on bottle caps and turkey bones, kneading them into the carpet. The chairs around the table stood out at wild angles, marked by whoever had been sitting and gesturing there.

The snow was falling so hard that I could hear the roof, the wood bending as the ground level rose. Our little world was closing off, being sealed in, shushed in plastic. Four a.m. barely found us, blanketed on all sides.

The pressure on the walls and roof gave the sensation of slow, laborious movement, a precursor to sailing. I heard the ripple of waves, of time at its weakest, grinding to a halt.

When I burrow through there’ll be nothing to fix my eyes upon.

Alone with the bottles and plates, the candelabra long dormant, wax fixing the centerpiece to the table, the locations of my life dripped into a waiting mouth, flowing into a furnace to be recast. The pictures on the mantle no longer

david rice

resembled me.

A sexless moan curled down the grand staircase.

A window shook in its frame, floorboards creaked in mimicry of the roof, making their peace before giving way.

The path up the mountain will remain unusable until late spring. From the highway there is no sign of a turn-off. The snow will fall until it reaches the sky that it’s falling from and the whiteness will be unbroken.

I take off my clothes, fold them beside the couch and sit down in the dark with a bottle of Brut.

A pulse rattles the House. A kind of energy slithers by, readjusting the décor. I take my Zippo from the pocket of my folded pants and flick at it. I hear another moan and feel narrow fingers brushing my ears, ruffling my hair. Maybe it’s the wind that keeps the lighter from sparking.

I have spent whole seasons as the last one awake, sitting up on the couch like this, one leg crossed over the other, leaning back and looking up at the ceiling or at my partial reflection in the nightened windows, warding things off or beckoning to them. I take a glass from the dishwasher and pour it full, toast whoever is watching.

My breath shallows and memories congeal, gain independence, edge, corner, crowd, and smoke me out, until they are only memories, not mine or of me. Every spot that I have ever been myself in turns haunted. The streets of a hundred cities bend from lines on a map to strings that unwind my skin, peeling away some husk of

commencement 2008

19

normalcy until I lose my shape. The string is sharp as dental floss as it pins my arms, and I hug my sides for warmth.

“I’m me,” I say aloud, for what it’s worth.

The House has always been a place apart. I knew this moment would come, heard its far-off footsteps from the backs of narrow hide and seek places when I didn’t want to be found.

The glow of the almost-morning, filtered through miles of snow, casts submarine shadows like eels swimming in front a projector.

The South The island sun pressed on my eyelids and, along with the crashing waves and everything else, it was too much to fight. I drifted to sleep in an armless plastic chair, head clamped to my tender burned chest, right hand loosely clutching half a bottle of beach bar beer, left hand dangling by my side, a bottle cap resting in the crook of its pinky.

A slight breeze blew through the café, which was dark to keep the heat down, and had open walls and a sandy concrete floor. Good music leaked out of a radio, but I could hear only drums and the crest of a falsetto, nothing in the middle. Most of the tables were clear; the staff was cleaning and restocking the cooler. Everyone was at the beach.

They’d set this chair aside for me.

My return ticket was wedged inside the pocket of my bone-dry bathing suit. The sun sunk into the waiting waves as I rowed my own seas with my eyes closed. My room was overpriced but I could spend whole afternoons there without answering knocks or even really hearing them.

I had an authentic Mao army hat that I’d bargained for in Chengdu and had now pulled over my head to keep the sun off. It was impossible that all the years and people could fit in there, but I guess that’s where they were.

I woke up after the sun had set but the moon still hadn’t risen, when the only light was a lingering reflection in the water. I watched the reggae band set up; it was Saturday. Couples promenaded along the beach, soaking up the mellow evening, on their way to suave island drinks and the sharing of underwater photos. Perhaps all of us came from the same North, really.

20

THE HARVARD ADVOCATE

It would have to be late November.

I went to the shop and bought a bottle of plain white rum. I’d tried all the flavors and ended up where I started. It was dark by the time I hit the beach. I could hear a few cursory upstrokes from the bandstand, the reggae getting off the ground.

My flight was at six the next morning. I made twenty-one unhurried trips from one end of the beach to the other, climbing the cliffs at either end, then hiked back to the road and hailed a cab, tossing the bottle into the surf without a note.

The rum and the beach and the sunburn were affectations. When I drifted out to sea I became small, but only by borrowing the contemplations of others, Greek musings from long ago. My own thoughts had grown too abstract. My senses had diverged and could not be coaxed back home.

Next morning, there I was at the baggage claim, gusty sleet blowing through the automatic door as shuttle buses waited to bring us to the carpark.

I never went back to my hotel room. Left the bill unpaid, my clothes and other possessions scattered across the bed, a ten-page letter for the maid.

At customs the agent scowled at my emptyhandedness. “What did you do all that time without any stuff or anything?”

Everyone on the plane looked unimpressed that we were flying. Their chewing mouths put me on edge. I splashed water on my face in the bathroom and dried my hands on the insides of my pockets, and then on my hair. I nursed a glutinous, sour stomachache. I kept fastening and unfastening my seatbelt, leaning forward and back, puffing out my cheeks.

The man next to me sat down as we were boarding, took a deep breath and shouted, “Goddamnit! I’m gonna be the first person to get off this plane and smoke a cigarette!”

I couldn’t clear my mind of those leering spikes on the tops of the rafters at the beach bar that kept the magpies away. That was how the city looked from above.

The woman next to me leaned over and asked where I’d been all this time, as if I didn’t seem to be coming from the same place that she was.

“I’ve been listening to a thousand and one

versions of The Girl From Ipanema. I needed to hear them all. Every bar on every beach in the world plays a different version. But every night it’s the same.”

She thought it over. “I saw sea turtles mate.”

I emptied some sand from my bathing suit onto my bare feet, under the seat in front of me. “I was watching the sun set. For five years it just kept setting. Over the water. Again and again, lower and lower, it just kept setting.”

She wrapped a wad of gum in the airline magazine. “Damn thing.”

I had abandoned my car in the lot of a strip mall, behind a Denny’s. It must have accumulated pounds of parking tickets since then. Maybe the local kids watched, marking its disappearance with concern or disinterest. I got off the shuttle and hailed a cab.

My skin was like wet toilet paper. The ice shredded my back and shins. I pulled myself through tunnels of ice, toward the surface, letting it slice my armpits and the soles of my feet. There was no pain. Or if there was, it hadn’t hurt.

I find the cab waiting and open the door and climb in. The driver says nothing as he releases the parking brake.

He turns on the radio. Baseball. It barely comes through but still he winces at the score. I watch the fare monitor, trying to count the increments.

The ground and the air look the same. He’s resting his hand on the wheel but isn’t steering.

So I’ll talk for a while. To you, or whatever.

I’ll see if I can find my way into an explanation of how I got here. It’s a long, long ride. I take off my seatbelt and smile to think that I still have the habit of wearing it.

The fare will exceed my savings, eventually, but it doesn’t matter since we’ll never stop. It’ll go up and up and up.

The City Suicide season is in bloom when I touch down on the runway. My apartment wags its tail and asks no questions.

If my death is to have any significance I

suppose I’ll have to introduce myself. Or maybe not. Maybe it’s enough to be speaking across so great a distance, going so fast.

I look at the trees and think that they really are dead, not just standing still. Or made of stone, or glass. There were times when I wondered similar things about myself and other people.

I spent days in the city, getting my winter clothes out of the closet, saying hello to shopkeepers and librarians, bustling in time with the crowds.

But, as if to keep my head warm against the winter, my thoughts grew fevered. I saw shipwrecks off the coast of my island, heard the heaven folks, the non-being folks, shouting like clowns with foghorns and football whistles, waving their arms.

I could die however I chose, tell it what to mean.

The cabbie sighs as the Yankees’ loss is announced. He switches over to the Knicks vs. the Celtics. The cab doesn’t even have a broken heater.

My parents supply me with enough money to live forever. They put it right in the account so I don’t have to ask. But this apartment is empty.

I’d filled up other ones to overflowing. I used to spend entire days emptying online catalogues, until I crowded myself out and had to move. So this place is bare, just me and the floorboards, a laptop, a phone, a mat to eat on. I take a collegial interest in the daily suicides on the news. I’m filled with ambition, optimism.

The city sparkles with light, open storefronts blowing warmth onto the sidewalks. I spend long afternoons in underground malls, thumbing through the merchandise, buying a few things or just sitting on benches, drinking sugary nutmeg tea, watching mothers and daughters, trying to pick out a new theme and aesthetic for a new year.

I like the smell of clothing stores in winter, a faint cologne in the heating system that makes everyone comfortable.

My name is Frank Carrington. This needn’t be one of those times where no one knows anyone’s name. I’m thirty-two, have light brown hair, am in alright shape. I try to sit up straight and stay up late. I love the holidays in a more genuine way

commencement 2008

21

than I could exactly convince you of.

I’ve never done Europe but fuck it.

I go up to my apartment and flick on the laptop.

The café downstairs sends up eggnog whenever I call. The Google icon is bedecked in holiday lights. I type in ‘aberrant suicides.’

Hours slip by. No, that’s a lie. Nothing slips by.

I spend forty minutes engrossed in information, photos of mild adults diving into pits of blood and rabid bats or snorting salt water until their sinuses pour out in streams of glue. There’s a rich tradition.

I call for more eggnog. Then I watch a clip where a guy staples his hands to the sides of his shaved head and ties a rope around his feet and a shorter razor wire around his neck. When he jumps off a building the razor pulls taut, so that he ends up dangling by his feet, holding his head at arm’s length.

In college I lived in a campervan behind the gym, wearing a huge camel-fur coat, smoking this and that from a pipe of polished ivory. It used to be a campus pilgrimage to come out and have a session in there, a Friday night, whatever trip I happened to be on. There’d be candles and costumes, the playing of giddy electronic instruments that the tech kids had helped build, jokes that we’d make up on the spot and never tell again. We’d tear around the city, our faces painted, toting customized weapons, wreaking havoc in defense of the bizarre.

One fall I bought an electric eel and we built a system of tubes and tanks that encircled the campus, up walls, underground, through windows, filled with fluorescent pink water. It swam around and around, casting impressionistic shadows when the light was low, often taking weeks to return to any one spot. The administration had ambivalently allowed it, lacking specific grounds not to.

After graduation people had expectations— antics, shenanigans, daring feats on a more professional scale.

My friends remember that guy. The intervening years had been what they usually are—a pane of tempered glass. We look the same, almost, but now we have code words, touchy subjects, a hint

22

THE HARVARD ADVOCATE

of condescension, as if ourselves back then had somehow become our children, sorely needing our newfound sobriety.

They’ve all gotten married, employed, impregnated, did what they had to, what was best.

I disappeared, seeking lands where a hot meal and a clean bed were enough.

I don’t blame them. We were all big talkers. I take out my address book.

My family has a mansion in the mountains way up north. Way, way up. We used to spend a week there every winter, with grandma and grandpa, all the aunts and uncles and cousins, secondwives, third-nephews-once-removed. But not for Thanksgiving or the Fourth—it was strictly a dead of winter place. It would have been sacrilegious to see it in any other light, without having to dig it out. It’s the place I remember best and worst—my farthest, hardest to reach memories are tucked away in the House’s closets and hallways, as are my happiest, the times I came closest to well-fed, well-rested wintry bliss; when at last I understood what it meant to snuggle. Nodding off in an armchair, I’d whisper, “Alright God, now you get some sleep too.”

In college it’d taken on a different role. In some moods we’d head up with sorority girls and cases of Wild Turkey. Other times, we’d light tremendous fires that burned blue as we sampled Ayahuasca, mescaline we’d ordered from the Ukraine, days salted with Salvia. There were rooms of pillows, rooms of pendulums and science tools, jam and chillout rooms with carpets and guitars and drum triggers. We hunted moose with bows and arrows and told ghost stories in a heated tent. We’d felt capable in a boundless, unspecific way, like we were digging something up that would one day surface and then just be there.

Those years had a timid air of tangibility that I remember as sweetly as I do creeping downstairs at four a.m. to count my Christmas presents. Both are safely sealed in amber. I have as many children as I do childhoods. A bachelor’s progeny.

I order more eggnog and write an e-mail to Bob and Marty, Jake and Carla. Danielle, Aaron ‘One Winnebago’ Walker, Max ‘Rigid Steve’ Sherman, Leon ‘The Legend of Leon Cranston’ Cranston.

All the old Crew, the people who knew me.

True to character, I keep the missive cryptic, inviting them up to the old palace for Christmas, promising a new freak-out.

I write a separate email to my family. Apologize for being out of touch. Say little more than that I’d like to see them, I thought we could all go up to the House if they didn’t have other plans. Give me a call, I’m back. You know, if you want. I’m around.

We’d last spoken at graduation. I’d flown to L.A. with my girlfriend that night to see R.E.M., and from there it hadn’t made sense to come back.

I go back to my suicides, chuckling at some, cringing at others. I do a few push-ups, take a shower. Think of my letters creeping along their wire highways, going places where I can’t follow them. I picture all the people on the other end, sort of real, sort of not. I take another shower, exhausting the hot water. I shave for the second time and call for more eggnog. I pick up my old electric guitar and just hold it, my fingers resting lightly on the strings. I pick up the phone to check that it’s connected.

I lay in bed picturing the get-together. They’ll tell me about their mortgages and mergers, I’ll listen, I won’t mind. We’ll have plenty of Wild Turkey. Mom will hire a caterer to bring up plenty of whatever we want to eat, we’ll crack champagne, play old student videos, tramp into the woods for one of our famously inept hunting trips. I will pet a series of dogs very lovingly. It’ll be like one of William Randolph Hearst’s notorious weekend retreats or that long scene at the end of La Dolce Vita.

And I’ll be among my trees and mountains and pinecones, breathing in the snow that I grew up with. When the time comes, I will slide without friction into the cutting mountain air, just before dawn.

With the covers pulled up to my neck, I feel better than I have in ages. I see familiar swirls of shapes and colors and sea floor forms, in and out of caves emanating tentacles and ribbons of foamy light. It is a dream of nostalgia, as if the sleep of the living were already far behind.

It’s a refreshing cold out, a day that props you up. I have nothing to do. Strolling through the city, looking in the windows, stopping for a cup of coffee or a chocolate snowman, an almond croissant or a cinnamon bun. These are momentous things.

I stop by the library to continue my research, checking out gothic tomes, grisly medieval images of flagellants and plague-ridden prisoners, defrocked kings and defeated generals.

The Japanese.

I’ve never thought less about what it is to die.

For the first time, it doesn’t matter.

I come back in the afternoon with another eggnog. I boot up the laptop and log in. My mailbox is so overrun with junk mail that pruning is a delicate task. I spend half an hour double and triple checking.

I turn on the TV. Two women sit on yoga mats in tights and leotards. They sip twig tea from porcelain mugs. They do a few stretches and breathing exercises. Then they face each other, grip one another’s necks, do a brief but complex series of motions with their fingers, sit still for a moment, look aghast at the camera, and drop dead, falling away from one another like mirror images.

Static. Perhaps a channel that’s hung itself from a broadcasting tower. I turn down the volume.

At 10:30 there are still no e-mails. Reluctantly I pick up the phone, pressing the digits one at a time, fleshing out my parents’ number. I go over my words as I listen to the first three rings and lose my train of thought as I listen to the fourth, fifth, and sixth.

I spend the next mornings cleaning out what few things I have lying around, using an old toothbrush to scrub dried toothpaste off the sink. It’s little more than checking out of a hotel room. I strip the bed and throw the sheets in the dumpster out back. I’d left my last apartment as it was, posters on the walls, socks under the couch, takeout in the fridge.

I’d just taken off, flown back to Mexico. It’s just down the street, that old place. I picture it boarded up, foreclosed, unsellable, as if no one could ever burrow into my wall of memorabilia. I

commencement 2008

23

smirk with a slight twinge of pride at the notion of wasting an apartment like that, as if through some grand process of converting functional spaces to museums I could slow down time and catch up with it.

