Winter 2009

The Harvard Advocate The Archive Issue. Winter 2009, Vol. 114 Issue 2 Table of Contents Art 20

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35 44

Three Necklaces (A diamond is forever forever ever forever ever) Dana Kase Untitled (Saturn had been distracted by Federico de la Fe and his town of flowers, and because of them he did not notice when she stood up from his bed and put on her green dress and walked away, walking to an apartment with pictures of pale men on the wall and crisper drawers filled with leafed lettuce neatly packaged in resealable bags.) Dana Kase From the Archives: Advocate Art, 1866-2009 Nicole Bass Anthems for a 17-year-old Girl (2004//2009) Amy Alamo Lien Features

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notes from 21 south street

Pop Adolescence Richard Beck Drowned Towns Ben Cosgrove The Art of Identity: Memory as the Maker Allison Keeley Cartography and Memory Alexander Fabry envoy Drafts Antaean Marta Figlerowicz Fiction

9 Summoning 16 The Buddha 46 Orchids

Linda Liu Maria Xia Carolyn Gaebler Poetry

Cover Image The Harvard Advocate Meeting Minutes 1918 - 1933. this page Doodle from the Meeting Minutes 1918 - 1933, p. 122.

8 A Christmas Visit with Uncle Charles, Pt. 1 14 On Seeing My First Western 30 South Pole Station 51 the numbers 1 to 10, each number on its own page 64 A Christmas Visit with Uncle Charles, Pt. 2

Jesse Barron and Mia Barron Daniel Wenger Abram Kaplan Michael Stynes Jesse Barron and Mia Barron

ART Emma Banay, Nicole Bass, Ruben Davis, Alexandra Hays, Dana Kase, Amy Lien, Paul Katz, Anna Murphy, Julene Paul, Thalassa Raasch, Anna Raginskaya, Julia Renaud, Michael Stynes.

The Harvard Advocate www.theharvardadvocate.com

Editorial Board President Geraldine Prasuhn Publisher Eyal Dechter Art Editor Nicole Bass Business Manager Millicent Younger Design Editor LeeAnn Suen Features Editor Alexander Fabry Fiction Editor Jesse Barron Poetry Editor Margaret Ross Art Pegasi Anna Barnet

Alexander Berman Literary Pegasi Sanders Bernstein

April Wang Dionysus Caroline Williams Circulation Manager Carolyn Gaebler Publicity Manager Linda Liu Online Editor Logan Pritchard Librarian Taro Kuriyama Alumni Relations Manager Alec JoneS

BUSINESS Ben Berman, Sanders Bernstein, Giselle Cheung, Diane Choi, Ruben Davis, Eyal Dechter, Amy Heberle, Catherine Humphreville, Alec Jones, Paul Katz, Taro Kuriyama, Justine Lescroart, Jeffrey Lee, Keri Mabry, Geraldine Prasuhn, Logan Pritchard, Anna Raginskaya, Daniel Thorn, Mike Segal, Caroline Williams, Natalie Wong, Millicent Younger, Lillian Yu. DESIGN Sabrina Chou, Dana Kase, Charleton Lamb, Amy Lien, Joseph Morcos, Anna Murphy, Lauren Packard, LeeAnn Suen, Joe Vitti.

FEATURES Anna Barnet, Richard Beck, Brittany Benjamin, Mark Chiusano, Becky Cooper, Ben Cosgrove, Alexander Fabry, Marta Figlerowicz, Allison Keeley, Judith Huang, Kevin Seitz, Jessica Sequeira, Daniel Wenger.

FICTION Katie Banks, Jesse Barron, Sanders Bernstein, Emily Chertoff, Marta Figlerowicz, Carolyn Gaebler, Justin Keenan, Seph Kramer, Charleton Lamb, Max Larkin, Linda Liu, Ryan Meehan, Alex Ratner, Juliet Samuel, Matthew Spellberg, April Wang, David Wallace, Scott Zuccarino.

POETRY Nicole Bass, Alexander Berman, Courtney Bowman, Judith Huang, Abram Kaplan, Jennifer Nicole Kurdyla, James Leaf, Hugh Malone, Celeste Monke, Lauren Nikodemos, Adam Palay, Margaret Ross, Michael Stynes, David Wallace, Maria Vassileva, Daniel Wenger, Mike Zuckerman.

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

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

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. 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).

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NOTES FROM 21 SOUTH STREET Richard Beck Pop Adolescent: A Personal History, With Lawnmowers It wasn’t until about the fourth time that I drove back from New England to the Philadelphia suburb where I grew up that I began to notice the thickening light. It’s a subtle phenomenon. The visual recalibration doesn’t really kick in for sure until I’m past New York City, driving down the New Jersey Turnpike, and watching pine trees rush by on either side of the car. In Boston, the sunlight is pure and thin, and in the late afternoons it comes slanting in at a low wintry angle and turns white steeples the color of cantaloupe flesh.

Mid-Atlantic sunlight is more substantial stuff–– yellower, too––and it’s rich with dust or pollen or rain vapor. I like each kind at different times. If I’ve been home for more than a few weeks I get anxious to leave, and the splashes of northern light that set the Maples ablaze every fall are refreshing to the point of disorientation or even joy. But the light holds more in Wallingford––more heat, more water, but also some twenty years of layered familiarities, all of which fan out and crowd in every time I drive back. Home is uncomfortable, but it’s my everyday jacket.

The first time I heard the band Neutral Milk Hotel was in a high school philosophy class.

Each student brought in a recording of what they thought was a good pop song, specifically good in that it measured up to David Hume’s criteria for aesthetic excellence (for public school, this was a pretty creative class). I brought Bruce Springsteen.

My friend Peter brought Neutral Milk Hotel. He played “Holland, 1945,” the sixth song from their second album, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. It begins with a second or two of upbeat strumming, and then there’s a goofy little count-off––“two, onetwo-three-four”––at which point the song really begins with what sounds like a fuzzy explosion.

The low-fidelity sound is completely intentional.

Released in 1998, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea was recorded on a four-track tape machine, and there are moments on many of the album’s tracks when a high vocal line or screaming brass chord will overload the apparatus and set the whole sonic space buzzing, which is exactly what winter 2009

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happened to my seventeen-year old brain as I sat in philosophy class listening to “Holland, 1945.”

I could not have articulated the transformation, but I was aware that something inside had come wonderfully unhinged.

I bought the CD as soon as I could, and for a year or two In the Aeroplane Over the Sea was the greatest music I had ever heard. My mother, who sometimes tried to be interested in the music I liked, hated Neutral Milk Hotel, which was an added bonus. She hated everything about it that I liked: Jeff Mangum’s keening vocal overconfidence, the way the instruments whip every song into a frenzied volume contest, the insane melodicism. My father heard Neutral Milk Hotel one time that I can remember, and only just the first thirty seconds or so before he reached for the volume dial on our car stereo. I don’t think we said a word about it, and future car trips were soundtracked by an innocuous mix of Bob Dylan, The Who, and Steely Dan. The album did what it was supposed to do to my parents: it pushed them away. Liking music that makes the veins bulge in Dad’s forehead is one of the things that makes being a teenager worthwhile.

Pop music is generationally specific, much more so than other kinds of culture. Moviegoing is a lifelong habit, and children actually spend a lot of time trying to sneak into the violent, sexy films that their parents go see on the weekends. (The MPAA ratings system, authoritative and opaque, adds to the mystique; I remember shutting my eyes in the theater when Kate Winslet disrobed in Titanic, thinking that PG-13 made it literally illegal for 12-year-old me to be seeing her breasts.)

Literature is either neutral or shared ground.

Catcher In the Rye and On the Road have been teenage bibles for more than 50 years. I have the sense that I missed out on the real golden age of teenage rebellion, the ’50s and ’60s. Then, adolescents were members of the first generation to be fed on the explosion of pop culture that took place in the wake of WWII. As the Hollywood Production Code withered until its death in 1968, movies, which had always managed violence, began for the first time to get bloody. The Sexual Revolution had literature to match. Philip Roth and Bonnie and Clyde stirred up levels of parental 6 the harvard advocate

outrage and indignation that I do not know and cannot really imagine. My bloody movies look like my parents’ bloody movies, only a little more so, and as a teenager my books were mostly theirs to begin with.

Pop music is the exception. The last three cultural figures who really made parents angry– –the rapper Eminem, the rock musician Marilyn Manson, and Britney Spears––are all pop musicians. This has something to do with the nature of music, which, as sound, can never be completely ignored (there is no aural equivalent to shutting your eyes). The phenomenon isn’t only physics, though. People tend to figure out their musical preferences by the time they can’t go on calling themselves “young”––somewhere around age thirty––at which point the individual canon gets closed down. New music agitating for admission runs up against ears that are not only deaf but hostile: “Turn that crap down,” or, in my father’s case, he turned it down for me.

He would never have unplugged the DVD player, and my mother never snatched a book out of my hands. For kids growing up in the last years of the twentieth century, pop music was the only available way to piss off your parents with culture.

The other part of what gets parents so mad about music is the fact that pop songs inspire teenage devotion in ways that books and movies can only dream about, and although taste differs wildly from teenager to teenager, everybody falls in love the same way. A 17-year-old who gets into Japanese art rock and a screaming tween at the Jonas Brothers concert are going to be completely different kinds of cultural adults, but they have more in common than they realize, and neither one could begin to articulate or justify their taste in a meaningful way.

Teenagers who can explain what makes the music they like good are improvising liars. Their words are vague units of praise that filter in from friends and media. Their words should not be taken as anything more than affirmations of love.

But despite the fact that adolescents and language have a hard time getting along, teenagers are very good pop music listeners (they are also frequently great pop music makers). People become better readers, watchers, and lookers with age, but the ability to hear pop songs honestly decays over

time and, almost always, eventually disappears completely. What makes adolescence and pop so well suited to each other is that inarticulate love, because pop songs are also bad with words. Lyrics matter to an extent––and, because they can be quoted, they’re much easier to describe and talk about than beats and tones––but even the greatest songs turn into crude sentiment when reduced to words on a page. Some musicians don’t realize this and become awful poets. (Joni Mitchell, from her poem “Bad Dreams Are Good”: “We have poisoned everything / And oblivious to it all / The cell-phone zombies babble / Through the shopping malls.”) What matters are the sounds.

The explanatory power of a pop song operates largely outside language, and teenagers, who have no idea how to articulate the biological and emotional lurchings going on inside them, were made to have their lives explained by music. In the little office where my high school newspaper was edited and laid out, I worked with three guys who became some of my closest friends, and when they began to listen to The Magnetic Fields, I knew that I had to do the same. When I began to actually like The Magnetic Fields, I knew that something good was happening. Pop music told us that we fit together, which is something we could never have told ourselves. When adolescents fall in love, they make mixtapes. Pop music is teenage talking.

Jeff Mangum has said that In the Aeroplane Over the Sea was vaguely written around dreams he had about Anne Frank and her family during WWII, but lyrically this almost never gets more specific than on the first song I heard, “Holland, 1945,” where Mangum sings,

The only girl I ever loved Was born with roses in her eyes But then they buried her alive One evening, 1945 With just her sister at her side.

That the album would be about Anne Frank makes sense in that the catastrophe of her adolescence was reflected in the catastrophe of history that trapped her in that little attic. On the album, this collection of personal and historical

earthquakes leaps out of the speakers like a circus.

Mangum loved the carnivalesque aesthetic of early twentieth century Penny Dreadfuls, the kind of vulgar gothic atmosphere suggested by woodcuts and hand-set type, semi-handmade products of an industrial age. The album’s lyrics were printed on a single sheet of paper––broadside style––rather than in the traditional tidy booklet. The record’s influence has turned out to be huge. In the late eighties and early nineties, the sound of indie rock was a kind of self-conscious laziness, an awkward, witty ugliness that viewed the tidy traditions of pop music as lame jokes. Neutral Milk Hotel, at the very end of the century, took that sound, that racket, and wrote pop songs with it, songs with melodies and sing-along choruses. What’s followed in the last 10 years has been a much prettier kind of indie rock. Many of the bands following in Neutral Milk Hotel’s wake, however, have nostalgically treated history as a simpler time when communities were close-knit and knitting was an everyday practical task. Neutral Milk Hotel looked back and saw a chain of disasters, one following another in horrible inevitability. They channeled that kind of history––itself trapped in a perpetual, thrashing adolescence––through sex, confusion, and longing.

None of this occurred to me at 17 because none of it needed to. Nobody ever asked me to justify my musical preferences and as long In the Aeroplane Over the Sea kept explaining me to myself on a day to day basis I was happy. The everydayness of pop music is built into the medium; since most albums are a little less than an hour long, it’s possible to listen to a record hundreds of times in a single year, at which point the music enters into a kind of symbiotic relationship with the people and situations it renders intelligible for the listener.

People pay an enormous amount of attention to the specifics of their listening: cracks in a CD jewel case, abrasions on the sleeve of a vinyl LP, the way a car stereo’s cheap speakers warp the sound of a particular song. This turns into fetishism at a certain point, but what lies at the root of all this obsessing is the fact that music refuses to be heard in a vacuum; it lives in its contexts. When I listen to In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, part of what I’m hearing is this: winter 2009

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The house here I grew up is a colonial pile of fieldstone with a big lawn, and it was my job to mow it during the summer. For the parts tucked in close to the house, I had a gray push mower with a black nylon bag hooked to the back which trapped the cut grass. Depending on how long it had been since I last mowed, I could walk back and forth for about 15 minutes before the bag filled up. Then I would roll the mower to a patch of woods that sloped down from the edge of our driveway and tug out clumps of grass with my free hand. This usually made me sneeze, and sometimes I would itch all over. For the more open spaces of the yard, though, it was possible to use our riding lawnmower. It had a yellow seat and a green chassis, and although it was also equipped with bags and a black chute which could be set up to collect the grass, I was usually allowed to leave them in the garage, which meant I could mow whole sections of lawn in big, uninterrupted swoops. I did this once or twice a week.

By the time Mr. Adams’ philosophy class and the school year had ended, I had memorized every word of In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. The difficult part was finding a time and a place to sing along.

Singing in the house, where any family member could have heard me through my bedroom door, was out of the question. I could sing while driving a car, but everyday drives never lasted for more than 10 or 15 minutes, and what I wanted was to yell my way through the album from start to finish. At the beginning of the summer, I bought an iPod. Once I wheeled the John Deere out of the garage onto the driveway, once I made sure to fill it with gasoline from the plastic tank with the yellow nozzle, once I was perched up on the seat, I threw a pair of enormous headphones over my ears, the kind that make big foam half-spheres and do a fair job of blocking out noise. With the album beginning to play, I stuffed the iPod into a cargo pocket and drove around to the back of the garage, where I began to mow the lawn.

The riding mower’s engine was not quiet, and with the blades turned on the machine made an incredible noise, which meant that I had to jack the volume all the way up in order to hear the music. More importantly, the mower’s racket 8 the harvard advocate

made my own singing inaudible to anyone other than myself. It was actually more like halfway melodic screaming. Mangum’s voice peaks about two or three whole steps out of the highest parts of my vocal range, but the lawnmower gave me the luxury of not having to quiet down when my high baritone gave out. I sang in choirs in high school and never quite learned not to jut my head forward and tighten up my neck trying to sing high notes. Yelling incomprehensible code at nothing in particular, with those big headphones strapped from ear to ear, I probably looked like an autistic war veteran up close. From any distance, I was just somebody mowing the lawn, the big machine’s insect hum as appropriate and unremarkable in the suburbs as traffic in a city or surf on a beach.

