Winter 2010 by The Harvard Advocate

The Harvard Advocate Congratulates the Newly Elected

2010 Executive Board

President

Publisher

Dana Kase

Charleton Lamb

Art Editor

Business Manager

Design Editors

Features Editor

Madeleine Schwartz Wendy Chang Lauren Packard

Fiction Editor Ryan Meehan

Pegasi

Matt Aucoin Mark Chiusano Sophie Duvernoy

Community Outreach Director Andrew Klein

Alumni Relations Manager Iya Megre

Ben Berman

Jessica Sequeira

Poetry Editor Adam Palay

Technology Editor Jeremy Feng

Dionysi

Emily Chertoff Sofia Groopman

Publicity and Circulation Managers Anna Raginskaya David Tao

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Editors’ Note

NOTES FROM 21 SOUTH ST: Feature Animals in Art: From Magic to Science

Eel and Water

Faust Cannot

House on a Hill

Escher’s Infinite Worlds

Caiman

Merlin: A Bestiary Entry

A Snake

Poetry

Poem

Poetry

When the Bear Came

Fiction

The Dog of the Marriage (excerpt)

Fiction

The Blood of Birds: Death, Steel, and Cockers

Bruce Boucher

Poetry

Erik Fredericksen Donald Revell

Maria Xia

Jessica Sequeira

Bret Anthony Johnston Sanders Bernstein Katie Peterson Mark Strand

Benjamin Percy Amy Hempel

Kevin Seitz

Poetry Fiction Feature Fiction Feature

Feature

At Customs

Poetry

In the Animal Shelter

Fiction

Chimères, (Vampire), 1982-1984

Art

Chimères, (Spider), 1982-1984

Art

Le Bestiaire Amoureux

Art

Lion Mountain

Art

Benares

Art

Wandering around, things becoming extinct

Art

Attention Chicken!

Art

SELF PORTRAIT

Art

CHAMPFLEURETTE #2

Art

MALE AND FEMALE

Art

Breyerfest

Art

Elk hide tipi liner

Art

Mystical Nokota stallion

Art

Fanny Howe

Amy Hempel

Annette Messager Annette Messager Annette Messager Harri Kallio Harri Kallio

Becky James

Nicholas Lampert Louise Bourgeois Louise Bourgeois Louise Bourgeois

Castle McLaughlin Pretty Hawk

Castle McLaughlin

Untitled (Paper doll)

Art

School of Evolution

Art

Zoo Kit

Art

Anatomies

Art

Book Nest

Art

Trust Workshop

Art

Sweetgrass

Art

Ilisa Barbash Lucien Castaing-Taylor

No one steers the bird

Art

Cell 204

Art

medusae

Poetry

Magic Kingdom Come

Poetry

One Big Garden

Rebecca Lieberman Gail Wight Gail Wight Gail Wight

Rosamond Purcell Tania Bruguera

Daniel Wenger

Liz Hamilton Peter Brodfuerer Maria Vassileva D.A. Powell

Ben Cosgrove

104 Atticus

Andrew Nunnelly

108 The Catcher and His Garden

Mark Chiusano

114 Comes the Fall

Carl Phillips

Feature Fiction Feature Poetry

115 The Jetty

Poetry

Carl Phillips

116 Domestic Terrorism

Emily Chertoff

Feature

120 People of the Glades

Fiction

124 Angelic Patience

Poetry

Rachael Goldberg Donald Revell

125 Bad News Bears

Madeleine Schwartz

Feature

130 Concerning

Poetry

131 Houses So Near

Donald Revell

Poetry

132 138

The Subaltern May Not Feature Speak, But It Certainly Can Be Pickled Poetry

Rae Armantrout

Anna Polonyi

Service Record Rae Armantrout

139 Sleeping with Pigs

Fiction

154 Wilderness

Poetry

Jay McInerney

Katie Peterson

155 ENVOY: Scorching Gold: Tracking the Phoenix in Myth, Fairy Tales, and Modern Fictions

Adam Horn and Maria Tatar

161 Contributorsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Notes 165 Special Thanks 166 Acknowledgments

Feature

Art Emma Banay, Ruben Davis, Molly Dektar,

Elyssa Jakim, Dana Kase, Rebecca Levitan, Rebecca Lieberman, Anna Murphy, Julene Paul, Thalassa Raasch, Anna Raginskaya, Madeleine Schwartz.

business Ankur Agrawal, Ben Berman, Sand-

ers Bernstein, Ruben Davis, Liya Eijvertinya*, Catherine Humphreville, Andrew Izaguirre, Olivia Jampol*, Iya Megre, Jaron Mercer, Arielle Pensler, Anna Raginskaya, David Tao, Natalie Wong, Emily Xie, Millicent Younger, Lillian Yu.

design Charlotte Alter, Isidore Bethel, Wendy

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Editorial Board

Chang, Dana Kase, Charleton Lamb, Rebecca Lieberman, Joseph Morcos, Anna Murphy, Lauren Packard, Aimee Wang.

features Anna Barnet, Sanders Bernstein, Emily

Chertoff, Mark Chiusano, Rebecca Cooper, Ben Cosgrove, Sophie Duvernoy, Anna Polonyi, Madeleine Schwartz, Kevin Seitz, Jessica Sequeira.

President SANDERS BERNSTEIN Publisher MILLICENT YOUNGER fiction Katie Banks, Sanders Bernstein, Emily Art Editor THALASSA RAASCH Chertoff, Eva Delappe, William Eck, Erik FrederBusiness Manager Natalie Wong icksen, Justin Keenan, Seph Kramer, Michal Labik, Design Editors AnnA Murphy Charleton Lamb, Max Larkin, Henry Lichtblau*, Lauren Packard Linda Liu, Teddy Martin, Ryan Meehan, Alex Features Editor Anna Barnet Ratner, David Wallace, Scott Zuccarino. Fiction Editor LINDA LIU Poetry Editor DAVID WALLACE poetry Matthew Aucoin, Courtney Bowman, Technology Editor BEN BERMAN William Eck, Erik Fredericksen, Ted Gioia, Art Pegasi Abram Kaplan Rachael Goldberg, Chris Johnson-Roberson, Abram jessica sequeira Kaplan, Andrew Klein, Jennifer Nicole Kurdyla, Literary Pegasi ryan meehan James Leaf, Adam Palay, David Wallace. Adam palay Dionysi MARK CHIUSANO TECHNOLOGY Ben Berman, Jeff Feldman, charleton lamb Jeremy Feng, Mark VanMiddlesworth, Scott ZucCirculation DAVID TAO carino. Publicity jeffrey lee Librarian KEVIN SEITZ Alumni Relations lillian yu *The Harvard Advocate congratulates its graduating seniors.

Board of Trustees

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

Chairman James Atlas Chairman Emeritus Louis Begley Vice-Chairman Douglas McIntyre President Susan Morrison Vice-President Austin Wilkie and Treasurer Secretary Charles Atkinson Founded in 1866, The Harvard Advocate is the nationâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s oldest continually published college literary magazine. It publishes Peter Brooks quarterly from the Advocate house at 21 South St, Cambridge MA John DeStefano 02138. Published pieces and advertisements represent the opinions LESLIE DUNTON-DOWNER of the authors and advertisers, not The Harvard Advocate. Domestic A. Whitney Ellsworth 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 jonathan Galassi addresses, the rates are $45 for one year (4 issues), $75 for two years Lev Grossman (8 issues), $110 for three years (12 issues). Payable by cash or check Angela Mariani made out to The Harvard Advocate and mailed to the above address, Daniel Max Attn: Circulation Manager. Back issues are available for purchase, CELIA MCGEE but price and availability depends upon the issue. Please inquire Thomas A. Stewart by writing to contact@theharvardadvocate.com. No part of this magazine may be reprinted without the permission of The Harvard Advocate. Copyright 2010 by the Editors and Trustees of The Harvard Advocate.

Editors’ Note

Western religion has it that God created two books. One was the book of sacred scripture, the other “The Book of Nature.” A bestiary was, and is, a compendium of information about the natural world, man’s attempt to rewrite the Book of Nature, best as he could understand it. While the worldview that shaped the bestiary has long since fragmented, our interest in nature and the life around us is—as it should be— stronger than ever before. We put before you a special issue of our magazine, what was envisioned as a 21st century bestiary, an exploration of our relationship to the world around us—plant, animal, and human—in the contemporary arts. In creating this issue, we have been fortunate to find the world outside of our 21 South St. environment to be—despite what postmodern discourse has relayed to us—extraordinarily benevolent and generous with its bounty. We hope that within the pages of this magazine, which has been a labor of love for all involved, you find the work inspired by nature and created by artists and authors to be as beautiful and strange, as wonderful and terrifying, as confusing and as edifying as we have experienced them in putting this issue together.

Winter 2010 1

NOTES FROM 21 SOUTH STREET: Animals in Western Art: From Magic to Science Bruce Boucher

dam was given dominion over all animals in the Book of Genesis, but there was a sting in the tail – the serpent’s tail. While animals provided food, work, and companionship, they also harbored other traits, which threatened danger in the form of wild beasts or evil as in the snake-like form assumed by the devil in the Garden of Eden. In art, animals figure among the earliest known representations: the painted bison in the caves of Lascaux, or a coyote head fashioned from the pelvis bone of an extinct species of llama in Mexico, or the earliest Egyptian stele with their processions of falcons and other beasts. A common feature of these earliest representations was a combination of direct observation and magical invocation; with cave paintings, in particular, the undulations of the rock form were employed by the artists to mimic the contours of the bodies of animals, and the carver of the coyote head must have seemed possessed with supernatural gifts to his or her contemporaries. Art, of course, has the power to evoke images out of nothing, by making connections between medium and the subject represented. This imparted a magical quality to most early representations of animals. It was seen in fabulous beasts like the Egyptian sphinx or the winged bulls of Assyria, resplendent with pinions and the bearded heads of men, and it persists in the anthropomorphic treatment of animals from antiquity to early modern times. Grafted on to the representation of animals were allegorical and symbolic meanings, which are found in both the classical and biblical traditions. Human psychology and character traits were paraded in animal form by the fables attributed to Aesop, and animals play a fundamental role in representations of Christ as lamb of God or the four Evangelists symbolized by the ox, bull, eagle, and angel. The classical zoological cultures of Aristotle’s Historia Animalium, Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis Historia, and late antique works like the Physiologus, contained a mixture of factual observation and folklore to which Christianity added an allegorical gloss. Take the case of the pelican, which became a symbol of Christ’s sacrifice because it was believed to revive its young with the flesh of its own breast. This erroneous observation was woven into a comparison with Christ’s crucifixion, 2

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when blood flowed from His side, symbolizing the water of salvation. This was the source of countless representations of the pelican and her offspring in medieval illuminations, ecclesiastical vestments, and stone sculptures. Thus, when one saw such images, one could interpret them in three ways: literally, symbolically, and allegorically. By the same token, the eagle, which adorns many lecterns in Christian churches, was considered the bird that flew highest and closest to God. The psalmist’s invocation to bless the Lord, “who satisfieth thy mouth with good things; so that thy youth is renewed like the eagle’s [Psalm 103:5]”, contained an allusion to the regeneration of the eagle by the heat of the sun and the cleansing action of spring water. The medieval bestiary was a major vehicle for transmitting images of animals and their Christological interpretation. As a literary form, the bestiary was a compendium of information and misinformation, enlivened by marginal illustrations of animals. Often these images now need to be deciphered because any resemblance—especially in the case of more exotic animals like elephants or tigers—can be tenuous. They are generally depicted as acting out mythic behavior, such as the lion resuscitating its stillborn cubs by licking them or the even more fabulous unicorn being tamed by a virgin. Ancient texts were respected for their auctoritas or authority, which was only gradually supplanted by contact with animals and observation of their traits and features. Menageries—both royal and civic—contributed to this shift from symbolic representation to more scientific study: there in one place artists and the general public could watch ostriches, leopards, camels, and a variety of birds. Thus, a Florentine chronicler of the fourteenth century witnessed the birth of live lion cubs, not stillborn as recorded by Pliny and the author of the Physiologus. The charismatic St. Francis of Assisi (c.1182-1226) also fostered a new awareness of animals, and his Canticle of Creatures or hymn to creation was one of the earliest compositions in the Italian vernacular. Likewise, the saint’s interaction with animals became a source of illustration. His miraculous preaching to the birds was depicted in the earliest altar panel dedicated to him in Pescia, near Florence, by Bonaventura Berlinghieri (c. 1235). Seventy years later, a predella panel by Giotto in the Louvre presented the same miracle withan array of carefully rendered images of hawfinches, magpies, and goldfinches, among others. By the end of the fourteenth century, sketchbooks with more precise renderings of animals were in circulation. The Italian humanist, Bartolomeo Facio wrote of the painter Pisanello that he was “blessed with true poetic genius in rendering the appearance of things and in expressing their sensitivity; in painting horses and other animals, he was considered superior to all others by the conoscenti.” Many of Pisanello’s drawings survive, and they display great flair in capturing the plumage and coloring of birds as well as more exotic animals like cheetahs and a camel. He drew them with an interest in reportage that raises them above other albums of similar material, and they found their way into frescoes like his St. George and the Princess in Sant’Anastasia, Verona, or his panel painting, The Vision of St. Eustace, in the National Gallery, London, where the saint on horseback is framed by a veritable menagWinter 2010 3

erie of hunting dogs, game and birds, many of them traceable to the artist’s previously prepared studies. In an exquisite portrait like Pisanello’s Ginevra d’Este in the Louvre, four butterflies are rendered with enough accuracy as to be identifiable. The sketchbook tradition continued well into the fifteenth century, and Benozzo Gozzoli’s fresco of the Procession of the Medici in the chapel of Palazzo Medici Riccardi in Florence offers a cavalcade of carefully presented portraits, both of men and animals. The birds in particular have the appearance of quotations from another source, but the hunting cheetahs in their bejeweled collars bear only a passing acquaintance with their originals. Albrecht Dürer raised this kind of study to a high art form, and he approached studies of stag beetles or dragonflies with the same eye for detail that made him peerless in the realm of woodcuts and engravings. One of his most mesmerizing images is a watercolor from 1502, showing a crouching hare in an attitude of intense concentration. Dürer manages a deft balance between details like the whiskers, fur, and the reflection of light in its brown eyes without losing a sense of the animal as a whole. Indeed, the authority of Dürer’s animal studies was such that his celebrated 1515 woodcut of a rhinoceros continued to be cited in later publications, even after photography showed that Dürer’s image had been based upon second-hand accounts and not direct observation. During the period known as the High Renaissance, two factors changed the way artists and the educated public regarded animals: the medium of print and cabinets of curiosity. Books devoted to natural history enabled a wider reading public to recognize a variety of native and more exotic animals. Exploration of the Indies – both East and West – brought animals like tigers into sharper focus while introducing new species like the American wild turkey. Pierre Belon’s Histoire de la nature des oyseux of 1555 was the first printed book devoted solely to birds, illustrating not only their bone structure but also various species in a comparative manner. Though of good quality, its woodcuts were largely executed in the manner of artists’ sketchbooks. Belon’s book was complemented by Guillaume Rondolet’s treatise on sea-dwelling fish of the same date as well as a host of similar texts produced in Europe in the latter part of the sixteenth century. Some of these authors, like the Bolognese doctor Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522-1605), had notable collections or cabinets of curiosity, which they used for their research. Cabinets of curiosity or Kunstkammern—to give them their German title—were the forerunners of modern museums. They were composed of natural and manmade objects and could trace their lineage back to the treasuries of great medieval churches like San Marco in Venice or Cologne Cathedral, in which the miraculous bones of saints and other sacred relics were displayed in containers made by the finest goldsmiths and stonecutters. Over time, the workmanship of the artisans rather than the thaumaturgic power of the relic commanded greater attention. Moreover, the scope of the princely Kunstkammer became the means of presenting the macrocosm of the world in microcosm. In addition to precious objects and regalia like crowns and scepters, these assemblages contained ancestral armor, portraits and other paintings, and specimens 4

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of natural history. The last category included minerals, fossils, botanical and ethnographic specimens, not to mention artifacts fashioned from exotic materials such as ivory, amber, and rock crystal. The objects in such collections were assembled in cabinets, a word that meant either a cupboard or the room in which such cupboards were housed. In Italy, these rooms were called studioli, in France estudes, both of which share the same Latin root as our modern word “study.” The name underscores a principal function of the cabinet as a place where the prince or a private collector could pursue the contemplative life as an antidote to the intrigues of the court or the pressures of everyday life. By the sixteenth century, the mania for collecting had filtered down into the realm of the wealthy and the intellectually curious. Animals initially figured in cabinets of curiosity as fossils, skeletons, tortoise shells or pelts, but by the turn of the seventeenth century, many cabinets began to be known as museums and were sights of cultural pilgrimage from Naples to Copenhagen. Because taxidermy was then in its infancy, accurate drawings or paintings of animals were in demand, especially to identify new and rare specimens from distant corners of the world. Perhaps the finest artist of this kind at the end of the Renaissance was the Italian Jacopo Ligozzi (1547-1626). After entering the service of the Medici Grand Dukes in Tuscany, Ligozzi began specializing in tempera studies of exotic plants and animals acquired by his patrons for their gardens and collections. It doesn’t matter now that his princely employer, Francesco I de’ Medici, was primarily interested in alchemy, poisons, and their antidotes; Ligozzi’s assignment was to delineate precisely the flora and fauna set before him. His studies, whether a study of a dormouse or a flying fish, have an intensity and attention to detail that anticipate modern photography. Like Leonardo da Vinci before him, Ligozzi’s focus on the subject at hand foreshadowed the empiricism of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century scientific analysis of the natural world. With the Enlightenment, the old cabinets of curiosity became the victims of their own success as they were broken up into component parts, eventually becoming museums of natural history as well as art. The artistic creations of Dürer, Ligozzi and others fall somewhere between both worlds.

Winter 2010 5

Eel and Water Erik Fredericksen

Eel as if there is a care such that a syllable can bridge it without. Eel, is there one sea to make or is one to throw in an other? About tender: will I have had room? Or does the collation disjoin that need to know? At least it can now be said that if fusion is room-making then we have either the eel or the ocean.

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Faust Cannot Donald Revell

Faust cannot, and all the nations Become unreal, men and women so old No way to tell the difference anymore— Only to love them, love them. Oleander of this morning’s drunkenness Calls to the horses, who must not eat. Radio music, yellow marimba, Calls to Christ, who must not come again Because I am enjoying the sunlight. I am taking a respite from disgrace To love imaginary deathless friends Alive in these flowers Where you will stay, please. I’ll find you. The color is youth.

Winter 2010 7

House on a Hill Maria Xia

“Where are the children!” “They are communing with the dead.” “The what?” “The dead. The deceased, the passed, the unholy and unsanctified.” “Damn you, Parker. Where are my children?” “I’m telling you, they are in spiritual conversation with—” But Parker was right, by appearances. When I open the upstairs walkin closet the children scatter like flies. They leave behind them a strange array of smoking sticks, used matches, and their mother’s old cardigan. How they got that from where I keep her things locked up, I wonder. I start to notice it all over the house. The children disappear for hours and I can hear their stealthy whispers in the dark spaces—in the linen closet, under the stairs, in the attic, in the cellar room with the pipes. They get better at anticipating my footsteps, even when I mask their heaviness with thicker wool socks. At first I can catch the sight of a ginger braid disappearing around the corner, or the gleam of a black shoe and frilled hem. In the end I stop seeing them, finding only those funny sticks they leave behind in sparse piles as though someone had too hurriedly tried to gather them up. With these, my wife’s old things. Parker, unlike me, is enviably and inexplicably unperturbed, and even more enviably and inexplicably in the know. He sits in the kitchen with his feet in ratty socks propped on my unpolished wooden table, for which I had cultivated a very rustic but clean look, and in this position he reads the columns in the paper, or he reads a book. He is bespectacled and unshaven, my wayward, sardonic younger brother; slighter of build, and for reasons that elude me, more charming to women and men and children. Sometimes he takes pity as I pace through the kitchen to the stairs leading up to the bedrooms, or back through to the corridor from which branch the dining room, living room, and den. “They are in the attic,” he says without looking up, and I feel a touch of shame as I stop whatever I am doing to bolt upstairs, to catch them before they change location. They migrate quickly. Each time I find they have just left, because I smell that strange incense in the air, and the floorboards are warm 8

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where their bodies have been. Maybe from the kitchen I’ll hear Parker say, “Broom closet,” and I’ll be off again, drumming down the stairs, toomtoomtoomtoom. I work in town during meal shifts, so Parker is the one who feeds them now that Eleanor has passed away. That was the condition we agreed upon for his staying here—he the vaguely scholarly bum—and sometimes I regret deeply that it is my brother who has taken their mother’s place. The children have taken to him well. I see them only once a day. At nine o’clock they turn in, and I go into their room to tuck in their blankets and place my hand against their small, sleeping faces. The littlest one flutters her eyelashes against my thumb. “So wouldn’t you like to commune with the dead?” “You know I don’t believe in that, Parker.” “Don’t even want to? After all, you have lost someone.” Parker twirls the “l” off of his tongue to lightly mock the phrase. “No jokes, Parker. That’s a warning.” “No worries, Sam! I’m just surprised, is all. You have much more of a reason than I, at least.” He sings, “Much more of a reason than I.” Parker is reading a book on folk songs and nursery rhymes, and he speaks to the yellowing pages. “Are you saying you commune, Parker?” “Well, well, we are getting somewhere! If I taught the children I can teach you, my brother.” I make a sound and he looks up innocently for my livid stare. He grins. “If I taught the children I can teach—” We rise at the same time. He places his open book face down on the table and removes his glasses with ten fingers. He folds the gold-rimmed glasses with a click and sets it on the book. Then he flies out of the kitchen and out the back door, and I give chase. I chase him over the cobblestone patio and into the garden. We stay on the winding footpath before plunging into the hydrangeas. He makes loops around Eleanor’s Japanese trees and leaps over the spreads of hyacinths and daffodils, and he follows the rosebushes down to the pond, ducking into the path cast over with willows. The pond is large, and as we skirt its perimeter there is time to notice the geese preening and the still water reflecting my house on a hill. We plow through the false indigo, hopping around the English ivy and cutting across the mulberries, displacing bees and sending the occasional small wood animal into a flight of terror. Briefly we traverse a section of the neighbor’s property, where there are old tires pooling murky water. He makes a sharp cut back towards the house, and we, no longer flying, trudge through the weeds with the sun going down. Back on the patio, I catch him by his thin shoulders and wrestle him to the ground. He is wheezing. On the second story, my children have their faces pressed to the glass, watching everything. When I see them, they cheer for me.

Winter 2010 9

Escher’s Infinite Worlds Jessica Sequeira

e climb out of the paper onto the table, our bodies pushing up from the flat surface into the studio’s cool dry air. In the artist’s sketchbook, our reptilian figures interlock seamlessly, limb jigsawing against limb in perfect tessellation. There’s a certain comfort in the way we fit together: it’s like it was always meant to be this way, this nestling, for eternity. But all it takes is a concerted effort of the mind—a few strokes of the pencil—to burst into another plane. And then we’re free, slithering or two-stepping or careening belly-forward into unbroken space, escaping at last the drawing of which we’d been part. Before we can take any real delight in our new bodies, here comes the academic tripping up to us with his notepad—What drawing is this? What strange beasts are we? Such information may be easily obtained on the shelves of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, the national library of the Netherlands in The Hague (easily accessible via Centraal station and the Trambaan). A plump, homely, good-natured little Dutchwoman sits there forever smiling at the front desk, pleased to draw out any fact from the archives the interested scholar desires. Title: Reptiles. Year: 1943. Artist: M.C. Escher. Medium: lithograph. Dimensions: 33.4 cm x 38.5 cm. Or, if our intrepid questioner is more scientifically inclined, he may consult the medical encyclopedias in the upstairs galleries, where labels projecting from anatomical diagrams designate the various parts of Paleosuchus palpebrosus in a clear, neat hand. One may spend many hours here, reclining in the firm yet comfortable armchairs the reading room provides, turning the pages steadily in the soft glow of a lamp as the windows darken into panels of night. Yet you, we know, do not wish to travel so far afield. Please, let us instead be your guides; let us be the ones to whisper into your ear what we know of the mathematics of our own existence, the Penrose triangles of our being, the ontological helicoids that find illumination not in any one moment but within the vast and endless spectrum of time. Sharing our thoughts with you is no great burden—no, it is even a relief to unweigh ourselves of them—to find diversion from these endless loops, 10 The Harvard Advocate

in which our only topic of thought is the limitless paradox of our own minds. Let us stop there, for we feel our insincerity mounting as we strain to impress. It would be better to turn to the tangible things in our image, the items we pass again and again with every additional spin. Thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s some sort of cactus-like plant, its roots in gravel in a clean white ceramic pot. A small glass rests beside a corked bottle, unmarked, against which it casts its shadow. In the upper right a book is propped open; one page lies in shade, curling at the corner. Then, of course, there is the reference book, the triangular plane, the dodecahedron (the high point of the drawing, where we stop for a minute to blow a celebratory puff of smoke), the metal bucket: this is the obstacle course over which we run all day long, moving out from the sketchbook into the open air before flattening out to make yet another round of the circuit. There was a time, decades or maybe eons ago, when these objects meant something to us. Now theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re just part of the scenery. But they do still mean something, to some viewers, anyway. Of all the hundreds of images Escher createdâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;woodcuts, lithographs, mezzotints, nearly all Winter 2010 11

conjuring up optical illusions or complex perspectival constructions— “Reptiles,” we are proud to say, remains one of his most discussed. By the cactus, for instance, there’s a dark, lozenge-like box on which the word “JOB” is elegantly inscribed: a packet of Belgian cigarette papers. (Like all good 20th century European artists, Escher smoked heavily.) Many have assumed it instead to be a reference to the Book of Job, and read into it all the accompanying theological subtexts. Escher, we know, was amused by these interpretations of his images, which he personally thought escaped symbolism. He particularly enjoyed retelling the story of a woman who rang him up to say: “Mr. Escher, I am absolutely crazy about your work. In your print ‘Reptiles’ you have given such a striking illustration of reincarnation.” “Madame,” he replied slyly, “if that’s the way you see it, so be it.” In the late ’60s, English glam rock band Mott the Hoople tinted the monochrome tones of our original print in primary colors and slapped it onto the cover of their self-titled album debut. Around the same time, “Reptiles” took on an odd second life as an iconic college dorm poster, a generation of undergrads mistaking the cigarette papers for joints. Tacked up above someone’s half-made bed, we looked down as earnest co-eds, sprawled in armchairs, talked solemnly of love and revolution. It would have been too cruel to point out that our image could just as easily have been used to defend a radical conservatism: that as much as we move, nothing ever changes. Better to remain silent, to let them keep on, sketching out their dreams with one finger like invisible shapes, holding them close like the heads of small children requiring reassurance to endure a terror-filled night. And the influence of Escher lingers, especially in the realm of pop culture. The Japanese video game Echochrome, which takes him as inspiration, challenges the player to search out various locations on a constantly rotating shape. A Simpsons episode has Homer chase fruitlessly after Bart over a series of impossible steps. Calendars featuring prints like “House of Stairs” allow the viewer to ponder segmented creatures and Möbius strip-like platforms for all of January. That Escher is appreciated primarily through copies or adaptations— rather than gilt-framed museum pieces—is not insignificant. We’re meant to be multiplied, to derive our meaning from replication and reproduction. Just imagine: if reality were an Escher print, our likenesses too would extend into the distance, stretching forward in smoky lines into some horizon without end. But you’re not here anymore; you’re miles away, and sunlight is falling in thick colorless shafts over the city (composed, you note, entirely of trim, repeating quadrilaterals). It’s one of those magnesium-bright days, the kind of day on which every building and person and blade of grass imprints in such dazzling relief you feel you can pluck them up and set them down with only your mind. The clear morning air renders everything pure and achingly gorgeous as a silver-gelatin afterglow. It’s too cold to be outside for long, though; hands curl into miserable balls in your pockets, and you’ve forgotten your gloves at home. There is a building before you: you enter. 12 The Harvard Advocate

Take a minute to get your bearings. The Escher Museum, where you find yourself now, opened seven years ago in The Hague and remains a popular destination for families and flâneurs alike. The structure in which it is housed is the Lange Voorhout Palace, owned by the Dutch royal family; a giant poster of Escher’s print “Day and Night,” flanked by two vertical red banners, decorates the rectangular façade. Drifting slowly through the rooms, visitors can examine photographs, letters, preliminary sketches, all the accumulated detritus of a prolific life. A flashing multimedia presentation, screening on a back wall, provides biographical and chronological perspective. Something about Escher’s work makes it jarring to consider him in this context. March 27, 1972, the date Escher passed away, was also the date of the second Watergate break-in; and many of his most famous prints were created in the midst of World War II and its direct aftermath. But knowing these details will not heighten your appreciation of his compositions. If Escher’s prints have any revolutionary potential, it is that they depend on no individual author, existing instead beyond time and space. Nobody really thinks about Escher as a person; their creator stands outside his creation as a universal figure, the overly analytical intellect or the youth obsessed with the playthings of his own imagination. Walking through this museum, looking at the items it holds, you realize that all these objects are anonymous: that they could belong to anybody, anywhere. At some point, the artist himself does enter. He tilts his head downward as he peers at us, so that his angular features, his long face and neck, appear oddly foreshortened from this angle. “Reptiles” took years

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for Escher to conceive and execute—an early sketch done in pen, ink, and watercolor was discovered from 1939, four years before the final version was completed. Deservedly proud of his efforts, he occasionally still pulls our print from the sleeve to admire the final delicate details, the flawless finish. Today, partly because of its reproducibility, much of Escher’s work is dismissed as kitsch, as gimmicks or tricks of the pen. It’s always been those at the cultural periphery who have trumpeted most loudly the genius of his arithmetical compositions. The art world never really took him seriously, criticizing his images for being both too cerebral and too easily accessible: for appealing, as one critic put it, to “scientists and stoned kids… Renditions of easily grasped intellectual and sentimental conceits, laced with the bizarre, they yield their essences with alacrity.” To Escher’s devotees, the pleasure of looking at his pictures lies in just that: the immediate joy of their painstaking paradoxes, the peculiar way they adhere rigorously to the laws of geometry even as they distort them. Kicking through piles of data searching for clues or any formal training to explain his talent, these enthusiasts manage to turn up only the dead leaves of external inspiration: a brief stint as an architect, a journey to examine Moorish mosaics in the Mediterranean, a father and three brothers trained as mathematicians and engineers. Escher drew mostly on inner resources, relying on intuition to anticipate with his hand and eye what would later become the field of crystallography. A geometeradmirer searching for empirical evidence of his greatness reported with satisfaction that his drawings and prints were so exact as to achieve precision down to the millimeter. But accuracy alone can’t explain why people keep returning to us, or to any Escher print. They keep coming back because our impossible worlds offer a way to abolish the constraints of the physical universe: because as long as we keep moving in our infinite loops, spatio-temporal boundaries simply cease to matter anymore. Perhaps you know this already. You’re sitting in your armchair with a drink, you’re reading this page, the glass you’re holding is cold against your lips, and when you set it down on the table, you prick your finger on the cactus so sharp to the touch: now the surface of the paper is dissolving beneath your gaze, now the book is firm beneath your clawed feet, now you’re scurrying up the ramp, stopping to exhale, tumbling back down into the sketchbook, nosing your way out to start once more. Don’t you see? You’re one of us, you’ve been one of for as long as you’ve been here, looking at these words and thinking about this image. All that remains is to set one foot in front of the next and begin again.

