Commencement 2014

The Harvard Advocate

Commencement 2014

Vol. 149 No.4

ART Kiara Barrow, Brad Bolman, Harry Choi, Camille Coppola, Isaac Dayno, Mattie Kahn, Julian Avery Leonard, Graham Moyer, Sarah Rosenthal, Nicolas Schwalbe, Jake Seaton*, Nora Wilkinson, Yunhan Xu. BUSINESS Nelson Arnous, Hayden Betts*, Jack Kleinman, Joy Lee, He Li*, David Manella, Tyler Richard, Sarah Rosenburg*, Tobi Tikolo, Kristin Tsuo, Krithika Varagur, Calvin Willett.

DESIGN Julia Cohn, Connor Cook, Louise Decoppet, Simone Hasselmo, Michelle Long, Eric Macomber, Vadim Medish, Kelsey Miller, Mahan Nekoui*, Sam Richman, Michael Segel, Lanier Walker, Jeannie Sui Wonders.

The Harvard Advocate www.theharvardadvocate.com

EDITORIAL BOARD President Publisher Art Editor Blog Editor Business Manager Design Editors

JULIAN LUCAS KEVIN HONG BRAD BOLMAN MOEKO FUJII CALVIN WILLETT SIMONE HASSELMO JEANNIE SUI WONDERS Features Editor INDIANA SERESIN Fiction Editor YEN PHAM Poetry Editor COLTON VALENTINE Technology Editor JAWAD HOBALLAH Hermes JENNY GAO Pegasi ISAAC DAYNO SAM REYNOLDS FAYE YAN ZHANG Dionysi NELSON ARNOUS KIARA BARROW Circulation & JACK KLEINMAN Publicity Managers MAIA SILBER Librarian WANJIKU MUNGAI Alumni Relations Manager KRITHIKA VARAGUR Communicorn EZRA HUANG STOLLER

BOARD OF TRUSTEES Chairman Chairman Emeritus Vice-Chairman President Vice-President and Treasurer Secretary

JAMES ATLAS LOUIS BEGLEY DOUGLAS MCINTYRE SUSAN MORRISON AUSTIN WILKIE LESLIE DUNTON-DOWNER CHARLES ATKINSON PETER BROOKS EMILY CHERTOFF JOHN DESTEFANO JONATHAN GALASSI LEV GROSSMAN ANGELA MARIANI D.T. MAX CELIA MCGEE THOMAS A. STEWART JEAN STROUSE

FEATURES Victoria Baena, Eric R. Brewster, Rumur Dowling, Moeko Fujii, Olivia Munk*, Noah Pisner, Sam Reynolds, Indiana Seresin, Kurt Slawitschka*, Ezra Huang Stoller, My Ngoc To, Bailey Trela*, Warner James Wood, Faye Yan Zhang.

FICTION Emma Adler*, Liza Batkin, Victoria Black, Brad Bolman, Bryan Erickson*, Gina Hackett, Anna Hagen, Matthew Krane, Julian Lucas, Wanjiku Mungai, David Neustadt, Rebecca Panovka*, Yen Pham, Maia Silber, Ben Sobel, Emily Wang.

POETRY Samantha Berstler, Wendy Chen, Anne Marie Creighton, Robbie Eginton, Reina Gattuso, Brandan Griffin*, Roxanna Haghighat, Zoë Hitzig, Kevin Hong, Ben Koerner, Matthew Krane, Eli Lee*, Ethan Loewi, Ben Lorenz, Tyler Richard, Daniel Schwartz, Christina Teodorescu, Colton Valentine, Lara Zysman.

TECHNOLOGY Luciano Arango*, Eric Arzoian, Eric Burdette, Juliana Castrillon*, Louis Cid, Dan Citron*, Dan Cole, JN Fang*, Zach Fogelson*, Jenny Gao, Ethan Glasserman, Jawad Hoballah, Yuqi Hou*, Rafic Melhem, Josh Palay, Michael Segel, Rachael Smith*, Victor Wu. *The Harvard Advocate congratulates its newest members.

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

Founded in 1866, The Harvard Advocate is the nation’s oldest continuously published college literary magazine. It publishes quarterly from 21 South St., Cambridge MA 02138. Published pieces and advertisements represent the opinions of the authors and advertisers, not necessarily those of the The Harvard Advocate. Domestic subscription rates are $35 for one year (4 issues), $60 for two years (8 issues), and $90 for three years (12 issues). For institutions and international addresses, the rates are $45 for one year (4 issues), $75 for two years (8 issues), and $110 for three years (12 issues). Rates are payable by cash or check made out to The Harvard Advocate and mailed to the above address, Attn: Circulation Manager. Back issues are available for purchase at www.theharvardadvocate.com. No part of this magazine may be reprinted without the permission of The Harvard Advocate. Copyright 2013 by the Editors and Trustees of The Harvard Advocate.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS FEATURES 4

First Aid

Noah Pisner

23

Labyrinths

Bailey Trela

37

Ukranian Identity and Mykola Kulish’s Sonata Pathétique

40

The Aftershock

Victoria Baena Moeko Fujii

POETRY

2

14

Syllogistic

36

From the Google Maps Car

COMMENCEMENT 2014

Daniel Schwartz Miles Hewitt

ART 7

Archival image of a collection of found objects on top of a painting specifically consisting of one blue vase and nineteen dirt encrusted flowers felled by a late and unexpected April snow

Ethan Pierce

8

Centre for the Unknown, Lisbon

15

Noon in Tonsai

22

Stop Looking At Me You Sick Fuck

34

Burano 1

Sarah Rosenthal

35

Burano 2

Sarah Rosenthal

Isaac Dayno Bianca Vasquez Mindy Yi

FICTION 9

The Letter

16

The Moth Garden

28

Just Say No

Wanjiku Mungai Kevin Hong Paul C. Taylor

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FIRST AID NOAH PISNER

4

Birth

Doctors

I have in my hands a textbook on post-atomic birth defects in Japan. The Effects of Ionizing Radiation From the Atomic Bomb on the Bodies of Japanese Children by R.W. Miller, M.D., University of California Press, 1968, is a volume that I cannot, in good conscience, recommend. In black and white photographs, it portrays many variations of our species’ form. For example, here is a little girl who is perhaps three years old. She is wearing a dark striped dress and has her hair untied. The two sides of her face do not meet as you’d expect.

Her eyes are far apart, and under each is a nostril. She has no nose, only a fleshy nowhere, an inch or two wide, that comes down smoothly from the forehead. You may be relieved to know that at least this child is not mentally deficient, as many of the children depicted in The Effects of Ionizing Radiation From the Atomic Bomb on the Bodies of Japanese Children are. “Intelligence: Normal,” says the caption. But then again, you realize, why should that come as a relief?

“An apple a day keeps the doctor away.” The first printed mention of this saying can be found in the February 1866 issue of Notes and Queries, a still-published magazine founded by a man named William Thoms, who, you might not know, also invented the term ‘folklore.’ However, neither of these are what made Thoms famous. In the 1870s, the young journalist began investigating claims of ultra-centenarianism. He is credited with being the first to prove that claims of very old age are typically exaggerated. In subsequent years, Thoms had a son, Bernard, who died of tuberculousis at the age of six. It turns out that a newly planted apple tree takes at least seven years before it can produce edible fruit.

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Differences in Blown Air A five-year old once asked me why his breath was hot when he opened his mouth all the way, but cool when he blew like a whistle. I did not know so I made something up, hoping he would for-

get before passing it on. It turns out the root of this phenomenon is Bernoulli’s Principle: when changing the diameter of your lips, the airflow speeds up; when the air moves faster, it draws in more surrounding air which is cooler than your body temperature, thus making it feel colder.

The difference between blown air, I told the boy, has to do with what the object wants: “Your fresh soup asks for cold air because it is hot. Your stiff hand asks for hot air because it is cold. Do not ever get these confused or you might get burned, or frozen, or both.”

Sleep My mother shows me how to swaddle him—this freshly boy whose genome has more in common with mine than almost anyone else in the world.

I bring the corner of the blanket over his chest. I wrap the opposite side around and around until his shoulders hold it tight as he squirms. “You are forty minutes old,” I tell him. His toenails are red; his eyes are unpeeking. The nurse puts the baby on his back in a bassinet crib, which confuses my mother, because this is not how she placed me down. Instinctively, the nurse explains: “We place infants on their backs now—never on their stomachs, god forbid they smother in their sleep and die. Ten years ago, we placed infants on their stomachs—never on their backs, god forbid they choke in their sleep and die.”

Dyschronosis According to the British Journal of Travel and Global Health, the desynchronization of circadian rhythms by a longitudinal translocation of thirty or more degrees (twenty, if the transplant occurs west to east), i.e., jet lag, and its associated symptoms—e.g., fatigue, hypoxitic deoxygenation of the blood, acute lordotic flexion of the thoracolumbular region, and atrophy/dystrophy of the anterior iliac tensor dorsal fasciae (including many of the same muscles employed in a stance of prayer)—can be relieved by a dermal grounding of disaccumulated electrons, which are lost, like luggage left behind, in dislocation thousands of feet over the Atlantic, which is negatively charged. This rehabilitative state, the study explains, is best achieved by lying nude on grass.

Sandstorms Sandstorms disorient by generating vast quantities of static electricity—up to eighty volts per square meter. In the 1950s, a Dutch geographer discovered a cure. Walking a sandstorm, he wired his car jack to his wrist; the jack grounded his voltage.

Groundwork As we grow taller, our bodies habituate to tensing when we fall, making it more painful for us.

Fighter pilots and paratroopers are trained to resist this tendency. In basic training, Air Force cadets are taught to relax their composure when landing from a jump in order to reduce risk of damaging joints and organs. They practice again and again, sometimes attempting shorter drops with no parachutes at all. If a paratrooper drops from the air and is completely relaxed, embracing the fall as he comes downward, then he will land on the ground with a quiet thud and carry on with his mission. If, however, he was dropping from the air and suddenly decided he did not want to, he would tense and become a bag of broken bones upon landing.

Severe Congestive Heart Failure On December 2, 1982, Dr. Kolff implanted the first artificial heart into Barney Clark, a dentist from Seattle who was suffering from severe congestive heart failure. Alone with a nurse while her husband was in surgery, Barney Clark’s wife, Una Loy, is said to have asked if her husband would still love her after his natural heart was taken out and replaced by this Jarvik heart. Clark lived with his artificial heart for 112 days tethered to an external pneumatic compressor, a device weighing some 400 pounds. During that time he suffered prolonged periods of confusion and a number of instances of bleeding, and asked, several times, to be allowed to die.

A Paradox Victims of severe hypothermia are often found naked. When you are on the verge of dying of hypothermia, you will become very hot due to your blood vessels relaxing as your body shuts down, and, as you do not know better, you will

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start stripping. This is known as vasodilatation.

Interestingly, a similar effect can be achieved in the reverse. Stand naked in front of a lover for the first time and feel your veins tighten, your skin pale, and your lips dry, as if moisture has been sucked out of the air. But unlike hypothermia, body temperature will not change. What changes, instead, is how she looks at you—bare, there—how your face becomes less the whole story.

Things The World Needs One summer, when I worked at a publishing company, a famous poet made a useful distinction for me. I had drunk enough in the poet’s company to feel compelled to describe to him a poem I was thinking of. It would be a monologue of sorts, the inner-peregrinations of a blind boy who has regained his sight through a cataract operation. The poem itself would be a series

6

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of re-encounters—with cherries, which the boy will call bumps, or with branches, which he will believe are panels shot with light, or with nighttime, which will upset the boy. Each encounter frightens him more and more until one day he re-blinds himself with his father’s shoehorn.

“And that’s that,” I told the poet, who nodded his head in a steady, sympathetic way, and then said that there are, in fact, two kinds of poems. There are the kind you write and there are the kind you talk about when you are drunk. Both are things the world needs, but it’s fatal to confuse them.

Weights H.P. Lovecraft once noted that the sum of human suffering is arrant mental correlation, the achievement of which is futile because the brain is too simple. That should be a load off your mind.

