PORTFOLIO OF STUDENT WRITING
2019-2020
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TABLE OF CONTENTS The Documentarians .............Felix Lecocq.....................................3 Kaieteur....................................Jason Lalijee.....................................5 How To Be Sick.......................Kevin Hassett...................................7 Certified Copy.........................Serin Lee...........................................8 A Baby Named Bathwater......Mireille Farjo..................................11 Two Poems...............................Jake Weiss.......................................13 The Chagrin River Valley.......Paige Resnick..................................15 On Cameron Knowler............Eli Winter........................................17
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THE DOCUMENTARIANS FELIX LECOCQ (AB’20) I like watching Asha’s mom make dinner. There is so much sound in the kitchen and the air smells of Old Bay seasoning. Asha’s little brothers, Scott and Caleb, clatter on the tiled floor, carrying knives and forks from the kitchen to the dining room, while Asha’s mom scrapes the scales off a fish into the sink. Asha puts a bowl of rice and peas into the microwave. As it hums and glows, she fills two new bowls with flour and milk to batter the fish. Although she and her mom aren’t using it today, my favorite sound in Asha’s kitchen is the timer shaped like a tomato. It twists its stem around, muttering quietly, and rings when the stem returns to its natural position. One day I want things to move around me so suddenly that I have to own a tomato timer. Because I’m a guest, Asha’s mom shoos me to the kitchen doorway, where Mrs. Lisa is sitting in a chair from the dining room. The boys scamper around her. “Hello, child,” Mrs. Lisa says, when I stand next to her. I know she has forgotten my name. When we first met, we traded the syllables of my name back and forth until I forgot it too. Mrs. Lisa is a nurse like Asha’s mom, and she’s eight months pregnant. Her house doesn’t have air conditioning, so she spends most of her time at Asha’s. “Hello, Mrs. Lisa,” I say. “Are you having dinner with us?” she asks. Asha’s mom drops the fish into a pot of oil. The oil screams and pops like fireworks. Mrs. Lisa and I wait in the doorway together, listening. When the dinner is ready, Asha’s dad has come home, and we all sit around the dining room table. Scott and Caleb are sitting in white plastic chairs from the backyard because there aren’t enough dining room chairs for everyone. The fish has crispy skin and a soft inside. After dinner, Asha’s dad drives Mrs. Lisa home, while I help Asha with the dishes. At seven, it is time to watch the movie. Asha’s mom and two brothers sit on the couch while Asha and I are on cushions on the floor, backs against the couch. I try to remember to blink. Asha shuffles forward and kneels in front of the television. She extracts the VHS from its box and slides the cassette into the VCR player. She presses play. The screen shivers. I let go of the breath in my chest, slowly. A man is walking home at night. His home is a cabin in a wheat field. The man is wearing a brown suit and whistling. There are no crickets in the wheat field. The words THEY HAVE ARRIVED creep out of the darkness, then vanish. The wheat field begins to flicker. The man stops whistling. “Oh, Asha,” Asha’s mom says. “I said no horror movies.” The twins squeal at the word ‘horror.’ The man stands on his front porch. Light flashes through his world. I want to press my hands to the screen and feel the light flash through me. He shields his eyes with a salute and looks up at the sky. Wind ripples through his hair. He runs into his house and shuts the door. Light falls through the windows like rain. He shuts the blinds, but it’s not enough. All the books in his bookcase fall off the shelves. The radio in his kitchen blares static. The house creaks, shatters, falls open. The light enters. Light pours down the throat of the man’s house. Light holds the man in a bright-knuckled clench. Light 3
drags him into the sky. The man begins to rise. For a second he looks like my father. The screen turns blue, then black. I feel my body grow heavy like a doll. A lamp is turned on and the living room appears. Caleb is on the floor, his hand on the television’s power button. Asha is staring at me, eyes wide through her glasses. “Jesus,” says Asha’s mom. “Scott? Go find the tissues.” I look down. There’s an exclamation mark of blood on my shirt. It gleams in the light. “What were you thinking, Asha?” Asha’s mom says. “I can’t believe they even let you bring home a movie like that.” Asha doesn’t say anything. Scott hands me a roll of toilet paper. I tear off a square and wipe my nose. “I’m sorry,” Asha says. She’s staring at me like she’s never seen me before. “Are you okay, honey?” Asha’s mom asks me. “Do you need Oscar to drive you home?” “No, thank you,” I say. My mouth is dry. “I can walk.” To prove it, I stand up, wobble, and leave the room. I walk to the front door and breathe. My fingers hover over the doorknob. I hear Asha’s mom in the other