14 The Harvard Advocate

Caiman Bret Anthony Johnston

Your mother wouldn’t let me bring the ice chest into the house, so I left it in the garage. Earlier, I’d knifed four holes into the styrofoam lid. One of them looked like half a star, which I remember liking. This was years ago, a windswept Sunday. This was Texas. When I returned to the kitchen, she pointed at the sink. She said, “Wash your hands. With soap.” She was breading flounder. She’d been listening to radio reports about that little girl who’d been abducted. So had I. Probably I pulled over and gave that man eighty dollars because I thought it would keep you safe. He was parked under the causeway, a handlettered sign propped against the tire of his van, as if he were just selling pecans. Your mother had flour dust on her neck. She’d already fried okra, boiled potatoes. Soon we would call you to the table and you, our little man, would bolt in like you’d heard a starter pistol. You were seven, a boy who liked bedtime stories with fantastic monsters and twisty, unexpected endings. You liked sneaking up on us. You hid behind closed doors and in the laundry hamper, then jumped out screaming and laughing. You loved the word “maybe.” (Maybe I’m a kid who’s a million years old. Maybe we should be a family with a pet. Maybe someday my eyes will turn blue.) Your mother swiped her forehead with her wrist. The kitchen was gummy with the day’s heat, the windows open. Before leaving that morning, I’d mowed the yard—you helped me rake, you wore your cowboy boots—and now, with dusk coming on, the cut-grass smell was rising and trying to cool everything off. “She’s still missing,” your mother said. “Now they think the uncle did something.” I nodded. I’d heard that, too, and if it was true, I thought he’d get killed in prison. But I didn’t want to talk about such things. Instead, I asked, “How’s our little man?” Winter 2010 15

“Worn out,” your mother said. “He’s napping in his room.” I’d been all day at the job site, drawing overtime. On the drive home, I’d seen the man under the causeway and pulled over for a look. Our ice chest was still in the bed of the truck from when we’d gone floundering. I took that as a sign. And he had only one left, which also seemed lucky. I was excited to surprise you, to hear what you’d name it. Now I said, “I wonder what he’ll name it.” “He asked for a dog.” “A pet,” I said. “He asked for a pet.” “Right, a dog. A cat. A goldfish. Pets have fur and show affection. Pets aren’t deadly.” “Goldfish don’t have fur,” I said. I didn’t think she was angry, not really. I took three glasses from the cabinet. “And it’s not deadly.” She fixed me with her eyes. “It’s an alligator.” “It’s a caiman. There’s a difference. It’s the size of a shoe.” “Not for long,” she said. She turned back to the stove. She laid one piece of fish in the skillet, then another. Grease started snapping. “They’re smart,” I said, repeating what the man had told me. “They won’t mate until the river is high. They make sure there’s enough water for their offspring. They build nests.” “They’re cold-blooded. They have scales.” “Danny can take it for show-and-tell.” “They bite. They escape. They escape into sewers and terrorize neighborhoods. They eat regular pets.” I laughed at that, but your mother said, “They do.” She flipped the fish in the skillet. The sound of frying started up again like distant applause. She blew hair from her eyes, stood with her hip cocked, holding the spatula. The applause quieted. She slipped the fish onto a plate she’d covered with a paper napkin to soak up grease. She put two more pieces in the pan and watched them sizzle. She said, “Why would that man take that little girl?” “We don’t know that he did.” “But you think he did?” 16 The Harvard Advocate

“Yes,” I said. “I do.” “I do, too,” your mother said. “You know she’s Danny’s age.” “They could still find her.” “But you don’t think they will?” “I don’t know, honey,” I said. “I don’t think they will.” She lowered the flame on the stove and turned to stare out the window. She was touching her fingertips to her thumb, one after the other, something she did when she was concentrating. The air in the room shifted. “What would we do if something—” “It won’t,” I said. “Not to him.” She nodded, pressed the heel of her palm to her eyes. She said, “We’re still getting a dog.” “I know.” “And you owe me a new ice chest,” she said. I poured milk for you but returned our glasses to the cabinet and opened up two bottles of beer. The meal was starting to feel like a celebration, like one of us had gotten a raise or was having a birthday. I found some cocoa mix, stirred it into your glass. “An alligator,” your mother said, shaking her head. “Caiman,” I said. “You know some husbands bring home candy, right? Or roses or diamonds.” “Their poor wives,” I said. “They probably—” “Tell Danny you caught it,” she said. “Tell him you were fishing and you saw it and you caught it just for him.” “You want me to lie to our son.” “I want you to make up a story for him, something with a happy outcome,” she said and turned off the stove. She went to the refrigerator and took out the tartar sauce and a salad she’d been chilling. The wind Winter 2010 17

lifted the curtains over the sink and sent a few paper napkins gliding off the counter. Your mother closed the window, and the kitchen went quiet as a secret. And then, with the wind shut out, we could hear your boots on the floor in the hallway. You were stalking toward us, planning one of your sneak attacks. Your mother sipped her beer. The flour was on her neck— it looked like snow, like a smeared galaxy—and she was smiling a little. I understood what she didn’t: you’d been awake the whole time, listening to us. You already knew about the caiman, about the flimsy hopeful story I’d tell, about everything else. The only surprise left was that I did believe they could still find that girl. I thought her uncle might prove everyone wrong. Maybe he cooked her favorite meals, played her favorite movies, never touched her. Maybe such extravagant misguided love was still possible. As a baby, you liked putting your feet in my mouth. You’d laugh until you got the hiccups and your toes would move behind my teeth as slow as growing coral, and sometimes, I swear, I wanted to bite down, to crush your perfect bones and swallow your body whole. Your mother knelt to pick up the strewn napkins. You were just on the other side of the door now, trying not to giggle and preparing your ambush. Maybe you knew we were onto you, maybe not. I joined your mother on the floor. I felt like we were praying or giving thanks or mourning. The kitchen tile was cool, hard. We were listening to you breathe, waiting for you to strike. We were on our hands and knees, our bodies low to the ground like strange and ancient creatures.

18 The Harvard Advocate

Myrddin Wilt, Myrddin Emrys, Merlinus Silvestri, Merlinus Celidonus, Merlinus Ambrosius, Merlin: A Bestiary Entry Sanders Bernstein

yrddin Wilt, if he does yet breathe, can be found in the Forest of Celyddon. Although some say he is merely a figure of legend, it may be less than prudent to concur with the doubters. After all, they were the men who dismissed the story of Myrddinâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s magicking of Stonehenge from across the seas and we know now that the monumentâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s stone came from a quarry that is indeed across a sea, across the Cardigan Bay, on the southern coast of Wales. Such disbelief, however, is not uncommon in the treatment of this man of the woods. His life, to this point, has not been one of ease, but has been marked, yes, by madness but also by a never-ending struggle against those who would sleight his essential nature, even going so far as to attempt to kill him for it. His nature is as his name indicates, Wild, or Of the Woods. Once a prince in the world of men, he rules over the forest as king. He speaks the tongues of animals and they listen to him as they listened to Adam, Noah, and the early men of this earth. The society of his animal companions, sometimes the pig, sometimes the wolf, is the only society that Myrddin can withstand for the world of men has driven him to despair and madness. Much has been made of his madness, which unmoored his mindâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s eye so that rather than experience the world in the present, as the mass of men do, he sees the future relentlessly unfolding before him. To hear him speak of the future is to put oneself in peril, for, as it is commonly known, foreknowledge is a grave danger to all sane men who encounter it. Myrddin was, before prophecy struck him, a great lord of the Welsh people, the bearer of a golden torque. He was terrible to meet in battle and his prowess inspired awe from his enemies and friends alike. He had a wife whom he loved dearly and who was deeply enamored of him and his powerful figure. He was, from all accounts, well spoken and well spoken of at court, though he harbored great hostility toward the Christian missionaries who had taken to trumpeting their new faith throughout the land. It might have been because of this animosity that he went mad, though the accounts all differ as to how it happened. What is certain is that he was never the same after the Battle of Arfderydd. Winter 2010 19

The Battle of Arfderydd was fought on the plains of Scotland before Scotland was known by such a name, between the rivers of Liddel and Esk. Assembled on the field that day were the hosts of the Welsh’s two most mighty warlords, Rhydderch Hael, a Christian ruler, and Gwenddolau, a devotee to the old Gods and Myrddin’s liege lord. It is during this clash of titans that the Gods touched Myrddin. According to some records, he was cursed by one of Rhydderch’s Christian clerics. Others say that it was his discovery that he had slain his sister’s children in the fight that plunged him into turmoil. Some warriors bearing scars from the battle tell of celestial figures that howled Myrddin’s name and chased him from the field of combat, while an equal contingent claim that the champion simply laid down his weapons and walked away from the bloodshed. Oh little piglet, Oh blissful dam if you saw the sheer violence that I saw, you wouldn’t sleep in the morning, you wouldn’t dig the hillside you wouldn’t make for the wild by a desolate lake. –“The Ohs of Myrddin,” The Black Book of Carmarthen Away from the moans of the dying and injured, away from the grunts of the soldiers exhausting themselves in the attempt to kill their enemy, in the attempt to stay alive themselves, away from the horrible accusatory silence of the corpses, of the cloven heads that bobbed in estuaries of blood, away from that silence, that silence! and into the woods went Myrddin. Off into the wild he flew “like any bird of the air,” if the Gaelic record The Frenzy of Suibhne is to be believed. He landed in an apple-tree in the Forest of Celyddon and was to stay there for many years. In that forest, the forest where the madmen searched for their sanity, he lived with the animals. He slept in the boughs of the oak trees and lived on a diet of nuts and vegetables. It was among the animals that he hid as he sought protection from King Rhydderch who he was certain was trying to kill him. It was to the animals that he foretold the coming of Cadwaladyr, the great King who would unite the Britons and bring peace. It was to the animals that he spoke as he attempted to find peace with the violence of his kind. Perhaps it is this preference of the world of animals to the world of men, the possibility that Myrddin harbors deep reservations about humankind, that spurs some chroniclers to deny him his madness, to deny him his time in the forest. Believe it if you wish, but there certainly seems to be a coterie dedicated to extirpating him, or at least Myrddin as he truly is, from the records. Geoffrey of Monmouth not only Latinized the Welsh, changing Myrddin to Merlinus (lore has it that he chose this name because Merdinus—the logical Latinization—would have been too closely associated with the Anglo-Norman word for shit, merde) but 20 The Harvard Advocate

he also expunged Myrddin’s madness and his sylvan life completely in his Historia Regum Britanniae. In fact, this “Merlin” was prescient from his earliest days, always able to divine the future’s truth, and is brought to the court of King Vortigern when yet a child. Geoffrey did try to amend his factual errors with his later work, Vita Merlini, in which he does recognize Myrddin’s time in the forest and the horrific genesis of his foresight, but the process of recasting Myrddin as Merlin, of siphoning away the man’s spirit to feed a fantasy was begun. In one account of his madness from the Gaelic tradition, Myrddin brings his madness upon himself by trying to spear a cleric after the cleric sprinkles him with holy water. It seems that the Welshman had found the ritual to be insulting. Close to six hundred years after this event, Robert de Boron, a deeply Christian French poet of the late 12th century, completed the cleric’s work—or at least did so in writing. Through his Merlin, he began to convince Europe that the man was a Christian. The unknown father in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s account becomes a demon and Myrddin’s otherwise troublesome paganistic aspects could be neatly explained away as the result of his devilish heritage. But his demonic blood, manifested in his full head of hair—a sign of his bestial associations—and his perfect knowledge of the past, which could be no other than a full acquaintance with pagan lore, is counteracted by his acceptance of the Christian faith. His mother has him baptized, neutralizing the threat of ungodliness and transforming the troubled antichrist into a leader of the Christian world. Gifted by God with knowledge of the future (for Christianity’s God is the future as Boron takes pains to make evident), Merlin spends his life as the courtly adviser to King Arthur and his knights. By Boron’s book, Merlin’s prophecies and

Winter 2010 21

magical powers are useful tools in creating the most perfect Christian world possible. Discounting a brief time masquerading as a shepherd so that he can usher Arthur into the world, the woods, the wilderness, the outdoors, seem to have been successfully exorcised from his person. De Boron’s account presents as self-evident the obviously false idea that Merlin was a man of the courts rather than of the woods. In fact, when Myrddin is removed from his arboreal kingdom, it is known that he becomes terribly depressed and is prone to retaliate against his captors with awful pronouncements. Geoffrey of Monmouth, referencing earlier records, tells of Myrddin being captured by his sister, Queen Ganieda, and being brought back to court. There, he refuses to speak a word about his experiences and suffers civilization in silence. That is, until one day, when he sees the King Rodarcus, his sister’s husband, remove a leaf from his sister’s hair. He laughs and there is a quality to the laugh that like the fury of a waterfall about to crash against the rocks, excites and frightens the King so that he must know why the madman is laughing. The King will give him anything to know, to know, from whence this secret mirth bubbles, finally promising to allow Myrddin to return to the woods. The response though, could not have brought joy to Rodarcus for Myrddin tells him that the leaf became entangled in her locks when she lay in the woods with her lover. Myrddin tells the King that his great love for his wife is unrequited. She loves the man with whom she lay that morning under the trees of Myrddin’s forest. And then Myrddin laughs because he shall be free. The records of other men exposed to Myrddin’s prophetical voice are equally joyless. In one account, Myrddin orders his wife to remarry—his love for nature leaves no room for any other—on one condition: that he never lay eyes on her husband. On the day of her marriage, he comes riding to her, astride a great stag, shepherding herds of animals that he desires to give to her. However, as she comes out to meet him, her husband catches sight of Myrddin and laughs at the man riding a deer. Like thunder is to lightning so is laughter the warning that Myrddin is about to strike. If you hear the sound in his presence, it is best to leave as quickly as possible. Myrddin, hearing the laughter, knows exactly who makes such noise and, turning to look at the man, flies into a rage in which he tears the horns from his stag and assaults the bridegroom with them. And then he disappears back into the shadows of the forest. The Myrddin that rides off in a burst of speed, astride his bloody steed, slicked with sweat from the exertion of ripping the antlers from his mount, lost in the exhilaration of dramatic action, is a far cry from contemporary depictions. The man who crushes his wife’s betrothed with a blow of the antlers is a virile, albeit chaste, being. He is strong and powerful, a warrior who simply chooses not to fight, a noble savage, not the doddering octogenarian in which his spirit—whatever is left of it at least—has been incarnated. Sir Thomas de Malory introduces this misconception in his romance, La Morte D’Arthur, as he writes that Merlin, after being ignored by Arthur when appearing as “a child of fourteen year of age,” “came again in the likeness of an old man of fourscore years of age, whereof the king was right glad, for he seemed to be right wise.” After Malory, the choice that Merlin makes to assume “the 22 The Harvard Advocate

likeness” of an old man is forgotten. The association between age and wisdom becomes primary. He becomes an old man because he is the wise councilor. Age, rather than the touch of madness, becomes the font of wisdom and Myrddin Wilt finds himself further effaced. Becoming thirsty, Merlin leaned down to the stream and drank freely and bathed his temples in its waves, so that the water passed through the passages of bowels and stomach, settling the vapours within him, and at once he regained his reason and knew himself, and all his madness departed and the sense which had long remained torpid in him revived, and he remained what he had once been—sane and intact with his reason restored. —Vita Merlini, Geoffrey of Monmout It is recorded by Geoffrey of Monmouth, even if the surviving Welsh poems do not acknowledge it, that Myrddin does eventually recover his sanity by drinking from a newly born stream. Restored to his senses, though still empowered with the vision that his madness had wakened, it is said that his first action was to praise nature. For Myrddin, there is nothing that can compare with the world of the forest. The forest is Myrddin’s home. There he lives and there he one day shall die. Thomas Malory’s La Morte D’Arthur tells of how the lady of the lake refuses Merlin’s love because she was “aferde of [Myrddin] for cause he was a devyls son.” This sentiment seems to characterize Merlin’s later “chroniclers” as well. They are afraid of Myrddin’s true nature. They age him, remove him from his natural habitat, and create a force to tame him—Vivien’s seductive charms. However, even in such stories as that of Malory and Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “Merlin and Vivien” they cannot deny his sylvan roots. Even if they remove him from his life’s rightful realm, they allow him to return there for his eternal sleep. Even if they cloud his reason with lust for the lady of the lake, they are unable to do away with all of his aboriginal tendencies. Malory tells of how Merlin returns to the earth, how he goes “under the stone to let [the lady of the lake] wit of the marvels there, but she wrought it so that for him he never came out.” Alfred Lord Tennyson, while reducing dignified Myrddin to lecherous Merlin, an old man allowing the needs of his “dying flesh” to lead him into doom, depicts the final moments of Merlin’s life as occurring among “the ravaged woodland” and ends the poem with Merlin sleeping forever not simply within the forest, but within a tree: “in the hollow oak he lay as dead, / And lost to life and use and name and fame.” So Merlin, Myrddin, is sentenced to sleep. The fantasists—Monmouth, de Boron, Malory, Tennyson—are unable to destroy his presence. His animal magnetism is too robust, too vibrant, too wild, to be fully washed away by the waters of baptism nor predictable enough to be channeled properly in the world of the court. And so they invent the myth of his lust to draw him out of the court, back into his wild world of the forest and there sentence him to sleep, not death—they do not have that power of the pen—and they proceed with the stories that they are interested in telling. They chained him to their purposes, forced him Winter 2010 23

to usher Arthur into the world and to his throne, all the while denying Myrddin his own true history. And then they cast him off, back into the forest from whence he came. But, Myrddin, even in his sleep, even as they have imagined him, laid to rest in a tomb encased by earth or oak, remains their nightmare, the specter of the natural world, not yet bent over by Christ or civilization. He haunts them like wolves circling just beyond the light of a campfire; they cannot distinguish the forms but they can feel the presences. In response, they crowd closer around the fire. On the outskirts of their minds, hidden in the caves that they have long since run from, they know he, Myrddin, is waiting with the knowledge that primeval nature is not something to be afraid of—simply to respect—and that terrifies them even more. When I remain under the green leaves the riches of Calidon delight me more than the gems that India produces, or the gold that Tagus is aid to have on its shore, more than the crops of Sicily or the grapes of pleasant Methis, more than lofty turrets or cities girded with high walls or robes fragrant with Tyrian perfumes. Nothing pleases me enough to tear me away from my Calidon which in my opinion is always pleasant. Here shall I remain while I live, content with apples and grasses, and I shall purify my body with pious fastings that I may be worthy to partake of the life everlasting. —Vita Merlini, Geoffrey of Monmouth Myrddin Wilt, if he does yet breathe, can be found in the Forest of Celyddon. Perhaps he is singing, for he is, they say, as gifted in voice as the famed Taliesin of the golden brow. But, if he has died in the centuries since he was last beheld by mortal mind, if the word-sorcerers de Boron and Malory have succeeded in stealing his soul to animate their fantastical courtier-counselor, Merlin the magician, and Myrddin Wilt has sunk into slumber, then, it is said, wait for the time of the great King Cadwaladyr’s return, when the steel cages shall crash to the ground, the black tar shall be uprooted, the endless fires shall be extinguished, the silver dragons that belch smoke into the sky slain, and Myrddin Wilt shall once again walk with the lonely wolf, ride the crownless stag, and speak prophecy to the pig.

24 The Harvard Advocate

A Snake Katie Peterson

The thunderstorm came like a pot boiling over and the color of water was made by that, all of a sudden, a pigment more tropical than dense with the reflection of light. Everywhere the scent of at least five plants lifted up. The desert can’t talk back but I believe it breathes instead breathes vivid when the water wants it the water can’t wait and it breathes back. I turned and went into the house. Under the dining room table, a snake. Green with a yellow stripe bisecting its back. Motion ate each centimeter of floor and air, scared, it makes sense to say, though there exists or existed no safer time ever in which that shape wouldn’t want to move, dead August being the exception to this when heat makes molasses of all of us. Why did I want to chase it out? I did, I got a rake and kept making it make that beautiful scared shape upon the floor, so clean. Like two ice cubes rubbing each other and too cold to melt. Or that nothing organized that fear? Seeing the edges it found its way out.

Winter 2010 25

Poem Mark Strand

Black fly, black fly Why have you come Is it my shirt My new white shirt With buttons of bone Is it my suit My dark blue suit Is it because I lie here alone Under a willow

26 The Harvard Advocate

Cold as stone Black fly, black fly How good you are To come to me now How good you are To visit me here Black fly, black fly To wish me good bye.

Winter 2010 27

When the Bear Came Benjamin Percy

Nothing had happened in a long time. Every now and then someone wrecked a truck or got divorced or shot a six-point elk or dropped out of college or shipped off for Iraq or bought a thousand-dollar Lotto scratch ticket at the gas station—and you know how those kinds of things get around in a small town like Tumalo—but otherwise, the sand kept blowing, the bulls kept lowing, and the air kept on smelling like it always smelled, like juniper and sage. Irrigation pipe got moved around. Barbed-wire fences got mended. The occasional thunderstorm boiled over the Cascade Mountains and lit a barn on fire and flattened the alfalfa crop and eventually rattled apart into a collection of black clouds that made the sky look full of bears drinking from a big blue bowl. That’s about it. Really, nothing had happened around here since the train came off the tracks and five of its cattle-cars rolled through the mini-mart, leaving behind a twisted snarl of lumber and metal from which bubbled soda pop and blood. That was five years ago. The only other thing I can think of is Josh Henderson, who they found at the dump, dead and apparently dragged behind a car—back and forth along a strip of county two-lane— his skin unpeeling against the asphalt in a long red trail that drew crows and magpies from all over the county. And that happened eons ago, before I can hardly remember. There’s the train—there’s Josh Henderson—there’s the Deschutes County Fair and of course the weekend stock-car races and the fat-bellied trout that drift along the shadowy banks of the Metolious River and dozens more diversions, all tiny and meant to distract me from the big spell of nothing that had settled over Tumalo. So when the bear attacks began, things changed and that was just what I needed. I was on break and finishing off an order of biscuits-and-gravy, left half-eaten on Table Five along with a perfectly good strip of bacon, when the door jingled and old Mr. Russell ran in and held up his arms like some kind of prophet. “Everybody!” he said. This was the Tip Top Diner—9:30ish on a Sunday morning. The Lutheran church hadn’t let out yet, so everybody consisted of three customers, and Mary, who owns the Tip Top and smells like fryer grease 28 The Harvard Advocate

and presently stood behind the counter, leafing through The Bend Bulletin. With every turn of the page she licked her forefinger as if it had some sweetness to it. Mr. Russell, his eyes were so big I thought they might pop out of his skull and roll around on the linoleum. It took him a minute to say what he said next—his chest rising and falling beneath his flannel shirt—but with an out-of-breath gasp interrupting every other word, he eventually got it out: “Girls camping in Dry Canyon got mauled by a bear.” It only took a moment for the diner to empty. Pow, those customers shot out of their chairs like in the cartoons, ghost-gone with a cloud of dust in their wake. They left their plates stacked with pancakes, their mugs steaming with coffee, their checks unpaid. One lady even left her purse. Goes to show how hard up we are for entertainment. A semi tips over on the Interstate or a heifer births a two-headed calf and you need only open a window and cup a hand to your ear—in the wind, you’ll hear it—phones ringing, hands swiping keys off kitchen counters, garage doors rumbling open, the streets clogged up with trucks and dirt bikes. People want to see. So in the middle of an empty diner, I’m standing there, gravy on my face, hands in my pockets. And what does Mary do? She folds her newspaper shut and walks to the front door and flips the sign from Open to Closed. “Might as well see what there is to see,” she says and off we went. It was one of those depressing March days, no rain, but cold, the wind tunneling into your ear so you had to cover it with your hand. Mary drove one of those Jeep Wagoneers with the fake wood paneling on the side. She parked in the parking lot that edged the canyon, the canyon three miles long and about as wide as I can throw a baseball. A file of cars steadily pulled in behind us—the whole town, it looked like. I forgot my jacket, so I hugged my arms to my chest the second I stepped out of the Jeep and into the wind. A shelf of black lava rock angled downward and then opened up into a trail, a steep series of switchbacks that took us deep into the canyon. The sunlight fell away and a blue shadow took over. The burrs found their way into my socks when I stepped delicately along the trail, making sure, in my sneakers, not to trip over a root or lose traction on a wash of pumice. After a hundred yards, the trail bottomed out and followed the curve of a dry creek-bed before vanishing into yellow crabgrass. Up ahead, peopled milled about, and soon I was among them. Their feet left craters in the desert dust and stirred up the smell of calcite. They snapped photos with Kodak disposable cameras. They put their hands on their hips and shook their heads as if this was a hell of a thing, a hell of a thing. Two boys raced by, playing tag, the boy in pursuit yelling, “I’m a bear!” in a high joyful voice. Five men stood in a circle and conferred with each other, gesturing with their cigarettes, taking off their seed caps to scratch their scalps. Women, in their Sunday dresses, walked barefoot, carrying their high heels in their hands. A man in a cowboy hat sat on a boulder drinking coffee from a stainless steel thermos. His eyes were Winter 2010 29

fixed on some far-off point in the landscape. The hat threw a shadow across his face and I peered into its darkness, thinking I recognized—in his broad face and quiet presence—my father. But I was wrong. It was just a man. I spotted two deputies and a ranger in the near distance and made my way toward them, where a basalt outcropping hung over a flat patch of sand. To the girls this had seemed a safe place, I guess, a place to pitch their little tent and hide from the big black night. The deputies, dressed in their khaki uniforms, stood before the campsite. There was blood all around them, rust-colored ovals and smears that in their ragged designs revealed where the girls had been dragged and thrown and chewed. Near the charcoal remains of their campfire, I noticed what could have been a shard of shale or bone. The tent looked less like a tent and more like an organ excised by blunt scissors. The ranger was busy making a plaster of a paw print. It was the size of a catcher’s mitt. The deputies motioned their arms authoritatively, emphatically, as if they were trying to guide, with glowing wands, a plane along the tarmac. They wanted people to back away, and no, they couldn’t answer any questions now, damn it. The voices all around me fell away as the wind picked up, its invisible hand passing through the sagebrush and making it tremble. In the air something lingered. If I flared my nostrils and breathed deeply, I could smell it. It smelled a little like my Labrador, McKenzie, when she comes in out of the rain. Musky. Hairy. I turned around to look for the man in the cowboy hat and he’s gone— there’s only an empty hole on the boulder where he sat. We always watched the news while eating supper—me and my mother and my little brother Graham—and on the news that night the KOIN 6 reporter stood at the bottom of Dry Canyon. “Hey!” Graham said. “That’s here! That’s our canyon!” He wore this look on his face. It was the look my mother used to wear when back in high school I now and then appeared in the sports section for pitching a no-hitter, making the ball blur at speeds close to eighty. But anyway. You know how on-site reporters are always trying to make things dramatic? Like, if there’s a flood, they’ll stand hip-deep in water, or if there’s a hike in gas prices, they’ll hold the microphone with one hand and with the other hang up the pump as if they just topped off their tank. That’s what was going on here, as this reporter—who wore a fleece jacket that couldn’t hide how nice her boobs were—walked along the dry creekbed until she reached the campsite, mimicking the passage of the bear. In the background people waved like people do when in front of a camera. “There’s Joe Simpson,” I said, and if my father had been there, if my father had been sitting at the head of the table, forking through his hamburger casserole, he would have paused in his chewing and narrowed his eyes at the television and grunted his amusement, Joe being a hunting buddy of his. There are essentially two types of cowboys. There is the drugstore cowboy, who wears Tony Llama boots and irons his jeans and keeps his cheeks smooth and sweet-smelling with aftershave. He loves the idea 30 The Harvard Advocate

of lassoes and spurs and bandanas and galloping toward a blaze-orange sunset and the whole rigmarole of Wild West bullshit, but aside from a few guided horseback tours, this guy doesn’t know his ass from a bridle. And then there are men like my father. Before he left us, he was a ranch hand at the Lazy H outfit, responsible for breeding and grooming horses, breaking the occasional stallion shipped in from Montana. He wore Carharrt and Wrangler. His breath smelled like coffee and cigarettes. Every few months he collected enough proofs-of-purchase to send off for a new shirt or windbreaker from Marlboro. He liked the pulp novels of Zane Gray and Louis L’Amour. When he took off his hat he revealed a white band of skin along his forehead, as white as the skin of his legs. The parts of him that saw the sun, his arms, his face, were cracked and brown, like beef jerky. He didn’t talk much, but when he did, his voice rolled out of his mouth in a measured baritone you paid attention to. I felt about him as you feel about a bear, fearful and full of awe, wanting at once to reach out a hand and back away with your head bowed. On the TV, the reportress explained what had happened. Sometime in the early morning, when only a red vein of sunlight brightened the horizon, a bear happened upon the campsite. The girls, two teenage girls from Prineville, had left their food and cooking supplies out, rather than washing it and bagging it and hanging it from the highest branch of a juniper tree. Springtime bears possess a terrible hunger, having slept through the long winter, and this one was no exception. One slash of its claws parted the nylon like a zipper. Their screams didn’t scare it away, only encouraged it, as it fit its jaws around the head of one girl, chewing her, her scalp finally sliding off her skull. The other, in trying to save her friend, was hurled against the canyon wall, then mauled. They played dead or fainted in their pain and after so many minutes the bear abandoned them. Now both were in critical condition at St. Charles Memorial in Bend. The reportress interviewed a Forest Service official with a salty beard— just like the one my father grew in the winter—who enjoyed long pauses between words and moved his hands when he talked, pointing in all different directions, making complicated hand-chopping motions that in their effect, I think, meant that it was only a matter of time, the bear would be found. When she asked him, “What then?” he looked at her boobs and made his hands into a rifle and said, “Bam!” People went a little crazy. At the tavern, over bottles of Budweiser, they spoke of how nice a bear fur would look hanging from their wall, among their pool cues and trophy fish and beer stein collections. They wondered if it was a kind of cannibalism, tasting the meat of an animal that had tasted human flesh. They stalked the woods and sat in tree stands, their rifles oiled, ready to fire. They baited traps with raw hamburger. On the hood of his F-10, Joe Simpson laid down a square of carpet and screwed in an eyebolt. There he chained his dog, an old hound dog named Cooter, the two of them driving up and down county roads, hoping for the scent that would make Cooter throw back his head in a howl. Winter 2010 31