Even with his voice like a fractured air raid siren, Mangum’s melodies are muscular, and so the songs on In the Aeroplane Over the Sea are desperate but sexy. It is not easy for teenagers to feel sexy, and Mangum is wonderfully gentle and strange about how two people learn to use their bodies. On “Two-Headed Boy” he sings, “Catching signals that sound in the dark / We will take off our clothes / And there’ll be lacing fingers through the notches in your spine.” He knows that sex is a threat, ominously repeating the words “semen stains the mountaintops,” on the song “Oh, Comely,” but he also understands adolescent sex as an alternate world, a woods, an attic. My girlfriend and I would set alarms all senior spring, waking up at four in the morning in her basement or our guestroom, and drive one another home, our fathers both inconveniently early risers. My house is old—it makes noises when you breathe, and so I had to work out a way of climbing the stairs slowly, resting my feet on the outer edge of each step and trusting as much weight as possible to the less creaky railing. I don’t have to sneak out of people’s houses anymore, and I don’t get grounded for staying out late. But fear and magic are partners, and one disappears with the other. I learned this riding the lawnmower, with headphones.

I haven’t listened to In the Aeroplane Over the Sea very much since I finished high school.

I hear “Holland, 1945” at parties a lot, almost always near the end of the night when everybody

is dancing and wasted. Usually I dance along and yell the words, but one time I threaded my way out of the crowd and found my coat, and it wasn’t troubling at all. I had something else to do. What makes you dance is a song’s visceral relevance, and when I hear Neutral Milk Hotel now I almost always think about mowing the lawn.

My listening doesn’t free-associate anymore. It has lost its creativity. My listening has lost its creativity.

Nostalgia always does this: think of Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca, angry and boring, drinking his way through “As Time Goes By” over and over. Listening to In the Aeroplane Over the Sea now feels almost tacky, which is not to say that I don’t do it. Listening to it in Wallingford would be nearly vulgar.

I was at a recent holiday party when I heard that Neutral Milk Hotel’s guitarist, Julian Koster, would be showing up to sing Christmas carols. He walked in wearing a festive sweater––ironically festive?––and sat down near the piano, and then presented us with his saw, which he had named Badger. Using a bow, he played Christmas carols on the saw at an easy tempo. Between songs he would bend Badger towards the audience––his

way of “bowing” to our applause. In an incredibly soft, childlike voice, Koster told us that Badger was eight years old, and that, like all saws––and surely we knew this, being educated college students–– Badger would stay the same age for his entire life.

He also told made-up stories about each of the carols, how they had been smuggled across the borders between European countries, cherished by clockmakers and peasants, and how the songs had eventually made their way into his possession.

Right before I left, at the end of Badger’s third song, I thought to myself, “This may be related, in a distant way, to the music you made back in 1998, but it has nothing to do with the music I heard.” I left with two friends, and I walked back to my room through the cold to study. When I hear the album now, and especially when I hear the song that inaugurated my relationship with it, I hear it through the wavy haze that comes off the summer suburban asphalt. I see myself drenched in midAtlantic light. And I wake up from the adolescent fever dream––if only halfway––and I listen to something else.

winter 2009

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A Christmas Visit with Uncle Charles: Part I

Jesse Barron and Mia Barron

What are you doing today, Uncle Charles?

I’m going to stack this bread.

What are you doing today, Uncle Charles?

I’m going to stack this bread, then eat the bread that I’ve just stacked.

What are you doing today, Uncle Charles?

I’m going to stack this bread and walk my dog, then walk your dog.

What are you doing today, Uncle Charles?

I’m going to stack this bread and wait for this bus.

What are you doing today, Uncle Charles?

I’m going to stack this bread and then unstack it, slice by slice.

What are you doing today, Uncle Charles?

I’m going to stack this bread and give you a beating.

What are you doing today, Uncle Charles?

I’m going to stack this bread and read a German novel.

What are you doing today, Uncle Charles?

I’m going to stack this bread and write a German novel.

What are you doing today, Uncle Charles?

I’m going to stack this bread and set my house on fire Will you tell me why?

Yes - as soon as I stack this bread.

10 the harvard advocate

Summoning

My father’s earliest memory was when he was five years old, looking outside into the darkness at the madwoman who lived a few yards down the dirt road, on the other side of the street. Every night she was there, he said. Every night she would sit outside in front of her house, a faceless silhouette sometimes backlit by the moon, slowly rocking back and forth. Every night for hours she would sit alone in the dark. She was crying out the name of her dead son, trying to call him home. “Gou Er!” she howled into the night. Her sorrowful voice rang out in the summer silence of the Chinese countryside. It echoed in the mountains. “Hui lai!”

My father remembers what his mother told him, when he asked what the woman was doing. “She is calling the spirit of her son,” my grandmother said. “If you call out the names of the deceased, their spirit will come back and sleep in the house.”

She added, very sternly: “Don’t go near her.

She has a demon air.”

My father doesn’t believe in ghosts. He is a rational man, a scientist and soft-spoken atheist, thoughtful and patient in abstract discussions, patient with his daughter. We have talked about this story many times, though he hesitates to tell it. He doesn’t think of himself as a storyteller, and he doesn’t like ghost stories. For him, there is no use for the supernatural or perverse aesthetics in a real world already filled with grief and horror, and there is no time for self-indulgence when there is work to be done.

For years he has been trying to get me to write his stories, about growing up during the Cultural Revolution, about his and my mother’s lucky love story, about his experiences in the Red

Linda Liu

Guards denouncing his teachers and singing the Chinese national anthem in the midst of crowds of students in Tiananmen Square, waving the Red Book in the air and cheering for Chairman Mao. My father has been trying all my life to get me to understand and appreciate my background, his background, and the complicated, difficult chain of events that led him from farming communes in rural China to graduate school in Wisconsin. My father thinks his story of survival — China’s story of survival — will put my life into context and give me perspective on my troubles and grief.

He wants me to write about China, but not in this way. Not through the lens of Oriental superstition that no one believes in anymore. This story is self-indulgent, he would tell me. And I would not argue.

They only lived in that village for several months, in the summer and early fall of 1964. The army had moved into that remote mountainous region between Hubei and Sichuan to build a bridge across the Chang Jiang, and the military families were all housed in villages in the surrounding area.

My grandfather was only a low-ranking officer at the time, but he was lucky enough to get a house that his family did not have to share.

They only got the house because no one else wanted to live there. The house was small and shabby, on the outskirts of the village, but that was not why it was empty. It was empty because the villagers said it was haunted. They said in the village that it was often visited by the spirits of the dead landlord and his young son who used to live there, and by the demons that plagued his crazy widow, mad with grief, who still lived in another of their houses, a smaller one, across the road.

They said the air itself was contaminated by the winter 2009

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devils that possessed the woman and caused her madness. This was the “demon air” of which my grandmother spoke.

No one from the village would live so close to the madwoman. They believed that her demon air was contagious. My grandmother believed it too.

She was from the countryside, poorly educated, her heart full of traditional fears and superstitions. She did not want to live in that house with her young son, so close to a crazy woman and surrounded by the spirits of the restless dead. She was afraid of the invisible demons in the very air she breathed. But my grandfather insisted — he had traveled, gone to medical school in the city, and prided himself on being a modern-minded man — so she relented. It would not stop her from trembling with insomnia in the middle of the night, as she listened to the silence between the madwoman’s howls for hints of a ghostly visitor, but my grandmother knew her duty as an obedient wife. Nevertheless, she would warn my father, her five-year-old boy, to stay away from that woman.

My father never told me exactly what my grandmother said in that first, fierce warning, but I can imagine her younger voice — if not her younger self — filling her words with an ominous fear that goes back through generations of Chinese country folk; a still-remembered childhood fear of black-faced, wild-eyed, fire-tongued demons that live high up in the mountains and kidnap children to be slaughtered for dinner and slowly roasted over hellfire. I can hear her voice through the ears of my five-year-old father, confused and a little scared and vibrating with a strange excitement in the transmission of such a primordial fear: Don’t talk to her. Don’t even go near her. If you get too close to her, if you speak to her and breathe in her foul, demon breath, you too could be possessed by her devils. They will swim around you, slip in and whisper, damp and cold, in the nervous sweaty spaces between cloth and skin. They will pull at each hair on your arms and your legs with tiny teeth, glide needle-prick claws over every inch of your skin. They will enter your body through your nose, mouth, ears, or slither into your brain through the liquid space between your eyelids and the whites of your eyes, snipping thread-thin vessels to turn your vision red with blood, reaching a clawed 12 the harvard advocate

hand deep down into your throat and retching out a sudden, anguished scream.

You too could lose your mind, she would have told him. You too could be possessed, exiled, despised, and shamed.

“How did they die, the madwoman’s husband and her son?” I asked my father. We were sitting in the kitchen drinking tea after my Saturday piano lesson. I was fifteen, and it had been ten years since I first heard this story. “Why were their spirits not at rest? Was there a murder, a suicide?”

My father doesn’t remember, or maybe he never knew. He was five years old in 1964, and his parents never fully explained the woman’s history, if they even knew it at all. It was a long time ago, anyhow, and his early years were very confused because they were constantly moving around with the army, and sometimes he mixed up people and places in his memory from that time because they seemed to be everywhere all at once. After he started middle school things began to calm down — or at least his family stopped moving around so often, so that he finished middle school in one place and high school in another, and his memories from then are more distinct.

Not that anything actually calmed down — in those later years everything became, if anything, more confused — but least he remembered his adolescence. His early childhood is not as clear.

But, if I really wanted to know, this was two years before the Cultural Revolution, and almost a decade after the Elimination of the Counterrevolutionaries campaign, which not only targeted intellectuals and capitalists, but also continued the Communist attack on landlords — on all wealthy families who held both economic and political power under the Kuomintang. He had the impression that the madwoman’s family had once been very rich — at least compared to the others in the village. Probably she was a victim of that wave of persecution in the mid1950s. Her husband was probably taken away by the Communists, who either executed or tortured him, or sent him to a prison labor camp, where many were worked until they died of hunger and exhaustion. Or maybe he and his family were so persecuted and humiliated by the Communists,

with their land and wealth gone, confiscated by the new government, that he could not take it anymore and committed suicide. It was common enough at the time for that to happen. Several members of my own family — some distant, some close — committed suicide after political persecution and public humiliation.

“But what about the son?” I asked. “They wouldn’t persecute a little boy.”

Maybe it was an accident, my father said. In the mountains many things can happen to small children if they’re not watched carefully, and though the children of former landlords may not have suffered direct harm from the Communists, they were often very cruelly bullied by other children. In any case, accidents happen. He may have gotten lost in the woods, or was eaten by a tiger, or he could have fallen into a river and drowned.

“Maybe his father killed him,” I said, “before he killed himself. Maybe he didn’t want his son to suffer as he had, so he decided to kill them both.

So they could be together.”

Maybe, my father said. That happened sometimes too, whole families committing suicide together when they see no other choice.

“But then why didn’t the mother join them?” I asked. “Why didn’t she kill herself as soon as her husband and child died?”

My father put down his steaming cup on the kitchen table. The sun was in the process of setting and cast a rosy-pink glow on the cheap blue and white ceramic of our tea set, bought in a Chinese supermarket downtown by my mother long before she died, years before I was even born. The lid and spout of the teapot were chipped, and out of the four original cups that went with it, only two of them — currently used by my father and me — remained unbroken. I was about to suggest that we buy a new set when I looked up and saw my father’s crinkled brown eyes. They were looking at me, troubled and concerned.

“You think too much about death,” he said.

Perhaps I do. Perhaps, in the scheme of things, I focus too much on the macabre, indulge too much my morbid streak, my fascination with superstition, with demons and death.

But for years I have imagined a kind of circular retelling, a family mythology of signs and spirits. I imagine our family haunted by ghosts, or haunted, at least, but the uncanny motif of haunting. The broken teacups, the first one shattered the day my mother first told me my father’s ghost story, the second one smashed on the morning of her death. The day of my first period, two weeks after the funeral, and the unexpected rush of blood that soaked through my jeans and into the upholstery of the passenger’s seat of the new car that replaced the one totaled in the accident. Those months afterwards, when I stayed in my room for days on end, listening in the silences between my tears for the sounds of my father, vague and absentminded, moving around in the kitchen downstairs. Guidance counselors and therapists and family friends, their dry eyes and hands that pressed my hands and shoulders and touched with mild reproach my tangled, uncombed hair.

Sleepless moonlit nights, the madness of sorrow, and whispers in the dark, hoping for the return of something lost. And my father, growing grey, tired, quiet, more distant than ever, his outlines fading as his shoulders gently stoop, his eyes creased and uncomprehending his daughter at thirteen, at fifteen, at twenty and never a moment beyond the first telling of a ghost story.

Could it be that she has haunted him, this madwoman from that village in the mountains?

Could it be that it is because of her that my father is wary of sad women, first of my mother’s tearful rages, and then of his strange, unhappy daughter, remote and reserved, quivering with a vague and aimless anger?

No — that’s not true. Not quite. In the line between fiction and nonfiction I sometimes miss my mark, veer towards a clumsier angle of understanding and alter facts that need not be changed. My father the scientist is not haunted by ghosts. But she has haunted me. All these years later, I am still thinking of this ghost story. I am still thinking of this memory, and this madwoman, of my father’s.

I can see her in my mind to this day, as clearly as if I had actually seen her — her head bent, hunched over, her hair unwashed and disheveled winter 2009

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and covering her face. It is daytime, and she is stumbling through the village, murmuring under her breath, talking to herself or to someone no one else can see. Sometimes she very softly wails.

She lifts her dirty hands to her face when her voice begins to crack; she looks like she is crying, but her hair is in her face and I cannot see.

My father told me that all of the adults in the village ignored her when she staggered by and pretended she was not there when she tried to speak to them or beg for money or food. If she became too much of a nuisance they would shoo her away, sometimes violently, threatening her with sticks. No one would touch her with his or her hands. No one in the village even spoke to her except my grandfather, who had a different view. He believed that the cause of her madness was not demons or sickness but merely sorrow, for the loss of her husband and particularly her son.

My grandfather would try to be kind to her and give her something to eat, if the family had any extra food. But times were hard, and charity was a luxury they could not usually afford.

Even my grandfather had his limits. He also would not touch her, nor was his charity seen by anyone except my father. In fact, no one gave her food in public. No one seemed to give her anything. No one knew what she ate, if she ever ate; no one had been inside her house for years.

Maybe she stole food from the farms, but if she did, no one complained. From what they knew, she had next to nothing left, yet still she survived.

I imagine some people in the village probably said that it was witchcraft keeping her alive, that the demons that persecuted her also kept her from passing away. I can imagine the stories, especially the ones that the children would tell to scare each other: that the madwoman wandered the streets in search of sources of sweet human flesh, for which her demons gave her an insatiable craving; that she had killed her own son after the death of her husband in a sudden and inexplicable fit of madness; that she had carved the meat off his little skeleton and roasted it in strips over her cooking fire, then made a soup from the bones. You’d better behave, parents would tell their kids, in order to scare them into obedience, or the madwoman will come and get you.

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The stories made the children cruel in their fear, especially the little boys. My father was among them as they threw rocks at her and laughed when they could make her flinch. They ran after her through the streets to make fun of her, shouting rude things and shrieking with laughter.

But the madwoman, if she noticed them at all, never seemed angry. In her soft, wailing voice, she would coax them with promises of money and candy, if they would only come and give her a kiss.

Her breath would gently lift her hair with each syllable, but they still would never see her face.

She would tell them to come to her house, where she had good things for them to eat. Her coaxes, promises, and soft wails would continue, increase, with each thrown stone and shouted insult.

I can imagine my five-year-old father’s fearful face as she sharply turned to face him and singled him out. I can imagine the outline of her lips behind the stringy, fringed curtain of black hair as they formed the sounds of my father’s name.

I can imagine her voice, soft, insidious, with a hysterical lilt that gradually turned her whisper into a wail, and then a howl, and then a scream.

I can imagine my father, frozen in place, as she stumbled towards him with arms outstretched, and how he finally gathered his wits with a sudden shock and scattered with the other children before it was too late.

Then they would laugh, these village children, as they looked behind them over their skinny shoulders from a safe distance. But this time, my father did not laugh. She had singled him out of the crowd of children. She had known his name.

