Volume 2 issue 1 spring 1990

The Yale Literary Magazine is a nonprofit, registered undergraduate organization. Entire contents 1990. All rights reserved.

Copyrights remain property of individual authors and artists. Yale University is not responsible for the contents of this magazine.

an undergraduate publication

charcoal on paper Front Cover Hanneline Rogeberg The Waiting Room 10 Brad Engelstein

Witching 4 Peter Rock

Transit 8 Laura Powers

charcoal and wash on paper 13 Hanneline Regeberg

come and pencil on paper 19 Hanneline Rogeberg

The Involuntary Hostess 16 Susan Choi

woodcut 20 Torn Daniels

Sonnet 8 Laura Powers

Dog Poem #1 21 Ted Cohen

acrylic on paper 9 Brian Novatny Epiphany 14 ThOng Nguyen

Cynical Poem (Dog Poem #2) 21 Ted Cohen

Contents Spring 1990

My One and My Question 22 Nick Quinn Rosenkranz

etching with aquatint Three Stories Tall Not an Elegy For Cannery Row 24 26 27 Tom Daniels Robert Chi Paul Saint-Amour

Limits The Striped Bass The Violence of Engagement Barefoot in the Bazaar drypoint 28 29 35 36 34 Hilary Liftin Jennifer Marshall Nick Rockwell Jonathan and Andrew Cohen Emily 0. Wittman Don't Look Back 37 Behrouz Montakhab

acrylic on canvas 39 Donna Bruton

woodcut 39 Donna Bruton

photographs 43 Kathy Profeta

etching Back Cover Torn Daniels

THE WATER IS GETTING HoT, heating so it would bum your lips, scald your tongue, cook your teeth. Quiet, waiting for the morning. Now the kettle has come to a boil.

It's screaming out an open window, calling the day, cutting the night in tatters, singing hot above the houses below. My house is built on a knoll, the others circling lower, and I'm standing in my yard, listening while the night escapes the kettle.

We're in the middle of a drought. My body is full of it, my bones brittle. Thoughts choke and twist and calcify. I am trying to resist this. I turn back to my house, to get my tools, to set out to work.

People expect me to bring the water back. My boots wait on the porch, warming in the sun. The people have begun to doubt me. So have I. The fields are baked solid. Morning fingers fumble through the buckles. My mind is reeling, off-kilter. The skin around my eyes is parched with doubt. It's August and we've had an inch of rain here. People expect me to bring the water back. I swing the door open into the simple room, pausing, looking inside.

But my step is too heavy. The house tilts, the floor slides tipping under my weight. Furniture cartwheels across the room, splintering into firewood against the wall next to me. I lift my other foot into the room, only to catch my balance, and the house tips further. The table against the far wall shakes itself loose and scrapes slowly toward me scratching deep lines into the wooden floor picking up speed, closing in, responding to the kettle's call.

In one motion the table cracks into my thighs, clocks me backward into the yard, collides against the frame of the door. I leap up and slam the door shut against the table, against the sounds.

There is a book lying open on the table and I look

Peter Rock

down, into it, in that instant.

I've trapped the sounds, caught voices in the house. I'll return forgetful this evening, open the door, and all the sounds of the collision — glass, voices, splintering wood, this morning's kettle — will pour out into the night. Bedroom lights will slowly turn on, growing in concentric circles, wondering at sounds caged for a day.

I am too old, too weak to face those sounds. Perhaps by the end of the day I'll muster the strength. I won't open the door now. I can find tools along the way. Hell, people have used whalebones, bedsprings. Peach wood is best, and old Stew Hendrickson's got a peach tree right in his front yard. It's on the way.

I had looked down at the open book on the table. Now I began to remember what I'd seen. It

Witching

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was a photograph of a young boy reading, his face pressed close to a book, his shadow slipping into the letters of each word, filling them like water.

What I do is a younger man's job. Over time I have fallen out of favor with the voice of water. I fear this drought. Years ago I would have laughed it away.

A branch from old Stew's peach tree.

That's all I need. While I've been thinking about the sounds trapped in my house, thinking about the open book on the sliding table, I've been setting out across the streets. People call out to me. Water is rationed for everyone. Men stand on their porches, rubbing their eyes, holding the news in their hands.

I'm snapping my suspenders to the rhythm of my steps, trying to answer the drought.

Martin Luther condemned what I do back in 1518. Said it violated the first commandment — that's putting other gods first. I'm a water-witch, a dowser, one who has "the gift". I'm trying to bring the water back. The truth is, it's not too respectable (not even rural folks like to admit a belief in it) but the county pays me to tell them where to drill for water.

It's a fact that almost all counties, all water departments, hire someone like me,though probably under a false title like "Geologist" or "Engineer". I don't know about the land or how it lies. We're in the middle of a drought. That I know.

The boy in the photograph was so close to the book, it was as if his head was being pulled into the open pages, forced to kiss the words softly. He is young, I need his kiss. I start working on him, calling him back, putting him together piece by piece.

Flesh on his bones, words in his mouth.

I'd say to Martin Luther that he should take a look at that part where Moses strikes the rock with his rod and water bursts forth, enough to feed his people. His congregation I think it was, and their cattle. Surely Moses, after carrying those commandments all the way down Mountain Sinai, wouldn't go off and break the first one? Still, I have often been wrong lately, dry wells newly drilled haunt my steps.

People want to brush their teeth. They want to wash their hands.

Old Stew Hendrickson's sitting out on his porch, his hands in his lap, watching the day unfold.

He lives on the edge of town. Fields suddenly stretch out in every direction, nothing is growing, tiny cracks slither hot through the earth. It's only the weight of Stew's false teeth and the blanket across his knees that keeps his chair rocking. That time between the chair and floor opens and closes, grinding the bones of the days into sand for hourglasses.

I shout to him. "Can I borrow a piece of your peach tree?"

Stew pulls himself out to his chair and it keeps rocking as he walks halfway down the stairs of his porch.

'What's that?" he shouts back.

The heat is bending at my eyes. A whole corner of Stew's house ripples like a flag. The boy in the photograph is still reading. His eyelashes snag along the letters, the words crush up into the soft skin of his face. If I could teach him what I know, if he could remind me with his unchanged voice. All dowsers know the rod must be green. It has to be from a living tree, one in which the sap runs smoothly.

"I said can I have a twig of your tree."

"Sure, sure, I'm not proud, never was proud," he says, patting feebly at his pockets, finally holding out a battered pouch of chewing tobacco. It seems as if Stew has ten times more bones than he should in his body. Rickety. He's got all kinds of elbows. The hair on his head is only the thin gray lines from a pencil.

"No, thanks." I explain again, pointing at the tree this time. Stew is watching my mouth carefully, as if a gold coin might fall out at any moment.

The creases in his face are lined black with tobacco juice and he watches my mouth as I ask again.

I notice a child hiding behind the soft folds of Stew's overalls, eyes watching me suspiciously.

Stew pulls the girl, his granddaughter, out by the hair. Her hair is long and thin and straight. She scowls and she smiles. Her little face!

"What's the matter?" Stew asks, "You never seen a witch before? This man," pointing to me, "is a real live witch!"

The girl blushes, beautiful, the chair rocks madly on the wooden porch, I try to remember the photograph I saw this morning.

Stew and his granddaughter follow me to the peach tree. Stew's chattering, taking his teeth out to cut a forked branch loose. He hands it to me.

"Well, good luck with it! I still remember the time you showed those city slickers! Whoo!

They was sure surprised to see that water!"

I can hear his voice spinning out behind me as I walk away.

"You sure showed them! Yep!" He's talking about a time many years ago.

A man who was writing a book came to test my ability to find water, to hook up machines to my forehead, to write it all down. I have a copy of the book

Spring 1990 AIN1.

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at home. It starts out like this: "Water-witching, dowsing, divining, whatever you want to call it, has been prevalent in rural society for at least hundreds of years. This study provides a brief history of the art of finding water, a case study, and some potential explanations. It is tempting to write off a belief in water divining to rural magic-mindedness. Is this temptation justifiable? How can modern science help us to understand? Or is this an old wives' tale, a shaggy dog story?"

I'm putting tousled hair into the photograph, pulling the boy out by it. There he is, in my house, pressing his face down into the book, waiting for my return. I must remember him to make him real. His clothes, they will be rumpled, they will be mismatched.

I don't think many people bought the man's book. It was long on graphs and short on everything else. In one of this man's experiments I found some lost water pipes out on Whittaker's farm. Then they found another man, normal, without the gift, and he walked over the same stretch of land, over the pipes. The forked rod stood still in his hands. It froze.

"The attraction to the water is not in the divining rod," the writer observed.

I look back to Stew Hendrickson's yard.

Stew's cut his granddaughter a divining rod and I watch them walking back and forth. Stew walks behind, holding onto the little girl's ears.

In the third part of the experiment I walked behind the man who had failed, holding his soft ears between my fingers like Stew holds his granddaughter's now. When we walked above the water pipes, the rod twisted, thawing in the man's hands, pointing down to the water.

"The gift of water divining," the writer conpossibly be passed through physical "can cluded, contact from one who has the gift to one who does not.

Stew is pointing at me, explaining to his granddaughter, his mouth silent, sound lost in the distance, his chair on the porch anxiously rocking for his return. The heat cracks at my lips, burns up through the soles of my boots. It lifts Stew, his house, his granddaughter, a foot off the ground. It's so bright I can see through my eyelids.

I keep walking. I'm growing old and so I doubt myself. Does one lose the gift like hair, slipping secretly away, thinning, escaping most where one can't turn to see? I think of the boy turning a page with his tongue, smelling the trees lost in the

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paper, tasting the octopus through the ink.

The machines used for drilling wells rest up against the sky, scratching their necks. I'm met at the site by the foreman, slapping his gloves against his thighs, shaking his head. I try to give him a confident look.

"You're late," he says. "We've been waiting. And hopefully not for nothing. Everything," he's bending to tie his boots, looking up at me, "every damn hole you pointed us to last time is dry as a goddamn bone! And you keep us waiting!"

The wind blows dust slowly across the ground. I'm looking it over, the machines creak like haunted houses, the foreman slaps his gloves, the clouds change shape, everything calls out to water.

"You ready?" he asks, impatient.

I nod and point my crooked, forked piece of peach wood at him. It reminds me of a story in that man's book. It was in the history section: "It is well-known that in some areas of Africa, particular men were reputed to not only be capable of finding water, but also of divining for belts of ore or even diamonds. One African boy was allegedly capable of 'seeing' diamonds underground!"

"You're not getting paid to stand there staring at the sun," the foreman says.

"Stranger still, a case in France is docuin mented which a well-known diviner, by walking through the town's streets, successfully pointed to the perpetrator of a terrible murder. Shortly thereafter, the use of the divining rod in criminal prosecution was discontinued."

"Looks like a bit of a drought," I say, trying to lighten things up somehow.

"No kidding. Not to mention your paycheck. And stop pointing that thing at me."

"Does it bother you?"

"No, it just makes me want to piss! Now come on! Let's go!"

It all starts seeping back in as I hold my divining rod out. The boy has no hands. His arms are hanging like shirtsleeves, his face pressed close to the page, touching it — I'm walking across the site, led by the forked branch, circling — why must he be so close? — circling, springs uncoiling, gaskets turning, voices calling — fallen asleep? lost balance? — my eyes are on the fork of the stick — he is blind — feel the pull of the water — reading braille — it's like electricity — does it with his lips — fork stuck in a socket — the boy is blind — hair's on end — kissing the words — key hanging from a kite string in a light-

ning storm — slipping each letter smoothly into his mouth — the stick turns like electricity, bark twisting off in my hands — he reads with his lips — the stick points down.

The foreman pounds a stake into the ground where I've stopped. I don't stay to watch the drilling.

"Better hope you're right," the foreman says as I point the rod at him and begin to leave.

"See you later, witch!" he calls.

The hot wind, its sound, is drying the sweat on my back, trapping my hair upright. The day is almost ending, shadows trickle from the sky and stretch into the night. My boots click along the street. I feel as if I'm coming home to the boy. He's waiting for me and I understand him better now. I hope to know him further than this. I let my forked peach branch rattle through a picket fence. People open their doors, their windows, as I pass.

"How'd it go? Water? Did you strike it this time?" they call. Hoping.

"We'll know soon enough," I say.

The windows close, the doors swing silent.

My skin lets off electricity. The earth too is holding onto the heat of the day, getting ready to spend it on the night. A chestnut crashes into the fence behind me. Stew Hendrickson's granddaughter has turned her divining rod into a slingshot! I turn and lift my fingers toward her, casting a spell that will haunt her dreams. She runs screaming, looking back over her shoulder, hair straining through her teeth.

The boy in the photograph, I've already started thinking of him as mine. I've remembered him, I've put him together. I feel as if I'm coming home to him, to drink him in, to rub his smoothness along my throat.