Ethan Pierce Archival image of a collection of found objects on top of a painting specifically consisting of one blue vase and nineteen dirt encrusted flowers felled by a late and unexpected April snow.

20 Found Objects, 1 Oil Painting

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Isaac Dayno Centre for the Unknown, Lisbon Digital photo 8

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The Letter WANJIKU MUNGAI

I was nine years old when Wairimu, seventeen at the time, left the letter to our parents on the coffee table so that it was the first thing you saw as soon as you had entered the house. It was Easter weekend, so nobody saw it until Saturday morning when we returned from Good Friday overnight prayers at church, by which time Wairimu had filled a bag with her clothes, stolen the money kept in the kitchen for daily purchases and made her escape.

Even at that age I knew that it was a stupid decision.

I feel that I must admit before we go any further that Wairimu was not known to be the stupid one. I had been the stupid one briefly, in Standard One when I held the lowest marks in my class for an entire year before my parents realized I could not see more than one meter in front of me and finally took me to the eye doctor. Wairimu, on the other hand, star daughter at school and at church where she led praise and worship for the youth service, had never done a thing to which the adjective “stupid” would be applicable until Macharia came into the picture. In fact, were I to be perfectly objective I would admit that even in her stupidity she made some very un-stupid decisions. For instance: writing the letter and leaving in such a manner, thereby sparing herself the trouble of having to look into my parents’ disappointed faces and seeing their shock and disappointment erupt into anger and hysteria before it collapsed back into itself, deflated.

If things had been different, or rather, if things had been the same as always and there had been no rift between Wairimu and my parents in the last year, perhaps she would not have done what she did. But months before Easter I had started to notice the change in her, a creeping sense of impatience, a restlessness and dissatisfaction with a way of life that had seemed to sustain her without trouble for many years.

And so, because things were the way that they were and not the way that they were supposed to be, it was not so difficult for her to leave the letter on white lined paper plucked from the middle of an exercise book and folded two times over. There was no envelope: “To Dad and Mum” was written on the side facing upwards in her perfect, even handwriting.

Mum read it first. No doubt thinking that it was something about school fees or a thing that Wairimu wanted them to get for her, she unfolded it with the indifference with which she would have approached a note reminding her of an errand, compiling the sort of checklist that exists in every mother’s mind keeping store of the things that need to be bought and done for her children. In retrospect she took it rather well.

After her eyes had scanned its contents from top to bottom, she let out the loud and heavy sigh of one who has encountered more than their share of disappointments in one lifetime, passed it over to my father, fell into the armchair by the door and held her head in her hands. She began to say a prayer of three words only: “Oh dear Lord…”

I was not surprised that my father reacted a little more dramatically. Where Mum had always been soft and pliant, Dad was loud, forceful. On Sundays in front of the congregation when he was particularly touched by the Spirit a vein would show on his sweaty forehead and sometimes he would even burst into tongues, leaving me terrified and in awe of him. At the moment he was done reading the letter, when he grabbed me by the shoulders so tightly that I could feel his nails digging into my skin through my woolen sweater, I thought briefly that he looked very similar to how he did during these services. I almost expected him to break out into tongues right now. But instead what left his mouth was the same sentence over and over again, in staccato: “Your sister has brought shame to the family. She has brought shame to the family.” With every other syllable that left his lips he shook me over and over again, with so much force that soon I could feel the metallic salty taste in my mouth that let me know I had bitten my tongue. In front of

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me: the heat of my father’s morning breath and saliva specks flying into my face. Behind me: my mother weeping quietly.

I think that, for my father, the evil was to be found not so much in the fact that she had become pregnant before marriage as in her decision to go live with the father of the child. The pregnancy was nothing new; girls had been getting pregnant since the beginning of time. When they did they dealt with it the proper way: with prayers, a tearful confession in front of the church and a renewed devotion to the church.

And so when I say that Wairimu acted stupidly, what I really mean is that what she had done was wrong for many reasons, not the least of which was the fact that for years after the event I was to bear the burden of her sin. My mother would drop comments in the middle of mundane moments: in the kitchen, cooking, the smell of fried onion and tomatoes and beef in the air and then, out of nowhere: “Don’t be like your sister,” words rising into the air like all of the irrelevant things that we say to one another as we cook but unlike those other things, this one does not dissolve and disappear with the steam, condensing instead into an accusation that drips back onto me with the weight of a disappointment that should not be mine. The first time I wore a skirt that ended above my knee, Mum sneered, hissed: “This is how your sister began.

This is how she ended up pregnant. You better be careful.”

It would be many years before I would forgive Wairimu for this, just like it would be many years before my parents would forgive Wairimu, just like it would be many years before my mother would start to see me as a person of my own, just like it would be many years before the coffee table would grow so old and chipped that we would give it away and purchase a new one.

By the time all this had happened, I would have realized that my mother should have saved her time and energy. As it turned out, there were many ways in which I was nothing like my sister. *** The Cameroonian lady next to me on the plane had decided that the two of us were friends. I did not know when this decision was made, which is why I did not have the chance to agree or disagree, although it was sometime in between waiting to board the plane in Heathrow three hours ago and this current moment. I would have protested but I did not have the energy to do so. As such, I listened to her recount all the details of her love life, which is how I now knew she was travelling to Nairobi to meet an old flame, a boyfriend whom she had not seen for twelve years who worked at the World Bank. But, back in New Haven was her current flame, an engineer who would have been perfect were it not for the fact that he was not very “well, you know what I mean”— a non-confession confession that came with a conspiratorial look. “Actually, no, I do not know what you mean,” is what I would have said if I cared enough to protest.

But I don’t. And so, I listened with half of my brain and not with the other half.

I was returning home.

I would have done it earlier. I had wanted to return for ten months, since finishing freshman year, but my parents balked at the suggestion when I emailed them about it.

“Barbie, what’s this I hear about wanting to come back?”

When I was six, I was a flower girl at my aunt’s wedding, an occasion that won me the honor of a tiara of faux pearls around my head and a cream-colored dress that was too big for me, so big it touched the floor when I walked and collected mud on its hem from the grassy field where the reception was held. Still, mud or no mud, something about me in that dress meant that my aunt could not stop marveling at how I looked. At some point she made the declaration, “She looks just like a doll: a Barbie doll.” And the name stuck in fitting irony, since my actual name is Beauty. Now, Mum still uses it when she is particularly worried about me, almost as if she sees me as that six year old again.

“Barbie, are you sure? There are not so many opportunities here in Kenya. You should stay there for a few years at least. Did I tell you about Margaret, the one who used to live next door to us when we were still in Buruburu? Her two sons just finished medical school in the U.S. They’re going to be doctors. Can you believe it? Can you believe it, Barbie? No, you can’t come back right now. At least reconsider. You told me you were thinking of going on until grad school, no? ” Yes, I was. And then things changed and I felt engulfed, suffocated in this space. I could not see myself staying. But my parents would not see me return.

10 COMMENCEMENT 2014

Then, two weeks before, when Dad fell ill, Mum sent a one sentence email to me: saying that she really wished I would stay away, but she would understand if I wanted to come home. It was the middle of the semester, so Wairimu was a lot less agreeable when she called me. “Do you really want to risk your visa? I’ve heard that you can’t get back in as easily, especially if this affects your academic record.”

“I’ve spoken with my advisors. They’ll deactivate my record for the time being, but it shouldn’t be a problem when I decide to return.”

My suitcase was open by my bed. A pile of my clothes was on the table. I had been planning to transfer the pile of clothes from table to suitcase for six days now and Wairimu’s phone call was the latest excuse to not bother. I lay on my bed and toyed with my earphones.

“Beauty, still. I don’t have a very good feeling about this. Are you sure? You never know with these people.”

And that’s when I mentioned that there were other reasons to go home, and what I really wanted to do was to go and mend my broken heart. I meant for it to sound like I was joking, but something about the way I spoke made it clear that I wasn’t.

“Eish Beauty, please don’t tell me all of this is because of a man? Don’t be stupid.” She clicked and snorted and I was quiet.

I would have left it at that, but there was something about the way she spoke, something about the fact that she of all people would say this to me. There was a bitter taste in my mouth. I wanted her to know that I was not the stupid one.

When she noticed I wasn’t speaking her voice lost its edge and she asked: “Do you want to talk about it? What was his name?”

The answer tumbled out and with it came the bitter taste, also: “Brenda.”

She laughed, and there was something familiar about the way she laughed. I had heard this laugh before. It was the way my mother laughed when she teased me every time I talked to a boy at church, asking me to recount the conversation. But I could always tell that Wairimu was not begging for details, she was begging for something else. And now on the phone Wairimu was laughing but what she was really doing was asking me to save her and I decided that I had had enough of saving these people, of carrying their fears and their sins and I let the silence sit. Let her drown.

Wairimu spoke: “Brenda?” And then she was quiet. She switched off the television. “Oh. Beauty, you mean to say that you’re a… a…”

I snapped: “For goodness’ sake Wairimu, stop being a child. You can say the damn word.”

I could hear her breathing on the other side and nothing else. The two of us were floating in the silence. I thought of that thing people say sometimes: when one is trying to choose between two answers and cannot tell which one is the right one, they should throw a coin in the air, because at the moment when the coin is falling they know what they want the answer to be. So now, throw a coin in the air, Beauty, stretch out time and wait, wait, wait for the assurance of gravity. Heads: you’re evil. Tails: I accept you.

But was it that simple? Was it really just those two options? My throat was tight and so was my stomach and I wondered if it even mattered what the answer was.

She spoke again: “Are you sure?”

My first night in America, the students on my floor in the dormitory played a game to get better acquainted with one another: two truths and one lie. This is how it worked: everyone would say three things, three facts about themselves, one of which was a lie and therefore not really a fact, and everyone else would listen and try to guess which one was not true. My facts: “I have never seen a lion. I have thirteen siblings. I like to dance.”

With the exception of one person, everyone guessed that the first one was the lie. Because, Africa.

Duh. It’s a fitting ending to this story that I would play this game with my sister now, only there were no truths to be found; only one lie that needed to be told.

“Are you sure?”

I say yes and the coin reaches the end of its journey and I know what the answer is. Or it shatters into thousands of pieces because it doesn’t even matter once I am free.

But I laughed and this is what came out, instead: “Wairimu, you need to learn to take a joke. But

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please stop fighting me on this? Dad is sick and I want to be home in case of anything, to help out and make things less stressful for them.”

The coin stops just before it would have touched the ground and stays there, spinning indefinitely. I have defeated gravity. I have rescued my sister from drowning. I congratulate myself but now I am the one who is drowning and there is no one to catch me.

“Oh, you’re so silly, Beauty. All right then, I will let you be. Come visit me when you get home. We should do a ladies’ night out—get our hair and nails done and do some shopping, maybe even go clubbing as long as you promise not to tell Mum and Dad. Oh, but Beauty, you’ve always been the good daughter.

I don’t know what our parents would do if they didn’t have you. I don’t know what I would do if I didn’t have you.” *** My last night in New York, I come as close to understanding Wairimu as I ever will, at least in one way. I cannot sleep so I get out of my bed and sit at my desk and I begin to write a letter. I think it might be a letter to God but I cannot tell for sure because I’m just writing what comes to my head. It’s at first a letter full of stupid things, like is it really wrong to drink Coke when it’s flat because sometimes I do that and it tastes OK, and why do people say “that’s so interesting” when they’re not very interested, and why is it that chewing gum that has been in one’s mouth for too long starts to turn into powder and disintegrate and why is disintegrating chewing gum such an appropriate metaphor for life at times? I keep writing for so long that my pinkie finger begins to hurt; I have not written this much by hand since secondary school.

And after all the stupid stuff is done I start to write about the darker things. Like the hurts I am carrying from my childhood and the ones I am just now starting to carry. How it is stupid that these people are always expecting me to save them, but whether it is even more stupid that I love them in spite of this. I am not afraid to express those thoughts that most frighten me and as it gets light outside Wairimu’s act stops looking like one of cowardice because I know I would never have the courage to leave a letter for my parents like she did, because I know that when I am finished with this one I will carry it outside, put a matchstick to it and let the ashes fall onto the grass in front of my dorm.