5 “And then what happened?” I ask my father. At home from college, I sit with him at the kitchen table, the fading autumn light warm for a moment through the steam rising from our teacups.

But there is a lot my father doesn’t remember.

He doesn’t remember ever speaking to her, or trying to help her or comfort her, or interacting with her at all beyond those cruel boyish taunts.

He doesn’t remember even that she had picked him out of the crowd, that she had known his name, though it’s possible that it happened. He doesn’t think about it much. The only thing he remembers with any real certainty is that first

image, the madwoman in the moonlight. All the rest is speculation.

“But mom told me you did try to comfort her, that one time, when you saw her crying alone in the fields,” I say. “You went outside to play one day and you saw her there, not acting crazy but just looking sad. You wanted to help her, but you hesitated. Your mother had told you not to go near her because of her demon air. But she was crying, and you could not bear the sight of her sadness.

You wanted to help. So you went over and put your hand on your shoulder, to show that you were there to comfort her.”

Maybe, my father says. But then, maybe my mother was just trying to tell a story. What else did my mother say about it?

“That the woman grabbed you,” I say. “She grabbed your wrist and her grip was like iron. You struggled with her, but she wouldn’t let go. After a long time you were able to push her down on the ground, so that her hand loosened for a moment and you could pull your arm away. Then you ran back to your house and never tried to do anything like that again. That is, you never disobeyed your parents again.”

Maybe, my father says. But my mother was probably just trying to teach me a lesson about obedience. It is a good story, but she probably made the whole thing up.

“I think she died soon after that,” I say. “That’s what I remember mom saying. That she killed herself days later.”

My father exhales heavily and shakes his head.

He doesn’t know, and he doesn’t think it matters.

She was one of many who had lost someone, and she was not strong enough to recover. The story doesn’t make much sense anyway. How could the woman have known his name? Why would she pick him out, of all people? Why would a fiveyear-old boy think to comfort a madwoman? And why would any of this be related to anything at all?

Because she chose you, I want to tell him.

Because of a haunting. Because a dead son was summoned and you answered her call. Because you touched her, wanting to help, and she held onto you. Because madness and sorrow and spirits are contagious, and you breathed in her demon air.

And now you hesitate to comfort, to put a hand on a female shoulder shaking with sobs, to smooth the hair of a bent head that trembles in her tears like a black silk curtain. You are afraid that when you put your hand on my shoulder, when my bent head lifts to look at you and the black curtain of my hair parts for you to see my tears, it will be her face.

Yours may be story of survival, I want to say, but maybe mine is not.

But maybe, again, I have missed my mark. It is too easy — my father would say, if this story were about anyone but him — to tell it as a ghost story.

It is too easy to imagine a haunting like this. The psychology is simplistic and based on aesthetics. It is, perhaps, self-indulgent.

But I remember those summer nights and the bright moon that cast eerie shadows in my room. I remember softly calling my mother’s name in the dark and wondering if her spirit will come back to the house. I remember the sleeplessness, looking outside my window at night, watching my father kneel in the driveway beside the open car door.

There is a bucket of soapy water beside him; he is washing out my bloody stain. His arm moves stiffly in and out of the car as he scrubs, hard, at the fabric of the passenger’s seat. His body, seen in pale moonlight, rocks slowly back and forth.

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On Seeing My First Western

1 / Meeting Burt Burt Lancaster and I don’t have much to die for: love of the game and the gold and the girl not as much makes simple to say she’s not beautiful, perpetually never quite undressed, dusty and sweaty under that scarf, her dress, her face, wide plain, blessed expanse glistening daily above breasts long fought for, Burt and I, too old now to care about love.

2 / Losing Burt The tropes gather faster when Burt appears, he’s lost craps and a woman, broke and rebuffed, smirking and grumbling that humans make love face to face, a remark worthy of some scoresettling cowboy in spurs, not you, Burt, your single regard for time and rock blown rough in one moment’s furnace of sticks, sweaty, buffed, refusing objection your fusework near blears human loss so unsavory

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Daniel Wenger

I’m lost, Burt, can’t tell your face features through the sure group’s tactics and horses, making calm ill-advised, more fitting to flail and blurt guilt in tumid air that soaks these shores without oceans,

Your hand is creased without a palm.

3 / Replacing Burt (On Seeing a Different Western) Burt and I have had a falling out I say loud, hoping after a reaction, eyeing with verve and meaning my now and new loved outlaw, lanky Gary. Faction different this time, clean-shaven and freshly married, on the run not from the long law but the lawless. Blonde-sweet Miss Kelly headstrong and stupid—seems he’s on the wrong side of her Quaker complaints. He stays to greet a death mimed by cruel schoolboys. A crime for their sake. Boys scatter. Streets empty. Smutty heat, smutty Gary beneath the Marshall sign, moral and certain, leather and tallow.

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The Buddha

When Sylvester first saw the Buddha in the shop window, it was marked at $200. With his right hand he fingered the felt-like softness of a worn five-dollar bill in his pocket, and with his left he held on to a wriggling younger sister of five. Her brown curls bounced as she stomped impatiently at being kept in the empty parking lot. She was not interested in the old and dusty statuettes, or the smiling fat man who sat on his rump and was as bald as an onion. She clutched a tousled Barbie to her chest and skipped impatiently on feet clad in clean white loafers — she wanted to go home.

“Five more minutes, Ruth,” he said, without taking his eyes off the display. Stout painted kittens waved their paws in endless homage, and red-blue dragons arched their scaly, snake-like bodies. The Buddha, however, was king. His golden stomach, as round as a pumpkin, radiated opulence, and his ears hung down as if they were weighted with heavy jewels. His eyes slanted like moons and his mouth was open in laughter. Sylvester’s chest tightened with desire.

His parents brushed his request aside.

“Do we really need it?” asked his father, sitting in his paisley armchair and not looking up from his copy of the Times. Sylvester pressed further — they hadn’t gotten him a birthday present this year, but Ruth had gotten a Barbie.

The ends of his father’s moustache turned down and he seemed to think for a moment. Then he ruffed Sylvester’s mouse-brown hair and said, “Ask your mother.”

“No space,” said his mother from beneath a criss-crossed curtain of leaves. He saw only a mass of frizzy brown hair, a plaid shirt, faded jeans.

She was bent, snipping at leaves, and her rump stuck up in the air. The fern would need repotting soon, and there were some new sprouts. And her 18 the harvard advocate

Maria Xia

dahlias — they were incredibly successful this year, red-purple-yellow bursts blooming under her care. She was estimating that by next month all the ledges and corners of the house would be occupied, and under the windows too.

Ruth got the Barbie, he pointed out once more.

“Mm.” Leaves rustled uncomfortably. “Could you pass the shears, honey?”

He turned on his heel and stomped away.

Ruth refused to hold his hand the next day on the way home from school. Instead she trailed behind him, jerking the doll’s stiff legs like chopsticks along the curb. Sylvester sat crosslegged under the store window, where the Buddha smiled benevolently at him over its golden belly.

There were seven dollars in his pocket, and his stomach growled for its missed lunch.

When he came home, his mother was sitting on newspapers, between piles of dirt and mulch.

He couldn’t see an inch of carpet in his family room between the dirt, the papers, and the plants.

“Well!” said his mother. “This will all get cleaned up soon.” She cupped a baby dahlia in her hands and beamed at him. “How was school?”

He asked her once more for the Buddha — slowly, in his best grown-up tone. I’m serious, it implied. I mean business.

His mother looked up and wrinkled her nose at him. Both of their eyes were almond shaped and almond colored, but his nose was sharper and mouth tighter. Were it not for his small face, weak chin, and baby skin, he could have had the older face. He was so severe, she thought. Except for the pleading in his eyes, which would have moved a machine, he was too old for his age.

“If you’re good, I think Santa will get it for you for Christmas,” she said, and winced to herself.

Once again she had failed at saying the right thing.

“That’s too late!” His lower lip pulled downwards, showing his bottom teeth. “You never give me anything!” He spat these words like venom, left the room. His mother eased the baby dahlia into the flowerpot and tucked it gently into the soil. *** It was getting harder and harder for Sylvester to get to the front door. An army of newly potted plants crowded the walkway and Sylvester needed to push past a few ferns before he could see the doorknob.

“Goodbye, dear!” his mother’s muffled voice came from somewhere upstairs. “Watch the plants!”

When he rounded the corner on his way to school each day, the sun would still be low in the sky, glaring orange off the shop window. He had followed the fate of the glass case’s inhabitants since July. They came in with the rich luster and exotic breath of the Orient. Then slowly, as summer wore into fall and fall into winter, they lost their shine, grew dusty. Their price tags became slashed with red ink, and each bore the humiliation of mark-downs until one day they disappeared, borne off in the arms of some pitying stranger. This fate awaited his Buddha, and he resolved to interpose on its behalf.

Under the sun the statue glowed bright and incandescent — a golden orb nestled in the store window. Ruth swayed sleepily by his side, her plastic pink backpack clashing with the store’s warm, Oriental tones. She took her Barbie with her everywhere. Its ice blonde hair and skinny rubber legs irritated him immensely when it chanced to venture near enough to the window for him to see both it and the Buddha at the same time. When his five minutes was up Sylvester would squeeze his eyes shut and pivot himself away in one brisk motion, walking with quick, knee-locked strides. He only allowed himself five minutes in the mornings.

His curious walk, and the constant companionship of his little sister, put him at the mercy of blacktop bullies like Jim Burkle and Big Joey.

“It’s Sylvester the Cat! Is Tweety-bird chasing you?”

“Why is he always doing that with his eyes? He must a eaten something sour!”

“Stinky Sylvie!”

Ruth latched both hands in the crook of his arm, and the closer she clung to him the louder the voices would scoff. Sylvester kept his hands in his pockets and his shoulders scrunched high up to his earlobes. Today a raspberry flecked spit onto his neck, but he walked straight up to Big Joey.

“I’ll do your homework for you if you give me a dollar,” he said. The bully narrowed his mean, beady eyes at him, but Sylvester didn’t flinch.

Big Joey had the nose of a pig. He wrinkled this at Sylvester. “One dollar?”

Jim Burkle overhead this and shouted it to the whole blacktop. “Sylvie the Cat here says he’ll do your homework for a dollar!” A crowd of boys gathered instantly around him and Ruth.

“I want in, too!”

“Do mine, I’ll give you two dollars!”

He stayed after school for three more hours, finishing the math problems of all the boys in the fifth grade. He was shrewd and auctioned positions in line, and he collected the money up front. That night he walked home by himself (he had told Ruth to leave on her own), and his tired hand was closed tightly and tenderly around a wad of thirty-four dollars.

The parking lot was empty as usual. His eyes caught the red smudge immediately. The Buddha had been marked down to $150 — a shiver of excitement tickled his bones.

His mother tried to scold him for letting Ruth walk by herself, but she could barely be heard from behind a thick layer of palm leaves. He nearly tripped over a geranium going into the kitchen, but he caught himself on a chair. “Oops, son,” said his father, and Sylvester looked at the chair with surprise. Indeed his father was sitting in it, with a bonsai plant on his lap. Sylvester squinted to see him more clearly — he didn’t look quite right. Ruth was playing on the kitchen floor.

Barbie’s clothes were beginning to fray, and the dirt clumped up in her synthetic hair.

When Sylvester went upstairs for bed, treading carefully over cactus bulbs, he found his room winter 2009

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jammed with azaleas, Chamaedoreas, hyacinths, and ponytail palms. His pillow was wedged between a potted gardenia and a bluebell plant, whose drooping flowers hung over his head like teardrops. “They’ll only be there for a bit,” his mother assured him. “They can keep you company when you sleep.” Sylvester turned onto his side — the look of the blue flowers made his temples hurt.

“Sylvester, I can’t sleep.” Her small voice came from the doorway. Her pink flannel shirt was much too big for her and draped over her shoulders, and the tips of her toes were pink from cold. He felt sorry for her, clutching her Barbie and forever playing on dirty floors. She shifted over and she climbed into his bed, wriggling her small body against his frail frame. He hadn’t eaten lunch for two weeks. He felt a matted tuft of hair brush against his arm, and looked down to see Barbie staring at him with unnaturally large and blue eyes.

“Get that away from me.” He pushed it off the bed. Ruth began to quiver and to cry.

“In the land of Buddha…” he began quietly.

They played this game nightly. He cradled her head in the crook of his arm as a means of apology, and as he talked, he began to doze, so that he half spoke, half dreamed of forests, temples, and cloudringed mountains coated with gold. The crying ceased, and the two lay side by side in sleep, like two tadpoles among the lilies and the reeds.

He began to feel a sense of urgency. At $100, it was a steal. He wished the shop window were made of lead, so that no passing stranger could witness its discounted shame. Someone would realize it was beautiful, someone would take it away. He had exactly fifty dollars.

He had stayed after school until dark this time, adding and multiplying in the woods behind school property for roughly four dollars an assignment.

He changed his handwriting after each sheet, stopping only when he could no longer see his pencil in the dark. Counting up his revenue, he had made fifty-eight dollars, and had fifty more in his pocket. It was enough.

He ran from school down four blocks to the store, as quickly as his jerking gait would take him.

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Paranoia nipped at his ankles. Thirty feet away a terrible thought-vision came to him. An old woman was hobbling past the shop, and chanced to turn her head. Twenty feet — she looks at the Buddha, and she takes a liking to its grinning face.

Ten feet — the lady is inquiring within. What would Sylvester do now, if a stranger snatched the prize from his grasp? He paled at the possibility.

His backpack bounced up and down his back, as if to hurry him along.

The setting sun glared red off the store window, and there was no old lady in sight. In fact, the store was closed — 6pm closing time on Fridays.

He pressed his face to the window, his breath coming in shallow gasps — it was there, it was still there. The Buddha looked back at him, lazy eyelids drooping over its smiling eyes. Tomorrow was Saturday; he could buy it first thing in the morning. It would be his by this time tomorrow.

When he reached home he saw that vines had crept up the sides of his house to an alarming extent. He could not find the door, so he climbed in through the living room window. His mother lay stomach down on the ground on matted palm leaves, untying two bickering vines with her fingers. A young, yellow vine snuck impudently up her wrist and she slapped it off lightly. She didn’t seem to hear him tumble in. Sylvester bent and kissed her cheek. It was soft and mossy.

That night he stuffed one hundred bills in his coat pocket — wadded it tightly and pressed it down as far as his pocket extended. He spoke breathlessly and squeezed Ruth’s hand. “In the land of Buddha…” he said, and could hardly contain himself. “In the land of Buddha, there was a little boy with glasses. He was the wisest boy in all the kingdom...” Whispered words slipped from his mouth like pearls. He spoke quickly and quietly late into the night.

“Good morning sleepyhead.” Ruth came into his room, her white loafers dancing from side to side. For the first time, she had risen earlier than he had. She stopped in the doorway when she saw him flinging clothes and sheets over his shoulder with violent motions. A white shirt flopped disconsolately at her feet.

His fingers were raking ferociously at the sheets,

at the vines, at the insides of his pockets, which he already knew were empty. It was there last night, a definitive lump of bills against his stomach, the thick wad of his after school labors and hunger pangs stuffed in his coat. Where was it now? Had his mother cleaned? Impossible—there wasn’t an inch of furniture to be seen beneath the room’s layer of plant-life.

“Good mo-orning, I said!” Ruth planted herself in front of him and pointed her freckled chin at his chest. “What are you doing?”

Sylvester’s eyes riveted upon the Barbie in her hand. Its clothes were strangely new — an outfit of a matching green and gray. George Washington gazed back at him from the front of its shirt.

He grabbed her by the shoulders, fingers clamping on either side of her small frame.

“What have you done?” His voice was high. Her eyes grew wide with an uncomprehending fear.

“Sylvester, you’re hurting me.”

He shook her until her teeth rattled. “Why is your Barbie wearing my money?”

She squealed and started crying, the sound bouncing up and down in her throat. “It’s not my fault,” she whined between jumping sobs. She said over and over that it wasn’t her fault.