My boots echo along the dusk and remind me of another boy, found in Germany, walking down the street with a letter saying he wanted to serve the King. His clothes were also mismatched, he had a picture of Munich in his hatband, but I'm thinking of the way he walked, the boots he wore. They say his boots were heeled not with leather, but with horseshoes. My boy cannot see with his eyes, but reads how I remember, how I witch.

This German boy had spent the first seventeen years of his life in a small box, in a cage. Then he was let loose, walking away on those boots with horseshoes for heels.

This morning I'd caught the sounds in my house, trapping their songs with a slamming door.

I'd locked my boy in the house all day long. My

boots turn onto the path.

Imagine how long someone had labored on the horseshoes for that boy's boots! Seventeen years of carefully heating, pounding against anvils, adjusting for growth. I've been witching all day.

Trying to strike the shoes forcefully into a perfect fit.

We're in a drought. Many times pulling the nails out of the boy's feet and beginning again. My boy will hear me enter, lift his head, mouth full of letters.

Imagine the pride of this unknown blacksmith, watching the boy walk away, walking like no one had ever walked before.

And I'm thinking of my boy. He reads with his lips. He will remind me. He is young. How will his voice sound? Will he spit letter after letter, soundlessly striking their target, witching indentations into my flesh which slowly push themselves out and disappear?

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Laura Powers Transit

8

He'd heard that to commute meant to lessen, like putting sugar in a cup of black coffee, like shaking salt on a stain, like pressing a white rag over an open mouth to distribute the cries over ten thousand stitches, rather than letting them blot the air.

He sought always in the backs of drawers for something to mitigate "I lost her" — feeling on fingertips the dull pecks of the envelope corners, finding only butterscotch buttons which he ate at the stop.

As the bus uttered its grunt of transport, he craved peace so much that he shouted Stop! If this dead girl must be on the bus could someone please just commute her with poster paint? Could they just play at diversion with her? — partner her in the quaint up and back of waltzing — Slowly, he watched response come: newspapers fluttered up to the averted faces like coquettish fans.

Laura Powers Sonnet I would like to be considered cherished — starting with my hands, in gloves, under the slackened faucet, the dishes coming in each other's way like bathtub boats, the snow coming down where I no longer want it, two pairs of stockings writhing quietly in a hatbox, two tea bags floating graceless in a pan of soup, oil in the water that I am trying to wash away with water, water running down the drain with a deadening grasp.

The box in the living room that can be opened a thousand times is collecting dust.

My hands, in gloves, are not precise enough to open it.

How can I teach the rubber fingers, the awkward skin to be slim and humble, to be cherished like a jam jar — rinsed and dry and put away when the riot's finished.

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Brian Novatny acrylic on paper

Spring 1990

10

Brad Engelstein

The Waiting Room

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LET'S START AGAIN. We were bloodied and bedraggled. Or anyway, we looked the way we should have, beat up and wet and unhappy. My jaw had ballooned. The gauze pads I kept pressing to the back of my head got soaked with blood one after another. This was after we had been taken to the hospital. We were sitting on plastic chairs that were linked by a long metal beam, the whole row creaking whenever you moved, as if you were on a boat. Maybe I was lightheaded from the blows, maybe there was something about the lights in the room — a kind of dull, fluorescent glitter — that made you weak. There were brooders everywhere. Some of them wore shawls and bent their white-haired heads to the burden upon them.

Poor Jessie: it looked like an egg was coming out of her forehead. She had flakes of mud on her nose and the ridge over her right eye. She looked so forlorn and like a little girl that I longed to be large so she would take comfort from me and maybe love me. But we laughed at each other, we looked so bad. We were big messes. It hurt to laugh, it made my head throb and she said as her eyes watered, "Oh god, don't make me laugh — my head is on fire."

I was forever defenseless before her, clumsy, playful, dark. Even though I had known Jessie for a while, I was still waiting for her to notice the passion that consumed her. We were just friends, but there was a wonder to us. A little girl might see a penny in the street, might stoop, pick it from the debris and read the date to see if maybe it names the year of her birth — and when it does she slips that celebration of her self in a back pocket and doesn't tell anyone and doesn't buy a gumball from the machine with that penny, and in this way the coin is torn from one circulation to enter another, younger existence. Our lives were like that, I thought. They came back to us brighter. They were coins we had found and wondered where we could have dropped them. Our lives were like secrets.

But we didn't know what to do now except to laugh at one another and sit there and hold our heads in our hands.

"My face," I said mournfully. I pressed the tender part with my palm.

"You look like Dizzy Gillespie."

It hurt to smile. "You look like some crazy ostrich that's pulled its head from the sand. No, you look like someone just hit you with a brick." We didn't even laugh faintly, we laughed hard. "There's

no justice," I said, bitter. "Here I am with a cracked head and all you have is a little bump. Why didn't they break a bone at least?" I don't .know why she was laughing, maybe from being safe and damaged and too late to have to do something or maybe, like me, because it seemed outrageous that the thing was so near, that it was already over and that it wasn't quite — I was still bleeding and her ache was just beginning to branch its roots out, a figure connecting the dots of pain. The moment I kept remembering was the stick swinging through the air — it had been sharpened to a point at one end, it was a pike, I guess — and then I felt it carve a gash several inches long in the back of my skull before jabbing deep and the next moment, then, surfaced behind the last, regaining consciousness on the ground with him hitting me in the face with his fist and the snow falling down and Jessie screaming, "No! No!" somewhere. I surrendered what money I had — four dollars — and begged him to make his friend leave her. "Oh god," she told me when we got to her kitchen. Already her forehead was like the stomach of a pregnant woman with blood trickling from the navel or a third eye put out, but she was more worried about me. I was leaning over the sink and she was trying to wash away the blood that kept coming. "You have a hole in the back of your head. You're definitely going to need stitches.

Jesus — I can see into your head."

You can't smoke in a hospital anymore.

You can't even pace because pacing only works in seclusion. The emergency waiting room is pure spectacle. The best you can do is take the hand of the person beside you while your other, surreptitious hand puts pressure to the wound, hoping to help it harden and close.

I took the cloth from my head, saw it was red, refolded it and rested my arm a moment. My body was not healing. On a television bolted to the wall, the Home Shopping Network was playing — the violence of a man peddling garbage to lonely people stirred the disgust in me and I began to grow irritable. All my anger wound around the edge of that voice. I couldn't see the screen from where I was sitting. I could only hear his voice.

"Goddamn that T.V." "Don't pay any attention," Jessie told me.

She took my hand, stroking it lightly.

"I'm trying. I'm just sick of waiting."

"I know."

One or the other of us would go to the

desk periodically to see if we had been forgotten but we would hesitate before the lone nurse rushing between papers and the phone and a woman sobbing, her face bloody with hundreds of cuts like it had been pushed through a window.

We waited. The man's voice kept on.

Our levity had come apart.

"Let's talk about something completely unrelated to this," she said.

"Okay." But we didn't have much to say. I would disappear into the pain in my head and then I would get distracted, scattering through dream time, scraping my foot against the shiny floor to trace an urgency beyond reach, a restlessness that would break open its mouth and lose its voice. It was like a fish thrashing through the murkiest part of me. I looked at Jessie, she had closed her eyes. I felt funny sitting beside her. What I felt was that I had failed her and was failing her right now, that I couldn't take the pain from her, that I should have been able to protect her, that I wasn't the one who would change her life through love. I got to my feet.

I went to the window where I could see my ghost, faint, barely recognizable — at will, I stared through the image and into the thickly falling snow. The pain with its claws in my skull tightened its hold. Even now I longed to take Jessie in my arms but her need reached elsewhere, leaving mine to sink through me, untouched, a stone pulling me to it. It no longer mattered what time it was or where I was or how it would end. I pressed my fingers to the glass. The snow was a swarm of white butterflies fastening themselves to the branches of trees, the sidewalks, the roofs of parked cars and ambulances. I wanted to warn the patients, but the sight of snow veiling the world, stifling cries, effacing whatever it fell upon, absorbed me. Distances into which to empty myself, inhuman stillnesses, corridors of quiet — it was through these the pain came rustling, hot and majestic, blistered, enraging, scorching with its touch. Cracking open dry lips, it spoke my name in a voice so fierce and unmistakable that when I fell to the room, singed, and into the revolving eyes of the others there, I couldn't remember what we were waiting for.

Spring ippo -••••-

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Hanneline Rogeberg conte and pencil on paper

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Hanneline ROgeberg charcoal and wash on paper

Spring 1990

III

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Th6ng Nguyen

Epiphany

In spring the dogwoods stretch their fragrant fingers and bare their Delphic navels to seed the wind with white petals, amid its velvet thighs.

Driven as if by the beating of wings at first surge of flight, the rush of blooms respires and subsides in echoes, sifting limpid down.

Ophelia of the air that strews the flowers in loosened furrows, plowed in the air like chaff, incline for morning: He is come—gone. Arch your boughs for the virgin Sibyl; will your leaves to prophesy the vision-bloom and staunch this sun that still bleeds lotus-dreams at night.

Or, chasten the reddening sky in folds of glory, till all is whiteness crucified on white.

II They shake in ancient cold of catacombs, where darkness dampens the echoes of secret fire.

Crowned in henna and bent with boughs of elegy, flecked branches murmur like ghosts desiring opulence.

Trunks brace among the throng of maiden-pillars, ecstatic as the incantation of vestal fires chastens dusky marble vertigo.

The pungency of saffron smoke and wine poured in libation mingle each in each to polish colorless the pallid irises of the oracle, as one dread syllable, consonant with the vowelless dark, redounds through cryptic cries of prophecy. And so we pale before this old cataclysm of terrible gods:

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The wind has lost intention; the sky has quit its hue; the moon has lost her way among the wind and sky: All rhythms cease to move.

Surrounded by vastness and filled with the motion of sky, the moon hangs like a lodestone. Winds range far and deep into the dusts of exodus.

The seas return to salt and unclasp the knees of the farthest shore, washed on a lidless dawn.

There, at the last horizon of thought, stands an obelisk of dense aluminum amid the undulation of dark auroras.

Like a child of the chrysalis, unfolding still moist on its pinnacle of sun and myrrh, the seraph of six wings fastened on symbol rises across the visionary air, out of amber into the quiet decor— unwinding the threads of being, burning the robes of time. Exeunt. The center becomes circumference, and all is ecstacy collapsed in communion and dream. The wind sweeps forth like entropy; the sky unravels white; the moon expands throughout the wind and sky: All rhythms now are free.

IV Weave, weaver of the wind, for me, and let the moments synthesize their sense.

The rebus of each thread is drawn from umber, from the vague magnitude of the ocean, into the mind's intrusion: Myriad images flash along the silken conscience—though disconnected in brilliance—then wash away. Often, I have caught her perfidy, when she unraveled her labors and miscarried the changeling child.

She speaks, and dense, inscrutable empires rise in the pianissimo utterances.

Weave, and manifest your patterns through this shuttle: All return to white beneath your stylus, a wax-white tabula rasa.

V AVE MARIA She weaves a shroud from the twilight cry of ravens, whose feathers fray the black with peacock colors.

Grasping its'corners, she throws their oily fire on the silence, white with asphodel within the darkness. Bare branches etch the air like the shards of a shivered mirror, beveled blank.

Through trembling fingers, the moon midwifes as the dark conceives an inky sepulchre, whose walls are azoth against encroaching azure.

Crows crouch in querulous crowds, divided from the dark. Preening their plumes, they question whether to roost in moonlight-mirrored corners, or to fly into the slender, splintered shadow— past the rasping leaves and through the threshold.

VI I have distilled the summers through my window and touched the lengthening ennui of corners, where shadows gather in the angles, brooding over the altar of blood spilled at the end of afternoons. It is too easy to sleep...

Astigmatism has shaped my eyes sphinx-like: Cassandra mocks my pupil, a cataract within the lucid curvature of vision.

She mutters idle prophecies to me at the moist stroke of an eyelid: I pronounce the prophet's pantomime; the motions of her lips are mine. And this soliloquy has emptied my skull...I conceive abstractions and lose my mind to ravenous chimeras.

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VII Time refracts itself through these lunettes.

The morning lens then bends our sun-struck wills to converge, or else disperses each to colors.

We have caught in rarefactions there, in beads of mercury on glassy water, in sateen tremolos of dogwood petals, the utter solstice of our souls. The moment where we cross the threshold onto water and darkly walk upon the mirrored space, eyes become as glass, are havens for reflections. Here, the iris is my pilgrim, and I regress into its motion, as voracious translucence exiles April into violet, inverted on a vast vignette.

VIII In he came, striding as on the noon, to bend beneath crepuscule boughs and sleep.