But before I can do that I must finish filling page after page with disorganized thoughts and ink, writing and writing as if my life depends on it. And if you read what is in my letter, you will know that it does.

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R E B O 2014 T C O , AL -26

23

H 15T

NI

N

BIE

THE 15TH BIENNIAL

DODGE POETRY FESTIVAL returns to Newark, NJ

OCTOBER 23–26, 2014 HALF-PRICE STUDENT TICKETS! Featuring: more than five dozen poets, storytellers and musicians Newark’s vibrant Downtown Arts District – home to galleries, historic churches, museums and NJPAC’s gorgeous theaters, all alive with readings, music and conversation new downtown hotels within easy walking distance to all Festival sites

DodgePoetry.org

deep discounts to the Festival on mass transit, a quick trip from lower Manhattan Poetry Bookstore featuring book-signings by participating poets

The complete list of poets will be announced in April during National Poetry Month.

Visit us at DodgePoetry.org D Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival E @DodgePoetryFest t @dodgepoetry THE HARVARD ADVOCATE 13

Syllogistic DANIEL SCHWARTZ

I. Self-deception police wear red slippers and yellow suits Comet-gliding through rain Nodding diplomatically to the dog, never acknowledging you Hiding parking tickets in side mirrors, bovine contortions as you chew, the trapeze-like idiocy of your laugh Arraigning you for existential exhibitionism: to engage in philosophical despair II. publicly. The how of mind misinterpreted as the what Hypostatizing why Deleting the unparticular from the person, the unmotivated act from matter Green-eyed howling stranded in the howl Either instinct or speech inside the un-self-knowing violet-barred III. God-cell. The origin of skepticism in the recurrent sprawled-by-the-heater dream in which Kafka is the mailman and the mail is your mother Appears again the slaughterer of perspective and mood, the categorical rejection, the eternal human ironed and exported Hanging like community service IV. from your father’s coat hanger. Solitary suppression of reality, antidoting mystifications of the girl you used to know the girl you never knew the introjected girl picking violets Peering through chain-link vivisection The girl converted into self-discipline and logic, metaphorical V. God-fearing dogma. The tame in us murders

14 COMMENCEMENT 2014

Bianca Vรกsquez Noon in Tonsai 35mm

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The Moth Garden KEVIN HONG

There was something about Peter’s clothes that attracted the moths. It was his scent, he thought. It had changed: there was some new chemical he released into the air. His most recent bedmates had commented on the aroma of his skin.

“Like Sweet Tarts,” one had said.

“Like dill,” said another.

He noted that certain of his clothes -- his cashmere cardigan, originally his father’s, and his red cotton shirt -- were especially popular among the insects. His shirt had been wearable until holes began to proliferate around the nipple area; Peter quartered the shirt and added the pieces to his pile of cleaning rags under the kitchen sink. Others evinced signs of life: a collar, burrowed-through, an opening in the armpit, a bundle of loosening threads. Peter did not mind much. He liked the way the moth-holes made him look worn, old, professorial. (He was only, in fact, a young lecturer in English.) At night, as he read by lamplight, pen in hand and cold stout on a coaster next to him, he would be pleasantly distracted by a moth beating about his head, wedging itself in the gutter of his book, landing on his shoulder to lay, he presumed without feeling the need to discover, many eggs. Looking down the bridge of his nose through his wire-rimmed glasses, Peter would continue to read, stopping once or twice to shoo the moth away from his pages.

He lived with the Colonel, a grey and black tabby he had adopted from his last lover. Gerard was from Arles, where the Colonel had fed on live mice, fish bones, and goat’s milk. He had stalked birds in the street and meandered among Roman ruins, which bore graffiti by teenagers tired of their city’s age value.

In Peter’s small apartment crammed with books, the Colonel paced back and forth in the living room, bored and angry. He expressed his frustration by refusing to use the litter box to defecate, unburdening himself, instead, on the sheets of paper strewn across the floor near Peter’s writing desk. In the mornings, the Colonel would leap onto the kitchen counter and snatch the bread that popped out of the toaster.

Peter usually left the toast to the cat, but had taken to guarding his breakfast cereal with a butter knife as he ate and read the paper.

The moths were the Colonel’s only entertainment and solace. He began to sit in front of the television whenever Peter turned it on; he knew the insects were attracted to the light. When the moths neared the bright screen, he would jump and deftly pluck them out of the air, his fur standing on end from the television’s static. He also spent more time around Peter, who could be trusted to have at least two moths circling his body at any moment. Peter, however, misinterpreted the Colonel’s proximity as an indication of their budding friendship.

For the most part, they lived together peaceably -- Peter, the Colonel, and the moths. Man and cat both missed Gerard, who had left suddenly after having lived with Peter in his apartment for almost a year.

He had left with very little: one suitcase which, inconveniently, did not roll, for that was the retrograde style of the day; and his straw hat, which was recognizable by its broad brim and thin black ribbon. Everything had been packed before breakfast, before Peter woke. *** The moths arrived with the warm weather several days after Gerard departed, and they increased in number over the weeks that followed. Peter, convinced that Gerard would return, restricted his relationships to one- or two-time affairs. The men he slept with understood this, and were not all that reluctant

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to leave Peter’s apartment, considering there were insects of considerable size circling his lamps, hiding in his closet. Half of them mistook the moths for butterflies, as many were very colorful: red and black, yellow and blue, with strange eyes painted on their wings and patterns like koans, demanding and refusing meditation with a soundless flutter. The thought of these insects kept them awake at night. They were all perplexed, and slightly unsettled, by Peter’s nonchalance about the moths. When an insect landed on his shoulder or hand, he did not care to bat it away. One man, a graduate student whom Peter had met at a reading, offered to brush his clothing down to get rid of any soon-to-be larvae, but Peter declined.

“I’m quite used to it,” he said, poking his finger through a hole in his sweater. “Besides, they’ll only come back.”

The men all decided, independent of each other, that being with Peter had been an uncanny experience they did not wish to repeat. If they missed anything in that apartment, it was the Colonel, whose imperiousness -- bloated now, as he was visibly gaining weight -- never failed to charm. Furthermore, the Colonel was the only one in the apartment who seemed to take the proper stance toward the moths: the men felt an alliance with the tabby, who understood the habits of the enemy.

Several of Peter’s close friends had heard, from Peter himself or from each other, of Gerard’s abrupt exit, and they interpreted Peter’s disheveled state as one of despair. It had been two months since anyone had seen Gerard. All of them had called him at one time or another, to no avail. When they visited his apartment, they insisted on helping him tidy up, but Peter maintained that things were tidy, that the moths did not bother him in the slightest, and if they disliked his apartment they could go out for drinks. Indeed, the apartment was clean, but for the occasional droppings the Colonel left by the writing desk, and Peter promptly swept those into the litter box. It was just that the moths were gathering momentum. They were not only proliferating rapidly, but were also increasing in size. Moths the size of a thumbnail had been replaced by ones as big as a whole thumb. There were aberrations: Peter had noted one moth that could have spanned his palm.

All things considered, Peter felt that he was faring rather well. It had been difficult, initially, to handle his academic responsibilities: he had trouble focusing during seminars and individual meetings with undergraduates. He also neglected to grade papers for two weeks, although he had colleagues who taught this way on a regular basis. But as the spring semester ended, Peter settled into his usual stride and looked forward to the open month of June, before summer courses began, when he could study and write. His students, who all acknowledged Peter as an above-average pedagogue, overlooked his unusual lapse of attention and energy. The more urgent discussion among them was about the suite of moths that accompanied their teacher to each of his three classes and around campus. Nobody pointed this out to Peter in class, perhaps because no one wanted to embarrass him, but everyone in the English department had heard of, if not witnessed, the phenomenon.

Images of Peter and his cadre, taken surreptitiously during seminars or through his office window, circulated among the students over e-mail and Facebook. Several tried to take videos, but it was impossible to pinpoint the airborne insects. One afternoon, two intrepid students followed Peter home. They watched him enter the apartment building, and then waited on the other side of the street, cell phones in hand. A picture taken by one of the students shows the facade of the building. From the third floor, Peter opens his bedroom window. His face is obscured by the reflection of leaves on glass, but the sun-faded chinos and emerald sweater are clearly his. When zoomed in, the photograph pixelates, but a strange shimmer is visible around him, composed of dozens of colorful specks in midair: minute squares of illumination that to the knowing viewer are intelligible as wings. *** Toward the middle of May, the Colonel grew lazy. His lethargy concerned Peter; the cat no longer chased and caught moths around the apartment, nor did he pace the living room like the aspiring generalissimo he was. Instead, he sat, bored, moved only by the spirit of toast that Peter waved in front of his face. A visit to the veterinarian revealed that the Colonel had developed diabetes. He would not need insulin shots, but would have to transition from dry foods to a low-carb diet: canned foods like Purina that contained chicken liver and fish meal, high levels of protein. Peter and the Colonel returned home, one

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frowning, the other asleep in his carrier. Later, at the dinner table, the veterinarian told his wife and wideeyed daughter of the strange encounter he had had at the office with a bright young man named Peter Long, no more than thirty years old, whose hair was a colorful nest of moths.

In late May, Peter stopped buying bread for the household. If the Colonel could not eat whole or refined grains, he decided, then no one could. It pained him to watch the cat suffer this treatment. Breakfast became a melancholy ritual for the Colonel; every morning, he would spend half an hour gazing forlornly at the unplugged toaster, pawing at the spring. As was expected, his mood became volatile. The Colonel was subject to long stretches of torpor punctuated by bouts of feverish anger, which could be traced by the trail of powdery wings left in his wake. Unable to subdue the cat, Peter waited for these episodes to end, and then swept up what remained of the ragged insects.

June arrived. Peter spent most of his time in the apartment, and took it upon himself to improve the Colonel’s health by encouraging exercise. He crafted a primitive toy: a long stick from a park nearby, tipped with beads and feathers, which he hung from the stick using leather string. He bought balls of yarn, which attracted the moths as well as the cat; when Peter tossed yarn across the room, the Colonel pounced, an attack that could be more accurately described as a fast stumble, rather than a true, feline lunge. With these tools, he could entertain the Colonel for up to an hour every day, and when the cat would let Peter pick him up, he would measure their progress on the bathroom scale. He considered it a victory to see the Colonel chasing moths once again, though he could only catch the big ones, and was even happier upon reading a popular-science article that declared moths to be the new “superfood.”

Peter received his last apartment guest in June. Although he frequented nightclubs, and men were attracted to his distinctive scent, which had only grown stronger over the months, they were all put off by the moths that encircled him. The moths created networks of light traffic between his head and the dim red bulbs hanging over the bar; this occurrence enchanted from afar, but disturbed upon closer inspection.

His friends, too, no longer visited Peter at home. Instead, they spent most of their time with him outdoors, in plein-air cafes, or at picnics, where the insects around his head seemed less conspicuous. They gathered that there were fewer moths before sunset, so several brunches and afternoon teas were had.

Some of them sensed Peter withdrawing from their social circle, and upon discussing the situation among themselves, realized that most of the conversations any of them had had with him in the past month were about his obese grey cat. They no longer asked Peter about Gerard, although they talked about the ex-lovers among themselves. Had any of them heard from the Frenchman? They surmised he was out of the country or had changed his phone, as they had been unable to get through to his voicemail.

He was an early riser. When they lived together, Peter got the sense that Gerard had lived an entire secret day before he opened his eyes. The morning he left, he woke Peter up and handed him a cup of coffee with cream.

“I have to go,” he said. “Please don’t ask why.”

They had an ordinary breakfast, each man reading a different section of the paper, while the Colonel wove paths around and through their legs. Each reached down instinctively to pet the cat’s grey head, or to feed him a crust, which would occupy him for several minutes. When Gerard finished his coffee, he folded his paper neatly, stood, and picked up his bag and hat.