room say, “Asha, I really think—” “We’re fine, Mom,” Asha’s voice interrupts. “I got this.” Asha comes out of the living room and stands next to me by the door. She doesn’t say anything. I let my arm fall back to my side. I wait until I hear Asha’s family start talking again in the other room before I speak, quietly. “Asha,” I say. “I think my dad was abducted by aliens.” My hands hurt with the truth of what I have just said. With a certainty I’ve only ever felt in dreams, I know it’s true. The entire surface of my skin is vibrating with the knowing. “Okay,” Asha says, finally. “Okay?” I ask. “Okay,” she says again. “I believe you.” “Okay,” I say back, blindly, foolishly. “Thank you.” “No problem,” she says. “What are you going to do?” “I don’t know,” I say. “Don’t tell my mom.” I open the door and walk home. It is still evening. California is pink and soft like the inside of a mouth. In the summer the days are so long they ache. 4
KAIETEUR JASON LALLJEE (AB’20)
David Stanley, 2014
I picture her like this: running barefoot against the heat-packed soil, dirt red with hell beneath, flying toward some fixed, unseen point in the distance. I picture my grandmother like this because I’m sure she had some instinct that I don’t, sensing that something was happening that she needed to see. I picture her there: standing in the kitchen, peeling mangoes, or balanjay, or fresh hassa from their spines. Suddenly dashing the produce from her hands into the sink, running through the house, out the door, whole cities and bodies of water disappearing fast from under her feet. It makes sense that she’s there because all of Guyana seems close-knit to me. That’s the way stories about the Old World sound when you grow up hearing about it: a lean geography that stacks together like folding chairs, disparate points sewn together so that you could see all the landmarks at once if you spun in a circle, eyes unblinking, whirring faster and faster together into someone else’s memory. In my imagination Kaieteur Falls is there, everywhere, a constant companion of noise sent by the Blue Fairy herself, like it’s the conscience that will be your guide, like there’s no whale waiting inside to vanish you in the cave of its mouth. I picture the water vapor blanketing the air thick and dense like exhaust, not quite motherof-pearl white but cousin-of-pearl off-white, the kind of white you wear to your second or third wedding. I picture my grandmother running through it, jackknifing through a fog that descends over the squat houses and hides their rotting porches, the roofs longing to unhinge their jaws. I picture her running from the farm, from the two younger sisters and four younger brothers she needs to take care of. There she is, weaving through the miles of sugar cane separating her from the horizon, from what holds the answer, needing to see for herself the 5
other side of the cane, where there’s a mass of brown bodies axled on their knees in prayer. I picture her like this: told explicitly to stay far away from that white man , from the brown American bodies that fan out from him in all directions like the outer rings of a spider’s web. I imagine that she needed to see it happen for herself (how could she not know it was happening, the stories of the Old World stack together and retrospect causes the Babel of it all to collapse) — If I were my grandmother, I’d need to know if they’d actually go through with it. I picture her speeding past the house, past inexhaustible chickens squawking in the adjacent field, Kaieteur protesting deafeningly from all directions, running straight into the arms of the sugarfield beyond. She starts in Canje and ends up in Jonestown because the cane is a wardrobe that leads to Narnia, she passes her fingers along top coats and hats, through towers of sugar— I picture the cane deferent in her path, pressing flat against either side like the Red Sea parted for Moses, like they were being forced down by the wind. I see her finally at the edge of the field in view of Jim Jones himself, his shared elixir passed around in communion. I wonder if she was parched; I wonder if she craved a sip. I feel her shock: the brown bodies caught still like planets in gravitational orbit, my grandmother hiding between the stalks and watching it all unfold. My grandmother still among the stalks in the nascent dawn, indiscriminate from one of the field’s own— I picture my grandmother watching these American bodies, dark like her own, thinking they could be the ghosts of relatives she never knew; I picture them holding their glasses to the sun, which glitter jewel-red in warning. I don’t know how the cult members are arranged. They might be clustered and willowy like the stalks behind them, or already composed as the photographs eventually document it: prostrated spirals of bodies that wrap into each other, like waves of oil into a sinkhole. I don’t know if she manages to watch its denouement, the bodies crumpling together, an igneous rock forming. I imagine she averted her eyes to Kaieteur but saw a geography beyond it, finally asking herself what America did to its brown bodies to drive them here in the first place.
