YDN Magazine

DAILY NEWS

MAGAZINE

by Madeleine Witt and Skyler Inman MFC% OC@@ @JJL< * A8EL8IP )'(,

recyclerecyclerecyclerecycle

YOUR

YDN

DA I LY OPINION. YOUR THOUGHTS. YOUR VOICE. YOUR PAGE.

Send submissions to opinion@yaledailynews.com

Read and be read.

Daily.

JOIN@YALEDAILYNEWS.COM

If your bothered by this, we understand.

Meet your people.

4 6

9

story by MALINI GANDHI

Shelved seas story by LIBBIE KATSEV

Ralph

Hillary, no last name necessary feature by ELIZABETH MILES

24

essay by EMMA SPEER

32 35

photo essay by YANGLIN CAI

The sounds that bind us

8 29

JEAN

Cenotaph fiction by KATHERINE ADAMS

Not your grandpa’s LSD feature by MARISSA MEDANSKY

Staying in the LEED story by STEPHANIE ROGERS

DAILY NEWS

MAGAZINE

37

Treading clouds and shelling peas feature by YI-LING LIU

“The dream is very much alive” cover by MADELEINE WITT and SKYLER INMAN

14

Editors Jennifer Gersten Oliver Preston Managing Editors Yuval Ben-David Lucy Fleming Photography Editors Wa Liu Alex Schmeling Magazine Design Editor Amra Saric Design Editors Olivia Hamel Carter Levin Illustrations Editor Thao Do

Associate Editors Abigail Bessler Jessica Blau Elizabeth Miles

Copy Editors Eva Landsberg Adam Mahler Isabel Sperry Sarah Sutphin Design Assistant Maya Sweedler Editor-in-chief Isaac Stanley-Becker Publisher Abdullah Hanif Cover illustration by Madeleine Witt

JEAN

by Yanglin Cai

I

n the photo series “Jean,” I upholster common household objects with scraps of denim. I consider the fabric an integral part of what is fashionable and covetable. Adorning the objects with denim heightens their visual interest and desirability, but ultimately renders the objects useless. The exterior is transformed, but the objects’ innate functionality is lost in the process.

THE SOUNDS THAT BIND US

BY MALINI GANDHI PHOTOGRAPHY BY ELIZABETH MILES

D

eep within a New Haven laboratory, there is a tiny room meant to eat sounds up. It has low ceilings and huge gray cones sticking out from the walls, like a funhouse. When I talk, my words sound flat and far away, as if I have just stepped off an airplane and the world is still muffled, distant.

As I touch my ears, Ken Pugh, president of the Yale-affiliated Haskins Laboratories that houses this cone-filled, claustrophobic room, smiles a bit. He tells me that my reaction is not unique.

“When I bring most people in here, they say ‘I’m sorry, I must have a cold — my voice sounds so congested,’” he says, explaining that the chamber eliminates echoes, swallowing sound to create a silent baseline.

While this space is crucial for technical sound experiments, the lab’s studies go beyond isolated tests. Founded in 1935 by scientists Caryl Haskins and Franklin Cooper, Haskins brings together neuroscientists, psychologists, linguists and engineers from across the world to understand human language.

It’s not an easy task. Haskins must draw from many disciplines — speech is not simply a sound. It’s intertwined with the faces we see, the words we read, the ways we move our mouths.

Haskins isn’t just about silence in a 6 | Vol. XLII, No. 3 | January 2015

walled-off room of cones. It’s about the roar of the real, ever-shifting human voices that stream down the white-walled hallways of Haskins and spill into the streets below. It’s about words, spoken and written. It’s about connection and communication, and about the moments when these connections crack.

I

was eight when I started speech therapy.

I used to cram my tongue into the side of my mouth when I made “s” sounds so they came out gargled, as if I was holding in a gulp of water as I spoke. It was subtle enough that no one thought to fix it, but as I got older people started to look at me strangely. For two years, I moved between three different speech therapists who gave me thick binders of exercises and colorful stickers but could not help me. Then I met Kathy.

Kathy was a large woman with short blonde hair who smelled of radishes and rain. She came every Thursday with her red canvas bag and sat with me as I read sentences about slippery snakes sliding down sidewalks. Kathy told me that whenever I wanted to say an “s” word, I should make a “t” sound and slide it down from there. So for a year, I went to Tsammy’s house and played tsoccer in the fall. After a while I started going to Sammy’s house. I started playing soccer.

I

t is not until I speak with Jonathan Preston, a Haskins scientist and former speech therapist, that I realize my initial struggle to improve through traditional speech therapy was not unique. As a speech therapist in the public schools of Rochester, New York, he noticed many of the kids he worked with had “been in and out of speech therapy for years but were just not making any progress.”

At Haskins, Preston has been testing a novel technology that might help many who struggle in a society that puts so much value on clear speech: ultrasound visual feedback. Kids can observe real-time images of their tongue as they make sounds.

This allows them to visualize exactly what’s going wrong and make adjustments.

“It’s sort of like a video game for them — we point to areas on the screen and tell them to try to hit them with their tongue,” Preston tells me. “And we’ve had some really stirring success stories. There’s been some kids who had been in speech therapy for four to five years, and in a relatively short period of time after we started them on ultrasound visual feedback, we got them to the point where they didn’t need speech therapy anymore. That’s huge.”

While Preston acknowledges that the technology is not a cure-all, he hopes that it could be integrated into therapy settings to help those who are struggling– those

who don’t have a Kathy.

J

ulia Irwin, a language researcher at Haskins, finds herself fascinated by faces. As a Ph.D. student, while everyone else was studying infant crying, she remembers peering down at the babies, startled not by their sounds, but rather by their expressions.

“Understanding faces is so important in understanding communication,” Irwin says, sitting across from me at a long, gleaming table at Haskins. “Faces mark our identity. They communicate whether we are happy or sad. And they give us speech information.”

Recently, Irwin has moved beyond babies to study how seeing faces influences speech perception. An example: let’s say you listen to the syllable “ba.” Then you watch a video clip in which the same sound is dubbed over a person whose mouth is saying “ga.” Strangely, most of us hear neither “ba” nor “ga” — we hear “da.” Known as the McGurk effect, it’s an illusion. The brain meshes audio and visual inputs.

As Irwin worked with toddlers in separate studies, she began to notice that certain kids weren’t talking as readily. They would make repetitive motions, refusing to make eye contact. She identified these features as pre-diagnosis signs of autism.

And it seemed children with autism had more trouble reading speech information from faces: in the McGurk experiment,

they were much more likely to hear a sound closer to the audio “ba,” instead of the melded “da.”

Irwin believes this deficit could be due to years of avoiding looking at faces and mouths, a common characteristic of autism. So she thought if autistic children engaged visually with speaking faces, some of their social skills could be improved.

From this hope, the iPad app “Listening to Faces” was born. Children watch a speaking face say a particular word. Unlike McGurk, the face and sound do match up.

Yet the word is one that is easily confused with other words if it was guessed based on sound alone. After the face says the word, the children are given several cartoon options to match it: a sleek orange fox, a pair of purple-and-pink striped socks, a man getting an electric shock. If they get two wrong in a row, they are prompted to “Look to the Mouth!”

In an initial study, autistic children showed improvement in audiovisual speech perception.

“It’s very exciting because ultimately, we do all this basic scientific work with the purpose of intervening,” Irwin says.

“We have a mandate to use science to give back.”

L

ike most children, I learned by sounding out words: the word “tulip” was a series of separate, stumbling sounds before it became the flowers I ran to in our backyard each morning.

Pugh says this is how children typically learn: since the written word is a series of individual speech sounds, children must first distinguish those that make up “tulip” and then connect them. When awareness of speech sounds is muddled, reading problems can result. Research at Haskins suggests that disorders like dyslexia can be predicted by early problems in distinguishing individual speech sounds.

Yet a recent study by Pugh showed that dyslexic individuals process certain kinds of visual-spatial information more efficiently — many dyslexic individuals excel in art, architecture, and design.

“Many children with dyslexia have gone through their whole life being told that they are not smart,” Pugh says. “The results of this study could direct them toward careers and bring out enthusiasm and self-confidence.”

A

s I walk with Pugh through the halls of the laboratories, past Buzz Light year posters meant to keep children occupied during brain scans, past the world’s first speech synthesizer in a glass case and a room studded with tiny cameras that capture micro-movements of the mouth, he calls the lab a “strange little utopian community.” I understand what he means.

Everything that seems to hum through Haskins, from the dance of ultrasound tongues to that bizarre “da” in McGurk experiments, refuses to exist in isolation.

We don’t hear speech just with our ears – we also hear with our eyes and mouths. I thought reading was just about understanding text, but reading, too, is woven into how we talk, how we listen.

Sometimes I find this deep interdependence unnerving. Can I trust myself if what I hear a person say is changed by the way their mouth moves?

If how I read may be tinged with how I learned to say “s” at age nine, sitting with Kathy at the kitchen table, reading about the slippery snake?

And yet at other moments, it seems somehow complete. When I finally step out of the muffled room of cones, my voice sounds deep and startling and very close.

yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 7

Shelved seas O

ne day last fall I thought I was leaving the Yale Law School Library but went down the wrong set of stairs. They led me into a dim hall full of tightly packed wooden shelves. I wandered past congressional hearings and city charters to the repository of Supreme Court briefings, through which I proceeded uncertainly, moving backward through the years, until I heard the sound of running water. I followed it. Its source lay across the aisle from Supreme Court Briefs: 1947-1942, next to a microform scanner: fish.