In the next room he found dollar bills strewn all over the ground. Some had been cut up, and one missed a chunk in the shape of a boot. Another crawled slowly across the floor, being pulled into the overgrown carpet by one curling vine. He caught it and tugged it out viciously. What he could salvage came to exactly thirteen dollars. It wasn’t fit to buy the Buddha’s left foot.

She didn’t understand what she had done.

Sniffling and smoothing out her Barbie’s new skirt, she couldn’t understand why he looked at her so, eyes like black beetles in a thinning face.

and rice paper.

“You can ask Mom for that. It’s almost Christmas.” Ruth said in her plastic lime-colored raincoat. She looked up at him meekly. Even their mother finally moved the pots and groomed the vines to let daylight back into the rooms, but his eyes had remained beetle-black. She had the feeling that she had done something very wrong that day, so she tried to say something that would please him.

He considered the item, but realized he didn’t want it that much. “Let’s go.” He took his sister’s hand and directed their umbrella homeward.

“We never play that game anymore,” chirped Ruth, opening her stride to keep sync with his brisk step. “In the land of Buddha.”

Their reflections slid in and out of view as they stepped over puddles and pavement.

“So?” “So—” She drew out the O in a long and dipping pout. When she received no response, she began: “In the land of Buddha, there was once a beautiful princess—” He cut her off irritably. That game is over, he said. Ruth was hurt, and she clamped her mouth shut and jerked her hand out of his. They walked for a while in silence — a slouching fifth grade boy with one hand stuffed in his pocket and his kid sister in an insolent lime green. The rain beat dirt off the rooftops and ran in oily rivers into the gutters. After one block Ruth had already forgotten all offense, and she skipped and scuffed her rain boots ahead of him. Her fingers slipped back into Sylvester’s hand like a small, wet fish, and he let her pull him home.

Tuesday was a rainy day. No sun hit the store window, and Sylvester stood for a quarter of an hour under the elements regarding the spot where the Buddha had been. Someone had bought it on Monday, because it was no longer there when he came back from school. Perhaps now it sat in a forgotten corner of an old lady’s house, where her Pekingese took leaks in its lap. A rickety Chinese temple stood there now, made of painted straw winter 2009

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Dana Kase Three Necklaces (A diamond is forever forever ever forever ever), 2008 Textile Variable Dimensions 22 the harvard advocate

Details From left: yarn, felt; fabric, fiberfill; fabric, fiberfill winter 2009

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Drowned Towns: Preserving the Lost Communities of the Swift River Valley

Ben Cosgrove

The city, however, does not tell its part, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

On April 28, 1938, the Western Massachusetts towns of Dana, Enfield, Prescott, and Greenwich received a notice informing them that they were no longer in existence. “By the terms of Chapter 321, Act 1927,” it began, “you are hereby notified that the corporate existence of the aforesaid towns ceased at 12 o’clock midnight, April 27th.”

Town officers were instructed not to carry on any municipal functions after that date, only to do “such acts as are necessary to affect the transfer of properties of the municipalities to the Metropolitan District Water Supply Commission.” The letter was signed by R. Nelson Molt, the commission’s secretary.

This was no great surprise to the inhabitants of these towns. Some years before, the state of Massachusetts had decided to flood the area then covered by the four rural municipalities in a grand solution to the increasing need for water in the ever-growing greater Boston area. Residents of the Swift River Valley watched in disbelief as state officials, engineers, then surveyors, and eventually lumberjacks swarmed over their land and began the long process of taking it from them.

The construction of the reservoir would be one of the most ambitious civil works projects in history, but it would result in the forced removal of all residents in each of the four communities.

The enormous Quabbin Reservoir (the name was taken from a Nipmuck word roughly meaning “place of many waters”) would supply water to Boston and the many burgeoning suburbs that had, at the time of the District Water Supply Commission’s decision, swelled to proportions that strained the resources of the city.

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Historically, Boston had always struggled to bring in enough water to adequately supply its residents. It had first seen the need to reach outside its municipal boundaries for water as early as the late 1700s, when pipes were laid between the city and Jamaica Pond in Roxbury. Disputes some thirty years later led the city to look instead to Long Pond in Natick. Rapid industrial and population growth, however, soon necessitated diverting water from the Sudbury River, and when this proved futile, the subsequent creation of the Wachusett Reservoir on the Nashua River. This in turn would prove sufficient for only thirty years after its construction in 1908. A more sustainable answer to the water problem was desperately needed.

The creation of an enormous reservoir in western Massachusetts seemed to be an ideal—if grandiose—long-term solution: the topography of the Swift River Valley was such that a couple of well-placed dams at the southern end could turn the whole region (an area of roughly 40 square miles) into a gigantic bowl with the capacity to hold 412 billion gallons of water. Aqueducts and an impressive system of tunnels would move the water east to Boston and the suburbs, and all that would have to be cleared out in the process was a few small towns. The plan was, in many respects, a resounding success—the project created muchneeded public works jobs during the depths of the Great Depression and today more than 2.5 million people draw their water supply from the Quabbin reservoir—but the success came at a great cost to 2,500 people who would lose their hometowns forever.

Many could only sit back helplessly as their trees were clear-cut, their buildings razed or removed, and their dead relatives exhumed and relocated. Over 7,500 bodies were moved from the cemeteries of the Swift River Valley and reinterred elsewhere. The living lost homes, jobs, and history with little to no provisions made by the state for their aid or benefit.

One woman, forced to leave Greenwich with her family as a young girl, remembers,“wishing that the Boston folks would choke on their first glass of water from the Quabbin.” Another resident, quoted in Evelina Gustafson’s particularly heartbreaking

1940 book on the then-recent disappearance of the towns, said “with tear dimmed eyes…‘I little thought that one day these childhood haunts would be closed to me forever.’” The only hint of the human consequences of this civil engineering project to appear in the near-500 pages of the Federal Writers Project’s otherwise effusive 1937 publication Massachusetts: A Guide to its People and Places is a note that says, “The route south of New Salem will be changed somewhat when the Quabbin Reservoir occupies the valley.”

The meetings during the planning stages of the project took place in Boston, on the correct prediction that the residents of the doomed communities would not have the means to travel to the city to make their voices heard. This set an unhappy precedent for how the concerns of the valley’s residents would be considered. The people whose lives were so inextricably connected with this land would ultimately have little to no say in the circumstances of its destruction.

Their fate is often overlooked, however: most histories of the Quabbin focus on the event as a triumph of civil engineering, writing off its indisputably tragic aspects as the inevitable side effects of progress. These were decisions made in the years just before the Great Depression, a time of an increasingly modern America, and the notion that the urban machine should thrive at the expense of a few bumpkins currently occupying what had become very desirable land was hardly offensive when viewed through the modernist lens of a society in the process of ecstatic urban growth.

However, many (not least the displaced residents themselves), were troubled by the thought of the loss of these communities and sought to preserve the people and places that would be sacrificed for the sake of the big city to the east.

Dana, Enfield, Prescott, and Greenwich would sink below the rising waters of the reservoir. As Boston was reshaping its own landscape, replacing water with landfill to support a growing population, the residents of the Swift River Valley would feel the dark irony of progress as a river they’d known all their lives was transformed into the 38.6 square miles of water that would spread over and erase their land and history.

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It is a false comfort to say that these towns now lie at the bottom of the reservoir. They are not anywhere. The land that once held them has been reshaped and changed by the waters that swallowed it, the residents are dead or displaced, and the buildings have been destroyed or relocated.

Nowhere in the world, for example, is there an Enfield, MA. So in the late 1930s, for the people whose lives had been so closely tied to those towns, the notion that they would disappear without a trace was unacceptable, and a few decided to do something about it.

The Swift River Valley Historical Society occupies an unassuming set of buildings in New Salem, a neighboring town only partly flooded in the creation of the reservoir. In the years since the creation of the reservoir, it has grown from a small collection of photos and trappings to a massive and comprehensive archive chronicling the valley’s history and abrupt disappearance. It now comprises three buildings, the WhitakerClary House, containing most of the collection, the Prescott Church Museum (hauled over from Prescott before the flooding) and the Carriage House, which contains an engine of the Dana Fire Department, various pieces of farm equipment, and an assortment of hand tools in addition to countless other odds and ends. It is managed by a devoted assembly of unpaid volunteers, several of whom are among the last surviving residents of the towns.

That the society was founded in 1936 is a testament to the fact that the residents’ desire to assemble and preserve their local history was (unsurprisingly) spurred on by the impending demise of the four towns, by the threat that the very ideas of those communities might be drowned along with their physical settings and disappear forever. The urgency with which the act of preservation had to be approached sets the mission of the Swift River Valley Historical Society apart from other historical societies: if you were confronted with the imminent destruction of everything you knew, what parts would you take away so that the whole could be remembered?

This was one in a series of burning questions facing the society’s founders. What mode of preservation would be the most effective? And 26 the harvard advocate

what things were already preserved? Despite the absolute elimination of the towns and the land that they occupied, some reminders of the communities nonetheless remained: not only did most of the displaced residents continue to live in the region for the rest of their lives, leading lives not terribly different from those they might have lived had they been allowed to stay, but you can even follow several roads, including Main Street of New Salem, directly into the waters of the reservoir if you go far enough. Whatever means the society would use to preserve those towns would have to focus on what could not be recaptured, and so the curators looked to the region’s recent past.

The versions of Enfield, Greenwich, Prescott, and Dana that are preserved by the society remain (perhaps for the obvious reasons) frozen in a very specific time. The artifacts collected speak to the character of the towns as they were in the early twentieth-century, complete with heirlooms from previous generations and a subsequent awareness of the towns’ recent past, but the communities depicted by the hats, photographs, and furniture of the SRVHS are plainly ones that know nothing of space shuttles or rock and roll, or barely even of World War II. Here it always is the nineteenthirties, and always will be.

It is clear, however, from every detail down to the Depression-era one-room schoolhouse replica, that this was intentional, that the SRVHS indeed aimed to capture these towns as they were just before the time of their flooding. The story that it tells is more than just a history of these towns themselves—it is also about the tragic series of events that made them so significant. These communities are being preserved not only because of the simple fact that they aren’t here anymore but so that visitors might get a more complete idea of what it felt like when they were taken away.

The society is preserving not only physical objects, which stand in for the towns themselves, but also an emotional reaction to the flooding.

What other way is there to preserve the feeling of a tragedy than by capturing the affected community up to and including that moment in time? The Swift River Valley municipalities had a history that decisively ended beneath the waters of the Quabbin, meaning that the SRVHS had its

work cut out for it in its efforts to reconstruct that history.

What defines the identity of a city or a town? It is certainly more than landscape: Rome without seven hills would still be Rome (and indeed the hills are nearly invisible today), just as Boston remained Boston even as it quadrupled its size, expanding horizontally out into its watery environs and sacrificing its own hills to create the fill with which to do so. The built environment and the artifacts it yields are certainly better reflectors of the human influence on a place, but only to an extent: how much can a total stranger be expected to glean about Greenwich from a set of cooking utensils? Could New York be captured by a coatrack, or even a subway map?

The idea that place can be satisfactorily defined by a discrete set of spaces and tangible objects is problematic, and its limitations are noted by Italo Calvino in Invisible Cities: I could tell you how many steps make up the streets rising like stairways, and the degree of the arcades’ curves; but I already know that this would be the same as telling you nothing. The city does not consist of this, but of relationships between the measurements of its space and the events of its past: the height of a lamppost and the distance from the ground of a hanged usurper’s swaying feet; the line strung from the lamppost to the railing opposite and the festoons that decorate the course of the queen’s nuptial procession; the height of that railing and the leap of the adulterer who climbed over it at dawn.

It is not the artifacts themselves but their inherent connections to the people of those lost places that make them so attractive to those who are trying to reconstruct the idea of a society. Since so many of the people who knew this land are now gone, the only way in which their lives can be recaptured is through the things that they used and touched.

The artifact is a stand-in for the person who cannot be there, and it is up to the visitor to fill in the imaginary space between the concrete object and its relationship to a different time, place, and set of people. A historical museum, then, takes a leap of

faith in assuming that its patrons will know to seek out that connection.

Museums like the SRVHS are predicated on this assumption, that the spirit of a community can be kept alive through its paraphernalia. But the idea expressed above by Calvino is not lost on them: as SRVHS president Elizabeth Peirce points out in her introduction to “The Lost Towns of the Quabbin Valley,” the Arcadia Press book authored by the society, artifacts and photographs cannot reconstruct, only approximate: What was sacrificed? Gone are the sawmills, gristmills, and cloth mills. Gone are the factories where boxes, brooms, bricks and buttons, nails, pails, piano legs, carriage wheels, and hats were made. Gone are the mining of soapstone and the making of charcoal. Gone are the orchards with 50 varieties of apples, the berry fields, and the market gardens. Gone are the doctors, dentists, lawyers, statesmen, artists, poets, writers, musicians, photographers, inventors, educators, and yes, patriots. Gone are the good times of the Grange, the neighborhood clubs, singing schools, debating societies, husking bees, quilting parties, and taffy pulls.

By and large, these are things that could not have been preserved in any literal sense. A few buildings were moved out of the valley (in addition to those now occupied by the society, there is at least one notable example of a home that was transported to Dorset, VT and reconstructed there), but due to the low income of many valley residents, most homes and public buildings were simply razed to make room for the water. Beyond that, it is impossible to imagine how these things that Peirce lists among the most important elements of the lost towns could possibly be kept for future generations. How do you keep alive the idea of an apple orchard if the actual land it occupied now lies beneath a massive body of water? How can you archive the idiosyncratic community that would have resulted from this specific set of “doctors, dentists, lawyers, [and] statesmen,” all interacting with each other in a way that can never be totally reconstructed? The Swift River Valley featured a unique community winter 2009

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of people, the essence of which could not survive such a transplanting unaltered.

The collection of the SRVHS represents simply what the valley’s displaced residents ultimately decided would be the best way to preserve and honor a collective idea both of the places that they lost beneath the water and the group of people that had inhabited those places. The idea that a place can be reconstructed by pulling together as many of its tangible, material artifacts as possible is an interesting one—certainly a former resident of Dana or Enfield will experience a surge of memories upon viewing a photograph of a particular house or examining a doll that might have belonged to a childhood friend. But as the number of valley refugees shrinks further and further with the years, the question of whom these towns are being preserved for becomes an increasingly important consideration.

The uninformed visitor to the museum is presented (ignoring, for the moment, the details that deal directly with the flooding) with a set of trappings that could spell out any part of rural New England in the early twentieth century. The melodeons, the farm equipment, the children’s clothing—these are items that could just as easily have appeared in the collections of countless other small-town historical societies.

How are these artifacts different from those of any other town in that period? The simple answer is that they are not. While there are certainly exceptions, a number of the items contained in the vast annals of the SRVHS could have come from any town in a similar time and region. Speaking generally, the only difference between most of the pieces in this collection and those in others like it is that here, the baseball uniforms and fire engines say “Dana” or “Greenwich” on them.

The exceptions to this rule, the things that remind the visitor of the unique fate of these towns, pose different problems. Copies of the letters from the state informing residents of the situation; a program from Enfield’s Farewell Ball; a relief map showing the stages of the reservoir’s construction.

While these artifacts are certainly remarkable for their poignancy, they play into the unfortunate fact that for most outsiders (and as the original residents age and pass away, nearly everyone is 28 the harvard advocate

one), the most notable thing about these places is that simply they are not there anymore.

The land on which Dana, Enfield, Prescott, Greenwich, and small parts of other communities were established now lies quietly at the bottom of the reservoir, and the number of people who can remember that land when it belonged to four small towns is diminishing rapidly. And though the younger generations may learn, even deeply appreciate the story of those towns, it is unavoidably a different sort of understanding that they experience. No combination of artifacts will awaken nostalgia for life in 1920s-era Dana or Prescott for someone who never got the chance to experience that firsthand—all it can do is dispassionately suggest what these places were like in their last moments. A lot of the artifacts are commonplace things that but for their context would never be associated with such a specific location and story, unremarkable but for their invisible history. Nothing ties them to these places but the society’s determination to preserve the mythology of the four towns by presenting their history as a series of objects.