And maybe I went a little crazy, too, when I came home and saw what the bear had done. We live in a single-story cabin surrounded by a half-acre of pasture and three acres of woods. Next to the cabin there is a stable and next to the stable is a corral enclosed by a split-log fence. Here my father’s horse, Black Answer, lazily grazed his days away. This was a Saturday. My mother and Graham were gone, visiting the grandparents in La Pine, while I went fishing along the upper Metolius. It was late afternoon—that time of day when the shadows start to thicken—when I came home. From my fist dangled a stringer of rainbow trout. Soon I would lop off their heads and shave off their scales and tear out their bones and guts and bury the whole mess beneath a slab of concrete behind the tool shed so McKenzie wouldn’t get into the bones and needle open her intestines. Black Answer was an old gelding. Many years ago my father rode him deep into the Ochoco and Mount Hood wilderness, through snowcloaked forests, in search of elk. But now his back was bowed, his hooves splintery. There was some grayness along his snout. He was good only for petting and feeding carrots, and even then, he snapped at you with his long yellow teeth. At this time he circled the corral at a quick trot, as if trying to find a way out. “What’s gotten into you, you son-of-a-bitch horse?” I yelled and when he heard me, he threw back his head and whinnied. I approached our front porch—its roof drooped from the weight of so many winters worth of so much snow—and saw the dog there. She looked over her shoulder at me and pawed at the front door where she always pawed at the front door, where the paint had worn away in a tan oval. “Hey, McKenzie,” I said and scratched her in her favorite spot, her breast, and she yelped and jumped away from me. I examined my fingers, warmly tacky with blood. “What happened, girl?” She huddled a safe distance from me, panting heavily. She is a black dog, making it hard to tell where she was hurt. When I moved toward her she whined, not wanting me to touch her again. So I talked to her in a soft voice, saying, “I’m just looking.” Her snout appeared a little chewed-up and the fur along her hind legs could have been bloody or could have been muddy. “What got you?” As if she understood, she looked away from me, looking into the nearby woods, and I followed her gaze there, seeing nothing except the shadows among the pines growing blacker every second. Inside, I headed to the kitchen, to dump the fish in the sink and cover them with ice cubes. A naked 60-watt bulb cast an anemic glow that revealed a house different than the one I left that morning. The lower cupboards yawned open, many of their doors ripped off entirely. A paw had scooped the cans of Mountain Dew and tomato soup and Spaghetti-O’s, the boxes of Lucky Charms and Ortega taco shells, onto the linoleum, where they lay crumpled and chewed-up, mixed up with the contents of the garbage can, tipped over and rifled through, its 32 The Harvard Advocate

coffee grounds and banana peels and chicken bones and candy wrappers. The bear had somehow managed to get into the fridge. Its door hung open, its glass shelves shattered. Among the shards an unopened gallon of milk lay on its side. I could hear the motor working overtime, trying to keep the whole cabin cold, but I didn’t bother closing the door, just as I hadn’t bothered setting down my fish, too shocked to do anything but look. A mug of coffee sat on the counter, half full, as if the intruder had been interrupted while drinking it. World’s Best Dad, it read. “Shit,” I said. There was nothing else to say. And only then, hearing my voice flutter through the cabin and die, did I realize I was alone. McKenzie still sat on the porch, peering in at me, her head cocked with uncertainty. “Come on,” I said to her and she whined in response. I finally laid down my fish and clapped my hands and she lowered her head and stepped hesitantly into the front hall and released a stream of piss onto the hardwood. It was the smell that scared her. It hung in the air like a dark shambling presence, overpowering the odor of garbage. I remembered it from the canyon. In Tumalo no one locks their doors. When my mother left that morning, she left the back door open, the screen door closed, to allow for a breeze. The bear had pushed through the screen and in doing so bent the metal frame in half and ripped it from its hinges. I could see this from the living room, just as I could see that the bear had been interested in more than food alone. Clothes, my mother’s clothes, were strewn throughout the living room and back hallway. Skirts and shirts and jeans. At my feet I found a pair of panties. The old lady kind that go way up your waist and corral the belly fat. I picked them up. They were damp with saliva and ripped along the butt. I imagined my mother inside them, the same teeth that gnawed on a skull gnawing on her. I think that was what bothered me most, the sight of her panties. The bear had done more than trespass in the name of hunger. As I saw it, he had deliberately violated her, and in doing so, violated all of us. I went to the back door with the intention of closing it. When I laid my hand on the doorknob, its coldness crept up my arm, along with the feeling I was being watched. I scanned the nearby forest for any movement. A chipmunk worried at a pinecone. A camp-robber bird flitted among the trees. Black Answer continued to nervously trot the circumference of his corral. I closed the door and the feeling didn’t go away. My father taught me how to kill things. How to break apart a rifle and run a brush through its cavities. How to fire a bullet uphill and down. How to rub bitterbrush all over my clothes to camouflage my scent. All sorts of hairy information I tucked away in my mind like socks in a drawer. I drove to Bend, to the Carmichael Candy Factory. Everyday the janitors swept from its floors enough cookie crumbs to fill a fiftygallon drum. For twenty bucks, they let me take all of it, along with a Winter 2010 33

compromised batch of caramel. At home, in an industrial bucket, I mashed up a few pounds of cookie crumbs and caramel, then added some fish filets from the freezer, dousing the mixture with a can of Mountain Dew. The smell and the sweetness, I knew, would draw the bear. Two hundred yards behind our cabin, way out in the woods, I found a clearing of cheat grass and there dug a shallow hole to fit the bucket into, so that it couldn’t be overturned by coyotes. On top of the bucket I placed the metal screen of an old rabbit cage, and on top of the screen a small boulder. Only a bear could get into this. Some hunters, around their bait troughs, douse the dirt with cooking oil. The idea is, the bear gets the oil on the pads of its paws, then tracks the smell around the forest, drawing other bears. But I wasn’t interested in other bears. I wanted only one and I knew he lurked nearby. My father, in the months leading up to deer season, would drive into the mountains, along logging roads, and park next to clear-cuts. He would set up a lawn chair in the bed of his pickup, and through a pair of binoculars he would peer out over the stumps and huckleberries. He kept meticulous notes about the deer he spotted—where and when they appeared, how long they lingered, their herd size, its doe-to-buck ratio—so that when the second Tuesday of November rolled around, he was ready. I, too, wanted to be ready. So I went to Gander Mountain and bought a Moultrie camera. I’m not sure how many dinner shifts at the Tip Top this added up to. A lot of them, I can tell you that. But really, after seven years of collecting two-dollar tips from truckers and blue-haired grannies, what had I spent my money on so far? Soda pop and beer. New tires for my truck. Bullets. The occasional blowjob from a Mexican hooker named Juanita. What else did I need? To go off to college, my mother said, but that seemed like something other people did. “I’ve got everything under control,” I would tell her, when she got on my back, asking about my plans, my life. “Of course you do,” she would say. The Moultrie is a weatherproof digital camera. You bolt it to a tree along a game trail or a bait station. An infra-red beam shoots from it. When triggered, the camera snaps a photo, recording the date and time, so that over the course of several days you can begin to understand the patterns of your prey. I attached the camera to a ponderosa and trained its beam on the nearby bucket. When the bear came, I would see it, frozen in a flash. I would know what I was dealing with. My family watches a lot of TV, mainly game shows and Law & Order re-runs, but I’ll tune-in to the occasional nature program so long as a snake is trying to swallow a rat. So here we were, planted on the couch, me and Graham and my mother, my mother smoking one Marlboro after the other so that a gray cloud hung over us. Since my father left, I’ve been in charge of the remote. I punched its buttons now, flipping through the channels, finally settling on an hourlong special called I, Bear. 34 The Harvard Advocate

“Hey,” Graham said. “Can you believe it?” My mother didn’t say anything, her eyes unfocused, her mind someplace faraway, but I was right there with him, nodding and smiling. A bear show—he kept saying—a goddamned bear show. It seemed a miracle, as though God had shot a lightning bolt into the satellite dish to make it just so. We learned that bears have shaggy fur and rudimentary tails and plantigrade feet. Though their eyesight is poor, their noses can decipher dead meat at a distance of at least seven miles. We learned that their ears don’t grow with their bodies—remaining the same size, from cub to silverback—so you can measure the age of a bear like so: the smaller the ears appear in relation to its head, the older the animal. We learned that they are among the most behaviorally complex of animals. “Practically as smart as humans,” Graham said, as if proud, as if the bear had brought something special to our cabin that reflected on us. Outside, in the stable, Black Answer whinnied. I went to the window and saw the motion-detector light had clicked on, making a pale yellow cone surrounded by so much darkness. I wondered what had drawn our bear down from the mountains—the smell of bacon frying in a pan—the endless supply of garbage cans and dumpsters—the trout-filled rivers? Hunger had to be the reason. It was always the reason. The Tip Top Diner is a square brick building that seats thirty. The booths are mustard vinyl and the floor is checkered linoleum. The menu never changes. The building is over a hundred years old. It’s lasted through a depression, recessions, wars, so many ice storms and sun-soaked summers. Two bay windows flank its front door, giving me a view of the Three Sisters. They loom over Tumalo, as silent as stone, dormant for several hundred years, but inside of them a hidden life burns redly. In this way they remind me of my father. The last time I saw him he came to the Tip Top with his girlfriend, Mona. For supper, if you can believe it. They had been at the Drywood Tavern—where she worked—drinking Budweiser and smoking Marlboros. I knew this because of the smells floating off them, the way they moved loosely and spoke at that level of too loud drunks prefer. He waved me over to their table, even though it wasn’t my section. I walked there slowly. The clatter of forks and knives, the country music playing over the sound system, all of it fell away. His beard opened up into a smile, as if we were the best of pals. “I want to introduce you to someone,” he said, or something. I wasn’t really listening, my ears thrumming with blood. When she held out her hand, her fingernails painted every color of the rainbow, I let it float there so long and lonely that my father lost his smile. “Manners,” he said, as if I was the one with lipstick on my teeth. Over their heads I caught sight of Mary. She stood by the coffee machines, watching me, so I didn’t do what I felt like doing—which was spit or turn over the table or take a steak knife and go slit slit slit across their necks and faces. Instead I looked, only looked, staring deep into Winter 2010 35

my father’s leathery eyes, seeing in them something made of equal parts shame and fury. His beard moved a little, but he said nothing. That was the last time I saw him, two years ago. Immediately after he left, he called a lot, but then the time between conversations grew from a week to two weeks to five months now. Maybe he got tired of listening to the silence on the other end of the line. He sent me a graduation card. In it he wrote, “Son, I’m proud of you. You’re going places. Love, Dad.” The card was marked up with dirty fingerprints, their swirling prints like the patterned dust off a moth’s wing. I still have trouble wrapping my brain around it. My father, who never danced, not even at weddings. Who smelled of horses. Who always left the house with a Leatherman multi-tool attached to his belt. Who ate everything with ketchup. Who on Christmas gave my mother a framed photograph of him and George W. Bush shaking hands, the photo taken after a stump speech the President gave in Redmond. Who, when I was a boy, helped me up into Black Answer’s saddle and laughed when the horse swung his head around and bit me as I dug my heels too sharply into his ribs. Who taught me how to tie a lariat—the running noose with a jammed knot to prevent it from pulling out—and who directed me to sink it over the head of Black Answer and who laughed again when the horse tore off across the pasture, dragging my body behind him. This same man, my father—who quietly lived in this quiet pine-forested hamlet his entire life—was not only fucking another woman, but had moved with her to Pendleton, where he now worked on a ranch owned by some formerly Californian surfboard developer. I had heard the rumors, and ignored them, like the faint grumbling of a thunderstorm you hope the wind takes elsewhere. I had seen his pickup parked along the Deschutes River with two shadows inside it. I had listened him stumble home from the tavern, the noise of the hide-abed unfolding, as he prepared to spend another night in the living room. But still. I hadn’t anticipated his sudden departure. That he could just leave us, like a bunch of old shirts that didn’t fit him anymore, seemed impossible. Even though he must have been planning it all along—just as he planned every hunting season—taking careful notes in a notebook and envisioning the kill long before he actually pulled the trigger. Like a mountain, there was such stillness to him—you never would have suspected that deep beneath the layers of his skin, as beneath the deepest layers of the earth, existed a channel for fire. The bear came. Every morning I trekked into the woods and found the bucket empty and on its side, buzzing with flies, like a hollowedout carcass. The cheat-grass was flattened and there were tracks and seed-filled droppings everywhere. I unbolted the camera and removed its memory chip and took it to the Tip Top Diner. Mary kept a computer in the backroom and I viewed the photos there. Some of them were washed out. Others revealed a raccoon or a possum or a coyote struggling to claw through the plastic, to push the boulder off the bucket. But many showed the bear. The sight of him made my stomach feel weighted down with heavy black stones. If I clicked through the photos quickly enough, they made 36 The Harvard Advocate

a sort of movie. The bear would untangle himself from the underbrush and move in an unhurried shamble toward the bucket. Every time the flash went off, its light would redden his eyes, making them appear lit with lamps of blood. One swipe of his claw knocked the boulder from the bucket. He ate with great smacking bites I could almost hear—their noise like feet moving through mud—each bite revealing jagged white teeth nested in blue gums. One time Mary peered over my shoulder and said, “My.” “Yeah.” “You’ve got him, don’t you?” “Yeah. I’ve got him.” “You should let the news reporters know about this. They’d be interested in this.” “No. I want to kill him. That’s all.” I heard her breath stop and a moment later start again. She laid a hand on my shoulder and I stiffened under its weight. “Daniel?” “What?” “You know you’ve got a lot of anger hidden in you.” It wasn’t a question. I shrugged and she took this as a cue to remove her hand. “You hold on to it like it’s worth something,” she said. “But it’s not worth shit.” Again, I shrugged, but she was already gone, off to restock napkins or refill ketchup containers or something, the same old motions. I stared at the screen. Because the camera was stationed at such a low angle, it was difficult to judge the size of the bear. I remembered the nature show and studied his ears. They were horribly small. I always pick up Graham after school. We have two hours together— before I return to the Tip Top for the dinner shift—and I try to make those two hours count. Sometimes we go fishing. Sometimes we go to the Dairy Queen for a Dilly Bar. And sometimes we drop a Frisbee in the backyard and call it home plate. He stands next to it with a baseball bat cocked and ready to swing. I teach him to hold tight in the batter’s box, while I whip fastball after fastball at him, trying to make him tougher. “Hey,” he said. “Remember that time, that game against Crook County, when you nailed that guy in the head? And he was like, ‘I’m going to kick your ass if you do that again,’ and then you did it again.” “What about it?” “I don’t know.” He had a smile on his face and it wavered a little. “I’m just remembering.” “Well, quit it.” “Why?” “None of that matters now. It was a long time ago.” “Not that long ago.” Today we went to Dry Canyon. According to some of the other fifthgrade kids, the riverbed was no longer dry. A stream of blood now ran down it, its currents growing stronger and scabbier every day. Graham wanted to see for himself. At the Dry Canyon trailhead, I spotted a pair of dirt bikes pitched Winter 2010 37

against a gnarled juniper tree. We soon saw who they belonged to— when we started down the trail, the canyon spread out beneath us like a gaping mouth—two boys with baseball bats. There, in the dry riverbed, they stood over a large black shape. It was a bear and it was dead. The boys took turns beating it. Every few seconds one of them would steadily lift the bat over his head, as if it were a weighty ax, and then bring it down in a blue flash of metal. It impacted the bear with a meaty thud I could hear from a distance of fifty yards. They laughed. They pumped their fists, smiling, as if they had won something or conquered something. I knew the feeling. I experienced it every time I brought a rifle to my shoulder, when the safety clicked off and my finger tested the trigger. It felt good, the absolute power that goes along with exercising death. But seeing it secondhand—watching as one of the boys took a home-run swing at the belly of the bear, the bat disappearing into the belly, having torn open a dark gash—I felt something shift inside me. I went to them. I started down the canyon at a clumsy run, my sneakers sliding in the grit. I put my hands in the air and unhinged my mouth as far as it would go and started screaming. I didn’t scream anything in particular—I just made noise, like a siren. Those two boys, one look at me and pow, they were gone. At the bottom of the canyon, I breathed heavily, my hands on my knees. The smell of decay raced in and out of me. Bluebottle flies rose off the carcass and tasted my sweat and I brushed them away in a hurry. The bear had a two-gallon jug over its head. Some idiot, I guessed, had used it for a bait barrel. Maybe a foot high with an eight-inch opening, the jug fit tightly around the neck, keeping the bear from drinking or eating or even breathing a fresh breath of air. Scratches and holes decorated the plastic—claw marks from the bear trying to remove it. The bear was small and thin, no more than a hundred-fifty pounds. Its fur was like a hairy sack draped over a collection of bones. I wondered how long it had wandered around blindly, stumbling over stumps and knocking into trees, eventually collapsing from starvation here. Right then Graham came up next to me and took my hand. “Are you okay?” he said and I said, “Of course I’m okay.” Then I did like the fathers do on TV and ruffled his hair. “Sorry if I scared you,” I said. He looked at me out of the corner of his eye and shrugged, like: no harm done, I guess. “Is that the bear that got the girls?” he said. “No.” “How do you know?” “I know.” “But—” “It’s not the bear, Graham. Okay? Poor fucker just got caught in the crossfire.” He swatted at a fly. “You said fuck.” One of the boys had left behind his bat. It was plastered with blood and hair, like a bone recently cut out of a body. My hands curled around its grip and my shoulders rolled with its familiar weight as I took a few 38 The Harvard Advocate

practice swings. “Good bat,” I said and held it out to Graham. “Keep it.” He wrinkled his nose. “I don’t think I want it.” “Fine.” I leaned on it like a cane and for several minutes we stood there in silence, looking at the bear, breathing in the smell of death. Then Graham ran off to hunt for arrowheads, to see if he could find any rattlesnakes curled up beneath the stones of the riverbed. I stayed with the bear. Inside of the jug, flies banged their black bodies against the plastic, drunk off blood. I closed my eyes and listened to them buzz and tap and imagined they were trapped inside my head, trying to get out. When Graham disappeared behind a thick patch of bitterbrush, in a flash of muscle, I turned the cane back into a bat and brought it down on the bear, once, twice, three times, striking the jug until it cracked open. I got down on my knees and grabbed hold of it and pulled— dragging the bear, then bracing my feet against its shoulders—until with a moist sucking sound the jug came off. I fell back on my butt—the jug in my lap and still buzzing with flies, like some kind of hive. The bear had its mouth open. A long blue tongue hung from it. I had struck its eye with the bat and this blackberry jelly goop slid out of the socket like tears, dripping down and beading the dust. I turned around and looked to the top of the canyon. But no one was there to howl at me like a siren, to tell me to stop. There was only the wind rushing fast-moving clouds through the sky. I imagined what my father would have done—had he been there—squatting in the shade of a juniper tree with a cigarette fitted along the corner of his mouth. “Why don’t you come down and see the bear?” Graham would have asked him. “And be by us?” And he would have said, “Rather not.” By the end of the day someone had dragged the bear from the canyon and run a rope through its hind-leg and hung it from a tree next to the mini-mart. The rope creaked as the carcass turned, blown about by the wind. People came from all around to get their picture taken next to it, some of them holding up their hands like claws, others crossing their arms and frowning, as if bothered by the smell. On the news, the forest service official—the guy with the salty beard— stood behind a many microphoned podium, surrounded by a crowd of reporters from Z-21 and KOIN 6 and all the other affiliates. “Rest easy,” he said and gave the thumbs-up. “We’ve got our man.” But then the paw-prints didn’t match up. And when they laid out the bear on a stainless steel table and ran a scalpel along its belly, they found in it a red spermy pudding—the mashed-up remains of huckleberries, grubs and worms, a tennis ball—but no livestock, no bits and pieces of girls. With this knowledge I could sense—all throughout Tumalo—people glancing over their shoulders, as if bothered by some shadow they couldn’t shake. I could relate. Winter 2010 39

I knew what I needed to do. After Graham went to school and my mother went to work, I took Black Answer by the reins and led him into the woods. In a Manzanita thicket he resisted, trying to tug me back, so I withdrew from my pocket a handful of sugar cubes and urged him forward. When we walked I could see, intermittently between the trees, the mountaintops of the Three Sisters, three glacier-covered volcanoes whose white fangs appeared, then disappeared, then reappeared, like something threatening me, or beckoning me on. We arrived at the clearing and I loosely harnessed the reigns to a pine tree along its periphery. Yesterday, after seeing what had happened to the bear in the canyon, I had removed the bait bucket. Where it once sat, a patch of strawberries had sprung up overnight, their white flowers forming a rectangle, as if something had been buried and remembered here. Around my shoulder coiled a lariat. I also carried a shotgun, a sixteengauge Foxboro that had belonged to my father, and before him, to his father. It hung from my shoulder by a leather strap. I removed it now and broke it open along the stock and slid two slugs in and closed the breech with a snap and brought it to my shoulder, taking aim at Black Answer. “I never liked you,” I said and pulled the trigger. The horse recoiled a few steps, then his legs gave out and he collapsed heavily with the still-lingering echo of the shotgun blast bouncing around the forest. It was noon and it was hot, one of the first hot days of the year. Soon the horse would bloat up and the flies and yellow-jackets would find it. A stiff wind raked the woods. It would do a good job spreading the smell. I rubbed myself all over with bitterbrush and climbed into the low branches of a nearby pine and munched some M&Ms and waited. The sun made its perfect path across the sky. When it at last dipped behind the Cascades, dusk gathered quickly. A thunderstorm had rolled through the other day and now the rain it left behind rose from the ground, gray tendrils of fog that curled around Black Answer like a hand. Then the bear came gliding in from out of the trees. It was massive and it was so close. Its giant triangular head. Its muscles surging beneath its spiked black fur. Its claws like knife-blades. Right there. It swung its head around in a circle and grumbled in its throaty language. Black Answer lay on his side with his legs sticking out straight. The bear snapped its jaws around one of them, testing the flavor. I could hear the grinding noise of teeth against bone. Then, apparently satisfied, the bear released the leg and let out a huff and approached the underbelly of the horse. I allowed it to feed. I wanted it relaxed. Around my shoulders I carried a lariat. I removed it now, taking care not to make a noise. I then descended from my perch. My boot scudded against a root or a rock when I dropped from the tree and hid behind it. At the sound the bear rose up on its haunches and swung its head left and right, its ears perked. I knew from the television program it couldn’t see any better than you’re average near-sighted grandpa, so I stayed stock-still. It barked once, a warning. The sound was so heavy with bass it would have taken two 40 The Harvard Advocate

large men to pick up and carry. I felt suddenly small and alone. My hand moved from the lariat to the shotgun and back to the lariat. I could hear the bear smacking its chops. A moment later it returned to its feeding. The rope was twenty-feet long. I tied its loose end around the tree and then positioned myself as if on the pitcher’s mound, eyeing up my target. I could not bobble this throw and make up for it on the next pitch. This moment was decisive. The rope could not fall off course, could not touch the ground, or I would become hamburger. I judged the distance, some dozen feet. I licked my fingers. I tested the weight of the rope in my hands. And then, in one fluid motion that ended with a snap, I swung and let go. I wanted to catch the bear around the neck, but no sooner had the lariat fallen around it did the animal come alive with such suddenness that the noose slipped to its waist. I pulled, to jam the knot tight, and the bear pulled back. I fell forward, sprawled on the ground, then immediately flipped over, scrambling backwards in a crabwalk. When the shaggy tremendous shape began its charge, I flipped over and righted myself and ran like hell. I kept my eyes on the ground before me—my feet dodging stumps and clumps of rabbit brush—while the bear swiftly closed the ground between us. I could hear the locomotive breaths huffing from its throat, the flat-footed stomp of its paws. I guessed it had passed the tree by now, which meant the rope would go taut and anchor its charge soon. A shaft of heat caressed my neck—a breath, I knew—that sent me reeling around in time to see its mouth open hungrily, almost lovingly, for me. I screamed and the bear bellowed and then the rope went tight and the bear stumbled into a praying position before righting itself again, coming up paws swinging. I was just out of its reach, but not so far that I couldn’t feel the air move, displaced by its claws. It wrestled with the rope a moment, like a dog bothered by a leash, then returned its attention to me. A low growl rumbled from deep in its throat. I could feel its eyes, like two heavy weights, on me. It was hungry. And I imagined what its jaws would feel like working around my skull, or through my belly, my flesh sinking into the dark oblivion of its stomach. We stayed like this for a time, looking at each other, each afraid and hateful. Minutes passed and the stars wheeled above us and I slowly brought my shotgun down from my shoulder and held it before me. “I should kill you,” I said, a gentle sort of loathing in my voice. “You son of a bitch, I should kill you dead.” I could feel the blood pounding through my heart and I could hear the air filling and emptying its lungs. I tried to breathe with the bear and soon our breathing fell into a rhythm where our lungs worked in perfect time with the wind, with the shifting of the branches and shadows. It was as if a rhythm had been beating all along, the rhythm of the land, and finally I had found it, here in the peace of the dark woods, with only one slug and twenty feet of rope between me and absolution.

Winter 2010 41

The Dog of the Marriage (excerpt) Amy Hempel

4. For sixty dollars charged to my MasterCard in advance, the psychic described a wooded area near a body of water—a pond? a stream? she couldn’t be sure—with a view across an open field to a “civic-type building”—a post office? a school? she couldn’t be sure—where, according to her vision as relayed to me over the phone, the lost dog had looked for food in the last twenty-four hours. This was less useful than the woman down the turnpike who saw the leaflet left on her windshield. She phoned to say she had seen the dog drag a deer across the tracks a hundred yards away the day before. I found the dead deer beside the tracks where the woman said, part of its flank gnawed to the bone. The dog could not have felled the deer; it must have been hit by a train. Had an approaching train scared the dog from its food? The leaflet is all over town. The ex-husband made it. He advertised a reward beside a picture of the dog. But he did not consult with me first. The reward would not buy you an ordinary dinner in this town. Whenever I come across any of his posters, I add a “1” before the amount. Despite the reward, calls come in. I chase down all sightings, even when the caller says the collar is red, not blue. But there is never any dog of any kind with any color of collar in the spot reported by the time I am able to get there. I check construction sites. Workmen eat lunch outdoors, and a hungry dog might try them for a handout, wouldn’t she? Half a dozen calls come from builders on the beachfront. Once, when I got there, there was a deer swimming in the ocean. It appeared to be caught in the tide, and as I moved toward it—toward the deer—it managed to pull itself ahead of the surf, where it found its footing and limped ashore on a hurt front leg, to leap away when I moved closer. So I, who only wanted to help, was made to stand there watching the deer head for the dunes. I went out again at night to lay down scent trails in the woods near my house, wearing the same shoes and socks I had been wearing for days. 42 The Harvard Advocate

The moon was nearly full above a snowy field. When I had made my way into the woods, I turned and saw deer standing side by side, watching. I thought, Saints, guardian angels, my saviors, my friends. We watched each other for a while, and then I went home, checking over my shoulder all the way for the deer. They never moved once—not that I saw. There were three animal psychics. I phoned them all. The famous one you can’t get to work with you anymore unless you’re the president of something and your dog is, too. Still, this woman phoned me from the airport, she said, between flights. She gave me the names and numbers of the other psychics who found missing dogs. Where’s the one who finds missing husbands? I called the most psychic-sounding one first, who turned out not to b available until after the holidays. What holidays? Were there holidays? I left a message for the next one, and the third psychic answered her phone and insisted we could go to work with no delay so long as I could describe my dog to her and recite the numerals of my credit card number. The worst thought I had was, What if the dog was just here? Right where I was standing? Every morning and every night there is a videotape I watch. The exhusband made it when he was my husband. It was made when the dog had first come to us and seemed to be everywhere, shared everything, offering, offering. I see the viewfinder swing wide across the lawn, one of those panning shots you always find in movies, where the idea is to get everybody in the audience ready for what will presently be revealed—but only if everybody will just be very very good, and very very patient, and will wait, with perfect hope, for the make-believe story to unfold.