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HOW TO BE SICK KEVIN HASSETT (AB’21)
A good word to move up higher in your vocabulary is ill. Sick is a wonderful word, it’s got a nice crunch to it. And it’s the perfect excuse-word, undebatable, over as soon as it’s begun. I can’t, I’m sick. Better than “personal issues,” more reusable than “family emergency.” You can even feign some offense if you get asked the obvious follow-up. Sick… with what? Well, what business is that of yours? Do you not believe me? Do you want a doctor’s note? Do I need to supply you with my entire medical history? However, in our case, there are two crippling flaws to telling people you are sick; One is that you sound contagious, and the other is that it sounds temporary. This is where having a catchy, blameless, non-embarrassing disease would come in handy. I have MS, Lupus, tachycardia, I have the type of diabetes that isn’t my fault. The absolute dream, the gold medal: I have cancer. But we don’t have cancer. We don’t really know what we have. But you are ill. Unwell. This is a fact, this is your state. It is impossible to accept this, to internalize its permanence. But I’ll feel better tomorrow, you’ll tell yourself, not out of optimism, but out of instinct. This is the lie you will never stop telling yourself, you have to catch yourself every time. I just need to get some rest and I’ll feel better tomorrow, I’m just feeling kind of out of it today, just feeling kind of shitty lately, just haven’t really been myself these last couple years. You don’t even have to remember ever feeling well to know you feel like shit. No matter how long you have not felt okay for, you still know what it is to feel okay, you’d recognize okay immediately if okay finally returned, and you’d forgive okay, teary-eyed, open-armed, you wouldn’t care at all where okay had been or who okay had slept with, and you’d take okay back on its terms, on any terms, as long as it’s back, as long as it will stay. There’s something profoundly sexless about the word chronic, something that conjures sad, overweight, ugly people on bad couches in dark, musty rooms, not just old but devoid of youth, youth sucked out as if by Dementor, lying there watching daytime television, and all the sexless paraphernalia that goes along with that, ice packs and CPAPs and ointments and powders and oxygen tanks and walkers and multicolored galaxies of pills and supplements all sorted into days of the week, divided into breakfast, lunch, dinner. You must hide these things, tuck them under the bed the way I do, if you want anyone to think you’re one of them, still young like them. Do not say the word chronic until it is dragged out of you. Something no one will seem to get, not the most patient, understanding, caring person in your life, is how difficult this is to talk about. Not emotionally, but logistically. It is hard to figure out what to say. This is something you’ll want to start working out as soon as possible. I have spent three years like this now and I still have absolutely no idea what to say to someone when they ask how I am doing. This may seem small but it will eat at you, turn you into a lost, broken man who cannot talk about the war. One reason for this is a riddle I cannot solve; no one wants to hear about your chronic fucking illness and yet the only way you can begin to explain anything about the way you are is by talking about your chronic fucking illness. Talking about yourself without mentioning your illness is like the Church of Scientology not mentioning the aliens, Mount St. Helen not mentioning the lava, the real estate agent not mentioning the murders. 7
CERTIFIED COPY SERIN LEE (AB’21)
Between the dog and the wolf, something darkening
To bank one’s wings on shelter is to run from one’s own shadow. Birds above and below go to the races, submerged nearly in the dreadscape of dying cows. What is it that happens in the unfinished photograph? The seaside, but something denser, more curatorial. Its window, washed ashore, is already too inundated to offer a generous view. Still, from its dim glass emerges Normandy and brine, each threading light through all that ice. In the distance, thunder and years of dueling remember only public faults. Arriving on their shores are men who remember only the child’s giddy dream, and the sober hereafter. In them, it is always raining. Perhaps they could be domesticated, but how then could the actor ever be his character? They are the peopled difference between memory and desire, as they err softly down the foothills. Meanwhile, illogical snow gathers itself around the earth, waiting on the ordinary to unfold.