Peirce wisely and sadly notes that the society’s mission is a necessary but bittersweet one. It is, she says, “a story about times that once were and can never be again [that] is remembered and told over and over at the Swift River Valley Historical Society, where that story is frozen in time.” Frozen to be sure, but necessarily so. The Quabbin towns never got the chance to exist beyond the 1930s, and any story or memory associated with them unavoidably stops there.

On April 27, the eve of disincorporation, the residents gathered in the Enfield town hall for a “Farewell Ball,” featuring a live band, a dance floor, and, assuredly, an overwhelming sense of imminent loss. At midnight, the musicians struck up an emotional rendition of “Auld Lang Syne,” before the attendees sadly shuffled out and the hall was locked up for good (one resident observed, “It is no longer a town hall in a town that is no longer”). The following day, they would walk away from the places that many of them truly felt they belonged to but would never even be able to visit again.

Only the youngest of those people in attendance

that night are still alive today, and they, along with the very few other onetime residents of the valley, have the distinction of being the only ones who can remember the four towns that were lost to the reservoir, the only ones who can ever possibly understand what those places were truly like.

When they are gone, Dana, Enfield, Prescott, and Greenwich will cease even to be memories, existing only in the clothing, photographs, hand tools, and fire engines contained in the rooms of the Swift River Valley Historical Society.

“Prescott is my home, though rough and poor she be The home of many a noble soul the birthplace of the free I love her rock-bound woods and hills they are good enough for me I love her brooklets and her rills but couldn’t, wouldn’t, and shouldn’t love a man-made sea.”

Charles Abbott (Prescott resident), 1921

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Dana Kase Untitled (Saturn had been distracted

by Federico de la Fe and his town of flowers, and because of them he did not notice when she stood up from his bed and put on her green dress and walked away, walking to an apartment with pictures of pale men on the wall and crisper drawers filled with leafed lettuce neatly packaged in resealable bags.), 2008 Porcelain doll, ceramic clown doll, rhinestones, sequins, googly eyes, tissue paper, pipe cleaners, computer keyboard keys, synthetic feathers, melted crayon wax, hard drive circuit board, bugle beads, pins, ceramic box, sliced bread model, electrical outlet, foam, watering can model, felt, Styrofoam, bottle caps, chess pieces, silk flowers, glass pebbles 16 x 7 x 7 inches

30 the harvard advocate

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South Pole Station

“There is no darkness behind the sun” you say, you who have not seen the sun in months, it being winter.

You thought about it once and couldn’t stop, calculating volumes, investigating temperatures of surface and depth.

You don’t remember depth. You don’t remember color, you spent days searching for a lamp the color of the sun.

The sun is not a color but a disk whose wavelength resonates your skin.

Plato mistook the good for the sun, that day in Amsterdam the clouds parted, you leapt up from the war memorial and the world had been given back finally. You heard of people lost their eyes this way.

32 the harvard advocate

Abram Kaplan

The Art of Identity: Memory as the Maker

Allison Keeley

In his recently published memoir, Nothing to Be Frightened Of, the novelist Julian Barnes offers a succinct view of memory: Memory is identity. I have believed this since… oh, since I can remember. You are what you have done; what you have done is in your memory; what you remember defines who you are; when you forget your life, you cease to be, even before death.

Memory is identity. The reader nods, in agreement. Barnes boils it down to three words and the equation is enticing in its simplicity.

It defines two otherwise ambiguous concepts with finality; it is both compact enough to be remembered with ease and grand enough to impress in conversation.

Memory is identity. The letters and words combine to contain a myriad of concepts. The specific order suggests a clear connection. Yet, the phrase ultimately reveals itself to be a paradox, rather than a definition.

Barnes’ definition is one of equating, presenting memory and identity as one in the same. His following logic implies that memory is the active variable, the prerequisite to identity and therefore existence. Yet, he cannot refer to memory without also giving agency to a higher sense of self. It is not memory, but the entity of “you” which dictates what is remembered and what is not. Memory is simultaneously in control of and controlled by identity. The phrase loses its appealing simplicity.

Barnes’ memoir is focused on his thanatophobia, an abnormal and excessive fear of death, and so his excerpt is focused on personal identity. But the connection between memory and the self resonates with the relationship of memory to collective identity, which encounters the same paradox. Archivists often use the metaphor of memory to describe their work of collecting and parsing through information, aiming to preserve the history of a culture, society, institution, or event.

In Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, winter 2009

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philosopher Jacques Derrida purports that an archive can only be defined as such if it is exterior to actual memory. The work of archivists is therefore bounded and largely directed by the technology of their times. The writing down of a memoir, for example, is a type of archive, as is a museum. In addition to these traditionally recognized archives, a word document, a saved text, or e-mail are also external forms of memory.

Regardless of which technology is employed, it is clear that the archivist, if capable of controlling it, is also in control over what that given technology preserves or discards.

Derrida questions whether these new technological advances actually improve the external representation of an individual’s psychic interior or whether they affect the functioning of that interior, perhaps permanently altering it.

Looking back at the history of memory, it seems that technology does have the powerful ability to change the psychic interior.

In the classical western world of the first century BC, when the simplest tools of external memory (paper and printing) were unavailable, actual internal memories functioned in an entirely different way. Memory was seen as an intensely visual and internal art that had to be mastered in the pursuit of spreading the art of rhetoric, meant to animate people to action through well-argued speeches, or orations.

Memory was divided into two categories, the natural and the artificial. Natural memory those captured spontaneously, during experiences.

Artificial memory was that which could be organized and improved, a step-by-step mental process that orators were taught by their instructors of rhetoric.

First, a student of artificial memory chose an image of a place that they were familiar with. This place, called a locus was to be a common structure or building, such as a theatre or a house. Once the locus was visualized, powerful images, called simulacra, could be placed within the rooms of the house or on and between the columns of a theatre.

It was possible to choose more than one locus, the number dependent on how much experience and material an orator had and aimed to possess.

Within this visual realm, the mood for memory 34 the harvard advocate

was to be set with the perfect lighting, so as not to obscure or dazzle the images. And the actual structures themselves were subject to zoning, as they were not to be placed more than thirty feet apart.

The strict structure and organization of the art of memory implies control on the part of the individual. But teachers of rhetoric recognized that natural memory was not entirely in their hands. Instead, the method of artificial memory looked to makes use of how the natural memory functioned when free from intense concentration and study.

The orator and philosopher Cicero advised that cues be taken from the observed tendency of natural memory to discard images that were “petty, banal, or ordinary.” For Cicero, this meant sunsets and sunrises, because they happened everyday.

Ultimately, whatever images were chosen, the art of memory was “inner writing,” as historian Frances Yates defines it. Images were used in place of words, the inner mind in place of paper.

It was ultimately the dissemination of knowledge in the form of moral rhetoric that the art of memory pursued, not collective or personal identity. Instead of looking to define the inner content of the self through an external archive, the art of memory looked to influence the external world by creating an inner archive in the expansive space of the mind.

In the age of an overflow of technology that can be used to compile external memory, archiving can be seen as a riff on the classical art of memory.

Archivists themselves metaphorically acquire the role of natural memory, deciding whether to filter the sunsets and sunrises that Cicero marked for deletion. They decide what is to be most vividly preserved in the collective mind of a society. They also acquire the role of orator, compiling artifacts from the collective history of any given subject, and organizing them in their physical loci so that the public may access them.

This metaphor sheds light on one side of Barnes’ original equation. Yet, the meticulous organization of memory and history is not a bridge to identity. Jorge Luis Borges masterfully uses fantasy to bridge gaps between how reality is understood and experienced. He plays with the

notion of the universe as an archive in his short story, “The Library of Babel.”

The library itself is enigmatic, its shape and size unknown to those who wander it, but its contents complete. It contains all books, organized to the best ability of its librarians. Some men organize by destroying useless work, others search for ciphers, and still others are designated as inquisitors, or official searchers: I have observed them carrying out their functions: they are always exhausted. They speak of a staircase without steps where they were almost killed. They speak of galleries and stairs with the local librarian. From time to time they will pick up the nearest book and leaf through its pages, in search of infamous words. Obviously, no one expects to discover anything.

Borges’ tale introduces the issue of discovery into the work of the archivist. It implies that something new would have to found among the unintelligible substance of the library, to free the searchers from their doomed exhaustion and failure. Derrida also addresses this issue of novelty stating that in order for the archiving of any knowledge to be worthwhile and not merely an indulgent act, it must introduce something new and be connected to the future in some way.

The archive of the universe does no such thing in Borges’ story. Is an archive of the collective self so expansive in its stated goal as to ultimately be useless, as well? Derrida offers a more hopeful assessment: Like every history, the history of a culture no doubt presupposes an identifiable heading, a telos toward which the movement, the memory and the promise, the identity—even if it be as difference to itself—dreams of gathering itself.

With a telos, memory becomes a deliberate act—used to moved history forward—largely through the work of the archivist. A telos separates identity, the second variable in Barnes’ equation, into three temporal types: past, present, and future. Of

those three identities, it is the future that is most important. With the promise of an identity ahead, discovery is possible, not only the discovery of an evolving telos, but of how to arrive at that future identity as well.

Personal identities are driven by personal telos as well. But the speed of the development of personal identity leaves it vulnerable to volatility. In his short prose poem, “The Maker,” Borges describes a moment in which his protagonist, a man who might be interpreted as the poet Homer, discovers his telos. Borges’ description shows personal identity to depart from the temporal structure that Derrida offers to cultural memory. As Borges’ protagonist loses his sight, he dips into his well of memories, which are described in active terms, as springing forward, effectively overtaking the entity that contains them: With sober surprise, he understood. Love and risk awaited him in this night of the mortal eyes into which he now descended: Ares and Aphrodite, for he now made out, since it

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was all around him, the sound of glory and hexameters, the sounds of men defending a temple the gods will do nothing to save and of black ships searching the sea for a beloved island, the sound of the Odysseys and Iliads that it was his destiny to sing and make resound reciprocally in the memories of men.

Here, personal identity is being driven by memory, rather than driving it. Yet it is only once the protagonist can no longer form new visual memories that he gains access to his most powerful memories and can develop a future telos.

Essentially, he must be removed from the present in order to do so, and in this case, blindness is his route to this disengagement.

Borges takes the fantastical study of personal memory further in “Funes, the Memorious.” In comparison to the protagonist of “The Maker,” Ireneo Funes has the opposite relationship with his present reality. He is completely engaged with the present, a young man left physically paralyzed after falling off of a horse, an accident that also gives him perfect memory and perception, or perhaps more accurately, robs him of forgetfulness: In effect, Funes not only remembered every leaf on every tree of every wood, but even every one of the times he had perceived or imagined it. He determined to reduce all of his past experience to some seventy thousand recollections, which he would later define numerically. Two considerations dissuaded him: the thought that the task was interminable and the thought that it was useless.

In the narrator’s recollection of Funes before his accident, he describes the boy in very human terms. Funes is sharp and mocking, wears loose trousers, and is best known for his eccentricities, such as always knowing the time. When the narrator finally gets a glimpse of Funes’ face, when he meets with him after the accident, the boy seems ancient and monumental. His wit is absent, his eccentricities untraceable. Funes’ gift of perfect memory robs him of the ability to engage with it, and with that loss, his paralysis becomes mental as well. Without the gift of selectivity his 36 the harvard advocate

inner being has no “dreams of gathering itself,” as Derrida puts it in Archive Fever.

In collective identity, remembering is an act driven by the knowledge of what future identity a culture or a society is moving toward. But personal identity is a less directed process, more informed by the past than in control of it. What is common between collective and personal identity is that both must be understood in relation to time, just as memory is.

Still, those relationships with time differ. If collective identity is more driven by a future telos than personal identity, it is logical that Julian Barnes’ preoccupation with personal mortality plays a role in this distinction. An archivist does not seek to establish a collective identity that will expire. An individual always faces an end date, when identity is no longer of the present or future, but a trace of what is left behind. It is then that memory can directly be equated with identity.

Until then, Barnes’ phrase is better interpreted as a representation of the three factors involved in the dynamic creation of identity: past memory, present existence, and the future self. Sixteen letters arranged into three words. An archive, but not a discovery: memory is identity.

March 9, 1866 Volume I Issue 1

It is said that a picture tells a thousand words. The following selection of old Harvard Advocate art speaks with clarity and distinction still. These covers are typical of their time in their rhetoric and more subtle forms of thought, composition, argument and expression: The Victorian decorum of the Collegian masthead (1866); the frantically Art Deco Heresy! (1923); the pictorial dearth of the Great Depression (1933); the inimitable strokes of a fledgling Franz Kline (1958), and the John Cage-ian Combine (1959). A cover blazes with the psychedelic sun of the Summer of Love (1967), curdles into American graffiti (1986), and becomes saturated with the chromatic—and other—excesses of Y2K (2001). A phoenix rises from the ashes of world war (1947), and an Advocate house rises up on South Street (1972). These images reflect their cultural moments, and some are remarkably synoptic. Others showcase the creative independence and idiosyncrasies of their makers. On these pages, they form a kind of technicolor dreamcoat that is a fitting suit for the Advocate’s venerable body of literature.

Nicole Bass, Art Editor

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March 9, 1866 Volume I issue 1

February 16, 1883 Supplement

October 3, 1990 Volume LXX Issue 1

June 30, 1911 Volume XCI issue 11

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November 24, 1911 Volume XCII Issue 5

December 1, 1922 Volume CIX issue 3

April 7, 1923 Volume CIX Issue 7

June 1933 Volume CXIX issue 8

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March 1933 Volume CXXIV Issue 4

November 1939 Volume CXXVI Issue 2

April 1947 Volume CXXX Issue 1

December 1948 Volume CXXXII Issue 3

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Commencement 1956 Volume CXXIX Issue 6

Registration Issue 1956 Volume CXXX issue 1

Winter 1957 Volume CXLI Issue 4

April 1957 Volume CXLI issue 5

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November 1958 Volume CXLII Issue 2

Winter 1959 Volume CXLII issue 3

Spring 1959 Volume CXLIII Issue 4

Fall 1959 Volume CXLIII issue. 2

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April 1960 Volume CXLIII Issue 5

February 1961 Volume CXLIV issue 3

December 1967 Volume CI Issue 3

February 1970 Volume CIII issue 4

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Summer 1972 Volume CVI Issue 1

Winter 1974 Volume CVII issue 4

May 1986 Volume CXIX Issue 4

September 1990 Volume CXXV issue 1

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Spring 1992 Volume CXXVI Issue 3

Summer 1992 Volume CXXVII issue 4

Spring 2001 Volume CXXXVII Issue 3

Fall 2007 Volume CXLIII issue 1

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Amy Alamo Lien Anthems for a Seventeen Year Old Girl (2004//2009) Digital Images From left: ernst_roehm_death.jpg anselm_kiefer.jpg sugimoto_theater.jpg These are part of a collection of images culled from the Internet when I was seventeen years old. Somehow in the process of transferring them from my old computer to my new computer, certain images became digitally scrambled. I see these accidental alterations as evocative of the transgressions inherent in the act of mining one’s youth [nostalgia. angst.] during the creative process.

Pixel-memory-scramble also describes ways in which reappropriating and distributing images over the internet can violate history’s hegemonic narratives.

46 the harvard advocate

LANGUAGE SCHOOLS SCHOOLS ABROAD

En la vida no hay subtítulos (Life doesn’t come with subtitles)

Ten different ways to live the language: Arabic Chinese French German Hebrew

Italian Japanese Portuguese Russian Spanish

Middlebury Language Schools

C.V. Starr-Middlebury Schools Abroad

Sunderland Language Center Middlebury, Vermont 05753 www.middlebury.edu/academics/ls languages@middlebury.edu 802.443.5510

Sunderland Language Center Middlebury, Vermont 05753 www.middlebury.edu/academics/sa schoolsabroad@middlebury.edu 802.443.5745

Orchids

Laelia’s father steered her across the room.