The morning must be made to last. I strive for longer showers, more coffee, more magazines, more changes of clothes, slower progress. At 12:37 I manage to wait until 1:16. Then I put on some dress pants and an old Brian Eno T-shirt, brush my hair and teeth. Thursday proper.

It’s time to admit that I have a problem with the telephone. And with the Internet. I can’t reach my friends, I can’t reach my parents. I get more and more ads in my mailbox. The TV keeps getting worse. There are ever fewer people at Banana Republic.

I dream of Christ imitators nailing one hand to a homemade cross and waiting for someone to nail the other. I walk under bridges and look up, expecting a fourteen-year-old in blue tights or gray flannel to fall at my feet. I call every night, more than I’ve ever called before. The rings grow

24

THE HARVARD ADVOCATE

accustomed to my breath.

There’s an ongoing TV special about a man stuck in a hole behind his house. Apparently he’d jumped in and started smacking the edges with a shovel, expecting the ground to cave in on top of him. But a harsh frost had come overnight, since he’d dug the hole and planned to bury himself, and the ground was frozen solid. Sixteen feet down, he banged and banged.

Cleaning out my desk I find wads of papers and notes, jotted phone numbers, semi-lucid dreams.

Runes. I line up the numbers and shout into a cemetery of answering machines. I call every day for a week. I try from the payphone. The graves remain motionless, not even a fluttering of feathers.

The apartment starts to scare me. I remember an old line that the Crew had been fond of: Fear is fear of yourself.

I could buy a green Jaguar with custom-fitted snow tires and a windshield defroster that took care of itself. Pay in cash. But instead I hail a cab. A few hours with someone will warm up my

voice. I hand the driver fifty thousand dollars, Merry Christmas written in blue pen on a post-it on top of the stack. He starts to drive.

I left the key to my apartment in the door. The room is cleaner than it was when I bought it. The property deed lies in an envelope on the table, with a signed note bequeathing it to Santa.

It takes nine and a half hours to reach the House. I tell him to take the scenic route. I found an ancient Cuban cigar in my desk last night. I pull it from my shirt pocket and find my Castroissue Zippo, closing my eyes and picturing earlier cigars, lined up like butterflies under glass.

Biting the end with my front teeth, I shiver and remember ice cream cones in summer.

The driver switches on a football game, the Patriots vs. the Packers. He keeps turning it up whenever I clear my throat.

Passing a park by the outskirts of town, I signal him to stop. I buy a loaf of white bread with caraway seeds.

I walk through the park’s frozen iron gate. My jacket pulled down as far as it’ll go, I sit on the edge of a bench. I take off one glove, look into the sunlight, like egg yolk and water. Slowly I pinch off a few crumbs, balling up the airy dough and the sharp seeds.

I scatter them on the ground, down with the packed sand and cigarette butts, where the pigeons descend.

They chew and look around and I throw them more. I remember all the times I’d seen the old men and women on this bench when I’d come by on a Sunday with my parents. I always wondered why they wanted to sit outside, pecking at bread with their fingers. Why they had to be so withered.

I breathe behind my scarf.

The North Four hours north of the city and everything has changed. It was cold there but not like this. Ice glints off the windshield and the side mirrors are covered with tiny crystals. The snow by the side of the road is three feet high; the drivers in the opposite lane look straight ahead.

It’s only four p.m. but the sun is flying low. The

scene glows blue as night settles in. The trees get thicker and the highway goes from two lanes to one. Between the density of the woods and the faltering daylight, I can barely see. I tell the driver to switch on the brights. He switches to hockey, Canadian teams I don’t know.

The snowy forest emits a low hum. There’s something about sounds that come from utter stillness. A motion should accompany a sound, but not in this part of the country, at this time of year.

At the rate we’re going we should be there by two-thirty or three, just as the snow is turning red in anticipation of the next day.

The House comes up all of a sudden. There’s nothing around for miles, not even one-story cabins or woodsheds, just the preserved footsteps of deer and snow hares, windy mountaintops and stark boulders, looming evergreens, their needles rigid, tunneling around the car. At the end of the tunnel is the House, like we had a hundred-mile driveway.

This tunnel is only for the drive up. Once there, the trees close in, the ground grows steeper, a network of valleys and sloping hills emerges, one that only the hawks and squirrels can navigate.

The House has been in the family for so long there is no tell of its acquisition.

It’s almost four a.m. We stopped at two at an all-night grocery to fill the trunk with supplies. A red glow colors the sky like a veiny leaf.

I ask that the cabbie turn off the engine but not the power, sitting in the car for a time, looking at the House, going back through all the times I’ve pulled up here. Sports have ended and the radio is at a loss.

I go inside at dawn. The key is in its usual hiding spot, frozen in place for safekeeping. I crawl up to my room, where the sheets are clean and tightly tucked in. I take off my wet boots and jacket and city clothes, and rifle through the dresser until I find my red and blue flannel pajamas. I hold them to my face, putting my hands into the tangle of pockets to open them back up. Every house’s clean laundry has its own smell. A combination of the detergent and the air and the water, and whoever did the washing.

commencement 2008

25

This flannel still has the smell, fifteen yearsold. I try to picture the detergent my mother used, where she might have bought it, why.

I kick my legs under the crispy sheets, finding an angle of repose, a sheepskin quilt around my shoulders, the windows open a crack to let in the air, full of sap. I say goodnight to God, thinking of the deadbolt downstairs, locked out of old habit.

When I wake it’s evening and a blizzard. The driver said he wasn’t cold.

I stay up all night going through old boxes and albums, closets where I used to hide, corners where missing chess pieces tended to turn up.

The next morning I fall into bed again and sleep until evening.

The next days pass softly and all at once.

The driver sits in the cab, staring through the windshield, hands resting on the wheel.

The firewood in the shed is dry and plentiful.

I build tremendous fires when I wake up, and sit by them, watching their progress. I go through a collection of slippers, rediscovering my favorites.

There are nights when I don’t think a single thing.

Other nights, I make up a peopled history of the House, imagining whiskery ancestors sitting in my place, watching the same fire, wearing the same slippers. I dig up dressers full of checkered suits, trenchcoats, thick wool sweaters with eighteenth century designs. I try them all on, start doing the voices, holding court through the generations.

I look through albums of yellowing photos; see countless versions of my face, earlier prototypes embossed on dusty velum. The hallways are so long, there are so many floors, the ceilings are so high. I yell, sometimes. Some nights I check on the driver, notice that he’s growing a beard, that the car battery has died.

The rooms don’t always look the same.

Sometimes I’ll turn on lights and find that they go out on their own. Sometimes the bathroom door will be locked; sometimes a half-full wine glass shows up by the sink. My bed is always made, the sheets always as clean as that first day, smelling of detergent. I catch myself leaving doors open when I enter rooms, because when I close them I hear knocks. I want to be gracious

26

THE HARVARD ADVOCATE

and respond to the knocks, but they’re so hesitant and thin. Sometimes a dress will be missing from my mother’s closet, a spot of my father’s shaving cream dabbed on the corner of a bathroom towel.

I boil a pot of water and squeeze in half a lemon. Hot water with lemon was dad’s poison, even at restaurants where he used to say that anything fancier came out lukewarm.

He has a point. As I pull on my coat and adjust my wool hat to cover my ears and take a sip, calming warmth encircles my ribs.

It’s about one a.m. by the time I make it outside. Perhaps four degrees.

I switch on the flashlight. The trees look incredulous, unsure what I’m doing out here.

It’s a time when they count on not being seen.

Maybe they dance and sing in baritone harmony at this time of night. They look incredibly hard, like pillars of stone, too hard to be living. I think of the ancient days when trees were impassible barriers, part of the landscape, like mountains.

The snow always makes it seem later than it is.

Or makes it later than it should be.

My old boots still fit. They’re falling apart at the ankles and some of the stuffing has seeped out, but they’re still my old boots.

After I’ve walked half an hour the House is just another warm memory. These are the hills where I raced my sister in snowshoes and bobsleds and built caves and forts with my cousins. I climb until I reach a ridge and then travel along it, eye to eye with the treetops, where there’s a speck of moonlight.

Gusts of cold air wipe my mind clear. I trudge forward, the snow past my knees. My right hand pushed deep into my coat pocket, my left clutching the flashlight, I come to the entrance of a part of the forest I haven’t seen before. This is where I’ve always turned back. Always right here. This spot contains a message, a warning, a phenomenon of acoustics and root structure. The edge of my childhood.

Tonight I keep going. I have a sense of where to go.

The snow gets thicker, beyond snowmobile and ATV territory. The trees have a wilder look

in the faltering swath of my flashlight. As if they haven’t been domesticated, hardly ever seen. A land untouched by morning.

Soon the ground gets steep and icy. Several times I slip and bang my knee on a buried rock.

Some branches are close enough to grab them and pull myself along. I turn off the flashlight and put it in my pocket, freeing my hands. It slips out and falls down the ridge. I’ll go where the evergreens go, pulling on them like a rope, syncing up with their senses now that mine are gone.

I grew up on so many stories of evil lurking among the pines that were there any out tonight, I’d have to disbelieve my eyes.

There are surely wolves.

I rattle with that same low hum that I heard from the road. It gets louder and louder as the rest of me is hushed. It’s almost a vibration, the pulse of energies frozen in the snow, the sound of the trees’ massive underground structures, the heaviness of the sky. The cries of distant animals come through like whispers, dissolving into thick frost. They hum in time with the rings of distant planets, a distance that’s shrinking.

I can’t perceive the change in temperature. My face feels like putty, my blood like slush. I’m so used to the cold that I can’t panic, can’t recognize when it’s time to.

I’ve known this all along. Soon there will be a point of seamless transition. It’ll look like a weary traveler succumbing to exhaustion and falling face first into the snow, limp and blue.

It will be a walking-through. But nothing so concrete. It’ll be like water flowing, once I’ve walked too far ever to come back. My bones will become wood, then rubber, then hot water, cool, cold water. Then ice. While my friends and family remain in a land of unsent or unreceived emails, all will go milky translucent and the picture frames will soften and bend until everything but the trees and the air in my lungs turns to music.

And then the trees too, even the air, all will gently melt into unbroken melody…

Another gust hits me square in the face, stirring up powder from the ground and searing the skin under my eyes. The spaces between the trees grow so thin, the eyes peering out so bright, the hum so loud, that I can’t walk any further. It

closes in, slamming on the lens cap.

There’s only an instant of pain. I hear the clink of wine glasses, a smattering of disparate applause.

And then I am sucked through, across to another side of a prism.

I look up and see the first pale white sparks of a new day. The red glow is passed. Must be seven.

I roll to my feet. It’s gotten a little warmer, temperate. I push up to a clearing in the pines just ahead.

And again there’s the House, lights burning in the windows.

The Dead The coffee always tastes better here. There’s a set of gigantic pewter mugs in the cupboard to go with our gigantic bacon breakfasts. The syrup is so thick and heavy that it dissolves the pancakes, reducing them to piles of mush.

Sitting on the couch, I share an inhalation of rich aroma with my mother, who’s the only person in the whole world that loves good coffee as much as I do. We flip through the film review sections of antique magazines, coffee on our fingertips.

My father sits in an armchair next to the fire, just looking at me and smiling, satisfaction in the creases of his face.

My aunt calls us to the breakfast table, where plates of steaming pancakes, Canadian bacon and warmed maple syrup appear, born by my uncle Harry and my dad’s cousin Susanne, a flannel mural. There are platters of sausages, corn bread, a pitcher of pulpy grapefruit juice. My father pokes the fire with the same cast-iron tools that I used last night, and all the nights before. I look at the snowglobe snow, the paper shaving, Santa’s workshop snow.

Two dogs groan by the fire.

The pancakes taste as good as ever. I cut sausages and bacon, and alternate bites, washing it all down with large gulps of coffee and fresh cream. My relatives beam contentedly. Everyone is in pajamas and a fluffy bathrobe or a wellworn sweatshirt, leather and wool-lined slippers, rubbing their hands over the steam rising from

commencement 2008

27

their plates, eating with the slowness of those with a free day ahead, smoke from the fire dusting our cheeks. There’s no conversation, just nodding.

I help myself to seconds and thirds, sleepy from the richness of the syrup, my cups of coffee half full of cream.

More people keep joining the table. Other aunts and uncles, my grandparents, cousins.

Everything takes on gentle yellow tones, easing into quintessence.

After two hours my aunt is still bringing out fresh plates of pancakes. She warns us that the melted blueberries and chocolate chips look the same, and she brings waffles too, with strawberries and whipped cream, a steaming pot of hot chocolate with a wooden ladle.

I excuse myself to the bathroom.

I find that I’m unable to lock the door. Afraid to pull too hard, I get into the shower. I can’t warm the water. I can’t smell the soap-salt; I can’t feel my hair between my fingers. Steam rises toward the ceiling fan, mixing with my skin and shearing

28

THE HARVARD ADVOCATE

off layers that grow back as soon as they float away. I am becoming the steam. When I close my eyes I see it passing by. It smells like my father’s aftershave, like the rind of a frozen lemon, slowly thawing.

I see the familiar dab of shaving cream on the corner of the sink as I climb out of the shower, bone-dry. I glance through the Venetian blinds.

The trees are different in some attribute besides their appearance.

I watch the snow for a spell, picking out the individual flakes with microscopic clarity. I can see the colors in the sky changing, afternoon already on its way. I could stare out this window until the House fell into the ground. I turn and see my mother in the doorway, radiantly smiling, watching me watch the snow.

“Isn’t this great?” Her mouth doesn’t move. I think back to breakfast but can’t remember if it moved then.

She just stands there. She says, “Isn’t this wonderful?”

Next moment I’m downstairs, looking up at

the massive Christmas tree in the living room, presents piled to the ceiling. I regard them for a long while, trying to be reminded of something.

I pick one up and tear at the paper. Underneath is more paper. I tear that too, and the paper underneath, and underneath that. Bright green paper with silvery stars and children ice skating in a cartoon town, or gleaming red with gold wreaths and chimneys breathing gold smoke. I tear and tear, building up a pile behind me. It’s getting dark. The tearing makes me sweat. I wipe my brow and again find it bone-dry. I shred the presents, unwrapping with both hands, digging in my nails. Soon the pile of paper and tape and ribbons and cards is taller than I am.

I turn to see my father and my uncle Powell in dinner jackets and wool slacks, swirling cognac in tremendous snifters. They bury their noses in the aroma. My father gestures to a tray on the coffee table, making a gracious welcoming sweep with his right hand. I see dots of lotion on his cuticles.

Their legs are crossed, both pointing in the same direction.

“It’s Christmas. Have a drink, won’t you?”

I glance over at the calendar hanging beside the chess set on the mantle above the fireplace, between a portrait of my great-grandparents and an ice rink in some imagined Swiss town, filled with wood cottages and pointed roofs. The calendar’s picture for December is a pastel Frosty the Snowman with a red scarf blowing in the wind. A red X through the box for the 25th.

I turn the page. Also December. And the page before—December. I turn the pages faster.

December, December, December.

I sit in the easy chair, swirling cognac, one leg crossed over the other. I try to go back through the events of last night, but I remember only the trees and the eyes, the howls and the hum. The sun setting and setting and setting all along the coast, marking the end of a new day by repeating the end of the day before. There’s a place along that trail where my mind falters. The snow falls ever thicker, halfway up the windows. I rock slightly in the chair, look at the steam rising in the kitchen where my aunts are baking a turkey.