Recurring symptoms begin when chance is displaced in snow
Memories of a sparely painted gunshot. The birds are unwieldy—respond only with their scattering. In the background, a howl. Closer, the hound. The hunter is less concerned this time of year, and wonders at the meaning of such an expanse—of voices crying when snow disrupts a scene. How can the actor ever be his character? The deer wonder, too, but leave no tracks of their inquiry. A crowd still parting. The horses, marbling themselves, break against continuum and hold stubbornly to the foreground. They are bracing for the third snow, and want only quiet with which to pad their hooves. Let the fulminating day forgive them as they catch up to the ecology of winter—breath, too, catching on the storm when birds are willed once more into movement. 8
(A CORRESPONDENCE OF 24 FRAMES)
To make good distance, the wind is the accomplice of lawless trees
Of course, at times it is all a mind buoyed up by the sea—how to hold it? Waves break with less precision, though still fraying the world’s edges. Retrieve the other cows that amble toward the dead ones by herding them whitely into synchrony. The sun, a thing unseen, scuttles narrowly past and informs the occasion. It knows fiction can hold no charms unless beaten on by light and water. Both break now, more pliantly, to sustain the picture. Stray branches retrieve new objects from the shore: dogs spreading through the day’s reef in muted tones. They pad across impasses, barbed wire—but outpaced by composition, they can retrieve only hunting rifles and late spring. The black herd is said to contain the missing crowds.
Afternoon multiplies thought, though not quite this one
The hushed trees too remind us of birds, now gone though evening isn’t missing, neither is light. Sniffing the season’s wet mask for the winged shadow of one, snout and sense-making await new settings for grazing. We do not survive well the old task of aerating reason through the fields. The cows are glacial as we move through them, and sound out how we have merely become watchful mirrors. Ligh but never to completion. Some vegetation and color, a morning that does not age as easily as it lives. Soon they will tear themselves away from the page, for it too will end, or give way to lighter concerns. All too long to make relative. Imagine having to divine all the pauses, things on paper—lowing does not mend the composition, neither do tracks. That which you know of yourself depends on them, but when in doubt one must refrain from welding the darkness into pleasure. 9
When ecology fails, try softer soil
But only the birds can be sure. Watch them as they unfold, flying finitely into the storm. All parties exhausted. His parts gathered together, the dog has no reprieve of most things—only of the wind, which breathes the caught sea. He frees it, for like him it is merely what it chases. Silence, a query forked by lightning, pads gingerly out of its death. The pleasure is in decreating. A sound bathes multitudes, even if one is simply passing through. Observe from a sanded distance the aired and aerated questions. Shadows are always behind in the framed world. Dying, too, is like this. It does not mean its indifference—its weightlessness notwithstanding.