Winter 2010 43

The Blood of Birds: Death, Steel, and Cockers Kevin Seitz

hen a cockfighting event has been planned and announced, local breeders return to their yards and select the cocks that are most willing and ready to fight. They judge their birds by the length of their legs, the strength of their neck and chest, and most importantly, the relentless pugnacious pride. At around six months of age each owner trimmed the comb, earlobes, and wattles of every young stag, shaping the slim mean profile of fighting cocks, and each raised the stags to fearlessness by setting aside private yards for them to walk and by offering controlled sparring matches with other game birds. The beasts have been fed, watered, and trained for the day of their fight over the course of two years. Should the animal survive, he might hope to sire the next generation of cocks. If not, the breeder has many others to replace him. Not all stags will make fine fighters, but experienced hands and eyes can discern the courage and strength of a feathered champion. For a single main he might bring only one or two birds. For a larger tournament, he may bring six or more.Before the fight, the handlers heel the birds, fixing steel gaffes over their natural bone spurs. The delicate ritual requires four hands. One experienced handler grips the bird firmly, calming it to avoid any unnecessary stress or worry that might sap its strength. The other handler wraps a cotton padding, a leather shoe for the blade, and a fine string around the claw to keep it in place. He knots in the back so as not to distract the creature. During the whole process, both men are wary of the three inch swords they are fastening to the gamecock. There are many rules for matching a fair fight and many regulations for preparing the birds â&#x20AC;&#x201C; the tying of gaffes, the trimming of neck and tail feathers, and the banning of chemical aids (blood doping or poisonous wings). Each owner gives money to a neutral third party for safekeeping. When the two birds and their handlers are called to the ring, an official wipes each gaffe with a slice of lemon. Each handler grasps the heavy sinews of his beast, thumbs over the shoulders and fingers on the breast. At a signal from the referee, they thrust their birds toward one other in the motion of an underhand toss. Held close, the long necks 44 The Harvard Advocate

allow the animals to stab and peck at one another. They swing the birds together three or four times, alternating one above the other each time, as the ritualized billing enrages both animals and ensures an energetic match. When released from their marks, the birds rise onto their toes, spread their neck feathers and prance forward. Amid the furious explosion of cracking wing beats and battle cries, even a novice spectator gathers that the birds aim to leap atop the other, slashing with their heels and striking with their beaks as they descend. An experienced observer follows each jab of the foot and sweep of the wing. A veteran of the cockfighting ring discerns the limp of an injured leg or the stumble of a blinded left eye. After a quick series of blows, the birds lock together. Needle gaffes can pass through bones, and the crescent “slasher” razors will slice deep into flesh. A handler is prepared for a cut throat, a blow to the brain, broken bones, skittish fear, and simple exhaustion. The best methods for separating the birds and reviving the injured is almost never written down or published. There are only moments to revive the beast enough for retaliation. Books and articles provide points for amateurs, while only experience can provide the real skills. When to blow air or water onto the back of a neck to cool the beast, when to pull feathers to spark a life in the bird, how to massage a cramped leg back to life, or when take its head into one’s mouth to suck congealed blood from the windpipe, these skills require an intimate knowledge of affecting circulation physiology and the magic of inspiring temper and spirit. The series of attacks and counter attacks could last mere seconds or they might take half an hour. Eventually, one bird can no longer rise to its feet. As it lifts its neck, the other, towering over it, picks maliciously at the face and neck of the vanquished until no longer moves. Strutting away, the victor is docile as its handler lifts it by the breast and examines the flesh for wounds and blood that might need treatment. The loser is taken by its tail feathers or feet, limp and irrelevant. Quickly, another pair steps over the low fence into the pit, beneath their arms are fresh birds with regal calm. *** Bestial contests, blood sport, or as one particularly emphatic and legally specific opponent put it, “The cruel and inhumane treatment of animal against animal violence,” appears across a wide range of animals, where its entertainment value arises from the size of the soul in the beast. Four curious children are an appropriate audience for a fight between two Siamese Fighting Fish (three inches long, colorful, popular with children, and often called, from the Linnean binomial nomenclature, bettas). Yet when two male roosters are set loose against one another, the ring for the cockfight is drawn in chalk on a dirt floor almost universally eighteen feet across with an audience that fills a small auditorium. In a barnyard match, the crowd rings the cockpit and men crane their necks to see the fight. Spectators to a dogfight arrange themselves sporadically about an expansive field, forming a much wider ring for the more serious event, and when a bull is killed, the crowd fills a stadium befitting Winter 2010 45

the much larger soul of the creature being slaughtered. In the public memory of ancient history, when humans, stripped of their dignity and right to life by a crime or enslavement, are pitted against one another, they die in the Roman Colosseum, one of the most impressive amphitheatres ever built to public spectacle. The wrong arena for any fight would seem ridiculous. Sweeping regulation that covers all of these contests has a relatively recent history. Tracing the origins of blood sport discovers records of cockfights and other bestial contests over 2500 years ago, but for the modern history of animals fighting, humanitarian outcry reached a critical pitch in early 19th century Britain. Outspoken reformers railed against the events of gambling and entertainment, which were enormously popular among plebians and patricians alike. Dogs were set individually or en masse upon ferocious bears; they often horribly disfigured the muzzle of the bear if they could not kill it. Frenzied packs of dogs were released into pens with massive bulls, whose horns and territorial aggression heightened the drama. Others were also trained to attack the usually bashful and timid badger, whose powerful claws and sharp teeth become destructive weapons when cornered. In other pits, male gamecocks were sparred with one another, tearing at their opponent with sharp beaks, battering them with swift kicks, and slicing with a sharpened bony spur on their heels. The fights became far more bloody and fatal when steel needles and blades, up to four inches long, were affixed over their bony spurs, enhancing nature’s weapons. In “ratting” events, small dogs were pitted against hordes of rats. In one case, a terrier named Tiny, weighing under six pounds, killed 300 rats in just under an hour. Another, named Jacko set British records when it killed 100 rats in five minutes and 1000 in just over an hour and a half. According to newspapers and drawings from the time, men in mustaches, black suits, and top hats watched these events with great eagerness. They stood behind low walls of wooden planks and leaned into the ring. In 1866, at the height of the industrial revolution in Britain, when humanitarian reforms were underway, a human dwarf was reportedly pitted against a bulldog in 1866. Scandal and strict legislation swiftly followed. The only irony of the event might be found in noting that the short man won the match. Beginning in the early nineteenth century, legislators reformed civilizations with increasingly strict laws, which were revised well into the twentieth century. *** In America today, illegal cockfights take place in a sparse landscape of low incomes, immigrants, and farming equipment—not remarkably different from its position decades ago when it was still legal in some states. Often in remote farmyards where fights will elicit little attention from law authorities, dozens of locals gather on a regular and informal basis. They follow routines unique to their region and inherited traditions, but in all of the yards and pits, located especially in the Southern half of the country, the scene is much the same. Locals arrive with tens or hundreds of dollars of extra income for entrance fees and bets. They bring birds 46 The Harvard Advocate

that represent years of careful cultivation and training to be weighed for a fair match and pitted against one another. It is a cheap form of entertainment, and a great contest between locals. Most of the gambling money changes hands directly between neighbors at the end of each match. Few make substantial profits; they are devoted and enthusiastic hobbyists. All breeders have the same goals: they want birds of ferocious speed, stamina, and gameness. And they fight under essentially under the same set of rules: bone or steel spurs exposed, set times to revive the birds, penalties for refusing to fight. Yet despite the remarkable consistencies, or perhaps, because of those things, the small nuances in a bird indicate to the experienced cocker an enormous amount about the breeder, his decisions and his geography. Among the many articles printed about cockfighting in America during the early 20th century, Outing Magazine in 1901 offered an introductory smattering of advice for the amateur cocker. It explained when to make hens available in a gamecock’s pen, and it offered detailed regimens of training and diet. It provided one schedule in great detail, noting deliberately that it was a proven method of Northern cockers. On the other hand, another potential regimen came from “the rules of a distinguished southern feeder.” It was different, interesting, and perhaps worthy of skepticism. Regardless, every day of the three week training periods were carefully prescribed with unique blends of grains and egg protein. The magazine scheduled and explained exercises for the novice breeder. One day, he might lead the cock about the yard for thirty minutes by carrying a hen, or repeatedly throw the bird into the air so that it must flap and strengthen its weak wings to land. Others threw their birds out into water to strengthen their legs and wind, or built a high roost to force the birds into daily leaping. Sometimes, breeders imported physical birds from other regions, some nearby and some shipped around the world. Investing in innovation raised the stakes and enhanced the risk. Beasts from afar were an exotic novelty into otherwise consistent lives. To opponents of the sport, the intimate relationship between the birds and their owners, breeders, and handlers is revolting. The legislation which banned the fighting, gambling, and transport of animals central to these events arose largely from the argument that it is morally incomprehensible for a civilized human being to find pleasure in the bloody carnage and suffering of a living animal. To that point, a reformer of education in London during the 1830s published a tirade against promoting or condoning cockfights. It was an atrocity and an embarrassment, she wrote, condemning those “[who] to the shame of civilized society, have the disgusting temerity to amuse themselves and their low, ignorant besotted tools, by the infliction of tortures upon the dumb creation - Devils in human shape, who have feasted your hungry eyes on the mangled bodies, the torn limbs, the dying convulsions of your purchased bipeds.” To its opponents, the carnage of the sport is abhorrent, but beyond that, the pleasure found in the pain ruins the participants and the community that surrounds them as well. The fights are a violation of basic respect for the living spirit in the animal. They seem to stand as a contradiction the nurturing love for their birds that practitioners claim to embrace. It is The Chain of Being, they proclaim, Winter 2010 47

that grants birds only a small degree of divine spirit, a partial soul, such that the violation and senseless killing of a beast low on that ladder is not far from the larger souls of a cat, dog, or human. To their minds the path is slippery, and the stable morals of the community as a whole are vulnerable to any violence, even against animals. Since the recent revival of legislation against animal cruelty in the 1970s, all fifty states have passed laws prohibiting cockfights. Condemning the sport, however, unavoidably condemns much more. Above the doorway to the abandoned Copper State Game Club a sign reads, “Carry them in with dignity, carry them out with pride.” The divide between the two opinions is more fundamental than a sterile debate of ethics. Those who continue to raise and fight their birds claim the rights of tradition, and point to the eager willingness of the animals to fight. The lifestyle of cycles in breeding, raising, and fighting cocks harmonizes with that of the breeders themselves, often agricultural laborers, who understand the annual hormone cycles of animals, the science and art of preparing soil, and timing the harvest. To the ancient profession of husbandry and those who still work the land, Nature possesses its own Spirits. The Secrets must be be respected and understood in order to nurture and reap sufficient grain and meat. Those who depend on its even-tempered kindness draw a different conceptual distinction between Animals and Men, defining an order in human life amidst the living chaos of wilderness. *** The history of writers trying to explain the fights and the men who watch them is ancient as well. In 386 AD St. Augustine was on his way to the baths when he wandered past two barnyard cocks circling one another in front of a doorway. As the two began a bitter contest, he and his fellow scholars paused for a moment, engrossed in the spectacle. In the battle of two irrational beings, they saw divine order and proof of Reason: “The lowered heads stretched forward, neck-plumage distended, the lusty thrusts and such wary parryings… the victor: the proud crowing, the almost perfectly orbed arrangement of the members, as if in haughtiness of supremacy. But the sign of the vanquished: hackles plucked from the neck; in carriage and in cry, all bedraggled.” Introspective scholars as they were, Augustine and his company meditated on greater questions of beauty, sexuality, pleasure in the spectacle, and life beyond the senses. With their feeling of profound inspiration from birds there was also embarrassment: “And thus admonished that there would be a limit to our watching the chickens, we went whither we had purposed to go.” The centuries of authors that would follow Augustine approached the cockpits that spanned the globe from India to Ireland and South America as outsiders with temerity and giddy intoxication. The very act of describing the crowds and the fights they surrounded was both an exciting and shameful task, aesthetic and filthy. Describing each bird was an ornothological science, but the collision of the two beasts became something else entirely. It was consuming and petty at the same time. 48 The Harvard Advocate

When LeRoy Neiman painted a cockfight, he fixated on a profile of a stern cock with beady eyes, outlining it in black ink beside a flash of red and color, feathers and swirls. Thin black lines meander anxiously about the edges. In the center, the noise, agony, and blood is a flurry of pigment. Pierce Egan, who pursued the study of folklore in London before such pursuits had a name, described one fight in 1832. He wrote carefully, “I must have leave to try my hand at a description of a game cock! He was a red and black bird – slim, masculine, trimmed – yet with feathers glossy as though the sun shone only upon his nervous wings. His neck arose out of the bag, snakelike, – terrible – as if it would stretch upward to the ceiling; his body followed, compact, strong, and beautiful, and his long dark-blue sinewy legs came forth, clean… The gallant bird clucked defiance.” When the two birds came together Egan’s language fought to capture the frenzy: “they dashed up in one tremendous flirt – mingling their powerful rustling wings and nervous heels in one furious confused mass. The leap, - the fire, - the passion of strength the certaminis gaudia, - were fierce and loud! The parting was another kind of thing every way... The separation was death-like.” The thrilling occasions exuded sexuality and gathered crowds of men (and the infrequent woman) who moved as a mass, like a beast in itself. Mark Twain was taken to a cockpit in New Orleans at the bottom of the Mississippi Delta, where he remarked first his surprise that “There were no brutal faces. With no cock-fighting going on, you could have played the gathering on a stranger for a prayer meeting; and after it began, for a revival – provided you blindfolded the stranger.” What took place next so confounded and troubled him that he left, noting only, “I never saw people enjoy anything more than this gathering enjoyed this fight. The case was same with old gray-heads and with boys of ten. They lost themselves in frenzies of delight.” Clifford Geertz wrote an account of a Balinese cockfight that he witnessed in 1958, which, largely due to its significance in the emerging study of anthropology, became a defining perspective on the culture of cockfighters and their sport. He turned away from the animals themselves and leveled his scrutinizing pen, through the terracing of commas and clauses–not unlike the rolling topography of the Balinese rice farms where he worked–on the culture surrounding the fight. To write about cockfighting in any fashion beyond personal anecdote requires a nod to Geertz. To the battle itself he offers few words, however, describing it only in terms that are projected back from his final argument about the social role of the fights. In his words, he witnessed “a wing-beating, head-thrusting, leg-kicking explosion of animal fury so pure, so absolute, and in its own way so beautiful, as to be almost abstract, a Platonic concept of hate.” When the fights were underway, the crowd around the rink “fused into a single body around the ring, a superorganism in the literal sense.” *** The hostile pugnacity of violence between members of the same Winter 2010 49

species are instinctively understood as deeply connected to masculinity. Theories of evolution attribute the bodily instincts of contest and competition as bound to their position as the expendable sex. Like the testosterone necessary to stimulate the formation of male characteristics in a fetus, the backdrop of a gendered social landscape in biology is feminine. Nevertheless, beyond these efforts to control the destructive forces of the beast that is natural virility, the instincts remain tied to the human mind; just as it is in the human spirit to fight for survival, it is in the spirit of men to conquer one another. When communities and cultures compose artificial and brutal contests between creatures, the dynamics of power, its display and its practice are effortlessly intelligible. In a Spanish bullfight is a carefully ritualized performance of dominance and machismo. In the pitting of dogs against bears, bulls, badgers, and rats, is a display of the selfless valor and reckless thrill of facing an inconquerable dragon or swarming horde. Breeders of fighting cocks are eager to show how quickly and readily their birds will spar with one another, releasing two from their cages for the curious visitor. The simple fight between two birds expresses a manly willingness to confront the knowledge of expendability with a proud defiance to the last moment before a cold death. The conflict is abstracted from any context of females or land, but the reasons for the fight somehow resonate deeply in every human audience. Something makes sense on a plane where moral perspectives are irrelevant. If the direct contest is immediately comprehensible, so too, is its vicarious dimension. Many have noted that the relationship between the “cocks” and their owners is a double entendre preserved across several languages. On the social role of the cockfighting, Geertz wrote that the fights themselves and the money and prestige exchanged at the events hold a minor and fleeting meaning, but the fight provides a symbolic structure of dominant themes beneath the surface of life: the “animal savagery, male narcissism, opponent gambling, status rivalry, mass excitement, and blood sacrifice.” Drawing a parallel to the more civilized audience that attends Macbeth to understand its own realities, “Balinese go to cockfights to find out what a man, usually composed, aloof, almost obsessively self-absorbed, a kind of moral autocosm, feels like when, attacked tormented, challenged, insulted, and driven in result to the extremes of fury, he has totally triumphed or been brought totally low.” Peering over the shoulders of spectators, Geertz understood that the beasts were more than surrogates, extensions, or symbols of themselves. The mechanisms of the cock’s body was animated by a spirit that was the opposite of humanity; it was an animality defined positively and in opposition to those men who bred, fed, trained, and pitted the birds. *** In the last week of October, a man in a chicken suit stood outside the state capitol building in West Virginia in a lonely, absurd stunt. He was trying to raise support and awareness for legalizing cockfighting in the state. For his arguments before a statehouse, perhaps he could have called upon the careers of George Washington or Thomas Jefferson 50 The Harvard Advocate

who once raised cocks. He could have noted that Benjamin Franklin proposed the gamecock for the national bird or perhaps he could have quoted a defense of the sport given by Abraham Lincoln, which he delivered (certainly with a precise eloquence) after working as a fight referee. He might have mentioned that the last words of Socrates were to settle a debt over cockfights, and Themistocles inspired his troops to defeat the Persians by pointing at the bravery of two sparring cocks nearby. But confirming these facts is difficult, and for the man dressed as a bird in West Virginia, they were probably irrelevant to his argument. Not many people would have heard him anyway. Corrida de toros, the bullfights of matadors and elaborate ceremony, is still a central, celebrated event in Spanish culture. The costumes are wonderful and ornate, speaking to a deep and lush tradition of centuries. By the end of the match, thick blood flows from open wounds on the shoulders of the beast and down its flanks, coating the fur in a wet paint of browns and reds. On handheld Nintendo gaming devices, the enormously popular “Pokemon” offers the chance for users to capture and train mythical creatures for fights in a world full of likeminded trainers. The battles are bloodless and carefully regulated as each opponent takes turns hurling fireballs, bubbles, or crushing jaws to strike the other. With each blow, the injured creature blinks and its bar of life slides closer to zero. The storyline is one of aspiration and achievement where trainers showcase their dedication, experience, and skill during battles in large arenas with high stakes. Since 1996, Nintendo has sold over 193 million copies of the successive editions, and sales have almost quadrupled since 2005. But in nature documentaries, shot with high definition clarity, mountain goats rear back and smash their skulls against one another on a vertical mountain terrain. Their bodies are fascinating artifacts of anatomy and natural selection, while their behavior flickers with shadows of human intellect and emotion. The bloodied and vanquished loser is tragedy at the highest resolution, and a sense of power and majesty is packaged as a panning camera angle or a flyover shot. When St. Augustine left the fighting roosters, the thoughts raced through his mind, “How could such striking things escape the memory of three diligent inquirers? In order to spare my strength, nothing more was done by me that day, except that it was my custom to go over half a book of Virgil with them before the evening meal. And we were everywhere giving careful attention to moderation, which no one failed to approve. But to observe it when one is pursuing something eagerly, is extremely difficult and rare.”

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At Customs Fanny Howe

There is an ocean under the sea. The sea has become a field of yellow wheat. The ocean stays fluid underneath. Shrimp grow in it. They are attached by gravity to the cell of form. Slabs of quartz and ore and tobacco-brown figurines all insects stand sentinel on top of here with the orbs UFOs, and patrolling choppers. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Why am I so scared?â&#x20AC;?

52 The Harvard Advocate

“A new kind of person is crossing the border daily. It’s a part of something lost and forlorn.” A fragment that can’t find what has lost it, or illuminate what’s going on, or what it’s seeing through. “It’s not a poet, a robot, a tourist, an insect or a terrorist.” It’s Little Lord Loneliness..

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Standing in line with this piteous being Is like waiting at a relocation center Where the meek will no longer inherit the earth Because they have left their hiding places. “Nudity might bring peace Because two nudes have to embrace To erase their embarrassment.” But in the face of this object, Negotiation hasn’t got a chance. “We only see him prostrate once And then he is a patient In a polyester suit.. We glimpse his arm And the needle going in. Then we hear him whisper “I did it.” But we are never sure which “it” he means.”

54 The Harvard Advocate

“Once words were conclusive, no matter what The author or the reader wanted. A contagion of angels swarmed around the novel where the hero lay Without his author to revive him. The deed was done. The words stacked up in columns. The acts of characters were the first manifestation of robotic thinking. Inevitable, the way the book ended in a hovel. Where one stokes the fire, one blows a cannonball into the air, And the reader finds a connection.. It’s as if a day was always a chapter, its parameters fixed And offered to the reader as a puzzle.”

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“Sometimes I Only look into children’s faces. Bless them, I suggest to passersby Being mature and unnecessary. But no one believes.”

There was rain on the porthole of the plane, Because rain rains upwards in time. The clouds were below with the unity of the past. Bits of people erased. God saw this, but didn’t really laugh. Slowly, as with anything else, God turned Into a blur. This mystery hurt. Who? “Both you and the passenger beside you Who you will never see again In any sense as faithfully as then.”

56 The Harvard Advocate

One has perseverance but is full of fear. Another has no perseverance but is brave. “Which one would you rather sit beside?” “My stamina isn’t up to either. My brain is like the sun I can’t look at.” “Or like an animal tired in its grave.” “Devils stroll with angels into our daily lives But they don’t know who is which.” “From burned forest to subway hole, What can’t we recognize but must?” “My cosmology was an impossible tangle Of planets and stars crashing into each other.” “Strands, yes, of fine colors, that glorified eyesight And the ability to recognize.... a strange trust.”

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Rendition is an interpretation, An explanation Of something not clear, Persecution and surrender, Translation and the handing over Of prisoners to countries Where torture is. Pass through customs if you can and do not joke with the man. You will leave when you have to, and return, playing a whole album of renditions of songs you loved when you were young. “Sing along like an old man in child’s clothing. “

58 The Harvard Advocate

I told him that decisions are only guesses. Suicide is even hard to decide on when you are already dying. Pebbles like snow under seventy degree sunshine. It is this place, part symbolic of something I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know. Each object on this table leads to the object beside it and all the way to Where there is no one left to call it anything.

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One is continuous in striking new paths. Redirected energies every second on the ground. “See a need, respond, inspire others if you can. Fight the inability to let go of power. Even if it destroys others and an idea that someone can’t give up.” Vocation, mutual. The person or place wants you as much as you want another.

60 The Harvard Advocate

“I hauled so many children after me with ropes, and spears, and nets like sea-creatures that others would eat that without them I have no purpose.” As in the Gospel account, I believed in their belief. But now there would be what? For he, Peter, Was kneeling, “Go away from me.” The brother who she didn’t know stayed near the door, So she raced off, she stood, when the police came Seeking coherence in everything. The total machine of retribution presses on. Regardless of desire or what you did. This is incredible. “We’re falling apart.” “When I was born, everyone clapped. When I die, I hope to be happy.”

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Strangers once emerged from a tradition Where nature was seen as divine emanation. Therefore, every name contained a meaning. Now there would be what But a new value for money-numbering And the distant memory of Unicorns in a tapestry: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Please wash and love me.â&#x20AC;?

62 The Harvard Advocate

â&#x20AC;&#x153;Little Lord Loneliness is like a walking stick, inert until picked up. And it is like a person, the first, I-with few verbs left. Vertical, even when it laughs.â&#x20AC;?

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In the Animal Shelter Amy Hempel

Every time you see a beautiful woman, someone is tired of her, so the men say. And I know where they go, these women, with their tired beauty that someone doesn’t want—these women who must live like the high Sierra white pine, there since before the birth of Christ, fed somehow by the alpine wind. They reach out to the animals, day after day smoothing fur inside a cage, saying, “How is Mama’s baby? Is Mama’s baby lonesome?” The women leave at the end of the day, stopping to ask an attendant, “Will they go to good homes?” And come back in a day or so, stooping to examine a one-eyed cat, asking, as thought they intend to adopt, “How would I introduce a new cat to my dog?” But there is seldom an adoption; it matters that the women have someone to leave, leaving behind the lovesome creatures who would never leave them, had they once given them their hearts.

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ChimĂ¨res, (Vampire), 1982-1984 [Chimaeras] Annette Messager

Acrylic and oil on black and white photographs mounted on mesh and acrylic paint on wall Overall dimensions variable Collection of the artist Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris ÂŠADAGP/ Annette Messager 66 The Harvard Advocate

ChimĂ¨res, (Spider), 1982-1984 [Chimaeras] Annette Messager Acrylic and oil on black and white photographs mounted on mesh and acrylic paint on wall Overall dimensions variable Collection of the artist Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris ÂŠADAGP/ Annette Messager Winter 2010 67

Le Bestiaire Amoureux, 1990 Annette Messager 98 framed watercolors, strings H186 x L195 cm Collection of the artist Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris ÂŠADAGP/ Annette Messager 68 The Harvard Advocate

Le Bestiaire Amoureux, 1990 (detail) Annette Messager 98 framed watercolors, strings H186 x L195 cm Collection of the artist Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris ÂŠADAGP/ Annette Messager Winter 2010 69

Lion Mountain #5, Mauritius 2004 Harri Kallio Harri Kallio/Bonni Benrubi Gallery 70 The Harvard Advocate

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Benares #3, Mauritius 2002 Harri Kallio Harri Kallio/Bonni Benrubi Gallery 72 The Harvard Advocate

Benares #4, Mauritius 2004 Harri Kallio Harri Kallio/Bonni Benrubi Gallery Winter 2010 73

Benares #5, Mauritius 2004 Harri Kallio Harri Kallio/Bonni Benrubi Gallery 74 The Harvard Advocate

Wandering around, things becoming extinct, 2009 Becky James Digital projection on Plexiglass 5 minutes Winter 2010 75

Attention Chicken!, public interventions, 2007-2009 Nicholas Lampert Hard coated polystyrene foam 10’ x 7.5’ x 5’ Project assistance: Micaela O’Hurlihy www.machineanimalcollages.com 76 The Harvard Advocate

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SELF PORTRAIT, 2007 Louise Bourgeois Bronze, golden brown patina 18 x 26 1/4 x 16â&#x20AC;?; 45.7 x 66.6 x 40.6 cm. Courtesy Cheim & Read and Hauser & Wirth Photo: Christopher Burke 80 The Harvard Advocate

CHAMPFLEURETTE #2, 1999 Louise Bourgeois Watercolor, gouache, crayon, etching and pencil on paper 14 1/8 x 16 1/8â&#x20AC;?; 35.8 x 40.9 cm Private Collection Photo: Christopher Burke Winter 2010 81

MALE AND FEMALE, 2005 Louise Bourgeois Drypoint, engraving and aquatint with chine collé, diptych 18 1/4 x 25 1/2”; 46.3 x 64.7 cm. Courtesy Harlan & Weaver Photo: Christopher Burke 82 The Harvard Advocate

Breyerfest, Kentucky Horse Park, 2007 Castle McLaughlin Winter 2010 83

Detail, elk hide tipi liner Peabody Museum 12-48-10/84298 Attributed to a Yanktonai Sioux man named â&#x20AC;&#x153;Pretty Hawk,â&#x20AC;? circa 1865 Copyright 2009 President and Fellows of Harvard College Photographed by Castle McLaughlin, Associate Curator of North American Ethnography 84 The Harvard Advocate

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Mystical Nokota stallion, North Dakota, 2006 Castle McLaughlin 86 The Harvard Advocate

Untitled (Paper doll), 2008 Rebecca Lieberman Digital collage dimensions variable Winter 2010 87

School of Evolution, 1992 Gail Wight performance with fish A day long seminar was held for the fish at the San Francisco Art Institute. Prehistory, genetics, anatomy and physiology of fish, as found in classic texts, were addressed. The day culminated with a lecture on conscious evolution and possibilities for evolving out of the fish pond. 88 The Harvard Advocate

Zoo Kit, 1997 Gail Wight wooden box, felt, text test tubes, DNA in solution 6” x 12” x 18” A small wooden box with racks of test tubes holds the DNA for land, air, and sea animals, the DNA for flora to sustain them, and the DNA for a zoo keeper. A tribute to Fluxus. Winter 2010 89

Anatomies, 2003 Gail Wight from a series of 9 ink jet prints aluminum bar & silk cord 42â&#x20AC;? x 68â&#x20AC;? each 90 The Harvard Advocate

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Book/Nest Rosamond Purcell found object of two weathered books made into a nest of syllables and straw by mice. photographed by Rosamond Purcell, author of Owls Head, 2003. 92 The Harvard Advocate

Trust Workshop, 2008 Tania Bruguera Former KGB agent, street photographer, eagle, monkey, photographic paper, printer, ink, and photograph of Felix Dzerzhinsky This performance/installation took the form of a workshop in which Russian citizens were invited to share with the program conductor, a former KGB agent, their lingering distrust of Soviet officials. They told stories of personal misfortune or political persecution. The agent used specialized skills acquired in Cold War training to redress the harmful psychological repercussions of the era, and to mend the generational and ideological gaps that separate the Russian people In conjunction, Bruguera established a makeshift portrait photography studio. Participants were invited to have their portraits taken beneath an iconic framed photograph of Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Bolshevik secret police. Visitors could choose to hold either a live eagle or a monkey dressed in childrenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s clothes, symbolizing, respectively, the choice between the establishment, history, and power, on one hand, and youth, fun, and the freedoms of capitalism, on the other.. The choice is the choice of new Russia, to cling to conventional ideology or to shirk its oppressive grasp and move forward. Winter 2010 93

Sweetgrass, 2009 Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor 101 minutes film Photo by Lucien Castaing-Taylor Sweetgrassthemovie.com. Distributed by Cinema Guild. 94 The Harvard Advocate

No one steers the bird, 2009 Daniel Wenger Length of twine, architectural board and taxidermy bird dimensions variable

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Cell 204 Liz Hamilton and Peter Brodfuerer This research was conducted to explore, on a cellular level, what makes a leech start swimming, and what makes it stop. If we can understand the cellular mechanisms of decision-making in the very simple system that is the leech, maybe someday we will be able to map out exactly how the cells in more complex brains interact to make decisions. Leeches donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have a single centralized brain like we do. They just have these little clumps of nervous cells, ganglia, distributed at regular intervals along their nerve cords. Each one acts like a mini-brain controlling its section of the body. This picture shows one of these clumps, the connectives are the main nerve cord running along the length of the leechâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s body connecting all of the ganglia, and allowing them to communicate with one another so that the movements in each section can be coordinated with those in the others. 96 The Harvard Advocate

medusae Maria Vassileva

underwater they are terribly farsighted, your body blurs as you approach. their bodies are set elsewhere. heavy chandeliers sinking with chains braided by wax, tempting you to reach into their folds and search them for whatever you threw into the murky sea, see if they would spill out or harden like shells. you peel one, look for the heart, highly organized water, it is shaking. you find a stone, apply pressure, watch it shatter.

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Magic Kingdom Come D. A. Powell

Let in the needy, the glutinous, the bald-headed children nearly posthumous. Finish each thought with a sprinkle of pixie dust. Hello, once formidable kingdom. Goodbye. Usually, the days are crowded hot. The line into tomorrowâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s weightless zone takes considerable agency. Baby strollers bump against ones anklebone. What a hangover one has. Yes. One does. Every choo-choo completes a similar circuit. Zippedy bippity. Almost merry enough to propel us into the firework-fretted fume. How we do persist, ourselves and little urchins, when every new attraction warns us off: this is where the heart stops pumping. This is where some big bad thing will get you and shake the marrow down into your toes. It were a barf. A blur. As pink as cotton candy. Once more into the splash. A tiny choir shrieks Please, Mr. Toad. The snug bar lifts too soon.

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â&#x20AC;&#x201D;for Vincent Guerra

One Big Garden Ben Cosgrove

A man’s nature runs either to herbs, or to weeds; therefore let him seasonably water the one, and destroy the other. -Francis Bacon We can in fact only define a weed, mutatis mutandis, in terms of the well-known definition of dirt - as matter out of place. What we call a weed is in fact merely a plant growing where we do not want it.