He held champagne in the kind of glass that is supposed to look like Marie Antoinette’s breast, and as he walked, the golden liquid kept sloshing over the edge. “Paul, this is my daughter, Laelia.

Laelia, my colleague, Dr. Gibson.” He said. “Laelia just got into Columbia. She dances.” Laelia smiled modestly. “Dr. Gibson” – he paused for effect – “is an actor.” Her dad turned, champagne splashing, and walked away. He always introduced people well.

“Pleased to meet you.” Dr. Gibson had dimples and a tiny southern accent.

“Nice to meet you.” Maybe thirty-five, Laelia guessed. He held himself like an actor, easy posture and a boyish face with a big, ingenious smile. They smiled at each other for a moment.

“Congratulations on Columbia. Do you know what you want to study?”

“Not for sure, but I think I’m going to be premed. What kind of doctor are you?”

“Radiation oncology.” Great dimples. “Your dad’s my boss.”

“And you act?”

“Your dad’s kidding. In college.”

She swayed a little to avoid a girl carrying a tray and he stepped closer and put his hand out to keep her from falling. “What kinds of things?”

“Different stuff. Equus. A lot of Shakespeare.”

Laelia moved toward him again to let the girl pass.

“The most fun production I was in was Twelfth Night. I liked comedy. What kind of dance are you interested in?” He had nice eyes. Gray. She looked down and then up again.

“Ballet. Or that’s what I do. But I’m interested in everything.”

“Can I get you some champagne?”

This was the first year her mom let her come 48 the harvard advocate

Carrie Gaebler

to her dad’s New Year’s party, which, according to her dad’s dumb girlfriend, was always a big deal.

More people kept coming in, handing her father’s girlfriend their coats, shaking hands, kissing on the cheek, and adding their voices to the murmuring crowd. Laelia had met two doctors, an anthropologist, and now Paul. She smiled into her glass. He was totally hitting on her. She was having a ball.

Laelia always spent the last week of Christmas break in New York City. Her dad took her to late lunches at fancy restaurants, and shopping, and to the ballet. This year there was the Chaconne she wanted to see, and something by Twyla Tharp.

And he loved taking her shopping, waiting outside dressing rooms, rolling his eyes. It was a little ritual. Laelia wore black jeans and heels and a sequined gray tunic top her dad had bought her, on her advice, for Christmas. The sequins were tiny, smaller than normal sequins, and arrayed in diagonal lines. It was a little casual, but she was glad she wasn’t overdressed. And she liked the way she looked in heels. Heels and jeans made her look older. Her face, in contrast, looked very young. She wore no makeup because she liked the effect.

The apartment was built to entertain. People were pressing in on all sides, but the room didn’t feel crowded. The living room was large and bare, just two sleek couches on a wood floor. And house plants. Her dad liked plants. There were orchids, and a few trees in baskets. The ceilings were high, and the whole west side of the apartment was one big window looking out over the river. It was dark outside, and it was very bright in the living room, and the window became a huge mirror.

“Grace, this is my daughter, Laelia. Laelia, this is our chief surgeon and very dear friend, Dr.

Palmer. Laelia just got in early to Columbia.”

Laelia smiled modestly. “Columbia is Grace’s Alma Mater.” Grace was wearing a black shift that clasped at the waist with heavy heels and heavy eyeliner. You have to be post-menopausal to wear that much makeup. She did it well.

“Well, Congratulations! And you go to school in New York?” She had a low voice for a woman.

“I live with my mother in Boston, actually. I go to school there.”

“I grew up in Boston! What school?”

“Concord Academy.”

“No!” Laelia’s wasn’t coed until the seventies, probably after Grace’s time. There were still more girls than boys. Laelia didn’t feel especially close to them. The girls at school, the older, artsy set with whom she had naturally fallen in, graduated last year. She knew a lot of ballerinas too, but they were, well, dumb. Dumb, she thought, but weirdly compelling, throwing their bodies around like dice, like bags of fertilizer on suburban lawns.

The girls in her classes knew Laelia was a virgin, but in the locker room they afforded her a perverse kind of respect. They admired her. Basically they

were nice girls.

Her mom liked the ballerinas. She thought Laelia should have more friends. But she also kept warning her not to slack off just because she had gotten into college, which was insane. Laelia always did well in school. Laelia had done so well on her Latin final that Mr. Arnold gave her a copy of the Aeneid with his annotations in the margins.

An early Christmas present, he said. Her mom was irritable. She just seemed exhausted all the time.

“Did you ever have Mr. Arnold?”

“Oh my god,” Grace said, blinking her made up eyes. “Yes. He taught me Latin. He was ancient even then.”

This was the first time her mom had let her drive down alone. Don’t speed. Don’t talk on your cell phone. Call me if you get lost. Her mother was more nervous than her father. She was probably smarter, actually, but her dad was lucky. She was a nurse, and he was a doctor. She had gray hair; he had a new girlfriend. Children liked him. Dogs liked him. He had a green thumb. Laelia drove herself every day from Brookline to Concord for school and then downtown for ballet. She drove stick, clutch out gas in, like a dance, and she was

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good at it. She drove her mom’s old Saab. She left at seven the day after Christmas — she was an early riser — and drove west through Massachusetts.

She stopped once for gas in Connecticut and bought herself a Diet Coke. She drank it in the dirty snow next to the pump, feeling competent and alone.

The caterers were cleaning up in the kitchen, which was almost as crowded as the living room.

Guests were waiting in line for the bathroom. Her father and his dumb girlfriend were making out.

She was wearing an awful dress, cranberry red. He was leaning against the island and she was standing in front of him, and he was holding her to him and nibbling on her ear. Laelia didn’t think you should kiss ears in public. On principle. Laelia was next.

No one ever used this kitchen to cook. She tried to make cookies once, for her father, not for herself, and she couldn’t find a cookie sheet. A bald man left the bathroom rubbing the top of his head.

There were three white orchids on the marble counter. The shower didn’t have a shower curtain.

Her dad had lived here for six years. How could you shower every day without a shower curtain?

She checked her outfit in the front and the back.

There were three mirrors set up around the sink at angles, so you could see all the way around. Her thong, which she worried about, was not peeking out.

She had had two glasses of champagne and a spinach canapé. Three hundred calories, probably. There are a hundred and twenty-five calories in a glass of champagne, something like that. There was Listerine. Throwing up was only gross if someone else saw.

Dr. Gibson sat down next to Laelia on the far couch.

“How are you doing?”

“Good, you?”

“Good.”

Just outside, two other couples were leaning over an enormous flower, amaryllis maybe, arguing about someone named James. Laelia could hear her father laughing in the kitchen.

“So are you going to dance in college?”

“I hope so, yeah.” He wore a white buttondown with rolled-up sleeves. He was tan. “Barnard has a dance program. I’d like to keep taking classes 50 the harvard advocate

there.”

“What’s your favorite ballet?” She laughed. He was teasing. He was leaning his head back against the wall.

“Favorite that I’ve done or favorite that I’ve seen?”

“Both.”

“The most fun thing I’ve been in was probably a hip hop workshop. Don’t laugh. Instead of having a performance we went to a club at the end. They had to sneak me in.”

“How old are you?”

“Eighteen.”

“You’re poised for eighteen.” Laelia was usually good at accepting compliments, but she didn’t know what to say. She shrugged.

“What’s your favorite thing you’ve seen?”

She took a deep breath. She had a good answer.

“Pierrot Lunaire. It’s this atonal Schoenberg piece, have you ever heard it? It’s a German translation of French poems set to music.” He shook his head but raised his eyebrows. He was interested.

“Anyway, there are twenty-one poems, and this guy Ratmansky did twenty-one little ballets. They’re sad and sort of toy-like. It’s really cool. I saw it with my dad last Christmas.” She shrugged again. She was enough shorter than Dr. Gibson that she had to look up. “Where did you say you were from, Dr. Gibson?”

“Washington. Virginia.” He smiled down, “Paul.”

Laelia wondered if he knew he was flirting. She couldn’t tell. He kept holding her eye a second too long. Maybe he flirted with everybody. Or maybe he was doing it on purpose. She was poised.

“Ten.” Some people started counting down.

“Nine.” Two buttons of his shirt were open at the collar. “Eight.” He looked professional and clean.

He was tan and blond with lots of gold hair on his arm. “Seven.” She wondered if he thought they might. “Six.” She bet she probably could. “Five.”

She bet it was like driving stick. Takes confidence.

“Four.” She bet she could. “Three.” She stared at him. He had nice dimples. A boyish face. And nice eyes. “Two.” What long lashes. “Happy New Year!”

In Latin class, Mr. Arnold once told Laelia that she was the namesake of a Vestal Virgin. She said,

“I was named for a flower.”

People had started leaving. Someone put on Benny Goodman and a few couples danced in the living room. The sounds of peoples’ voices had changed. Earlier the clamor sounded bright, and now the crowd made more of a murmur. Everyone was sloshed. Her dad was sitting down, and Laelia knew that meant the party would be over soon.

His girlfriend was handing people their coats.

Laelia sipped from her fourth glass of champagne. She was standing by Paul. They were standing in the corner by the kitchen, over the amaryllis flower. They had made friends. He kept smiling at her, with his dimples and his big ingenious smile, like the two of them were in on a joke. She kept Mona Lisa-ing back at him. Look sexy. Look bemused. She was charming. She was charmed. He wore a tiny trace of cologne.

“Want to dance?” She asked. He offered his hand. This is not so improbable, she thought. I’m interesting. I’m poised.

When you dance with a partner, the man has to know what to do. One, two, back step. There you go. Paul knew how to lead. He indicated direction with pressure on her hip. The girl doesn’t turn on her own. Turn her. Start the spin with your arms.

Toss her away from you, spin, and catch. He knew how to do it. He knew how to catch her, too. Some of the other couples had stopped to watch Paul and Laelia. Her heels made her just tall enough for this. She came up to his chin. He was not too tall. He dipped her. Someone clapped. Paul laughed.

“You’re good,” he said.

“You’re good,” she said.

She let him move her across the room and tried to guess what he was thinking. She moved closer as they moved out of what was left of the crowd.

She stared at him hard, so he would know that she was staring on purpose. They were standing near the kitchen when the song ended. Paul held onto her for a second, then he bowed.

“Come with me to get a glass of water,” Laelia said. She pulled his hand — she was still holding his hand — to show that he should follow.

No one was in the kitchen. The caterers had gone. She poured herself a glass of water and drank it, then poured him one in the same glass.

She jumped up and back onto the black counter next to the sink. She had seen someone do this in a movie once. When he handed her the cup, he moved forward, and she pulled him forward, and, hands on his shoulders, she kissed him on the mouth, and he didn’t pull away. Laelia hopped off the counter and pulled his hand again. There were two doors to the kitchen, one to the living room, and one to the hallway with the bathroom and bedrooms, and if they went into her bedroom no one would see.

“Do you want to go somewhere?” He asked, when he saw where she was leading. He had his arm around her waist. They stopped and whispered in the hall.

“Do you live far away?”

“In Brooklyn.”

“My dad’s about to pass out. It’s okay” Close the bedroom door. Stand on your tiptoes and kiss him. Let him spin you. Giggle and stand on point. Kiss him again. Reach for the hem of your shirt. Laelia had a ballerina’s body, and she never wore a bra. The watery top came off and trickled onto the floor. Paul reached for her hips.

His hands were warm. His lips were touching her ear.

“Do you have a…?” he asked.

She shook her head. “We can—I won’t—.”

“I can think of other things.”

“It’s ok, I haven’t had my period since September.”

“We can—” he stared at her stomach, then her ribs, then he ran his hands up and down her arms and shoulders.

“Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.”

“Maybe we…You’re a beautiful girl.”

Laelia stood up straighter. Her posture was very good. She was not embarrassed.

“Maybe we…”

He should be embarrassed. She didn’t put her shirt back on. She stared at him in the eye.

“I can count your ribs.”

God, the kitchen smelled. Everyone had gone.

Laelia put her hand on her dad’s back. He was gripping the black countertop. There was vomit winter 2009

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in the sink, along with cocktail sauce and shrimp tails and a leftover tray of spinach canapés. All of the muscles in his stomach and esophagus were reversing at once and wrenched what was left of the spinach and champagne up and out into the sink. Like revving an engine in neutral. All wrong.

His face contorted again, and his body heaved, but a little spinachy mucus was all he brought up. He coughed and spat. “That’s good,” she said, “Shh, shh.”

Paul had to pass through the kitchen to get to the living room to get to the door. He was trying not to look at her, but she was staring at him. And then the front door closed. He was gone.

Her father had vomit all down his stomach.

She poured him a glass of water and watched him drink. A pink flower behind the sink had come untied from its stake. She tied it up again.

“Come on. There you go.” She led him toward his bedroom.

“I’m fine,” he said, dazed. “Did you have a good night?”

She was taking off his shirt. “I had a good night.

Shh. Shhh.”

Laelia left clothes in a heap on the bathroom floor. She ran her hand over the gash on her shin.

She would cry in showers, if she were the kind of girl who cried. She sat in the bottom of the bathtub, hot water streaming down the sides and onto the tiled floor, hot water streaming across her back, and drew her knees to her chest. She wasn’t that kind of girl. She folded and unfolded her limbs. With her left hand she counted the ribs on her right side, and with her right hand, she counted the ones on her left.

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5/11/08 16:26:10

the numbers 1 to 10, each number on its own page

Michael Stynes

The square opens like a screen, touching it, how it’s a hand and a pattern clears.

The morning is some hands in front of finishing at the time of light this is because a pattern makes it not happen.

There is no light against the panes they abstract and stay, you touched your knee as if you are saying anything else. The monument where a boy set himself on fire and put an image in his throat, this is true because you are doing all of it, like his hand clearing or an icon which is fissive.

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Cartography and Memory

Giacometti, The Palace at 4 A.M. Museum of Modern Art, New York

Alexander Fabry

Matteo Ricci, a Jesuit missionary who had studied in Rome, arrived Macau in 1583. He would spend the next 27 years in China, until his death in 1610. Ricci wrote his first book in Chinese in 1595—a book of maxims culled from classical and ecclesiastical texts—and the following year he published a small book on the art of memory for a prince of the Ming dynasty, the governor of Jiangxi province. In this work, Ricci laid out the classical system of artificial memory, said to originate with the Greek poet Simonides (“Ximo-ni-de” to his audience), a series of cognitive techniques designed to artificially extend what was seen as the natural human memory. Ricci presented a theory of mnemotechnics that had proven itself a dominant intellectual force for centuries in Europe. As Mary Carruthers argues in The Book of Memory, “Medieval culture was fundamentally memorial, to the same profound degree that modern cultures in the West is documentary. This distinction certainly involves technologies—mnemotechnique and printing— but it is not confined to them.” These techniques— technologies even—of memory were almost always variations on a similar theme involving the mental construction of an imaginary memory palace—a grand structure made up of a series of rooms each distinguished by unique architectural features like arches of columns. Into each of these rooms of this memory palace you would mentally place a collection of objects which would stand for what you intend to remember through some metonymic process. As you imagine yourself walking through this space—perhaps Giacometti’s The Palace at 4 A.M. approximates something of this process—each object would immediately and sequentially bring to mind the things committed to memory. Matteo Ricci wrote in his treatise on the art of memory: Once your places are all fixed in order, then you can walk through the door and make your start. Turn to the right and proceed from there. As with the practice of calligraphy, in which you move from the beginning to

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the end, as with the fish who swim along in ordered schools, so is everything arranged in your brain, and all the images are ready for whatever you seek to remember.

Though Ricci’s devotion to the art of memory is apparent, Ricci was perhaps even more renowned for his work on mathematics and cartography.