His eye is glass and bears the arcing world upon its surface. In the meditation of an eyelash, through vision turned prismatic when thoughts are diffracted, one eye comprehends the wilder winding of clouds, the inconstancy of butterflies, the vocalizations of the wind. And I have dreamt the solitude of bluest atmospheres, the quietest boundaries of time. Upon what altar have I set my son? I turn the coals and set incense to my soul. As Bacchus comes again, I dissipate to smoke and spirit.

.c014,101990

ON A DAY IN EARLY SUMMER fUll of light and a brisk wind Marina and I took a drive out of town to a distant location where she had a comfortable property by the sea. The trip was her idea and I owed to her the meticulous planning, which included a several-day's picnic and a bundle of fresh linen for the beds. There isn't a great deal there, she warned me, it's just a little place by the sea. Still, to your health! This is all for your recovery.

I'm well already, I told her. After all it wasn't much, was it? 'The best pregnancy is the shortest one possible.'

Is that a proverb?

I think it is.

So you're better, so what? We might as well

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Susan Choi

The Involuntary Hostess

Yale Literary Magazine

take our trip.

I hadn't even noticed the passing of time when we rounded a bend and came out abruptly at the top of the chalky cliffs which stood next to the ocean. The road ran along precariously, and at moments I could look almost straight down onto the tumbling surf, the sea being luckily on the passenger's side of the car. Marina did not even bother to look over, but she had obviously done the drive before. It was her place by the sea! I noticed with shock that the sun was going down. Hadn't we left very early?

Time flies when you're on the road, Marina reasoned. And besides we are practically there.

It's funny, how even now the noises of the city seem to be just behind us. Turning around in my seat I was surprised by a car following in our wake, which I had not even heard until then. Even more surprising because it was rattling loudly, and without notice the left-hand front-end wheel flew off and was lost in the roadside grasses. The crippled corner of the vehicle fell loudly to the road and the car, collapsed, ceased to move.

I suppose we should get out and lend a hand, said Marina, stopping our car as well.

The driver of the capsized vehicle sprang out of the car and, casting a humiliated gaze upon me, dove into the grass and soon emerged with the renegade tire. Marina! I shouted, not realizing that she was just at my elbow, now standing beside our car.

Yes, she replied, it is oddly enough Riault, whom I was sure we had left behind.

It was our object to leave him behind, if I may be so self-centered, I said.

Well it is notoriously difficult to get away for a holiday.

Riault had righted his car with alarming speed and now stood before us. Is it much further? he asked. I could see now that there was a third car

behind his, but beyond that I could see no further.

After all, we were blocking the road.

Marina was very gracious, but it was her role, being the hostess. Not at all! She exclaimed.

And as sure as she said, within only minutes we were there, and the sun was fully set. There were a great number of guests after all, but the accommodations were much larger than I had expected.

Supper was served outdoors on tables discovered by one of the gentlemen in the utility shed.

A utility shed, I remarked to Marina. I didn't even realize there was a utility shed. What kinds of other things are there, have you been in it?

Marina remarked in a very low voice that we would go there together after supper and have a look, just the two of us. There are sure to be all kinds of, devices...

But after supper our plan was interrupted by one of the women whom I had not noticed up until then, and I supposed she had arrived in that second car, with Riault, although that car was very small... In little more than a provocative, tasselled shawl she was hurrying around the circumference of our party, ensuring that no one left yet. The hammocks were brought out by a number of man-servants, whom I imagined came with the house.

Everyone! she exclaimed, arranging surreptitiously a tassel of the shawl over the tiny and poignant bud of her left...Everyone! Gather round! Monsieur Riault is going to tell us a ghost story, and then we'll have a walk by candlelight!

Good God I said to Marina, where are these people coming from?

She had taken out a paper and was no longer paying attention to anyone.

Where did you get that paper? Is there a village around here?

Riault took position nearest a bonfire that had been built while I was not paying attention. An anxious guest hurried up to him with a little stool, and then all was quiet. I admired the moulding of RiauIt's arms and shoulders beneath his thin suit.

After all, he really isn't something to be ashamed of, I reasoned...

Once upon a time, began Riault. Or rather, many years ago, because this story is true, there were three children, or perhaps there were five; there were a group of children, an odd number, no smaller than three and no greater than seven, and they were all playmates of long standing.

Five! cried the shawl woman. Five is the best number. I couldn't stop looking at her now, she was really so distracting.

All right, said Riault, with a lazy smile directed at her. I had seen that smile before, that indolent, sleepy, spent-out - God! How could they be so obvious about themselves? I was not sure whether I was shocked generally or hurt personally.

No one else seemed to have noticed, even though she had turned up to dinner without even bothering to dress. I didn't have any reason to be angry, it's true that he didn't owe anything to me. ...and so there is always a house being built, the forest is pushed back further, and their little world becomes more and more a neighborhood, and less a wild wood, each day. They don't mind this, because each new house built brings new children to the neighborhood, and so the loss of trees is repaid a thousandfold.

Marina, still looking through her paper, gave a snort here. I agreed with her, I would sooner have trees than children any day.

One day, when playing by custom in the soon-to-be front yard of the latest house, which is in its final stages, all the beams and studs assembled, many walls up and windows in, and even the floors down (the foundation of a house is the hardest part) there appears in an upstairs window, one of the few windows, a head! Disembodied, and floating there with its gaze upon them! The children scatter, but not before they notice the terrible stench, a stench such as of rotting flesh or a pustulent sore that you have rubbed dirt into and so it continues seeping with no chance of getting better, oozing now a clear, now an opaque yellowish juice, all of which stinks of the worst, most hidden part of the inside of your body, your sick body Oh! Everyone was shuddering, everyone's mind was on their supper which they had only just ate and which they were acutely aware of now. ...The next day they return to the site, and one discovers upon a refuse pile in the front yard a box, a foot long and as wide as it is deep, with a lid at one of its square ends. They open it and what do you think is lying inside, as if in wait of its discovery by the five small children? A shit! A tremendous human shit, the very size of the box, and clearly slid into the box through that very end which they now held open, and left there, an affront, it was a foot long and so wide around that it should make us all shift in our seats with discomfort, and pointed neatly at both ends like a hand-rolled cigar...

A number of the guests were almost sick.

A successful story. I imagined that I was going to have to watch Riault take his lady-friend with the shawl off now to one of the bungalows (I had not

Spring 1990

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18

looked until now but they were all lit up with candles, and it was clearly time to retire) but instead I found him by my side. The shawl lady was saying to the retiring guests, But what about a walk by candlelight! Riault said to me, Let's go for a walk alone.

We discovered a path which ran like a wide shallow trough between low dunes in which weeds had managed to take root. Although I had not seen him fetch it (from the utility shed?) Riault produced a lantern which he swung in his right hand, leaving his left hand free and swinging near me because I was walking on his left side. The shadows produced by the lantern and the weeded dunes shuddered and made a ghostly effect, and the sea could be heard more than it could be seen. Riault, perhaps only to get the conversation going, had his name changed, to Harry.

Please call me this from now on.

Riault I'm sorry Harry, what for?

Riault is so, I don't like it, is it because it is so bourgeois?

It's not that.

It is just so pretencieux, indulge me in my new name, please.

How far should we walk?

I had thought just to the little cabana there, and then we can talk.

Is there a cabana there? I hadn't even realized there was. Does someone own this beach?

Riault I mean, dammit, Harry had now insinuated his left hand and arm around my waist, as we had reached the small cabana. The voices of the others, whom I had thought were retiring, were heard in the distance. There seemed to be so many of them now! Harry shiewdly extinguished the lantern and comparably the sea came much more distinctly into view. Back at the house, I wondered, were they going to stay up? Perhaps something was happening, a card game or a song around the piano.

I had not noticed a piano on the first tour but then it was likely there was one, right in the middle of the front room where we'd had refresher drinks after arriving. Harry, I said, hadn't we better get back to the house and see if there isn't some kind of latenight activity? Or has everyone retired to their bungalow, do you think.

I have been thinking, Harry replied ponderously, of a great many things since the last time we saw each other, and I was thinking now might be a good time to share them with you. He was going to disregard my suggestion. And weren't those voices in the distance closer than the house? Perhaps they were all coming out here, for a lobster bake. Were

Yale Literary Magazine

there nets? Was this an area where we could hope to find lobsters?

Are those your friends I hear coming, Harry?

They aren't my friends. What I wanted to say chiefly was that (think a lot about us and I wonder whether or not I am wrong in thinking that you find me some kind of an embarrassment. And if you do, and (think you do, then I was thinking isn't it unfair, after all we've been through. After all...

Don't start, I think they are coming out here.

We did practically have a baby together, doesn't that say something? You must not have always thought I was such a stupid and overly handsome therefore unintelligent bore.

Riault, I won't call you Harry if you are going to start dredging up like this.

I think about him a lot too It wasn't anything, he or she. Just like you to assume 'he.'

Sorry. Only goes to show that at least one of us isn't so insensitive and unaffected (think I'll go back now, have you got that lantern? ...and what I think of most is that he's a litghost, dancing around my head. I can hear him, tle as if he were just at my head. I wear him like a little crown.

Please hand over the lantern, Riault.

Just don't say Riault in front of the others, is all I ask.

Riault please We've got a lantern right here, should we head back now? Turning around I realized that Marina and the rest of the company, at least a dozen guests, had crept up entirely unnoticed. With six lanterns shared out between the twelve of them, there was no lack of light now to see our way back to the house. Walking close beside me Marina said to me in a low voice, To the rescue, eh? I definitely owe you one, I told her.

Back on the low, wide porch of the house a petite woman with artificially curled hair and an excitable expression suggested a sing-along in the front room, and a night-cap. I thought I recognized her as the shawl woman, although it was much chillier now.

No one seemed to take to her suggestion, and everyone milled around vaguely, seeming to have the intention of retiring, and making remarks to each other with discomfort.

Chilly isn't it! I didn't think it got so chilly in

this climate.

Only thank God there are no mosquitos, that would be horrible. Where I come from...

Where do you come from, I asked him politely. Are you from south of here, or north of here?

Marina was flabbergasted. Hasn't anyone been introduced? I suppose we'll have to go into the front room after all and tell our little stories, and get familiar, so I'll just roll in the portable bar...

Someone said, bemused, Maybe Monsieur Riault has another little surprise for us!

Riault looked at me with an expression of incalculable hurt, as though it was my fault that his new name would not stick! and followed the others into the room. For some reason I decided to linger on the porch, maybe a get-away was still possible.

It's too bad, I thought, that Riault is here, the last thing I would think of bringing along on a relaxing holiday. Although it was not clear who brought him along. Out of the darkness, from the left of the house, Marina hissed Over here! I think I've got them occupied!

She was standing in front of a small squat structure that I could only barely make out in the darkness. The utility shed? Let's have a look, she said. Here's the lantern.

The guests?

Completely preoccupied with getting to know each other. Riault has enough admirers, there's no reason for him to be after you again.

Nostalgia, I think. The lost potentiality. He goes on and on about Oh, I heard. They just don't understand!

He'll come to see that he has no right to persecute you over it. Now let's see what we have here.

In the morning Marina and I woke up early and laid out a breakfast on the veranda furniture, found intact and only a little dusty the night before.

A number of small children that I had not been introduced to on the previous day appeared with the guests, and Riault (Harry) was dispatched immediately to the shed for high chairs. There are only three, he said upon returning. There seemed to be at least five children, but they would not hold still.

We'll feed them in shifts then, said Marina, settling herself at the head of the table.

How cruel! exclaimed a guest.

Oh really, said Marina, Who's the hostess here anyway?

Breakfast was dispatched in silence.

Who's for a swim? asked Marina unencouragingly. No one took it up. Uncomfortable silence

reigned again for several minutes, uninterrupted even by the children (they held very still now; there were actually twelve). Finally Riault announced that he was interested in changing his name, to Harry.

More forceful, don't you think? he cried cheerfully.

Everyone was very enthusiastic. Yes! exclaimed the petite woman. She was wearing a thin shift, and I could read the outline of her figure perfectly...

Another surprise from Monsieur Riault! I'm sorry, from Harry! said one of the men. You're certainly good at amusing us!

Riault (I won't indulge him, I won't)shot me a look of great significance. I'm very glad I didn't have his child,(thought. It would have been so, unbearably, theatrical.

Then let's go! Marina stood, imperiously.

Although there had been no clatter the plates were cleared and the high-chairs carried back to the shed.

Such stealthy servants. We packed the cars.

On the way back Marina, driving, took my hand with her free one and said, I just thought you should know that Riault, I think calling him Harry is ridiculous, was sharing his room with a woman.

They were above-board about it, and I'm sure you noticed already.

I did, I said.

Well, I just wanted to be sure you knew that he was putting one over on you. I doubt his sincerity, that's all. And so the things he said should not be taken to heart.

Oh I didn't, I said. I'm very immune to that.

I knew you would be.