-E.J. Salisbury, The Living Garden

“Aquatic plants are found in most of the lakes and ponds in New Hampshire. They are a natural component and a vital link to a healthy and diverse aquatic ecosystem. When aquatic plants interfere with man’s activities, the plants are quickly designated “weeds” – something that must be removed.” - N.H. Department of Environmental Services ----

ew Hampshire has weeds. An infamous invasive plant called milfoil arrived in the state several years ago, probably as a stowaway on some tourist’s propeller, and lakes and ponds across the entire region have been choking to death on it ever since. There are several varieties of the species, only a few of which pose real threats to the integrity of the ecosystems they happen upon, but it is variable milfoil, one of the more malevolent ones, that has been routing the northeast lately. Winter 2010 99

Variable milfoil, it should be noted, is a robust and endlessly fascinating organism, one that has been the scourge of water bodies across the continent. It floats in the water, taking root wherever and however often - one plant will usually set down several distinct sets of roots - it feels the need. After seizing hold of the ground, it sends its long, slimy stalks towards the surface, where they transform (hence, “variable”) into a leafy flower. Once it flowers, it’s able to pollinate, and the steps between that and total takeover of a body of water are few and short. As the New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services will tell you, it’s nearly impossible to kill too, which obviously accounts for much of the problem. It has been subjected to chemical treatment, manual harvesting, and even strategically deployed insects and viruses (this latter helped achieve a 95% reduction of the milfoil in Chesapeake Bay). The residents of one pond in upstate New Hampshire, long plagued by the stuff, recently threw all their chips in to eliminate it, draining the entire watershed area totally dry for three years on the assumption that this would simply starve the plants out. To their dismay, when they refilled the lake at the end of the test period, the weeds reemerged almost instantly. Milfoil dies hard. Of the other various methods the state is employing in its effort to eliminate the offending plants from its water bodies, the most entertaining involves what is called a DASH (Diver Assisted Suction Harvesting) Unit, basically an 8’x10’ barge outfitted with a gas-powered vacuum and built-in collection area. The process consists of divers dragging a comically large hose down into the lake and spending the better part of a day laboriously cramming it full of plants. These are then sucked up onto the barge, where the sunburned DES employee onboard directs their broken, soupy remains into 5-gallon buckets to be carried off at the end of the day. Kayaks swarm around the barge collecting plant fragments; a pontoon boat looms nearby with a radio and equipment for the divers. As the image of this whole ensemble—the big support team flanking a barge engaged in the act of desperately sucking plants out of the bottom of a lake—might suggest, the milfoil issue is something that is being taken quite seriously, not only in New Hampshire but in dealings with invasive plants across the country. For powerful reasons ranging from the aesthetic to the economic, absolutely no one wants to see a lake become a wetland. The weed’s devoted combatants know their fight to be one that is necessary both for a balanced ecosystem and for human satisfaction with the landscape. They understand that nature is not equivalent with wilderness, and indeed that the latter can severely restrict the human experience of the former. This is why some spend hours manually yanking tens of gallons of plant matter from lake bottoms. We are fiercely protective of our pastoral places – when wilderness tries sneaking back into them, it stands to face as much opposition as a proposed parking lot might in the same place. *** Meanwhile, down in the southeastern part of the state, bulldozers are 100 The Harvard Advocate

lumbering purposefully back and forth around dozens of construction sites, relocating onramps and pushing asphalt over newly cleared land around Interstate 93. Here, construction crews are engaged in the long process of widening the Salem-Manchester stretch of that highway from four lanes to eight in an effort to significantly iron out the commute between New Hampshire’s largest urban area and the Massachusetts border. Though this region is the most densely populated in the state, the highway still manages to cut through a lot of forests and wetlands as it winds down into Boston’s outer suburbs. The wilderness around the highway is different, however, from the areas to the north and west, where the state is dealing with the milfoil issue and taking such an active interest in preventing one species from dominating an environment. These woods are largely inaccessible to people—they’re not organized; there aren’t hiking trails (or often, any real access points); and let’s not forget that there’s already an interstate highway charging through it all. Substantial efforts have been made to minimize the damage to these southern NH wetlands, but admirable as these have been, in a way it seems that this sort of do-no-harm environmentalism is missing something. Aldo Leopold, pioneer of American conservationism, wrote in the late forties of a “land ethic,” a new brand of environmental thought hinging on the idea that people ought to be conscious of their relationship to their land and the other things on it, that this consciousness should automatically guide any changes they make to the land and prevent them from considering any action that would break or betray that tie. And expanding a highway into the woods isn’t honoring or integrating with the landscape, isn’t tying people to this land in any meaningful way. Whatever the steps taken to protect the wetlands from our influence, all they can ever achieve is exactly that: protection. Or, more basically, separation, a line clearly drawn between places of man and places of nature. In this way, efforts like the ones around I-93 tend to protect the land but not the human relationship to it. In fact, the goal of the highway, to streamline a channel of mobility and implicitly to make the region even more a part of Boston’s ever-widening suburban wingspan (a major selling point of the highway expansion was the taxable residential development an easier commute would promise the area), seems more likely to destabilize regional identity than to reaffirm or build on it. Even in the abstract, highways, far from being complements to the land, have always tended to exist more in spite of it, flying over ravines and cutting into mountains in defiance of the landscape’s natural contour. This isn’t by any means to say that building a highway is necessarily a bad thing, or for that matter that it’s unnatural to take an active role in deciding what sort of plants should populate your lakes. In each of these situations, a human hand is simply trying to guide the landscape in one direction or another: either towards the organized, efficient, and urban, or towards an idea of nature as both accessible and unspoiled. Both are ordered landscapes, well under human control, and favorable (one directly, one indirectly) to different sorts of human comfort and economic progress. But rarely do they coexist. There’s a pronounced tendency toWinter 2010 101

day to adhere to this clearly delineated division between places of nature and pastoral enjoyment on one hand and places of human development on the other. *** The romanticization of wilderness never really showed up in the public consciousness until the mid-19th century (an arrival that suspiciously coincided with the industrial revolution). For the first Europeans to land in North America, the wilderness was something entirely different, a thing threatening and terrifying, the place where order gave out and the unknown ruled. Accounts by colonial settlers depict it variously as “ungodly,” “savage” or “great and terrible”; to their minds, the noblest, most honorable thing to do was to somehow order or subdue the wild and turn it to productive human use, to make something organized and godly from the malevolent void. In a 1992 article called “The Trouble with Wilderness,” William Cronon summarizes the mindset of this period: When Adam and Eve were driven from that garden, the world they entered was a wilderness that only their labor and pain could redeem. Wilderness, in short, was a place to which one came only against one’s will, and always in fear and trembling. Whatever value it might have aross solely from the possibility that it might be “reclaimed” and turned toward human ends – planted as a garden, say, or a city upon a hill. In its raw state, it had little to offer civilized men and women. In 1964, Leo Marx published “The Machine in the Garden,” examining the conflicting relationship between the industrial and pastoral ideals in America, and lamenting the American mind’s “tragic ambivalence” between them. He locates the American’s ideal landscape firmly in rurality and focuses on a discussion of what he calls the “middle landscape”, an ideal situated somewhere in the vast interstice between untouched, foreboding wilderness and, say, Los Angeles. The middle landscape is characterized by a certain give and take, or an equilibrium between the forces of the land and those of the people that work upon it. The landscape historian J.B. Jackson wrote glowingly of the American “vernacular landscape,” which he defines in similar terms. This middle/vernacular landscape tends to be fiercely maintained by those who live in it. The people going to such lengths to hold milfoil back from overtaking a lake or pond are preserving the idea of nature while preventing wilderness from creeping in. We have the technological ability, and indeed the obligation, to shape and maintain our landscape wisely. This has led, though, to a situation where the industriallydriven need to create dedicated places for humans and machines seems to have pushed us to feel an equally burning need to compensate by casting other parts of the land in the role of “nature.” And while it is not without clear environmental advantages, if left unchecked this attitude could potentially be as harmful to the human landscape as the most hyper-urban overdevelopment. Carried too far, it can involve (and has 102 The Harvard Advocate

involved) the cordoning off of large swathes of land, effectively removing these from time and cutting off the dialogue that should exist between people and place. People like the milfoil weeders, however, want neither to conquer the wild nor to blindly genuflect before it; rather, they want the noisome plant gone because it threatens a relationship with the land that is important to them, one that depends on their ability to keep their lakes and ponds balanced and accessible. The “garden” in Marx’s title is his metaphor for the pastoral, the rural ideal he espouses and explores in the book. And it is apt. Gardens provide the simplest ways for people to cultivate little natures of their own design. They grew to prominence on the wave of the internationally resonant Romantic fetishization of the natural world, offering people an accessible, often personally-tailored version of nature. In a way, gardens made of wilderness what zoos and house pets made of wild animals, representing a unpredictable, overwhelming, and dangerous thing in a setting that was fully and unabashedly of human design and under human control. A lot of what we do to our landscape has everything to do with the array we decide we want to be greeted with when we amble around or gaze from our windows, and with a specific idea of how much wilderness we’d like to seep in and where. Our landscape history is one marked by an admiring – even humbled and awestruck - but always cautious view of wildness. It’s an attitude that strives to keep nature nearby, but under control and at arm’s length, always in a form that we can easily access and understand.

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Atticus Andrew Nunnelly

Marcy finished picking up after the dogs and tied the plastic grocery bag with two simple knots. The three greyhounds barked when they saw she was done because they wanted treats. “Hush dogs,” she said. She crossed the yard and opened the side gate that led to the front of the house—and the two late Thursday afternoon trashcans that would be emptied on Friday morning garbage day. She swung the gate behind her as she usually did and proceeded forward across St. Augustine grass of the front yard. When she did so the purebred, silvery dogs raised their heads like chickens around a cock. They were waiting for the click of the gate. This was the sign to stay put, though the opposite had been true during their racing days. The starting cages would snap open, and nothing would have been better than to finally sink their teeth into the fake white rabbit that was always just out of reach. Men would have bad days because of them, and some lucky men would name their own kids after their winning bets. Now, standing around in the yard with ears pinned back, the dogs can’t quite remember how the track and rabbit would, without fail, be replaced by wire cages and rough human hands, but they remember other things. Before they could really understand what they heard, they were running—the three of them— streaking across the yard. There had been no click, and the first dog to hit the gate and force it open yelped. Marcy hadn’t even reached the trashcans when they ran past. In all her years of rescuing dogs, she had never once yelled after the ones who got out. They would come back. Blocks away, an old man was trimming stray branches off of a tree in his front yard. The look in his eyes was that of a meticulous man, but his dry, cracked hands made him clumsy. His white undershirt was a good fit, and the wrinkled dimples of his forehead overflowed their narrow banks with sweat. The sunlight coming through the branches and leaves made it look like he was underwater. Occasionally he would stop his work and look toward his house, perhaps in anticipation that his wife might bring him some water or lemonade. Across the street, a boy passed by his living room window and saw the old man cutting the trees. He doesn’t know the man’s name, but 104 The Harvard Advocate

he doesn’t remember many people’s names. His mother says that he should be starting high school now, but the high school said no, so now he doesn’t go to school “for the time being,” his mother said. His own name is Peter, and it helps him understand the man cutting trees better if he imagines his name is Peter too. Moving away from the window, Peter picked up a pen from his mother’s desk and went into the kitchen to draw on the newspaper at the kitchen table. He would add details to the pictures. Not mustaches and missing teeth, but instead birds and other people, standing in the background. His principal once told his mother that he was troubled, but Peter hardly ever got in trouble. His hands got dark with newsprint, and Peter started thinking about the other Peter, who could still be heard rummaging in the yard. When he was younger, Peter would play in his front yard or in the street, and once, the old man came and talked to him. The old man reminded Peter of a horse riding character from a movie, and his voice was like a bassoon. He didn’t introduce himself as is the way of most old gentlemen, but his name is, in fact, not Peter, but Sergei. Sergei asked Peter questions he didn’t understand about his father, and then he said he was sorry. Peter was still thinking about the Western he had seen and finally asked Sergei what he knew about horses. Instead of answering the question directly, Sergei began telling a story, as is the way of most old men. He said that when his parents first arrived in America with him when he was very young, they had had a very rough time. His father had been a skilled taxidermist, which Sergei explained is when you stuff an animal, and Peter nodded in understanding. “He could make no money doing this in the cities, though, so he answered a letter from his older brother, telling him we would join him in his new home in Kentucky. He lived in a small town outside of Louisville, Kentucky, and he worked in the only ambulance. My father was able to start stuffing the animals that the hunters wanted as trophies, and we were soon able to live in our own small house, and my mother worked in a restaurant.” His uncle had always told his father that they should all go see a horse race in Louisville. Sergei’s father would sit amongst stuffed ducks and cardinals and think about the horses gliding over the mud and all of the rich men cheering their favorites. Sergei’s father had never gambled outside of poker games with friends, but the thought of hugging a horse with a collar or roses lifted him beyond the musty seclusion of bird feathers. He began setting aside money for his first bet. “Then one day, my father took my mother and I to Louisville for a horse race. He asked us to dress in our church clothes, and he wore a fancy tie he had made for himself out of the colorful feathers of ducks. In the car, we passed horse farms that went on forever, and I could see the horses playing games and asking their owners for food along the fences.” The track was exactly how Sergei’s father had envisioned it, and he kept his hand in his pocket, feeling the greasy dollars and lint inside. Sergei watched as his father placed a $50 bet on a horse called “Sea Wolf,” and when his father finished, he turned and winked at his son. Winter 2010 105

Because they couldn’t afford seats in the grandstand, they stood along the fourth turn railing. “When the race started, Sea Wolf was in the middle of the pack, and we were all yelling. The leader started slowing down though, and Sea Wolf took the lead! My father’s voice broke when he screamed with excitement, and our horse sprinted toward our turn, leaving the others in his dust. My father was watching his $50 become $500, and my mother couldn’t contain herself.” Sea Wolf started making the fourth turn, and as Sergei clutched the white railing, something began to happen. Sea Wolf’s leg buckled in the mud, snapping her femur. The jockey was thrown as the horse fell and lay motionless and unconscious. The other horses just barely avoided the two as they flew toward the finish line. The horse made horrible sounds as it lay there in the mud, looking wildly around in pain. “The horse looked at me, and I yelled at it to keep running. It was sad, but I didn’t understand. Three men came out and restrained the horse while a fourth inspected Sea Wolf’s leg. With his back still turned to us and the grandstand, he brought out a needle. The horse kept screaming, and then that was it, and it was silent.” Sergei’s father lost his bet, and a man in a nice suit and hat made fun of his tie as they exited through the turnstiles. The story made Peter upset, but he didn’t say so, and he began playing again as a sign for Sergei to return to his yard. Peter kept scribbling in the newspaper, only stopping momentarily to drink a glass of orange juice. His mother called, and he explained to her what he was doing. She said she would pick up dinner on her way home. Sergei opened his garage door and brought a trashcan out to the curb for trash pick up. His white shirt somehow seemed even whiter now as it soaked through and sparkled with sweat. Very few cars were on the road. Sergei started working in the flowerbed nearest the front door. He wasn’t wearing gloves for this, and as he pulled dollar weeds from the flowers, black soil would get stuck in the cracks in his hands. From the kitchen table, Peter first heard dogs barking and then the shouts of a man and then something closer to screams. He went again to the living room window. Sergei lay on his back in his yard, and the three greyhounds were sinking their teeth into him and scratching at him with their paws. Peter could see some of Sergei’s blood on his white undershirt, and it scared him. Peter thought about the other Peter being attacked by the dogs, he thought about Kentucky, and he remembered what his mother had always told him about being a gentleman. Peter walked out of his front door, and he crossed his yard. As he crossed the street, the largest kitchen knife his mother owned reflected the sunlight like a playground slide. Without hesitation and with the methodical movements of a livestock farmer, Peter brought the knife into the dog nearest himself, and he thought of butter. The dog reeled on Peter with its jaws but too slowly. Sergei was so badly torn that he wasn’t fighting as much anymore. Peter moved to the second dog with equally passionless movements. A butcher might have had more misgivings than Peter. The third dog, now without the advantage of his pack, 106 The Harvard Advocate

lifted his blood-filled jowls and growled. Peter stepped over Sergei and lifted the knife. This time, though, it was the dog that was quicker, and it ran back down the sidewalk in the direction it had come from. Peter turned from Sergei and the two dead dogs, and he started walking back toward his house with the dripping knife at his side. A crowd of neighbors had gathered on the sidewalk, and they quickly rushed to Sergei after letting Peter pass. Peter cleaned his mother’s knife off, and sat back down at the kitchen table. He wished his father was there, but he quickly forgot about everything as he returned to the newspaper. Marcy opened her front door. It was a prospective adoptee, who was there to see her greyhounds. Marcy was about to explain that her dogs had just gotten out and hadn’t come back yet, the third dog wandered up the sidewalk to her front porch. It smelled the other woman before nuzzling against Marcy’s outstretched hands. Marcy sighed and said, “Yes, of course, these are great family pets.” The dog had already licked its jowls clean on the walk home.

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The Catcher and his Garden Mark Chiusano

he day that Carl Hagenbeck’s father decided to change the family business it was raining in St. Pauli, the Hamburg suburb where the family lived. The dock on the banks of the Elbe was sweating. The boats had arrived late. Carl Hagenbeck’s father was and always had been a fishmonger, so he was used to the haggling that necessarily took place on the wharves. He was used to the fishermen delivering excuses instead of their promised catch. But today was remarkable even under normal circumstances. The fishermen had come to the elder Hagenbeck without any fish at all: the rain had fallen in flood-like torrents, they said, and the ships could hardly keep their nets down for long. Instead, they brought him six live seals. The seals were splashing and grunting in a barrel that one of the sailors had hoisted up onto Hagenbeck’s trading table. Little Carl was about to turn five. It was spring in Germany. He peered up at the strange creatures on the counter wide-eyed, on tip-toes so he could see. Carl’s father was tickled by the animals—he was a robust man and greatly interested in natural history—so he bought some wooden tubs for their house in Spielbudenplatz and charged an entry fee of one Hamburg shilling (about a penny) per head. He took the show on the road to Berlin, where the lookers-on were entranced. Years later, Carl’s father would sell those seals to local circuses, who brought them back to Berlin advertised as mermaids. Not so sophisticated, Carl remembered his father saying, those Berliners. Carl Hagenbeck didn’t go to school much. This was 1850 or so. Another thing he remembers his father saying: I don’t expect you to be a parson. But he was very much taken with his father’s new work, and he followed him on all his endeavors: trips to the great cities in France and England, selling and buying wild animals, keeping the books, organizing transport. When Carl Hagenbeck’s father told Carl very solemnly that he would have to decide what business he would choose for a profession—fishmongering or the animal trade—Carl Hagenbeck leapt at the latter. His father told him it would be very hard but it also had the chance to be very exciting and financially rewarding. Their business, at 108 The Harvard Advocate

that time, had recently established its own menagerie. Carl Hagenbeck nodded and said that fishmongering was not for him. The surviving pictures of Carl Hagenbeck are mostly from his later years, when he had become famous for zoo-building. He is dignified. In photographical portraits, he has close-cropped hair that is turning gray at the tips, hair that he must have combed incessantly, or rubbed over with oil. He has a wide nose, and grandfatherly eyes, and a white beard that is thickest at his chin and under his neck. In different clothing he might look biblical, but he always has a black suit on, and it is always buttoned to the top. But at fifteen, when he dropped out of school to build an animal catching empire, he must have looked different. He travelled the world by rail and steamer in search of rare creatures. He was young. He described Africa: “Daybreak at Atbara. A gentle breeze stirs the grassy steppes; the trees are suffused with the bright glare of a rising African sun.” He developed a network of agents. He organized the arrival of animals in ports, found them births on barges, worked them through customs in pairs. He was busy. During the 1860s and 1870s zoological gardens—we call them zoos—were being built around the world at the rate of almost one per year, and someone needed to fill them up. In 1870 Hagenbeck gets a telegram from one of his best agents, Lorenzo Cassanova. Cassanova had owned a small circus, but he found employment under Hagenbeck eleven years earlier when he lost his dog-and-monkey show in St Petersburg to a fire. Since then he has been Hagenbeck’s best man in Africa. In the telegram he says something like look, Carl, I’m dreadfully ill, but me and Migoletti—this was another agent—are driving our caravans up to Suez. Meet us there to get them to Europe. It’s eight days from Germany to Egypt. There, in the courtyard of the Suez Hotel, Hagenbeck finds the animals waiting for him: elephants, giraffes, buffalo, cages containing lions, cheetahs, wild birds. There are jackals howling in the corners, and monkeys groping at the bars. The racket is deafening. The hotel proprietor pats Hagenbeck on the back, glad to see him, ready to see the animals go. On the train to Alexandria, the ostriches escape. One of the railway trucks catches fire. The cars travel through the night, and in the morning Hagenbeck and his agents feed the animals. Cassanova dies of illness in the city. Hagenbeck mourns but leaves the next day, giant wooden cranes lifting his elephants and the other heavy animals from the docks to the steamers. For the voyage to Trieste Hagenbeck buys young goats for their milk, to feed the grazers, and then for their meat, to satisfy the lions. At the port, the whole city comes out to watch the parade. They cheer when the big animals pass. It is like the march of a victorious army, coming down the plank and up the street in pairs. All in all, the caravan consists of five elephants, fourteen giraffes, four Nubian buffaloes, a rhinoceros, twelve antelopes and gazelles, two warthogs, four aardvarks, and no fewer than 60 carnivores: lions, panthers, cheetahs. This from Hagenbeck’s records, of which there are many, all of them scrupulous. His records indicate many imports, many creatures carried many places. Hagenbeck once estimated that, for twenty consecutive years, Winter 2010 109

he traveled over 50,000 miles annually. He presided over enormous projects, like the fabled transportation of 63 elephants from Sri Lanka to Europe. Eventually, however, the enterprise peaked. Competitors arrived. It was 1874 and Hagenbeck was looking to diversify his business. It wasn’t until after a particularly arduous reindeer shipment that someone suggested to Hagenbeck how nice it would be to have, with the reindeer, a family or troupe of native Lapplanders to go with them. It was the summer. The Lapplanders built a hut on Hagenbeck’s property, and people came to observe them in a natural setting. When they left, Hagenbeck replaced them with a Sudanese tribe. The Eskimos stayed longest. It was a family of four. Hagenbeck described the mother as “far from ugly, even from the European standpoint.” The father, Ukubak, was a master with the kayak, and used to do tricks in the pool Hagenbeck had built for him, entertaining the paying guests. He never tired of flipping himself and his kayak over, upside down in the water, and righting it again, to tremendous applause. When the Emperor of all Germany was in attendance, Ukubak stayed under for such a devilishly long time that the monarch leapt from his seat in horror and asked Hagenbeck if something was the matter. Hagenbeck watched calmly. Ukubak resurfaced to everyone’s relief. “In April of the following year, 1878,” Hagenbeck wrote, “the Eskimos returned to their native land, greatly enriched by their travels.” Lots of people traded in humans back then. Panoramic shows were popular. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West performance was a hit all over Europe, and his raging Injuns made the people thirst for more. Hagenbeck was a quencher. In reference to arranging a second ethnographic show, he exclaimed, “the money is still just lying there in the street, you only have to know how to pick it up!” There’s more, but you get the idea. His father said he’d never be a parson. There are too many stories to tell. In 1892, half of Hagenbeck’s animals came down with a strange sickness, vomiting followed by diarrhea and convulsions. They all died. The next month cholera swept through Hamburg. If anyone had diagnosed it in the lions they could have saved thousands. Or: Hagenbeck once bred and sold a liger for millions. Even: at the turn of the century he organized expeditions to search for a hulking beast, half elephant and half dragon, whom European hunters had seen in Rhodesian swamplands, whose caves held ancient drawings of heaving behemoths, spitting fire and water. The more famous story, however, is what Hagenbeck did closer to home, the project that was more important to him than human trafficking. He was always more of an animal man anyway. This was of course the construction of his park in Stellingen, the existence of which made him the father of the modern zoo. It was simple, really. Zoos and menageries had been around for a thousand years, but not as we think of them now. They were dark indoor places: the dank dens of exotic beasts. Woe unto the viewer if the strange creatures were to break free from their imprisoned confines. These were animals that you could not know, unspeakable mythological beings whom it was necessary to keep under lock and key. 110 The Harvard Advocate

But the far reaches of the colonial systems were giving people a wider (if cruder) view of the world around them. They wanted to see animals—whom they knew to exist on the plains of Africa and the jungles of India—interacting in their natural habitats, not penned up one-byone in boxes. They wanted safe transport to a wild world. They wanted limited escape, for themselves and for the creatures. Hagenbeck saw the demand, and it fit with his own inclinations. He had been working for years to develop a humane system for training circus animals, one that more resembled education than indoctrination (“Brutes, after all, are beings akin to ourselves,” he wrote). The natural continuation of this was a wish to display his animals in a way that was comfortable for them: removing bars and cages and replacing them with open spaces, wide trenches being the only thing separating carnivores from viewers. Besides, it was financially sounder. Buildings where animals were kept had to be heated and cooled expensively. It was much easier to let the animals back outdoors to acclimatize themselves to their new environment. Visitors got to see animals in action, animals that in old zoos would have been lying down behind railings. Plus, Hagenbeck had discovered long ago that happy animals stayed alive, and when menagerie deaths went down, profits went up. The park at Stellingen was his grand experiment, a turn-of-the-lastcentury Disneyworld. He found the perfect place: “a splendid estate on elevated ground.” To realize his vision, he dug valleys, raised mountains over creaking wooden scaffolds—shifting 40,000 cubic meters of earth—rerouting rivers and planting native flora. He measured the

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longest distances that his bigger animals could jump, and dug moats of three times that distance between pedestrian paths and the animal confines. But other than that separation, it was as if the zoo-goer was on safari with the lions, swimming with the hippopotami. This is a model that zoos continue to follow—an experiment in transplanting you to a faraway (and realistic looking) animal habitat. The park—Hagenbeck called it his garden—opened on May 7th, 1907. There was a coat and tie celebration at the entrance. The gates were massive, and supported sculptures of polar bears, elephant heads, spear-holding Nubians and rifle-thrusting Cherokee. The elephant trunks held lamps. Beyond the gate there rose a craggy mountain, and beyond that the paradise spread around to all sides. There was a lake with an island in the center, white bridges spanning the distance, fish kissing the water’s surface below. In the wide meadows on either side there were flamingoes and ibises. The plains stretched out until they eased into hillsides. Zebras and Peruvian shaggy yaks populated the elevated turf, while buffaloes and dwarf goats grazed together below. Lions lay on a rocky gorge next to North African sheep and families of Himalayan wild goats who watched from across the promontory. Hagenbeck was prone to boasting about his garden. “Across the plain there roam so many different kinds of herbivores that one might fancy oneself in the Garden of Eden,” he wrote. Visitors loved the park, but critics questioned the extent to which Hagenbeck’s creation represented innovation. Nigel Rothfels, author of Savages and Beasts: The Birth of the Modern Zoo, writes that some of these critics noted that zoo-builders and keepers had been moving towards Hagenbeck’s inventions all along: giving animals space, presenting them well. In Germany alone, the Berlin Zoo had a flight cage for birds decorated with cliffs and a waterfall, and in Frankfurt there was a “Tropical Landscape” for crocodiles. In part it was the sheer size of the experiment that deflected such attacks: the whole park was organized around these principles, from the smallest fishpond to the largest antelope run. But it was the advertising that really did it, Rothfels says. Hagenbeck branded his park “The 7th Wonder of the World,” and “The Zoological Garden of the Future.” It was a general public relations policy: Hagenbeck wants to save the animals, went out the call. It was what he wrote in his autobiography. It was the party line that his assistants talked, the words they fed journalists. He had always loved animals, and this was true, but he had also always loved money, and in many ways this park was a means to more of it. What few realized was that the park was, beyond a zoo, also an expansive holding ground for merchandise. The attractions were all for sale. Entertainment was a positive externality. Hagenbeck was first and foremost an animal trader. But the image stuck so well that it seems real: the zoo as paradise, where the lion lays with the sheep, where the men roam with the lion. One of Hagenbeck’s assistants wrote that the best way to save wildlife is to teach everyone else to love it. Bring people to zoos. The zoo functions as an ark. Hagenbeck is Noah, at the helm of his ship. 112 The Harvard Advocate

There is a picture of an older Hagenbeck in a top hat, watching the walruses get fed in his garden. The walrus keeper himself looks like a walrus. Hagenbeck stands in the background, flanked by visitors, and it appears that his hand is reaching down to give a walrus’ head a patriarchal touch. His eyes are clenched and his hat brim is low. In his autobiography he tells a story about catching a walrus in a northern sea. He doesn’t, by the way, ever mention Ukubak again, who must have lived close by. But he says that the young cub had been dragged on board and was crying plaintively, so plaintively that a large male heard it, and pursued the boat in a rescue attempt. It was a furious attack, the male leaping up out of the sea like some animalistic apotheosis, driving three holes with his tusks through the boat’s floor to try to save the newborn. When he brought his second batch of walruses to the garden, the first batch reacted excitedly. They foamed at the mouth, developed bloodshot eyes, patted the new arrivals on the back with their flappers and bellowed incessantly. The old ones showed the new ones what to eat, where to swim in the elaborate pool, ostensibly explaining that this Hagenbeck was friendly, and that their new home was paradise. Upon his death in 1913 Hagenbeck left the park and business to his sons, who have hung on to it. Remarkably, the company is still privately owned. The park today is much as it had been. It was destroyed during World War Two but then rebuilt to its former specifications. It continues to be an attraction. It continues to sell animals to zoos and circuses the world over. At Hagenbeck’s gravesite, a carved likeness of a lion lies draped over the tomb, sleepily. Her paw hangs over the edge with finality and she stares forward, alert. One of the last things Hagenbeck wanted to do in his zoo was put in a pasture of prehistoric animals, stationary artistic representations of lumbering stegosaurs. They were the only animals he never had a chance to catch.

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Comes the Fall Carl Phillips

But differently, the kind of bondage that’s been mostly sport – meaning competition – becoming force of habit, and then just how it’s been always: little crack in the glass that regret blows sometimes through, beyond it the branches and the foliage that they hold indifferently aloft, each leaf a ribbed sail that the wind catches, the way hunger catches, the land falling away as the sea opens out again into a loneliness that, often enough, freedom also means – doesn’t it?...As if all this time you’d been dreaming. A dream of horses. Two of them. Fitted with blinders. This, the better life, the best way. Horses, and the present future they kept thundering into…

114 The Harvard Advocate

The Jetty Carl Phillips

Some are willing to trust any anchor. Some will choose the ship anyway, no matter how anchorless and dashed, between the wind and the sea. The sea the same then as now: more blear than blue, more blue than silver – processional, seeming to blur at once increasingly and at random toward and away from where everything catches fire except what doesn’t. How they fucked him, yes, until he couldn’t, yes, but – couldn’t what. The raptor’s wing unfolds, and then folds back. We turn here, but separately. Did his eyes close. Did he close them. Look how the jetty shines in the sun, for nothing.