They live in a 180-gallon freshwater tank which for 14 years has stood, encased in a wooden cabinet about as tall as the average supreme court justice, under several faded black and white photos of men wearing wigs. Mostly the fish are there, but occasionally they aren’t.

Once, when the glass of the tank had to be replaced, the fish were temporarily housed in Greenwich at House of Fins. “The ongoing joke was, we had these lofty fish, so when they went on vacation they went to Greenwich,” says Shana Jackson, who curates and maintains the fish tank.

Separated by thin sheets of glass from the fish, law students sit hunched over tables, faces lit with laptop glare.

They are the reason the tank’s being: the fish are intended to make the library’s atmosphere more bearable during long hours of studying.

With the help of her daughter and nephew, Shana carefully chooses an assortment of fish that will give the tank both balance and wonder. The result is a rigidly enforced hierarchy of aesthetics: top of the tank, middle of the tank, bottom of the tank; beauty, motion, eccentricity. The tinfoil gleam of the languid angelfish is remarkable on its own, but the best tanks also incorporate the movement of the long-tailed rosy barb and the

8 | Vol. XLII, No. 3 | January 2015

by Libbie Katsev

“craziness” of the clown loach, which looks like a cross between a clownfish and a very small nuclear submarine.

Glowfish hover at the top of the world like living neon lights, advertising only the extreme edge of brightness. The fish acquire this color through a steady diet of bloodworms, which Shana allocates via turkey baster. When she tells me I can watch her feed the fish, I brace myself, but it turns out that to the naked human eye, bloodworms look like tiny red strings, not intestines with teeth (thank you, God). There are glass catfish whose transparent skins leave their spines almost bare, delicate little skeleton fish that drift together in the upper corners of the tank, like they’re trying to figure out how to escape so they can go find some sushi restaurant to haunt. There are midtank dwellers like the roseline sharks, the rasboras, and the lone German Balloonfish. (“I asked them to get me a normal balloonfish,” is all Shana has to say about that one.)

And then there are the bottom feeders. Spotted plecos, wearing the drab tan and black of a cleaning crew, use their mouths to suck themselves along the porous rocks or blades of seaweed. The tank is a self-purifying world of perfect 90-degree angles, a clear prism of a universe that exists only to display the beauty of its inhabitants, and as I watch the fish race up toward food, it seems to be outside the jurisdiction of want, even of gravity. But there is always the threat of violence.

After receiving multiple reports of assault by a tetra, Shana walked in to find it restraining another fish in its mouth. She immediately ordered the tetra’s removal. “Every now and then, you get a rogue fish,” she explains. Currently, Shana is dealing with a spike in uprisings by the clown loaches — “five clown loaches may be too many clown

loaches,” she speculates — who have been challenging the status quo by swimming up to the top of the tank, hoarding food, and bringing it back down to their territory. To remind them of their place, Shana forces them back to the bottom of the tank with a long net: the fish equivalent, she says, of being waterboarded.

I ask Shana what happens when a fish, uh, passes away. She shows me the net.

It’s the same net that she uses to put down coups, and I wonder if the fish recognize it through the glass — if they balk at the color, a wrathful, faceless shade of blue that brings low the prideful, raises the departed, and delivers them to some unknown end.

This end turns out to be the bathroom around the corner, appropriately unisex, accented blue and grey tiling and multiple yellow signs asking users to keep the facilities clean and to please remember to turn off the lights. Shana tells me that the fish, left to their own devices, prefer to eat their dead.

Although she wields her net among them like a gavel, feeds them, flushes them, knows their personalities, scientific names, and the temperatures at which they can survive, Shana maintains a professional detachment with the fish: “I don’t get close to them.”

Get up close to the tank, and the glass is so pristine that the barrier between you and the fish is invisible, and when the fish make their way over to you in iridescent shudders and stare at you through the tank with perfect, round eyes it is very easy to feel a sudden shock—where has the glass gone, make it come back. The fish come toward you and the clown loaches, quite close now, open and close their mouths, and they look like they’re shouting at you, and you can’t decide if you want to get a restraining order, or if you want to get a little closer, so you can hear them.

Hillary, no last name necessary

by Elizabeth Miles cover photograph by Wa Liu

Hillary has yet to declare if sheâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s running in 2016. What, then, explains college studentsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; fascination with her?

S

o I’ve heard Hillary Clinton has Yale in the bag. She’s a Yale Law school grad (’73), people practically sold their kidneys for tickets to her 2013 campus appearance, and, after all, Yalies are assumed to be universally bleed-blue liberal. But why did campus support group Yale Students for Hillary go dark over a year ago? Has student apathy begun to stall momentum rallied too early? In the age of Facebook and Buzzfeed and feminist blogs — when ideas have short life cycles, and heroes are transient — what does it take for young voters to form an attachment to a mainstream party candidate?

“Everyone knows about Hillary Clinton,” says Charlotte Juergens ‘16, who has worked on gubernatorial and Senate campaigns, and has spoken at the UN on nuclear nonproliferation.

She believes Clinton can already count on a formidable — almost unprecedented — base of support.

“Thanks to Clinton’s political history, her legitimacy is indisputable. She feels presidential. She has settled into the collective consciousness as a national leader, something few men or women in this country can say.”

During the 2008 and 2012 election cycles, formal student groups sprung up only after Obama declared his campaign. But Haley Adams ’16, a Global Affairs major from California, formed Yale Students for Hillary in 2013, three years before a presumed run. As of this writing, Clinton has not said anything definite about whether the rumors are true. Still, it seems Hillary’s iconicity already resonates strongly with college students. “The only reason I’d become a US citizen is to vote for Hillary,” Ally Daniels ’16, a Canadian citizen, told Adams.

Yale Students for Hillary emerged last year amid preparations for Clinton’s campus visit in October 2013 to receive the Law School’s Award of Merit. At the time, Adams was one of the first college organizers in the country to contact Rachel Schneider, the youth coordinator at Ready for Hillary, with 10 | Vol. XLII, No. 3 | January 2015

the express purpose of bringing their “grassroots movement” to her school.

Ready for Hillary is a Super PAC like any other: it raises large amounts of funds, independently of a candidate’s campaign. But Ready For Hillary also intends to convince its candidate to run in the first place. The home page stridently asks, “ARE YOU READY? Pledge to Support Hillary for President.” Behind the capital letters, a joyful Hillary Clinton is frozen midclap. Some might say you can see naked ambition in her eyes. Some might say it’s just a photograph.

On October 5, 2013, the day of the event, nearly a hundred approached a table smothered with Ready for Hillary stickers, and the movement began. Adams formed a club, with an official constitution, around the group of volunteers who had helped her gather signatures. On Facebook, the page currently has 162 likes. One does not have to feign surprise at a Hillary fan club at Yale, an overwhelmingly Democratic liberal arts college in the Northeast, located in a ward of New Haven in which registered Republicans number under 200, out of 3715 total registered voters.

“The List,” as Adams refers to it — containing the names, phone numbers and addresses of those who have authorized any potential Hillary Clinton campaign to contact them — was already longer in November 2013 than it had been at the end of Clinton’s 2008 campaign, with some 3 million members. If Hillary declares she will run, Ready For Hillary has pledged to shut down and transfer the list, through a complicated legal process, to her campaign. You can feel some revolution on the ground, taking place even without the organized political power of a declared run. Are young Americans Ready for Hillary, even if we’re not sure Hillary is Ready for Hillary?

H

illary, for many, embodies the dream of “Madame President.”

She’s the icon, the battletested Washington pro who got there

before this generation of college voters was born. Perhaps Hillary has already chipped the glass ceiling; now she stands the chance of breaking it. When evidence of gender discrimination comes to light, the necessity of action isn’t questioned. Instead, a definite and vociferous clamor arises unified — on change.org, on YouTube, in thousands of Facebook shares, and pressure from a nation of Internet activists. College students with politics on their mind have evolved into a typing-postingsharing-liking movement that demands a woman in the White House, too.

As a political candidate, Hillary Clinton is much more than the movement’s placeholder.

Eve Houghton, ’17, a member of the Yale College Democrats, feels that “greater representation of women in politics is always pretty much unequivocally a good thing. But Hillary has demonstrated a serious and deeply held commitment to improving the lives of women around the world, so I think her election would be more than a symbolic victory.” She showed me a video that summarizes her feeling about the Hillary campaign: an anthem titled “Female President,” by the Korean pop group Girl’s Day. I couldn’t understand the upbeat Korean lyrics, but the synchronized leatherbooted stomping and glittery shoulder pads undeniably conveyed some sort of girl power.

Haley Adams believes Clinton’s (hypothetical) platform will appeal to students. “I would say she’s committed to saving the middle class. I think she is principally concerned with the growing income gap and what the institutional reasons for this trend are,” Adams says. “[Hillary’s] ‘Too Small to Fail’ campaign shows her commitment. Where she’ll differ from Obama is in the ideals she emphasizes. I would imagine her campaign would be less about ‘hope and change,’ and more about concrete issues and solutions. I think the public is a tad weary of promises for sweeping reform.”