The longer I sit, the more I start to hear. Old

conversations, secrets I told my cousins as we lay awake in the bunk beds in the guest room, times my uncle caught me cheating at Monopoly but laughed and said he didn’t mind, times my grandfather lit his pipe and told us about the air force, or when I’d overheard my mother talking to her mother and understood that she had been as young as my sister once. Sometimes in the air I can perceive the faint crackle of movies I’d stayed up to watch with the adults while my cousins slept. When I look at the carpet I see old Pepsi stains, the places where our dog peed or I spilled fingerpaint, the coasters on the coffee table where grandma’s souvenirs sat before they were carted away. An ivory bull from Zaragosa, a porcelain doll from Novgorod, Gulliver’s Travels bound in red leather and gold leaf. I can tell that they’re all still here. All these layers coexist, one on top of the other, like sheets of painted cellophane.

Again the voices come without moving.

“Dinner is served. Turkey’s getting cold, Franky-o.

Come take a plate and serve yourself.”

They seem unsurprised to see me here. I dig into a hearty mound of turkey and stuffing, mashed potatoes with melted marshmallows, cranberry sauce with grated orange peel in an elegant glass dish.

I watch the snow piling up.

“Relax, Franky. It always snows like this. Makes it all the toastier in the ol’ igloo, don’t you think?”

My aunt Bea, spooning gravy onto my plate.

I think I’m getting the hang of the language.

“So how long have you all been here?” I ask, in between mouthfuls.

“What do you mean, honey?” My mom looks very slightly concerned.

“Well, you know, having Christmas dinner. Do you remember when everyone arrived?”

My dad intervenes. “Like every year, Frank.

Like normal. Your uncle Powell and aunt Lara came up on Thursday because they get off work first, lucky ducks, and then your mother and I came up Friday, just to help get the place ready, and well, you know, everyone came at their own pace.” He dabs his cheek with a cloth napkin.

So they live out the same weekend, over and over, reverting back to the beginning when it’s

commencement 2008

29

time for everyone to go home. I have some gravy.

It’s not that surprising. If I were scared, now, I would only scare them. I change the subject.

“I’m really loving my new job, I think I’m going to get promoted in the new year. Clarissa and I are considering marriage. She says that we’re working toward it. Maybe we’ll move closer to the Baltimore area to be near her parents, get a house on the Chesapeake, that sort of thing. I can work from home some of the time, so it’ll be really ideal.”

“That’s wonderful Franky. Just great. Fantastic place for children. Near the water and all. You must tell her to call us some time so we can help her plan the wedding. I assume you’re not in charge of that department, eh Franky? Eh?” “I’m sure she’d like that. It’s a pity she couldn’t make it up this year. She wanted to.”

“Isn’t that sweet.” My mother pours a glass of white wine and licks her lipstick off the rim.

I help my father pick out champagne in the cellar.

We have bread pudding and Asti Spumante for desert.

Later I sit down on the couch, not for the last time tonight. I put down my champagne and spill out the cayenne peanuts I’d been absentmindedly squeezing. It does me good to spend a while with nothing in my hands. My perception slides a hundred yards out the window, into the snowy field, under the humming crescent moon. It looks back at me, illuminated by the crackling fire, arms spread along the top of the plush couch.

I glance again and again at the snow, hoping the taxi isn’t buried.

Everyone is slow in getting to bed. They go in and out of their rooms, change clothes, come back for nightcaps, watch the fire burning low, settle into chairs with hardcover novels. Two uncles start a chess game, allowing ten minutes between moves.

I sit in the living room for a while, enjoying everybody’s company. Bottles are starting to crowd the floor, the vapor condensing on the windows like fog. The woods beyond the fog, through the fluttering snow, look like the shore of an unearthly lake tended by a ferryman with an

30

THE HARVARD ADVOCATE

oar of pine needles.

In a previous life I had a hunch. Following it, I’ll take off later tonight.

Excusing myself from the communal atmosphere of the living room, I pass through the kitchen with its red ochre tiles, through the den with its bearskin rugs, through the library with its crystal chandeliers and crowded oak shelves.

I enter the ballroom, full of some weight that sits on the curtain rods. The light is the color of port wine.

I stop for a moment to listen. I see my grandmother, her grandmother, hers, hers, hers. Sitting in identical rocking chairs, they shift slowly back and forth with creaks that have nowhere to go. Their knitting on their laps, their hair tied in buns, cheeks touched with powder, their eyes closed, they pass the needles by feel, argyle sweaters and Christmas stockings they’ll never finish. Their perfume is light, their motions hypnotic.

I tiptoe back through the heavy wooden door and turn toward my mother’s studio with its floorto-ceiling window.

My fingers almost tremble as I reach for the doorknob at the top of the basement stairs, unaccustomed to the rush of old habit.

I smell a chill from the unpainted concrete.

Strains of a drum waft up to meet me. Epitaph (March for No Reason): I’d recognize those harmonics if my ears were stuffed with mummy rags. I sit on the third stair from the top and listen, my eyes tearing up, bone-dry. I keep time with my tongue against my teeth.

The Legend of Leon Cranston is the first to notice me. Like my parents he seems unsurprised, just happy. Danielle takes a deep hit from a fourperson fish tank that they’re all sitting around, cross-legged, on bamboo mats. She leans back and exhales, fixing her wild green eyes on me. My nostrils flair at the smell of cramped exorcisms and the conspiracy of mathematical subtraction and God’s top secret sense of humor, the kindly old buffoon pent up in a ski chateau with a Polaroid camera and a bottle of Jack, making prank phone calls to the righteous.

Danielle passes the mouthpiece to Rigid

Steve, who makes one half of a handshake in my direction and inhales with gusto.

She rotates her head, then her shoulders and elbows and then her hands. Her eyebrows dance, her toes wiggle. “I’m a naked genius in the mouth of Jesus,” she asserts. “Have a seat, Frank.”

I come down the stairs and pull out a mat from the closet. One Winnebago asks me point-blank: “Who do you think you are?”

The old words take a moment to come back.

“I’m the former rind of whoever I am.”

Everyone relaxes when I remember our old greeting.

I don’t pass up a hit when my turn comes. I sit back on the concrete, reel in the familiar sensation of becoming a negative physicality, a slurping mouth that sucks out matter and puts it nowhere. I succumb to consideration of the word ash, walking down an institutional hallway where all my former babysitters are embodied as towering boxes of Cheerios and Special K. “Tiznit!” shouts Jake. I look in his direction.

“Tiznit!!” he shouts again, imploringly. “Tiznit?”

Carla leans over and explains. “We’ve been systematically reducing his vocabulary. That’s all he has left. Impressive, huh?”

I nod, approving their work.

Jake restarts the King Crimson record and I hobble over to the corner and plop down behind a keyboard. Without looking at the keys I find the two most perfect notes in the dictionary, and play along with 21st Century Schizoid Man’s deranged chords.

Through a veil of incense, Marty gets my attention. “Nice to be back together, man. We were wondering if maybe you weren’t coming, like maybe you liked it better back there, or something.”

I keep playing the keys while I turn around halfway to meet his imploring look. “You’re just twiggin’, mister. I haven’t gone anywhere.”

He doesn’t seem to have heard. “How was it?”

“How was what?”

“You know. It. Your curtain call, Frank, your grand adieu. Your damn suicide. How’d you pull it off? Did it hurt?”

It’s time to leave. Making my way to the door, I fish out another classic line. “Why don’t you

chew on some maybe!”

Danielle, lying on her back, voicing a conversation between two stick people cavorting on her stomach, hears my parting words. She responds, turning her head in my direction.

“Future is the dodge ball of the absurd.”

So I left them there, climbing out of my cereal box museum, yawning to clear my head, pulling the door softly shut.

Upstairs all the lights are out, the cups and bowls and platters left dirty on the table, chairs strewn in all directions, stains, spilled wine. Today is Sunday, which means tomorrow is Thursday, the day when everything reverts. So no need to clean up. It’ll all be taken of.

The specks of nightlights and appliances and clocks shine, and the snow outside gets ever redder.

Needing to gather my thoughts by holding something, I feel my way into the kitchen and find a dish. I lick cranberry sauce from its edges and begin to polish it.

Sitting on the couch, I finish a bottle of champagne. The House is starting to stir with the forces of reversion. A grandfather clock picks up speed; a groan saunters down from the roof, from the weight of the snow, or reindeer. This Christmassy waiting is nothing if not familiar.

There is to be no farewell ceremony. I hoist a poker high over my head and smash the windowpane next to the fireplace, burying glass in the wall of snow.

I put my head down and wriggle my shoulders through the window, half-swimming as my arms find their way into the snow. It’s soft and warm, like coconut shavings.

It only takes a moment to readjust my breathing. I paddle with wide breaststrokes, like a tadpole. I can’t see my body, not even my hands in front of me. I take my time, stretching to my full size, inhaling the soft coconut smell. Soon the House will have vanished beneath me, like a nothing village drowned by a public reservoir.

I burp and find a hint of smoke, passing it around my mouth as I swim, or climb, or fly.

Just as the sun is rising I poke my head out of

commencement 2008

31

the ground. A thick layer of ice has formed on top. I tear at the surface, biting, scratching my way through. With deep cuts up and down my arms and across my chest and around my neck, I emerge.

I stand up, the pain jolting me to my feet. I am dizzy with open veins and scalding ice. Ten feet to my left is the yellow Taxi, the driver regarding me suspiciously from inside, bestial behind his beard.

He reaches across to open the passenger door and scowls as I sit down naked on the seat.

And so we drive those glacial miles, mutely glued to the road. He’s not frightened by the plateau, but is happy to accept my directions. I know exactly where we’re going. With the tip of his thumb he nudges on the fare monitor.

He twiddles with the radio like a second wheel, snatches of Barcelona vs. Cadiz, New Zealand vs.

South Africa, snatches of matches, sports with no name. He turns the headlights on and off; I close my eyes and shout left! and right! like a coach

32

THE HARVARD ADVOCATE

leading a gymnastics practice.

Thus passes a featureless eternity.

The actual suicide party, as far as I can tell, was barely worth mentioning. I am glad to remember it only as a final moment jarred into me by a hiccup of disappointment, before our procession fell into such stately and listless waltz-time.

Phone calls trickled in slowly, friends complaining of sundry other commitments, complaining about the roads this time of year, or worried that seeing me would call up old times that they’d already put to rest. My parents said they’d already organized a Christmas party at the House; I was welcome to join them.

Some said they’d try to make it, others called for rain checks. The catering had been passable but uninspired. There had been excessive drinking, uncalled for toasts, ironic discussions about global warming and the unbelievable cold outside. No one was that enthusiastic to have me there or to know where I’d been.

Popped bottles, page after page of old photos

that everyone gasped at; surprised by how similar those nested timeframes had all come to look. My friends all drank microbrewed mahogany lager and talked about mahogany hardwood floors.

It was a house of ghosts.

I’d announced my suicide on Christmas Eve, slating it for the next morning, making some sloppy pun about caskets and Boxing Day. That’d been a graceless evening, all stumbled pleas to reconsider. My mother had emerged with more baby photos, pictures of me as Captain Hook on Halloween or Bottom in an eighth grade Midsummer’s Night’s Dream.

These people had the stench of suicide leaking from their armpits. They had all been down that road before.

It came as no surprise when, the next morning, everyone woke up with hunger in their eyes. It was time for my Christmas present to the family, to make it clear that I was back for good.

I’d ordered sixty pairs of opera glasses and matching white gloves, distributed them to everyone on the afternoon of Christmas Day. I got my cousins to help me set up chairs in a circle in the cavernous den. We built a little stage in the middle. Lusting for a reaction, I’d gone to the effort to set up an elaborate mess of wires and electrical equipment from the basement, to confuse everybody as to what the method would be.

Earlier that month, when I was in the House alone, I’d come across a family secret. When I killed myself in front of them, it was no one’s first time.

At long last we reach a grove of pine trees, thick as the walls of a tunnel. He hasn’t been interested in hearing me explain anything. “Just tell me where to turn.”

“Keep going straight. Yep, yep. Okay, here, bang a left.”

I direct him through a few taut maneuvers, but mostly it’s all straight. We haven’t crossed any metaphysical borders—it’s just been a really, really, really long drive. Sometimes that’s enough.

We accelerate down the tunnel and glide to a

halt in front of the House, dim with the solemnity of death, windows hardly lit.

He pulls into his usual spot and yanks the brake, resenting that the battery is dead and with it the radio.

“I’ll just be a minute.”

I walk up the brick steps to the house, noticing that the window to the right of the door, next to the fireplace, has been hastily patched with duct tape.

I knock, dried blood stiffening my knees and wrists, and am received. I make my appearance inside, concluding the trick. A coffin is open in the living room, adorned with a wreath. Everyone sits around in a circle, sipping cognac from tremendous snifters.

As I walk back, the driver pops the hood. I reach inside and jumpstart the engine. It’s snowing again. I pry open the passenger door.

“Okay, let’s go.”

So we’ll drive on and on, across and across. The nagging of gasoline will strain to keep up with us but will fall behind, sucked into the irrelevance of a tremendous past. We will drive on without it. Perhaps from time to time we’ll find another house, another iteration of the House, the family sitting around the table, subtly different, with minute variations on their idiosyncrasies, until I come to know my family so well that they grow invisible. Perhaps these Houses will occur at constant intervals, like plots on a suburban avenue, intervals that I’ll learn to tap out after we’ve cycled through them enough times, imposing rhythm onto the white. As demure a waltz as any.

And I’ll stay at each House, I suppose, visiting with everyone, until I detect the length and nature of the recursion, and then I’ll have to escape, quickly, before I become incorporated or the invitation grows too cozy.

commencement 2008

33

I hate you don’t touch me or Bat and Hat

Becky James 16 mm animation 5 minutes

34

THE HARVARD ADVOCATE

Directions from Bread City gabriel rocha

(high morning) What bread knew is a soft place to land on the street.

On the grass, on the styrofoam rooftops. On the bell towers.

Buildings and signposts and chimneys crook to the sky of bread.

Throw a glass cup out the window.

Throw a chair. Three legs stick up and another snapped one claws into the sidewalk.

Lie face down in bed and eat till there is crust. Regenerating bread rises over you like new skin. There’s no security for anyone. The weather leavens and five people go missing.

Don’t forget them. In the marsh, packs of thigh-bodied geese refuse to leave the premises

commencement 2008

35

(pilgrimage to the silo) i.

The dome-roofed silo bunker, we direct our prayers there.

A smatter of a glint corkscrews to the gold-tipheavy clouds.

From anywhere you can listen.

Slow-moving water deposits accumulate earth up to the knees, ii. and back there, under, a purple brick furnace connects with the tunnels pulling a massive bulk of air. Where the first tunnel opens with a giant chainlink tent, take it straight on.

Eyes will tighten their belts for orange night. Follow the railing forward with one hand. iii.

Aside, a pair of headlights fills the floating plastic bag with a boxing glove breath.

Air is damp from tadpole ponds curdling somewhere above your head. Not too many others walking, and any of the few could pull a knife, among other things. iv.

Prepare for it and pad your sides with sticks of butter.

Clip them like a T.N.T. vest under your arms. Fill out each rib spacing, and add another layer to your torso.

36

THE HARVARD ADVOCATE

(barricade home) The lighthouse doubles as a smokestack.

Roar out the yawn coming.

Turn on the television for a real threat.

Dismantle the monument not of bread.

A furred garlic clove body skitters with its head down and breathes fast like a bird to make a home under the floorboards. From time to time, it chirps.

A sleeved elbow points and eases into the wall.

Lie down the chair in bed on its back. Sit in it, put your legs up.

commencement 2008

37

Letter

Xiaowei Wang Canvas mailbag, red embroidery thread 48” x 32”

38

THE HARVARD ADVOCATE

My ParentS’ Bed

Michael Ellis Oil on canvas 26” x 26”

commencement 2008

39

Things Are Not As They Seem

“Take care, little gringo cowboy. Things are not as they seem.”

I shook my head, confused. The bathroom was humid and smelled of tangy chemical shit and disinfectant. His silhouette blocked the door. I squinted and posed the question, “You mean you aren’t a Native American transvestite working in a Mexican dive bar?”