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Domestic Terrorism Emily Chertoff

ast year, the state of Virginia executed John Allen Muhammad. In 2002, he and his 17-year-old accomplice Lee Malvo carried out a series of thirteen random shootings in the Capitol area. The media called them the DC Snipers. The two men would station their car in an unobtrusive spot, in a leafy corner or crowded parking lot, and set up their Bushmaster XM15 semiautomatic rifle. The Bushmaster takes a .223 caliber bullet, which is designed for high-velocity firing and, when fired at a human being at a distance of two hundred yards or nearer, tears an especially large “wake” through the flesh. The two men had bored a hole for the muzzle of the rifle through the trunk of their Chevrolet Caprice; that way, they didn’t have to leave the vehicle. Malvo would wait patiently in the backseat with the Bushmaster while Muhammad selected a target. Then he would aim, and fire a single shot. Quietly, swiftly, the men would start the Chevrolet and flee, before bystanders could figure out what had happened. The two men had bonded with each other a couple of years before in Washington State, where Muhammad had drifted after a stint in the military and two failed marriages. He took the younger man for karate lessons and put him on a special diet of honey, crackers, and vitamin supplements. Malvo dropped out of high school, and he and Muhammad lived together in a homeless shelter in Bellingham. Then they came east, bouncing around between friends and acquaintances while they acquired the supplies they would need for the shootings. The only constant in their lives besides each other was their regular workout at a YMCA in Silver Spring, Maryland. Although they were not related, Malvo called Muhammad “Dad.” Around Washington that October, one could see suburban moms sprinting from errand to errand; grown men crouching behind their cars while pumping gas; office workers weaving down the sidewalk because the local morning news had run a segment on how “erratic walking” might save lives. Malvo—at this point, of course, no one knew it was Malvo—had good aim. Ten of the shootings were fatal. Anyone could be targeted as easily as another, and if one were targeted, one were likely dead. 116 The Harvard Advocate

According to several stories run in the Post, this was supposed to upset children. My family lived in Washington that year, and I was twelve; but truth be told the killings didn’t bother me much. My brother, who was nine and sensitive, did not adapt to the situation so easily. On the day of the Aspen Hill shootings, a substitute teacher was running his fourth grade class at a public school for gifted students. Around 11am, another teacher came into the room and said something to her. And the substitute just couldn’t control herself. But first she announced that there had been an emergency, and that the students should sit quietly at their desks. She and the other teacher began to cover the windows with construction paper. The students had probably all been in school on September 11th and during at least one anthrax scare. At this point in their disaster response training, they were not satisfied to know that what had occurred was an “emergency.” They began to pass notes. The most common theory was that there had been a crime in the area. Terrorism was ruled out, since Aspen Hill is two towns over from Chevy Chase, where we then lived, and the area—my brother observes—doesn’t have anything worth terrorizing. Although the snipers had made their first kill the day before, in the parking lot of a Shoppers Food Warehouse in Glenmont, none of the students connected that circumstance to their own. Several minutes later, the principal came into the room and announced that the school was in a “code blue situation.” This statement had no particular meaning for any of the children, although it does convey a sense of severity and impending danger, the way that in a movie a shot of a flashing light in an airplane cockpit or on a nuclear reactor control panel frequently means something is about to explode. The phrase “code blue” did trigger in Philip vague recollections of the evacuation procedures we had both learned last year at our old school. But that was the elementary school half a block from our house. This was a different place and things had different meanings. So they stayed at their desks. It was lunch. Someone came around with food. Their classroom was really one side of a classroom that had been severed from its other half by a divider. The teacher from behind the divider came over to talk to the substitute, and the students sat and waited. By noon the notes had stopped being about the “code blue situation” and started being about other things. By one, the code blue situation came up again. At around two, the substitute—who had very briefly ventured outside the room—burst back through the door. “We’re in a code red situation!” she said. Red, as even a fourth grader knows, is a more urgent color than blue. She took them to the cubby room. This made sense. They were going to get their coats and evacuate, or their parents were going to pick them up. Then the substitute ducked down into one of the cubbies, and told them to do the same, and to sit as far back inside as possible. After a few minutes of confinement, says Philip, all the children who hadn’t yet become alarmed were starting to worry. A girl wet herself. The substitute had to take her out of the cubby room to clean her up, and she sent the girl back, but didn’t come back Winter 2010 117

with her. And they could hear her crying all the way from her desk, and the old-lady teacher from the other side of the divider trying to comfort her. The whole time, she was moaning, I’m just a substitute, I don’t know how to handle this. Philip is convinced she was having a panic attack, but she probably didn’t, because if she had, she’d have been doing more than just crying. Eventually they all went home. But about a year before the shootings began, Philip had apparently realized he was someday going to die. What scared him most about the shootings was their spontaneity. One could walk out of one’s house in the morning, and—if Malvo aimed his gun just right, and usually he did—die on the sidewalk. No forewarning. They caught Muhammad and Malvo on October 25, and the spree killings became just one more episode from childhood. If one detached from the world, it was the repeated jolts that did it—first the terrorist attacks, then the anthrax, then the shootings, and later, from politicians and the media, that intimation of impending disaster that shook the floor for years and years to come. That year Philip and I sometimes went back to our old elementary school to play ball or use the jungle gym. We also fought constantly. He was soft and needy and I couldn’t understand why. He was probably pestering me about something. It was probably the fourth or fifth time he’d asked the same question, or called me a name, or threatened to go to Mom about some week-old negligible instance of teasing. We had crossed the blacktop behind the school and were climbing up the hill to get to the baseball field. The grass was just like the grass at every public school I’ve ever attended, more dust than grass and pitted with stones. He said it again, whatever it was. So I picked up one of the pits—one might call it a large pebble, or a small rock—and threw it at him. It hit him on the upper thigh. He went down. He started to wail. I hadn’t even thrown it that hard. Threads of snot were coming down from his nose, and his face and lips were contorted and wet and red. He was a mess. I wanted him to stop, so I picked him up off the ground, and held him, and told him to calm down, and why was he crying, and if he went to Mom. He was so soft, I thought later, he’d never make it. You cannot always be in control. I realized that later. Philip already knew it. Realizing was painful and, when I did, I understood Philip a lot better.Bad things are going to happen to me and to Philip. Our two surviving grandparents will die and our mother and father will die. We will grow old. One or both of us may never marry. One or both of us may lose a child, or I may be barren. One or both of us may never work, or work for decades at something we will always fail at. One or both of us may be betrayed by friends. Or the roads we take may narrow until all that remains is a stony path that we will follow to our deaths.If we are unlucky, over time the circle of people who will help us deal with these bad things is going to shrink. An unlucky life shrinks over time. But a sibling has to be reliable. A sibling is blood and you can’t ignore blood when it asks you for help. 118 The Harvard Advocate

Sometimes blood will ask you for comfort. And, because blood is blood, even if it wants revenge on the world you may well answer it. You may run wild with it, through some hidden leafy spotâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;fleeing everything, quietly, swiftly.

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People of the Glades Rachael Goldberg

Save every bit of thread. Have you a little chest to put the Alive in? (Emily Dickinson letter 233 to Thomas Higginson) --Anne Carson, Sumptuous Destitution My grandmother told me not to jump into the bay because it was too shallow. I wouldn’t have gone in anyhow—I’m terrified of the water. Also, I hate the name. Chesapeake. It’s a perpetual grey color, like skin on a rotting body, pallid and ashy. Even on sunny days, the water looks dark and rough. Also, the bay is full of jellyfish. They float by, tangling each other with their tentacles; their bodies pulsing like huge muscles, like a heartbeat. Once, my brother pulled one from the water with a stick. When we brought it to the surface, it was the size of my fist, with tentacles like knotted dreadlocks. Setting it on the wooden deck, we thought it would flop around like a fish. It didn’t. He called it Seviche. We weren’t sure if it was dead and we were both afraid to touch it, afraid of the sting. He dared me to throw it back in. I told him he should, because, Jesus Christ, he was the one who pulled it out, anyhow. He said he was afraid of being stung. I didn’t tell him that I was, too. I suggested he kick it in, gently, so he didn’t step on it. He said he was worried about squashing it, and that I should do it because I have smaller feet. And what if it got wrapped up in its own tentacles and strangled to death? I said that jellyfish can’t breathe, but even as I said it, I wasn’t sure. We decided to leave it there, on the deck. The next morning it was there, shriveled, like an old plum. I picked it up, cupping it in my hands, to throw it back in. I felt a quick, sharp jolt as its tentacles brushed my fingertips. Still, I was happy to be on vacation. The novelty of this place was still pleasant. Chesapeake. Each time I said it, it rolled off my tongue like a curling wave. In Florida, we live by the Everglades. I used to hate the Everglades, appalled by the lack of romance and glamour. How Sawgrass can grow to be ten feet tall and is razor sharp. You can kill someone with that. Slash right through the nothing flesh of their neck. On weekends my 120 The Harvard Advocate

grandfather would take me for kayak excursions or trail hikes. Each time I’d walk along the stony paths with him, I would put my right foot down, slowly, to make sure that I wasn’t stepping into quicksand. Heel, toe. Heel, toe. Once, I saw a snake eating a frog, the two hind-legs perpendicular, sticking from the snake’s jaw. Then, I read that Indian bones and shipwrecked Spanish treasure were buried in the Everglades. Indians had lived there for thousands of years until the Spanish came and made them move onto reservations. Before the Spanish came, they ate shellfish and turtles, crafted dug-out canoes from giant trees. They used seashells for hammers, and fishhooks, knives, and drinking cups. Then the Spanish came and used the same seashells to build forts along the cost, to protect themselves from the Indians. Ponce de Leon came searching for the fountain of youth in the Everglades. Instead, he found over ten-thousand islands, long-haired natives, and sugarcane. Then, he was killed by a native’s arrow, poisoned with the sap of a Manchineel tree. Even with all of the old bones buried under the weedy paths, the Everglades still smell like dust and eucalyptus. This one family of Indians started a business on their little plot of land, called Jonnie’s Swamp Safari. You pay thirty-five bucks and they take you out on a rusty air-boat, in circles around their two dinky islands. Then, they take you back to the main island where they have a rotting wood amphitheater with twenty bench seats. Jonnie’s daughter brings out a rabbit and a snake, and she lets you pet them. After the show, you can buy popcorn and alligator shaped lollypops at the gift-shop. A one-legged dog hobbles around the property. When we ate our lunch, packed turkey sandwiches on white bread, I fed the dog my turkey. He nibbled at it, then stumbled away, lethargic. There are two cages of show-animals, sunk into the mud. In one cage, some dusty birds peck at themselves, picking pebbles and twigs from behind their wings. Their thick black tongues loll against their beaks. In another cage, the alligators lay in the mud. I went to the safari with my seventh grade class. Some of the boys threw their popcorn at the caged alligators, and were disappointed when they did not move. We expected them all to rise up on their clawed feet. We wanted them to try to bite at us through the cage with their jaundiced teeth. If I didn’t see their scaled stomachs inflate, I would have thought that they were dead. Maybe I am too much like Emma Bovary. I always want to find the romance in places. I imagine myself too often in love with people who won’t have me. I’m sick of where I am and where I am not. On a transcontinental flight, I watched a documentary on India. When people die there, their bodies are thrown into the Ganges. This terrified me, but when their bodies were thrown into the water, they were wrapped in the most beautiful multicolored fabrics. As the stiff bodies fell into the river, the fabrics bloomed about them like camellias. Then, the tide carried them off and the documentary ended. My grandmother used to sew me dresses out of different patterned fabrics. On Christmas, it was a reindeer pattern. On Easter, one with Winter 2010 121

long-eared rabbits. There is a family portrait hanging in my parent’s den where I am wearing an itchy plaid dress puffed with tulle. For my seventh birthday, she bought me a sewing canvas with a huge fat cat. I tried a few stitches, pricked my finger, and gave up, burying the canvas under my bed, as if I was humiliated by it. For weeks, I couldn’t sleep, dreaming of the unfinished cat under my bed. I half expected it to grow claws and attack me in my sleep, digging its paws and teeth into my wrist, like Pet Semetary. At night, I would stare at the popcorn ceilings, watch the night-light flicker, listen to my father watching television downstairs. Then, just as I was falling asleep, I’d hear him sneak up the stairs, open my door, and gently turn on the fan. Minutes later, after I heard him tumble into bed, I’d scramble out of bed, turn off the fan, and fixate on the unfinished sewn cat under my bed. Then, I cut my hair, read some Proust and moved out of the swamplands. I think back to the days when I would sweat through cotton tshirts, sip Yoohoo from the bottle, pick ants from my calves, lay on the dry dead grasses and think of the romances I wanted, or maybe had. How maybe the Everglades were flooded with love. Sitting on a bench by the river, I remembered them—none native to the glades, but all born from it, sewed indelibly into its fabric. Jonah used to make beaded bracelets during recess, when the other boys weren’t watching. Once, he spilled his beads in the sand. There were hundreds of them, small, like salmon eggs. I spent an hour sifting the sand through my fingers like a sieve, collecting each one. When I showed him how I had collected them, each one, cupped in my palm, he knocked them out of my hands and said that beads were for girls and queers. Ferran and I sat on the hood of his car, a mile from the Everglades, and watched the lightning strike. I called it heat-lightening. He said that all lightning is heat-lightning, and then began to explain physics to me. Ezra broke his arm in my back yard, jumping over a garden snake. Later, when he told me that he was gay, I wondered if either the snake or the broken arm had anything to do with it. His eyes were the color of an ibis. Yael was delicate, like a heron or an egret. His mother taught piano and yelled at her students, andante! Andante! Ollie and I slow-danced at his pool-party. He smelled like sweat and nervously inched his fingers around my waist, then after the song ended, excused himself to go to the bathroom and ran all the way home. Jack would wink at me each time he made a vulgar comment. Jeff buried me in sand and kissed my eyelashes before kissing my best friend on the mouth. Judd taught me how to roll a joint and we sat together in a hammock as he smoked and told me stories about his friends who had died. Greg had hair the color of loam. He said that he was a Communist and told me a joke about Trotsky, but I can’t remember the punchline. Matt first kissed me, and relieved, sighed that he was absolutely, defi122 The Harvard Advocate

nitely, unquestionably, surely, certainly, assuredly, positively, gay. Then he gently kissed my hand, and left my room. I wondered if maybe it was my fault that both he and Ezra were gay. Dan said he liked to practice karate while in the muddy water because it made him feel weightless. When we walked across a footbridge one night, he pretended to push me in, and I was frightened. Perry and I kissed while drunk and never spoke about it again. Emerson was always nostalgic for experiences she never had, and would write moralistic journal entries about feminism and xenophobia. Tom was afraid of the water so he stayed in his room all of the time. When I went over we’d watch movie trailers until I got bored and would make up a lie about family coming over for dinner. When I left his stale room, I breathed heavily, smelling the salty humidity. Denny squashed a mosquito on my upper arm and I thought that I had cut myself. Then, he enlisted to go fight in Afghanistan and never sent postcards. Alex got married to a woman with just as many freckles as I have, and I don’t think he ever knew that I loved him. Michael slept with the journalism teacher in our high school, and he told me that he took her to a lover’s lane on Glades Road. I said, “I thought those only exist in movies and the 1950’s.” Oz and I kissed in his grandparent’s shed, and heard an alligator floating to the surface of the lake behind his house. Julian wrote music in the swamps and went to music festivals like Swampfest, where he shared a tent with a lesbian whom I had taken a literature course with. She had short black hair and a tattoo of a mermaid on her back. He said that at night, she and her girlfriend, an older Asian woman, would lie in each other’s arms and cry. Pete told me that Judas really did love Jesus as we drank vodka cranberries. Now, I am too nostalgic for the moments all lived through the people of the glades. This river is not enough, or too much. Sometimes, I feel like my heart is going to desiccate and crumple inside of my chest, and I won’t be able to stop it—like a stone, it will sink in the dark muddy waters of the Everglades, and I won’t be able to find it. I want to go back, back to the moment before the stone makes the water ripple, before its smooth tip crests under the water. Not to the place as I remember it, but to how it was a hundred years ago. Hanging mosses and ivies, thorny strangler vines, a Spoonbill whooping as Redfish nosedive into the waters. Back to when the bones were not buried, but still carving hollow canoes, floating down the waters like blue fabrics, alive, alive, alive.

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Angelic Patience Donald Revell

Angelic patience, it rains to the ruin of spiders. What use is a childhood? I never told The very warmest afternoon how daddy Pulled the car over into a birch grove Because the engine was failing. It had choked On a dozen yellow birds, and we buried them. Like the shadows beneath a stone bridge Humans diminish towards mid-day. And then We vanish. Fedoras. Polish sopranos. The afterlife unravels before our eyes while angels Cross the stone bridges back to Heaven. Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve been drunk ever since. My children Have nothing to forgive, never having been children. They buried no birds.

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Bad News Bears Madeleine Schwartz

hen Cannelle, the last indigenous French female bear, was shot by a hunter in November 2004, a helicopter carried her body from the rural forests of the Pyrenees to the veterinary hospital in Toulouse. She glided up and out of the mountains and towards the city, passing over the secluded villages, the shepherds’ huts and the grazing pastures of the country she had once lived in. Her body drifted over the harsh landscape of the Pyrenees, those scraggly mountains on the border of Spain, where a small population of bears had until then roamed the remains of France’s wild. In Toulouse, the experts measured and prodded, but it was too late. Cannelle was dead and the lineage of French bears had come to an end. The next day, President Jacques Chirac announced at a cabinet meeting that the death was, “a great loss for French and European biodiversity.” The state called for an autopsy and a ballistics test on the body; police closed off the killing zone and studied it like a crime scene. All hunting in the area—even dog-walking—was put to a halt. French newspapers burst with questions. What had happened to Cannelle’s cub, who ran away at the gunshot? How should the state prosecute René Marquèze, the hunter, when he claimed he had only fired in self-defense? And what would become of the bears of the Pyrenees? The Pyrenean brown bear (Ursus arctos pyrenaicus) is the smallest bear in Europe. Males weigh about 200 kilograms (450 pounds) and stand a meter tall when on all fours. The bear is known as a fairly timid and docile creature, and, for many French, the animal is its country’s pride. According to Chirac and the environmentalists who protested at her death, Cannelle and her cousins are a part of France’s patrimoine— the closest English translation is “heritage,” but the arcane “patrimony” better captures the word’s familial, almost biblical connotations. Patrimoine is the property of the fatherland, the representation of the national lineage and a part of the country’s identity. Like the Cathedral at Chartres or the baguette, these bears are France’s cultural inheritance. For years the number of French bears had been dwindling—there Winter 2010 125

were about a dozen bears in the mid 90s—so in 1996 the state began a reintroduction program, importing female bears from Slovenia to revitalize the population. The plan, coordinated by France, Spain and Andorra, would release 15 bears over the course of three years and across all three borders, in the hopes of eventually raising the population to a stable level at 30 animals. Conservationists and environmental groups praised the move, saying that the ecosystem of the Pyrenees would be damaged without a viable bear population. But in the mountains, the shepherds seethed. For every show of support in the city, a counter-protest raged in the villages, and while thousands of enthusiastic letters poured from the cities into local town halls, farmers complained that the bears would disrupt grazing. On the winding mountain roads, large white letters stood as a warning: NON AUX OURS1. Upon one bear’s release, an anonymous group placed plastic cups filled with honey and glass along forest trails (Luckily for the bears, the group was ill-informed. Bears are attracted to bee larvae, not the honey itself). When the next bear was released a few months later, heavily armed police escorted her in a van until she was let out in the middle of the night, location undisclosed. In Arbas, a village near the bear zones, demonstrators destroyed the interior of the town hall and threw bottles of blood across the building. The mayor received death threats and was briefly taken hostage. After that, reintroduction plans were put to a halt. French anti-bear arguments, which continue today, often take on elements of the immigration debates that also divide the country. The Slovenian bears are ill-suited to the French climate. Better to let the French bears die out than to pollute them with foreign blood. But mostly the anger turns on the bears themselves. These creatures are incompatible with an agrarian lifestyle, say the farmers. In talking to the press, the bear’s detractors rarely use the word “bear”—they talk more commonly of “the animal” or “the beast.” This hope for the French bear’s eternal existence, one farmer said, was all “the propaganda of city slickers brought up on Winnie the Pooh.” Those in the country know that the creature can only bring trouble. When Franksa, one Slovenian bear, was run over by a car, a spokesman for a local farmers union declared, “We are immensely satisfied that this bear was killed. This is a great relief for farmers.” Another added, in a snub to national authority, “If people had only listened to us, Franksa would be living a happy and peaceful life in Slovenia.” Reintroduction on the Spanish side of the border has encountered none of these problems. Journalists like to track the history of bears in France as they might the extinction of any other animal, documenting how human expansion gradually encroached upon the wild population. As they present it, the bear’s demise is just one more example of man’s incompatibility with his surroundings, another sad version of “man conquers wild.” Daily activities like beekeeping and grazing disturbed the animals. By selling the meat and pelt of the bear, and reaping rewards from shepherds, a hunter 126 The Harvard Advocate

could make in one killing what a teacher might in several months. Before bear hunting was outlawed in 1962, it was not uncommon for a man to go out with a shotgun and come back a village hero. Earlier still, bears were prime hunting game for French nobility—according to medieval hunting treatises, their difficulty to defeat made them a worthy quest for aristocratic egos. But France’s relationship with its bears goes further back and is more closely tied to France’s national identity. If the bear is French patrimoine, the country considers it more a bastard child than a first-born son. In his book, L’Ours: L’Histoire d’un roi dechu (The Bear: The history of a fallen king), French medievalist Michel Pastoureau surveys the history of the bear in France from prehistory to the present day and argues that as France defined its identity as a Christian state, bears were demonized and eventually killed off. According to Pastoureau, the bear was originally considered the king of the animals—he points to early descriptions of the “royal bear” and to Neolithic caves where bear bones were stowed away for worship. The Germanic tribes crossing through early France hallowed the bear as an emblem of male power. Warriors rushing to battle would dress in bears skins and nothing else; fighting a bear with only a dagger as protection became the greatest achievement for young males wishing to prove themselves men. (The act involved getting so close to the bear that the pressure of body against body would push the blade through the animal’s thick skin. Often, the young man suffocated.) This changed when Charlemagne took to power in 768. The ambitious king wanted an empire, and building an empire means deciding who’s in and who’s out. For Charlemagne in were Christianity and a nascent French culture. Out were Jews, Muslims, pagans and those Germanic Saxons who worshipped the bear like he was a God. The enemies had built their identities around bears—even their names evoked its untamable power. Ber, Bern, Bero, Bera, Born, Beorn, Per, Pern, Bjorn, Bernardus, Bernhelmis, Gebernus, Osbernus, Perngernus, Torbiornus read the Saxon ledgers. Charlemagne undertook two organized bear massacres throughout his kingdom—in 773 and 785, each time after successful attacks on the Saxons. The deforestation of battle indirectly killed countless more. But the church’s war against bears was more subtle and its effects more lasting. The new Christian kingdom needed its devil and the bear, with its uneasy anthropomorphism, was a good animal to endow with human evils. Early writers wondered at the similarities between men and their hairy cousins—standing upright, both beings walk with their entire foot touching the ground remarked one early treatise; without fur, bear bodies might resemble those of humans speculated another. One 12th century author observed with awe (and a heavy dose of romanticism) that bears are the only animals beside men to look up at night and wonder at the stars. Saint Augustine took a less favorable view of the creatures. The 5th century Christian scholar was reading Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, Winter 2010 127

learning about the way that bears mate, which in Pliny’s Roman eyes eerily resembled the particularities of human relations. Bears, Pliny wrote, copulate more hominum: they interlace their bodies and embrace one another before each retreats to a separate part of the cavern and sleeps. Saint Augustine took the scene for what it was—unnatural—and declared, “Ursus est diabolus!” Three centuries later, the bear had become the devil’s avatar par excellence. Bestiaries portrayed Satan as the animal, with dark bristle and a greedy tongue. Clerics declared that the bear brought sin. In the monasteries, novice upon novice dreamt of the devil in bear form, threatening and raging over the quiet beds. (In tales of the visits written by the monks Peter the Venerable and Caesar of Heisterbach,] novices named Hermann seem to have been particularly targeted by the Satan’s specter). Charlemagne, too, dreamt of bears—at least so did the mythical Charlemagne, immortalized in French poetry. In the 12th century epic, The Song of Roland, Charlemagne is sleeping after the bloody Battle of Ronceveux, where his knight Ganelon has betrayed him to the Muslims. He sees a bear, chained on the steps of his palace, waiting for judgment. 30 more bears run from the forests, shouting, “with the voice of living men,” for his release. The chained bear is Ganelon himself, the others his kin, and they are all promptly killed. When Charlemagne awakes, he puts Ganelon on trial for treason and the fight against paganism rages on. France’s Christian mission prevails. But the dream is more than just a reiteration of paganism’s menace and the state’s response. Its threat is more personal. Ganelon is French, more than that, he is Charlemagne’s relative—he has all the traits of a good and noble man. And still the deceitful knight takes on the face of the devil; the bear masquerades as France’s most sinister traitor. In that, the dream is at once a condemnation and a warning to those who hear of it: The capacity for evil is present in all creatures. If the bear resembles the human, so too do humans resemble the bear. That is what made his presence so threatening. Some hair here and there and the two creatures would be identical. When the devil comes in bear form, he really just looks like a man with a dark fleece. This ambiguous identity meant that the bear’s sins, such as lust and violence, could be human too. His evil was just as restricted to his being as his physical features. Some hair here and there—who knew which creature would transgress? So as they demonized the bear, the church stressed his animal qualities to distinguish him firmly from humans. His brown fur and his loafing stance became symbols of sin. Since man was created in God’s image, any change in the duplication was a sign of Satan, clerics said. Better not disguise yourself as a bear, ecclesiastical texts warned—you are calling forth your own evil. The bear took on the role of the scapegoat, who in the book of Leviticus is burdened with human sin and then sent off to the wilderness. He was sin incarnate and his animalistic features a mark of his evil. By staining him with the devil’s imprint, the clerics were driving off the threat of human sin. They were doing their best to end the uncertainty, to draw 128 The Harvard Advocate

the boundaries between man and animal, good and evil. No one today believes that the bear is the devil incarnate, but fear of its evil has never quite gone away. Preserved in the folklore of mountain danger and the variations of Beauty and the Beast scattered throughout France, the bear’s threat has been secularized and popularized, but it remains firmly planted in the forests and mountains of France’s landscape. The shepherds who loathe the bear, who claim that it “rapes” the Pyrenees, speak in the voices of their terrified forefathers—why bring in evil when we do so much to push it away? And so, when French environmentalists advocate on the animal’s behalf and when they plead its harmlessness to those who oppose the reintroduction, they never really let the bear ever take its full form. In the pro-bear pamphlets, stacked up in tourism centers and municipal halls, the animal is infantilized, cartoonish. He looks out sheepishly over the lines of data contending his friendliness, a simple drawing, almost thin; a tamed and innocent creature. He looks more like a lamb than a demon. This image of the bear graces almost all the documents arguing for reintroduction and, in the campaign, its vulnerability is projected onto the bears themselves. The Slovenian bears have been fitted with tracking microchips, a kind of electronic leash which makes sure that the bear is always within human reach—there’s even a phone number that tourists can call to find each bear’s location. Every bear has a godmother and a godfather from among France’s celebrities. Gerard Depardieu and Carla Bruni add their own symbolic protection to the dozens of government employees whose job its to watch over the wild animal. Such vulnerability distances the bear from its legacy of evil. These are not the kind of creatures to kill sheep, the measures say. The animals can’t even look after themselves. These are bears gone mild; they too roam the woods in fear. A few weeks ago, a pile of such pamphlets arrived in Cambridge. Embedded among the pictures of happy shepherds and the interviews with scientists was a catalogue of bear-inspired gifts: fundraising tools like bags and shirts with the bear’s face—each of course, made in France. The catalogue opened to its middle, and there she was—Cannelle, France’s last bear, stuffed and cuddly, 40 centimeters tall and for sale with her own original bedtime story. A little blurb highlights how soft she is and the high quality of the stitching. Below reads a stamp: “Sécurité garantie tous age.”2

1 2

No to bears Safe for all ages Winter 2010 129

Concerning Rae Armantrout

A woman dangles her key ring in front of the baby on her lap as if he were a cat – to keep him from crying. * I look away before, “whatever concerns may mean, an event always concerns a point in a situation,” before the gyre is a floating island of plastic debris the size of the United States adrift in the Pacific. * You single Q-tip afloat in the remaining oil in an otherwise empty herring tin – you have an air of mystery 130 The Harvard Advocate

Houses So Near Donald Revell

Houses so near and never entered, Years of increment or aggregateâ&#x20AC;Ś Is it a thrasher on the nest? Is it a mockingbird? How do we die Alone never having lived alone? The trees have voices. The mockingbird and thrasher Drive roots deep into the earth, Even flying, and the woods burn. How we die? I have gone out riding every morning, Passing the dark doors and empty Garden furniture in pretty alcoves. I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know.