For students poised to enter a dispiriting job market, economic issues

will become as important as they are for their parents. On October 14, 2011, Occupy Wall Street organizer Matthew Siegel told NPR, “Young people are at the helm of this movement. With debt, with joblessness, with living at home with our parents well into our mid-20s, being told that we’re likely to be less better off than our parents, there is a great deal of frustration there.”

I asked Adams what Ferguson will mean for Clinton. In the aftermath, Clinton remarked, “If a third of all white men — just look at this room and take one-third — went to prison during their lifetime… Imagine that. That is the reality in the lives of so many of our fellow Americans.” On a campus where support erupted for Ferguson and protesters held a die-in the length of Wall Street, it’s a sure electoral bet that Yale is Ready for “Candidate Who Takes a Stand on Police Militarization” — fill in Candidate Name as Candidate Appears. But Hillary has been criticized for speaking rarely, too little and too late, and without conclusive policy recommendations, as if she were merely giving lip-service. Are candidates just passive vessels for the issues we demand they care about, attempting to please as much of their constituency as possible?

Yale students are willing to make bold, unapologetic statements about Hillary herself. A dedicated early organizer at Yale Students for Hillary, where he is now treasurer, Adam Gerard ‘17 began interning for his assemblyman Ted Lieu, in El Segundo, CA, at age 13. He has been a political staffer ever since. “Personally, I believe there are no other individuals, in either major party, as qualified as Secretary Clinton for the job,” Gerard says. He cites her experience, eight years in Congress and twelve in the White House. “Clinton has had the opportunity to build relationships from both perspectives — which will be an invaluable skill in a political climate dominated by brinksmanship.”

Though the Yale College Democrats will not endorse a candidate at this juncture, Tyler Blackmon ’16, President

of the Dems, says that “on a personal note” he believes “Hillary Clinton would be one of the most well-qualified candidates in American history to run for the Presidency, given her time in the White House, in the Senate, and as Secretary of State.”

But Fish Stark ’17, who campaigned enthusiastically for mayoral candidate Justin Elicker in 2013, considers the fact that Hillary is “seen as an experienced, tactical, powerful figure in American politics a major advantage and major disadvantage.” Her decades as a DC veteran have solidified her love and hate camps. The August 2006 Time magazine cover even superimposed checkboxes labeled “love” and “hate” over her portrait, to let all of magazinereading America decide. Unlike Obama in 2008 — who was a senator for only three years, a relative newcomer to everyday voters and television audiences — Hillary is undeniably established.

F

or Clinton, established doesn’t imply out of touch. She takes selfies with another Yalie darling, Meryl Streep. When actor Jason Segel publicly expressed “interest in sharing the big screen” with Clinton, she wrote back a kind note: “I am a little occupied at the moment, but perhaps someday I can help you forget Sarah Marshall ... again. My only condition is that there be Muppets involved, and that is nonnegotiable.”

As Time magazine put it, while Hillary was secretary of state, she was “a little occupied [negotiating] as a kind of referee between [the] dangerous frenemies” of Afghanistan and Pakistan. She can toss out winning pop culture references, destined for immediate immortalization by Buzzfeed. Like Time, she moves deftly between newspeak and youthspeak.

In 2012, a Tumblr blog called Texts from Hillary popped up. The blog published a series of memes based on Diana Walker’s photograph for Time of Hillary texting from a C-17 jet, en route to Tripoli for negotiations during the Libyan civil war. In one image,

President Obama and Vice President Biden text her, “She’s going to love the new Justin Bieber video!” Looking as icily intimidating as a Matrix character, behind sunglasses and a snazzy brooch, Hillary responds, “Back to work, boys.”

In the meme, Hillary is responding sarcastically, snappily, and she’s always in power. Meme-Hillary rejects Mark Zuckerberg’s friend request. She responds to “Who run the world?” with a deadpan “Girls,” as many Yoncéobsessed college students would. In April 2012, she really did respond, submitting her own post and meeting the founders of the blog. A year later, she solidified her social media celebrity when she joined Twitter. In her first tweet, she thanked the founders of Texts from Hillary, then said, “I’ll take it from here… #tweetsfromhillary.”

Bill Clinton later updated his Twitter photo to a similar image to the meme’s photo, tweeting that he was following his leader, passing the torch for all of the Twitterverse to see.

Hillary Clinton’s social media explosion resonates with a generation that hyperventilates when the WiFi is down. For many, she is, as Houghton put in all-caps in a message, “FLAWLESS.” She is no longer known to voters as the “frumpy” or “bossy” harpy the 90’s media made her out to be, when she asserted she wouldn’t stay home, doomed to a life of tea and cookies. It’s a far cry from the “cankles” she’s been teased for — a turn in her charisma that says just as much about her audience as it does about her appeal.

Blackmon makes a point of referring to her as “Clinton” instead of “Hillary.”

“We would never regularly refer to a male politician by his first name,” he says. But I don’t think the first-name status implies disrespect. Hillary as a moniker has come to embody an inimitable political pioneer, someone whose “rhino-thick skin,” as she once recommended to young women with political aspirations, has helped her outlast so many who doubted her. Like Beyoncé, one name is enough to call up superstar status.

yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 11

Charlotte Juergens’s gut feeling is that if Clinton runs for president on the Democratic ticket, the liberal majority at Yale will turn out to support her. “Although some Yalies identify as more radically liberal than Clinton and others as more moderate, I expect that Clinton’s reputation as a fundamentally reasonable and capable person will appeal to Yalies,” she says. Stark agrees, but also thinks Hillary will have to prove her willingness to take a strong stand for those values rather than “just preserve the status quo,” especially if she has a challenger from the left.

I

n years past, both Juergens and Stark have had many doors remain shut to their Get Out the Vote efforts. Fun and games and memes aside, come Election Day, Hillary may not be immune to intense voter apathy.

As Blackmon puts it, “Whether it is for alder, governor, senator, or president, the Dems are always going to be doing work, and people are always going to be upset that we are asking them to walk five minutes to the polls.” Dustin Vesey ’17, for one, avoids the canvassers.

“I know it is my responsibility to get involved in the election cycles, but as a resident of a different state I feel a little overwhelmed,” he says. “The only way to make an educated decision at the poll is to spend time researching each candidate independently, since Yale’s political activists won’t give me the full picture of their respective candidates, only why I should vote for them.”

Once the canvassers have knocked more than three times (sometimes in one day), many suites without strong political convictions talk quietly amongst themselves, and leave the door

unanswered.

Blackmon asserts this trend is not as strong as it may appear. If you look at the numbers, he says, people did go out to vote in 2014. In fact, over 1000 Yale students came out to vote in the gubernatorial election, a surprise to many. And that isn’t even including those who voted absentee elsewhere. So while it seems common-sensical that the presidential election will draw a bigger crowd than the midterms, Blackmon says Yalies have begun voting in every election more consistently since the Yale Dems became a more deliberate organization after 2004. Juergens found that in 2008 and 2012, many Yalies lost their political apathy in the high-stakes excitement of presidential elections; she expects they will do so again in 2016.

When I speak with Adams, she’s even more specific, expressing confidence

26% 44% 50% 50% UNFAVORABLE

66% 51%

45% 45% FAVORABLE

OPINIONS OF CLINTON BY AGE GROUP

18

-2

12 | Vol. XLII, No. 3 | January 2015

9

30

-4

9

50

-6

4

Source: The Quinnipiac UniversityPoll

65

+

// WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

not just in students, but also in students inspired by Hillary Clinton. “There’s a first group of students that doesn’t agree with Hillary, and a second that just doesn’t want to get involved in politics.

The second group will shrink when we have someone like [Hillary] run.”

But the Yale Students for Hillary page hasn’t been active for over a year.

It has only three posts, all published during a week in November 2013: one photo promoting the national Ready for Hillary organization, another of an event on Cross Campus, and a hiplooking snapshot of Bill and Hillary on a beach bike ride. At this point, as the 2016 candidate speculation approaches a fever pitch, the page remains silent.

Haley Adams insists this doesn’t reflect a waning enthusiasm for Hillary. “[The campaigning] took a backseat to midterm and gubernatorial elections.

It seemed to be a waste of energy and momentum to be focusing on Hillary, it wasn’t about her this past semester.” The page organizers are also gathering their strength for the official Democratic nomination that much of America takes as a given. Blackmon believes the organizers should have waited until she declares her candidacy, asserting in an opinion for the Yale Daily News that the national Ready for Hillary “jumped the gun.” “Organizing ahead of 2014 not only distracted from the importance of the midterm elections, but it made it appear as if Clinton were being coronated, implying that she is the default candidate. Clinton is an extremely capable and intelligent leader, and she deserves to make this decision on her own time. I would suggest that anyone who is interested in progressive politics work on legislation this spring and wait until much later to build a movement for Clinton on campus for 2016.”

Adams intends to begin that movement this spring, anticipating an announcement during the semester — more specifically, the unambiguous declaration that Hillary Clinton is Running For President. She tells me the group is in a unique position. “We’re

not Students for Hillary, like the groups for Obama in 2008. There hasn’t been a preemptive presidential support group before.” Currently, Adams plans to organize around large student events where more people are likely to sign up to support Hillary in the future.