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A BABY NAMED BATHWATER MIREILLE FARJO
(AB’20)
My assistant got my lunch order wrong, and she knew it too. She’s a strange girl, really bad at her job and really nervous about it too. It seems to me that her situation could be easily remedied, but what do I know. “What is it?” I asked. “Smoothie bowl,” she said. “Coconut. I think I got your order today confused with your order from yesterday.” She kept moving her hands in jerky motions towards my desk, like she might work up the nerve to whisk it all away. “Oh. Really? I don’t think I’ve ever seen this stuff before.” My assistant shoved her unruly hands down the pockets of her slacks. “I’ll go back.” “Don’t even worry about it,” I said, too late, and then I spent the rest of the afternoon worrying that there’s an evil part of me who just wants to watch other women suffer. I know this is an instinct lots of us are supposed to share, and inconveniently I am a moral hypochondriac. Sometimes I just need to sit down and breathe deeply and remind myself that if I were a sadist someone probably would have noticed it by now. I decided to make a solemn oath to be kind to women for a full week at least. I pulled a sticky note of my stack and wrote my oath in pen. NICER TO GIRLS. Then I stared in silent penance at the smoothie bowl sitting uneaten at the corner of my desk. There were dark pods in the milky sludge… I let it run over my pen and back into the plastic bowl. Food doesn’t look like food anymore, do you ever notice that? Rima emailed me later that day. It was this thing she’d started trying after her divorce, sending out newsletters with updates on the kids and her job and also Fred, on the days she’d decided the split was amicable. It was a constant stream of information, near-daily, though she never replied to any of the follow-ups we sent her. I didn’t hold the uncommunicativeness against her. Her divorce was still new, like really new. If her divorce was a baby it could focus on objects a foot away, but it would have trouble following you with its eyes. Hey there family and friends, said Rima’s email. Thank you all so much for all your support during this time <3. Fred and I appreciate it more than we can say. I wondered if this meant she was reading our messages after all, and then I wondered if she actually had replied to some of them. I couldn’t tell who all the newsletters were getting sent out to. Rima had used blind carbon copy.
Kitty and Marshall are little troopers, and they’re super excited to go skiing with their dad over spring break. Living room is currently full of kiddos sliding around with books 11
strapped to their feet to “practice”. RIP my hardwood floors!! Though there might be fewer scuffmarks now that Fred won’t be stomping around in his work shoes anymore. Yeah, you read right— he’s moving out. I’m planning a remodel of the kitchen (in commemoration? celebration?? heehee) and I’m excited and a little nervous to test out my eye for design. Fred used to take care of all this stuff. This new development should be thrilling to say the least!!! We’re still in couples therapy to work through the separation, and it’s going really great; learning lots about ourselves and our respective potentials for abject and unforgiving cruelty. We might get the kids a dog! Name suggestions??? I’m thinking Bambina or Velma or Twinkletoes or Lizard or Vixen or Sweetiepie or Meaniepie or Chucky Doll or Cut-Your-Heart-Out-With-A-Spoon. Or Flynn for a boy. Stay tuned for pics :) Cheers, Rima
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I wondered if Rima was okay. I figured not.
2 POEMS
JAKE WEISS (AB’20)
A Portrait of Flannery Miller What she is Is not so much A tulip; rather,
Flannery would be an apple Dripping in bronze, My wiring
A fresh red conundrum Drumming To my breastbone.
Dissolved to pink Bubbling air. But I cannot Proceed. Seagulls breeze
Top hat reposed On her restless shoulder, Her figure realized
In the mind Of my wind, and Where am I, Flannery,
By the velvet dress, Her eyes sojourn here, Her mouth: A dimensional
Next to be whisked? Behind some new Artifical blockade
Wallop. Fair Flannery, Glued to each star flake In the burgeoning sky,
Made for bruised and bony Figments like myself And you? Hustle me along
What is your horizon, The one you see? Am I? I
To the next orchard, A pleading crescent Of pallid night. I am not
Am not allowed to wonder. Am fed Strict calculus Through a meat machine.
Allowed to wonder, to wander, to Walk in a line. You and I are Becoming a We, I feel, oh Fading,
I’ve already begun to love Flat Flannery when The fat man accosts me
Flippant Flannery, “a We, Oh Flannery, a We!—” Static jolts my jaw. How often
(Sir, step away From The painting)
I must be remanded, Reminded: I am not To wonder aloud.
And I would love To continue loving Her; To continue loving
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For Violet I.
II.