“When are you coming back?” Peter said.

“Take good care of the Colonel,” Gerard said. “The bread is making him fat.”

It was the kind of joyous day that put winter behind it once and for all. Peter looked out the third-story window and waited to see Gerard exit the apartment. He followed the tall form down the street and saw him switch his suitcase to the other hand. Then he shook his head, thinking how stupid it was to carry luggage without wheels, and what a cliché it was: the lover, from high above, watching the beloved disappear from view. *** Peter’s last guest was his landlady, Leslie, an easy-going woman in her forties. She had been hearing strange rumors from other tenants since the beginning of June, and had come to investigate for herself.

It was a Friday afternoon. Peter answered the door, and Leslie blinked several times, as if she had been roused from a deep sleep.

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The apartment was still recognizable as an apartment. On the right side of the living room, Leslie saw the couch that had been left by a former tenant. On the left, there was the small television, and in the middle, the glass coffee table. It was dark. The windows were open, but the venetian blinds were closed; they moved silently in the slow air. The errant light that fell through the slats illuminated the light blue couch and the dust and pollen that filled the room, moved across it in big spirals. Leslie could see where it settled: on the window ledge, and the bookshelves next to the television, and on the glass table, where it glimmered like a white beach. If Peter had not been standing in front of her, Leslie would have thought that the apartment had had been uninhabited for fifty years.

Then, of course, there were the moths. They were scattered over many surfaces, massed along the living room’s molding and the top of the couch. It was difficult to see all of their colors in the dim light, but the ones near the window shimmered like so many shifting jewels. Leslie saw them flying in all directions, casting fleeting and amorphous shadows on the carpet and the walls. She saw the largest insects she would ever see in person: monarchical things, big as model airplanes, clinging to the corners of the room. There was a large garbage bag next to the door, half-full, and not tied up. Inside it, Leslie saw a mound of dried forms: whisper-thin wings, legs, bodies like little rifle shells, smooth and blunt.

“How nice of you to visit,” Peter said, smiling.

She entered slowly and came up against a very sweet smell, a smell that drew up in her a memory of herself as a child, burrowing her face into her mother’s pillow. Peter dusted off a wooden chair and offered it to her. She sat, but declined a beverage.

“I’m sorry about the mess. I’ve been meaning to vacuum.”

“Yes,” she said, a little dizzy.

“Perhaps we should have some light,” he said, and pulled up the blinds. The afternoon sun made the living room glow. Peter and Leslie both looked around the room and saw it as a garden, time-worn, yet full of life. They sat this way for several minutes, as moths hung off of lampshades like small earrings and others made little waves in the particles that swirled around them.

“Peter, can you explain this situation?” she finally said, unsure of how to begin.

He shook his head. “They’re not my pets, if that’s what you mean.”

“That’s not what I mean. I mean, they’re quite dazzling, really. But, as I’m sure you can guess, I can’t allow them in this building.”

“Have they been a bother?” Peter said.

“No,” she said. “At least, not yet.”

The Colonel, who was more nervous among women than men, had emerged slowly from the apartment corridor. Leslie bent down and put her hand out; the Colonel sidled up to her and stood stiff, at attention, as she scratched behind his ears.

“Where’s Gerard?”

“He left in April,” Peter said. “You remember the Colonel, our cat.”

“Yes,” she said, as the cat buckled, let out a timid purr, then folded himself up in ecstasy.

She sat back up and looked at Peter. He was an earnest man, and she had always liked him. He was handsome, and she felt herself warm at the sight of him on his couch, surrounded by color. She counted the little holes in his thin, white shirt until she could not remember which holes she had already counted.

“There are issues I have to consider, you know,” she said. “Allergies. Structural damage. I’m sure you would agree that this constitutes an infestation.”

“I understand,” he said. “Are you asking me to leave?”

“Not at all. But you’d better contact an exterminator.”

Peter shook his head. “I don’t think so,” he said. “It’s like I’ve told all of my friends -- they’ll only come back.”

At night, after packing most of his things, Peter went out for ice cream. It was a cool evening, so he took a roundabout route, traversing the familiar streets, admiring the yellow moon from different vantage points between houses and trees. As he walked into and out of the street lamps’ warm lights, a tremulous cloud appeared around him, then disappeared. He spread his arms to feel a slight breeze brush past. He walked at a measured pace, slowing, sometimes, to look into windows and see what someone was watching on television.

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As it was a Friday night, the square was crowded with people leaving restaurants, entering bars, skipping with children, embracing each other. Those who paid heed to Peter saw a man wearing a threadbare shirt, dark jeans, and running shoes. Later, most would describe the aura around him as a blanket of butterflies, while some correctly identified the insects as moths. Several children mistook the creatures for hummingbirds. But they were all confounded by the large form on his back, the size of his entire body, shining blue and yellow, folded flat like a silken tent.

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Mindy Yi Stop Looking At Me You Sick Fuck Mixed media 13”x18”

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Labyrinths BAILEY TRELA

I “Here the Minotaur roamed, and was fed by human victims.” – Thomas Bulfinch, The Age of Fable Here’s a story you’ve probably heard: A fresh-faced youth sets forth from Troezen on his way to Athens. Brave man that he is, consumed by the desire to prove himself, he takes the land route (more dangerous than the sea), encountering various brigands and marauders along the way. He defeats them all with ease, and arrives at Athens an established adventurer. He is instantly recognized by his father, the king.

But all is not well. The Athenians, at this moment in time, are forced to pay a tribute to King Minos of Crete each year: seven youths and seven maidens sent to be devoured by the Minotaur, that timeless abomination.

Theseus, our hero, vows to deliver his people from this terrible yoke. He volunteers himself as tribute, and sails away under black sails. When he arrives at Crete, Ariadne, the daughter of King Minos, falls madly in love with him. She gives him a sword and a clew of thread with which to find his way out of the labyrinth. This he does, slaying the Minotaur in the process.

Victorious, Theseus sails back to Athens. He forgets to change the portentous black sails to the white sails that would signify his successful homecoming. His father espies the black sails from his castle ramparts and, devastated, throws himself into the sea, hoping to join his son in that other kingdom.

Theseus will have other adventures, but none so famous as this. Its cup runneth over with archetypes and tropes: the dispossessed prince, the young adventurer, the love-struck princess, the unholy chimaera, and, perhaps most fascinating of all, the labyrinth.

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Constructed by Dædalus, prince of artificers, the Labyrinth of Knossos has become synonymous with doom: a prison, a puzzle, a site of execution—a web of senseless passages, one unsolvable riddle. Thomas Bulfinch, author of several classic compendiums of mythology, gives the following succinct description in The Age of Fable: The labyrinth […] was an edifice with numberless winding passages and turnings opening into one another, and seeming to have neither beginning nor end, like the river Mæander, which returns on itself and flows now onward, now backward, in its course to the sea.

The human mind has long been fascinated by this supreme interconnectedness, by the strange illusions engendered by such a perfect web. Cretan coins from around 400 B.C. are some of the earliest examples of the labyrinth’s unicursal iteration, in which a single, winding path wends its way ponderously to the center. The design, propagated by myth, flowed down through the ages, past rebellions and invasions and the births of several prophets. It outlasted empires, surviving on the strength of atavistic fascination.

In medieval times (around 1000 C.E.) the curious image began to pop up on the walls and floors of churches. The grandfather of the modern labyrinth can still be seen inlaid in the floor of Chartres Cathedral in France. Nobody’s quite sure what significance the labyrinth held in those benighted days. Walking it might have simulated a pilgrimage to the Holy Land; the image might have been a representation of the Holy City itself; or, most probably, it was merely a pretty ornament.

unconscious with its unknown possibilities (and somewhere stalks the repressed nightmare: the Minotaur). If you are a Jungian, then the labyrinth is “an entangling and confusing representation of the world of matriarchal consciousness.”

If you simply enjoy platitudes, why, the labyrinth is life, and at its end lies death (a death which, you hasten to point out, might arrive at any moment, at the turn of any corner).

As susceptible as any symbolic image to projection and wanton associations, the labyrinth, of course, encompasses all these interpretations.

And underneath each reading runs the collective thread of a reticulation so ensnaring as to prevent escape. We cannot leave the labyrinth—our attempts to do so are so futile that these attempts themselves come to define us.

I’ll add another reading, because I think the form will bear it: The labyrinth is Fate, and when Theseus foolishly forgets to raise the white sails, it is simply another turning of the Wheel.

He never left the labyrinth.

II “Solvitur ambulando.” – Saint Augustine My hometown—New Harmony, IN (population 789 on a good day)—is fortunate enough to have two labyrinths. The first is on the north side of town, right next to Maple Hill Cemetery. It’s made of hedges. There’s a cozy little hut at the center, where you can rest after walking the long arabesques of the path.

Nowadays, the labyrinth has become a New Age-y spiritual tool. Masses of people attuned to the rattling of cosmic strings, to the telluric forces that engender life, walk the labyrinth as a meditative practice. It frees the mind, bursts the spirit’s sleep, and sets the soul to wandering.

The second is on the south side of town and occupies a small square courtyard girt about by a low brick wall. Behind this courtyard lies a larger expanse of walled-in grass, dotted here and there with subtle mounds: an Indian graveyard, we were told as children. The mounds, as it turns out, really were made by Native Americans, nearly two thousand years ago, though they contain no bodies: mere monuments, sites of worship.

Unsurprisingly, idiosyncratic interpretations of the labyrinth have multiplied over the centuries. If you are prone to psychoanalysis, then the labyrinth is merely a representation of the

A quick disclaimer: these aren’t the kind of labyrinth that Theseus—blinded by dust, his palms skinned from groping the way—would have stumbled through. I’m inclined to call that sort

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of edifice a maze. The labyrinths I grew up with are circular and unicursal, like the Cretan labyrinths of old. I’ve devised a simple rule for telling a labyrinth from a maze: Most people can and will lose themselves, quite excusably, in a maze, but it takes a special kind of fool to lose himself in a labyrinth.

One October evening in the long-ago days of my childhood, I found myself walking the courtyard labyrinth. I was there by maternal decree. There were several adults and a handful of children present, the former enjoying themselves, the latter all bearing, with a penitent air, the same expression of ineffable boredom.

I tried to walk the labyrinth, quickly tired of it, and quit. I wandered over to my mother, tugged at her overalls (she wore overalls then, capacious and shalwar-esque) and hissed meekly: “Mom I’m boooored!” She patted my head and turned back to her friend, condemning me to that special purgatory reserved for children whose parents are talking to friends.

My mother used to take me to the labyrinth all the time. Sometimes we went alone, sometimes with her friends. It was hell for me, but she loved it.

She grew up in the 60s, saw Jimi Hendrix live (she once woke up in a van to hear him playing in the distance), ascribed to the pedagogical theories of Rudolf Steiner (an early 20th-century German mystic and madman who got a few things right, I’ll admit). Walking the labyrinth fit easily into her worldview.

And certainly she could always use a moment of respite. A single mother raising four boys on a teacher’s meager salary, she bore our shit with admirable chutzpah, and took her peace where she could get it. I once nearly set fire to our kitchen (rubber cement, candle); afterward, when various small flames had been stamped out, she hugged me.

As a kid I laughed at my mother when she walked the labyrinth. I told her it was dumb, and boring, that it took too long. But she kept walking, now onward, now backward. I don’t know what she experienced during the ritual. Perhaps she stepped

out of time, hanging over it to look downward from a peaceful realm?

I hope not.

III “God alone is a “fashioner,” a musawwir, the very term used for painter. As the only Creator, he cannot admit of competitors, hence the opposition to idols which by association and by extension could become an opposition to representations.” – Oleg Grabar, The Formation of Islamic Art The setting of Orhan Pamuk’s novel My Name is Red—late 16th century Istanbul, and, more specifically, the ateliers where master miniaturists slave over illuminated manuscripts—is, like the settings of Saramago, intensely personal and almost unbearably symbolic.