Adam Gerard describes the plan as “demonstrating that Yale is indeed ready for Hillary, and hopefully mobilizing support for Secretary Clinton if she announces her candidacy.”

Yale Students for Hillary has the distinction of being one of the earliest college organizations supporting Ready for Hillary, which now has a presence on most large campuses. It’s a gamble supporting a candidate before she or he even formally joins the race. But Adams and other like-minded students want to improve Hillary’s odds. They understand that elections begin far

earlier than four years to election day.

Hillary Clinton, #textsfromicon, has inspired a notably early push. Students at Yale and other colleges the generation whose inheritance is Twitter and selfies, are Ready for Hillary. Eve Houghton tells me in an email that “it’s much more satisfying to engage with her campaign when I can actually participate in the political process. For many undergraduates (including me), the 2016 race will be their first time voting in a presidential election; and personally, I think it feels quite satisfying to vote for a candidate who I’ve supported and admired for most of my life.” Much like Beyoncé, queen of the Internet, Hillary Clinton, over a decade of political strategy and social media maneuvers, has accumulated a core group of supporters in college voters — who consider her ***flawless.

IT TOOK A WHILE TO GET THERE Pablo Uribe

“It doesn’t seem reasonable to build a new version of the death of the poet based only on the opinions of his driver,” —official statement by the Pablo Neruda Foundation, 2011 I. Today in a wooden house with low ceilings by the coast We are given coffee just after four.

Later, taken to the poet’s grave. Schoolchildren have chalked up the path with a long game of hopscotch.

II. Perhaps not by the coast but better to say: on a cliff over the ocean the poet’s body will be drawn up from the ground tomorrow.

Low tide, the string quartet is rehearsing on the beach.

The cellist asks the poet’s nephew for a clothespin against the wind.

III. At night, perhaps you are expecting this, we build a fire.

The driftwood catches well; the smoke is salt-thick and everywhere. We turn our back to it, step closer some to the house, some to the water.

It is late and hard to hear. yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 13

16 | Vol. XLII, No. 3 | January 2015

18 | Vol. XLII, No. 3 | January 2015

yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 19

20 | Vol. XLII, No. 3 | January 2015

yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 21

22 | Vol. XLII, No. 3 | January 2015

yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 23

24 | Vol. XLII, No. 3 | January 2015

Not your grandpa’s

LSD

by Marissa Medansky photography by Wa Liu

W

hen Timothy Leary told a crowd of San Francisco hippies to “turn on, tune in, drop out,” he cemented the link between psychedelic drugs and the free-loving, draft-dodging counterculture. The acidheads of the 1960s got high recreationally, swallowing spiked sugar cubes or small squares of paper at Woodstock or Monterey Pop. Today, you could recreate those bygone days at Bonnaroo or Burning Man — or you could head to New York City, where a group of modern LSD enthusiasts comes together annually in an entirely different context.

Back in October, I attended the Horizons conference, an educational forum that “examines the

role of psychedelics in science, healing, culture and spirituality,” according to its website. Now in its eighth year, the conference offers attendees the chance to hear leaders in the field discuss the latest developments in hallucinogens. Past speakers have included Ethan Nadelmann, the founder of the Drug Policy Alliance, and Alexander Shulgin, the chemist credited with popularizing MDMA. Horizons drew its largest ever audience last year.

For three days, in between lectures like “Leading My Family to Ecstasy” and “Realizing Transformations,” over 200 people lunched on catered falafel, exchanged business cards over beers and, in many cases, shared personal stories of illicit drug use.

yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 25

Dispatches from this psychedelic underground were diverse. When I arrived at a Friday night social that kicked off the conference, my first conversation partner was a 60-year-old woman from Massachusetts. “I’ve started using MDMA,” she told me, requesting that I withhold her name due to the illegal nature of her confession. “I’ve done three sessions already.”

With her white hair and all-black outfit, the woman looked ready to curate an art museum, not rave at the club. But she said MDMA, the party drug known in pop culture as ecstasy or molly, has changed her life. When I asked how, she just grinned. “It’s not all fit for print,” she said, but the smile and subsequent look in her eyes let me know that the ecstasy has made her life, for lack of a better word, ecstatic. She offered a more PG example, too: because MDMA allows her to feel emotions more deeply, the drug has inspired her creatively. Now, she has begun writing a novel in her spare time.

Other attendees also praised the benefits of psychedelic drug use. One young guy told me about the “grandfatherly presence” magic mushrooms have played in his life, guiding him through times of distress. An older gentleman in a black turtleneck, who called himself an “unrepentant hippie,” said he worked as a therapist; he became interested in psychedelic drugs again when he learned they could help his patients manage anxiety and other conditions.

% of Americans 12 and over who have used hallucinogens: lifetime: 15.1 past year: 1.7 past month: 0.5

“There are a lot of therapists here,” he added, waving his hand toward three men at a nearby table deep in conversation.

Save for the occasional tie-dye Tshirt, no one at the conference called to mind that 1960s acidhead stereotype. I interviewed ordinary people: men and women, young and old, students and professionals. What brought them all to Horizons was their shared belief in a kind of psychedelic medicine: that LSD, MDMA and similar substances can be used as more than mere recreational drugs.

Enter the world of psychedelic therapy, where doctors encourage patients to work through anxiety, post-traumatic stress and a host of other conditions

% of Americans 12 and over who have used MDMA: lifetime: 6.8 past year: 1 past month 0.3 26 | Vol. XLII, No. 3 | January 2015

while under the influence of psychedelic drugs. The idea of rolling on your shrink’s couch might sound absurd, but, as I learned at Horizons, a growing body of evidence has come to support the practice. Now, supporters say the next step is to take faith in these healing trips mainstream.

T

he term psychedelic comes from the Greek: a combination of psyche (soul) and deloun (to manifest or make visible). Most psychedelics work by interacting with the same mechanism in the brain that produces pleasure, which means that they generally induce a sense of euphoria along with their trademark visual distortions.

For most of history, humans used naturally occurring psychedelics, like ayahuasca, a potent hallucinogenic brew native to South America, and ibogaine, a chemical found in certain African vines. But the eventual advent of laboratory science changed how people tripped. In 1943, a 37-year-old Swiss chemist named Albert Hofmann was working in a pharmaceutical lab when he decided to ingest a small dose of a compound he’d first synthesized a few years earlier. As he cycled home from work, the substance induced fantastical effects. “I was taken to another world, another place, another time,” Hofmann

later wrote of the experience. “At times I perceived myself to be outside my body.”

Back in the lab the next day, Hofmann told his supervisors about his strange journey with the substance: lysergic acid diethylamide. His bosses were eager to explore its potential pharmaceutical uses. Within a few years, researchers had completed an array of animal trials and began testing the drug on human subjects at the University of Zurich.

Soon, LSD traveled to America, where researchers began to study its effects at Harvard, the University of Chicago and other top universities. “By the mid-1950s, researchers had experimented with LSD during therapy for various neuroses, depression, addiction, psychosomatic illness, and emotional and physical trauma,” writes the journalist Tom Shroder, who chronicles the history of psychedelic medicine in his new book Acid Test.

At one point, private clinics even emerged to provide LSD-enhanced therapy to famous names like Briton Hadden and Cary Grant. “The action of the chemical releases in the subconscious…so that you can see what transpires in the depth of your mind,” Grant wrote of the sessions in his autobiography. “I learned many things in the quiet of that small room.”

By the mid-1960s, however, the rise of recreational LSD use began to overshadow the previous years of medical research. Thanks to Timothy Leary and other icons of the counterculture, medical psychedelics now had a huge PR problem, as the public grew to associate them with burning draft cards and dancing naked in the mud.

So did the federal government. In 1970, then-President Nixon banned LSD under the Controlled Substances Act, placing acid on a category of substances known as schedule I. The Drug Enforcement Agency classifies schedule I drugs, which include heroin and methamphetamine as well as most psychedelics, as having “no currently accepted medical use”: five little words that have

been dogma for nearly five decades.

The federal ban not only ended the practice of legal psychedelic therapy, but also effectively thwarted most future research. “There’s a lot of bureaucracy,” said Peter Addy, a psychologist who presented his research on salvia at Horizons. Barriers to entry include everything from gaining approval for studies to obtaining samples of particular drugs.

Funding poses a major difficulty.

In the face of these challenges, a committed group of supporters emerged to keep psychedelic medicine alive post-1970. In Acid Test, Shroder tells the story of Rick Doblin, who founded an organization called the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic studies in 1986. Then a wild-haired hippie, Doblin hoped that MAPS could promote and fund psychedelic research, but he realized he needed to sharpen his image to become the public ambassador of LSD and other drugs. Many professional haircuts (not to mention one graduate degree from Harvard’s Kennedy School) later, Doblin and his organization have raised over $20 million to fund psychedelic research around the globe.

As Shroder wrote in an email, “Doblin is definitely a unique character, but his transformation is symbolic and parallel to the transformation in image of psychedelics themselves.” Alongside MAPS, money and support from organizations like the Heffter Institute and the Beckley Foundation has laid the groundwork for a new generation of psychedelic research.

O

f these more contemporary researchers, the scientist most likely to carry on Hofmann’s pioneering legacy is another Swiss man.