She was in a box. She was fixating vividly On boxes. Was affording piqued attention To new blue mold on rich red Raspberries. She fixed Herself a crooked spliff. Four grams later Her grammar slips beneath A blushing willow. Comforts of God brush her Under: slalom nightmares Feeding again and again the beast of Her minute hand. She is woken By the prospect of there being a sun, Though he is soon and yet to peek. When Is she to know? She must anticipate All the returns: ferns to foxes, coughs To fevers, pills, quakes, bluster and Love in its twenty-one-thousandOdd means of self-exposure. She is boxing with raspberry eyelids, The left one verging on Currant. She knows fear in the heart Of its biome. The spider cracks And gold, pollinated expanses Abandoned by cardinals, bared For her estranged dance, her muscular Panic. When is she to untether? Rocks between banyans to listen. She does not know but wants to know She is her own Green willingness, thumb Plastered to camera: the first violets.
Contemporary, her gait. Favorite tune Temporary, a half-life, a bass clef, Page-bound bars vibrating a cello.
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Unsatisfactory. Rain boring somnolent Windows in walls, holes in windows Lick her cerebrum She has grown to smack and Smooth in carefully administered Doses: pink tactile teardrops sent between What she believes is her visage, knows Is her nape. Paper gradually befalls The hideous typewriter Burping sweet plum, the sunny catastrophe of The heart. Fonder by the day of her Extemporaneity. She swills Herself among merlot sulfites by The glassâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s stem, to pass the time. Her glasses Droop. Stems her waking hours By the violet root.
THE CHAGRIN RIVER VALLEY PAIGE RESNICK
(AB’20)
We park in the lot around the corner. We pay the three dollars and walk a block to the campaign office. The office is next to a car repair shop and across the street from a deli that sells a pretty good Reuben and a strip club that advertises their Monday lunch special on a big sign out front. $5 for fries, a drink, and the Best Burger in Cleveland from 11:30am-1:30pm. The strip club is called Crazy Horse, like the Native American war leader. We read the Yelp reviews in the break room. Henry V. gives it five stars: “Older dude who loves and respects all strippers. Makes me FEEL 20 years younger.” A homeless guy with only one shoe comes around every day with a dirty rag to wash the windows of all the storefronts, even the abandoned ones. We put data into spreadsheets for five hours a day. Data about people who will definitely give money to the campaign and who might give money and who definitely won’t give money. We color-code the data; green means ask for money, yellow means maybe ask for money, and red means republican or dead. We work hard and fast like good Midwesterners, but then not so hard and not so fast, because the campaign manager took a three hour lunch break. We share a wall with a photographer who watches movies at top volume while he edits his photos. We try to guess what he is watching from the sound. Sarah thinks it’s Star Wars. Ian thinks it’s Planet of the Apes. We make phone calls in our confident but humble voices: Would you please think about donating money to the candidate? Or voting for the candidate? Or coming to a fundraising dinner at so-and-so’s beautiful home, there will be a lively political 15
discussion and homemade margaritas. We make the candidate sound thoughtful and personable, and we don’t forget to mention his career as a prosecutor, his tireless fight against crime and injustice. We call lawyers, we call doctors, we call Jewish housewives. We apologize to Mr. Smith when Mrs. Smith can’t come to the phone, she passed away 5 months ago. We update our spreadsheets. C5 is now red. Everyone is excited about the total eclipse of the sun. The local paper writes about it every day for weeks. NORTHEAST OHIO’S GUIDE TO THE GREAT AMERICAN ECLIPSE: HOW TO WATCH THE BIGGEST EVENT OF THE SUMMER. It’s the most talked about news story since Lebron came back from Miami. We stop color-coding and calling the politically-active suburban elderly at 2:30pm and step outside onto the sidewalk, where the homeless guy is washing windows. Protect your eyes, the articles say. Don’t stare directly at the sun without the special eclipse glasses. Someone brought a pair, maybe Ian, maybe Meg, one of us brought them, blue cardboard with dark plastic lenses. But only one pair. So we pass them around between us, the campaign manager and the finance director and the deputy finance director and the lead intern and the new intern. We take turns staring through the glasses as the sun goes from bright to