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The Subaltern May Not Speak, But It Certainly Can Be Pickled Anna Polonyi

If he were to let me rise up from this table, I’d spirit his knives and cut out his black heart, seal it with science fluid inside a bell jar, place it on a low shelf in a white man’s museum so the whole world could see it was shriveled and hard, geometric, deformed, unnatural. —From “The Venus Hottenot,” Elizabeth Alexander

his is not a cahier de doléances for those illegitimate human remains gathering dust in the archives of museums across the world. This is not an indictment of nineteenth-century anthropologists who looted graves in the name of science. Nor is this a litany bemoaning the defilement of the dead. The colonized dead are dead, have been dead for years and will remain so, no matter where their remains may be. And yet their ghosts haunt our museums—the misuse of their bodies has come to the forefront in post-colonial times. The formerly colonized demand the return of their objectified ancestors’ bones, and museums, those formerly imperialist institutions, apologetically FedEx them back. In the past twenty years, there has been a veritable exodus of bones from Europe, America and Australia—last 132 The Harvard Advocate

month, Stockholm’s antiquity museum Historiska Museet returned to Hawaii twenty-two skulls that had been taken from burial sites in the 19th century. While through a natural fascination for the macabre, the public has always been enamoured of exhibits that include dead people, the recent trend in repatriation raises the question of how these cadavers came to these institutions in the first place. Repatriation does not attempt to remake history by ‘healing the wounds of the past,’ but rather to keep mistakes from being perpetuated into the present. “Repatriation and reburial,” as explained by the Insitute of Archeology at the University College of London, “are loci for processes which both construct and reaffirm Aboriginality, empowering its participants by enabling them to assert, define (and thus take control over) their own identity.” While contemporary discussion of imperial power follows the tendency to abstract ideas away from their living context, the restitutive process today condenses concepts of colonialism and slavery back into a tangible reality that can undeniably be found in our very own closets: the discourse of colonialism has indeed been inescapably and materially “felt” by the body of the subaltern. The subaltern may not speak, but it certainly can be pickled. Saartjie Baartman, better known as the Hottentot Venus, died in 1815. Hailing from South Africa, she had had a brilliant and scandalous career in anthropology circles of the European capitals. In Paris and London, the public came to see her live exhibitions, to be horrified not by the indecency of her enslavement but rather that of her body—they were riveted by her large buttocks and tickled by the myth of the Hottentot’s extravagant genitalia . Upon her death, the zoologist Cuvier attempted to discover the scientific truth of her inferiority by dissecting her body and pickling her labia. The latter were displayed in the Musée de L’Homme in Paris until 1974; at which point they were relegated to the archives. Her remains were finally returned to the descendants of the Khoikhoi tribe in 2004, after a personal request from President Nelson Mandela. Live displays were not uncommon in the nineteenth century. Baartman is one of the few individuals to be known by name. What was this fascination with the Savage, combined so disturbingly with the colonial compulsion to collect and label? Under the guise of anthropology, this desire was given vent through the “scientific” documentation of the inferiority of colonized peoples. Anthropology’s dark origins are no secret. The Cannibal Club, an elite society affiliated with the Royal Anthropological Society, which was to become the Royal Anthropological Institute in London, was overtly fetishistic. Members were “gavelled to order by a mace in the form of a Negro head” and discussed exotic erotic practices thinly veiled in the propriety of anthropological method. Tagged with anthropometric markings to facilitate measurements, individuals were presented as flagrantly transgressing the taboos of the civilized audience: the installations were an enticing concoction of cannibalism, prostitution, nudity and incest all at once. By staging the “NaWinter 2010 133

tive” as lewd, violent and dangerous, remarks Anne Maxwell in Colonial Photography and Exhibitions, the public could relieve itself of its own bad conscience and deflect the violence it knew itself to be perpetrating. In order to stage the spectacle of racial inferiority, the museums depended on setting up sharp contrasts between the colonizer and the colonized. In these institutions the latter were sentenced to a space of savagery occupied by the object rather than the human. As Homi Bhabha points out in his preface to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, the colonized people have been denied the status of the “Other”—and so have been withheld the very subjectivity that comes from alterity. Colonial identity has been constructed not as a mirror image of the colonial, but rather as the reflection in a fractured mirror: fragmented and non-reciprocal. The colonized are constructed as existing outside the flow of history and progress—as simple props to a play in which the white man casts himself as hero. This is clear in the body-grabbing practices that reached their peak in the late nineteenth-century. The “scramble for Africa” was mirrored on an individuated scale by a scramble for subaltern cadavers. Truganini and William Lanney were the “last” surviving Tasmanian Aborigines. After having been unsuccessfully “europeanized” and “civilized,” they were allowed to live on a compound on Oyster Cove, off of mainland Australia. Upon Lanney’s death in Hobart Town in 1869, rival scientific establishments scrambled over his body like a pack of wolves: all that was left to bury was his torso, and even that was illegally exhumed the very same night. Frustrated at missing out on the spoils upon digging up his grave, the surgeon of the Colonial Hospital George Stokell and his fellow colleagues trashed what was left and “had a tobacco pouch made out of a portion of the skin.” None of Lanney’s remains are known to have been returned. The mutilation of Lanney’s body led Truganini to express concern; she told Rev. H. D. Atkinson, “I know that when I die the Museum wants my body.” No truer words were ever spoken. When she died in 1876, she was buried near Melbourne despite her explicit request for cremation and a few years later, with the Australian government fully complicit, she was exhumed and displayed at the Royal Society of Tasmania. She remained in a glass case for another hundred years before being returned in 1976 to her aboriginal descendants, who had her ashes scattered to the wind. The collection of human remains in itself is not under discussion here—it is undoubtedly important to have a taxonomical archive of the natural world, ranging from butterflies to humans. Science however does not operate in a vacuum, but rather in a world in which ethics are constantly undergoing change. Thus, while it might have been relatively “good sport” in the 19th century to fish for dead bodies to dissect and display, this is no longer the case. While it might have been socially condoned to study skeletons for evidence of their “racial inferiority,” this conception of the world has long since lost any pretense at legitimacy. Having human bones in ones’ collections is causing museums increasing discomfort, not only because of their shady acquisition, but also be134 The Harvard Advocate

cause of whose bones they are. Of all human remains ever to be collected by archaeologists and anthropologists, the vast majority belong to members of communities earlier classified at the bottom of the racial hierarchy. In the British Museum Collections, of the 195 human remains dated with certainty to come from the 18th century and after, 192 belong to non-European societies. Any human remains collected from British soil are at least a thousand years old—not a single femur dates from to the 19th century. Not only then have human remains been collected for the sake of science without consent, but they have also been taken from historically marginalized societies. Thus the Irish to the British as the Aborigines were to the Aussies. Northern Ireland’s Charles Byrne, over eight feet in height, moved to London to make a living in Cox’s Museum as a live display. Having acquainted himself with scientists during his career, he was well aware of their grave-grabbing tendencies: in the event of his death, he requested to be sunk to the bottom of the sea in a lead coffin. Thanks to the handsome bribe of five hundred pounds, however, anthropologist John Hunter obtained his body and boiled down his skeleton, to display it in the Hunterian Museum, named after the anthropologist. There the skeleton still hangs today, as Byrne had no known descendants who could attempt to reclaim his body. This is the double-standard of burial ethics: we would never dream of displaying Charlemagne’s skeleton or George Washington’s skull, no matter how fascinating their anatomies may be. The museum collections speak for themselves: we are not comfortable exhibiting our own immediate ancestors in glass cases. Granted, University College of London displays Jeremy Bentham’s fully dressed skeleton in a glass case to this very day. This is only deemed acceptable, however, because the eccentric founder of the university explicitly mentioned such a desire in his will. While the remains of saints are preserved and displayed, considered as they are by the Catholic Church to have miraculous powers, there are strict rules as to the use and maintenance of these remains. Such is not the case for the after-life of the body parts of non-whites such as the legendary Native American warrior, Geronimo. The leader of the Chiricahua Apache successfully evaded five thousand American cavalry with his band of forty warriors for most of his lifetime: upon being he caught, he was not treated as a prisoner of war but rather as a bandit, and deported to work in Florida. When he returned to a reservation in the 1890s, he was exhibited in shows as a noble savage, riding at the forefront of Roosevelt’s inauguration parade in 1905. He died in 1909 and was buried in the Apache Indian War Cemetery in Oklahoma. A few years later, his skull was allegedly disinterred by members of the infamous Skull & Bones society, including Prescott Bush. Though Skull & Bones deny ever having been in possession of the skull, a letter found in the Yale Archives written by one member to another in 1918 reads: “The skull of the worthy Geronimo the Terrible, exhumed from its tomb at Fort Sill by your club and Knight Haffuer, is now safe inside the T — together with its well worn femurs, bit and saddle horn.” Geronimo’s great grandson, Harlyn Geronimo has been suing the sociWinter 2010 135

ety for the past five years to reclaim the skull. As Klaus-Peter Köpping pointed out in his lecture “Bones of Contention” at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin earlier this year, though Geronimo’s grave-digger fans clearly recognized him as a valiant warrior, they were unable to express this through anything short of desecration. Geronimo the Terrible’s skull is kept as a pet in the lair of the white civilized American: the ultimate emblem of subjugation. The equivalent of a mounted head trophy, it is divested of human value. Such fetishism stages and constantly re-stages the story of colonial domination, even in post-colonial times. Some prejudices ubiquitous in the nineteenth century still linger in the contemporary debate on repatriation. The discourse of restitution often recycles the nineteenth century narrative: now rather than the god-blessed Colonizer vs. the ignorant Native, it has become the story, as the press tells it, of the righteous Native vs. the ex-imperialist Museum, the former fighting to loosen the latter’s grip on its ancestors. Current debates run the risk of lumping Hawaiians with Aborigines with Native Americans with Egyptians in an attempt to construct the ‘Native’. The case is far from being so clear-cut. The entire process was initiated in ‘80s by intellectuals on the cultural left, rather than “Native” communities. Indigenous groups began negotiating within a political framework set into motion by external forces some time later—thus offers of repatriation made by museums often went unanswered in the ‘90s. There still remains great dissension within communities as to the right handling of remains. The discourse around the case of the Kennewick Man, found in 1996 in Washington State, brought forth some sentiments harking back to the 19th century: the skeleton was assessed to be one of the oldest prehistoric skeletons to be found in North America, but in accordance with the NAGPRA (Native American Grave Protection and Repatriation Act), it was “snatched” or “confiscated” by Native Americans and reburied before any further research could be done. Falling into the binary of scientific interest vs. indigenous ones as the Kennewick case caused the press to do, we rapidly slide further down to claiming the “Native” as outside of (white) science and progress once again. If the ghosts of colonial prejudice haunt us today, the body-snatching effectively still continues. The wildly popular “Human Bodies” exhibition which displays dissected human bodies for the sake of education around the world, including the Boston Science Museum recently came under scrutiny regarding the provenance of its bodies. They were claimed to have been anonymous citizens of China who died of natural causes and, failing to be claimed by friends of family, were turned over to medical schools. Yet being confidentially dissected for the cause of educating medical students is a far cry from “plastination,” where a cadaver is stripped of its skin, dissected and infused with hardening plastic. An investigation last year revealed that the company operating the exhibit as unable to provide any documentation as to the origin of the deceased. “The grim reality is that [the exhibit] has profited from displaying the remains of individuals who may have been tortured and executed in China,” said Attorney General Cuomo. The controversy 136 The Harvard Advocate

boosted ticket salesâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;an indication that the world has not changed as much as one may believe since the 19th century. Museums are going through a crisis of cultural authority. As contemporary cultural institutions, they must walk the fine line of propriety, avoiding the pit-falls of colonial skeletons, illegal dissections and unsanctioned embalmments. In the 19th century, live displays and the collection of human remains for scientific study constituted efforts to justify their educational purposes and their allegiance to the imperialist government. In the â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;70s, as a direct consequence of decolonization, museums sunk controversial remains into their bottomless archives. Now, divestment of illegally obtained remains is imperative in remaining a legitimate liberal institution of culture. All human remains today are a reiteration of the injustices perpetrated upon those like Baartman, Lanney, Truganini, Byrne and Geronimoâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;unless proven otherwise.

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Service Record Rae Armantrout

If narrative is a police report, a woman tells her companion, â&#x20AC;&#x153;I had woke up at 11:03.â&#x20AC;? * A mourning dove walks along a low wall with odd propriety, then flutters to the roots of a tree nearby where she picks up and drops small sticks. Her chest is dusky rose, her feet magenta. There are intense black circles on her gray wings. * As if any stranger or strange thing might serve. * The only person on the street wears brown slacks and a polo shirt. As he walks, he slashes downward, now and then, with what might almost be a quirt.

138 The Harvard Advocate

Sleeping with Pigs Jay McInerney

“Wait a minute,” my shrink says. “Stop. Go back. Did you say in the bed?” I nod cautiously. Actually, my mind was drifting off on a tangent. Even as I was droning on about my failed marriage, I was wondering, not for the first time, why she had a picture of John Lennon in her office and whether it was an Annie Liebowitz. You know, the one where he’s in a sleeveless New York City tee-shirt with his arms crossed. “The pig was sleeping in the bed. With you. In the marital bed. With you and your wife.” “Well, yes,” I say. “You’ve been coming to me for more than a year, trying to come to terms with your guilt about the breakup off your marriage, and this is the first time it’s occurred to you to mention that the pig was sleeping with you in the bed?” I can see her point. I don’t know why I hadn’t mentioned it before. It was actually a big point of contention at the time. On the other hand, I was behaving so badly by then that I didn’t really feel I was in a position to make demands. Blythe used to have all kinds of jokes about sleeping with two pigs. No, actually, it was the same joke over and over. Plus, McSweeney’s my surname and she liked to call me McSwine. “Was this a nightly occurrence? How long did it go on?” “Pretty much every night for a year or so. Two years maybe. Mostly at the end.” “And where did the pig sleep?” “Between us.” “Between you. In the bed.” Apparently she wanted to make sure she was clear on this point. “Sometimes it would burrow under the covers and sleep down at the foot.” “Didn’t you think this was relevant to our enterprise here? To the whole question of the fate of the marriage? That you were being asked to sleep with a pig between you. Am I safe in assuming this wasn’t your idea?” “Of course not.” About this at least I could be emphatic. “It was hers.” “And you didn’t object?” Winter 2010 139

“Well, yeah, sometimes. In the beginning.” “And then?” “Well, you get used to things.” She sighs and shakes her head. “I think we need to talk about this.” I can see her point. In retrospect, here, on the Upper West Side of New York, sitting in this book-lined office across from my shrink who is literally and figuratively framed within a constellation of diplomas and portraits of Carl Jung, Hannah Arendt and Anna Freud—I can imagine how bizarre this sounds. Now that it’s come up, I’m kind of amazed myself that I let my ex-wife talk me into sharing the bed with her potbellied pig. Over time almost anything can come to seem normal in the course of a marriage: food fetishes, sexual kinks, even in-laws. First you get talked into a pet pig, and the next thing you know it’s sleeping with you. “How did it get up on the bed?” “She built a ramp. With carpeted steps.” “And you didn’t think this was…unusual? And in terms of your marriage, unhealthy? How did you manage to have sexual relations with a–how big was the pig?” “By then? Hard to say, really. Too big to lift, anyway. I threw my back out last time I tried. Hundred and sixty, hundred and seventy pounds. About my weight. Plus the shape’s kind of awkward and it’s not like they’re going to hold still and stay quiet when you try to pick them up.” Normally her expression is pretty imperturbable, but for the first time in our association I get the impression that she’s looking at me like I’m a crazy person. “They’re actually very clean,” I add. “And they’re smarter than dogs.” I realized I’m quoting my ex. I can anticipate my shrink saying something to the effect that we were enabling each other in our respective fantasy worlds. She nods slowly, drinking this in, and regarding me with what seemed to me an air of wonder mixed with disappointment, as if she now has to reevaluate our relationship and start again from the beginning. It’s the kind of expression that leads me to wonder whether psychiatrists ever fire their patients. I want to point out, in my defense, that her cat’s purring away in my lap and she didn’t seem to think there was anything weird about that. “Well,” she says. “We certainly have a lot to talk about next week, don’t we?” Having thought I was marrying a Southern belle, I hadn’t counted on getting Ellie Mae Clampitt in the bargain. I met her at one of the most fashionable watering holes in Manhattan, where she made an unconsciously grand, fashionably-late entrance on the arm of a movie star. It was a birthday dinner for my friend Jackson Peavey and the chair next to mine had been empty for half an hour. When I asked someone about my absent dinner partner and was told the seat belonged to Blythe, Jackson’s aunt, I imagined a blue-haired southern dowager. I certainly wasn’t prepared for the leggy, luminous blonde who finally alighted beside me with the ease of someone effortlessly mounting a horse. Though she 140 The Harvard Advocate

has since denied it, I could’ve sworn the movie star leaned over and whispered “see you later” as he took his leave. She should have been thoroughly daunting, except that somehow she wasn’t. “Hey there, Blythe Peavey, delighted to meet you. If I’d known what an excellent seat I had I would’ve absolutely come sooner. That’s a beautiful shirt, is it linen? I love that color with your eyes. Have I missed any bon mots or bad behavior?” She dispensed compliments with a liberality that would have seemed insincere in anyone I found less attractive and made me feel as if we were dining alone, tete a tete. She seemed to know quite a bit about me, which I found gratifying, considering how little there was to know at that early moment in my life, and what she didn’t know she seemed to be in a desperate hurry to learn. Eventually I admitted that I’d been expecting someone much older. “My brother Johnson, Timmy’s Dad, is almost twenty years older than I am,” she explained. “Timmy loves calling me Aunt Blythe, which seemed funny when he was ten and I was twelve, but now that he’s followed me to New York I’m thinking of offering him lots of money to quit it.” Later she told a self-deprecating story about having lunch, in her early days in the city, with Leo Castelli and an artist named John something, she hadn’t caught his entire name. She found him rather attractive and confessed to possibly flirting with him a bit, frequently repeating his name and touching his arm. The artist became more and more remote until he finally said, “My dear, I’ve been called a John before, but never by a woman.” Castelli later told her that she’d been flirting with Jasper Johns. “You can imagine,” she said, that I’ve never been able to show my face at a Castelli opening again for fear of running into him.” I thought her story was a kind of wonderful spoof of the name-dropping that passed for anecdote in the world I was then aspiring to enter. She slipped away around midnight, whispering that she hoped to see me again and disappearing at a raucous moment so that I was the only one to actually observe her departure. I would learn later that this was her habitual strategy, that she didn’t believe in saying goodbye. After that I followed her career as a girl about town, watching for her at parties and in the gossip columns. She was one of those women who conquered Manhattan for a few years, who seemed to be everywhere and to know everyone interesting, although even the most brilliant and articulate among her admirers had a hard time defining the qualities that made her so popular, in part because her greatest gift was the ability to reflect and magnify the attributes of those around her, particularly with men, a talent which was much rarer in New York than it was in Tennessee. She had a way of identifying and admiring the traits you liked most in yourself, no matter how recessive, so that as long as you were with her, you could imagine you were the person you most wanted to be. “Tony is the most extraordinarily talented tax accountant.” “Roger has the most exquisite taste of any heterosexual in the city.” “Collin was without a doubt the most popular man in Savannah before he chose to break a thousand hearts and move up north.” She added to the collective sense Winter 2010 141

of self-esteem. And though it wasn’t obvious at the time, it became clear after she left that she wasn’t terribly invested in the whole scene–and that was another aspect of her charm. Unlike the rest of us, her lack of vaulting ambition gave her an aura of grace. As it turned out, she was just visiting from another world. Several admirers tried to get her to stay. I knew of three spurned marriage proposals—from a publishing mogul, a playwright and a tennis player–-and two book dedications. One theory about Blythe’s elusiveness, propounded by her nephew, was that she would never marry anyone while her father—a former Tennessee governor and doting domestic tyrant—was alive. I never met the man, but he left a big footprint on his native soil. In Nashville a street and two buildings, including the tallest skyscraper, were named for him. As the president of the Chamber of Commerce he’d gone up against the prohibitionist lobby to legalize restaurant alcohol sales, reaping a whirlwind of calumny and death threats; for more than a year Blythe had been attended by a full time bodyguards. He had not approved of any of Blythe’s suitors, Timmy told me, not even the English Lord who’d brought him a present of matched Purdy shotguns. And he certainly wouldn’t have approved of me. Another of her expatriate kinsmen speculated that it was the death of her beloved brother in Vietnam, that had made her so skittish about long-term attachments. At any rate, she left the city before anybody had a chance to get tired of her, and before she became coarsened by it or embittered by watching younger women take her place. Blythe went home to Tennessee to care for her ailing parents, but she kept her apartment in the city and returned for brief visits every couple of months. I saw her at parties with a poet or a CEO, or, once, with a ridiculously good- looking guy who she said was a carpenter from Tennessee. One night, at a cocktail party in an Upper East Side penthouse, I stepped outside to smoke a cigarette and found Blythe standing alone, her blonde hair billowing in the breeze from the river. Against the backdrop of the downtown skyline—with her head slightly tilted to the right, it looked as if she were leaning up against the Chrysler building—she seemed like the embodiment of all my cosmopolitan fantasies. “Well,” she said, “you’ve certainly made good since I last saw you.” It was true. My first book had been a success and I was currently adapting it for the screen. Perhaps this emboldened me enough to ask her out, something I would have been too intimidated to do a few years earlier. I couldn’t believe my good fortune and not long after finding myself in her bed at the end of our third date, I proposed. Why she accepted me, having turned down so many others, I can’t really say. Maybe it was because her father had died the year before, or maybe she’d just gotten tired of fleeing. Sometimes I think she agreed to my proposal on a whim, marriage being one of the few adventures she hadn’t essayed. Or it’s possible I was just at the right place at the right moment, standing beside her when the music stopped playing. At the time I never really asked the question, being more than a little full of myself and my own success, but in retrospect, I have to wonder. Better-looking, more successful , richer and funnier men than me had failed to drag her to the altar. 142 The Harvard Advocate

A childhood friend of Blythe’s once dropped a clue that I didn’t initially pay much attention to, saying that I reminded her of Blythe’s deceased older brother. “I don’t know what it is, something about your smile, the way you carry yourself. But damn if you didn’t make me think of Jimmy just now. They were really close. Blythe was just devastated.” Later, I cautiously tested this theory on my wife. We were in bed, flipping through the onscreen cable guide, looking for movies. “Platoon” was coming up on HBO. “I never really thought about it,” she said, in response to my question. “I suppose it’s possible. Maybe, subconsciously, you do remind me of Jimmy.” “Do you think about him often,” I asked. “No, not very,” she said. “Really?” “You know, one of the things I hate about the South is the backwardlooking aspect, the obsessive dwelling on the past. Nostalgia is like our regional disease. All that longing for the lost cause, lost plantations, Dixie. All those odes to the Confederate dead. That was one of the things I wanted to get away from when I went east. I try not to look back. Ever.” After our city hall wedding we split our time between Manhattan, where I taught a spring semester workshop at Columbia, and Tennessee, where we bought an antebellum farmhouse outside Nashville with sagging wide-board floors, tilting barns and ragged pastures. Early on it became clear that she was happier on the farm than she was on Park Avenue. I came to think of her as Persephone, who stoically suffered her six months in Hades in exchange for another six in the sunlight of the surface world. Which would make me the King of the Underworld. For a long time I was happy enough with the contrast between our two worlds. After a decade in the city I was ready for a change—and I was in love. Honestly, I would have followed her anywhere, although there was something particularly romantic for me, student of Faulkner and Welty that I was, about seeing her in her natural environment. For me the South was mysterious and exotic and the sense of nostalgia for a lost Eden, the deeply ingrained social hierarchies and the polite insincerity of public discourse were all endlessly intriguing. I studied the local population with the detachment of an anthropologist and the passionate intensity of a man attempting to decode the mysteries of his wife. In those early days Blythe’s menagerie consisted of six cats, one of which deposited a dead bird on my chest the first morning I woke up in her bed. “A welcome offering,” she said. “You should feel very honored.” But once we moved to the farm the animal population exploded, starting with goats, eventually five of them. Blythe left the table in the middle of a dinner party to check on the pregnant goat that was confined in the laundry room and returned forty minutes later, her white peasant blouse thoroughly stained with blood. “We have a new member of the household,” she said, sitting down to resume her meal as if she’d just stepped out to go to the restroom. “Topsy just gave birth to a fine Winter 2010 143

young billy goat. What did I miss?” The chickens came next, although the foxes eventually took care of those–except for the one clever enough to move in with the goats. Our first horse was adopted from the local polo club after it came up lame; she took the second, a stately black Tennessee Walking Horse, in trade for a Parker side-by-side shotgun inherited from her father. I took to the role of country squire, even going so far as to buy a second-hand John Deere tractor with a bush hog in order to cut the fields myself. At times I could almost imagine leaving my life in the city forever. In the spring, before the heat became unendurable, we would sit on the back porch and observe the sunsets, which could be positively lurid across the back pasture. I would fix a pitcher of martinis and we’d sit and watch the horizon flare up pink and orange. The air was laced with the sweet, herbal tang of fresh cut grass and horse manure and you could feel it grow cooler as the fireflies became visible in the failing light. If we lacked anything at all it was hard for me to imagine what it might be. Blythe, however, had plans. I would always claim later that the pig was foisted on me through trickery, particularly after it had just eaten an entire coq au vin, or destroyed a cashmere coat in search of the packet of cashews in my breast pocket. She’d talked before about getting a potbellied pig but I’d quashed the idea, or so I thought. Her strategy was to buy one for the movie star, whose fortieth birthday party we’d been invited to, and for some reason couldn’t attend. So in our stead Blythe sent a baby potbellied pig to the event, at the Beverly Wilshire, dressed in a bridal veil. The pig was presented to the movie star shortly after the cake and was a big hit, especially with his kids, who apparently were pretty upset when he decided he couldn’t keep it; he was about to go off on location for three months and his ex wife wanted nothing to do with a pig, potbellied or otherwise. I think Blythe had been counting on this all along. In her birthday card she offered to raise the foundling if it didn’t prove convenient for him to do so. A week later the pig was back in Tennessee. If I’d known it was meant to be an indoor pet I might have protested from the start, but in it’s infancy, when it was about the size of a football, it had the inherent charm of all baby mammals and the fact that it was so easily trained to use a litter box was an added bonus. But somehow I assumed that when it got bigger and fatter it would take its place outdoors with the other farmyard creatures as God and nature had intended. At any rate, I was led to believe it would that it would always remain a shrimp among pigs. “Potbellies don’t get really big,” Blythe assured me. “She’s definitely fully grown,” she said, a few months later, when she was already too heavy for Blythe to lift. “No way will she get any bigger than this. The breeder showed me pictures of her parents.” I don’t quite know what compelled Blythe to surround herself with animals, even in the face of fierce and protracted human opposition. After two miscarriages and one round of in-vitro fertilization we had both resigned ourselves to the fact that we weren’t going to have children. This certainly played a role, but I think it was a pre-existing condition. 144 The Harvard Advocate

Her friends told me about the raccoons and squirrels of her childhood, and a previous boyfriend, with whom she was still on good terms, confided to me one night over bourbon that he thought she cared more about animals than people. At any rate, a week after Sweetheart arrived, Blythe discovered she was pregnant again. We might have been spared the pig if our son had been born a little earlier. The pig was, if anything, cuter at first than the baby. Certainly Blythe thought so. For three months after Dylan came home from the hospital, after a long bout with a Staph infection, she seemed strangely indifferent to him, and far more absorbed by the piglet. Eventually her maternal impulses kicked in, for which I was grateful, although our sex life never really recovered. We would hardly have been the first couple to have experienced post-partum celibacy, but I couldn’t help wondering if the pig, by now sleeping in a little box beside our bed, didn’t bear some of the blame. Dylan gradually grew hair and developed recognizable human features, while Sweetheart, whom Blythe referred to as his older sister, soon sported long black bristles and a vast sagging belly. To me she resembled a boar who’d come in from the wild in order to live the good life. I don’t think it was ever Blythe’s intention that her name would seem ironic, but it was hard not to see it as such. Many of our friends were horrified once the pig got big enough to knock them over if they happened to be standing between it and a food source, or after it rooted through their purses or their luggage to snack on soaps and cosmetics. It didn’t help that Blythe would inevitably blame the victims. “Well, you could hardly expect a red-blooded pig to resist a delicious and highly aromatic Cadbury bar that just happened to be lying within easy reach practically begging to be eaten. It’s not fair. Really, Karen, you should watch where you leave your purse. Now she’s going to have a tummy ache all night.” Pity the houseguest who made the mistake of leaving his suitcase on the floor and then tried to complain about the destruction. “You don’t have to tell me she ate your prescriptions—she’s been up all night puking her guts out. What the hell kind of pills did you bring into this house anyway? You could have killed little Sweetheart McSwine.” The houseguest would be too flabbergasted to point out that there was nothing little about Sweetheart, too flummoxed by Blythe’s righteousness to press his grievance—the fact that hundreds of dollars of pharmaceuticals were consumed and that he would be suffering from acid reflux, insomnia, high cholestorol and high anxiety until he could replace them. Instead, he stammered an apology. He came from across the seas, after all; he’d heard about the eccentricity of Southerners. Blythe used to say pigs were smarter than dogs and this one certainly showed great ingenuity in the pursuit of anything edible. Sweetheart learned to open the refrigerator door before her first birthday. She would feign sleep only to lunge at a bag of potato chips or a bowl of popcorn when she sensed we’d let our guard down. Dylan was regularly robbed of his snacks and his bottle. If we failed to clear the table after a dinner party she would inevitably pull the tablecloth to the floor in order to get at the leftovers. On the first such occasion we lost a fair portion of the Winter 2010 145

antique crystal and china that Blythe had inherited from her parents. We heard the crash and came running downstairs from our bed—neither the first nor the last time the pig would interrupt coitus. She was busy rooting in the remains of the cheese plate, becoming frenzied as Blythe tried to separate her from the feast, snorting and grunting as she engaged in a tug of war for the last of the manchego. Then she bolted for the living room, sliding and nearly falling over as her hooves hit the bare floor beyond the dining room carpet as Blythe jumped to her feet empty handed. “Bad Sweetheart,” she shouted. “Bad girl!” “I don’t believe this,” I said, surveying the wreckage—the shards of Waterford and Worcester, the linen tablecloth soaked in red wine. “Cheese is just so bad for her,” she said. “That’s your big concern? That cheese is bad for her?” “Well,” she said, “at least there wasn’t any chocolate on the table.” It was trying enough to have the pig in the house in Tennessee; weirder still when Blythe decided it should come with us to New York. She felt Sweetheart would be too lonely in Tennessee for six months without us. During our New York sojourns we lived in one of the snoottier co-ops apartment buildings on the Upper East Side, where capital was only the most obvious of the entry requirements and I certainly wouldn’t have passed the co-op board if not for Blythe’s venerable family name, which even graced the Declaration of Independence. I still couldn’t believe they’d let me in, but I was pretty sure they’d draw the line at Sweetheart. “What they don’t know won’t hurt them,” Blythe told me. I pointed out the impracticality of transport, of sneaking Sweetheart into the building and keeping her existence a secret, but it was no use. Blythe had a friend who designed handbags and had him construct a special carrying case with a sturdy plywood bottom. “She has to fly in the cabin with us,” she insisted. “She’ll be traumatized flying in the hold.” I said that even if Sweetheart could fit under the seat, which I doubted, it was probably illegal to bring a pig in the cabin of a passenger plane. “Then we’ll just have to smuggle her aboard,” she said. Because the beast was now tipping the scales at eighty pounds this scheme required my participation. On the morning of our departure, I staggered into the Nashville Airport carrying a heavily reinforced black canvas shoulder bag. Blythe was carrying Dylan, who then weighed about eighteen pounds. “What’s in the bag,” the guard asked at the security checkpoint. “Actually, it’s a potbellied pig,” Blythe said. “A what?” The other guards gathered around, more excited than alarmed, while I unzipped the front of the bag and Blythe expounded on the habits of the domestic pig. “They’re actually very clean. She loves to eat soap; she had a bar of Crabtree and Evelyn lemon verbena that she relished the other morning. A free range pig will always go to the far corner of her enclosure to do her business and Sweetheart has a litter box. Well, yes, it’s a big litter box. They eat just about anything but we try to keep her on a vegetarian 146 The Harvard Advocate

diet to help her retain her girlish figure.” In the end, the security supervisor couldn’t recall any official ban on pigs and Sweetheart marched through the metal detector on her leash while her bag went through the x-ray machine. A small crowd had gathered before we managed to stuff her back in her bag. Blythe was addressing a young brother and sister. “Of course she knows her name. They’re very smart—way smarter than dogs.” With no small difficulty I hoisted the bag up on my shoulder and started toward the gate, moving deliberately, like a conscientious drunk. When our group number was called I threw a jacket over my bulging carry-on and followed Blythe past the stewardess checking boarding passes—hoping Dylan might distract her–and lurched into the plane, located our seats and swung the bag into the space in front of them, though it didn’t quite fit and its occupant was grunting indignantly. When I straightened up I felt the sharp bite of a pulled muscle in my lower back. I pressed the top of the bag, the pig squealing away, and finally slid it under the seats. Glaring at my wife, who was standing in the aisle behind me, I indicated the window seat. She climbed in and perched, her feet resting on the bag; I eased myself into the aisle seat, grunting as I felt the hot stab of back pain. I‘d just settled in beside her when a fat woman clutching a violin case tapped my shoulder. “I’m sorry, but I think this is my row. Twelve A. That would be the window seat.” “This is row thirteen,” I said. She pointed to the illuminated number over my head. “Twelve, see? You’re in the next row back.” “Oh, shit,” I said, rolling my eyes and glaring at Blythe, who seemed to find the whole situation hysterically funny. From a certain point of view, I guess, it was funny. But from seat 12B it was incredibly frustrating. It wasn’t the pig, per se, although that was a major component. A year ago, even a month ago, I’d shared a frame of reference with Blythe; we lived within the same marriage. Her idiosyncrasies were charming and her faults, in the early years of our marriage, virtues. That she insisted on living with a pig and treating it like a member of the family was amusing enough, especially when we were still having sex on a regular basis. But for the first time I felt myself looking over at her as if from a great distance, from outside the rosy bubble of our shared existence. At that moment I think I felt something turn cold inside of me. With an almost palpable sigh of relief I resumed my life in New York. For the next six months I was back on my own turf, among my friends in a beautiful apartment, which I now shared with a potbellied pig. A pig which, by the end of the year, was well over a hundred pounds and far too big to be lifted. Blythe had taken one of the doormen into her confidence, but we had to hide her from our fellow shareholders and especially the super, a cranky tyrant who certainly would have reported us to the board. To prevent her detection, Blythe designed a secret compartment underneath the platform bed where Sweetheart could be hidden on short notice. As she grew we had to get increasingly bigger litter boxes, which we Winter 2010 147

concealed beneath a round side table draped in a floor length cloth. Our occasional dinner parties would sometimes be interrupted by the thunder of hooves on the parquet floor as a black shape shot across the floor, disappeared under the table, and then, after a pause, unleashed a hissing torrent. The contents of the litter box became something of an obsession for Blythe. Because our garbage was sorted by the super and his minions down in the basement, she believed they had to be disposed of outside the building. She solicited her friends and kept a collection of shopping bags–Barney’s, Bergdorf’s, Chanel, Armani–that would seem appropriate on the arm of an uptown girl, and once a day she would venture out with one of these, a beautiful woman carrying a bag of pig shit out to Park Avenue. She chose a different street-corner trash receptacle each day, fearing irrationally that the garbage collectors might become suspicious of agricultural waste and locate the illegal animal unless extraordinary measures of concealment were taken. Blythe had her Sweetheart and I found mine. With her I could talk about how I felt under appreciated and unsatisfied at home; many were the justifications with which I mollified my conscience, although the pig wasn’t necessarily one of them. To me it was now merely a fact of life, albeit one that signaled Blythe’s increasing distance from social conventions, especially as practiced on the island of Manhattan. Whatever the rationalizations for my affair, it would hardly have been possible if Blythe hadn’t grown increasingly withdrawn, frequently sending me off into the night on my own while she stayed in the apartment with Dylan and Sweetheart and her needlepoint. After all those years of being a virtual dervish, Blythe seemed to have lost her curiosity. “I think I’ve already been to that party,” she would say when I would run an invitation past her. “Like about three thousand times.” I don’t know, maybe we’re all born with a certain quotas and she’d hit her limit of parties. A jaded fried of mine likes to say that God allows us all a swimming pool full of vodka and a bathtub full of cocaine and that he finally quit the latter after realizing he’d started in on his second bathtub. Blythe had burned pretty bright and steady in her early days in New York. Maybe some filament had burned out. She’d gone to more parties, on the arms of more men, than most people even read about in the course of their lifetimes. She would rather sit on the couch, a bowl of popcorn within reach on the coffee table, reading a book, one foot rubbing the belly of the pig lying beneath her, our son crawling around on the floor. “Besides, somebody has to watch Dylan.” I pointed out that we had a nanny to watch Dylan, not to mention that he’d be asleep anyway by the time the party started. “Well, somebody has to watch the Sweetheart.” Perhaps she’d evolved to a higher plane of consciousness and no longer required the shallow distractions of small talk and flirtation, of voyeurism and self-display. But I did and I wasn’t ready to retire. Even though I’d sworn off the bathtub, I still had several feet of vodka left in my swimming pool and I was still drawn to the music of the night. And inevitably I was drawn to a face across the room, the glance that kindled 148 The Harvard Advocate

the flash of a provocative smile. My affair with Katrina lasted for the duration of that Manhattan sojourn, almost six months. It seemed incredible that Blythe didn’t question me more closely about my late nights and midday disappearances. With each successful tryst I became more emboldened, more entitled, less guilty about my transgression. I didn’t really have a plan or a specific ambition for the affair. Katrina was funny and sexy, and she also seemed to be happy with a part-time lover, with the stolen hours and midnight departures. I often went to sleep on the daybed in my office so as not to wake Blythe and Sweetheart, although I would often, after a late night, return to the master bedroom for a restorative nap; on these occasions Sweetheart liked to join me, shoving her nose into my armpit and stabbing me with her hooves. Actually, it was strange how well we got along during this period, after almost two years of uneasy coexistence. Katrina and I had been friends for years, a fact that helped to mask the drift into physical intimacy, to make it seem innocent even to ourselves, right up until the irrevocable moment–the kiss in the back of the taxi, my hand sliding down the shoulder to the breast, her hand sliding up my knee. “This is probably a terrible idea,” Katrina said as she unfastened my belt. After the night we moved from her couch to her bed, we fell into a pattern of twice-a-week trysts. I probably would’ve been satisfied with this arrangement indefinitely, but eventually Katrina’s conscience started to bother her; she wanted more, yet was loathe to demand it, and I wasn’t nearly ready to leave Blythe. But I was crushed when Katrina ended our affair and in order