Peter Gasser, who just this year published the results of the first human LSD study in four decades, took to the stage on the second day of Horizons to discuss his historic research.

Speaking from a lectern flanked by stained glass windows, Gasser said he drew on the psychedelic research of

the 1960s to inform his hypothesis that LSD could ease anxiety in patients with terminal illnesses. Of the dozen subjects he recruited, only one had previously taken the drug, so he met with each at least twice before their first trip to answer questions and assuage fears.

“Giving safety and confidence,” he said, “is the most important thing.” During the trips themselves, nurses measured the blood pressure and heart rate of each participant. Afterward, attendants monitored each patient overnight.

Gasser conducted each therapy session with a partner, a female psychotherapist. First, the patient ingested the drug. Once the LSD took effect, they would lie down, listen to music and discuss their feelings — often the same kinds of topics they’d discuss in a normal therapy session — with the pair of guides. “All emotions are enhanced” during a psychedelic trip, according to Gasser, which allows patients to cut to the heart of the issues they’re facing.

Each of his sessions lasted eight hours, the length of an average acid trip.

“It was a pilot study,” Gasser said from the stage. “You cannot do a big statistical evaluation with twelve patients, that’s clear.” Still, he believes his results point to the therapeutic potential of LSD: All of his patients reported positive experiences. “After twelve months, people basically said it would help them, they would do it again and they would recommend it to other people,” he said.

His findings were published twice this year, first in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease and then in the Journal of Psychopharmacology.

Many other presenters at Horizons shared firsthand stories of psychedelic research. John Harrison, an addiction specialist, led a MAPS-sponsored study examining how to treat opiate dependence with psychedelics. During the conference, he recounted how ibogaine could ease withdrawal symptoms and reduce cravings for harder drugs. Katherine MacLean, who conducted research at Johns Hopkins, told the crowd about how she discovered psychedelics

yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 27

could encourage long-term personality change, reducing anxiety and increasing one’s affinity for new experiences.

Toward the end of the day, representatives from New York University’s Psilocybin Cancer Anxiety Study played a clip from a new documentary about their research, which examines how exposure to the active chemical in magic mushrooms can reduce anxiety in terminally ill patients. In the darkened conference venue, testimonials from study participants played on a oversized screen.

Afterward, during the question and answer session, a woman rose to mention that her mother had participated in the study. Before she sat down, she added, “She thinks she got cancer so she could have that experience.”

C

omments like these underscore the seriousness with which supporters of psychedelic therapy view their cause. Generally, speakers at Horizons maintained psychedelics could allow anyone — regardless of his or her state of mind — to expand consciousness and work through problems in the process. But current research into these drugs, the kind conducted by people like Gasser and the NYU team, focuses on their ability to heal traumatized groups like veterans, addicts and the mentally ill.

These studies have increasingly captured the attention of the public.

Throughout the past few years, psychedelic therapy has made headlines in The New York Times and The Guardian, popped up in TED talks and been the subject of documentaries on CNN. The unprecedented attendance level at this year’s Horizons also speaks to psychedelic medicine’s growing prominence.

“We’re at a really interesting time right now, the turn of the century,” said Brian Normand Viveiros, the founder of Psymposia, a series of conferences series to Horizons. “I feel like we’re kind of in the Zeitgeist for this movement now.”

Zeitgeist or not, getting the public to take psychedelic therapy seriously 28 | Vol. XLII, No. 3 | January 2015

will take time. The ghost of Timothy Leary still haunts public perception of the drug.

This became clear to me during a presentation by Annie Lalla, a relationship coach known for her belief that families can improve their relationships by taking MDMA as a group (“One trip on MDMA is like ten years of therapy,” she said, her heels clicking across the stage.”) During the Q&A, young people asked Lalla how they could recreate her success: how much MDMA should they give their own relatives? Should a person under 18 try psychedelics?

Others had a more basic question.

“My mother doesn’t find taking drugs an acceptable path to improvement,” one man stuttered; he wanted to know how to persuade her. “I have my dad here,” began another young woman,

pointing to the man sitting beside her.

After Lalla responded to the daughter, her father stood up. “I don’t need an altered state to love my family,” he said.

“When you come back down, you may not be as sharp as you think you are.”

The point stuck: research and results can only go so far. No matter how many journal articles Peter Gasser writes, no matter how much money MAPS can raise, a makeover will likely prove the key to bringing psychedelics to the masses.

“What we’re all saying is, we have to talk about it,” John Harrison, the addiction specialist, told the crowd on Sunday — the last thing said at the conference. “Come out of the closet, say what we’re doing. We’re doing it with intention and consciousness. It’s a good thing.”

WINTER WALK, BEFORE SALT Jane Smyth

This is fall-down weather.

The sky laid out a rink. We have ourselves sleet street.

Our eyes and the ground gleam, conspiring to trash us.

The wind draws our voices.

It’s less the ice out to trip us than the light, we decide.

That crash of winter air reflects on our faces. Tricky.

This is a game the street will play sometimes.

It reminds us of the one in which the sidewalk, overnight, becomes cratered. In that one we fall too.

All the games involve clamor and geometry.

This is a game of structure.

Don’t rush the thoughts. They form like the thin membrane of a yolk, encasing, clarifying.

The eyespot of egg is awake.

It reminds us of the noon glare in a scavenged sky, after rain.

The idea bears a tension we want to burst.

Games are tempting. The street puts its palms out and resists us.

This is walking weather.

Our questions slip and the sky whisks order into the runny disarray.

The cold tempers the bowl.

RALPH I

would soon identify that time of year as “around Ralph’s birthday” or “about to open the pool,” but at the time I considered it “almost done with sixth grade,” and my oldest brother Pete had gotten mad the previous summer and threw an ax at our above-ground pool, so the water was really low and green and icky and the pool wouldn’t be opened that summer.

“Emma, James, Gigi. Ralph and I have been talking and we want to ask you guys how you feel about Ralph moving in with us.” Ralph sat in a rusted iron patio chair across from me.

Gigi started to cry. My mom apologized to Ralph. I decided to use this distraction to pull my mom to the side.

I figured Mom would take me more seriously if I used my sixth-grade words.

“I really really really really really don’t want Ralph to live with us, Mommy.”

“Why?”

Already I felt guilty. Sixth-grade words were failing me. Present-day me would have said, “Because his motto is ‘children should be seen and not heard,’” or “Because he wears a gold cross but goes to church twice a year and listens to Rush Limbaugh every Sunday morning,” or “He eats yogurt for breakfast so he doesn’t have to put his teeth in until lunch time,” or “He beats your dog when you’re not home!” or “He doesn’t believe in organic foods or global warming and he says mean things to my black friends,” or “He looks like a peanut with a mustache!”

All I could say at the time was, “I don’t know. I guess because he’s old.”

S

he misses me in three ways. The first way Ma is missing me is like how her tomato sauce is missing something when she tries to follow Grandma’s recipe. No matter how ex-

BY EMMA SPEER

actly Ma followed instructions, sitting down at her table and eating her pasta is not the same as it was sitting down at Grandma’s table. The pasta is missing something, some mystery something.

More salt? Less oregano? Paprika?

We don’t know the spice and so we can’t know where it is. And we can’t ask Ma if she forgot an ingredient because then she’d start to miss Grandma and we’ll all lose our appetite. Ralph usually cooks dinner.

W

hen I’m home, Ralph always asks me to make a salad for the dinner table. Then I always ask him if he will eat any, and he always says, Yes, this is why he is asking me. If my ma wants salad too, I make sure there are no raw onions. Ma hates raw onions.

I am not there anymore to make the salad. Dinner without me goes more

yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 29

or less like the following: Gigi and James return from basketball practice at 5:30 and Ralph does not let them have a snack “because dinner would be ready soon.” Four hours later they sit down to eat. Ma tells Ralph the NRA called and he thanks her between bites of barbequed ribs. His gray chest hair and gold cross peek out from behind the unbuttoned top two buttons of his business shirt. Gigi and James shepherd their potatoes around their plates.

They were hungry at 5:30. They are no longer hungry thanks to Gigi’s secret stash of Reese’s.

M

y ma is missing me like a flashlight can be missing batteries, or a house that suffered from a hurricane can be missing a roof.

The flashlight is not quite functioning. The house is not quite complete.

My ma is not quite functioning and not quite complete. The seat I filled at the table is full of an echoing emptiness. The silences I normally fill are themselves broken, and my mom does not know how to break them properly.

My ma needs me to function properly, but alas, she is missing me. This second type of missing is a need missing.

M

a breaks the silence to share a story she read about a new dinosaur they discovered that is bigger than the T. rex, but she stops the story short because it’s not true. Ralph said so.

Gigi and James speak for the first time and ask to be excused. James looks

at Ma and says he needs $20 for school.

Ma looks at Ralph. Ralph looks at up at the wall in front of him as he slowly puts down his ribs, his hands shaking from his medication, and gets out his wallet from his back pocket.

T

he third way she misses me is a want missing. This is the type of missing that rides in on the back of late night silence. This is the missing that then pries its way into her heart while she lies lonely next to Ralph.

This missing pops her heart open like a champagne bottle. This is the kind of missing that transforms liquid emotion into one solid thought: My ma misses me.