dark to bright again. When we aren’t staring at the sun, we stare at the kid riding a bike with no tires, the guy hurrying into the strip club. Three employees from the deli stand with heads tilted up at the sky. A hair net flies off one of their heads and dances down the street. Two mechanics from the car repair shop look up too, with wrenches hanging loosely in their hands. After a couple minutes, it’s over. We go back inside and finish our spreadsheets. We call a woman who turns out to be in hospice care. She says there is no point in donating if she won’t be alive to see him elected. It’s 3:00 pm. We close our computers. We walk to the parking lot and get in our cars. I see the body. I look through the windshield at the squashed mosquito twitching next to the wiper, at the overflowing dumpster I parked in front of this morning, at the body behind it. Its legs stick out, bare feet and bare calves, long yellow toenails and curly brown leg hair. Something deep red encrusts its feet and ankles, and for a second I think it might be dirt. For a second I think it might be asleep there, wedged between the dumpster and the brick wall behind it. It’s 87 degrees with 100% humidity. I have a halo of frizz around my head and sweat stains on my new business casual button-down and I can smell the garbage rotting. I sit there, the air conditioning tugging at the hair stuck to the sweat on my neck. There is no one left from the office in the lot. Should I call the police? Will the police think I did it? When I think about it, killing someone during an eclipse is the perfect crime. No witnesses with everyone looking at the sky. I laugh out loud, a throaty, hiccuping laugh, and then cover my mouth with my hand. I breathe hard and fast, like a runner. I will myself to breathe slower. I back out. I drive away. I spend the weekend trying not to think. I tell no one. What kind of person drives away?
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ON CAMERON KNOWLER ELI WINTER (AB’20) The last time Cameron Knowler and I saw each other, we got together to play guitar a few days after New Year’s. A year before, we had gone on tour; now we had hopes to record some of the music we’d played on the road. At some point, Cameron let slip his lone serious New Year’s resolution, which was “to stop talking.” He’s the only guy I know who could keep it. I’ve known Cameron for a little over two years. I don’t remember how we met. We play music together, but we come from different backgrounds. My music has a nebulous position within experimental circles; Cameron, meanwhile, describes himself as a “recovering bluegrass musician.” He’s tan, limber and tall, with thin lips, a sharp nose and acne scars dotting his cheeks. He often dwarfs his instruments—arms angled, neck bent, tapping his toe when he plays. His voice is a narrow tenor, quiet yet incisive. Bantering in between songs, he can be difficult to hear, yet one senses that he’s saying something important. He talks carefully, deliberately, with focused restraint. And he speaks in paragraphs—pausing, digressing, backing up, turning to face a thought. Nearing home after a summer tour, I tell him he feels like a kindred spirit. He feels the same. On tour, I saw his attention to detail firsthand. Each morning, whether he’s slept in a bed or on the floor, he rolls the cuff of his jeans up an inch or two past his ankles when he gets dressed. He wears his hair long, swooping diagonally over his forehead down to his brow. There’s usually a trucker hat; sometimes, themed socks. You get the sense that he’s self-sufficient, and that, in many things, he’s taught himself much of what he knows. Cameron plays guitar in a number of styles: bluegrass, oldtime, rock, jazz. He started when he was three. His dad, who was fascinated by the guitar, gave him a Guns N’ Roses cassette tape. Cameron remembers his reaction: “I became obsessed… Holy shit.” Soon, he was playing every day. His hand, he says, formed in the shape of the guitar’s neck. Don’t get me wrong: the guitar has a steep learning curve. To strum, you turn your right forearm in towards the guitar, clipping a pick between your thumb and forefinger, like one might hold a pen. Your picking has to be precise to play notes in quick succession, moving between and across the strings. Meanwhile, your left hand curls around the guitar’s neck, fingers bending into stiff, complex chord shapes, fingertips pressing the strings hard against the fretboard and in towards your palm, forming calluses or even drawing blood. The motions are unfamiliar, challenging, often painful. You could hardly blame a first-time guitarist for quitting once this mess of coordination challenges confronts them. This might explain why, when