At the center of the text is a nagging question: whether art should attempt to represent the world as seen through the eyes of God, or depict it through our own, more fettered eyes. Through the eyes of God, of course, we are as ants: small, nearly insignificant, and ultimately indistinguishable. Hence 16th-century Islam’s theological opposition to the representation of living beings. To depict a discernible individual—who might, as in the European style of portraiture, be identified by a telling feature (a distinctive nose, a scar upon the cheek)—is the epitome of presumption.

The novel is, too, a meta-fictional murder mystery (a rich pasha orders the creation of an illuminated text that will—egad!—depict himself in a recognizable and heretical manner; he must be stopped). Intriguing as that sounds, I have always found Pamuk’s descriptions of the miniaturists’ craft far more beguiling, as delicate as the subject matter. They revive, like Colonel Aureliano Buendía’s obsession with crafting golden fish in One Hundred Years of Solitude, our childish fascination with the fragile and picayune.

An image that sticks with me: The great master miniaturists, frail and frowzy, spend hours in darkened corners, lit only by a candle, working on their illuminations. Gradually their sight be-

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gins to bleed away. The greatest masters go blind, yet continue to work afterward. Those who retain their eyesight are looked down upon; their work is considered inferior.

The loss of sight is a loss of temptation. The master miniaturist will no longer be tempted to draw from sight, by looking at reality. He will not subconsciously impinge upon the territory of God. All his work, after the loss of sight, will be drawn completely from memory, from the store of Platonic forms that for a lifetime has gradually engraved itself upon his memory. His hand will follow a sacred pattern, drawing every fern, every stork, every horse (every sinuous ripple of muscle on that horse) exactly the same. It is pure repetition, the abrogation of personal style.

Accessing the metaphysical via repetition isn’t exactly a revolutionary idea; It is the soul of most every ritual. The Bacchae drink their fetid wine and drunkenly tear a calf limb from limb, and each time it is the same wine, the same calf; a devout Catholic goes to church each week and receives the same sacrament to revivify the same belief.

Repetition is the essence of walking the labyrinth. The idea that repetition and transcendence might be linked seems to fly in the face of modern conceptions of the metaphysical. Beckett, after all, called habit (a crystallized form of repetition) “the ballast that chains the dog to his vomit.” He meant that the mind sunk in habit is fundamentally disconnected from time, that a mind anaesthetized by meaningless repetition cannot experience time in all its humbling ubiquity. The habitual mind misses out on half of its existence. Hence the importance, to Beckett, of the act of waiting, in which the undistracted mind must confront fully the horrifying passage of time.

For the miniaturists, repetition was a nearly ascetic means of elimination (of style, of temptation, of the temptation to style) and, by extension, of escape. This seems, too, the crux of the standard method of walking the labyrinth: to eliminate thoughts, to divide the mind, to escape what David Foster Wallace once called “the day to day trenches of adult existence”; to exit time and its promise of vicissitudes.

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Surely some hermetic guru perched on a faraway mountaintop has mastered this form of meditation; it may even make him happy from time to time. But overall it strikes me as offering a specter of true peace, a placebo-induced contentment. Stepping outside of time? I think of a fish who throws himself onto land and calls his strangulation catharsis.

Living immersed in time, as Beckett claims, is an unbelievably painful way of being. Yet it also offers the possibility of contact with Beauty. The suffering of being is the price and pain of Beauty.

How should one walk the labyrinth? Walk it so that pain is not dulled, so that memory is kept intact. So that time hangs dense and black in the gullet. Walk it so that the repeating path does not distract. Inhabit every step; do not lose track of time.

IV “But maybe time was invented so that misery might have an end. So that it shouldn’t last forever? There may be something in this. And bliss, just the opposite, is eternal? That is no time in bliss. All the clocks were thrown out of heaven.”

– Eugene Henderson Whenever I find myself back in New Harmony I try to make it to the labyrinth a couple of times.

To try my hand at the whole meditation thing, see if I’ve stumbled upon peace while out in the world.

The courtyard, I always find, has fallen into a soft desuetude. The pathways of loose, smooth, hefty stones are coated with a chalky dust; the trees in the courtyard have grown massive and umbrageous, depositing their sticky blooms everywhere; the pretty flowers that fill the interstitial spaces bloom no more; the harp-shaped fountain I splashed in as a child no longer carries water.

I walk the labyrinth in a forced trance, my face blank, my steps regimented. I repeat my meditative word endlessly in my head (a technique intended to tame the wandering mind; you can choose any word you’d like, whatever floats your

spiritual boat): “Expectorate…expectorate…expectorate…” It doesn’t seem to help.

At a certain point, every time, I realize I am bored. I realize my limbs are itchy, frenetic. I realize that I am a phony.

My thoughts, stymied briefly, come rushing back to me. A sudden pressure builds behind my eyes.

And then the dam breaks, a disorderly rush begins—I see my mother and my father, my brothers spread across the country, I see from above my thinning hair; my root canal’s up next, then my smoking, my habits, my money, my bad wrist and all the lost pets buried in shoeboxes and— somewhere around them—my soul. The facts build up. It’s all I can do to keep standing.

I walk over to the harp-shaped fountain and sit down, resting my feet in a hollow that used to

serve as a footbath for the weary walker. Sitting there, tired and defeated, I toss my gaze out across the labyrinth. Suddenly a veil is lifted, the curtain of intervening years folds away, and a phantom tableau materializes.

I see a breathless child with dirt-stained knees running the labyrinth. I see a mother walking near him. They have been out to collect the wild asparagus that grows behind a nearby church; her hands are clasped behind her back and around a bouquet of freshly cut stalks. She’s walking, serenity manifest, taking her time and smiling, awake to every moment, blind to the path and all that lies outside it.

The wind blows, or the light changes, and the scene dissolves.

She loved to walk the labyrinth.

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Just Say No PAUL C. TAYLOR

I’m here to answer questions about men’s urinals, not about heroin addiction. That’s what I should have said. I should have said that, and put a ‘sir’ at the end, and then cut the call off, or referred it to my supervisor. And then I should have gone back to wait for the next blinking light on my screen to ask about replacement flushometers for our discontinued wall-hung models.

I could say the guy sounded really desperate and I couldn’t just do nothing, but that would make me seem like a better person than I am. Or I could say what Marla says, though not the way she says it. A girl like you, she says, by which she means me, with problems like yours, by which she means Ray, needs someone to talk to, by which she means someone other than her. Whatever it was, this guy called up and my screen blinked and I answered and I stayed on the line.

“I’m a heroin addict and I need help,” he said.

“Sir, this is the information line for Sani-Fresh Sanitation Systems,” I said.

“Oh,” he said, and then went quiet for a while. I could hear ghostly voices as other calls bled into my line. “What’s that?”

“We make those little round deodorizers that go in men’s urinals. We make other things too, but that’s our biggest seller.”

“Men’s urinals,” he said, then coughed. “Men’s urinals. Are there women’s urinals?”

“Yes,” I said, “but they haven’t really caught on outside Malaysia.”

“Deodorizers?”

“In the industry we call them urinal cakes.” I’m the only one here who would say ‘in the industry.’

Most of my colleagues (they wouldn’t say that, either) are telemarketers, hired ears willing to work phones for anyone. But I started at Sani-Fresh in a summer internship program for sanitary engineering majors, and just stayed on after.

Anyway, I learned a lot during my internship. For example, I learned a way to respond when people say ‘sanitary engineering’ is just a euphemism for ‘janitor,’ like Ray often did after he moved in with me.

My supervisor told me to ask what these people do for a living, and then make some simplistic comparison right back. So I tried one last time to explain to Ray that SE is an actual field, populated at the professional level mostly by environmental engineers, along with other kinds of engineers and a few people with specialized degrees like the one I’m working on. Then, when that didn’t work, I tried my supervisor’s way. I said, Does graphic design mean just doodling, and he shut right up.

“So,” the caller said, “how’d you end up working in a place like that?”

“It was my major,” I said. I should have said that SE is my major, instead of was, since I plan to go back to school as soon as I can. I was supposed to go back for my fifth year once the internship was over, but I couldn’t because of family issues. My dad, being my dad, sent rubber checks for his and my mom’s part of my college expenses, and I found out too late to come up with the money before they canceled my enrollment. This is what I mean by family issues, and this is why I prefer not to think much about my parents. Anyway, I couldn’t afford to go back to school, and I wasn’t qualified to move from my internship into an entry-level salaried position, at Sani-Fresh or anywhere else. So I took an hourly job in the customer service office, just to get some money coming in. Ray moved in with me at about the same time. I thought he was going to help with the rent.

“How’d you end up with that kind of major,” the caller said.

“Who knows how they end up with anything? It was a good major. Lots of required courses, so I didn’t

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have to worry about electives.” This is what I always tell people, no matter how well I know them. It’s true enough.

“Electives,” he said, like he was trying to connect the word to something. Then he got quiet again. I was in no hurry to take another call (these lines stay busier than you would think: there are lots of urinals in the U.S.), so I put my chin in my hand and waited. We use headsets to talk, so with my free hand I drew spirals on the little yellow pad by the phone.

For some of my colleagues a customer going silent would be a problem. Most of the people doing phone work get into it because it seems to require no skill, or no skill they don’t already have, since we all grow up talking on the phone. But it’s not that easy. You have to learn how to deal with the unexpected, how to keep going when the world presents itself to you in ways you’re not prepared for. Before Sani-Fresh I worked for three years in the call center for BigCorp, which is where I met Marla, and I learned a thing or two about the unexpected. The problem there was usually people yelling, not going silent, but still. So I can do silence, but the guy didn’t say anything for a good twenty seconds, which is forever on the phone.

I thought maybe he’d passed out.

“Are you still there, sir,” I said.

“Oh, yeah,” he said, like we were having an everyday conversation. “I’m here.”

“Should I call someone for you sir?”

“No, I like talking to you.” He said this slowly, like he was really relaxed. He said the next thing more quickly, like he was trying to talk to someone on the other side of a closing door. “That’s okay, isn’t it? Is it okay if I keep talking to you? I’m a heroin addict and I need help,” he said again.

I thought, (a) if I stay on the phone with him I don’t have to take any more real calls, and (b) if it doesn’t bother him to talk about his habit, it doesn’t bother me to listen.

“I guess,” I said. He got quiet again, so I said, “Why did you call this number? Where’d you get the number from if you didn’t know what it was?”

He cleared his throat. “I saw a, I was in a… I was using the –” “You were urinating,” I said.

“Yeah, I was, yeah.” More quiet, and this time I left it alone. “That’s a funny word, isn’t it? Urinate.”

“You were using the facilities,” I said. “And then?”

“Oh, there was a plastic… this little plastic –” “Screen,” I said. This is a poly-blend mesh grating that covers the fluid reservoir – where the urinal cake goes – so that it’s easier to clean out extraneous debris like cigarettes and gum. When the caller mentioned this I thought of what Ray said when Marla told him I worked at Sani-Fresh and what they do. He told us how guys chase things around in urinals, taking aim at cigarette butts and so on. Like Luke Skywalker, he had the nerve to say, in the first Star Wars, or the fourth one, or whatever, when he has to shoot a laser beam into that little hole to blow up the Death Star. He put his hands on his waist and swiveled his hips, and made movie-laser sounds through pursed lips. This is not the sort of behavior that makes Marla describe Ray as a problem.

“Yeah,” the caller said, “a screen. This one had a phone number on it.” He paused, breathed. “Well, first there was a message. It said to just say no to drugs. Then there was a number. I called it and got you.”

This explanation made me feel better about deciding to stay on the phone. Suddenly this cry for help had become a business call. I made a mental note to tell my supervisor that someone needed to do something.

“Sometimes we put minimal contact information on our products,” I said. “Not on the cakes, since there’s really no room. But there’s room on the screens. I didn’t know we had public service announcements.”

“This one had one. I didn’t look at any of the others. I just looked at that one. Because I, you know, had to. “It didn’t say it wasn’t the number for addiction services.”

“I’m sorry about that.”