(I am the only one who remembers

ILLUSTRATION BY ZISHI LI 30 | Vol. XLII, No. 3 | January 2015

that she hates raw onions.)

A

bowl of salad — untouched — rests on the table. Ma asks Ralph if he wants any, since, in my absence, he had made it. He holds out the shaking hand that isn’t holding a rib in a stop gesture. He shakes his head. He continues to stare up at the wall across from him. Ma tries to eat around the onions in the salad, but it takes too long. Ralph puts his dish in the sink and goes upstairs to his office to make business calls. Ma is left alone at the table, wondering why onions make one cry.

M

y mom is 56 and Ralph is 72. Ralph grew up in the Bronx with two siblings and his Italian immigrant parents. Ralph attended an all-boy college on track scholarship. Ralph eventually became a businessman and started a company selling computer parts. This supported his wife and two children until he went bankrupt. Thereafter he became a salesman for a pharmaceutical drug company. A few years after this and prior to meeting my mom, Ralph had divorced from his wife of forty years.

She requested it.

Ralph lived alone in an apartment when he and Ma met. His grandchildren had not yet been born. His kids were busy with their own jobs, so Ralph could and did travel a lot for work. He brought back all the complimentary mini lotions and shampoos from the hotels he stayed in. He brought my

mom home her favorite candy from San Francisco whenever he went. Before he moved in, he used his travel miles to fly them to Puerto Rico on vacation.

There is a picture of them dancing in Puerto Rico. Ralph holds himself as still as a tree in the winter while my mom is mid-movement, lithe, alive, like a flame frozen in time. Her hair is still long and golden. She is tan, and she glows.

I have never seen Ralph smile like he does in the picture. He smiles as if he has never seen how crowded his bottom row of teeth is. He smiles as if he does not know that this deepens and multiplies the wrinkles on his face. He smiles like he is unaware of how old my mom’s youth makes him look (“Is that your father?”), or — if he does — like he doesn’t care.

H

e locks the front door when he mows the lawn. Gigi, James, and I used to play out in front of the house but he would lock the door if he saw we didn’t have our keys. To “teach us responsibility.” Two Thanksgivings ago, Ralph locked us out of the house, and so James tried to unlock the door with a toothpick. It broke off in the lock, making it impossible to open the door. We eventually got inside once Ralph pulled up in the driveway after visiting his daughter (his son was still not speaking to Ralph at this time.)

My mom agreed with Ralph’s idea to make James stay home while we went to Thanksgiving dinner at my uncle’s house. ( James ended up ordering Chi-

nese food and watching TV instead.)

I wish my mom had said something.

I wish she had remembered that that was her house. I wish she had comforted Gigi and me while we cried and begged her to let James come. I wish she had remembered how she made Ralph shut up that time she beat him with our house phone until it fell off the wall. I wish she had remembered that Ralph needed to ask her to open jars of mayonnaise for him. But I guess she had forgotten all that, or she remembered only that Ralph bought that mayonnaise. And that we had to leave soon because Ralph had also bought the turkey.

M

a didn’t ask me what we thought about kicking Ralph out of the house. However, she did ask Sunshine, the local psychic. For $50, Sunshine articulated my ten-year-old intuition, without tears.

She read Ma’s face and advised her to get Ralph out of the house within two months. After that, Ma would come into great wealth and would find true romance on an internet dating site. My Ma asked me for help writing her match.com profile, but by the time I got around to it she had already started. Her favorite things? Yellow.

A good white burgundy. Salad. Latest reads? Rolling Stone interview with Bono. Siddhartha. Treasure Island.

Velveteen Rabbit (to her kids). Her introduction? “Dancing with abandon on the quais of Paris one Bastille Eve night, my feet were blistered for days, but my heart was free. This is the real me.”

yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 31

Cenotaph

BY KATHERINE ADAMS ILLUSTRATIONS BY THAO DO

M

emories? The memory is of nothing. The memory is of abortion and not-being. What was it that I had said about the repulsion of the physical world? That was a lyrical cheat to solicit Q.’s love, denying overlaps between me and things. Only now do I recognize the irony in his response: that he had a friend who at one time ceased to be able to read words or to recognize faces, and was my dilemma something like that? At that time, ‘touch’ was simply how I witnessed objects falling from my hands, a muscular deficiency — and the ‘touch’ of my voice, also, was a dimension

32 | Vol. XLII, No. 3 | January 2015

inappropriate to the space. To dare to move was to cry and shake. I was in a glass box, although my screams remained hidden beneath its transparency. Somehow my cries dispersed all gazes.

Yet I am a risk taker! Others don’t see the risks in my withdrawals. Don’t you see the great risk of my flight? People say I am a coward — but don’t you see what violence I summon around me, what destruction is beginning to pool around my ankles in this absence? No, I put myself into battles all the time — battles to keep my eyes flush to the light, tacked to the prisms of space; matter excoriates me, yet still to it I yield

my unarmored flesh.

I managed, yesterday, to frighten myself into a second dawn and dusk — I wrote July 4th when it was still the 3rd.

Something had finally made its appeal to me on that night (the true “second”), in the form of that unnerving visibility that saints affect. It was Q. pressing up against my sight in the half-darkness.

E

ven now to write this account I falter: I repeat, misspell, redact, insert — my hand takes on my own alienation, to remind me what I had discovered. A number of recent days have

been similar flukes, like one still hour reentered again and again by slips of the clock’s hand, quickly rewriting the entire calendar. The room I write in records the steps above it like the darts of line left in wood by the ax — the paths upstairs splinter upon and onto my walls, and I quiver at the thought of the pyre being built above me; I crank open the window despite the freezing air. I imagine them up there. They’re pacing and circling, Q. and my departed, parting and embracing, closing and opening. I fall silent in the reliability of this new chaos — my silence is a manner of wakefulness, of not blinking, because I believe there may be a clue of a possible escape — some light under a door, the gleam which hints at a makeshift weapon, a chink in this brick wall…

So I have been making these slips of the hours — divisions to suggest time’s passage — simply to drag you along with me. In truth, mine is one unbroken vigil, whose loneliness I ration out across the seasons.

Q. is thereby immaterial, the body of a portrait that hangs down outside the frame, swaying its legs in impatience.

When I glance at others, each face is there with body like the run-off from a storming precipitation of its mask: the colors of cheeks gather in vertical clouds to their torrent, barely separate out of their natural farrago of shadows. Q. used to paint me, and there I would be after the sitting, glazed onto white, dripping. Something in the paint was always loose, the coloring frictionless, and the reds seemed to vanish.

I recall one critic remarked “I see! This woman is sleeping. Her gaze droops — and see how things fall from her palms!”

Now in silence I do not waver, it is firm upon me — I am pressed up on either side by the inexpressive like an arch. The reticence braces my spine. Only when I return places am able to “see myself from the outside,” as Q instructed, which I could never do with any portrait he made.

Again I took a trip to his favorite gallery today. There, the guard’s surprise — “Were you here yesterday?” — inaugurates my return. Not until then do I “come back,” having infiltrated the space, Klimt and his Adele having remained beside me. Only

at that moment when my body has been recognized does the whole sequence run through itself and extract me from what I originally beheld, at which point I say: “Yes, I’m back again…” But even here I lie: “back again” is an expression for the third time.

I

write over my shoulder, in passionless fear, observing myself. The active body is the one beneath, enclosed. I wrote of being my apparition, but today — in these layers of today — it seems I wait upon the shell of me, and that exterior informant probes me for the hidden. Tell me my armor, my twin, my skin — shouldn’t you seek to ply my limbs off of me, set me down behind the glass of a curio cabinet? No, it retorts, even that is too much: it is already my protectorate, and tends my bracket of space like a vast country.

I feel pressed to mention the streetlight that goes off whenever I pass it on my evening walks — even when it is not morning yet, and still the other side of safety. The darkness meets me as a stencil over a white canvas — except that its coverage is gapless. I want to stretch my hand to the other side — I want to get my fingers around the screen to mark its tracery, though it will have to be invisible.

I would like to have that watermark that will come from my pressure against its encroachment — like a fabric just before it is torn.

Y

ou see, my nothingness is baroque.

Although there is, in my memory, a story of some small sentence, a gift of some mantra that had to be unspoken or else be emptied. When I finally spilt it before other tongues, was a new one granted? I don’t remember anything about myself. I am maybe packed into the mortar, or ground beneath the rampart of some castle. Did I give some gift that was never opened, mistaking a temple for a person? What has got me thus suspended?

There are of course other dramas like mine: escaping from a death sentence; being the nominated assassin of a target whose life expired naturally before the crime.

It is not unheard of for ruins to be mistaken for modern commissions. Thus

even in my self-dispersal I am met as something new. I do not yet meet myself alone, without a mirror, which suggests to me that what dies in me came first, and that I am the umbra of this first existence, whom I now trail. She is a density that mocks me who upon every surface breaks and bends. In our procession of two the rhythm of our march can claim no pattern of a pulse — it varies like the rifts upon an eggshell that is cracking, an untamed melody that quickly turns the prey of order’s rage. I arrange and arrange again.

I like to think the child would have merely been worn down, out of myth — nothing much of a painting or a girl. Yet I cherish one dream of her in an open space, sitting in its center and singing as though the field were a vessel rocking her towards dreams.