“No, well, yes. That part is true,” he said and sighed and shook his head. He had a heavily accented smoker’s voice. His beer breath washed over my face. “But that sweet young squaw you’re consorting with out there, she is going to take your kidneys and leave you on ice.”

“Oh. God damn,” I said contemplatively. As much as it irked me that he called me a gringo, it fit the trend. But his ancestors failed him on foresight. My girl was no killer. I was sweating. I wiped my forehead and ran my hand through my hair. Then I asked, “Literally or figuratively?”

“Both.” His tense, broad-boned shoulders rose and fell with each breath and even in the shadow I could feel his eyes locked in on my mine as I looked away.

I took a deep breath and tried to clear my head.

My mind was crawling all over the place. I had eight hours. For what? My pulse was laboriously consistent just behind my eyeballs. I grimaced and cleared my throat. I was twelve beers deep, two blunts blown, had lost my cowboy hat somewhere, spilled Micheladas on my shirt, taken a shot of Bacardi 151, kissed an old toothless woman and swallowed some small pill with a bat on it.

I blinked and shook my head again. Then I reached up and clapped my hands on his bony-

40

THE HARVARD ADVOCATE

brad baughman edged shoulders. “Gracias, Kemo Sabe, but I’ll be skipping back across the border soon, and that little squaw out there… I think it might be love.

Our eyes met, that little freakshow. She was doing a shot of tequila with her friends. She had a small sprinkle of salt on the back of her hand. She slowly brought it up to her lips and kept my gaze as she kissed the salt off the swell of skin between her thumb and the base of her forefinger.

We were drunk long before we came – we being Juan and me.

My name is Joshua Turin.

We had already been stopped twice by the police, those brown shirted slackers with cow eyes just waiting to go crazy on a gringo. I wore a cowboy hat, a lone ranger mask and a black shirt with the collar up and the top button undone.

Juan had draped a gaudy cross necklace onto me for “Jesus bling,” which I told him was dumb, but wore anyway. The bouncer was a lanky Indian in a flowered dress with a ponytail kept loosely together by a pink scrunchie. While she frisked me, I noticed she had a remarkably dark five o’clock shadow and a conspicuous Adam’s apple.

I held my arms out straight and stood casually limp. The music was a thumping Shakira techno remix. I ignored it.

Her/his hands sifted lightly up the inside of my leg and past my crotch.

Out of nowhere, Juan shoved the bouncer, and bounced on his toes with his fists up. “No le chingas wey. ¿No sabes que es el Christo Estadounidense?” The bouncer stared back at him blankly. Juan continued, switching

effortlessly into English, “Can’t you see he’s the White Jesus?” He pointed at my necklace and then stuck his hand up my shirt. “Feel his palms! Feel his side! Would Jesus carry a gun?

I’ll cut off your ear you pinche Pedro.”

“Pinche Romano,” I corrected softly, swaying, batting his hand out from under my shirt.

“What?” he asked me.

“Nothing, just chill out, ok?” I said, trying to shrug off his antics as if he hadn’t been referring to me as “the Jesus” for the past four days. He was wearing a flannel shirt with suspenders and big rubber boots. He tore off his bright orange cap, held it between his hands, and then kneeled in supplication to the Indian.

“My dark-skinned Indian friend, you have to understand that the Peace Corps Jesus thinks we should no longer laugh,” he said as he shook his head, “but it’s obvious you don’t speak a word of English, you dumb, drunk, indigent indígena waste of wine and oxygen.”

He turned to walk away, but I reached out and spun him back around. I found my balance. I said, “Hey… fff-fuck… Apologize to him, you stupid spick.”

At this, Juan burst into laughter and shook his head, “You crack me up, whitey, I mean you’re really cracking up, aren’t you? No wonder administration is psycho-vaccing you.”

The Indian’s eyes darted back and forth, scrutinizing our body language. My face flushed red with embarrassment which quickly turned to anger. I was sick of seeing the natives being subjugated to street-sweeping status. Sick of the global hierarchy of double standards. I said, “Apologize, alright?”

“Or what?” asked Juan, still laughing, “Joshers you really crack me up. You think you’re a Tapatío, but any true Tapatío knows that gringos are all talk.” And with that, he turned and walked towards the girls at the bar.

I stood and fumed, not ready to follow him, not ready to call it a night. I looked at my rubber bracelet – WWJD? The Indian had a little bracelet on as well. He cleared his throat and spun the color coded beads of black, red, white, green and yellow. It was probably from

a five-day club.

“Do you need someone to explain that to you?”

I asked.

He shook his head.

Juan had already broken the ice with the girls at the bar. There were three. Mine, the girl that had kept my eyes, was small with emaciated collar bones that stuck out like bike handles. She had short black hair with blue streaks that swept down in languorous curls around her ears like a gust of wind had just hit her. Her nose was a tiny beak. Her earlobes were gauged with black shiny studs that bore the Jolly Roger.

To judge by her loose, striped shirt (black and white, horizontal) and the low-slung saber permanent markered onto her jeans, I would have immediately guessed she was a pirate. But her face was white with distinguishing red circles on her cheeks, so I said, “Are you a fucking mute?”

Her chin dropped slightly and her eyebrow raised – just a bit.

“I mean, mime. I meant mime. I meant to say mime.”

Juan doubled over with laughter. I hadn’t even glanced at the other two girls. A Spartan (with panache). A Cop (with cuffs). Whatever. I turned around and looked at the Indian. He turned his head away and acted like he was counting the till.

A wrinkled beggar woman with one a matted grey braid walked in and stumbled right past him. He nodded unconsciously.

Juan stepped in. “My friend is a mystic, you see, he wandered in the desert for thirty days and now he’s losing control…”

“What?” said the Cop. “He was tempted by el Diablo, thrice…”

The Spartan touched her chin and looked over the Cop’s shoulder at the rest of the bar.

“His way is the way, his light is the light, he is the way, the truth and-” The Mime-Pirate put her hand up. She gave me her empty glass. “Turn this into wine for me then.”

I squinted at her. She brushed a strand of hair back behind her ear and then pulled it out slowly with one finger so that it flipped softly and cradled her cheek. Her deep dark eyes looked wet, expectant and up to the challenge. Without

commencement 2008

41

so much as a glance at the other girls, I swung around to the bar, reached over, and filled the glass half way with the nearest beer on tap. My stomach was full and raucous. I sat down on the stool and drained the glass. The cold went down my throat in heavy gulps. I called to the bartender. I mumbled something about shots and then waited. I was fairly confident he had understood me.

My plane would be taking off in around fourteen hours. That would leave ten, if I could pack, pay out, and get to the airport in four. Better make it six. No, this is Juan’s last night. Or is it mine?

The bartender didn’t get the shots. He just stared at Juan and the girls. Juan and the girls stared at me. The girls giggled and held their drinks up in front of their faces. Except for mine, the girl who had kissed the salt so softly off the back of her hand, the girl who had dropped her chin and arched her eyebrow, whose coy painted frame looked like it could be blown away in a gust of wind. She was looking over at the Jukebox, which was playing Rosario Tijeras.

Then she turned and leaned through the group towards me, with her tilde curved, squinted eyes.

First she just stared. Then she said, “Juan says you think… that you’re a Tapatío?”

“I am,” I said.

She moved through the group and sat on the stool next to me. She took off my hat and crowned it lightly on her own head, cocked forward just a bit.

“You kind of look like Batman without a hat,” she said.

“Batman was a Tapatío.” Hah! She pushed the hat back on her head and knitted her brow. “Not the way I see it,” she exhaled deeply. “You see, Gotham was really just New York, like every other movie you guys make.”

I knit my brow, “What does that mean?”

She accepted the drinks from the bartender and slid one in front of me. “The Big Apple.

The City. The Empire State building. Can you imagine fucking the Empire State Building?”

I hunched my shoulders and leaned away, peering at her as if she were a freak in an exhibit.

42

THE HARVARD ADVOCATE

Her chilango accent held out the ends of words with a curious Mexican whine. “What does that mean?”

“I mean going down on it, you know. You guys use it to fuck the entire planet, but there is a difference between fucking and getting fucked.”

I shook my head incredulously, “No, there’s no difference, everybody gets fucked… Top or bottom is just a matter of preference.”

“Well, what’s your preference?”

I turned and looked at the door. I pulled my mask down off my face.

“Well?”

“I think that, um…” I leaned back to check where Juan had went. He was laughing as the Cop tried to cuff one of his wrists. “Hey, Juan!”

He turned around. “What?”

Then the Cop cuffed one of the hooks through his belt loop. He fought for balance and then backed up right into the toothless old woman, who had been circling the empty pool table lining up a shot, imagining she were playing with a full rack.

“Hey, Juan,” I said.

“What?” he said louder, looking back over.

“Did you know that the Spanish word for handcuffs is las esposas?”

“Yeah, um, I did.”

My girl put her hand on my cheek and turned my face back to her. She had dark almond eyes and dark eyebrows and the rest of her face was white. “I asked, what’s your preference?”

Her fingers had clammy tips that were sticky on my cheek. My skin was damp from walking in the humid night. I resituated myself on my stool and looked back at all the different types of tequila. Hacienda del Cristero, Mayor, Patron, Pura Sangre…

I took out my cellphone. It was dead. I looked around at the back of the bar – nothing but bottles and mirrors. I turned around and looked at all four of the walls.

“It’s three and a half,” she said. She leaned in front of me and I instinctively turned slightly towards her. Her chin jutted out slightly, judiciously, as she reached with both hands and gently folded my collar down.

“Tres al media?” I confirmed.

She nodded. She was impressed with my pronunciation. I had nine, no, about ten hours.

No. Wait.

“You speak Spanish?” she asked.

“Sí, creo que sí.”

“So why don’t you answer me en español?”

“Answer what?”

“My question.”

I stared at the taps. I went to reach and fill my glass but it was still full.

She moved her hand to the back of my neck. “I asked, what’s your preference?”

Her face was painted with faint red circles on her cheeks and red lips and I bent forward and kissed her without actually connecting.

She breathed in and then held. With my face sideways, lips open in tremors just over hers, I closed softly just brushing her lower lip and then pulling back.

“Well…” she said, hunching her shoulders up tight and then expanding out with a giant deep breath, her chest thrust like a striped bulge of plumage. Then Juan slapped one of the cuffs around her wrist. She spun on her stool and tried to get away, backing into me. I caught her in my lap and nearly fell back, balancing the stool on two legs.

“Straight to the slammer now, bitch!” he yelled.

Her friends both howled with laughter and Juan had to fend them off with his free arm. I let the stool touch all four legs to the ground and held her tight as she turned in my grasp and her hat fell off as she squirmed to get away. As soon as she had spun in my arms, she wrapped her legs around me and used all her leverage to pull her cuffed hand away from Juan.

“Uncuff her,” I said.

“No,” they said.

“Uncuff her, I’ll do anything,” I said.

“Kiss that old woman.”

I kissed her.

“Take a shot of 151.”

I took one.

“Take this little pill. Made especially for Batman.”

I shook my head.

Juan was wearing the officer’s cap and the

Cop was wearing his orange hunter beanie. The Spartan stared me right in the eyes, head lowered, bearing her panache, mouth in a brutal frown.

My little plumaged Pirate came back over to me and fake-sobbed into my neck. Then she stood perfectly still, just holding me, breathing softly onto my neck.

Juan, the Cop, and the Spartan all looked at me.

I cleared my throat.

The Indian was watching. He shook his head.

I wrapped my arm around her shoulder and swallowed the pill.

“Yeah!” cheered Juan, throwing both hands up into the air. He then took my girl’s hand. She curled off of me and held her wrist out delicately as he used the key to unlock it. Her other hand was on the small of my back. I reached out and felt the metal chain. The cuffs were real.

Then she turned to me and looked me right in the eyes with her face right up next to mine, “Que caballero,” she said to me. “Que payaso,” I said right back to her. “I’m really drunk,” she said to me. “Yeah?” I said, in English. “I have to pee,” she responded, finally, in English. Then she peeled off of me and went to the ladies’ room.

I went to the men’s room. This is where the Indian met me.

When I came out of the bathroom, a breeze swept over my sweat-covered shoulders and around the small of my back. The far door was open and Juan was standing with the two girls beckoning me to hurry up. My girl came out of the ladies room, her face paintless and soaked, her eyelashes glossy. She smiled at me with wet lashes and shook her head furiously.

I extended my arm to her and asked her why she had stuck her head under the sink. She said it was for self-control. I told her she didn’t have to worry. I was a changed man, no longer interested in premarital carnal pleasures, just newly born again, only out and about to take care of Juan for one last night. “Ha! You’re doing a great job,” she said. I told her if I went too far just to snap my WWJD? bracelet on my skin.

The streets were short and narrow and dirty and the stars were obscured by the smog. We walked along the cobbled brick paths, dodging hanging

commencement 2008

43

power lines, maneuvering around potholes, joking about the toothless old woman and the Indian transvestite. Then I was in the room alone with her.

She was on top of me, and we were sitting on the bed. She moved with her hands and pushed my shirt back over my shoulders. The buttons were undone. My belt tightened and then fell loose. I cupped her breasts in my hands. I held her head in my hands, her short wet hair clumped in strands between my fingers. I popped out one of her gauged earrings and slipped the tip of my pinky into the hole.

“Ow,” she said, pulling back and looking at me, grimacing.

Then she took the mask from around my neck and put it on. It was loose, so she bunched her hair up behind her head and spun the elastic strap around it so that the black velvet plastic pulled tight against her face.

Then she pushed me back on the bed and started to take off my pants. I sat up and removed her shirt by peeling from the bottom up. Halfway up, I reached out to brace myself by holding on to the bedpost and she handcuffed my wrist. I stopped and my eyes came to focus on my hand, holding the bedpost, the cuff around my wrist, and the other end of the cuff around the bedpost.

She got down on her knees and dipped her hand down inside my pants and found me. I watched as she struggled with the zipper and her chilly wet hair rubbed just below my navel.

“Wait.” I said, before she could start, “Why am I cuffed?”

“What?” she asked, looking up at me, both hands on my inner thighs. “I uh… I don’t know.”

I watched her as she turned her little head, as if she were burrowing, as wasted and incompetent as I was. Why would she say that? Where was my focus?

I reached over and snapped the WWJD bracelet against my wrist. My skin was warm and numb.

“Why am I handcuffed?” I asked again. The walls were cinderblocks covered with blue paint.

The floor was concrete with a worn, patterned rug. The bed was a mattress without sheets. There were no pictures or lamps or furniture. There was

44

THE HARVARD ADVOCATE

no closet full of dresses and underwear. There were no Virgin Marys on the wall. No stuffed animals. There wasn’t a mirror or a makeup kit or even a window. There were mile marker bars lying in the corner of the room and a bag of concrete, covered in a thick layer of dust. “Why am I cuffed?” I asked again, standing up.

“No… no, sit down,” she said, wrapping her arms around my waist and forcing me back into a sitting position. My head was pounding. Splitting.

Had she got the cuffs from her friend? The Cop? When? Why? The lights were fading in and out.

I grabbed her chin and made her look at me, her face faded in and out of focus, “Why am I cuffed?”

She shook her head free and muttered softly into the half-down zipper. My pulse was pounding down through my cuffed wrist and I pulled away, testing the metal and finding it real. “Hey,” I said.

Then I shouted at the door, “Hey!” She looked up at me. She put her hand over my mouth and tried to stand.

“Hey…” I said.

Then she slapped me. She grabbed my face held it back, up towards the light, and stared at my pupil. The silhouette of her head went sharp, then hazy, then sharp.

“Hey!” I shouted again. I raised my knee and tried to kick free of her. “Why am I cuffed?”

She fell back and put a finger up to her lips.