“It should say something. It was unclear. Ambiguous.”

“I’ll pass that message on to quality control, sir,” I said. I actually wrote this down next to the spirals on my yellow pad, announcing each word so the caller wouldn’t think I was blowing him off. “Avoid … ambiguity… on … urinal … screen.” I included this phrase in the email to my supervisor.

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“What do I do now,” he said.

“I’m not sure,” I said. “I think the first step is to admit that you’re an addict.”

“But I already told you that.”

“Yes, but I think you’re supposed to do it a certain way. You’re supposed to say my name is such and such and I’m an addict.”

“Okay. My name is Bill, and I’m an addict.” This announcement seemed to loosen him up some, and he launched into the story of how he got hooked. Apparently his girlfriend Sherri brought some heroin home one time and told him that while she didn’t expect him to take any, he should at least be open-minded about what she liked. Soon she made it part of their sex life and by the time she left three months later he hardly noticed – until he lost his job and the drugs ran out. When he got to this point I must have made a noise, because he went what? And I guess then I said something about how his story reminded me of what Ray did, because he went, who’s Ray? “We’re living together,” I said.

“What does Ray do,” he said, and I laughed and said, “Don’t ask so many questions. You’re the one who called for help.” He laughed too, which made me feel like I’d done him some good. *** “Sounds like you needed someone to talk to.” This is what my friend Marla said when I told her about the call. “Shit, with Ray, who wouldn’t?” She didn’t say why talking to her didn’t count.

When things started going poorly with Ray I felt like I was supposed to be talking about it to someone. Marla used to date Ray, so she knows how he is. I would go over to her place when she had time before her dates. She had dates pretty much every day, but she also had time pretty much every day, because she was a real night owl. When I got there on the day of Bill’s first call she made tea, and we sat on her couch and drank it while she said the things about Ray that I couldn’t quite bring myself to say. Like I said, she knows how he is.

Marla left BigCorp the same time I did, last summer. I went to my internship, and she started keeping the books for Sims and Son Construction, where she still works, and where she met Ray. Ray works construction during rough times, which is most of the time now. But if you ask him what he does he’ll say graphic design. He says this even though I’ve never known him to do anything but construction, and even though he doesn’t really look for jobs doing anything else. He doesn’t even look for construction work now. He just sits around. Maybe that’s how graphic designers look for work, but I doubt it. It’s certainly not the way to get construction work. After a while I started to get on him about the rent or about how he was sitting so much the couch was losing its shape, and he’d puff himself up and go to where they pick day laborers. Neither of us enjoyed playing our parts in that ritual, so after a while we gave it up.

Anyway, Ray met Marla before he started just sitting around. To hear her tell it, she was on a bad one, whatever she means by that, and wanted to go home with someone and picked him. “He’s cute enough,” she concedes, “but I shouldn’t have let it turn into anything.” Marla has a foul mouth, so I wasn’t surprised at what she said next. “Cute is a fuck,” she said, “not a boyfriend.”

Marla feels this way because Ray (a) cheated on her with several women he met through Marla, including me, (b) gave her crabs, which he did not get from me, and (c) stole $460.21 from her, which he could not get from me, though he tried. These are not the kinds of problems I had with Ray. After Marla dumped him he and I made our relationship public, as if we’d just started going out.

Marla was so glad to be rid of him, and so glad I was seeing someone, that she didn’t even object. She just warned me to keep a close eye on him. He got kicked out of his apartment soon after that, and since I needed help with rent, I let him move in.

Sometimes I felt a little bad about having gone behind Marla’s back, especially since she’s been so good to me. When it was going on, when he was sneaking away to be with me and when I was lying to her about what I’d done the previous night, I was able to justify it because I knew she and Ray wouldn’t last. She’s too much for him, too outgoing, too pretty, too demanding; a relationship between them must have been like a conversation with everyone talking at once. That’s why he cheated on her: he needed

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someone who wouldn’t compete with him like that. I didn’t, and that’s why he never cheated on me.

Then again, maybe if he’d cheated he wouldn’t have started with the pornography.

So there I was with Marla, sitting on the couch with our tea. I was pretty glum, like usual, so she kept saying things like “That Ray was a waste of his daddy’s sperm” to try to help. Marla says things like that, and keeps saying them, even when I don’t laugh. Between sips of tea she talked about guys she was going to hook me up with, sensible guys who’d treat me right, “Not like that blood clot,” she said, meaning Ray. Then she remembered where we’d started the conversation, and asked, “Do you think this guy’ll call again?” *** Bill called the next day to thank me for listening.

“Five times a charm,” he said, sounding pleased. “I mean, I had to call back five times until you answered. Can you tell them I’m sorry? I mean, the people I hung up on.”

“Sure,” I lied. I could hear a lot of noise in the background, dishes clinking and men talking. I didn’t ask him where he was. We just started talking about nothing, the way normal people do, and pretty soon he told me he was at a rehab facility. Then he asked about my problems with Ray. When I told him that Ray wanted me to watch dirty videos and look at dirty magazines with him, he couldn’t see the connection to Sherri’s drugs. I told him it wasn’t really about looking at pictures but about using them, and how after a while Ray couldn’t do anything in bed without them. He had to leave a magazine, sometimes more than one, open on the pillow next to my head, or propped up on the milk crate that we used for a nightstand. That bothered me, but since I knew I was no Marla in the bedroom I figured I could give him that much.

But then he started with the dirty movies. They’re not dirty, he’d say. Sex is natural, he’d say. And I’d say, Peeing is natural too, but I don’t want to watch anyone do it. And he’d say, Some people do, as if that was going to get me to do what he wanted. I think he thought this was the sort of open communication everyone says relationships are supposed to have.

“But how is that like Sherri’s drugs?” Bill asked. *** “Porn,” Marla said, almost like she was trying to remember what the word meant. This was the day after Bill’s second call. She had made what she called milkshakes, what other people call floats, since she was too lazy to mash up the ice cream properly. She spooned a lump into her mouth. “I can’t believe he went there.”

“And movies,” I added.

“I wish he had tried that shit with me,” she said. “I’d a sent his ass right home.”

I wondered why he didn’t try it with Marla. She’s the filthy one, by her own admission. She’s the one who calls herself a “nasty bitch” and says things like “you fuck cute.”

“Then again,” she said. “What were the pictures of? I mean, what were the people doing?”

I didn’t want to answer this, so I lied and told her they were doing all kinds of things. Sometimes oral sex, sometimes other things. But really it was always women performing oral sex on men. I lied because Marla had already told me, many times in vulgar detail how she felt about this subject.

The way I remember what she said, with all the nasty talk to one side, it was about power and control. She could inflict injury or give pleasure. Most important, she could manipulate. She could get a man to do things he wouldn’t otherwise do, for her or to her, just by doing something that required practically nothing from her, all things considered. She liked this phrase. All things considered, she’d say, it’s a pretty sweet deal.

Marla and I see things very differently. For me it’s about the mess, and the smell, and trying not to choke, and what do you do with your teeth. And it’s about the fact that I work for a company that makes urinal accessories, which means that I spend every day thinking about what men do with themselves when they’re not having sex.

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“You don’t have to do it,” he’d say. “I don’t want to pressure you to do anything. But if you watch other people do it maybe you’ll get used to the idea.” *** “He said that,” Bill asked. “No pressure?” This was during his third call, which began after he’d hung up on Jean, Sunita, Bob, and Sunita again. I hadn’t had time before to explain the connection between Ray’s porn and Sherri’s drugs, so I gave him some of the details.

“Yeah,” I said. “No pressure.” Then I told him about how even after I said I wasn’t comfortable Ray kept bringing it up. After a while I would just look at him or roll my eyes, and so he just started using the stuff right in front of me. I’d come home from work and he’d be there on the couch, pants down past his hips, doing his business. Maybe I was supposed to be turned on by all this. But I would just ask him to sit on a towel or take a shower, one or the other, if he was going to pull his pants down like that. And then I’d go into the kitchen and fix something to eat.

“That is kinda like what Sherri did, I guess,” Bill said. *** “Did you ever just say no?” This was what Bill said when we got to the Ray segment of our fourth conversation. “I mean, really, straight out, say no? That’s what you have to do with men,” he said. “I mean, if you don’t flat out say ‘No, I don’t want to sleep with you’ or whatever, we’ll think there’s still hope.” I didn’t ask him if he thought saying no to Sherri would’ve made things turn out differently for him. *** A couple of days later I came home to find Ray on the couch again, sweatpants around his ankles, towels safe in the pantry.

“Oh good,” I said. “Now I’ll have something to talk about at work tomorrow.” Ray is vain, so he pretty much had to say what he said next.

“You talk about me at work? Our problems are my business,” he said. I tried not to notice that he was going limp.

“They’re my business too, and I wanted to talk about them.”

“Then you should talk to me.”

“I can’t talk to you when you’re doing that,” I said. “And you’re always doing that.” I took off my coat and hung it in the closet by the door.

“Who do you talk to?” Ray said. I started towards the kitchen and he pulled his pants up and followed. I took the bread out of the cupboard. I got the mayonnaise and ham from the fridge. I got a plate and a knife out of the dish rack.

“Thanks for washing the dishes,” I said.

“Who do you talk to?” he said again, and stood in the doorway while I made my sandwich. Between bites I told him about Bill. I told him how we compared our failed relationships and our partners’ odious habits. I told him about our fifth conversation, the one Bill and I had just finished.

“If things are as bad as they seem,” Bill had said, “why are you still with him?” I didn’t tell Bill that every so often, when Ray had really had it with me, he would ask if I wanted him to leave. I’ll just go, he’d say, I really mean it. You won’t have me to laugh at anymore. But like Marla says, he is cute, like a skinny version of that singer, you’d know the one I mean if you saw him. And I’m not Marla. She can go from man to man, dropping one when the next one isn’t even on the horizon yet, and somehow never getting mixed up with losers like the ones I get mixed up with, except Ray. And she doesn’t need friends so much, because she’s always with her latest man. So when Ray would start up about leaving I would

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say, No, I don’t want that, and he’d say, Well you better straighten up, then, and we’d usually have sex.

“Do you love him,” Bill said.

“Get real,” I said.

“Then why... I mean, is there a good side to this guy that I’m missing?”

I told Ray about this conversation and then I ate the last piece of my sandwich. After staring at me for a minute, he went into the bedroom. He returned with untied yellow work boots and a grey hoodie added to his sweatpants and t-shirt ensemble, and with a duffel bag that he hadn’t really had time to fill slung over his shoulder. “I’ve had it,” he said. “You don’t know why you’re with me? Then you don’t have to be.”

I turned back to the sink and washed the plate and knife I’d used.

“This is it,” he said. “I’m going,” he said. He moved to the front door, stomping either to keep his boots from falling off or to let me know how he felt about all this. “This is it,” he said, shouting as if he had traveled six miles instead of six steps. I turned and looked at him, and he stopped declaring himself and left.

I turned over the cushions on my couch. I closed the dirty video he had been watching on my laptop, and then closed the laptop.

The day after Ray left, I went to work just long enough to get Bill’s call. I gave him my home number, told him to call me in thirty minutes, then claimed I was sick and left. Marla says I’m stupid, he could be a psycho, after all he was, or is, an addict, at which point she got distracted by her own curiosities.

“I wonder if all addictions are like being an alcoholic,” she said. “You know, once an addict always an addict. Or is that just for drunks? Is he an addict or was he?” Then she started talking about sex addicts, and wondering if she was one. But before that, when she was calling me stupid, she was making pretty good sense. Bill could get my address from my phone number, and I don’t really know him. But he called me totally by accident, and out of a pure intention to correct his problem. We clicked when we talked. All five times. Maybe I’m crazy, but he just doesn’t seem dangerous.

Bill and I talk almost every day now. He says he’s kicked his habit, and he says the only fix he needs is talking to me. It’s corny, but it’s nice to hear. He sounds much better than he did that first time, and he’s gone back to work. He calls me from there on his breaks sometimes, and it shows up on the caller ID. He keeps asking if we can meet, and I can’t just do nothing.