Ricci published a Chinese translation of Euclid’s Elements, and in his introduction he discusses the uses that mathematical study gives rise to, reserving the ultimate position for geography: “mountains, seas, kingdoms, continents, islands, and districts all laid down in miniature,” each “answering to the points of the compass” (the compass itself was a Chinese invention). One of the first large projects Ricci undertook upon his arrival in China was the construction of a full map of the world with place names translated into Chinese phonetic equivalents. This map apparently brought him great fame, and he later expanded it for publication with detailed historical and informational notes about the locations. A map must have a center somewhere: most European world maps put this center near Europe, but Ricci put the China smack in the center. A gigantic edition of the map was installed on six panels each six feet wide in one of the inner rooms of the palace of the emperor Wanli: as Wanli wandered his palace, he could be reminded of not only the cities and territories within his realm, but also of distant lands about which he had only heard stories.

The Great Khan owns an atlas whose drawings depict the terrestrial globe all at once and continent by continent, the boarders of the most distant realms, the ships’ routes, the coastlines, the maps of the most illustrious metropolises and of the most opulent ports.

He leafs through the maps before Marco Polo’s eyes to put his knowledge to the test.

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

According to Frances Yates, whose The Art of Memory is the authority on Renaissance mnemotechnics, Giulio Camillo “was one of the most famous men of the 16th century.” Camillo’s

great achievement, though he is almost unknown today, was the creation of a “theatre of memory,” which was built in both Venice and Paris. The secret of this theatre’s operation was revealed only to Camillo’s patron, the King of France. Erasmus writes of Camillo: “They say that this man has constructed a certain Amphitheatre, a work of wonderful skill, into which whoever is admitted as spectator will be able to discourse on any subject no less fluently than Cicero.” Construction of the theatres began in the 1530s. Viglius, the Frisian scholar and jurist, wrote to Erasmus on the progress of the theatre: The work is of wood, marked with many images, and full of little boxes; there are various orders and grades in it. He gives a place to each individual figure and ornament…

He pretends that all things that the human mind can conceive and which we cannot see with the corporeal eye, after being collected together by diligent meditation may be expressed by certain corporeal signs in such a way that the beholder may at once perceive with his eyes everything that is otherwise hidden in the depths of the human mind.

Though Viglius balances his enthusiasm with the skeptical verb “pretends,” Camillo’s theatre proved to be a deeply captivating idea to the Renaissance audience. The theatre, in effect, embodied the ars memorativa, making materially real the techniques of memory. Instead of mentally construction an imaginary memory palace, a physical theatre is built of wood, possibly similar to the Vitruvian model of amphitheatre.

Instead of placing particular mental images of objects within niches of the rooms of this palace as an aid to memory, real figures and ornaments (one must imagine metal or porcelain statuettes in addition to a host of the sort of knick-knacks one would expect to see cluttering a desk in a Holbein painting) are physically placed in the boxes and shelves of the theatre, and associated books and sheafs of papers were stashed nearby.

But the systematization of knowledge presented

by Camillo was not simply a filing cabinet for the mind, rather it was a system in which “the mind winter 2009

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and memory of man is now ‘divine,’ having powers of grasping the highest reality through a magically activated imagination.” The archival theatre of memory is imagined as the ultimate cognitive aid, the ultimate extension of cognition. Not only does it embody and systematize all Renaissance learning, but it also allows anyone who enters to immediately “discourse on any subject no less fluently than Cicero.”

Italo Calvino, in his book Invisible Cities, transforms this theatre of memory into a city of memory: “This city which cannot be expunged from the mind is like an armature, a honey-comb in whose cells each of us can place the things he wants to remember: names of famous men, virtues, numbers, vegetable and mineral classifications, dates of battles, constellations, parts of speech.

Between each idea and each point of the itinerary an affinity or a contrast can be established, serving as an immediate aid to memory. So the world’s most learned men are those who have memorized Zora.” The memory of this city organizes and archives all the world’s knowledge: historical and scientific, linguistic and religious. The palace has expanded to become a city, and a cartographic representation of this location (evoked by the traveler’s itinerary) becomes the basis for a systematization and recollection of the sum total of human understanding.

“I think you recognize cities better on the atlas than when you visit them in person,” the emperor said to Marco, snapping the volume shot.

And Polo answers, “Traveling, you realize that differences are lost: each city takes to resembling all cities, places exchange their form, order, distances, a shapeless dust cloud invites the continents. Your atlas preserves the differences intact: that assortment of qualities which are like the letters in a name.”

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

Standing on the in the center of Camillo’s memory theatre, the macrocosm of the world is mirrored immediately in the microcosm of the individual, the stage becomes the world; this equation is inverted in Shakespeare’s As You Like It: “All the world’s a stage.” There are of course 56 the harvard advocate

punning analogies between the Globe Theatre and the wider globe, but Yates argues in detail that the design of Shakespeare’s theatre is intimately influenced by the memory treatises of Robert Fludd, who was building off of Camillo. The theatre of memory becomes a theatre for entertainment: both become theatres of the world. It is no accident that the first true atlas ever published, by Abraham Ortelius in 1570, was titled, Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, or The Theatre of the World. Maps were a key technology of the 16th century. During the last decade of the 15th century, two events in particular had enormous implications for both politics and cartography: the world was declared round by an Italian named Columbus, and the Pope declared that the extra-European world should be split between Spain and Portugal with the Treaty of Tordesillas. The technology of the map became increasingly important in controlling and expanding the empires of trade that grew up over the following centuries, and unsurprisingly the sudden rise of Dutch economic and trading power was accompanied by a steep increase in Dutch mapmaking. A map is a key link in the chain of conquest: the king of Spain, as he raises a globe in his palm, would not have been without justification for feeling a broad sense of ownership.

As the historian of science Bruno Latour writes in his essay “Visualization and Cognition,” “The ‘great man’ is a little man looking at a good map.

In Mercator’s frontispiece Atlas is transformed from a god who carries the world into a scientist who holds it in his hand.”

Mercator’s atlas followed Ortelius’ by a quarter of a century, but Mercator and Ortelius were friends and traveled together; they had discussed plans for a collection of maps—an atlas—in 1569. The science of cartography was based upon mathematics, as Ricci (who had brought a copy of Ortelius’ atlas, as well as Mercator’s famous direction-preserving projection of the world) describes in his translation of the Elements, but it was also another systematization of knowledge.

Though the atlas of Ortelius is clearly not intended as a navigational aid, many of the maps are dominated by the constructions of geometry, and therefore encode not only data relating to the memory of a location, but also data derived

from complex calculation: the lines of longitude and latitude, the compass rose from which spins a spindly net of directions, the distortion of the projection used, the scale of the map in multiple units (this often pinned to the maps surface by a drawing of another compass, this time the geometer’s compass, a medieval symbol of God’s act of creation of the world). The Theatrum also includes symbolic representations of forests, rivers, and mountains, but its most notable features are the cities, which speckle the continents like a swarm of bees. In maps of small scale, the cities are denoted by a cluster of three houses with peaked and curving rooftops rising up into spires; at larger scales, the more prominent cities sprout additional roofs and spires. Each city is labeled: Paris, Alexandria, Nubia, Delli, Cantan, Mecha, Lima, Orixa, Benin, Mosul, Novgrod…each is depicted identically, and as Calvino’s Marco Polo says to Kublai Khan, “Your atlas preserves the differences intact: that assortment of qualities which are like the letters in a name”: here, though, the only distinguishing properties of the cites are their relative positions and, of course, the assortment of letters that make up their names.

One city, Salis Burgensis (Salzburg, City of Salt), is unique in having an aerial map: the map of the surrounding territory on this folio spread is drawn to appear old and cracked, with tears along the edges and the lower right corner rolling and curling up to reveal the bird’s eye view of the city below. Though this is the only occasion in Ortelius’s Theatrum Orbis Terrarum where the charted cities are given accurate physical description, this particular page of Salzburg serves the essential function of reminding the reader of the purpose of the atlas: every city in the world could be located and recognized in the pages of the book; each grouping of three roofs with rising spires stood for a complete extensive city. It’s easier to recognize cities in an atlas than when you visit them in person, this almost says. Easier in that the atlas distills and condenses knowledge of the world into an easily accessible and memorizable form. As Ortelius writes in the 1606 Theatrum, And when we haue acquainted our selues somewhat with the use of these Tables or ,

or haue attained thereby to some reasonable knowledge of Geography, whatsoeuer we shall read, these Chartes being placed, as it were certaine glasses before our eyes, will the longer be kept in memory, and make the deeper impression in us: by which meanes it commeth to passe, that now we do seeme to perceiue some fruit of that which we haue read.

Parsing this grammatically convoluted text, we find the atlas therefore becomes mnemonic tool for storing date relating not only to space, but also to history since each atlas is accompanied by texts relating to the natural, biblical, and political history of the locations mentioned.

This information, by connecting it to the spatial cartographic arrangement, can be remembered as if it were immediately before the eyes, Ortelius argues, and the student can now enjoy this fruit of their education by retaining this knowledge in his memory. The atlas becomes a microcosm of the universe, with all human history, from creation through to modernity, arranged within its pages, and the owner of the atlas becomes by analogy the caretaker of this weight of historical memory. Just as objects placed into mental memory maps through the classical art of memory immediately recall the memorandi—those things to be remembered— “The sight of a ‘modern’ geographical map spontaneously creates a mental historical map.”

The map is a vital part of the vast Renaissance reconstruction of knowledge, and is an exponent of the encyclopedic and documentary urge that found various outlets in Wunderkammern, theatres of memory, and atlases.

Kublai asks Marco: “When you return to the West, will you repeat to your people the same tales you tell me?”

“I speak and speak,” Marco says, “but the listener retains only the words he is expecting.

The description of the world to which you lend a benevolent ear is one thing; the description that will go the rounds of the groups of stevedores and gondoliers on the street outside my house the day of my return is another…It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.”

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From left: Frontispiece of Mercator’s 1595 Atlas; frontispiece of Ortelius’ 1570 Theatrum Orbis Terrarum.

Bruno Latour tells the story of another cartologically inclined European sent to China: Louis XVI dispatched Jean-François de La Pérouse “with the explicit mission of bringing back a better map.” Upon landing on the place called Sakhalin, La Pérouse wanted to figure out whether it is an island or a peninsula. He met an older Chinese man who has a strong grasp of geography, and the old man drew a map of the island into the sand— as the tide was rising, and would destroy the map, a younger man took La Pérouse’s notebook and drew there the map. This symbolic representation of the land, of no particular value to either of the Chinese men on the beach, is as Latour says with slight exaggeration, the single object of La Pérouse’s journey:

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He is passing through all these places, in order to take something back to Versailles where many people expect his map to determine who was right and wrong about whether Sakhalin was an island, who will own this and that part of the world, and along which routes the next ships should sail. Without this particular trajectory, La Pérouse’s exclusive interest in traces and inscriptions will be impossible to understand—this is the first aspect, but without dozens of innovations in inscription, in projection, in writing, archiving, computing, his displacement through the Pacific would be totally wasted—and this is the second aspect, as crucial as the first.

There are two interesting things about this. First is the role that memory plays in cartography. What

for the local is stored mentally and immediately accessible whenever required must for the foreigner be depicted and remembered using external symbolic representations. La Pérouse’s map of Sakhalin, which he will bring back to Versailles with him, becomes an artifact in the archive of memory: future sailors and diplomats, traders and explorers, will “know” that Sakhalin is an island and not a peninsula. The memory is transferred from the internal storage into external storage as the map is drawn in the sand and in the notebook. The second interesting feature is that the construction of this map relied on a host of antecedent technologies: “dozens of innovations in inscription, in projection, in writing, archiving, computing” made the creation of this map possible. Technologies are required to externalize memory.

These three mapmakers who traveled to China—two Italians and a Frenchman, their visits at intervals of a few hundred years (1271, 1584, 1787)—have had their stories related by a novelist, a historian of China, and a historian of science.

The first mapmaker carried an atlas in his head, an encyclopedic memory of cities both real and imaginary, visible and invisible, a memory of the encyclopedia of life and of living; the second mapmaker carried a physical atlas of the known world, a work known as the theatre of the world, a work which through its geographic arrangements of lands and cities not only helped the reader remember the history of the world, but also served as an external repository for the memories that Marco Polo carried within his head, a work upon which the second mapmaker based his publication of a vernacular map of the world; the third mapmaker carried with him a set of technologies: a ship, compasses, sextants, theodolites, systems of mathematics, computation, cartography, his mission was to bring back a map, to bring back a memory of an island (or perhaps it really was it a peninsula?) on the coast of China in the Pacific Ocean. The map is a special kind of epistemic artifact: it is an artifact that both structures and remembers the world for us.

So, the map revives her words, the spot, the time, And the thing we found we had to face

Before the next year’s prime; The charted coast stares bright, And its episode comes back in pantomime.

Thomas Hardy, “The Place on the Map”

It should not be surprising that cartography and maps are important tools of memory, or that they can serve powerful cognitive functions. In fact, the German cardinal and polymath Nicholas Cusanus (known alternately as “of Cusa”) used mapmaking as a metaphor for the entire cognitive process in a 1464 treatise on knowledge acquisition: a cosmographer stands in the middle of a walled city (the mind within the skull), where he gathers and records all the data brought to him by messengers entering the city through five gates, each one of the senses. He then creates “a description of the entire perceptible world represented in his own city,” and finally “he compiles in into a wellordered and proportionally measured map lest it be lost.” It should of course be obvious by now that the cartographic epistemic system functions in a role closely related to the cognitive task of memory, serving in part as an external memory storage system and in part as a system encoding previously completed cognitive actions. The “memory content” of the map is greater than the knowledge of either the user or the creator (Ortelius poached sources from all over Europe and employed more than 90 engravers at one time or another to complete his atlas). As Edwin Hutchins writes in his Cognition in the Wild, a work exploring in meticulous detail the collective cognitive task of navigating a US Naval vessel, “A navigation chart represents the accumulation of more observations than any one person could make in a lifetime. It is an artifact that embodies generations of experience and measurement. No navigator has ever had, nor will one ever have, all the knowledge that is in the chart.”

There is one simple cognitive function that maps enhance which has so far not been explicitly mentioned: maps help us find our way from location A to location B. The map symbolically encodes information about how to get between any two points on the maps surface. It is this seemingly pedestrian task of navigation that concerns Hutchins. Hutchins describes with astounding winter 2009

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View out of my window in Winthrop House, from Google Earth (mullions added for perspective)

detail the complex cognitive interactions that together meet the calculation-intensive task of getting the US Navy helicopter transport ship, which he calls the Palau, from A to B. As a point of departure and contrast, Hutchins includes an extended exploration of the navigation practices of Micronesian sailors. “The Micronesian navigator holds all the knowledge required for his voyage in his head. Diagrams are sometimes constructed in the sand for pedagogic purposes, but these (of course) are only temporary and are not taken on voyages. In the Western tradition, physical artifacts become the repositories of knowledge, and they were constructed in durable media so that a single artifact might come to represent more than a single individual can know.” It is strange that Hutchins does not here mention that Micronesian navigators did in fact construct more durable representations of practice, charts that showed the position of islands and prevailing winds and currents. These charts were primarily used for teaching navigation, but they do represent a physical crystallization of navigation practices, practices which as Hutchins shows are calculation-intensive and founded upon generations of accumulated knowledge. In addition to serving as a repository of information— an aid to memory, in which knowledge about the world was stored—maps also serve an important computational function. “One can see the work 60 the harvard advocate

that went into constructing a chart as part of every one of the computations that is performed on the chart in its lifetime. This computation is distributed in space and time. Those who make the chart and those who use it are not known to one another (perhaps they are not even contemporaries), yet they are joint participants in a computational event every time the chart is used.” The map extends the mind.