Q. would have said what he always did — that the harmonies were trackless, the vibrato undisciplined. But how she would have moved across a stage! She would have glided even as Maria Callas did, striding still like a gust amid the flames of Ms. Lammermoor’s madness.

A

lmost (now) to my horror, it delighted me to thrill Q. with my code and pattern, I who exist somehow intact as a membrane shaped between two voids, holding one and held by the other. Emptiness is enough for me, it keeps me upright like the battery of water against the capillaries’ skin, it flatters my double infinity — which is folded round and depthless.

Q. had tested the world upon me, I was his medium and he showed me to this cusp of myself, around which I am wound. He risked so much to so little effect that I came to seem illusory. I received him as a neutral.

He became tied to the surface of himself, his hand always resting on the doorknob of an exit. Yet I was one of those stage props that opens once more onto the dirt, unto the sky — it might have seemed to him at one time that, by walking thus through me, he had simply missed or been misdirected — but it was true, I was nothing, a joke of a threshold, entirely historical, entirely air.

Now I am being taken into something new — a corridor. Perhaps that space of a

yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 33

cloister, everywhere passageway except where is gathered rest and sky. There the hue that comes out behind all colors is a dull purple, dried blood muted, which makes a clearing for the light of the day’s unrest. When Q. tried to capture that shade, it always seemed in need of sealant to gather its original intensity and to soothe whatever corrugation caused the color to interrupt itself.

N

o, no one is born with faith, no one begins kneeling at the foot of the Pietà. I am not done yet; I am still obsessed, I’ll never forget the jokes about my “bitterness” after Q. had left. It might have occurred to those jesters that I was early with child,

since of course this face could not be a pregnancy of thought, but a mere mask taken up in competition with another life. Even so, “scowl” misnamed my inexpressiveness — though I know the catatonia of my neutrality deceived by not simply causing my features to shrink to one point. If only stillness would grant diminishments! Yet I would have to be sucked back whole eons to accommodate the negative growth of my paralyses and their contractions…

I

am tolling tomorrow, which is why I miscount myself among the hours.

I sharpen my seconds, winnowing them down with a pressure like that

of tombstones pushing into unthawed earth, flaking off all evidence of past time. I hope to find that placid heart of earth where image meets the lips and hand will not have to scamper after but to simply dip into the inky basin of the seen world, and each word be simply plucked from the bath…

Oh, but I still long for that demilife in paint, in which I might not straighten my legs, but only bow, or kneel! It’s under the spell of that lost feeling that I recite what I now know, as though Q. is watching enchanted from the wings: I have never suffered — I am ungenerous — I have nothing inside of me. I live void so as to house the disappeared.

yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 34

Staying in the LEED

by Stephanie Rogers photography by Sarah Eckinger

I

n Kroon Hall, the toilets flush blue.

Built in 2008 for $33.5 million, Kroon, the flagship of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, has a koi pond out front containing 25 types of native Connecticut plants that help recycle blue runoff water for the entire building’s use — including the

bathrooms.

During every prospective student tour of Science Hill, tour guides bring groups inside Kroon and point to a plaque on the wall. Kroon, it reads, is Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design Platinumcertified — an international designation

yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 35

awarded by the U.S. Green Building Council for “commercial, institutional and residential projects noteworthy for their stellar environmental and health performance.” It is designed to use 81 percent less water and 58 percent less energy than comparable buildings.

Over 22 percent of Kroon’s electricity is generated with solar panels.

Kroon is the first stop on the Science Hill tour, and its slotted exterior, like giant window blinds, graces many a Yale brochure. The making of Kroon did not come easy, FES professor Stephen Kellert said.

“We had to struggle to convince [the Yale administration] that you can design buildings this way and that it was the right thing to do, not just in terms of the environment, but also in terms of people’s health and wellbeing inside these buildings.” As Kroon went up, its designers fought to tear down the Pierson-Sage power plant next door, which was spewing steam and periodically leaking oil. It was torn down to give the new green building room to breathe, according to FES associate dean Gordon Geballe.

One of 22 LEED-certified buildings and laboratories on campus, Kroon was conceived in the mid ’90s — more than five years before the LEED certification system was even created. Kellert says the building goes above and beyond LEED standards, and epitomizes the ideals and practices of biophilic design: architecture that connects humans to their natural surroundings.

But Kellert warns that the LEED certification system should not be confused with what he regards as true sustainability: in his view, a combination of environmentally lowimpact and biophilic design.

As is typical with green buildings, engineers needed to work out several mechanical and computerized issues during Kroon’s first few years, according to FES director of finance administration Susan Wells. In 2011, she said, during the building’s first full-recorded year, Kroon’s energy 36 | Vol. XLII, No. 3 | January 2015

consumption was 38 percent higher than its target energy use. This past summer, the facilities team discovered that a relative humidity sensor had broken. The solar hot water system meant to heat the building’s water still has yet to work properly; a $40,000 repair is in the works.

Kellert attributes the failure of the building to reach its energy efficiency target to professors and students using the library after hours and on weekends — proof that students and faculty loved the building so much they didn’t want to leave. But, according to Wells, a computer programming error — which has since been fixed — caused the building to consume more energy than it should. Since the fix, the building has performed better than expected.

“I’m always a little skeptical if the building is living up to its height,” FES associate dean Gordon Geballe said. “I always think there are things we can do to make it better.” As people using Kroon Hall become more conscious of the building’s energysaving mechanisms, he added, Kroon’s efficiency will continue to improve.

Former FES dean James Gustave Speth said he believes the Kroon project was a “powerful learning process” for Yale. A champion for Kroon’s construction, Speth said the building helped inspire a campus commitment to the environment, and helped spur the creation of the Office of Sustainability in 2005.

But Geballe said he is unsure if Kroon has inspired the rest of campus as much as its creators had expected. He said Kroon proved that Yale is capable of creating LEED certified buildings, but he questions whether Kroon’s platinum rating has set a standard for the future. At present, according to the 2013–16 Yale Sustainability Strategic Plan, Yale projects are only required to meet LEED Gold, not Platinum, Standard Certification.

James Ball FES ’16, who has inspected and certified LEED

buildings across the country, said that while he and others would love to see a commitment by Yale to a standard of biophilia, he believes it is reasonable for the campus to set LEED standards as their goals.

Robert A.M. Stern, dean of Yale School of Architecture and architect for the new residential colleges set to open in 2018, asserted that new residential colleges will be part of Yale’s renewed commitment to sustainability. In designing the new colleges, Stern said his team has carefully selected materials that are locally sourced or recycled whenever possible. He added that the designs take advantage of low-tech solutions like allowing for the optimal amounts of sunlight into the courtyards.

Stern noted that over the years creating energy-efficient buildings at Yale has become easier as Yale’s clientele becomes more sustainabilityminded. He added that more thought goes into the long-term cost of buildings now compared with 40 or 50 years ago, when the public was enamored of architectural shapes that did not lend themselves to long-term efficiency.

Although Kroon is still the greenest building on campus and may be for some time, Kellert believes its erection paved the way for a more green and biophilic-minded Yale.

Ginger Chapman, director of Yale’s Office of Sustainability, said new standards for LEED, implemented in Spring 2014, will correct many of the issues in LEED certification and set the standard for Yale architecture in the future.

“There was a constant tension because we were always pushing the envelope on what we wanted to do,” said Kellert. “We always saw [Kroon] not just as a building for the Forestry School but … as a way for the University to become far more aware, appreciative and committed to sustainable design and development across campus. I do think the building had that effect.”

Vanessa Bell, on left, with sister Virginia Woolf, playing cricket (Wikimedia Commons)

Treading clouds and shelling peas

by Yi-Ling Liu

“M

rs. Bell says nothing.

Mrs. Bell is as silent as the grave.” This was how Virginia Woolf described the works of her sister, Vanessa Bell, while walking through her first solo exhibition in 1930.

I sit in the quiet underground room of the Beinecke Library, holding in my hands a thin slip of the old exhibition catalogue, fragile and tan like a fallen autumn leaf that has long ago lost its luster. Closing my eyes for a moment, I try to imagine briefly that I am no longer sitting alongside antiquated bindings and rare manuscripts in the monumental, marble-paned glass structure of the Beinecke, but walking

in London, a crisp February morning eighty years ago, entering the modest gallery at 92 New Bond Street.

I try to imagine the paintings hanging in front of me, like Woolf as she walked through the exhibit, attempting to come with “some idea of Mrs. Bell herself, and by thus trespassing, crack the kernel of her art.” Vegetables sitting atop a venetian red kitchen counter, a vase of Zinnias painted with thick impasto strokes, a young child looking out into the sea — Bell took as her subject, in all of her paintings, the tangible, domestic world of her immediate surroundings. Her color palette is warm and muted — ochres,

olives, pastels and gray-blues; her forms are reduced and simplified to their geometric components. Although the pictures are immensely expressive, the paintings are silent, and betray nothing of Bell’s character. No stories are told, no insinuations are made, the hillside is bare and the little boy stands in the sea saying nothing. “Their reticence is inviolable,” Woolf concludes.