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Sarah Rosenthal Burano 1 Unedited photograph

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Sarah Rosenthal Burano 2 Unedited photograph

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From the Google Maps Car MILES HEWITT

In the end, all maps, self-led by vestigial scent, melted or forgotten, caressing their digital sisters— the ones with aptitudes, subtracting the call of danger—fail to render. The mapmaker pretends to engross in topography, moves out of state, divorces & takes up with a sultry 3rd dimension, sprawling in her loft & breathing cigarettes of middling price & quality. They make love.

Sibling to yawning July, the drought built to last.

The photographer skirts the outskirts, compiling as he pleases: their streets, their sisters, the upset grass, the amoebae in the sky—always so far?

He learns that content & content are not always the same; his sister morphs into a mailbox (empty). I have no interest in the Messiah, he says, unless He creeps into Street View rifling his leaflets & then I’d have to digitally scan Him. The 3-D version, still in development, will include an immersive Danger Zone— we can’t get to Syria, except by the News, which is a different design— there is no tab, a simulation will have to suffice: the pucker of loosened gravity, the click & drag & drag & drag . . .

The photographer, which is us, spares no one, remembers his father mostly for the cigarettes, he bridges the gaps in memory with real dyslexia.

What street, what ‘burb could surmount the creeping din: explosions of nothing, words of nothing, each surveyed road calling ghosts too stupid, too gone to cry out: Google Map for a Google Earth?

Somewhere out west, two hours from where he was conceived, then born, then switched into a long range of broken sisters, the cropped shadows, chopped pixels, he sees another. I have too many grounds yet to cover, he says, I am misunderstood.

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Ukrainian Identity and Mykola Kulish’s Sonata Pathétique VICTORIA BAENA

Mykola Kulish, Ukraine’s most famous 20th-century playwright, was known for his formal experimentation and dismissal of contemporary conceits. He was also among many Ukrainian writers forced to couch any reference to Ukrainian national identity in a teleology of socialist revolution, culminating, inevitably, in a Bolshevik victory.

Kulish was able to find loopholes in devices of characterization, setting, and allusion all the same. In Kulish’s 1930 play, Sonata Pathétique, neither Soviet triumph nor pure Ukrainian nationalism is fully exempt from satire, as Kulish pokes fun at the national cult of Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko, widely considered to be the founder of modern Ukrainian literature and language. The work is centered around the conflicts between Ukrainian and Russian forces following the 1917 Russian Revolution. In Act Four, a conversation takes place between nostalgic retiree Ivan Stupay-Stupanenko and his daughter, strongwilled Ukrainian nationalist Maryna, as the Bolsheviks march into their sleepy provincial town:

Stupay (tries to uncover the window): I’ll go to meet them!

Maryna: They’ll kill you.

Stupay: I have arms.

Maryna: What arms?

Stupay: The Ukrainian language.

Maryna: A language is only persuasive when it’s backed by weapons.

Stupay I will meet them and remind them of Shevchenko’s sacred words: “Embrace, my brethren, the smallest one.”

Maryna: Who will you remind of it? The Bolsheviks? The bandits? The bloodthirsty barbarians who are destroying our loftiest ideals? (She covers the window.)

Unlike Maryna, Stupay is consumed by an overwhelmingly romantic, ethnic, and ultimately antiquated conception of Ukraine. For him, Shevchenko and his language are the only hope for national regeneration: “Hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of Ukrainians swore before Shevchenko’s picture not to lay down their hands

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until Ukraine is restored to full freedom. I swear it, too!” Maryna counters such idealism with a more pragmatic approach: the idea that military might holds the key to national defense. The narrative warps the attitudes of both into alternatives that are, at best, vaguely unsatisfying. Neither proves a fully suitable emblem around which a divided nation could rally. ** Earlier this spring, Ukrainians celebrated the 200th anniversary of the birth of their national poet, Sevchenko. The deteriorating relations between Russia and Ukraine, having lowered to a simmer in the Western media, flared up again briefly here and there. Clashes between Russian nationalists and those opposed to secession interrupted commemorative rallies in Sevastopol, while Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk told a crowd around the Shevchenko statue in Kiev that they wouldn’t “budge a single centimeter from Ukrainian land.”

Confusion concerning Ukraine’s borders—political and otherwise—is, of course, hardly new.

Generations of Ukrainian writers have so comfortably plodded the terrain of riot and revolution between Russia and Ukraine that the genre—a particular kind of Soviet historical epic—has become a reliable trope. Yet the elevation of Shevchenko as a symbol of a single, united Ukraine belies, as the process of canonization tends to do, the complexities and contradictions that have characterized the country since long before its official birth, long before even the establishment of the Ukrainian language. Sonata Pathétique, in which Ukrainian nationalists, Red Army Bolsheviks, and Russian autocrats collide to the variously steady and frantic tempos of Beethoven’s sonata, is an eerily prescient reminder of these contradictions.

It was only in 1905 that the Russian Academy of Sciences officially declared Ukrainian to be a language rather than a dialect, thus ending over half a century of linguistic and cultural suppression. Among the Russian literati of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the country was a provincial outpost surrounding the cosmopolitan (though certainly not “Ukrainian”) Kiev.

This prejudice eased only with the official estab-

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lishment of Ukraine as one of the founding SSRs in 1922, after what is now widely considered a civil war between Russia and the Ukraine from 1918 to 1920. Now, for the first time, Ukrainian literature was part of a state enterprise. The early Soviet policy of korenizatsiia encouraged this status, seeking to promote (and monitor) ethnic nationalism, local language, and national literary activity in what historian Terry Martin has called “The Affirmative Action Empire.” A brief but powerful flowering of Ukrainian literature and culture ensued.

In 1926, riding high on the literary nationalist wave, Kulish helped to found VAPLITE, the Free Academy of Proletarian Literature—a writers’ union that aligned itself officially with communism but took an ironic, often comic, and subtly subversive approach to literature through its magazine The Literary Fair. Kulish himself had fought for the Russian Army in World War I before joining the Bolsheviks. But by the late 1920s, he had become more interested in the question of national communism. How could Ukraine embrace the values emanating from Moscow while still cultivating its own literary tradition?

Kulish’s Sonata Pathétique was a response to such a challenge, as well as to the prevailing examples of nationalist theater in Ukraine and Russia. Ironically, given the radical politics of Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita— which was not to be published until long after Bulgakov’s death—one of these examples was Bulgakov’s The Days of the Turbins, a play about the White Guard, the Russians intellectuals of the Tsarist Army, which ran regularly in Moscow from 1926 to 1941, and which Stalin himself was reputed to have seen more than 20 times. Kulish took offense at Bulgakov’s characterization of the Ukrainian national forces as anarchic and unmotivated. And he was impatient with the requirements of socialist realism emanating from the Moscow Art Theatre, where Bulgakov staged his work. These requirements would ultimately harden into policy, responsible for a crackdown on modernist experimentation in Ukraine and elsewhere beginning in the early 1930s.

While he still could, Kulish challenged Bulgakov’s argument through an expressionist rather

than realist frame, seeking to probe the limits of modernism by folding a different work of art—a musical score, no less—into a theatrical piece.

The “early legato of a hoarse cock” presages the capture of Russian soldier Georges by Ukrainian nationalists; the accompaniment to the grave section becomes a fugue of Easter bells as the protagonist, the poet Ilko Yuha, anxiously awaits the return of Maryna, whom he loves. Sometimes the echoes are explicit in the stage directions: “(He can almost hear the sound of horses’ hooves as an echo of the Pathétique).” ** While far from the most appealing character in Sonata Pathétique, the plucky, headstrong Maryna is probably the most interesting. She uses the love of Ilko—who is gradually converted to Bolshevism, but who, in one scene, proclaims “the way of love!” over “the way of revolution!”—just as she uses the admiration of André, a member of the White Army, to further her own goals of an independent Ukrainian state. These manipulations backfire: by the end, Ilko feels so betrayed that he hands her over to the triumphant Bolshevik forces.

Of course, history had already intervened in support of Soviet victory. And the success of socialism had to be certain for the play to have any hope of being staged at all. As it was, Kulish was unable to publish it in Ukraine. But Sonata Pathétique went on to be staged in Moscow to an initially favorable response, eventually expanding into regional cities like Omsk and Korsk. By late 1932, though, the Ukrainian literary renaissance had ended. The official Soviet newspaper, Pravda, wrote a scathing review of the play based mainly on his condemnation of it as “nationalist.”

Kulish would go on to be arrested in the purges and would die in a concentration camp, either in 1937 or 1942—the official historical record unravels, here, into uneasy ambiguity.

Historian Timothy Snyder has called the contested terrains of Eastern Europe the Bloodlands.

The mass killings from 1930 to 1945, he has argued, which we tend to associate with the images of Auschwitz and gas chambers and Stalin’s gulags, were part of a broader, more sustained pro-

cess of murder. 10 million civilians who never entered concentration camps were shot, deliberately starved (beginning with Ukraine in 1930), or gassed in killing centers unrelated to work and death camps. By the time of Auschwitz’s greatest efficiency in 1943, a vast percentage of the inhabitants of these lands, Jewish and non-Jewish, had been killed. Trampled over by the massive violence, famines, and purges of Stalin’s regime, only to be re-trodden by the genocidal and environmental ravages of Hitler’s empire, in-between lands like Ukraine were condemned to near-annihilation. The search for Ukrainian identity was subsumed under the daily, yearly battle over Ukrainian lives—a battle that Kulish himself lost.

After being suppressed by Soviet censorship, Sonata Pathétique would not be heard of again until the mid- to late-1980s. It was only with Ukrainian independence in 1990 that a full edition of Kulish’s works would be published, emerging from the rubble of what in some ways had been a lost, foreshortened century. Its reissue kickstarted another chapter in the process of national identity and definition whose competing partisans have yet to come to accord.

Pathos in Ukrainian— —means both what it does in English, and also something like “the essence of things.” The structure of theater and music might impose a kind of aesthetic unity, then, for a people and in a land where real, lived unity—or even the freedom to pursue it—has long been elusive.

“Well, I’ve risen,” declares Stupay as he emerges into the streets of battle toward the end of Sonata Pathétique. “But I don’t know which side I should join.”

(He thinks and hesitates). Neither this side nor that. (The bullets whizz by.) Wait. There are Ukrainians on both sides. What are you doing? Let me think!

And as Stupay bends to the ground, still undecided, a bullet strikes him in the chest. He falls, his own vision for Ukraine extinguished between the yellow and blue of the Ukrainian flag and the bright crimson of the Reds. “I suggested red, yellow and blue stripes,” he’d said, “but they won’t listen to me.”

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The Aftershock MOEKO FUJII

“That’s how high it came,” the lady says, pointing at a faint brown line drawn straight by the waves, high across the exterior of her broken house. She gives us water and lukewarm orange juice, and we do our work.

The woman’s fake eyelashes caught my attention as I dug away the mud. Half of them were still clinging on, although most of those remaining were half-hearted in their fight, drooping in strange angles from the side of her eyes. She was in her late twenties, and she was there for a week.

As we carried back the sacks of dirt back to the white, beaten-up truck, she told me that her arms and thighs were sore from all this carrying. Usually she was a stylist, and she picked out clothes for wealthy women in Shinjuku. She was also known as the one who had the portable air shampoo.

When evening came, women flocked around her large orange suitcase. One by one we took turns to sink the prongs on top of the air shampoo bottle into our hair. Water wasn’t running in the tsunami regions, then.

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With her holding the other edge, I concentrate first on removing the tatami. The straw mats are light when dry, but hard to get rid of when sodden with seawater. Too delicate to remove by machine, but too heavy for easy human removal, tatamis were usually one of the last pieces of debris left in tsunami areas. I was too weak to carry it alone.

Thin slabs of tatami dotted the beaches of fishing villages, attracting flies. Sometimes, a tatami would split in the middle of a removal, presenting a mass of maggots and dirt wriggling at your feet.