I grabbed her arm and pulled her up to me. I cradled her with my one free arm and pulled the hair at the back of her head and shouted out at the door, “WHY AM I CUFFED?” She shook her head and started to cry and turn in my grasp but I just kept shouting, yelling the same question over and over again until she screamed. She scratched at me and kicked me in the knees and waist and tried to get free when the door burst open. The Cop stood topless, no longer wearing the orange hat, with bloody hands.

The Spartan came behind her, still holding her helmet.

I was losing focus and slurring my words, but I held to the Pirate tighter than ever, screaming.

I slammed my fist against the bedpost, raging, holding her against my chest, my mute, my Pirate,

as I bent and roared through the cinderblocks. I took a step forward, dragging the bed with me, cuff cutting into wrist.

My girl struggled loose and suddenly all I had was her shirt. The mask had pulled away and ripped. She backed up towards the other two. I grabbed the bedpost and charged towards them, dragging it behind me with a grating metallic screech. I pulled as far as I could into the hallway, slamming the bed into the doorframe.

“Josh!” I heard Juan yell.

“Where are you?” I screamed back. I yanked at my hand.

“In here!” he yelled.

“What the fuck?” I yelled. “Where’s here?” I leaned forward and peaked around the corner only to see him sitting bent against the wall, shirtless, holding a cut in his side, face swollen, bleeding from the mouth.

I yanked again, this time harder.

The door down the hall burst open. The Indian in the dress stormed in and stripped off his flowered one-piece from the bottom up. My heart leapt. I nearly fell. I had to brace myself against the wall. Within two steps he had socked me in the jaw. Then he kicked me in the balls and commenced to kick me in the ribs as I slid to the ground.

“I told you not to take the pill!” he yelled without any trace of an accent.

I bent and coughed as he kicked me, one arm still hung up.

“You think you’re Batman?” he asked.

“You think you’re the Lone Ranger?”

He kicked me again.

“You think you’re in love?”

Again.

“You think you are Jesus-fucking-Christ?”

And I just kept shaking my head, No. No. No. “Well where’s your deus ex machina now, bitch?” he said, still kicking, “Oh shit. Tonto can read!”

I just shook my head.

“That woman in the bar, she was mi madre.

Not some tourist gag prop!” Then he stepped back and tore at his wrist, “You want a gag prop?” he threw down his bracelet, “There’s your fucking

gag prop!” Then he pointed back, towards the empty doors down the hall. “You want to be fucked? These are my fucking daughters! Not some one stop fuck shops you found on the road from Vallarta to Mexico City!”

He kicked me in the face. The cartilage hadn’t numbed and my whole existence squeezed with warmth into my nose and front teeth.

“Who you are? What you want to be? Go back to your fucking country!”

From flat on the floor, I saw the girls crawl out from the rooms on the ceiling, their hair falling down in straight shocks of black. Then the Pirate fell straight down onto me, straddling my waist, and bit a hole in my skin just under the ribs. I felt my whole stomach pull tight as she tore up with her teeth and then stuck first her face, and then her entire head down into my abdomen. I screamed and tried to breathe but kept fading in and out. Her neck rotated with long lingering black hairs still above the skin, but when she pulled out, her head was a golden eagle with a struggling snake. Blood flicked off the tale as she shook the writhing snake and gnashed at it with her beak. The Spartan came up behind me with Juan’s severed head, and I suddenly felt my body grow light. The room grew light. The walls grew white and all around me I could hear the writhing of skin on skin, like a sea of snakes, or wind over a wing. Somewhere my plane was taking off, and they were taking Jesus off of the cross, and the Lone Ranger rode alone while the Bat call shined onto the clouds, a cry for help in a deep, dark city, far, far away.

commencement 2008

45

Ambient Magnetic Dipoles: Amplified Mapping of Dipole Moments Through Magnetoresistance Sensors, Analog Differentiation Techniques and Ferromagnetic Fluids

Lewis Z. Liu Ferromagnetic fluid, magnetoresistance sensors, 60 gallon liquid tank, electromagnets, wires, instrumentation amplifiers, operational amplifiers, solid state relays, resistors, capacitors, 555 oscillators, tripods, chalkboard, laboratory notebook, rectifier diodes, PC boards, multimeters, Tenma 30V current supplies, cinder blocks, and other laboratory equipment Dimensions variable

46

THE HARVARD ADVOCATE

ARTIST STATEMENT

Both physics and the visual arts generate ways of looking at the universe. Traditional painting, photography, and video use the physical world in visible light (400-750 nm electromagnetic radiation) as a basis for art creation.

At the same time, physics theories and experiments allow us to understand the fundamental, mostly invisible, structures that govern the world we live in. Just as light permeates our world, so do magnetic fields as created by our planet, by our technology, and even by our bodies. This project makes visible the unseen physical world of magnetic fields through an exploration of painting and mark-making using controlled magnetic fields and a newly developed magnetic spray technique, and a joint laboratory/studio/gallery performance that maps this “magnetic world� using magnetoresistance sensors, analog differentiation techniques and magnetic coils, onto an artificially constructed magnetic field. These artificially generated fields are then made visible through ferromagnetic fluids.

commencement 2008

47

ZOMBIES That zombies have always eaten brains is a common misconception. Only recently have the undead refined their palates.

For thousands of years, zombies abstained from the consumption of human flesh. While the Epic of Gilgamesh tells us that, “Zombies eat infants,” it seems that most zombies were content to roam the Earth aimlessly (sans nourishment) for millennia after. The draugrs of Scandinavia committed more traditional violent acts; the revenants of Britain were usually just content to harass their still quite living family members. The zombi of Haitian voodoo was simply a mindless drone, doomed to serve as a voodoo priest’s pawn for the rest of existence.

Cannibalistic feasting, however, as a modern trope came about with George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, an attempt to out-gore the campy splatter flicks of the decade.

Even then, the zombies were not portrayed as eating brains exclusively. They were equal opportunity flesh gourmands: limbs and viscera would also do.

Only in the 1980s, as neuroscience departments were popping up in the nation’s major research universities, did brains become a staple in the zombie diet. Plain biology and standard devouring of flesh were too monistic. In science and in horror flicks such as Return of the Living Dead, attention to the body became more specialized. As the modern corpse puts it, “not people… BRAINS!”

alexandra gutierrez

48

THE HARVARD ADVOCATE

New Orleans Rocking on a porch in the Lower Ninth is an age-old pursuit, the steady back and forth barely pushing the thick heat that rolls in like waves off the delta swamps. But behind the loose-fitting dress wicked with sweat and the paper fan wilting in the humidity, there is a stigma scrawled across the door. The neighborhood is pockmarked with them, afflicting the houses still in ruins and the recently reinhabited all the same. It is the scar of the late summer fury, going on three years now but it could’ve been yesterday.

The simple, hasty spray paint reads in code: TFW, circled, center—toxic flood water.

NE, right—no entry. Numbers down and left—number of human bodies, number of animals bodies. Date, above—when the house was checked. These are the cardinal directions of devastation, the signs of the cross for the dispossessed. Across this vast, flat swath east of the gaudy French Quarter, the gleaming Central Business District, and the posh areas uptown lies a slow descent into a magnified inferno—here the Ninth is just the beginning, and the frozen lake is somewhere at the lower end of St. Bernard Parish. In Exodus, the angel of death passes over the houses marked with the blood of the paschal lamb. In New Orleans, the marks are put up to signal where he has already passed.

But Genesis tells of the rainbow that God sent to affirm his covenant after the flood.

Cross into the Upper Ninth and there it is: peach, lavender, sky blue, teal. A pastel rainbow of houses, all inhabited by musicians stubbornly putting roots back down. They may comprise a block in a city composed of thousands, but this block is a beacon of accomplishment: it has scrubbed off the stigma, painted over the marker, and begun to remove the watery shackle.

greg scruggs

commencement 2008

49

UNTITLED (days 3, 7, 12, 16)

Marisa S. Williamson 16 Stereographs 9” x 6”

50

THE HARVARD ADVOCATE

Artist Statement

Assimilation is defined as the absorption of something foreign, an incorporation of otherness. It refers also to adaptation, resemblance, recreation and modification. To assimilate to a culture that is itself dynamic and changing, is to be caught in a cycle that is at once problematic and compelling. This work is about process, change over time, and the malleability of image. I traced a line of thought that followed technology, the body, and nostalgia back to the public, private, physical, and emotional sites where they were conceived. Hair (the motif, the unifying strand) is in all the dusty corners, caught in the teeth of a fine-toothed comb, and clustered round the drain— simultaneously and naturally central and peripheral—often ambiguous. Hair is genetic evidence: a racial signifier or false indicator. It is an extension, expression, suggestion of self, nothing but highly evolved fur, anything but easy, never always one thing; never always another. It is mine to render and surrender—my metaphor, my analogue, my constant variable. It is just one way to incorporate otherness. I become stuff. Stuff becomes me. I am my hair now as I am my shoes, my music, my phone, my profile, my people.

commencement 2008

51

hear me, o posterity

I know meaningful things are perplexing when you’re young, so I don’t expect you to understand this immediately. At the end of my story my red balloon drifts away and two thirds of my ice cream plops onto pavement. This is probably the most important visual of my narrative. (It’s a symbol.) I thought I’d mention it now to give you time to appreciate its meaning. It’s okay if you don’t get it now - but if you don’t by the end, you’re a moron.

I was sitting at the kitchen table watching William my grandson play computer games.

He was in the living room, which opens up to the kitchen, so I had a good view of his profile from where I sat. He’s a sensitive kid – I think the digital violence really affects him. And it’s no use telling him that it’s just a game on a screen.

It’s hard for kids to understand that the gore is merely virtual. I tried to explain the science of it to William once, but he just rolled his eyes at me as if to say, Please Grandpa. I’m not an idiot.

I know the blood is real. It’s my job to sit here and make sure he doesn’t throw a fit when one of his computer personas dies. When he starts muttering under his breath, I have to say, William, muttering didn’t help the Israelites. What do you think it will do for you? Then he’ll thank me for bringing him to his senses, and probably ask if we can play cards, like we did before computers replaced humanity.

My son came downstairs and asked if I had my cellphone on me. He’s always asking me that now. I told him I couldn’t live with a son incapable of going down a few steps to speak to his father in person. He asked me what I was 52

THE HARVARD ADVOCATE

courtney bowman

doing. I told him I was watching William. He told me I should read a book, or do something useful. My son forgets that I’ve already read everything worth reading, and that the best use of my time is to reflect on all my past experiences.

That and watch my grandson.

While William was playing his hair kept on stupidly falling in his eyes, like he was some kind of stupid. He’d brush it back and then it would fall again.

—William needs a haircut, I said.

—No he doesn’t. He likes it that way, said my son.

—He likes walking around like a blind mushroom?

—Will, do you like walking around like a blind mushroom?

—Yeah, he said, without even looking up from the screen. He kept on staring at it with his mouth open a little, like a baiting carnivorous plant.

I remember teaching William how to type. He hadn’t quite mastered the alphabet yet, so he was about ten times slower than I. He started out by tapping the keys the way you prod a steak at a restaurant to show the waiter you are skeptical of its preparation. Now it looked like he was using a couple more fingers, which is good.

—William, are you typing like I taught you?

He gazed absently at me for a moment and nodded. Then he went back to the screen.

—Use your four fingers on both hands. The thumbs are for the space bar. Thumbs. Space bar. I can’t put it any more simply than that.

—Dad, said my son, if you don’t have your cellphone, do you at least know where it is?

—No, I said. I had a vague recollection of putting it in the pocket of my khakis. I had another vague recollection of putting those khakis in the washing machine.

—You have got to start carrying that on you.

Here, take mine for now. If you had had that on you yesterday, you could have called me right after the accident.

A lunatic obstructed the intersection yesterday on my way back from the dry-cleaners. The fool was lucky to have escaped with only an arm injury.

—I don’t see how it’s different from just asking to use someone else’s phone, I said.

—Because, that’s not reliable.

—But I saved money that way.

—Great. You saved ten cents toward the thousands of dollars we’ll lose in compensation.

You are so lucky that man doesn’t have more than an arm injury— he could have died, the way you hit him. And you always drive too fast.

—I only start out fast. Then I get faster.

I looked at William to make sure he got that joke. It didn’t look like he heard. I made a mental note to repeat it later.

—Besides, I said, we’re not spending a damn cent on that fool—he was waiting for an accident.

—Dad, have a little empathy.

—Empathy? You think you can take away my car keys, put me on your cellular leash, and then monopolize empathy? This might be the Age of Technology, but you can’t just type “empathy” into your little Wikkipedias and presto, thank you technocracy, you’ve got sentiment. I was around before there was even a word for empathy, and let me tell you how the feeling hung over us like a cloud of imminent immersion.

—What’s that smell, asked William.

—Is anybody listening to me?

—Oh God, said my son. It really smells. Dad, was that you? Please tell me that was not you.

—Don’t try to change the subject. We’re talking about emotion— something that requires being, actually being, you hear my mouth? Who’s been more, you or me?

—Obviously you.

—That’s right. Obviously me. I’m more been

than bin Laden, more had than a streetwalker.

—Very colorful, Dad. But please, try to pass gas in the bathroom.

The phone started ringing and I made a gesture like I was going to get up so no one could say I didn’t try. Also when I do that it makes my son get it faster.

—Hello, he said. Yes, this is Mr. Whitefield.

No, this is William Whitefield Jr., William Whitefield Sr.’s son.

—Is it that nancy from yesterday? I asked.

—Yes, said my son into the phone. I know he’s old. He’s not going to drive anymore, that’s certain.

—What are you saying?

—Shhh, Dad. —Don’t shhh me, you don’t have to say one word to that ninny—you tell him to talk to my lawyer.

—Hold on Mr. Taylor, said my son, and he walked out of the kitchen up the stairs.

There is no one more incompetent than my son. Besides my dead wife. That’s the kind of very funny joke she never understood. Nor, I suppose, will she ever. Am I right?

I am right. William stretched his limbs and got up from the computer. He opened the refrigerator and poured himself a glass of juice.

—Soon your hair is going to be so long, you won’t even be able to find your mouth.

William kept on pouring juice. He poured it almost to the top, a sickening thing to watch.

Who drinks a whole cup of juice? Tops is half a cup, and that’s only when you’ve got prime thirst.

—Heh? I said. You have ears, kid? Listen! Or maybe you got crazy hair growing in your head, too.

He didn’t respond, but kept on gulping down juice like he’d been playing ball for two hours instead of sitting in front of a computer screen.

—That’s it, I said, I’m taking you to the barber.

—I don’t want to go to the barber, said William.

I have schoolwork to do.

—Like hell you have schoolwork. Get in the car. continued on page 56

commencement 2008

53

Self Portrait at 25

Michael Ellis Oil on panel 9.25” x 9”

54

THE HARVARD ADVOCATE

Happy Lollipop Surprise

Zulie Malone Crayon on paper 8.5� x 11�

commencement 2008

55

—But you aren’t supposed to drive.

—Whose house is this?

—Our house.

—No. My house. I bought this house. I make the rules. First rule: get in the car.

I grabbed my son’s keys from the coffee table and William and I headed out to my son’s car.

My car was still at the shop.

—Who is going to take care of simple chores like this when I’m gone? I asked, backing out the driveway. Your hair is going to grow to the ground, your coats will never be dry-cleaned, and you’ll starve before your father can take a break from work to get groceries. I can’t die. There is no one competent enough to prepare my wake.

—Grandpa, you’re driving too fast.

—I only start out fast. Then I get faster.

—You say that all the time.

—That’s because it’s an excellent joke.

—It’s an all right joke. William stared out the window in silence, as if reflecting on how he was wrong, and how it actually was an excellent joke.

—William, I want you to write down some of the things I say.

—Grandpa please stop calling me William.

Everyone calls me Will.

—That’s not your name. William is your name. William is my name and your father’s name and if you change it you lose history.

—It’s just a nickname.