I happened to glance into the rear view mirror at that moment and saw that Riault, driving the car behind us, was waving his hat with his free hand. It was absent-minded; he wasn't trying to attract my attention. He had shared his car with the small, promiscuous woman,although I couldn't see her through the window. Abruptly their car veered off to the right, and though the change of direction was clearly unintentional there was luckily a turning there and so they disappeared around a bend.

Confused, the remainder of the caravan followed and soon we were alone again.

Well, said Marina, That takes care of them.

We continued on. The road came off a rise onto a level plain and it became clear that there was a drop to the right, because beyond there I could see the sea again. Marina asked, are you up for a holiday? I happen to have a house just ahead.

I noticed that we were not being followed.

Spring 1990

Ted Cohen Dog Poem #1 This dogfaced rustic sags out of its proportions and into the seismic overtures of age (a cracking, like the bone in its soup and a swelled novel in the rain): Kick the dinghy, a hollow laugh, an airy husk, and the dust-driven motor chokes its approval.

Pull in the anchor, dead weight in these arms, and wind each coil of rope between the webbing of my palm and the crook of my elbow, like film caught in sprockets.

A motion which powers a slight story, a wisp of plot: snagged on studied hesitancies (the formal constraints of this genre, the eyes of too much influence staring down his steady spectacles like a whole history of fathers) — a smile, a cough, nothing, an imperfection in the materials — I am, in this, an engineer of responses.

The wake of these sounds (a drowned rattle-laugh) tears your name in the surface of the water.

A silent response.

Ted Cohen Cynical Poem (Dog Poem #2) Has he ever — and in the most trying circumstances — talked about you?

Does he call you, a devil or a dog?

Are there things he might conjecture, a wish, a name, a word, but writing, have forgotten?

Or more to the point: Do you dream at night, on a pillow of his papers?

And when, if we are always at a moment of saying or of no?

1 sense a line, a silent strip that in my dreaming wakes the difference: A dream that tells me, 1 can only tell a yes to bring to bear the cycle of your smile.

Spring 1990 1==,

21

THERE'S ONLY BEEN THE ONE - who knew me. I mean it's nice to think that four or maybe even seven would love to jockey to hold that title, but I would definitely be lying if I said that there'd been more than one. And slow down about any assumptions you might feel like making at this point. I mean try and keep with the program here,'cause I don't even slightly intend to mean what I think you think I mean. I do not mean that she has known me in the carnal or for that matter in the biblical sense since there have indeed and in fact been seventeen who have known me that way and yet not known me at all. But above and beyond all those nameless faceless bodiless seventeen, there was for better or worse this one.

I knew she knew me. I knew it when I met her in the park. I mean I guess I knew it before then,

Nick Quinn Rosenkranz

My One and My Question

Yale Literary Magazine

but then I knew it for absolutely certain. Because that day on a whim I had up and decided to bring champagne to meet her with in the park. I remembered to bring two bottles of my parents' champagne and I remembered to bring a whole shopping bag full of ice to keep them cold in. I remembered to bring a corkscrew and then I remembered that champagne bottles don't need a corkscrew but only two strong thumbs so I remembered to forget the corkscrew. I remembered all these things — but I forgot cups. I knew when I was waiting and sitting with my shopping bag full of ice and my two bottles of my parents' champagne and my no cups at all to speak of — I knew then that I had a problem. I knew then that I wanted to run to get us two plastic cups for us to drink up my parents' two bottles of champagne with. But I also knew that she would be there any second and that if I went to buy us two plastic cups that I would be many minutes late and that she would have to sit here and wait for me and think who knows what kind of thoughts. And then I pictured us drinking up my parents' two bottles of champagne from the bottle and passing the bottles back and forth and drinking from them. That is to say I tried to picture that but I couldn't envision her doing that because she is not, in fact, someone who would enjoy doing something like that. I thought these things and then I knew for absolutely positive that no one could ever love anybody who could remember to remember the champagne and remember to forget the corkscrew and forget to remember the cups. I knew this for absolutely sure and when I knew it for sure I thought I was just about ready to break one of my parents' two bottles of champagne on the edge of a park bench and cut my throat open with the jagged edge. I say that I

was just about ready to do this but I didn't actually do that because of what happened then.

What happened then was this: She came down one of those paths in the park's() that then I could see her and she could see me. She saw the bottles of champagne that I was holding by their necks and the big shopping bag of ice and the zero cups total which I had remembered to bring, and then she began to laugh. She started to laugh hard then because of what she knew she was just about to do right then. Right at that moment, she was getting good and ready to pull out from behind her back nothing less than two of those plastic champagne flutes that the plastic bottoms sometimes come off of. She knew she was going to whip out those champagne flutes and she did it because somehow she had known, even though she really had no possible way under the sun of knowing. She had known from somewhere way far down deep in her mind that I would think on an utter whim to bring two bottles of champagne and ice to keep them cold with and no cups at all. So she had brought those two plastic champagne flutes which are so funny to drink out of because the little plastic bottoms of them keep coming off. She had known that somehow and I knew then for absolutely certain and beyond the tiniest shadow of a shadow of a doubt that she, the one who had brought the champagne flutes, knew me, the one who had forgot them.

I tell that story not as an anecdote or for that matter also not as a slice-of-life vignette. Or rather I tell it not merely as both of those but I also in fact tell it as exposition for the question which I would like to now pose to you mostly because I am very sick and tired of posing it to myself. Before I can pose it to you though there is one more thing that you must know and that is that at this point in time the girl in question does not return nor to the best of my knowledge acknowledge my phone calls.

Now there is also a premise which we have been operating under from the very beginning, from sentence one so to speak and that is that this is a girl who knows what she is doing. This girl must in fact be a girl who knows what she is doing because a girl like that, who could bring those plastic champagne flutes completely unbidden, a girl like that would definitely have to be a girl who knows what she is doing. So we know now what to think of that girl who remembers champagne flutes that she's not even supposed to know we need, and who knows me the teller of this tale like no one else knows me, and who does not return my phone calls.

We know that that girl knows what she is doing. But the one thing that we don't know I think is the one thing that I would like to pose my final question to you about. My question is this question: What — granted this whole story which I've just told — what, I ask you, are we supposed to think of me?

23

Spring 1990

Yale Literary Magazine &

WHEN THE CIRCUS CAME TO EL SALVADOR III

Tom Daniels etching with aquatint

Sprillg1990

26

1.

The accountant on the first floor talks To miniaturized, rechargeable Ether in her one-piece cordless phone.

Somewhere else, her interlocutor Seems to answer in sync, laughing and Languishing in bed with his princess Phone. At times, she has heard—or thought she Has heard—tiny clicks on the line, the Footsteps of birdlike surreptitious Eavesdroppers; she now believes that all Her calls are routed through a central Switching station hidden in the South Dakota hills, where a computer Synthesizes the conversation.

Doing the same for the real other End of the line. She has stopped doing Business in person for fear that no One, not even she, can ever know What anyone else has really said To her, or what they have not. Perhaps There is nothing to be remembered After all.—Or even to be said.

Robert Chi Three Stories Tall

2.

The salesman on the second floor will Not turn off his living room lights. He Used to keep only one room lit at A time, as he had done since childhood, To save power. But after many Months and miles of travel, having found, Finally, a home office desk, he Wondered why everyone else still and Always seemed like strangers, distant and Automatic. Especially the Neighbors. And once when he was on the Road, a lone tourist hailed him to ask For directions; "I'm sorry, I don't Live here, either," he had to say. So He reasons that his neighbors are just Acting as such and that perhaps a Mere dozen people inhabit this City. Or even none at all, for Every day everyone moves in the Morning commute to a different place, To populate a new neighborhood.

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3.

A retired explorer, the third-floor Tenant, a real cipher, completes the Cycle: for the third of anything, Following the footprints of the first And the second, verifies patterns; Fulfills triads, trinities, hat tricks, Dialectics; and opens floodgates To infinity. And so the manOn-three sits in adamantine and Static profile in his living room, Watching indeterminate hours of Television docudramas, those Action-packed theaters of the real, Of staged news and adventure (no need To choose between fact and fancy); he Fantasizes about being an Actor, because they have the power To be someone other than who they Really are. He imagines cracking The screen open to climb inside, but What is inside?—ln an earlier Age, at an earlier age, he would Have tried to scale the back of the sky.

Paul Saint-Amour Not an Elegy. For Cannery Row A township of teetotalling Methodists Has less use for economy of poetry Than for a way of viewing its precious fishing trade.

Twelve or a hundred bronze-backed men who pull the nets and corkfloats Are just broad-backed men who sleep in houses, And slouching spent on the gunwales is a sign of exhaustion, Not of anything Messianic to be coaxed From the heart of the sea, They will be the first to tell you.

Perhaps a sardine-canner might find patience for caesura If the Quonset corrugated walls could fall away And the tongue not taste of rotting rubber gaskets, Or blue sleeves reek of processed flesh.

But here the only meter is mechanical: shunt and stamp and stack, And in the Margins, shuffling of booted human feet.

Only when the dappled shoals had migrated to Mexico And the canneries and troller fleets congested in a mothball sleep Did loss become a marketable mode.

On a well-paved shelf between the sea and gutted fisheries (Despite a breeze to fluster pennoncels and postcard stands) The tourist trade is flourishing, And in the listing apparition of a boiler's carapace in a weedy lot The ironic eye finds fodder for encomium, and the passerby has finally Found something tangible to mourn.

•••

Winging over the wharfboards and the Pretzelman and Monkeyman A seabird sallies shorewards, beakful of silver supper. On the Margin below the beardy dockbottoms of a burned-out cannery, A jellyfish splayed on the beach isn't even A sign for nothing. Like a viscous bridalveil, it seeps Deliberately into the jewelled sand.

Spring 1990

27

f\i( dito C.}z.

S-Hk7 The Striped Bass

FUSE a wave, though the sun had not yet risen 1 and

Fltatitl 6(.1 (5

a

Low- LiN& r ico 6

the sea was indistinguishable from the sky.

Pk) NtO 1Yo

pp,-FA - PA

The crest says, "fuck, Puck."

PAT

Ft 5

"fuck is the furrow that draws it ahead "fuck is the furrow that pushes it on.

The crest says:

-t k-e

Gol iS

vlAt

vio sttreetwt.

"Let's face it --

I cast away the sky's rays

that would min e our watery jewels — my turned back allows 6Zu.e (AA)

di-eso

b0C G/14d

that we are told from the sky.

-r tvAt

So es t•A't c,ti.5_,A4.1A-1-

And it is I who break."

Yale Literary Magazine

A certain imperative exists; whether it is "intellectual" or "ethical" remains to be decided. Here is perhaps the most cogent of its formulations: "There is a [way of thinking] that would like, in order to be consistent with itself, not to remain enclosed in purely speculative, theoretical, academic discourses, but rather... to aspire to something more consequential, to change things and to intervene in an efficient and responsible, though always, of course, very mediated way, not only in the profession but in what one calls the cite, the polis, and, more generally, the world. Not, doubtless, to change things in the rather naive sense of calculated, deliberate and strategically controlled intervention, but in the sense of maximum intensification of a transformation in progress, in the name of neither a simple symptom nor a simple cause." This formulation of the imperative is, to say the least, guarded; in its phrasing and its caveats, it manages to preserve its "very mediated way." It allows for intervention, but only of the efficient, responsible, and lit remains unspoken) rigorous variety.

In another formulation of the imperative, the necessity of intervention cannot be held inside the bounds of testing, or, for that matter, within the structure of comparison required for such testing. A structure of that sort is the province of poetic language, which "would not be susceptible to political engagement."

The vision of an instrumentality of language which would permit it to discern or reveal truth in its isolation is, perhaps, vitiated by a distinct imperative of comparison. The "poet," here defined as subject to the force of this imperative, does not care to name the world; nothing is named,for naming implies a perpetual sacrifice of the name to the object named, or, to speak as Hegel does, the name reveals to itself the inessential, in face of the thing which is essential. The "poet" puts aside the hope of instrumentality; he has chosen once and for all the "poetic" attitude which would consider words as entities, differing in the propriety of their essence from things, and not as signs, subordinate to those things which, in distinction, exist. The phainomena exist, they should be in evidence, and the word is far from supportive of them. The imperative of comparison would thus seem to mandate claims of unparalleled negativity: "Poetic language surges over the ruin [it makes] of prose. If it is true that the word is a betrayal and that communication is impossible, then each word, by itself, recovers its individuality, becomes the instrument [I] of our defeat, the receiver/concealer of the incommunicable. There could not exist any other thing to communicate: if communication through prose has failed, it is the sense itself of the word which has become the purely incommunicable." These claims should seem familiar; if the imperative to place things in relation is to retain its force, they should not be discarded lightly. But this talk of "failure," absolute, apocalyptic, and fraught with pathos, seems all too open to a swift, pragmatic refutation. Scrupulous analyses which deny the possibility of the evident have always been confronted with this evidence as disproof. One might imagine, for example, such a "refutation" of Zeno's fourth paradox, in which the interlocutor would coolly get up, and, in no particular hurry, walk out the door. For the second paradox, the shooting-off of an arrow would do nicely. In short, in the face of the appearances, recourse to the idea seems counter-productive. As long as an everyday, working knowledge of the appearances is sufficient, the aporia to be found in their explication are apraxia, deterrents from action which are to be found in the mode of questioning and not in the things themselves. As long as one does not wish to make

Jaques Derrida,'Force of Law: Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice," translated by Mary Ouaintance. Keynote address given at the conference of the same name, October 2, 1989 at Cardozo School of Law. To be published in Cardozo Law Review.