S

ince I first stepped into the Yale Center of British Art and saw the paintings of Vanessa Bell hanging on the walls, I have been intrigued by both the artwork and the artist. Getting a sense of who Vanessa

yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 37

Bell was, however, particularly as an artist, is a difficult task. Throughout her life, Bell assumed a variety of roles — daughter of prominent literary critic Sir Leslie Stephen, wife of Clive Bell, lover of Duncan Grant, sister to legendary writer Virginia Woolf — and it is often in these roles, not as an artist, that Bell has been represented.

Her posthumous bibliography is thin: one full-length biography, a handful of articles, a few exhibition catalogues, scattered comments. It does not help that she rarely wrote about art and published nothing at all. As a person, Bell was, according to Virginia, “mute as a mackerel.”

Untangling her role as an artist from her roles as mother, wife, lover, and Bloomsbury goddess proved to me to be almost impossible. In the process of trying to do so, digging through letters and journal entries and art criticism and biography, I found myself returning instead to the place where these roles were the most intertwined: Charleston House, Bell’s country home in East Sussex. It was at Charleston that she was most prolific as an artist.

It was at Charleston that she produced her finest painting, Iceland Poppies (blood red poppies on a thin stem next to a porcelain jar, later hung with the best works of the Charleston collection alongside Matisse and Picasso). There too, alongside Roger Fry, she hosted the Omega workshops, a showroom and marketplace for young artists to cultivate their art.

Charleston was more than just her artistic hub; it fell under her domestic reign. The house in itself was a work of art —perhaps, as some say, her greatest masterpiece. She took complete control of the aesthetic space. She washed the walls and furnishings with the same distinctive palette of her paintings, of yellow, gray, pale salmon, and unripe apple green. She alone carried the whole edifice, making sure that every clock ticked more or less accurately in time, and that every vase was filled with fresh flowers.

38 | Vol. XLII, No. 3 | January 2015

Always rife with blowing roses, trees bowed with fruit and ruddy children running free, Charleston became a thriving hub for writers and intellectuals.

Bell had created a powerfully seductive refuge that her daughter recalled as “bathed in what seemed to be the glow of perpetual summer.” Friends queued up to be invited. Bell gave what Roger Fry described as a “sense of security of something solid and real in a shifting world.”

Somehow, she balanced the uncompromising demands of her art with the daily minutiae of domestic life: ordering meals, directing servants, and educating her children, all while wielding a paintbrush.

I picture her in my head to be somewhat of a 20th-century equivalent of a Lean In archetype, or what we would celebrate today on an Oprah panel of sorts as “having it all” — life, love, motherhood, and painting. Much to her sister’s envy, Bell seemed not to be “a woman at all, but a mixture of Goddess and peasant, treading the clouds with her feet and her hands shelling peas.”

Straddling the roles of Goddess and peasant, however, was hardly effortless. Although seemingly poised and in control, Bell in fact struggled to balance these two clashing realms of her life. Once, when she was throwing a party and the Charleston house was particularly hectic with friends and guests who demanded her attention and energy as a hostess, she vented her frustration to her daughter Angelica. “I can’t paint, you see,” she complained, “which is the one infallible refuge from such things.”

It appeared that Bell was just as envious of Virginia’s achievements as Virginia was of Bell’s. In her journals, Virginia expressed her complete shock when she realized that Bell, far from being the imperturbable creative force that she believed her to be, was afraid of failure. “Nessa said that she was often melancholy and envied me,” she wrote, “a statement I thought incredible.”

And yet, almost a century later,

comparing the artistic careers of the two sisters, I can see that “Nessa” had every reason to be envious. While Virginia’s novels have been canonized alongside the works of other literary giants, Vanessa is remembered as a “lavender” artist, her professional achievements constantly overshadowed by her life story. Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse adorn English department syllabi throughout the world, but your average art history class will most likely not spare a second glance at a Vanessa Bell still life. What happened? How did the paths of the two sisters diverge so dramatically? If Virginia had supposedly chosen art at the expense of life, to what extent did Vanessa choose life at the expense of art? Does maternity and domestic responsibility choke creativity and artistic expression? Does being a great woman artist mean relinquishing one’s ability to raise children and nurture a happy, functioning family?

I

f we step outside the Beinecke and the YCBA — timeless, ageless spaces largely insulated from realities of contemporary society — we find that these questions continue to plague women who have chosen to pursue the arts as a vocation.

To this day, female artists bred at our own semi-utopic, academic hub of Yale University, both as undergraduates and at the Yale School of Art, continue to grapple with what to put first: art or life. When Kathryn Parker Almanas ART ’07 left for New York to work as a practicing artist, she began to notice a contrast between her professional and student lives. “When you’re at Yale, you’re in this beautiful bubble of creativity and everyone gives a shit and you have this routine and schedule,” she explains to me over the phone. In the real world, however, the artist does not have what Bell yearns for — the “infallible refuge from such things,” things such as finances, maintaining friendships, cultivating romantic relationships, or what Almanas calls

“the business of living.”

For Wangchegi Mutu, ART ’00, now a successful practicing artist and sculptor in Brooklyn, “such things” include taking care of her three-year old daughter Neema. In an interview for Mater Mea, a website that represents women of color at the intersection of motherhood and career, Mutu describes the sheer pragmatic and logistical difficulties of this balance. Just as Bell had to attend to the various needs of her three children Julian, Quentin, and Angelica, Mutu must move just as fluidly from studio to hearth. “You can’t just postpone a child’s needs,” she explains. “If Neema’s back home with the babysitter and it’s time to have dinner, I can’t say, “Oh well, I need to work another hour-and-a-half more.

No, her appetite says now.”

While it is a challenge to juggle any profession with the demands of everyday life, it is particularly challenging for artists. Every artist I have met creates art because of a simple, powerful, visceral need to do so.

Mutu is “in love and obsessed” with her work. Almanas’s “heart and soul is tied to the process of making art,” and she could not imagine living without it. “If I were to become a mother,” Almanas explains, “I would need a partner that understands the enormous passion, dedication, and focus it takes to be a professional artist.”

However, this kind of understanding — of the dedication it takes to be an artist, and of the sacrifices and compromises that the female artist must make to pursue her art — is not commonly shared. Why is it that lionized British painter Lucian Freud, renowned for his meticulously rendered portraits, can go largely unscathed for having fourteen children with various lovers, whereas Alice Neel is condemned for being a bad mother?

Amelia Sargent ’13, who just completed a Fulbright on the role of gender in contemporary Chinese art, found major obstacles for women who wish to pursue a career in art. Women

applying to MFA programs in China, for example, were still asked if they planned to get married or have children, and their entry to the program was highly dependent on their answer to that question. “There is still the deeprooted societal expectation that women should be caregivers, and that should be their primary role in their family,” Sargent says.

“You also often have these artist couples, and people will pay more attention to the man and his work,” Sargent says. “She is expected to support him and sacrifice her own career through his ambition.” While many have heard of artist-dissident Ai Weiwei, for example, who specializes in controversy, confrontation, smashing Qing dynasty pots, and building massive sculptures out of steel bicycles, most of us have probably never heard of his wife Lu Qing.

Bell has been labeled a “lavender artist,” one who dealt with the mundane, miniscule world of the domestic — still lives of unripe apples, the sunlight streaming onto a bedside table at Charleston, her children playing by the windows. Similarly, Lu Qing’s artwork — intricate grid patterns painted on bolts of silk over the course of months — has been largely overlooked for being private, hermetic, quiet. In general, work by women artists today, like that of Lu Qing, is still being dismissed as “too small in scope, too personal, not broad enough,” according to Sargent. On the other hand, Chinese political pop art, an area dominated by male artists, has become popular in the West, admired for “being subversive and for tackling big issues.”

According to Sargent, because men still own the majority of property and wealth in the world, they will naturally support the art that reflects their worldviews. “The life of men is seen as more profound and transcendent, whereas the female experience is specific enough, not universal,” Sargent explains. “The art world is very much

still an old boys’ club.”

If this is indeed the case, why should the female artist even bother to balance a life of art and motherhood if her experiences as a woman, and as a mother, are deemed also unworthy of great art? What does she do if her membership in this old boys’ club remains contingent on her ability to separate her art from an important and inextricable part of her life?

A

mong the Vanessa Bell paintings that hang on the fourth floor of the YCBA is a self-portrait, one of the few that she painted over the course of her career.

Standing in front of the portrait, I can feel her presence: she sits upright, her shoulders powerful, her lips full and pursed, her cheeks ruddy. And yet, at the same time, her whole figure seems to harmonize into the backdrop. From her saffron skin to the patchwork of her hair she seems to blend into the wallpaper, as if she were simply a part of it. It appears that perhaps even Bell herself could not distinguish the artist from the mother, could not really separate herself from the colorful life that she built around her.

Perhaps we should not be so keen to separate the two. “There is something that bothers me about this idea that life and art are separate,” says Almanas.

“The time that you devote with your family and friends and other areas of life does feed you artwork and makes you a more effective artist, because it enables your art to speak to people.”

Any effort to extricate Bell’s role as artist, from her role as mother, therefore is perhaps not only futile, but also unnecessary. “The portrait painter must not say ‘This is maternity; that intellect,’” wrote Virginia Woolf. “Any attempt to sum up, will distort and diminish the subject.”

As I walk away from the painting, I try to catch the gaze of the woman in the portrait. But she is turned away from me; her eyes, two solid spheres of teal, are impenetrable and elusive.

yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 39