—No, wrong. Your whole life is in that name.

Your life and your father’s and mine. Without it, you don’t exist. A wise man once said, a good name is rather to be chosen than great riches.

Actually, that sounds like something I once said.

William was being quiet again, so I turned on the radio to the news. There was a report on an old African dictator who was murdered by his own kadogos, child soldiers. The despot had thought they were all loyal to him; there was a sound clip of him before he died, proclaiming that the soldiers would never rise against him because they were his children. One of the teenagers came into his office one day while he was discussing a trip with his economic advisor. The old man leaned toward the teenager as he approached, thinking that he wanted to say something in private. Then the teenager fired four shots into his chest.

56

THE HARVARD ADVOCATE

—That’s a terrible story, I told William, but there’s nothing any of us can do about it. It just goes to show that in the end, this world will break you. And I don’t mean in a fragile way, like going to a lake in autumn and gingerly pressing the ice.

I mean like raging through an antique store with a machete in your hands. That’s how this world breaks down.

—I know, he said.

—I know you know. You’re my grandson and I’m a goddamn genius.

The car ahead of me stopped suddenly and I slammed on the breaks and swerved to avoid him.

The car behind me laid down on his horn and so did I. After a few seconds the traffic resumed, but I was out of the lane. I realized the spot where I was wasn’t too far from the barber. I was sweating and shaking and William looked scared. I pulled closer to the curb and got out.

—Get out, fungus-head.

—Are we there?

—We’re close enough.

At the barber’s I sat him down in front of the owner. I’ve been going to this place since I was twenty-five so I can do things like sit my grandson in front of the owner without anyone telling me I’m cutting the line or the owner is booked until five. I told him when he was done with William I’d come back for a good shave.

—Can’t you shave yourself? William asked.

Dad can.

—Of course I can shave. I can shave backwards in my sleep. This is called supporting the economy. I’ll teach you about it on the way back.

—Stay with me while I get my haircut, my grandson said. He said it under his breath – not urgently, but timidly. I tried to catch his eye in the mirror so he could see I was relaxed, which would relax him. But he was staring down at his fingers, playing with the hem of the smock. He is pretty sensitive for a ten-year-old. I thought it might be best for me to leave, to harden him in a way, get him ready for a world beyond computers.

—I’ll be right back, I said. You want an ice cream? I’ll get you an ice cream.

—You could sit down for a shave now, the

owner said. Jeremy is free.

I gave Jeremy a once-over. He was young. I usually don’t like the young ones because they’re overeager with the blades. William looked up at me in the mirror with eyes as huge as a lemur’s.

—Okay, I said. But tell him he can take his time. And it’s okay if he doesn’t talk, I want his full concentration on my beard.

—Jeremy wasn’t too bad. His shave was close, smooth, and without probing questions. He even gave me a balloon at the end, which was a funny joke that I appreciated. I glanced over at William in the mirror and pointed at it to let him in on the joke. He smiled. It was a red balloon.

William seemed more relaxed now, so I decided to take a walk and come back for him.

He was safe in this shop, and I was only going down the street to get him an ice cream. Five minutes max. Even if he did walk out, it’s not as if he can’t cross a street. Just in case, though, I told him not to leave the shop.

I wasn’t exactly sure what flavors William liked.

When I was young we only had two: vanilla and vanilla with sprinkles. When William was a toddler I used to get him blue raspberry because that’s when that cartoon The Smurfs was popular, and there was nothing funnier to me than a little boy running around with blue all over his face. I narrowed it down to vanilla, blue raspberry, and pistachio, my favorite flavor, so I knew I couldn’t go wrong there. In the end, I decided to get all three scoops.

At the crosswalk I could see William sitting in his chair across the street. I waved to get his attention but he was talking to the barber.

Something was buzzing me. It’s difficult to negotiate a balloon and an ice cream when something keeps buzzing at your thigh. I realized it was the phone my son had lent me. I took the balloon in my ice cream hand and answered the phone.

—Hello?

—Dad? Where are you? Are you with Will?

—I’m not saying a damn thing.

A woman was daydreaming while the light changed green and the car behind hers honked.

—Is that a car? Are you driving right now?

—No, I’m just walking down a street.

—Tell me where you are.

—I’m with Will and we’re getting our hair cut.

—Okay. Don’t go anywhere. And definitely don’t drive. I’m picking you up in a taxi.

—I have the car, I can drive us home.

He hung up his phone. I stuffed my phone into my pocket and stepped out into the street.

A truck barreling toward me broke so hard the tires screeched and I looked up to see it swerving zigzag to blunt its speed. I froze. I shut down.

The only thing running through my brain was, please don’t let my grandson see me. I knew I shouldn’t but I glanced at the barber’s and there he was, gazing right back with a fixed expression of terror and awe. I looked away and locked eyes with the truck driver. I felt alarmingly magnetic.

A hand clutched my arm and my body lurched backward as a boy who couldn’t have been more than seventeen grabbed me. I crashed at his feet as the truck passed the crosswalk and pulled to the side. All in the time it took for my balloon to drift away, and two thirds of my ice cream to plop onto the pavement.

SUBSCRIBE TO THE HARVARD ADVOCATE $35 FOR ONE YEAR (4 ISSUES) $60 FOR TWO YEARS (8 ISSUES) $90 FOR THREE YEARS (12 ISSUES) CASH OR CHECK TO: THE HARVARD ADVOCATE 21 SOUTH STREET CAMBRIDGE, MA 02138

commencement 2008

57

CHAI SHANGHAI

Zhang Yue and Alexandra Hays Embroidery, cotton, lace Dimensions variable

58

THE HARVARD ADVOCATE

Artist Statement

This is a project made for a Shanghai restaurant one day before the block was scheduled for destruction. We embroidered twelve tablecloths and hand towels for the restaurant, outlining and labeling bowls, chopsticks, and containers. Scraps of language taken from casual conversation, as well as Chinese art discourse, were embroidered between every face-to-face seat position to encourage conversation between people who ate there regularly and in close proximity but rarely interacted. After one day of use, the stained and discolored tablecloths now bear a particular record, the traces of a location and livelihood that no longer exists on Wuding Road. The website www.chaishanghai.com will serve as an interactive archive for the information we collected: detailed records of time from every customer who occupied each seat in the restaurant on this day, the interactions they had, their portraits, and the stains they left. “Chai Shanghai” translates literally as “destruct Shanghai” but “chai” also refers to the word’s ubiquity throughout the city on thousands of buildings scheduled for destruction.

commencement 2008

59

The Short and Dreary Life of Sergei Necháev, Revolutionary On certain rain-spackled spring evenings, the earth parts to reveal the downtrodden— petals crushed underfoot, shapes huddled in the streets. One perceives in these moments of quiet clarity the unjust structure of things, the need to destroy current sets, to shake a fist at their blind and corrupt puppeteers. Then the earth closes again, thoughts are engulfed, steps go on stepping, we forget. We, but not all. This one did not forget: his mind and eyes and mid-nineteenth century Russia would not let him forget. Bourgeois, proletariat, intellectual—these names did not apply. He was a revolutionary, pure spirit devoid of lazy flesh; he thirsted for revolution under blood-red skies, and armed revolution in the streets. With a like-minded, wildly bearded, and oft-imprisoned anarchist, he wrote a catechism insinuating the visceral pleasure of obliteration, the sensuality of destruction foreshadowing the later beauty of molecules sliced open to unleash apocalypse. (Though he would take issue with its arbitrary boundaries, a parenthetical mention must be added about this mentor, who too was an idealist of revolution, a believer that even Marxism was merely dictatorship renamed. Coming across a band of rioting German peasants in his travels, he organized them into army-style ranks and helped them attack and set fire to a castle. With the countryside in flames behind him, he continued on his way, never once asking their cause. This madness of the blood was only to be expected—poets are more likely than the norm to be mad, and he was nothing if not a poet of destructive passion.)

It was a game of pawns; dissidence and political conspiracy; wild prison escapes, secret societies, and powerful connections that never existed. He had a silver tongue, convincing four comrades to help him strangle, shoot, and hide the body of a doubter in a hole in the ice. They took the blame, he escaped. He even stole from his proxy father a compromising box of letters as insurance: the creature had turned on its creator. Capture at last, and hard labor, but correspondence with the rebels continued. Then death, the last institution.

While others scraped away at the monolith of time with toothpicks, he tried to scale it and was consumed. The onlookers below whispered amongst themselves and wrote books.

jessica sequeira

60

THE HARVARD ADVOCATE

Bowerbird ayten tartıcı

The male satin bowerbird chews blueberries, dipping twigs in its juice. It weaves butterfly wings, bottle tops and pink seashells into the blue walls, lining the walkway with flower petals and green broken glass.

So Paul Celan wrote to Nelly Sachs that his son (upon seeing the birds on the window sill) sprinkled bread crumbs: Venez moineaux! Venez pigeons! –sparrow! pigeon! –come,

come: how likeness is like nearness,

and has your face changed?

Your face spilling down my face in long black strokes— Gravity on the end of the tongue.

When I close my eyes, I can’t

commencement 2008

61

Celebrity

Michael Ellis Oil on canvas 26” x 26”

62

THE HARVARD ADVOCATE

CREATION MYTHS

O Word, you were there for a moment like Oh! You were there in the mind, whispered with a carillon of little breaths, faint bell-like syllables ringing in a far-off spire. You sang in me, oh word, and in this note was all of music. I reached out to pluck and plant you on the page: a kernel, a germ, a gene, a genesis. Perfect communication, grand and unified, my perfect equation for conveying thought. You were there in the mind for a moment, but faced with the confinement of black lines inked on a chilled page, you fled. * Aleksei Peshkov, who sometimes called himself Maxim Gorky, and his friend Leonid Andreyev had been drinking. Leonid, who was sometimes too lazy to write seriously, was playing a game. With remarkable skill, he found the ideal aphorism to encapsulate the character of a chosen target. “Yes, she’s just like…” With these words he picked out the character and even the habits of the person just about perfectly. He was very pleased and began boasting in a guiltless and childlike way: “You know, I’m sometimes amazed myself at how succinctly and precisely I can get at the very essence of a thing or a person.” He saw that it was slightly ridiculous to praise himself so, but he continued with half-serious, half-hopeful hyperbole: “In time I will so refine my genius as to be able, with a single word, to pinpoint the meaning of the entire life of a man, a nation, a historical epoch.” Perhaps this is the dream of the idle writer, but if Leonid was sometimes lazy he

alexander fabry

was also sometimes prolific, and so perhaps this is the dream of all writers. Aleksei wrote down this story on a little scrap of paper and stored it away in an envelope which he kept in his library.

A shared fantasy among writers is the hope that one day—some day—they might find the perfect word. It is the hope that somewhere there exists a word that will translate the full content of intended meaning onto the page and to the reader. This might not always be a single word; it might be a phrase, or a line, or a sentence: but it is always a contained unit. Drifting in the aether of the English language, floating somewhere in the sea of a quarter-million words, is the one required. Of course, writers aren’t always so particular. Often any old word will do, or at least be serviceable. But sometimes, perhaps in midconversation, we stop and say, “No, that’s not quite the right word.” Perhaps we find a better approximation, or perhaps while finding the right word our thoughts have changed ever so slightly so that they now match perfectly what we’ve found. Or perhaps we give up. Yet sometimes there comes a moment when it feels that the entire weight of a document rests on one point: here is a hinge without a pin, and so the choices are weighed, compared in shape and heft, rolled and measured, and finally fit into the joint. And the door opens and the writer continues.

Some authors, almost by force of will, pack individual words with deep layers of meaning.

T.S. Eliot will surround a word with a dense

commencement 2008

63

cloud of associations: etymological, mythological, phonological, contextual, rhetorical, and even literal. Like hunks of clay molded around some center, each level gloms onto the handful of letters that make up the word. In The Wasteland, Eliot even elucidates for readers not familiar with their Upanishads some of these allusions with extensive notes. Of course, the other masters of this referential style, which prizes the depth and complexity of a word’s associations, are Joyce and Nabokov. They squeeze and contort words.

They pack meanings into every narrative chink.

By power of ego, they cram their references and jokes, their thoughts and their fantasies, into the space of a single word, and each re-reading reveals more connections. They hand the reader an overstuffed suitcase, straining its hinges to their elastic capacity; it is up to the reader to unpack it if they can.

This is not the only way of approaching the mythical word, though. On the other side are the laconic and efficient phrases of writers like Hemingway and William Carlos Williams.

64

THE HARVARD ADVOCATE

Hemingway does not pack words with allusions, but still manages to convey multitudes with a single “good night.” He once wrote a short story six words long: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”

It’s a bit cloying, like an aspartame gumdrop, and perhaps not worth the ten dollars he won for it in a bet, but it makes a point. You can get a lot from a little.

Both these explicit and implicit styles (in one the reader is left to discover the context, while in the other the reader creates it) betray an infatuation with the density of meaning and with finding the perfect word as carrier for that meaning, as a key to creativity and creation. * Word as passcode Lear: Give the word.

As formula Edgar: Sweet Marjorum.

Magic words Lear: Pass.

Ali Baba, hidden high in the branches of a tree, heard the captain of the forty thieves speak an incantation into a wall of bare stone, and a stone door appeared in the mountain, and the door opened to reveal a cave full of riches. “Open, sesame,” said the captain. In the original story, he says, “Iftah ya simsim,” which really does translate that way (and not as Popeye’s corruption, “Open sez me!”). Ali Baba, laden with gold, told his envious brother Kasim the secret of the cave, and Kasim went to get some of the gold for himself.

He went into the cave, the door shut behind him, and he lay out as many bags of gold as he could carry. But he could not remember the formula to leave again. The more he struggled to remember the word “Simsim,” the more his memory was confounded. He had as much forgotten it as if he had never heard it mentioned. Possessed by frustration, he threw down the bags he had loaded himself with, and walked distractedly up and down the cave, oblivious to the riches around him. In a German folktale, “Simeliberg,” which begins in much of the same way with two

brothers and the magical opening of a rock, there is the magic phrase “Open Semsi,” which the Grimm brothers explain is an old German word for “mountain.” The same syllables perhaps have power regardless of the language in which they are spoken.

Magical words signal a creation and a transformation. The formula of transubstantiation, through which a Catholic priest signals the metamorphosis of a Necco wafer into the divine body, is: “hoc est enim corpus meum.” The phrase was corrupted by Protestant skeptics into “hocus pocus.” The “abracadabra” employed in cheap parlor tricks is first recorded in the second century by Serenus Sammonicus, physician to the emperor Caracalla, who inscribed the formula on an amulet. It perhaps originates in the Aramaic “avra kehdabra,” meaning, “I will create as I speak.” The writerly urge to find the perfect word is in many ways a cabalistic or mystical fantasy: to create reality through a word.

Words become the clay out of which creation is formed. Rabbi Lyeb, Maharal of Prague, had locked himself in his study for 28 years searching for the great mystery. He emerged, blinking his translucent eyelids in the sunlight, but then suddenly he turned away and hurried off. It struck him that he had forgotten God’s name on a slip of paper in an envelope on the little table in his room. And so he rushed back.

According to the legend, the rabbi created a golem out of clay. He kneaded the clay figure of a man, and he inserted the holy name of God into the golem’s mouth. When the rabbi inserted God’s name into the golem’s mouth, the golem came alive, and he was able to destroy the entire world. And it was only when the rabbi removed God’s name from the golem’s mouth that the golem lay there as lifeless as a lump of clay. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God…All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life; and the life was the light of men.” The word is spoken, the door opens, and a new world is formed: the author apes the creator. * commencement 2008

65

Writers are not the only ones to seek the secret to reality’s cipher in a contained phrase; their linguistic formula is mirrored by the mathematical one. A young Albert Einstein once declared, “I want to know God’s thoughts—the rest are just details.” The mathematician and astronomer Pierre-Simon Laplace imagined a single formula that would move the world from the present to the future, which would in effect construct slices of reality. He wrote in the introduction to his 1814 “Philosophical Essay on Probability:” An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes.