29

Jean-Paul Sartre,"Quest-ce qu'ecrire " Quest-ce aue ta littOrature, Paris - Gallimard, 1948, pp. 18-19, 42-43.

Aristotle, physica 233a 22-31, Metaphysics 1012a 18-20.

The Violence of Engagement Engagement: Founding Violence/Jonathan Cohen the appearances lin'comprehensible by means of something else, to conceive of language in this way is to speak of a "different kind of language:" prose. "Prose, essentially, is useful. I shall willingly define the [prose] writer as one who makes words serve him." Prose's field of activity is discourse, and its matter is naturally significative: that is to say, words are not first and foremost entities, but solely designations of entities. They indicate, more or less correctly, things or notions. It often happens that we find ourselves in possession of a certain idea which someone has communicated to us by way of words, without our being able to remember one word that actually gave us the idea. Given this phenomenon, in all its forgetfulness, interrogation of the individual word would be beside the point; the word is not the instrument of instrumentality. In this latter formulation, then, the "[prose] writer" exists in distinction from the poet. Intervention is the sign under which the writer — concomitantly, the politically engaged author — exists. The writer reveals the situation through his project, to himself and to others, in order to change it. With each word he speaks, he engages himself somewhat more with the world, and, in the same act, he emerges with some benefit, having gained impetus out of the word towards the future. In this way, the writer is one who has chosen a certain secondary mode of action which might be called "action through disconcealment [devoilement]." The writer who is engage

Spring 1990

Sartre, pp. 25 ff, 28.

poet:writer :: law:force

Derrida

30

Derrida

"Legitimation" of method

Benjamin, "Critique of Violence," Reflections transl.

Edmund Jephett, New York; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978, p. 287.

knows,from his position, that the word is action; he knows that to disconceal is to change, and that one cannot disconceal without making the act into a revealing, without future change in view.

The two faces of this latter formulation rest in a continuous strife; Sartre, who articulated it, would term it "non-dialectical." If one were to separate these faces, as illegitimate as this might be, they might respectively correspond to concepts of "law" and "force." Having undergone such a transposition, it would be desirable that they not comprise an oppositional pair. And yet, if there were an opposition, it would necessarily be unbalanced. "The very emergence of justice and law, the founding and justifying moment that institutes law implies a performative force that is also an interpretative force." The carrying out of "justice" implies a comparison between what has been instituted in law as prescription and what has happened since then in the areas over which it has concern. The result of such a comparison would lead to a judgment, in which an act might be accounted just or unjust insofar as it stood in a ratio [logos] of identity or difference to the institutes. The perpetuation of in-justice, in a lack of correspondence with the institutes, requires a disregard for the law, an ability to ignore the force embodied in its original institution. This in-justice, then, given sufficient force, would seem to amount to a new law, a new dispensation.

When in-justice is followed on the level of law and peoples, not only does Derrida succeed in encompassing "discursive" concerns "textually," but the automatic justification of escape, general strike, and revolution takes on a greater complexity, both temporally and on the level of the concept.

"The operation which consists of founding, inaugurating, justifying law, making law, would consist of a coup de force, of a performative and therefore interpretative violence that in itself is neither just nor unjust and that no previous law with its founding anterior moment could guarantee or contradict or invalidate. No justificatory discourse could or should insure the role of metalanguage in relation to the performativity of institutive language or to its dominant interpretation... Justice therefore remains a yet-to-come, the very dimension of events irreducibly to come. Perhaps it is for this reason that justice, insofar as it is not only a juridical or political concept, opens up for the future the transformation, the recasting of law and politics."

"All revolutionary situations, all revolutionary discourses... justify the recourse to violence by alleging the founding, in progress or to come, of a new law. As this law-to-come will in return legitimate, retrospectively, the violence that may offend the state of justice, its future anterior already justifies it. The foundation of all states occurs in a situation that we can thus call revolutionary. It inaugurates a new law, it always does so in violence. Always, which is to say even when there have not been those spectacular genocides, expulsions, or deportations that so often accompany the foundations of states."

"These moments [of event in the sense of Ereignis] are terrifying moments, because of the sufferings, the crimes, the tortures that rarely fail to accompany them, no doubt, but just as much because they are, in themselves and in their violence, uninterpretable or indecipherable. [In these moments...] the foundation of law remains suspended in the void or over the abyss, suspended by a pure performative act that would not have to answer to or before anyone. The supposed subject of this pure performative would no longer be before the law, or rather he would be before a law not yet determined, before the law as before a law not yet existing, a law yet to come... The law is transcendent and theological, and so always to come, because it is immanent, finite, and so already past."

This cannot be mistaken. A way in which this can be very briefly shown is through the example which this speaker reads in order to get to these statements. It is Walter Benjamin's example.(We follow him here in another way: in presenting a text, with its own specificity, made up of quotations violently taken from their sources and assembled into a context[Zusammenhang].) Benjamin's example, taken as example by the speaker, is from his Critique of Force: the police. The police are meant to enforce the law by means of the employment of force. They are meant to be the shadow of the city, the omnipresent presence, "sometimes invisible but also effective, wherever there is preservation of the social order." And yet, when they enforce it, as, for example, at a demonstration, "they are no longer content to enforce the law, and thus to conserve it; [in their interpretation] they invent it, and publish ordinances... The police are ignoble because in their authority 'the separation of the violence that founds and the violence that conserves is suspended.— The police, in their application, whether of truncheons or laws, make law "each time that the law is indeterminate enough to give them the chance." To those under the law, the collusion of law and the police is defective: the people seem to have been excluded from this partnership. Engagement would seem to consist in introducing this kind of a third term back into the hegemonic structure of authority comprised in the totality of law and force, law and police. And yet, what happens if one attempts to make law representative of the people, in their entirety? This, too, is marked, and, just as the speaker says, it is inevitable. The people, in their entirety, have a name, insofar as they are constitutive of a state: der Volksgeist, that brainchild of Karl Friedrich von Savigny

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later adopted by less benign actors. The suspension of law, in that moment of epokhe when distinction is set aside, or, better yet, excluded and set upon, is the necessary consequence of engagement; the consequences of the suspension itself cannot be understood, only justified. Justification of the ways of G-d to man: "Divine violence, which is the sign and seal but never the means of sacred execution, may be called sovereign violence." So says the high priest.

To restate the argument in the most crude manner possible, we need only return to the distinction between the poet and the [prose] writer, the writer engage. Presently, the way in which many would wish to set about "inscribing themselves" in political engagement is through an instrumental, prosaic "application" of the way in which the poet concerns herself with language. For reasons set out above, this may not take place in good faith. The sedulous concern with the law of what has preceded would serve to "legitimize" an act of force majeure which, in point of fact, can operate without reference to prior law, and without respect for a past reason. When such individuals militate for a suspension of prior law in the jouissance of revolution, they are taking upon themselves a responsibility — admittedly one that dissolves for them with the onset of their power — for the "genocides, expulsions, and deportations that so often accompany the foundations of states." Those who would wish to reap the political benefits of "speaking on a political level" in combination with the supposed "safety" of "acting on a textual level" might not wish to see the working-out of the inevitable transposition, followed by the dissolution of the distinction. If the alternative is a species of martyrdom,this may be what is needed. "It is necessary to know that war is common and right is strife [diken erin] -and that all things happen by strife and necessity [erin kai khre6n]." This understanding is not completely homologous with the will of those who would make a decision to enter into the destiny of a world-historical people. That decision has already been made for them, in what has been left unmastered. To understand what has been left unmastered is to understand one's situation among them.

Benjamin, p. 300.

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Hermann Diels, Fragmente der' Vorsokratiker trans.

Kathleen Freeman, Cambridge MA. Howard University Press. Heraclitus, Fragment 80.

Martin Heidegger, The Origin of the Work of Art • poetry Lanauage. Thought, trans.

Albert Hofstadter, New York: Harper & Row, 1971, pp. 48, 55.

Reading, Irony, Resistance/Andrew Cohen The first time I read Foucault mock "the great warm and tender Freemasonry of useless erudition," I reveled in the baroque headiness of his engagement and the delicate outraged tenor of politicization with which he passes judgement on the academy. I took it as trenchant corroboration of some of the many quiet fears and secret slanders I'd nursed through college. But when I read the interview again I began to wonder about my own erudition, and the dimensions of my own political engagement. These days, I reassure myself how much I enjoyed Yale, then I worry that worse and less tender things may be in store.

"Right is strife and all things happen by strite and necessity"— I commenced and continued worrying. —By now, I've simply commenced — Pascal wrote "it is just that what is just be followed, it is necessary that what is strongest be followed," yet, even if there is only strife and necessity, by "a certain imperative" we are determined to navigate a "just" course within and without the procession-lines of our quadriennal university pageant.

Derrida delivered his decidedly timid formulation of the theory/action imperative to an audience mainly concerned with "Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice." But the Critical Legal Studies movement in this country, what Derrida called "the most fertile and the most necessary" of endeavors, has fallen victim to an unlikely consensus of Left and Right; the comeback of the religious Right having convinced more than a few scholars of liberal bent that this is no time to be mucking around trying to undermine the concept of justice. CLS scholars may stand accused of having their heads stuck in the theoretic sand; their importance lies in their attempt to forge a non-instrumentalist model of legal interpretation.

The pedagogy of justice presents two related problems. To "justify force" we might bring to light some deep truth conveyed instrumentally by language, to "legitimize" our interpretation. To avoid this, must we appear under the banner of illegitimacy? More important and secondly, in terms of the study of force, do we place our emphasis on textual, or on discursive practices? For this consideration, we should address the text of the Foucault-Derrida debate.

"Having formerly had the good fortune to study under Michel Foucault," Derrida begins "Cogito and the History of Madness," "I retain the consciousness of an admiring and grateful disciple. Now,the disciple's consciousness, when he starts, I would not say to dispute, but to engage in dialogue with the master.... is an unhappy consciousness." The unhappy disciple struggles "to articulate the interminable and silent dialogue which made him into a disciple."

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If the dialogue makes the disciple in silence, who makes the dialogue?

"Starting to enter into dialogue in the world, that is starting to answer (the master) back... the disciple knows that he alone find himself already challenged by the master's voice within him that precedes his own."

He is "like the 'infant' who, by definition and as his name indicates, cannot speak and above all must not answer back."

The disciple has not yet spoken. How has there been a dialogue if there is only the master speaking?

"The master," Derrida writes, "like real life, may always be absent." Nevertheless, "the disciple must break the glass, or better the mirror, the reflection, his infinite speculation on the master. And start to speak." With this, Derrida pointedly breaks off his preamble and, changing tone, goes "straight to the most general questions" he has concerning Foucault's Madness and Civilization.

Smashing through the glass, the disciple breaks the dialogue, pulls himself together, speaks in vivid long monologues, as if to a great audience; vies for tenure. He is happy to be a disciple no longer. Smashing the mirror inaugurates his identity, his history; he has won his way past that "interminable" state. Born into time, he has spoken. And Derrida has doubtless spoken. But for him, the "admiring and grateful" disciple, the essay, the speech itself is a return to the problematic scene of pedagogical dialogue.

Derrida's speech carries an understated note of appeal, as if he were in fact in dialogue with Foucault, engaged that is, but wary of the master's quick temper. Madness and Civilization is "admirable," "rich," "powerful," "monumental,"; only "certain aspects" are open to question, and these the most difficult; Derrida stresses he is deeply indebted to, "grateful and admiring" of, and "profoundly aligned" with Foucault. He explicitly indicates his fear the essay will be "taken — incorrectly — as a challenge." (Luckily, we don't have to imagine what kind of response he went so far out of his way to try, preemptively, to mitigate.)

An actual piece of dialogue appears in the essay on the third page, but to understand its significance, some background will be helpful. In his book, Foucault links what he considers to be Descartes' derogatory reference to madness in the Meditations, to the "great internment" of the mad in France. Foucault claims that here we have an example of philosophy following juridical theory, functioning to exclude "madness" from society.