Cameron started seriously learning to flatpick a few years ago, he spent a considerable amount of each practice session holding his guitar in his lap and looking at it. When you hold a guitar in your lap, its curves fit the shape of your thigh. Play it long enough and it feels like it’s part of you; the Indian slide guitarist Debashish Bhattarcharya says the fretboard of his lap guitar feels like part of his spine. But there’s a scientific basis for it, too. A few minutes is all you need to use a tool, such as a guitar pick, and think of it as part of your body. Cameron’s pick isn’t separate from him, but an extension of him. The guitar, too, feels connected, part of a musical symbiosis. And so, when you hear Cameron’s music, you feel like you’ve shaken his hand. Cameron’s main inspiration is Norman Blake, the iconoclast bluegrass guitarist. When I ask him where 17
to start with Blake, Cameron gives me a list of nine records to listen to. Blake’s music is at turns rollicking and stately, dignified yet unpretentious. He recorded with Bob Dylan, Kris Kristofferson, and Joan Baez, toured with Johnny Cash, but since the early 1970s, he’s been playing bluegrass, which he first heard growing up in rural Georgia, through a radio hooked up to a car battery. Cameron plays many of the same instruments as Blake: guitar, lap guitar, mandolin, banjo, fiddle. He appreciates Blake’s “honoring of the fiddle tradition through his guitar playing.” It does sometimes feel as if Blake is adapting qualities of other instruments to his own: trying to conjure the melodic sensibilities of a fiddler with a guitar, or the tone of a fiddle with his voice. I can imagine Cameron entranced by the possibilities Blake’s music uncovers. He mentions Blake’s simple, earthen melodies and muscular guitar playing as models for his own music. But, Cameron says, “what attracted me originally to his work is the fact that his music captures his childhood.” Cameron grew up in Yuma, Arizona, in the foothills of the Gila Mountains, where there weren’t people his age. A lot of people winter in Yuma, but winter is short. School would have helped, but Cameron didn’t attend. He wrote poetry with his dad and kicked around flea markets with his mom, who sold vintage glass beads. With his older brother, he dug holes in the backyard, and he rode dirt bikes, alone, in the Sonoran Desert. The Sonoran stretches from Arizona to California, spilling across the border into Mexico. Yuma lies near the border, at the center of the Lower Colorado River Valley, the hottest part of the Sonoran, where the Colorado and Gila Rivers meet. The Sonoran is a place of extremes. Gila comes from the Yuma word for “salty water,” but Yuma is among the driest places in the world. There are few aerosols in the air to scatter light, so the sky is a deep, clear blue. Summer highs can reach 120 degrees, at which point it hurts to breathe. It’s so quiet that the silence feels like sound. Rufinus, writing from Egypt in the fourth century, calls the desert quiet a “huge silence.” He was visiting Christian monks who had moved there to pray, focus and reach a state of grace. Entire communities moved to join them. One monk, dying, said that a monk “should be all eye.” Another held a stone in his mouth for three years. They were surrounded by silence. The late experimental musician Pauline Oliveros writes, “listen to everything all the time, and remind yourself when you are not listening.” Like the monks, she made listening her life’s focus. “I have faith in listening,” she writes. “Listening brings me to faith.” Playing accordion, she performed in duo. The second performer was the space. For Cameron, the desert plays a similar role. There, he says, “smaller things had greater weight.” Dove calls captivated him: they travel the farthest, he says, with four distinct notes. Cities obscure their nuances, but the open space of the desert brings them out. Listening to silence, then, is really just focused listening. To hear things you otherwise wouldn’t, and to recognize the significance of what you hear. “I think that the space in between things,” Cameron says, “can create more effect than any compositional device…it allows the listener to make connections in his or her brain that wouldn’t have been there before if we just laid it out for them.” He had this in mind working on his first record, New & Old, though he’s developed it further with his second, Honey off a Rock. Cameron says he wanted to, “without accompaniment, create a record where you’re just as aware of the silence as you are to the sound of the instrument. And, to me, that’s kind of how my childhood felt, being in a desert environment.”
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