66

THE HARVARD ADVOCATE

With the simple Newtonian formula equating force to the instantaneous change in momentum, Laplace’s intelligent demon could calculate every future state of the universe. Newton is inaccurate, however, in some situations: the very small, the very fast, and the very heavy. As the fundamental forces of nature proliferated, into the electrical, magnetic, gravitational, and the strong and weak nuclear forces, physicists have continuously tried to combine and unify the equations describing each. Physicists desire a theory of everything, a theory which will encapsulate all five fundamental forces in a single equation: year by year, they seemed to be approaching that “final” theory. As it stands, all but gravity has been mutually woven into an underlying mathematical structure.

Equations not only encode reality, but also carry a density of cultural meaning. When Einstein was on the cover of Time in July 1946, behind his portrait rose a fiery Technicolor mushroom cloud. Written in giant smoky letters on the underside of the spreading canopy of fallout was his equation E=mc2. Einstein’s famous mass-

energy relation came to symbolize not only a new understanding of the atom in the postwar period, but also the atomic bomb itself, the new nuclear age, and even physics in general. An infatuation grew around a mystical understanding of the equations of physics. Many claimed that esoteric formulas, the x’s and y’s of theoretical physics, contained the hidden secrets of the atomic bomb. The House Un-American Activities Committee, in conducting investigations of suspected communists, accused an employee of a Manhattan Project laboratory—who was identified only as “Scientist X”—of passing along key equations to a Communist Party member.

Scientist X had read out a complicated formula, which was copied down by his accomplice: it had to be copied since the handwritten original had to be returned to the laboratory safe the next morning. There is a fetish for the written word in these accusations—the vital innards of physics were captured in symbols on a page and the equations were chalked and erased by physicists on a blackboard palimpsest.

But this is nonsense. A bomb’s secrets aren’t held in a series of formulae, which a sufficiently advanced undergraduate can understand, but rather in the industrial capacity and practical and experimental knowledge of metallurgy, explosives, neutron production, and lensing. (In fact, this distinction between equation and object was lost when a Princeton physics undergraduate announced he had constructed a set of blueprints from declassified materials about how to build a bomb: “Where are you hiding your weapon?” he was grilled.) It is surprising to many people that E=mc2 had no practical application during the construction of the Manhattan project gadget, though the equation does describe where the energy comes from. This is Leonid Andreyev’s drunken folly, too. Both the poet and the physicist fall prey to the alluring delusion of picking an individual droplet out from the deluge of reality, and seeing or finding within it the entire universe.

Most atoms are drawn like little solar systems, with elliptical orbits around a central solar nucleus: the very large contained in the very small, the universe in a grain of sand. Roland Barthes writes

in his Mythologies, “Through the mythology of Einstein, the world blissfully regained the image of knowledge reduced to a formula.” He recognizes the joyful foolishness of this, but is all the same captivated by the illusion.

The detonation of an atomic bomb mirrors a modern day creation myth, the primordial explosion of the big bang. Scientists have rolled up the name of God (or at least Einstein’s formula) and placed it in the mouth of a plutonium golem, which is now capable of destroying the world.

The physicist George Gamow, who co-authored one of the foundational papers on the big bang and who had a peculiar sense of humor, rewrote a version of Genesis, and sent a copy of his book, The Creation of the Universe, to the Pope: In the beginning God created radiation and plasma. And the plasma was without shape or number, and the nucleons were rushing madly upon the face of the deep. And God said: ‘Let there be mass two.’ And there was mass two.

And God saw deuterium, and it was good.

And God continued to call numbers until He came to the transuranium elements…

* Barthes, again in Mythologies: “There is a single secret to the world, and this secret is held in one word; the universe is a safe of which humanity seeks the combination: Einstein almost found it, this is the myth of Einstein…

The historic equation E=mc2, by its unexpected simplicity, almost embodies the pure idea of the key, bare, linear, made of one metal, opening with a wholly magical ease a door which had resisted the desperate efforts of centuries.”

O Word, you were there for a moment like Oh! You were there in the mind, and equation rolled up on the tip of the tongue, a lapidary formula to open the mountainside’s stone door. I reached out to pluck and plant you on the page: a gem, a seed, a seasame, a genesis. You were there in the mind for a moment, but faced with definition, you fled.

commencement 2008

67

Dead Dog Story

justin keenan

You feel like you’re driving something much larger than your old Corolla, like a limousine, or a hearse. Everyone else is crying in the backseat.

You try not to cry yourself because you have to be the adult right now, but you are not an adult right now. You are 18 years old but that does not make you an adult right now. You can drink and not sound drunk on the phone when you talk to your mom and you can unhook a bra strap without looking at it but these things do not make you an adult right now either. Your eyes feel heavy with tears. Your family is a smear in the rearview mirror and every few moments you rub your eyes with the back of your hand and then try to wipe the snot from your nose without stringing shit everywhere. There. You can see them in the backseat now: your mom and little brother, grabbing onto Mongrel, who rides middle hump and tries to keep his head down as low as possible.

In the corners of the mirror you can sometimes see the outlines of his fluid-filled abdomen.

Bloated and grotesque. It looks like it belongs on an African dog, wobbling around a collection of dusty huts in the background of a National Geographic photo. But it is on your dog and your dog is in your backseat and he whimpers whenever the car bumps, and then your mom and little brother cry and squeeze him harder, and then you tighten your grip on the steering wheel and try to steady your quivering lip, because you know that their tears aren’t as sincere as yours because you’re holding them in like an adult, but when the tears well up in your eyes your vision blurs and then you drift or thump over potholes

68

THE HARVARD ADVOCATE

and then Mongrel whimpers again. Your car is a perpetual motion machine of tears. You realize before you’re out of your neighborhood that the entire drive is going to be like this.

When you first moved into the house you live in now you were six years old and bored. Your little brother was barely a year old which meant you didn’t want to play with him. At the same time, you knew you were too old or too smart to play with the other children in your neighborhood because your mom didn’t let you watch television and instead gave you Legos and Great Illustrated Classics. So you started walking. You walked when the weather was nice, but if it rained or if it was muddy you had to stay inside because you would track mud into your mom’s kitchen. At first you would walk to the end of the street and back.

When you started walking you would ask yourself a question, and then you would talk through the answer to yourself as you walked. Your first questions were simple enough: if lightning bugs need their lights to see, why don’t they just leave them on all the time? You leaned forward slightly as you walked, like Sherlock Holmes. Well? You narrowed your eyes until your forehead wrinkled.

You tried hard to make your forehead wrinkle.

Everyone you knew who was smart had lots of forehead wrinkles, which is probably why they didn’t mind being bald because then everyone knew that thought a lot and they didn’t have to brush their hair back to prove it. Well? Well, you reasoned, lightning bugs have to turn their lights on and off because when their light bulbs burn out they can’t just buy new ones. You were

satisfied with your cleverness. By now you turned around and were on your way back to the house, satisfied.

You answered every question you posed yourself. Your intellect knew no bounds. Soon, however, your questions got more complicated: if all the dinosaurs died when a meteor hit the earth, who buried the dinosaurs? You walked to the end of the street and back, but you still didn’t have your answer. This upset you. You looked at your front door, painted orange by your mom for the season and bedecked with a wicker wreath.

If you went inside now, you wouldn’t be able to concentrate on your mom’s chicken pot pie and mashed potatoes, which you could faintly smell through the poorly sealed windows. So you kept walking. You walked to the end of the street and around the corner, down to the blue mailbox with the bent leg. The one that your mom used to call The Happiest Mailbox in the World because it looked like it was dancing. You walked slowly, shuffled, really, and took care to step on every leaf of a certain color as you went. You kept your

head down. You could hear other people, your neighbors, raking or talking in their yards. You intended to wave or smile if they said something to you, but other than that your job was to keep walking. Could mice and birds bury a T-rex?

What if they all tried at the same time? These were not good ideas. You were a keen observer of nature and you knew that birds and mice never worked together. Could the dinosaurs have gone underground themselves because they knew the meteor was coming? They were not smart enough to be polite. Dinosaurs had brains the size of walnuts; you read this in a book. You could see the mailbox up ahead. Dancing at you. You thought of what your mom called the mailbox and then you thought of your mom and then you thought of the dinner your mom was making for when you got back to the house and then your stomach started to rumble and you thought of earthquakes. Hmmm. You paused. No one buried the dinosaurs. When Pangaea made earthquakes all the dinosaur bones rolled into them and got swallowed up, and the ones that didn’t got found

commencement 2008

69

by cavemen and they made tools out of them or put them in their noses. You were a genius.

Perhaps you would have a new forehead wrinkle to show yourself in the mirror tomorrow morning.

You turned around and made a loop. When you got home, your mom was standing on the porch. She looked upset. Where have you been?

Walking. You weren’t supposed to go past the end of the street. The street wasn’t long enough. Long enough for what? For my thoughts. You think a lot, don’t you? I have a lot of thoughts.

The next day your mom brought home a dog.

What am I supposed to do with it, you said. It sat in the center of the linoleum kitchen floor and looked around. You thought it didn’t know what it was supposed to do with itself, either. If you’re going to go walking, your mom said, you should at least have somebody with you. That’s not a somebody. Regardless, she said. I don’t need it to go with me. Your mom put one hand on her hip and leaned over you because when you’re six everyone can lean over you. If you want to go past the end of the street you need the dog to go

70

THE HARVARD ADVOCATE

with you. You were defeated. You looked down at it again. You doubted it could even make it to the end of the street without getting in the way.

Pet it, go on. When you tried to pet it, it barked at you and you pulled your hand away. Then it peed. Your mom handed you a leash and said you should make sure to keep the strap around your wrist at all times.

You dragged the dog, which you called Mongrel, down the front steps and into the yard.

It was not interested in walking because it didn’t have problems to think about because it was a dog and it was dumb. But you jerked it by the leash until it yelped and started following you.

You didn’t appreciate its dilly-dallying, but it was your chance to take longer walks, which led you to ask yourself questions you had been afraid to ask before. Questions that didn’t have anything to do with dinosaurs and bugs and kid things. Why did your dad pack up all his things and leave your mom crying in the living room? But before you got walking properly, you had to jerk on the leash. Every minute or so it stopped and hiked

its leg up by a shrub or a pile of leaves. It looked pleased with itself. You made a dramatic gesture out of looking away in disgust. Soon it could not wait to find new things to mark. It began to trot without you jerking on the leash. Every tree along the street and around the corner was a new opportunity. You came to The Happiest Mailbox in the World and it hiked its leg up alongside the mailbox’s own dancing leg. For a moment they danced in sync. Then it kept going. Soon you had to rein it in from lanes of traffic. For the first time you could remember, you felt concerned and annoyed and excited all at once. You walked past The Happiest Mailbox in the World and down to the convenience store parking lot, and you only stopped there because you didn’t think you could find the way home if you went any further. On the way home, it occurred to you that you hadn’t answered your question. Hadn’t even thought about it, actually. The feeling of not thinking made you feel buoyant. You went for walks almost every day after that, even when it rained and your mom yelled at you for tracking mud into her kitchen.

You squatted on the front porch with your backpack next to you. Wrinkled pages of notebook paper stuck out of your big pocket, mauled by the heavy-duty zipper that you zipped in too much haste. You flipped through a chapter book while Mongrel chewed on your shoulder straps. You spent most of your afternoons like this. Once you started going to school, your mom stopped buying Legos and made you read longer books. You were not disappointed. For months, you had known that Legos were for children and you only played with them because you didn’t want your mom to feel like she was missing out on your childhood.

You passed them along to your little brother, who put them in his mouth. Mongrel chewed on your shoulder straps because he had figured out that your backpack had something to do with why you didn’t go on so many walks anymore. You still weren’t convinced that Mongrel had thoughts, or at least not as many as you had, but you had decided that you couldn’t let that destroy your relationship. You appreciated that he waited at the back door for you with his head thrown back and his mouth open like a piranha or a

trashcan. You made time for walks every once in a while, even when you didn’t really have time for them, because you were in the advanced class and this week you were learning how to write in cursive and divide fractions, and when you got home you didn’t want to think about answering more questions. You ran into the house and found Mongrel’s leash. Your loop grew with your maturity, expanding to encompass almost the entire neighborhood. You walked past the convenience store and down to the post office and back without thinking a word. When Mongrel stopped to pee or rest, you squatted next to him and scratched him behind his ear, which you had discovered was his favorite place to be scratched and you wanted him to know how good it feels to have someone who knows your favorite place.

In high school you made friends. You had had friends before, people you ate lunch next to, or people that you gave answers to, but these friends wanted you to come over to play video games and go to movies with them. You spent less time at your house, which was alright by you because

commencement 2008

71

your mom had become kind of a bitch lately.

And your little brother. Jesus Christ. You sat on your front step and rubbed Mongrel’s back as you waited for your friend’s mom’s minivan to pull into the driveway because you didn’t like listening to your mom and little brother shout at one another in the kitchen. Yesterday you told her that she was too lax with him, didn’t deliver on her own threats, and that’s why he had no respect for authority. She asked you who the adult was in the house. You said you couldn’t tell. The front steps felt nice except on days like that when the cold seeped through your jeans and made your ass numb. Mongrel waited patiently with you. Lately he had been putting on weight. He did a lot of sitting and waiting, except for those moments when he trotted around to the side of the house to pee. You knew your friend’s mom wasn’t coming. Most of the time she did, but some days, like that one, everyone was busy with homework and family dinners. All was not lost, however; you had a contingency plan. You just sat on the front step until it got dark, and then when you were ready to go to bed you went back inside and told your mom that you didn’t feel like going out after all. She didn’t ask any questions, and you pranced on up the stairs and went to bed. But most of the time your friend’s mom came. She would pull into the driveway, then you would disappear behind the sliding back door that made the weird sound like air sucking and be gone.

You pulled up alongside the curb, let your fingers rap on the steering wheel. You watched the large bay windows for silhouettes. Your friend was late again. You sighed and slid back a little further in your seat. Near the end of your junior year, you got your dead great aunt’s old car, a busted old Corolla that had never been anywhere but church and the grocery store. It wasn’t a sexy car, and you never had the chance to put the backseat to use, but it got you places, and for that you were grateful. Finally, the unmistakable shape of your friend moved across the bay window, appeared in the doorway, waved at his mom like he was brushing her away, and trudged across the yard to the car. You unlocked his door. It was one of those cars where you had to lean across the seat and pull the lock up yourself. Not sexy at all. But

72

THE HARVARD ADVOCATE

you didn’t drive people around that much. You were only driving tonight because your friend got into his first wreck a few weeks ago and was still on shit terms with his parents. You met your other friends at the theater. You sat through the movie but didn’t pretend to enjoy it. You let yourself sink in your seat and hogged both armrests while your friends explored one another’s thighs or provided running commentary replete with pop culture references. After the movie you drove your friend straight home. He tried to make small talk, but what really occurred was less a conversation and more a collection of bodiless words floating in space between two people who didn’t really know one another. You dropped him off at his house and he trudged across his yard and disappeared behind his front door. You drove away. You had realized that you had little in common with the people that were your friends. They didn’t want to talk about the Fitzgerald or Conrad you had been reading, and you didn’t recognize actors from television shows or get jokes about The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and after a while you got annoyed with them for screwing around like children. You started taking your car out and driving around. That night you took the interstate out into the country. You tried to keep your eye on the road as your right hand fumbled with the glove compartment. A pack of cigarettes. You shook the pack, tapped it against your chest until a single cigarette slid out. You put the cigarette in your mouth. Shit. The lighter. Again with the glove compartment. You had been practicing for weeks, but the same thing happened every time.