Now, by the time Derrida introduces the dialogue he has distinguished, first, between what Descartes wrote ("the sign in its immediate materiality") and what he was believed to have meant. Secondly, he has distinguished the sign from the "total historical project" assigned to it by Foucault, namely the exclusion of madness. He has also defined "historical meaning" as "the relation of stated intention to "total historical structure--again, in this case, the ongoing internment of the mad. Given the sign, the stated intention: Does it have the historical meaning assigned to it? "Does it have the historical meaning assigned to it?" Whose voice is it intruding?

Derrida treats this interruption as if it revealed to him that his question was actually "two questions."

One, does the sign have the historical meaning, the one that Foucault assigns. Two, does it have the historical meaning? In other words, can we say otherwise than what was believed to have been said by Descartes — by classical commentators, contemporary hospital administrators, etc.? The interjection is potentially the stentorian voice of pedagogic authority, come to demolish Derrida's initial, hapless conflation of Descartes' stated intention with his historical reception. Yet for both formulations, the authority, the authorship, the responsibility and the final credit devolve upon Derrida. Plowing through the essay, we are more likely to suppose he talks to himself while delivering lectures than read the piece of dialogue as another voice.

This dialogue, repetition or exchange (whatever we wish to call it) repeats the scene of pedagogy in the preamble. That scene ostensibly has the structure of a dialogue between master and disciple, but as we have seen, it is wildly figured. Either the master and the disciple are both present, engaged in spoken dialogue; or the disciple, having internalized the master, is alone talking to himself; or both master and disciple are absent, and the "dialogue" is itself silence; or, the dialogue is unspoken, yet ongoing.

This catalogue comprises several categories of paradox. The two most important are the temporal rearticulation of an interminable state— the spoken silence— and the interminable reiteration of a silent exchange— the unspoken dialogue. An example of the former would be Derrida's preamble, given as a disciple, and example of the latter would be the experience of the disciple he describes, the internal dissent which torments him until he breaks the mirror.

The play of the textual dialogue, of the two questions, reflects this mirror-ridden structure. The reiteration of the same question twice generates difference out of identity, suggesting a degree of intransitivity inherent in the "sign." (This measure of latitude will become important presently; it is given by the different inflections of the question, and the different voices to which it could belong.) Because there are only one set

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.11=Mm.

of quotation marks, Derrida could be talking to himself— as a master embarking on a monologue, or as the disciple of Foucault he figures himself to be. Then again, since he is speaking but refers to himself as a disciple, he could be articulating a spoken silence, or both the master and the dialogue, "like real life," could be absent.

More obviously, he could be quoting an acute interlocutor; more interestingly, on the condition of Derrida's abdication of author-ity, the passage would represent both an unspoken dialogue and a spoken silence. If Derrida wrote Does it have the historical meaning assigned to it, and failed to indicate, with quotes, that he actually said it, then just as the spoken quality of the disciple's speech or the essay itself is entirely questionable, the response "Does it have the historical meaning assigned to it— could not have been given by a speaker who heard the question, unless the speaker were Derrida.

The significance of these drawn-out considerations is to make clear the strategy Derrida uses to unhinge Foucault's reading of Descartes, and everybody else's reading of Descartes, and most people's conception of reading. The "hinge" is a single "sed forte" in the middle of the Meditations but at the heart of Descartes' pedagogy. "And how can I deny that these hands and body are mine?" he asks. Such behavior, and such denials, are characteristic of the mad, "whose cerebella are so troubled and clouded with the violent vapors of black bile." Then the clincher: "I should not be any the less insane were Ito follow examples so extravagant." Derrida argues Descartes actually uses the pedagogical device of "feigned objection" to trick the reader down the path to a hyperbolic doubt worse, and as incapacitating, as madness— the "evil demon" theory. Derrida takes Foucault's evidence for assigning philosophy a functional role within a historical system, and reads it ironically, as an interpolated voice of tradition-bound dissent, as a pedagogue's clever tactic. To be sure, the speaker shrinks from the comparison of doubt with madness, and uses the term demens for the insane, a word which connoted the madman's legal disqualification. But Descartes actually undermines the grounds of this exclusion, Derrida argues, even if his text manifests its existence.

Foucault risks "erasing the excess by which every philosophy of meaning is related, in some region of its discourse, to the nonfoundation of meaning." He overextends his argument and falls back into instrumentality: Descartes said x,y,z, which functioned in such-and-such a way. For this reason, Derrida claims, Foucault's is a totalitarian pedagogy: he won't admit the possibility of new, or ironic, readings.

Foucault opposes an ethics of memory to Derrida's ethics of poetry. He shoots back: Derrida's "little pedagogy" is even more tyrannical, because when you "textualize discursive practices" rather than contextualize them, having "erased" or dismissed historical traces, you will confer on the master "limitless sovereignty to restate the text." Derrida cannot abdicate his authority. Sooner than he will revolutionize the practice of dogmatic commentary, his readings will be themselves be canonized. His disciples will never break the mirror, but grow up made in his image.

Discursive practices include many sorts of things we've heard enough about: author-functions, celebrity-makers, academic professionalism, copyrights. Discursive practice is historical: the valorization of thematic consistency, as Foucault points out, began with the oldest traditions of exegesis and "commentary."

Discursive practice is also political in the extreme. It's being able to mail glossy brochures on university investment policy to every Yale Station box, while the anti-apartheid movement puts out ragged batches of recyclable table-tents. It's having interdisciplinary departments that can't do their own hiring. Absence,just as much as exclusion, qualifies as a discursive practice. You have only to look at the Rodin report to see how laggardly Yale's minority hiring practices are relative to national averages; if you've pursued ethnic studies, or sought the time or the advice of your professor lately, it's likely you don't have to look as far as the Rodin report to know that Yale's minority faculty are few and dedicated, but they're swamped, and many of them are leaving.

How best to describe discursive practices at Yale? We write papers for our TA's to read and grade.

But TA's in the humanities are already talking about going on strike next year, faced with fellowships $3000 below Yale's own New Haven subsistence-level estimates, and salaries an equal or greater amount below those offered by comparable graduate programs. In a move understandable only to the bean-counters who want more science buildings and federal R&D, and to the two classicists whose unlikely pet project the implementation of the Frown report has become, Yale will reduce the number of TA's for lecture courses by 25% and require that dissertations in the humanities be completed in two years less time than what is now the median.

I know that in many quarters, even so brief a digression into concrete political reality will be considered unseemly, theoretically unsound and even, perhaps, unliterary. One can only speculate on how far theory has won suffrance on the basis of its abstractedness, its seeming toothlessness. On the basis of this foothold, it has made inroads from "literature" to philosophy, history, law, and architecture. How lasting and legitimate an effect remains to be seen, for me,for the time being, from an extracurricular, extramural vantage.

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Emily 0. Wittman

Barefoot In the Bazaar

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The madness of your March fever forms a homunculus, so that only a shoemaker from Gcerlitz can name your song; a proud air to accompany delirium and dancing.

While the year arches its back he kneels before you as a prophet, untying your laces and humming a familiar tune of March.

He casts his bets with scalloped hands and mercurial glances which slide uncompleted down the belly of your day.

The sun is coming, which the prophet remembers as a circumstance, while he was gunned and goaded in Gcerlitz.

And this will be your sorrow, a sun which has your name but burns up quickly. The season has sent mud, and the steps you print on the prophet's floor will measure the sting of ensuing evenings, once the closed companionship of cold is gone.

The body of March is known by your tongue but lives a language away, a restless Tetragrammaton.

The prophet who traces your steps and eyes your soles has promised you asylum and room in his basement for your concoctions and configurations.

He predicts that you will lie awake most nights, nude-footed, and smelling in sheets the glue and battered leather found in roofless stores in old Gcerlitz.

The arid night will take you travelling again, now that the fever of March steeps your forehead and creates from your sweat and frenzied fancy, the body of a little man, who, born through intoxication, has mastered your secrets and put them to song, a one-time prophet and soldier of spring.

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Hilary Liftin Limits These distances exist: snow is like sugar, but it only falls from its height and forgets no surface.

There is no space between this street and that curb, or the sidewalk and the grass.

Your hand is exactly the size of my foot.

I have read this book before; I have lived in this place for six years today.

How the stairs we climb add up, so everything can be counted or spoken, so, over years, a set of twelve porcelain dishes will crack, plate by plate, until the cabinets are full of blue chalk.

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This is how I know you slept somewhere last night— or did not sleep at all— This is how I know that your sleep was full of dragons or what you have learned or where you want to go or you did not sleep at all the way you sometimes don't.

This is why I know what your living must be like no matter where you are.

Certainty is imposed, the differences restricted if only because no matter how many fields I see I still know them as fields and though I have never seen that lamp before I know that if I say a lamp if will be understood.

When you taught me these things you gave me the outline of how you will live.

But the closer I am to that line of being the more I think of lampposts in this light becoming trees, or the first time I touched fire, how I held my hand there, watching it turn black.

In a certain evening, on this same street, nothing is familiar and I have forgotten my own name.

And then you are far away and I do not know you and your outline is only an obscure curse of memory, reduced to the vague limit of what I think you used to do.

Then I ache for you to hold your coffee cup again.

Again, for you to lock that door behind us, for your fingers to move against the covers, Do these things again, again.

I will never recognize you.

Spring Ip90 ••

Jennifer Marshall drypoint

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I DoN'T

Behrouz Montakhab

Don't Look Back

KNOW

WHY I am taking this class. I don't really want to be a writer anymore. If I did, the sight of a room full of people with the same ambition would sicken me with contempt, with jealousy and fear. But now they seem harmless enough, these lonely and clever children of which I am one. They still hope that fame can bring them happiness, but I know somehow, without knowing yet how I know, that it will only make things worse. That they are all headed in the wrong direction I am sure.

Probably nostalgia brought me here, nostalgia for the girl I was in high school, for the teachers I had crushes on, the suicidal poetry I read and tried to imitate in notes which I passed to the nearest friend, nostalgia for the dissipated field of venom, pretension and timid fucking that served as my social circle. It was a while before I could see people here as being anything more than analogies and counterparts to my past. I would tell each of my freshman year roommates who they reminded me of, or who I thought they would have gotten along with. I cried some nights, more than I want to remember, and I paid dearly in long-distance bills, trying to re-establish some kind of connection with people back home.

But the weight of the past was so strong that it pulled even my longing for it away from me; even that became part of the past. I felt very alone, and surrounded myself with people, and still what I felt was loneliness. There were new sensations: wandering through the stacks of the library, trying cocaine, writing a paper about Plato, having a boy go down on me — his gentle, curious tongue. But these were only uninspired episodes of the same tired show.

At some point I must have decided that a little more selfishness might be healthy, that it might help me to hold myself together. So I started sitting in a different section of the library, where I knew that people wouldn't be able to find me. I tried to lose myself in work, but instead I found myself there. At first I didn't pay much attention to the comments on my papers, because I could not respect my professors at all. They were all old men in tweed jackets, and I imagined them in their homes, sitting in armchairs and smoking pipes, surrounded by scholarly tomes. But eventually I caught on. I was doing very well.

And I started to see even these elders as merely people, more people to be treated with the politeness that everyone deserves and so few receive. My resentment began to unclench itself. It

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was true that some of them wanted only to assert their superiority over these young, blank minds, that some wanted star pupils who could inherit their vendettas, that some could not tolerate any independent thinking, that some could not even recognize it. But there were some who wanted only a response, who wanted to know that they were getting through, that something they said had made its way inside another person and nested there.

I hated no one except those who tried to get too close to me, peddling their diseased ideologies of love. It was only in the strangeness of a stranger that I could find the beautiful and the human. Only distance was noble. And soon I worked myself free of hatred altogether. You do not know what this was like; you can only imagine.

My own hand was a pleasure to me. I do not deny that I was unhappy, but I wore this mood patiently until it softened and changed its shape to fit me, renouncing its ancient title. Whatever might have been said to me, I would not have wanted to hear it. I was alone, a genius, and deaf to everything but the strange music that sometimes moved me.

I don't want to tell the story of the summer again. The truth is not that different from the version of it I delivered in the first assignment for this class.

Peter's name is actually Allen, but that changes nothing. He did in fact get a job at a bookstore after dropping out of school, but actually only kept it a few weeks. He was fired for sleeping in. In the story I gave him a few years on me, a brown suede jacket he had always wanted, and the hint of tragedy that he lacks.

He had written to me during my first year at school, entertaining letters, humorous descriptions of the people he had met at Brown, accounts of the nightlife there and the strange escapades he undertook to stay afloat in the thick and heavy element of darkness. He never asked for more than a little sympathy, and often I wrote back to him.

Sometimes he would write about how great things had been between us in high school. I threw these letters away. One letter didn't make very much sense to me; he had written it on acid, so it was largely incoherent fragments illustrated with a series of deformed, grinning cartoon animals. It tried to be poetic and failed, but for some reason I can't explain, it scared me. As if it could somehow have communicated its madness.