Megalomaniacs confuse the map and the territory and think they can dominate all of Paris just because they do, indeed, have all of Paris before their eyes. Paranoiacs confuse the territory and the map and think they are dominated, observed, watched, just because a blind person absent-mindedly looks at some obscure signs in a four-by-eight metre room in a secret place. Both take the cascade of transformations for information, and twice they miss that which is gained and that which is lost in the jump from trace to trace—the former on the way down, the latter on the way up.

Bruno Latour, Paris Invisible City

Google Earth opens on the computer screen.

Against a background of stars appears a cloudless blue and green orb, glowing slightly (you can toggle the clouds on, if you like, to add some white

to the mix). The view spins around the small marble, zooming until the globe becomes the size of a grapefruit on the screen: perfectly handsized. We modern Atlases don’t need a physical globe to hold: virtual ones are much lighter. I type “Cambridge MA” into the search box and hit enter. With a dizzying and vertiginous swoop, I plunge from 10,000km above the earth’s surface, decelerating gently to hover 7.30km above Harvard Square, like the gut-turning fall in the 1986 sci-fi movie The Flight of the Navigator.

Zoom in further and it becomes clear that this isn’t simply a two-dimensional picture, an ordinary composite satellite image taken sometime in the summer from the look of the greenery, as it first appeared. Every building is modeled in three dimensions; each one is clad in a skin of photographs. Cambridge has become a toy city (see Google Earth’s breathtaking New York City for a real model metropolis), and there is something reminiscent of childhood when you see the familiar buildings arranged in miniature below. It brings to mind the lone aerial view of Salis Burgensis in Ortelius’ Theatrum. Descending further, and panning upwards, I’m now at street level, seeing Cambridge from an altitude of 2m.

I walk through the deserted streets, down JFK, along the river; taking a detour, I float up to my room in Winthrop House and look out of my virtual window. The trees are missing, flattened against the ground, but there is something that feels deeply the same. It is an eerie and uncanny feeling to walk though this strange doppelganger city, down the center of an empty Mass Ave; in truth, you don’t “walk,” you either glide using direction arrows, or you click and drag yourself to the desired location, under a strangely ominous blue sky.

By toggling a particular layer in the Google Earth toolbar, certain locations will have a little boxed “W” floating over them; clicking on the one brings you to the Wikipedia article. Clicking on a floating blue square will bring you more information, created, again collectively, by the Google Earth community, a million-strong group of users who not only explore but also help build Google Earth by adding geotagged data.

The variety and depth of information available

through this cartographic interface is stunning: aside from the three-dimensional buildings and the ordinary transportation-related cartographic information, there are Wikipedia articles about all major landmarks, spherical panoramas, geotagged photos and videos from flikr and YouTube, traffic and weather reports, nearby sex offenders, flu outbreaks, dining and shopping information, live webcams, and even collections of antique maps of the same locations, among many, many others.

We use Google’s cartographic technologies to find the best restaurants nearby, to track the progress of an around-the-world sailing race, to plan vacations, to explore museums (go to the Prado in Madrid, click on a painting, and you fly into a 3D version of the building. You are presented with a version of Las Meninas so detailed that you can zoom in to see the individual threads of the canvas), and we even use them to figure out how to get from point A to point B. The collective memory of a million participants is marshaled to provide answers to almost any data query. Just as Mercator intended his atlas to encompass the history of world—divine, natural, and human— Google Earth aims at nothing less than giving a simulacrum of earth to the user. The Medieval and Renaissance maps served as a repository for memory, and would help the reader remember history, a history written either in boxed asides on the map itself or printed on an adjacent page; dotted around Paris are other cartographically inspired historical memorials. A network of exaggerated metal oars, labeled “Histoire de Paris” and bearing a paragraph of historical information, are stuck in the ground around the city like pushpins on a map, the better to paddle your way around the Île-de-France. Standing next to one of these signs, the technologically savvy Parisian might bring up the Wikipedia article using the Google Earth iPhone application and find ten times more information. Every piece of information about the world is potentially useful, and therefore deserves mapping. Every home study becomes one of Latour’s oligopticons (his term for the bureaucratic control centers that collect and display the vital signs of the city)—even more, the oligopticon becomes personally portable.

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Paris is as flat as the palm of my hand. Folded perhaps, and folded again like an origami, but flat everywhere, without the distance between two circumstances ever being eliminated. Even today, any movement from A to B has to be paid in coin of the realm: by registered letter, escalator, elevator, telephone or radio link, petrol, diesel, elbow grease. Remove all these intermediaries and Paris unfolds like a map that could cover the surface of the Sahara; unfurl the City of Light and it’s as vast as Siberia.

Bruno Latour, Paris Invisible City

Latour’s imagery of Paris unfolding as a map over Sahara or Siberia immediately brings to mind Borges’ short story “On Exactitude in Science,” in which cartographers of a particular unknown empire construct ever-more perfect maps, first mapping a province onto the area of a city, then mapping the area of the empire on a whole province, until finally a map of the empire was constructed which was exactly the size of the empire itself. Each and every point in the territory was mapped to a corresponding point on the map. The map was deemed useless and it was discarded, its tatters and remnants remaining still in the deserts in the west of the empire. Once more let’s return to China, this time virtually.

Type the coordinates “38.26568, 105.953865” into the search bar of Google Earth and watch Cambridge disappear beneath you. You descend into the northern interior of China. A set of redroofed barracks, looking like blocks of plasticine, sit beside a portion of topography—at firsts all looks well, but look at the scale: those snowcapped mountains are a dozen feet wide, the lake is a hundred feet in diameter. This bizarre map was discovered by a Google Earth enthusiast while touring the world from his armchair; soon after, a photograph was released from the Chinese state press agency showing men in blue coveralls walking on this simulated topography, which was said to be a “tank training facility.”

The map actually depicts a disputed portion of the Chinese-Indian boarder. But in his unfolding of Paris, Latour’s imagination has gone beyond either the Chinese military or Borges’ imperial cartographers: he has imagined a map of the city 62 the harvard advocate

that dwarfs the city itself in size, a map of Paris that spreads over vast desert and deserted spaces in Africa or Asia. Latour is saying that a one-to-one mapping is not enough. We already have a oneto-one mapping right in front of us (we call it the city itself), but even this is clearly insufficient for making the city fully visible, it is insufficient for allowing us to completely know the city.

For Latour, virtual versions of Paris are simply mappings of the physical city. Distinguishing between the virtual and the real is not only impossible but also pointless, however, since each virtual city is also included in the physical city. The virtual network of history and memory resides within the volumes of the Bibliotheque National, on the oar-shaped signposts, in the minds of the residents.

When unconstrained by physical parameters, the range of the possible seems infinite. The virtual earth in Google Earth aims at nothing less than the duplication of all potentially significant and representable data within its framework. Just as we have a memory of history, there is also a history to memory. The mnemotechnics of Cicero and Aquinas were seen as artificial tools for mapping thoughts. The Theatre of Camillo was a stage for the expansion of the human mind. Google Earth is a direct continuation of this tradition.

It seeks to replicate the macrocosm precisely in the microcosm. It seeks to be a theatre of memory. It seeks to be the theatre of the world.

Chinese state news agency photograph of the Yuanxi military installation.

A Christmas Visit with Uncle Charles: Part 2

Jesse Barron and Mia Barron

What are you stacking today Uncle Charles?

Bread and then some other bread.

What are you stacking today Uncle Charles?

Your head on a platter and bread.

What are you stacking now Uncle Charles?

Beats me. The bread tells me what to stack.

What are you stacking now Uncle Charles?

Today, just bread and raisins.

But when are you stacking bread Uncle Charles?

As soon as I finish rolling down this embankment.

But when are you stacking bread Uncle Charles?

As soon as I finish rolling the fucking bread down this embankment.

But what are you stacking, Uncle Charles?

Don’t worry yourself about that, Breadface.

But what are you stacking, Uncle Charles?

Just pudding. Just kidding. Just bread.

How do you stack it?

TheHow do you stack it?

Only TheHow do you stack it?

Bread knows.

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ENVOY Drafts Anteaen

Marta Figlerowicz

At Harvard’s Houghton Library, you can examine a telegraph Marcel Proust sent to one of his friends during the Dreyfus Affair. Dozens of words, several lines, all of it one convoluted sentence forced to a halt at the bottom right margin of the blue form. All capitals, the lines typed up crookedly, it seems to shout at you with clumsy, irate long-windedness: the perfect parody and the perfect antithesis of Proust’s easily ignited, well-worded sensitivity. A draft of Thomas Hardy’s Two on a Tower scribbled in a rapid, nervous hand, then overwritten with corrections. On one of the first pages, Hardy describes the novel’s eponymous tower. In the initial draft, the tower affords the protagonist a glorious view of five neighboring counties. Looking closer, we note that the first halfline has been crossed out in reconsideration—the number five replaced by a more modest three. In another one of Houghton’s indigo carrier boxes are several notebooks of drafts and sketches by E. E. Cummings, replete with joyous doodles and happy faces.

Textual artifacts writers leave behind can all too easily become unconscious parodies of the very qualities whose more controlled, artistic form we have come to admire. Proust’s unforgivingly complex syntax, Hardy’s sensory enthusiasm, Cummings’ delighted pantheism, assume a comic quality as soon as we start treating their quotidian expressions with the interpretive sincerity and high standards with which we approach their masterworks.

Though it affords some guilty pleasure, there is something wrongheaded in this deadpan parodic approach towards archival materials; not simply because it is mean to authors we want to love, but because it misrepresents the aesthetic qualities which draw us towards such drafts or sketches in the first place, the kind of artistic object they constitute.

That the difference between a manuscript and a published work might be one of aesthetic category, rather than degree of perfection, was signaled in recent debates around the publication of Elizabeth Bishop’s drafts. When they were posthumously anthologized a few years ago (as Edgar Allan Poe 64 the harvard advocate

and the Juke-Box), many of her critics and friends protested. They were not appalled by the fact that the drafts were being made available to the public: many of them had already found their way into scholarly articles. It does not take away from Bishop’s talent that she wrote poems arguably inferior to the ones she published, or that her first stab at “One Art” bears little resemblance to the polished version achieved after a painstaking series of rewrites. The publication of her drafts was most shocking as a violation of the limit the poet had set between her personal space and her public image, the things that surrounded her and the voices she heralded her audience with. What the poet intended to remain a crossed-out, half-intelligible scribble on a crumpled piece of paper should not be given the communicative transparency of a clearly typeset composition. An object should not be made into a text.

Walter Benjamin has long alerted us to the difference in the way we respond to a reproducible and a non-reproducible work of art. We admire in a work of art which cannot be reproduced its aura of uniqueness, the fact that its beauty can only be accessed in one physical location. Disseminated widely, a work loses this aura and begins to draw its power from other sources. Transient and less intimidating in each of its many manifestations, it gains in status through the persistency with which its copies keep being spread, the rapidity with which its many versions infect the minds of societies.

Conventionally, we treat masterpieces of writing as belonging to the latter category. A writer’s canonical work is not the collection of the pieces of paper whose content she personally penned or dictated, but the nebula of multiply copied texts which she decided to release into the cycle of printing and reprinting. The effect of their works does not depend on any single, however authentically manuscripted copy.

What distinguishes writers’ drafts and sketches from their public work is the continued Antaeuslike dependence of the former on their physicality and the moment in time that first brought them to life. Seen as a part of a writer’s unique personal space, palpable like his lamp or chair, they are mysterious and instructive: a window onto the

author’s private thoughts in their more fragile, momentary expression, a silent observer of one or many instants of their lives. Seen as additions to a public persona or mirrors of the author’s inner self, they appear silly and comparatively amateurish, deflations of the artistic efforts which originally made the writer into a publicly interesting figure.

Unlike their canonical cousins, drafts and sketches are therefore at their most powerful—as objects of art and as expressions of the person who wrote them—when they manage to convince us that they are physical objects rather than fullfledged texts. We appreciate them, and their connection to the authors we love, not because they accurately express their heights of genius, but because they remind us that these writers were fragile, non-reproducible individuals whose material selves we have irretrievably lost. They conjure up before our eyes not a trusty substitute of the author’s self, but a space made empty by his absence which they refuse satisfactorily to fill.

Tantalizing us through their connection to works whose many reproductions we have seen, they pull us back towards an older, more idolatrous aesthetic mode, making us imagine—as printed books do far less ostentatiously—how much we are missing because their author is not there to be addressed directly.

Part of the mission of archivists and collectors is thus to resist the temptation of uprooting the manuscripts they are entrusted with: to make them available to the public in a way which emphasizes their uniqueness and physicality, preventing us from approaching them merely as texts. The Brontë sisters’ juvenilia, tiny books of stories about a fairy kingdom in minuscule childish handwriting, are kept in inch-by-inch compartments distributed evenly in a large case: a collection of butterflies we could imagine Emily and Charlotte finger and patiently gather. James Joyce’s galleys of Ulysses are preserved in their original, uncut form. With several pages on each giant sheet of paper, it is a map rather than typescript of Joyce’s master work, a mute account of the bodily acrobatics he must have subjected himself to in perusing and richly penciling its margins.

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SPECIAL THANKS

The Harvard Advocate wishes to thank the following generous individuals for their support of our activities during the 2008-2009 academic year. Their gifts have made possible the replacement of obsolete media and design equipment, the creation of a new and improved web presence and repairs and improvements to our historic Harvard Square Building. However, we still hope for assistance in digitizing our back catalogue so that our rich legacy can be available to all. We are committed to bringing The Harvard Advocate into the digital age, embracing new media. The inclusion of the first Advocate DVD in the Fall 2008 issue as well as the continued development of our new website are testaments to this commitment. The continued publication of the nation’s oldest continuously published literary magazine depends on your contributions; please consider supporting us at any level.

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Please e-mail contact@theharvardadvocate.com with questions or to discuss specific giving opportunities. Thank you for your devotion to Mother Advocate.

PATRONS Louis Begley Ted Greenberg Sarah Baffler Hrdy James Family Charitable Foundation Meryl Natchez P. David Ondaatje Remnick Group BENEFACTORS Jonathan E. Freedman Maxwell N. Krohn DONORS Peter and Tina Barnet Andrea Blaugrund Bruce A. Boucher Norris Darrell, Jr.

Heather Evans Lewis P. Jones Billy N. Joyner Richard Nalley

Walter Patrick Eve Herzog Robbins Paul Rodman

FRIENDS Rebecca Abrams David L. Auerbach Lily L. Brown Lawrence Clouse Edward J. Coltman Robert Cumming Caroline G. Darst Steven Dell Frank P. Davidson Lorraine T. Fowler Nancy Hannaford Greer Miles H. Grody

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Chad Heap Jessica R. Henderson Mayme K. Hostetter Rex Jackson Frederick A. Jacobi John Keene Gil Kerr Crawford N. Kirkpatrick Day Lee Richard Lowry Anne S. Miner Anita Patterson

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CONTRIBUTORS’ NOTES Mia Barron’s first novel, “What Are You Doing Today, Jesse Barron?” is in bookstores now.

Richard Beck is the only girl I ever loved.

Ben Cosgrove will freeze that way if you keep doing that.

Alexander Fabry is wanting and raving.

Marta Figlerowicz is a penciled doodle, shaped like an hourglass.

Carolyn Gaebler is lost in a blizzard in the Upper Midwest.

Abram Kaplan is now on the list.

Dana Kase wears a vest underneath her vest.

Allison Keeley wants to know: who are we? amy lien is a fixed but adjustable peg.

Linda Liu is terribly self-indulgent.

MichaEl StynEs’ poEm is for RSL. Maria Xia is anthropomorphizing her vegetables.

For a look into the Harvard Advocate archives, order our Special Edition Archive issue and receive a collection of correspondence, posters, and invitation facsimiles from the past 145 years of Mother Advocate’s history.

Send your order with a suggested donation of $25 to: The Harvard Advocate Special Archive Edition 21 South Street Cambridge, MA 02138

Doodles courtesy of The Harvard Advocate Meeting Minutes 1918-1933, p. 122.