You had a routine down, but not the one you wanted. You lit the cigarette and took a few puffs, but it made you sick to your stomach like it did every time, and then you had to roll down your window with the little plastic hand crank and lean your head out and retch, which didn’t look very dignified. You decided to focus on your driving.

Most of the time you just made circles around the interstate until late, but tonight you had a long stretch of country highway to yourself. You kept driving; you drove until there were no lights anywhere, the clouds blocking out any starlight.

You loved racing through darkness the most. As soon as you were sure no one else was on the road,

you floored it, took your eyes off the road and pushed the little needle on the speedometer as far as you could make it go. Around 80 it would start to wriggle with uncertainty, but you anticipated this. When the needle hesitated, you whispered to it, made it steady, and eventually you eased it past 100, perhaps 105 on a decline. After you were satisfied, or as satisfied as you could be, you looped around and headed back. When you got home, you slid the key into the front door and glided up the stairs, but you made sure to rub Mongrel, who sat patiently on the front step and never told anyone about your adventurism.

At Thanksgiving, you ate in silence with your mom and little brother. You were only there because when your mom called to ask if you were coming home for Thanksgiving you were drunk and said yes of course you would be home because you needed to get her off the phone as fast as possible. This was the first time you had seen them since August when you left for that fancy liberal arts college in the middle of the woods.

You never called home. If anyone had asked, you would have said that it was because you could

never find the time. This was not a total lie. You kept yourself busy. You spent a lot of time walking through the woods, sometimes with a girl, often not. Last week you went walking with a girl from your twentieth-century Russian lit class. She thought it was cute the way you mispronounced Nabokov, stressing the first syllable rather than the second. NAH-buh-kahv. She taught you how to say it right, how to explore the contours of a word with your mouth. Nah-BAH-kahv. One more time. Nuh-BOH-kahv. There. Later you took her back to your room and said she would teach you how to explore her contours. The line made you cringe, but not enough to stop. After she left, you didn’t bother to turn the lights on, so you sat on the corner of your ruffled bed, expended, emptied. You pulled out the flask that you stored in the back of your desk drawer. This filled you back up with something, not necessarily what you lost, just something to stave off feelings of emptiness. You had tried drinking socially a few times, but could never get past the way other people acted like children when they drank. After that you only drank in intimate settings or alone.

commencement 2008

73

Later that night you tried to read some critical theory but you couldn’t get out of the funk the day had put you in. You were still in this funk as you sat hunched over the kitchen table with your mom and little brother. The sound of silverware against ceramic, layered over a background of chewing noises. Your mom told you about the trip to the vet two weeks ago. You saw Mongrel briefly when you came in, saw how his abdomen had expanded like a balloon, filled with fluids that his heart could no longer pump to wherever hearts pump abdomen fluid. You looked down at your sweet potatoes and green beans, nodding slowly. You tried your hardest not to make eye contact with anyone at the table. You didn’t have to; you knew exactly what was happening. Your little brother was shoveling food in and talking with mashed potatoes coming out of his mouth.

He was trying to berate you for not caring enough about your family. You could feel your temples pounding a steady drumbeat against your skull as your temperature started to rise. Outwardly, at least, you had become a master at ignoring your

74

THE HARVARD ADVOCATE

family, but inwardly it affected you the way it did every time, and would continue to do so. You took a big bite of corn. Your mom’s voice over the sound of your own chewing. Tomorrow morning.

Alright. Can you drive? I can drive. After she finished talking, you wiped your mouth off and went upstairs. When are you going to get your hair cut? The sound of your door closing.

The vet’s office is bright and white and full of sound. You want to collect your thoughts.

You wish you could have a moment of stillness, wish the only sound beside your mom and little brother’s sobbing would be the hum of the fluorescent lighting. But the vet’s office is loud, a din of cats meowing and dogs of all sizes growling and yelping. Mongrel is visibly upset. He huddles under your chair, and whimpers when you look down at him. You try to scratch his favorite place, but either you can’t quite find it or it isn’t helping him in this place, at this time. When the nurse comes out, your mom can’t form real words through her hysterics. You tell her to sit down and you fill out all the necessary forms. Death is mostly paperwork, you realize. You feel like you’re keeping your composure, but then you look down at the forms and see the nervous squiggles made by your shaking hand on the shaking clipboard.

You hand the clipboard to the nurse. She is obese and covered in makeup that runs down her face with her sticky obese person sweat. You think she tries to smile at you, but the line of her mouth is too crooked to be sure. You smile politely just to be safe. Then she takes the clipboard and disappears behind a door. You start to measure your breaths.

Inhale through the nose and exhale through the mouth. People tell you that this has a calming effect. You don’t see how. Your mom and brother have pushed their chairs closer together and are making heaving motions in each other’s arms.

The nurse reappears and explains what’s going to happen. You hear something about two shots. No pain. Just like going to sleep. Four minutes. He’ll be returned in a bag. Sometimes there are fluids, she explains. He’ll be returned in a bag. You process this. All you hope is that it doesn’t look like a garbage bag. Through all of this you nod your head. Would you like to be there with him?

You pause. You’re trying to be the adult here, but

you feel your jaw slacken slightly and your eyes shift back and forth, searching for anything solid to grab onto in this room that you swear is starting to list. You try to think, but all you can hear is the bellowing of your mom and little brother. You imagine Mongrel in a room by himself with the obese nurse. Imagine him recoiling in the center of a cold metal table in the center of a cold white room. You want to be there to whisper to him and scratch his favorite place. But you don’t think you can. You’ve been trying to be the adult for too long.

You want to go for a walk where you don’t have to turn around at the mailbox or the convenience store. You say that won’t be necessary, thank you.

You lift up Mongrel and pass him to the nurse’s big arms. Even with his bloating, her mass still swallows him up. She disappears behind the door again. Now the waiting happens. You stare at the spot of tile between your feet, listen to the sound of your own unsteady breathing. Your mom and little brother blubber all over one another; you’re convinced they don’t even realize Mongrel is gone until the nurse reappears with the heavy black bag that looks just like a god damn garbage bag and feels stiff and awkward in your arms as you carry it out to the car.

Your mom insists on a funeral in the backyard.

She says it’s where Mongrel would have wanted to be buried. You know that this is bullshit, but you don’t say anything. While you work the cool, autumn ground with an old shovel, your mom and brother proceed from the car. They walk one after the other in the style of what they perceive state funerals to look like. You wipe dirt off your face and forearms. Your mom tells you that the hole isn’t deep enough. Show a little respect, she says, this was a member of our family. You bite your lip and dig deeper. Soon the ground is too dark and too hard to dislodge any more. You let the shovel drop to your side. Your mom blubbers through a prayer that lasts way too long, your little brother wrapped around her trunk like a tick through every sloppy syllable. Under your breath you let the word cow escape, linger a moment in the air, then dissipate. After the service, your mom and little brother hover around your work.

She produces a small packet of seeds and scatters them over the mound. Forget-me-nots, she says,

they were his favorite. You wait patiently to the side for them to leave. Eventually they do. Only after you hear the heavy thud of the front door do you allow yourself to grieve properly. You squat in front of the mound and let your face fall into your dirt-covered hands. You feel everything around you sinking but you have no desire to do anything about it.

Later that night you go driving. You take the Corolla out onto the interstate, push the needle as far as it goes. No one else is around to tell you to slow down. You make the normal loop around the city, twice, a third time. You ride the interstate until it ends, dissolves into a lonely country highway you haven’t explored before. You fly past black fields and plains while the black shapes of barns slide by against the clear night sky. Out here you are surrounded by stars. Each point of light reminds you of something you don’t want to be reminded of. Because you’re taking astronomy this semester you know that bright star in the corner of your windshield is Sirius, the Dog Star.

No matter how fast you drive, it just hangs there.

If you could obliterate your mind and all your thoughts in it, you would. You settle for driving the accelerator into the floorboard. You heave and make crying noises but no tears are coming.

Your goal is to drive fast enough so that even the stars slip away, leaving you wrapped in a simple darkness. Everything in front of you is perfectly focused. You keep your eyes fixed forward, feel the strain as the streetlights and stars slide outward into the periphery. Light speed. From high above, your blur creates contorted loops of red and white light, intertwined and pulsing to an unconscious rhythm.

commencement 2008

75

ENVOY

Pogonotomy

Head bent, neck taut, razor sharpened and held at an acute angle to the skin; at this point, little separates the barber from the barbarian. A bit of perpendicular pressure affirms the straight razor’s reputation as a cutthroat. But with a gentle touch, a finely honed edge, and a smooth pass across the day-old growth, the razor grants us the ability to craft ourselves in our own image, a luxury unknown to the rest of the animal kingdom. Humanity’s knack for tools, responsible for cultivating the land and its resources, is turned towards our own visages, cultivating a clean appearance.

Perhaps the desire for a good shave is an innate urge. Why all this hair, when it gets in the way of important things like chewing, talking, and kissing? This aspect of personal hygiene surpasses simple cleanliness; it is a matter of personal aesthetic.

It’s not much of a stretch, then, to describe shaving as an art, and a dangerous one at that. A blade in use, especially a straight razor, is never safe. There is no margin for error; mistakes result in swift and bloody consequences. Missteps in hair styling and clothing choice may leave you open to ridicule, but rarely do they put anyone in physical danger. In front of the mirror, fully lathered and armed with a razor, however, you must willingly put yourself in harm’s way for the sake of the shave. Trembling hands, a moment of doubt, or a poor stroke undo not only the beard, but the flesh as well.

76

THE HARVARD ADVOCATE

evan hanlon

It’s no wonder, then, that wielding a razor was initially reserved for the barber, a skilled artisan whose medium was the human face. Just like portraiture, the shave was best left to a real artist. You will not find such a personal canvas anywhere in the world. But despite the comfort of the barber’s chair and the thrill of seeing a master at work, the joy of having a shave pales in comparison to the joy of shaving oneself. To master one’s own presentation: what more could you ask?

Jean-Jacques Perret knew this, and thanks to his double-edged safety razor the wet shave moved from the exclusivity of the barber’s chair into the bathrooms of the masses. This more forgiving, but no less precise, tool and Perret’s own treatise Pogonotomy or The Art of Learning to Shave Oneself, imbued facial hair with a new sense of style. What Perret gave the bearded masses was more than just a razor and a quick how-to guide.

The self-administered wet shave allowed an individual to gaze into themselves via the mirror, turning the bathroom into an even greater zone of contemplation and self-reflection.

First, a wash of the face, then a thorough lather, finished off by the shave itself. Deliberate and measured, the wet shave is a ritual that transfixes man on the image of himself and pits man against beard. Armed and laid bare, man confronts himself in the wet shave. The blade imparts a sense of your own vitality, and mortality. So maybe it makes sense that today the

shave has been reduced, stripped of its ornament, and relegated to a tiny corner of the morning routine.

As the shave atrophies, so do the tools. The double-edged blade has been replaced by fully loaded cartridges of nearly cut-proof razors. In the case of electric razors, the blades have turned into tiny whirring turbines hidden behind a cage.

Treatment of the face is neglected, the grain is transgressed, and the tradition of the wet shave becomes as quaint as the spinning barber pole.

As the aesthetic of the face suffers, so goes our connection to the more thrilling side of life.

So the ritual must be revived. The beard must not be treated as a nuisance or a mere annoyance,

swatted away with the perfunctory pass of a clumsy appliance. The beard is insidious, and much too clever for a machine as imprecise as an electric razor. Shaving requires skill, cunning, and above all attention to detail. Personal shaving must be recognized as the art Perret insists that it is when he writes, “It requires above all a wise and steady hand to guide it;” “it” could as easily be a paint brush as a razor.

Or both. An artist requires the proper tools to properly execute their craft. Preparation for the wet shave is half the battle, and without the badger hair brush the outcome is decidedly tragic for the face. The razor blade arms race casts its ever growing pall over the shaving industry, but

commencement 2008

77

as blade counts double, triple, quadruple even, has the lather been forgotten? Without the proper soap, proper preparation for the shave becomes impossible. The beard must be prepared for the razor lest the more brutish side of the blade leave its mark.

The application of the lather requires its own tools as well. Coarse hands do little more than rub the soap like butter on toast. With a badger hair brush, however, the lather is not only applied, but the face and beard are fully prepped for the razor’s work. Lifted from a mug topped off with shaving soap, the badger hair allows for a supple, even lather that is soaked up by the face and the beard. Soon the beard is soft, the skin exfoliated, and the razor can come and go as lightly as the

78

THE HARVARD ADVOCATE

breeze.

Despite the best attempts of Gillette Corporation and its competitors, no new technique has yet risen to rival the tools that King Camp Gillette himself made popular among the masses. Perret’s invention provides more than just a close shave, with its close calls and poor strokes reminding us of our own tenuous position in this world. No other learning curve is sharper, the evidence of its trials so clearly laid out. But if comfort is never set aside, well-being never put on the line for even greater reward, the value of a good tool will forever be lost. In the world of the wet shave, it is time to pick up the double-edged safety razor again.

The Harvard Advocate wishes to thank the following generous individuals for their support of our activities during the 2007-2008 school year. Their gifts have made possible extensive repairs and improvements to our historic Harvard Square building. However, we still hope for assistance in replacing obsolete media and design equipment, preserving historic documents and photographs, and digitizing our back catalog so that our rich legacy can be available to all. The continued publication of the nation’s oldest continually published college literary magazine depends on such contributions; please consider supporting us at any level.

Patrons Ted Greenberg, Meryl Natchez, P. David Ondaatje, Remnick Group

BENEFACTORS Louis Begley

Donors Andrea Blaugrund, Bruce A. Boucher, Norris Darrell, Jr., Richard Nalley

FRIENDS David L. Auerbach, Lily L. Brown, Lawrence Clouse, Edward J. Coltman, Robert Cumming, Caroline G. Darst, Frank P. Davidson, Lorraine T. Fowler, Nancy Hannaford Greer, Rex Jackson, Frederick A. Jacobi, John Keene, Anita Patterson, Charles R. Peck, Vernon R. Proctor, Family Ross, Richard M. Smoley

All gifts to The Harvard Advocate endowment fund, a partitioned division of the Harvard University endowment, 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 or over), Benefactor ($500 or over), Donor ($200 or over), and Friend ($25-$199). Those who give $50 or more will receive a complimentary year’s subscription to the magazine.

Checks should be made out to “Harvard University” with “Harvard Advocate fund #480105” written in the memo line. Envelopes can be sealed with a kiss and mailed to 21 South Street, Cambridge, MA 02138. Please e-mail contact@theharvardadvocate.com with questions or to discuss specific giving opportunities. Thank you for supporting The Advocate. commencement 2008

79

Contributors’ Notes Brad Baughman subscribes far too liberally. Courtney Bowman is cautious around pastels. Michael Ellis lives and works in Boston, MA, and currently maintains a Teaching Assistant position in the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies. His latest project consists of a contribution to the Harvard Advocate. Alexander Fabry is tip and ty. Evan Hanlon once saw a panda shave. Kim Gittleson is going south. Alexandra Gutierrez is post-clever. Becky James is GNASH/CHOMP/ WILD EEP. Justin Keenan has devolved into sweater vests and sentence fragments. Laura Kolbe is a better-than-average tree climber. Zulie Malone spends her time riding around the Quincy courtyard on her yellow bicycle, loves her family, and has 58 stuffed cats. She is four-and-a-half years-old. David Rice was born in Brazil, Indiana, on Feb. 14, 1913, and grew up believing that Duty, Discipline, and David were spelled with capital Ds. Gabriel Rocha: GEORGE THE MOUSE, WHERE ARE YOU GOING, WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN? Ayten Tartıcı: “Yet you are holy to me”—Hölderlin. Xiaowei Wang is chillin/what more can she say/ top billin. According to Facebook, Marisa Williamson’s interests include: art, movies, music, feeding my brain, doing my part, being active, thinking thoughts, family, friends, traveling, cuddling.

Zhang Yue and Alexandra Hays: pandasinternational.org