By July I had moved in with him, just to get away from my family. We had cats and rented

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movies and I got a job at a dentist's office. One day we drove down to Niagara Falls and watched the river for hours. You can't listen to the roar for long; it just joins up with you. We saw people who put a quarter in the binoculars, looked around for a few minutes, and then went and grabbed some lunch.

We stayed for hours. The water kept falling. It would never run out, it would never stop, it would never hesitate. Allen made a predictable comment about wanting to jump in, but most of the time we were both completely hypnotized and silent.

We got a hotel room. The story ended there, in that strange moment of decision, because it would have been too hard to describe anything beyond that point. Our night together lasted forever.

Time just hung there on the walls like a dusty tapestry while we talked, made love, ate, talked, sat quietly, got into the shower together and forgive the expression, made love again.

As we lay together in bed, listening to the sound of each other's breathing, I fondled him gently and he grew hard. I hadn't meant to do it all. So a third time Allen slipped inside me and began to push his hips at me, back and forth. He moved very slowly, because he was exhausted and already satisfied, and this slowness excited me beyond belief. I closed my eyes and forgot him, forgot myself as well, forgot where we were and who we were and how we had gotten here. All the violence of desire was gone from him, he was a boy, and I relaxed and stroked him gently at the small of his back. My feelings were very sexual, but also somehow maternal.

He vanished out of my thoughts and into his labor. It was as if his time were over, as if this extra time belonged only to me. Only the part of him that was inside me continued to exist. Only its solidity, its force could be felt. He was as hard as a policeman's nightstick, but he moved so regularly, forward and back, that the effect of the machine was to create a zone of warmth and gentleness. Not emotionally but physically, down there, inside of me.

I waded into the ocean of my swelling pleasure.

The tension flowed out of my body, but the moment it was all gone it started to come back, in a different form. More muscular, more active. I felt an athletic control of my body, I felt really in it. Though I only rocked slightly, it was as if he stood still and I did all the moving. After a few minutes the moving moved itself, it moved me. In my soul I rode as if on an amusement park ride. I was caught in something terrible and powerful. My throat went tight and my limbs went loose, hung like fingers from a hand. To

Donna Bruton acrylic on canvas

Donna Bruton woodcut

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hear the moaning was almost a surprise.

By the time I knew I'd come I had come again.

40

Going back to school was like going from one foreign country to another. The long, slow days turned cooler and began to close themselves up like blossoms, at times slashed through by chilly winds from the approaching season. The songs of crickets were replaced by the buzz of dinner table conversation, a noise which pulled at you, demanded you step into its domains. There were always questions, and even if you were evasive or disinterested the questions would find you, guided to you somehow by the life inside you, the rhythms which betrayed you. Everything was torn to pieces and examined, even silences were neatly dismantled.

One of my periods was a week late in coming, and I spent that time in anticipation of the worst. Perhaps I had gotten pregnant. I thought about what it would be like to have something inside you that wasn't being digested but instead composed, a creature at home in you. In an occasional inspiration I would realize that this strange gift, the potential to bear life, indicated that I myself was alive, alive in the same miraculous, meaningless, vulnerable way that a newborn baby is. But there was no chance of having it, and because I didn't want it, and the operation scared me, I usually thought of it as an intruder, a parasite, at times even as a cancer growing inside me that could ripen into my death.

When I felt the blood run in me I sank back into my life. I hadn't thought of Allen the whole time, not once, and probably would not have bothered to tell him what had happened if there had been anything to tell. His face remembered had been illuminated, by our happiness perhaps, or his, or by the innocence of his not being able to reach me at all, but it was not long before the face became transparent, letting more of the light through, and finally faded into the invisible. Only the light could be seen, the blinding and nameless light. His image, lingered over briefly, had ignited the way a film will if you stop the reels from turning and let a single frame heat up. His name, his features, the time we shared — all burned away. Even writing the story was a purge, a writing it out to stop its leaking away.

I started seeing a senior named Gary. He was incredibly handsome, so much so that when I looked at him, at a party, over dinner a few days later, eventually on the neighboring pillow, I could

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hardly believe he was there. He was too radiant to be merely a presence. I listened to his guilty declarations, not so different from the ones he had made to others, nor from those he even now offered to other ears. Because of his appearance, he could have anyone, and knowing this, it was impossible for him to decide. He kept another girl, imagined us both deeply devoted to him, and lived out his days in an anguished and unauthentic morality, unaware that he had no one, that his torture was low and earthly.

Once or twice I thought of trying to talk to him, to help him understand what was happening to him, but it would have been taken as insult. He would have been hurt and hateful and not at all improved.

We spoke French sometimes. He had been in Nice his junior year, and had a wonderful accent. I was determined to major in French, and so demanded that he would speak to me for practice. I wanted to go abroad for my junior year as well, to become sophisticated and fluent as he had, but also to leave this place. I suspected that he had shied away from the French, spent his time with rich American kids in bars and discos. He was content to think himself the master of his native language, in which he made a few vulgar jokes and of the rest said that it was a long story. Like so many, he sensed in foreign languages the foreignness of all languages and so backed off, aiming to quit while he could think himself ahead.

During this time, nothing was more important to me than my work. Not because of its content, or even because it was work, but simply because it was mine. I chose the courses, the topics, I made my own arguments. Out of these intellectual materials I could fashion for myself a freedom that didn't really exist in the world, particularly not for a woman, and I could enjoy it nonetheless. The French Revolution became my specialty, and on this question I could destroy anyone's authority, reduce anyone to admissions of their limits, their biases, I could draw confessions of uncertainty from professors and students alike. By doing so I inferred that it was possible to displace anyone from any position, to interrupt any impassioned speech or learned monologue, and so arrived at the end of my lessons.

I had wanted to be something fearsome, and certainly achieved this goal on a local scale. I had a reputation in the department. This only caused me to lose respect for what I had done and to set myself new goals. I enrolled in the intensive course in German, and planned after that to move on to

Russian. In my own way I was Napoleon. Perhaps everyone is in their hearts a scaled-down hero, a leader of the tiny region each carries with them, undisputed ruler of everything within arm's reach. I speak only for myself, I who was, while living within the quiet and modest life of a student, simultaneously a restless and valiant conqueror of distant lands.

that's it, huh?" It made me laugh and think, this is so you, but I didn't say it, not knowing how it would sound. "I thought you hated the Dead," I said, pointing to a sticker in the rear window.

"Still do. Came with the van." We exchanged another comically stunned look, not quite adjusted to the situation yet, and then I took him inside.

Allen is here. Last night I was drinking with a random sampling of acquaintances when someone proposed a toast to absent friends. Each of us raised our glasses, took a moment to think of a name and then drank. It took a little time for me to come up with Allen, but I was glad to remember him. To Allen, I thought, wherever he might be. I had not heard from him, but the story out was that he had taken his savings and bought a van. The last time he was seen, he was boasting of all the landmarks he would visit: the Hoover Dam, Death Valley, Graceland, the Grand Canyon. Unable to remember if we had been happy together, I wished him happiness now and swallowed the rest of my beer.

He says that he mailed me a postcard from Utah, warning me to expect him. It might be true. I know it did not arrive. At the very least I believe that he had the intention, and maybe he avoided it because he wanted the surprise to be greater, or he feared he would not be welcome. I don't actually know what I would have said. I suppose he was in transit the whole time and I couldn't have responded anyway. He was waiting on the steps of my building when I came home from class. It was a shock to see him, the same shock you feel when you see something you dreamed about recently and then forgot. It was also a shock to see how different he looked, with his road beard and the mess of dark hair falling around his collar. To see that grin and those familiar eyes, flashing behind a different mask.

"You're thinner," I told him when my arms were around his waist. "What do you eat anyway?"

He kissed me quickly on the cheek, and took a few steps back, holding up his arms, to let me get a better look at him.

"Really? I hope not," and then answering my question, "McDonald's mostly." He made a face. "Hey, but you look great. I mean it," he said, and it sounded like he did. He lowered his eyes briefly.

He showed me the van, which had a grungy mattress laid out in the back. On it were his guitar, a few used paperbacks, and a duffel. "So

I suppose college ought to be called the spring of one's life, but really the only appropriate background is that of autumn. The leaves abandon their green naivetĂŠ for a more diverse wardrobe of reds, yellows, browns, all mixed up on different streets, different trees, with even individual leaves bearing all three colors and some lately developed shades of compromise. While I took Allen on a tour of the campus, the leaves dropped delicately from their branches like children who have resolved to leave their homes, swirling around us in the currents of the wind, dancing and whirling in widening rings.

Some daredevils would scrape against the sidewalk and then float up again in a breeze, displaying the same daring as those brave few who used to dive down in order to touch the bottom of the pool.

Eventually the great sleeping masses would be swept away.

There wasn't so much to show: the library, the post office, the statues of the founders. But mostly we talked, he about why he left home, I about various complaints against the college regulations. At lunch he described Mount Rushmore to me as proudly as if he had designed it. "It sounds amazing," I said. "I'd love to see it sometime."

"Any time," he said, jangling the keys to the van.

At no point had I asked why he was here. I simply assumed it was on the way from one big piece of rock to another, and that after a couple of days here, he would get his things together and move on. We were talking that night and after a comfortable pause he said, "You know, Michelle, it's really great seeing you again." The emphasis he used, the mention of my name: I knew he was leading up to something. He looked down and went on, "I came to see you." He checked to see if I was listening, and then started again, "I've been thinking about you a lot, and about the summer."

"Yeah," I said, half to myself and half the way you respond to someone so that they can go on with what they are saying.

"And about how happy we were." Then he

Spring 1990

41

42

caught himself. "Listen, I guess that before I say anything else, I should ask if you are seeing someone."

"Not really," I told him in all honesty.

He was very relieved. "Okay. Well, I'm basically pretty broke at the moment, so my nomad days are going to have to go on hold, at least for a while. I'm going back home. I don't want to. In fact, I can't think of anything I'd hate more. But I can stay with my brother, and probably even get my old job back. The manager likes me," he explained, and by his smile I knew that she was a woman. He took a deep breath and said, "The point is I want you to come with me."

"Allen," I said, flattered and irritated. He looked serious. "I don't know." It wasn't clear to either of us what this meant. I wanted it to apply to everything, to say that I didn't even know if this was really happening. I said it again.

He wanted it to mean that I couldn't decide so quickly, and apologized. "Take your time, you don't have to decide now. I mean, I wasn't expecting you to drop everything. But the semester is almost over."

"Three weeks," I said.

"Okay, three weeks. In three weeks I can find us a place."

Things were quiet as his words began to sink in. "And what am I going to do?" I asked.

"You can work if you want. Or enroll up there. It's up to you. You're not happy here, you said so yourself. I just want to be with you."

"Allen," I said pleadingly.

He was apologetic again. "Take your time. I was thinking I would leave tomorrow. There are things I have to take care of. I'm not trying to pressure you." I could imagine him saying this to himself while driving up here: I'm not trying to pressure her.

"You decide what's right for you."

"All right," I said.

"Either way, I love you," he said, and leaned over to embrace me.

"I love you too, Allen," I responded, holding him, patting his back.

That night he played a song for me, an old Dylan song that we used to listen to together. He said that some hermit in Colorado had taught it to him, and hearing this I thought of all the stories I would miss if I never saw him again, all the characters I would never meet. The song was beautiful.

While he played I asked myself who he was, what he was doing here. He was a guy who loved me, he

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was here because he loved me. Those were the only possible answers, but they were questions too..

Did it mean anything to me? Did I feel the same way? He closed his eyes as he sang. A certain line reminded me of all the times we had been together, strung them all together like wet towels on a clothesline, and it seemed sure that if anyone had mattered to me it had been him. I realized that he had been my first, so long ago, and was touched to remember his gentleness, our awkwardness. I wanted him. When he finished playing, he looked at me and laughed to see the way I was looking at him.

"What's so funny?" he asked. "I know, my singing sucks. I can play a lot better now, but I still can't sing."

"You can sing," I told him, pulling him towards me.

We are standing on the corner where he has parked his van. The window on the driver's side is smashed in. Allen sweeps out the glass and then climbs in to look around. "Oh man," he says, "they got the stereo and the guitar."

"I'm really sorry, Allen," I say.

"Hey, it's not your fault." He doesn't want to upset me. "I'm just glad they didn't take the van. I need to sell it when I get home." He rummages around in the glove compartment. "They didn't take any of the tapes. I guess they don't like my music."

He picks up a cassette and gets out, comes over to me. "Here," he says, offering it to me. "I won't need it." I know he has a deck at home, but he wants to give it to me, so I take it.

"Sell this when you get home too, okay?" I say, taking from my pocket the ring he had given me.

"No, Michelle, I want you to have that."

"Allen, it's okay. I don't want you to be without a guitar." I press the ring firmly in his hand.

"You have to practice, or you won't get better."

"I'll hold on to it," he says. "You can claim it in three weeks."