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to console myself I embarked on a crime spree of serial infidelities. Or perhaps I’m being too easy on myself; maybe I’d just developed a taste for it. I must been exuding some kind of scent that telegraphed my debauched availability and my intentions because there were willing women wherever I looked. I had never noticed them in the early years of my marriage, but suddenly I was awash in opportunity. The dental assistant who held my gaze as she suctioned my gums. The librarian who helped me find Peter Quennel’s Byron in Italy. The studio executive I met on the plane to L.A. I was compulsive and insatiable. It reminded me of one of Blythe’s folksier aphorisms, that once a dog starts sucking eggs there’s no stopping him. In her part of the world, where guns were standard household equipment, the implication was that the dog needed to be shot. Yet in the end she was surprisingly forgiving. The tipping point was reached back in Tennessee, where I was spotted emerging from a hotel at midnight with the wife of one of Blythe’s cousins. At that point, the community, which teemed with friends and relatives, took it upon itself to advise Blythe that enough was enough. The showdown was surprisingly muted. We were lying in bed, Sweetheart splayed between us, her sharp, cloven hoofs thrust toward me. She grunted interrogatively, hoping for a tummy rub just as Blythe launched her interrogation. “They say people are calling me the Hilary Clinton of Tennessee.” Scared and guilty as I was that we were finally addressing the elephant in the room, I tried to delay the inevitable. “Down here I guess that’s a bad thing to be.” “This isn’t the time for you to be a smartass Yankee. They mean I’m a fool who’s turning a blind eye to your flagrant and relentless philandering.” “I know,” I said. I was, I realized, actually relieved that we were finally discussing this. “This can’t go on. I can’t go on.” “I know.” “You realize my father would have had you shot. And I’m not even exaggerating.” “I guess I could only say I deserve it.” “Now you’re exaggerating. You don’t believe that, so top bullshitting me. Stop bullshitting yourself. You’ve been lying to both of us. And don’t you dare say not really. Not telling isn’t the same as not lying. Now listen, I’m not going to give you a real hard time about this, though I probably should. People think I’m crazy, that I should cut your balls off and have done with it, but I just don’t have it in me to yell and scream and cuss. I can’t say I’m not hurt. I am. You really stabbed me in the heart and turned the blade. But nobody can help falling out of love with someone else. “It’s not that,” I said. “I still—“ “Shut up and listen,” she said. “All I ask is that you tell me everything. And everyone. I’m serious about this. You owe me that much, at least. And if I think you’re not being honest you’ll end up wishing Daddy was 150 The Harvard Advocate

still around to shoot you and put you out of you misery.” So, I told her. About Katrina. About the dental assistant and the librarian and the studio executive, about her cousin-in-law and the neighbor two farms down who’d come over to dinner one night and flirted across the table then ridden her horse over a couple days later after seeing Blythe drive into town. “That sneaky cunt! Goddamn her. I saw her shaking her cleavage under your nose. But I hardly thought she’d come riding right over here like Annie Oakley and fuck my husband.” It was curious how she seemed to blame the women more than me; she hated every one of them from that day forward. I have no idea why I largely escaped blame. It was like the time when Sweetheart ate our houseguest’s dop kit. She didn’t find fault with me so much as with the women who’d tempted me, who waved treats in front of my face. Over the years she managed to cut most of them dead, to let them know that she knew and was pissed. This is another Southern trait–cutting people—and she’s good at it. She didn’t forgive and she didn’t forget, except in the case of Katrina, who, she felt had at least shown remorse and done the right thing by breaking up with me. Years later, at a play opening in New York, she went out of her way to let her know that it was okay. As to her treatment of me, I eventually remembered the conversation we’d had about her brother, when she said she never looked back. Even by her own admission, Blythe’s post-marital dating life was somewhat compromised by the presence of Sweetheart. “I’ve become familiar with a certain facial expression,” she told me. “These guys walk in and look at Sweetheart and what they’re wondering is, how long does a pig live? They’re wondering if they can outlast her. Sometimes they ask. But even when they don’t I still know that’s what they’re thinking. I see that look, I just up and say, ‘About fifteen years is the answer to your question. And she’s eight.’ Some of them turn tail right away.” I was living in the city with my new girlfriend; Blythe had stayed in Tennessee. I visited every month to spend time with Dylan, staying with them for a week, an arrangement that made perfect sense to us, if not always to the girlfriends and boyfriends. In the end, though, I think Sweetheart scared away more suitors than I did, which was only one of the reasons I was astonished when Blythe told me she was getting another pig. “Are you crazy?” I said. We were sitting on the back porch, watching Dylan splash in the pool, and looking out at a vermillion slash of sunset bleeding through the storm clouds above the roof of the old barn. “Probably,” she said. “Explain this to me.” “I’m not sure I can.” “It’s perverse.” “Look, I know it’s going to be a disaster for my love life, but somehow I don’t care.” The afternoon’s intolerable heat was finally subsiding, the cicadas shutting down their tiny chainsaws, the fireflies just waking up under logs and eaves, checking their switches. It was a moment of hiatus, of Winter 2010 151

stillness between the activities of the day and the night. Sweetheart lay on her side catching the last rays of the sun. Even Dylan seemed to pause for a moment, standing at the edge of the pool, gazing out over the pasture as it turned from pink to gray as the sun slipped beneath the treetops at the far end of the field. The air was heavy with the promise of rain. All at once I felt myself projected back in time, the light and the temperature and the scent of the air exquisitely and precisely mimetic of a previous June evening some four or five years ago when I was a better and a happier man. “I already paid the breeder,” she said. “He’s arriving at the airport tomorrow. It’s a boy. Another McSwine.” “What the hell,” I said. “I’ll drive you.” It was no crazier, I realized, than certain aspects of my own life. And it was no longer my fight. The next day we dropped Dylan off at pre-school and then drove to the air freight terminal. After several inquiries we were directed to a door with plastic flaps and a gravity wheel conveyor. As we watched, three big cardboard boxes with holes punched in them parted the flaps and rolled out, Grassmere Zoo stamped on each one. “What are those,” Blythe asked the men who were retrieving the boxes. “Mice n’ rats, I reckon,” one of them said, in a slow country drawl. “Chow for the reptile house,” said the other. “I would’ve thought frogs,” Blythe said. “Frogs, too,” said the country boy. “Frogs was last week.” As they wheeled the rodents away a large redand-white striped box appeared between the flaps. Blythe saw it before I did, and a pained expression crossed her face as she lifted her hand to her mouth. I looked again as the box emerged, sliding toward us on the steel rollers. Then I saw the blue field of stars at the other end of the box–an American flag wrapped neatly around a coffin. “Oh, my God,” Blythe said. I looked around. “Shouldn’t someone….be here.” For the moment we were alone. I looked at her. “Maybe we should….” “I don’t know.” “Me neither.” At that moment a uniformed baggage handler holding a small animal carrier approached us. “Are you the pig parents?” Blythe nodded, gingerly taking the carrier. Tears rolled down her cheeks as she bent down to look in through the slats. “Look at him, he’s so scared,” she said, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. “The poor baby.” “Maybe you should tell someone about…this,” I said to the baggage handler, gesturing toward the coffin. He shook his head and sighed. “Second one this week.” 152 The Harvard Advocate

Back in the car, the little pig squealed like a banshee when Blythe took him out of the carrier and held him in her lap. He was about the size of a beer bottle, with black and white bristles, stubby legs and a straight tail that twitched incessantly. “The sweet thing,” Blythe said, stroking his back. The tears reappeared as we drove down the exit ramp. “That poor boy,” she said. “Why wasn’t anybody there for him?” I shook my head, not trusting my voice. “It’s so awful,” she said, rubbing the piglet. “All alone, nobody to welcome him home. Oh, God, my poor Jimmy.” It was, I realized, just the second time I’d heard her say her brother’s name. We drove in silence until I finally found my voice. “I’m so sorry, Blythe,” I said, my voice a hoarse whisper. “I’m so goddamn sorry.” It was some time before I could speak again. “Please forgive me. I never even said I was sorry.” “It’s okay, McSwine,” she said, turning to me and wiping my cheek. I took her hand and lifted it to my mouth. Kissing the back of her wrist, I could smell the sweet, milky, barnyard tang of her fingers. As I squeezed her hand and pressed her fingertips to my lips, I believed there was still time and hope for me, if I could only remember always exactly how I felt at that moment.

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Wilderness Katie Peterson

In the cities where the waste would exist in the future, no vista but sinage. Long past the time it took a law to change the institutions would tell visitors translate the instructions in case they couldn’t understand into your own tongue. My car went off the road once where it curves because an antelope looked like the dusk and I was driving into the dusk to catch a plane. I mean I didn’t want to stop. The blue shadow in the middle distance a band of ice cut the middle out of eyesight, out of those mountains, out of everything: no middle here. Back at the ranch, behind the house, you and I sat around the spool watching the moon’s deckle edge unchange for one entire warm spring night. You left your jacket, didn’t come to get it for a day. One cleared field adjacent to a field that grew wild. More ravens in the vicinity of it than persons. The road is the gateway to the valley but the pass it passes through is so tiring that the eye concentrates on its own failure, not imagining the rest.

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ENVOY Scorching Gold: Tracking the Phoenix in Myth, Fairy Tales, and Modern Fictions Maria Tatar and Adam Horn

t Harvard’s 2008 Commencement, J.K. Rowling spoke eloquently about the fringe benefits of failure. Describing her own life experiences, she elaborated on how, a mere seven years after her own graduation day, she had failed on an “epic” scale: “An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless.” She was, by every imaginable standard, a colossal failure, and for her there was no light at the end of the proverbial tunnel. It was then that she suddenly discovered those fringe benefits: “Rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I built my life.” As a student of the Classics, J.K. Rowling might have reached for a different trope, though it would have risked sounding a false note in a nearly pitch-perfect address. Too modest to invoke the phoenix, she must nonetheless have been aware that the legend of that avian creature captured perfectly the essence of her own reinvention. As a single mother on welfare, she was an unlikely candidate for a journey toward radiant consummation. And yet she managed to reconstitute her identity from the ashes of failures, giving birth to a triumphantly successful second self. What emerged from failure was spectacularly beautiful —the scorching gold of a series that captured the imagination of children the world over, in part through its productive use of myth, fairy tale, and legend, including, as we shall see, the story of the phoenix. EX ME IPSO RENASCOR (“From myself alone I am reborn”): this inscription, which accompanied early representations of the phoenix, captures the mystery of self-regeneration that makes the bird so compelling, the enigma that has endowed the legend with authority and endurance. The narrative itself—concise and captivating—has remained remarkably stable, not subject to the infinite malleability of its counterparts in fairy tale, myth, and lore in general. In medieval bestiaries, the phoenix, aglow with its characteristic reddish-purple and golden hues, was known for a long lifespan, for a morbid eagerness to prepare its own funeral pyre, and, most remarkably, for its resurrection from the ashes of a fire-consumed corpse. Inspired no doubt by the daily reappearance of Winter 2010 155

the fiery sun, the phoenix was unique in its ability to attain eternal life, though not without suffering the pains of death and rebirth. As a story about eternal life as well as conception untainted by carnality, the tale was naturally associated with Christ’s birth, death, and resurrection. Early Church Father Clement of Rome even used the Phoenix’s resurrection to argue for the plausibility of Christ’s resurrection, an apologetic move that made scholars wary of relegating the phoenix to the domain of myth and fantasy. As recently as 1633, serious debate over the phoenix’s mythical status was opened with Patricius Junius’s publication of his edito princeps of the First Epistle of Clement. That Christians should see the phoenix as a worthy symbol is no surprise, but that the Church has done so much to ensure the persistence of phoenix lore is remarkable. Not much changes when it comes to the narrative coordinates of the phoenix story, but the symbolic meaning of the fabled creature alters dramatically over time. Hans Christian Andersen, an early apostle of aestheticism, situated the bird in the Garden of Eden, under the Tree of Knowledge, and, ironically, at the same time drained the bird of theological significance. Suddenly the radiant bird becomes the “holy swan of song,” an airborne Muse that flutters through the halls of the Wartburg and lands on Shakespeare’s shoulder. With its coruscating beauty and rainbow promise of fame, the bird settles on the chosen few and whispers into their ear the word “Immortality!” The Phoenix in Mythology Tracking the phoenix’s origins is something of a challenge, in part because it raises the-chicken-or-the-egg problem in broader, mythical terms, in part because so many cultures claim to have invented the bird. The phoenix rises from multiple countries, cultures, and continents: China, the Middle East, Egypt, Europe, and Greece, to name just a few. That the poetically emblematic bird should ascend from nowhere in particular as well as from everywhere at once accords with its quintessential nature as a creature constantly reborn and renewed. In the sacred Egyptian bird known as benu, we find a first powerful written evocation of the phoenix story. The Greek historian Herodotus claimed to have learned about the phoenix from the priests of Heliopolis, the Egyptian site of the temple of the sun. The benu looked much like a heron, with its two long feathers at the back of the head – unlike the eagle-like phoenix—and its name was derived from the verb wbn, which means “to rise radiantly.” Associated with Atum-Re, the god of creation, the benu’s first flight was launched from a hill that emerged from primordial waters. Its connection with life and the soul was strengthened by the Book of the Dead, which called the benu the “god of the morning,” or, more literally, the “morning star.” The benu as symbol of rebirth and perpetual life would reappear in its function as lord of the Sed Festival, a celebration commemorating the continuing reign of pharaoh and the onset of the New Year. The Book of the Dead also suggests the compelling duality of the phoenix, for the dead claim the “purity of benu” as their own, implying 156 The Harvard Advocate

that the god of creation also reigns over the dead. In the New Kingdom the benu became associated with Osiris, the Egyptian god of the dead. The core assertion of the phoenix myth, that death can bring forth life, that life swallows up death, is embedded in the phoenix’s early appearance as benu. The benu is where Atum-Re and Osiris meet, where life encounters death. This duality, inherent in the cyclical rebirth of the phoenix, is perhaps the most compelling facet of the phoenix myth, and it is present from the very beginning, no less fixed than the brilliance of its brushfire plumage. Classical phoenix myth, the direct ancestor of contemporary phoenix lore, is more specific about the phoenix as animal and less concerned with the phoenix as associated with a particular god, allowing the phoenix’s classical associations to become supremely diverse. The bird was considered representative of both the Great Year – the period between times in which the planets are in alignment – and the idea of cosmic regeneration, the end of all things that begins a new universe. The Roman Emperor Hadrian’s reign saw the phoenix appear on coins announcing the return of the Golden Age of Rome. In a Coptic Sermon about Mary, the phoenix was said to serve as harbinger of a new era, the beginning of a new age in the relationship between God and man. It therefore appears at Abel’s death, the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt, and the birth of Christ. That its symbolic versatility has allowed it to represent both the end of an old era and the beginning of a new one is consistent with the phoenix’s story: some versions have the phoenix travelling to the altar of the sun god to bury its dead father, but others have it flying there to initiate its rebirth. The phoenix represents an end, but its end is always a beginning. The story of the phoenix’s end varies as well, but Dionysus and Claudian tell us that the phoenix knows death is approaching when its halo of light begins to diminish. It prepares a scented nest from the tree branches and spices of Paradise (cinnamon in particular was considered to have been brought to the world of men by the phoenix). According to Lactantius’s poem “The Phoenix,” it then turns to the rising sun, singing a beautiful, mournful dirge that silences other animals and anticipates its end. Lactantius shows the phoenix burning after death, but more typically, the phoenix flaps its wings until its colorful feathers burst into flame at the sun’s heat, burning until all that remains are ashes. From those ashes emerges a new phoenix, one described by Lactantius as both new and yet also the same—the very same phoenix that burst into flame is reborn as a creature at once absolutely new and absolutely itself. This apparent contradiction firmly asserts the phoenix’s emphatic triumph over death, recalling the famous inscription “From myself alone I am reborn.” The Phoenix in Fairy Tale When mythological creatures speed, soar, or inch their way into the fairy-tale world, they invariably conceal their exotic origins. The “Juniper Tree,” touted by the Brothers Grimm as a shining example of native lore (it was one of two tales published in a low German dialect rather Winter 2010 157

than in the standard German of the other tales), features the phoenix in Teutonic disguise, almost placed in a supporting role through its subordination to the tree in which it is born. In the Grimms’ story, a woman decapitates her stepson, blames the crime on her daughter, chops the boy up in pieces, and cooks him up in a stew served up to his father. Marlene, the boy’s sister, buries the bones tossed aside by the father under the juniper tree, which goes up in flames to produce a bird that sings “magnificently.” The beauty of the bird, along with its intoxicating melody and heady aroma, captivate villagers, who arm the bird with what it needs to mete out rewards and punishments. Once the stepmother has been flattened with a millstone, the bird transforms itself back into the boy, resurrected through a ritual that unexpectedly restores a human to life. How did the phoenix come into this particular fairy-tale picture? The Grimms themselves emphasized the ancient origins of the tales, how they capture the myths and beliefs of pagan times. Their collection abounds with singing bones, speaking skulls, and fingers that fly through the air. To ensure happy endings, those body parts, like the protagonists, need to return home or find a new home. At the end of one of their versions of the “Bluebeard” story, the third in a trio of sisters reconstitutes the chopped-up body parts of her two dead siblings and restores them to life. The phoenix, though imported from cultures to the east, was the perfect agent for a genre that specialized in restoration and revivification. Bursts of radiant beauty in fairy tales required nothing more than the feather of the phoenix. The Russian firebird, which appears in several of the tales in Alexander Afanasyev’s monumental nineteenth-century collection of Russian folktales, has feathers so bright that a single one can light up an entire room. It has a bad habit of stealing fruit, plucking golden apples from the orchards of monarchs. Whether those apples are borrowed from Greek or from Norse mythology is unclear, but in both cultural traditions, golden apples are the source of immortality, keeping the gods forever young. Migrating with ease into fairy-tale lore to animate through beauty and the promise of immortality, the phoenix takes on the protective coloring of native names to blend in with local lore. The Phoenix of Albus Dumbledore The phoenix returns with renewed force in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, both as a symbol of life’s triumph over death within the series itself and as a reminder of how the charismatic bird’s life cycle can become a trope for finding immortality through song and story. Dumbledore’s pet phoenix and Harry’s savior, along with the “Order of the Phoenix,” made the avian creature perhaps the most significant magical creature in a literary world overflowing with captivating beasts and in a series of books that has emerged as the defining literary experience of a generation. A flaming funeral pyre could not have made for a more dramatic rebirth. Fawkes’s exploits familiarize the casual reader with the most impor158 The Harvard Advocate

tant aspects of the phoenix myth. The bird’s association with Dumbledore, the greatest wizard of his time, foreshadows the ultimate theme of renewal and resurrection that the series does not make explicit until the final book. The phoenix’s lament at Dumbledore’s funeral procession suggests its impending death and the beginning of a new era, a Golden Age constituted from the ashes of the old. Just when Dumbledore dies, precisely when the battle ahead seems most difficult for the forces of Good, Rowling’s phoenix song suggests the renaissance of the magical world that we witness at the close of Book Seven, and the resurrection of Harry that makes the books thematically consistent with the story of the phoenix. But the first signs of an ultimate resurrection emerge, for those familiar with phoenix lore, far earlier. Book Two’s confrontation between basilisk and phoenix recalls the phoenix’s traditional classical pairing with the crocodile or snake, a pairing suggesting that even what seems most threatening can ultimately be harnessed to the chariot of the sun, with which the phoenix is associated. The phoenix’s blinding of the basilisk and healing of Harry with its tears – a healing power suggested by Pliny’s claim that phoenix ash could be made into an elixir – prefigures the defeat of Voldemort, the triumph of life over death that occurs with Harry’s sacrifice. That Harry and Voldemort’s wands contain feathers from the very same phoenix touches even more brilliantly on the phoenix story. The pairing recalls benu’s dual association with the creator Amon-Re and the destroyer Osiris, the likeness between life and death that is ultimately the triumph of life over death. Voldemort resists death and in turn brings death to many others, but Harry submits to death in phoenix-like fashion. It is the phoenix that loves life, yet also prepares a nest before the rising sun, and sings a lament at death’s approach even as it recognizes that death must come so that life may reemerge. And reemerge it does, as Harry rises like the phoenix, proving that even death can be conquered, that, as his parent’s epitaph reads (from Paul’s first epistle to the church at Corinth), “The last enemy that shall be destroyed is Death.” That this most achingly conciliatory line should show up in Rowling’s final volume is no surprise, especially considering that the author began writing about the Boy Who Lived when her mother died at age 45. As Rowling’s books remind us, as the phoenix story tells us, and as Albus Dumbledore puts it (with a nod to J.M. Barrie’s play Peter Pan): “to the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.” The impact of Rowling’s work has ensured the persistence of the phoenix myth for a new generation, but it also proves the point of Hans Christian Andersen’s story “The Phoenix.” Art endures, always refashioning itself as it endows those who create it with immortality. Behind Rowling, behind the writers and artists who bring it back to life time and again, the phoenix soars onward—massive, radiant, mysterious, and bursting with the life force.

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CONTRIBUTORS’ NOTES

Rae Armantrout’s most recent book, Versed (Wesleyan, 2009), was a finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry. She teaches at UC San Diego. Away from the Houses and into the Trees went Sanders Isaac Bernstein. Bruce Boucher ’70 was managing editor of The Harvard Advocate in his senior year. He is the author of numerous books and articles on Renaissance and Baroque art and architecture, among them, Andrea Palladio: The Architect in His Time (Abbeville Press, revised edition, 2007). He is the director of the University of Virginia Art Museum and an adjunct professor of art there. Emily Chertoff loves Phillip Chertoff. Mark Chiusano always wanted to be a zookeeper. Ben Cosgrove just can’t talk to animals about these things. Erik Fredericksen is a dogs person. RachAel Goldberg is unacceptable, there won’t be a Hannukah! Adam Horn and the Paper on the Phoenix, FH’s most recent publication is What Did I Do Wrong? from Flood Editions. Winter 2010 161

Bret Anthony Johnston is the Director of Creative Writing at Harvard. This is his first story in The Advocate and he’s embarassingly proud of its inclusion. Rebecca Lieberman is Sallie Dahmes, in the Domain of the Great Bear, missing her snail. Andrew Nunnelly ’10 is happy like a seige of herons. Katie Peterson is a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and was born in California. Benjamin Percy is the author of a novel, The Wilding, and two books of stories, The Language of Elk and Refresh, Refresh, which has also been adapted into a graphic novel. He teaches in the MFA program at Iowa State University. Carl Phillips is the author of ten books of poetry, most recently Speak Low. Anna Polonyi loves the smell of the Peabody. Donald Revell is the author of eleven collections of poetry, most recently of The Bitter Withy. The winner of numerous awards, he is a Professor of English and Creative Writing Director at UNLV. Madeleine Schwartz smuggles cheese across the border. Mark Strand lives in New York and teaches at Columbia. His most recent book is New Selected Poems. Kevin Seitz stood in the center of a group of newspaper men and waxed wroth. Jessica Sequeira dedicates her piece to the Grandísimo Cronopio. 162 The Harvard Advocate

Maria Tatar chairs the Program in Folklore and Mythology at Harvard University and is the author of The Enchanted Hunters: The Power of Stories in Childhood. Maria Vassileva says thank you for the jellyfish picture. Maria Xia tends to overfeed small to medium-size rodents.

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164 The Harvard Advocate

Special Thanks The Harvard Advocate wishes to thank the following generous individuals for their support of our activities during the 2009-2010 academic year. They have made it possible for the Advocate to remain committed to publishing the best literature and art that the Harvard campus has to offer, four times each year. The contributions of the following individuals, though, have not only supported the printing of our magazine, but have also made it possible for the Advocate to further our mission of promoting the arts on campus. Last year, our building at 21 South Street was home to a host of literary and artistic events, including visits from Richard Russo, Denis Johnson, and Robert Pinsky, to name only a few. We witnessed the revival of the Spring Dinner, which will be from here on out an annual event, produced the first Advocate DVD featuring student films, and reestablished the Advocate’s presence in the Boston-Cambridge music scene by hosting several concerts featuring local artists. Gifts have made possible the creation our new website (www. theharvardadvocate.com) and we are dedicated to improving and expanding further our new web presence. We have implemented new features such as video hosting and online subscribing and we plan to expand the depth and breadth of the back catalog of issues available for viewing online. However, digital development can be costly and, as we pursue this project of digital expansion, your contributions to The Harvard Advocate are now more valuable than ever. Please consider supporting The Harvard Advocate at any level! All gifts to The Harvard Advocate endowment fund, a partitioned division of the Harvard University endowment, are fully tax deductible according to 501(c)(3) non-profit donation guidelines. Gifts will be acknowledged in the four issues following receipt according to the giving categories of Patron ($1000 and over), Benefactor ($500 and over), Donor ($200 and over), and Friend ($25-$199). Checks should be made out to “Harvard University” with “Harvard Advocate fund #480105” written in the memo line. Envelopes can be sealed with a kiss and mailed to 21 South Street, Cambridge, MA 02138. Please email contact@theharvardadvocate.com with questions or to discuss specific giving opportunities. Thank you for helping to support Mother Advocate.

PATRONS Anonymous BENEFACTORS Anonymous, Glenn Schwetz DONORS Anonymous, Peter and Tina Barnet, Bruce A. Boucher, Frances Suen FRIENDS Daphne Abel, Nancy Hannaford Greer, Jessica R. Henderson, Walt Hunter, Taro Kuriyama, Anthony Pino, Gregory Scruggs, Emery M. Younger Winter 2010 165

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This special issue of The Harvard Advocate could not have been accomplished without the support of the following individuals and organizations. The list recognizes not merely financial contributions but also, perhaps even more importantly, the contributions of time, energy, and spirit that went into this magazine: Harvard University Office for the Arts. The many established (and accomplished!) artists and writers who were kind enough to let us publish their work: Rae Armantrout, Ilisa Barbash, Bruce Boucher, Louise Bourgeois, Peter Brodfuerer, Liz Hamilton, Amy Hempel, Adam Horn, Fanny Howe, Bret Anthony Johnston, Harri Kallio, Nicholas Lampert, Jay McInerney, Castle McLoughlin, Annette Messager, Katie Peterson, Benjamin Percy, Carl Phillips, D.A. Powell, Rosamund Purcell, Donald Revell, Mark Strand, Maria Tatar, Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Gail Wight. The Harvard Advocateâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Board of Trustees. The illustrators: Charlotte Alter, Isidore Bethel, Wendy Chang, Dana Kase, Charleton, Lamb, Joseph Morcos, Anna Murphy, Lauren Packard, Aimee Wang. Our student contributors: Without you, we would have neither content nor a purpose. Our readers: why create a magazine, if not for you? And, of course, last but not least, those who faithfully devote themselves to the best interests of The Harvard Advocate: our members.

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