"Allen," I warn.

"If you want to," he adds.

He tosses his bag into the back, kisses me and gets behind the wheel. "Do you want to tape something over the window?" I ask him. "I could get something, like plastic wrap or cardboard."

"No," he says. "It's a beautiful day."

I sit on the steps and watch him drive away. I feel in my pocket for the slip of paper with his brother's phone number on it. I have promised to

Kathy Profeta photograph

4

Kathy Profeta photograph

Spring 1990

call. It's there. I rub at it nervously, between my thumb and forefinger. At the intersection, he leans out the window and waves. I wave back. He turns the corner, and accelerates down the street, honking his horn as I lose sight of him.

44

Why didn't I tell him? I am dead to love. I never believed in it, not in high school, not here, not over the summer with him. People are born, they grow up, they get married, they grow old, they die: the whole time they are thinking only of themselves.

I have seen these people, watched them closely enough to be sure that nothing they do is for free.

They stay together, sometimes for a long time, but only out of a sick emotional dependence or the boredom accumulated after a series of careless lovers. They stay together because they know where it hurts, because each knows what the other needs and what they can get away with giving them. They get married only when they have finally given up on each other, when they take stupidity for stability and a numbing indifference for commitment, when they have been handled enough to be worn smooth. The ones who think they are in it for sex are just as foolish. They are the clumsiest and most brutal of lovers, and while they are imagining themselves to be reaping the wildest rewards they are in fact subjecting themselves to the cruellest of punishments.

Why didn't I tell him this? Is it because I saw something in him that said it was untrue? The way he looked at me. What would it mean if he loved me? Would it mean that it was possible for anyone to love? Is it something you can learn from someone who loves you? Or is it a matter of continuing the search, deep into hopelessness, until a certain person is found who has been waiting all this time? Did I hide my doubts for fear that he would have destroyed them, that his voice could have drawn me into the world of the vulnerable and the small?

Within a week I have gone to see Gary again, to gauge what happens when I see him.

Nothing happens, nothing unusual. He is sweet to me, and seductive, and I let him take me to bed thinking that I'll find my oblivion there. It helps a little. I keep my phone unplugged, ostensibly so I can make up my mind before I talk to Allen, but actually to try to forget him. Eventually I am with Gary almost every night. I wonder what he is telling the other girl, but do not ask. One night I am playing the tape Allen left me and Gary shuts it off, condemning

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my taste. I explode at him and go home, where I smoke cigarettes and listen to the tape from the beginning and wait for the phone to ring. But it does not ring that night. Later I find myself apologizing to Gary for my behavior. He says to forget'it.

Gary makes me sick and yet he makes me happy, in the cheapest sense of the word. When I reach the limits of my solitude, he is there. He lets me leave when I want to, and if I call before I come over, he is almost always glad to see me. Really glad. We don't talk about love. We talk about our classes and people we know in common,about politics and whatever happens to be on television late at night. I do not think of him as someone I have a future with, but the present we share just seems to keep on going. Time passes, and we are still together.

A letter arrives from Allen. I quickly fold it in half and put it in my back pocket, planning to read it later. At Gary's I can not stop thinking of the letter, and it has a strange effect. Everything Gary does rings false. When he asks me about my day, I do not think he cares. I think it is habit. When we get into bed together, he strips me slowly and it is exciting, but then he does not have an erection and expects me to give him one somehow. I refuse, for the first time. "It doesn't have to be your mouth," he says. I pick up my jeans and go to the bathroom, locking the door. "Have it your way," he calls out. "I'm going to sleep."

I put a towel on the toilet seat and sit down, taking the letter out of my pocket. I look at it for a while. It seems to me that if I am ever going to make up my mind, it has to be now. It is a momentous occasion, on which I feel that I have never made up my mind before, that I have always hidden from real challenges, from emotional risk, but also that this time is different, that I can carry through on any possible resolution. This crumpled, miserable piece of paper. His pathetic handwriting. A wave of revulsion pours through me and then is gone forever. A distant music seems to swell and grow louder. I feel free of the need to judge, I am no longer afraid. I take the letter and read it.

"Dear Michelle. I don't know what to say. I guess there is nothing left to say. You didn't call, and I tried calling but you seem to know it's me and never answer. Or maybe you never answer at all. I don't know. It seems like a shitty way to do it, and I was pretty angry at some point, but I am not angry anymore. I don't know why I am writing, but I have

to say something, to give the whole thing some feeling of finality. So maybe I am just writing for me, just so I know that it's over. Or maybe just so when I run into you sometime by accident, things are that much less awkward.

"I've taken to the mysteries of drink. I'm not saying this to make you feel bad, I don't want to send you on a guilt trip. If I am disappointed it's my fault for expecting so much. In a sense, I am the one who hurt you. Anyway, like I said, I've been drinking a lot at The Dungeon, hanging out with the old crowd there. Martin, Vivian, Roger, etc. You get the picture. Incidentally Vivian asked about you, said to say hi.

"A lot of times I can't remember what I did the night before. The first time I blacked out it was terrifying, even though it was a little funny. Well, I thought, there goes another little piece of my life — it probably wasn't very memorable anyway. I'm told that one night I went off with Vivian, but I can't remember doing it. It might be that Martin's teasing me, you know what an asshole he is. I haven't asked her. I don't want to know.

"I went and threw the ring off of Stuckey's Bridge, so I still don't have a guitar. Anyway, none of the bands here need guitarists. They all need drummers.

"I am seeing other people. I don't want to but I am. I know you are too. I think of you all the time, sometimes even while I am in bed with someone else. I will bite a girl's earlobe and she will laugh, and I will think of you and how you liked that.

Once I started to cry, but I was really drunk.

"It's tearing me apart, your not being here.

After a while it became harder and harder to remember you. I don't have any photos or anything.

I started seeing people who looked like you in bars and introducing myself to them, not hitting on them but just needing to know if they talked like you too, if they said the same things, laughed the same. Of course, none of them do. One has your hair color, another that funny knob at the end of your nose, one holds her head up straight as imperiously as you do.

One even owns that paisley skirt, the exact same one. I couldn't believe it. Each one carries off a piece of you, to my torment and relief.

"It was a while before I realized that I was only trying to replace you. I didn't want to face that.

When it got so obvious that even Martin mentioned it, I stayed home for a while and tried to get myself together. But why bother? Who was I trying to impress?

"The bookstore lady made a pass at me so I quit, and I'm working at a nightclub now. Not one I think you've heard of.

"I guess that's about it for news. I hope things are okay with you, school and everything.

"I'm just writing to say hello. Or goodbye, or something. It seems like it didn't have to be this way, you know. But this is the way it is, and I'm not going to lay any more bullshit on you than I already have.

"I almost think I shouldn't mail this.

Looking it over, it seems really stupid. But it doesn't make any difference. If I don't mail it away, then I just have to look at it or something. I don't know.

You don't have to write back. I don't know if you would if I asked you to, but I'm not asking.

"Take care of yourself. Love, Allen."

Spring 1990

45

Dear Blue, Itake ityour Blanchot work is over? For a time? You sounded mighty sick ofthe whole scene a while back. Ifyou don't mind me mentioning Bkinchotfor a bit, however... i talked my way into a card at the Bibliotheque Nationale (socialist country:yes, perhaps, but one needs a letter ofrecommendation to get a card and to be at a Master's/Ph.D. level not to mention specific references to work in letters when it concerns manuscripts.., the woman'sfriend was a "conservateur"at the Bibliotheque e3- had put together Bataille stuffhimself)and have been reading through Bataille's lifetime correspondence for the past week. Merely interested untilIfell upon Blanchot's letters to Bataille(undated butsomewhere between 1941 when they met and the end ofthe war)thenfascinated. More thanfascinated: moveeh as Ihaven't been in a long time. I was literally trembling, extremitiesfrozen, head one big centrifisge. Needless to say i transcribed the letters that i could (before the library closedfor 15 days) read—a whokfirst set were completely illegible. II ecrit comme un pied. I willshow you these letters when you come;ishould be able to see you (?) before i leave on June 8. Bkrzchot expressing his friendship to Bataille(9years his elder—Blanchot is now 84), as the Latter prepared to undergo major surgery...

Liz

Letters DearPubic Service Director, Enclosedpleasefind a series ofcameraready print advertisements thatpublicize a specialprogram to help borrowers who have defaulted on guaranteed student loans.

Recent legislation (signed in December 1989)providesfor a six-month period during which a borrower who is in default on a guaranteedstudent loan may repay that loan without being assessedpenalties or collection charges.

The advantage to the borrower can be substantial— these charges can be as much as 3596 ofthe total debt.

The six-month periodfor repayment of these ofthese defaulted loans began on March 1, 199o. Consequently, time is of the essence ifwe are to inform borrowers who are in default ofthis opportunity.

We hope you can help uspublicize this program —and reduce the number ofdefaultedstudent bans— by using these announcements.

Leonard L. Haynes III ASSISTANT SECRETARY

Hey, Joe Isend you a collection ofmy songs in english. the musik is no bad. me 1 like it Thanx a lot, und ich halte grosse Stacke aufdich Dein JOST philosophers reality part 2 I wrote a songfor a girl she didn't like it Me,Ithought it was very impressiv All myfeelings and my wishes within it But she only called me a "mental defective" I wrote a song in which I'm rich and leave it driving my car don 't have to workfor living and in the end ofthe song!sing it's you what I'm what I'm missing Me, I thought it was really intensive But she said: forget about it, stop singing lovesongs , stop to obey me , stop writing lyrics ,stop playing music But I won't stop singing the I'm feeling blue-blues in english

US DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION OFFICE OF THE ASSISTANT SECRETARY FOR POSTSECONDARY EDUCATION

I wrote a songfor a very good boyfriend he was really touched he nearly embrassed me a lovesongfor a man is very interesting But she only called me "mental defective"

Hillary!

O

A little cheap advice: GET MARRIED TO SOMEONE YOU MEETIN COLLEGE! It's hell out here on thefar side, the arena ofperpetual dating, the players'ball I met another nice woman the other night who turned out to consist ofa veneer ofciviliry over a core ofpure hell... college, orgraduate schooL or wheneveryoufindyourselfpart ofa highly selectedpopulation ofequals, is the place tofind a mate, andyou ought to look at it like it's a necessary task, a goah a mission. Think ofit.

Yale has done you a tremendousfavor. They've scoured the country tofind a whole raft ofeligible partners ofsimifrr or complimentary background intellect, and interests, a hand-pickedpoolofthe likliest [sic]potential matesyou'll ever be thrown in with again in your entire lift. You'd be an absolute ass to decline the opportunity. Granted I'm sure college boys don'tseem like very attractive prospects much of the time; on the other hand fyou can love them now,you'llfind them increasingly easier to deal with as time marches on and the inevitable encroachment ofmaturity begins to take effect. After you get out into the real world thepoolshrinks rapidly, and sooner or lateryou start meeting the dregs, the leftovers (Iexclude myselfftom this rubric, and nojokes please, dammit)and the loonies—sociopaths, swingers, people who are lately divorcedfrom raving psychopaths and can'tgive out their phone numbers in public, thefadedflowers ofyouth who've been around the track a couple ofthousand laps too many, a Freudian hell oftroubledsons and daughters(okay, so Ican't exclude myselfftom that group)... a veritable pantheon ofusers, losers, lechers,freaks and theflipped-out.., and the listgoes on... and age starts to be a majorfactor. We won't even talk about that. Hilary, it's hell. Avoid it. Cut it offat the pass.

Marry young. And show this letter to yourftiendr.

As always, Much love, Cantankerii.

The Yale Literary Magazine gratefully acknowledges its benefactors, without whom this publication would not be possible.

Our thanks to the many people who failed to confront us with the fact that we are collectively living a lie:

Mr. Harvey Buchanan Mr. John E. Ecklund

Huda Abi-Fares Ivo Banac, Pierson Master Amelia Eisch Michel Foucault Phillip Greene

Mr. John Ellsworth Mr. Clyde Farnsworth Mr. Maxfield S. Gibbons Mr. Brendan Gill

Alex Shakar, editor-in-exile

Mr. Joseph W. Harned Mr. Stanley F. Klimczak

Gabrielle Silver Charles Witham Yale Graphic Design Studio Yale University Printing Service imprint and language, which made it all possible.

Mr. Harman McBride Mr. Ruluff D. McIntyre Mrs. Diana M. Senior Professor Gaddis Smith

Editors-in-chief Brad Engelstein Hilary Liftin

the staff

Editors Andrew Cohen Jonathan Cohen Behrouz Montakhab Publisher Andrew Cohen

Design, Production (3Consultation Kathryn Haines Gloria Lee Dona Wong Photography Bill Murray

Staff Jeremy Benoik-Keymer Kathryn Haines So Young Park Steve Rich Alicia Senior Emily 0. Wittman

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