The ground left after a tsunami has a fine, gritty texture, dried dirt peppered with slivers of plastic and wood. We all try to move efficiently. I scrape away at the first layer, rubber strips peeling away from the metal of my shovel. Mud from the bottom of the sea bed, hugging asagao plants and tomato plants in the garden. I throw the dirt into a sandbag. There is just so much sludge. At first, teams talk amongst each other, commenting on the thickness of the toxic waste, the photographs.

But after a while, we drift into silence.

When we left Tokyo for the tsunami-stricken regions in the north, the bus stalled, waiting for a man to run on. He was a salaryman, 30 or so.

He carried a big duffel bag over his Comme de Garçons suit and shirt. Snug in his arms were metal lined boots, minted fresh, and he slung his regular bag to his back so he could carry the duffel bag with convenience store food in his arms.

As he sat and the lights dimmed on the bus, he muttered apologetically that he had to finish something overtime. No one really heard him, and the bus left for the north.

II Aftershocks are fairly dependable and predictable, unlike earthquakes. Their occurrence and magnitude follow certain empirical laws, and the number of aftershocks can be trusted to decrease in time. In 2011, in the month of March alone, 2941 aftershocks rippled through Japan.

Ten days after the main shock, there were only a tenth the number of aftershocks that rocked the island on the day of the quake. The release of the energy resulting from the fracturing of rocks relieves the stress at the earthquake’s focus, but also transmits the energy to nearby rocks. This causes new stresses in rocks, stress that had never existed before.

When I left there was a big debate going on about whether young people should even go to the north to help out. Stereotypical disaster guilt.

Fresh-eyed volunteers would arrive in a disaster spot just to leave a few days after, to satisfy their own need to help out. Going home to Tokyo, chanting that they had done what they could, and promptly forgetting whatever they had seen, except to humbly mention that that they had been there and had tried to help. Pundits argued. Newspapers proclaimed that the youth were apathetic. Groups on college campuses rallied and sent busloads of their students up north to retaliate. Loads of volunteers kept on pushing their way to the grimy truck heading back home, and girls in makeup back home played guessing games to figure out whether that last aftershock was a 4.5 or a 5.0. Why go. Why stay. Why leave.

Why do we remain?

In April my mom drove me to the big Costco

out in Makuhari and bought me a good sturdy jacket and dozens of air masks—she tried some on herself, noting that the air in the north was toxic, according to national television—and heavy boots, and a duffel bag full of dried food.

I asked around and found myself accidentally at a Peace Boat gathering, an organization that usually ships students around various continents on a big cruise ship to volunteer for a meaningful experience. They suspended their usual activities and were organizing volunteers to go help out with tsunami relief efforts. I wasn’t sure about the meaningful experience but they were the only organization that took those under the legal age—twenty. So I sold my so-called interpretive skills, and was told that I could be helpful, since there were a lot of foreigners helping out. I was on a bus the next day.

After the earthquake in Tokyo I heard dozens of stories about what it was like in the north. Don’t tear the photographs of boys in sodden bowl cuts, stories stamped and sodden. You will meet people who had seen cars being dragged along six foot waves, filing up with water, with people inside them. Women who had to leave their bedridden parents on the ground floor as they escaped upstairs with their children. How fast it must have seemed, to run up the stairs, and leave a lifetime of photos behind. A few minutes of warning. And troops, troops of volunteers, stamping across toxic mud. The famous flying bus, lifted up into the sky by the waves and balanced on top of two twelve story buildings. Volunteers marching with Kodaks and Nikons. Tetanus, through a thin sneaker, by kitchen knives sharp and still hidden in the mud.

III When I went back three years later, everything had changed. The streets were cleared of rubble, and I couldn’t find a trace of mud. The gargantuan towers of car metal and truck were gone. I visited the headquarters of one of the local newspapers. Their building looked half-done. It was spanking new on the bottom and old and wavetorn on top.

I entered their machine room in the basement, led by a reporter who had been in the building the day of the quake. There were three printing

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presses, all of which went under a few minutes after the shaking. As their basement filled with water, the newspapermen were silent, and they clung to the windows on the highest floor of the building. They saw cars and trees pass. As soon as the black water receded, they would go down and survey the damage. They would divide into teams and go out to their neighbors to record, as quickly and accurately as possible, the typeface information: the number of dead, the locations of shelters and those still living. But their only means of doing so was underwater, and their ink was staining the mud of the sea.

So the bureau chief bit his lip and unfurled a man-sized roll of paper—thankfully, the paper for distribution was stored on the second floor— and took out a big fat marker. The newspapermen looked at each other, and they watched as their chief hauled and balanced his big body over the clean white expanse of machine-use paper. He drew a shaky box on the right side with the marker. Inside it, he wrote:

March 11th. 2011. The pen squeaked.

He kept on writing: numbers, figures, locations.

The junior bureau chief took over when his hand was tired, and the next junior member after that.

A fifty-year old Japanese man’s handwriting is not the most legible thing in the world, but it had to do. By the next day half of the bureau wielded markers and pens, while the other half were out gathering information. Beats, jurisdictions, assigned topics—assignments and who-wrote-what didn’t matter anymore, as half a dozen reporters collaborated on one handwritten article. On one sheet, a sentence would break off, and the thick, tired dashes of a masculine hand would twist into the thinner swoops of a female reporter. With no backshift, mistakes were crossed out in red ink.

This is how they did it before, they told each other, as they took shifts to prevent cramping. This is what we have to do. As soon as a sheet was finished they sent a runner to pin it on the bulletin boards of relief shelters.

A week passed until they were able to find a printing press that worked. Three years later, the first sheets that they had hand-written were on their way to Washington D.C., to be preserved for posterity. On one of the sheets were lists of names,

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names of those who were in a specific relief shelter. “There were too many who passed,” the bureau chief said. He pointed to a few names written by a shaky, smudgy hand, and told me with an embarrassed smile that that was his writing.

“At that point, it was more important to chronicle the living.” But the living names would go unrecognized in D.C. And soon the living beings those names represented would pass, and then the paper would simply be paper.

IV There’s a blue bridge that crosses into a wide street next to my house in Tokyo, and the river is lined for a mile with persimmon trees. A nameless man planted them after the war, and when you bike down the street, every other tree flashing by would be a thick persimmon tree, followed by a cherry blossom tree. Come autumn, thick, waxy leaves bundling orange persimmons would collect on the gravel roads, and come April, drudges of pink-brown blossom petals would line the concrete encasing the river, and stink.

One April afternoon after the quake I crossed over the bridge on my bicycle, heading home from school. I heard the whirring of a bicycle behind me, and a man’s voice saying that I had dropped something, stop. So I stopped and the man’s voice came closer, and I felt something, a petal maybe, touch the back of my neck. But it was the man’s finger, and he was asking, “What color is it?”

And I answered with a rush of adrenaline and my foot stamped on the pedals, but his arm was wrapped around the head of my bicycle, his thumb on my brakes. The light touch moved from my neck to my collarbone. With that I swung my leg off my bike, surprisingly easily, and I started to run. I wondered if they recognized what was going on. The grandmothers in motorbikes, buzzing along in their white, plastic helmets. The boys playing with insects on the gravel. The pastel colored houses snug right next to each other, pushing bicycles and schoolgirls through their narrow streets. Middle-aged couples talking to their pets. Looking up, then looking down.

I reached the front gate of my house, and his

voice turned into an image. He was on a slender red sports bike, and he wore a yellow shirt. He was waving at me, and his grin blended into a white flash as he sped past. “I’ll see you again!” he said. The police came to my house and asked if I was wearing a skirt while I was riding my bicycle. A week later I left for the north.

In the morning we had camp-wide morning exercises, radio calisthenics. Just like the old days.

We spreaded out evenly across the university yard and picked our patch of grass. Then we swung our arms and stretched in unison to the rasping music from the radio. Most of us had been doing this since we were children, and our limbs swung automatically to the coordinated routine.

The elderly do it to keep their memory fresh, and every time I swung my arms to the crackling I remembered with a laugh that my grandpa said he liked it because the Americans had banned it for a while, because it was too militaristic. One of the veterans led the radio calisthenics, though it doesn’t really need leading, as we all knew the routine anyway. He sported a black jacket and a black square mask and black boots. He lugged around a black megaphone, and—I checked— he had a black tent.

There was a system of hierarchy, at least in the place where I was, which was the makeshift camp for Peace Boat in a local university. The man with the black leather jacket held the power, because he owned the fleet of buses and vans that transported mud, food, debris, and water.

Anyone who stayed longer than two weeks was called a veteran.

Many would stay, accepting a new skin of dirt and donated food. But most would leave. And every Monday, the bus would leave and a pile of a line of unpopular ramen and beans would be carefully left in a big cardboard box, and veterans would swarm around the pile, picking up favorites from the fresh plastic debris.

V While we ate, we talked. There was a big communal stove, and we dumped our ramen near it, while a veteran would find a big pot.

Do you know the story about Kiko-sama and the

scandal about how she bullied our Empress into mental breakdown? That’s why she won’t have any more children, poor woman.

One time my boy got home and realized that he didn’t have his key to open the door. So— this is what he says, I can’t believe I wasn’t there to see it—he climbed up the fence and scaled the wall to our third floor window, which he knows is usually open, through using his ties as rope!

So this happened to my friend, Saori. She was on the elevator one day and a man came in with a cellphone and a cap. Saori was looking at the mirror and he had come in and his cellphone light flashed. She looked at him, and of course she said “Wait,”—matte, stop, wait, don’t move—“Did you just—” And the elevator door dinged and it was the first floor. With a shrug she walked out but before she did, she tripped. She tripped on his shoe, an oversized white shoe with two velcro pads, and dropped her bag. And then he ran out of the elevator and knelt down beside her. “Are you hurt?” he said. He ran two fingers, two surprisingly clean fingers, she said, up her forearm. And there they stayed. She looked at him and he looked at her, and she felt how nervous he was, and it scared her, she said. And then he said again, “Are you hurt?” and she ran.

But the police of course did nothing and her parents decided not to change apartments. And then he came again. And his knife grazed her skirt and she knew she had to leave somehow but he pressed the button, B1, to the basement garage.

Saori told me then that as she pressed herself against the cold linoleum, as he cut off the buttons of her blazer, she thought about all those times when she had been grasped on the elbow by a scout from a modeling agency in Shibuya.

She would be walking with her friends and they would appear from nowhere but they would have those voices, and of course you would say no— fathers, you know, hate that kind of thing—but you would take their company card and show it to the girls the next morning and complain that another one of those scouts had assaulted them on the street the other day. But somehow this wasn’t like that and she was actually scared because the man’s pants were yellow. They were chemically yellow at the hems, stained yellow with chalk, and rode low on his hips, baggy like

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a construction workers’. And he was now taking off her socks, and putting them into his pocket.

She didn’t resist because she had heard they let you off easy that way. The elevator wasn’t moving though. He’d noticed too. He banged the elevator door and the doors jolted like they were answering but our trusty Mitsubishi elevators don’t really work that way. He pressed the B1 button again. The elevator was too narrow. She’d told the police, hadn’t she, she’d done everything right. And they had said everything was going to be all right, nodded to her parents, and bowing, of course, they had left the apartment.

And everything was going to be alright, though Saori hadn’t known it then, doesn’t really know it now, she says. The elevator had stopped on the first floor and a woman with her dog had come in and screamed and the man with the yellow pants had run out, leaving the knife and Saori on the floor. The woman rode with Saori down to B1 and up to the seventh floor where Saori’s mother had been waiting with her dinner and her pia-

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no lesson. And then Saori’s parents decided to change apartments.

Did you watch the new Ghibli movie? I’m so jealous, I love Porco Rosso, can’t stand Spirited Away, thinking about re-watching Nausicaa again. Let’s watch it tonight, my computer still has a bit of battery left. Don’t call me otaku, I’m not like that, more like obsessed, more obsessed than too obsessed, you know. You know.

They say that the next earthquake will hit Tokyo within the next five years.

You wouldn’t believe it but I think I might want to stay here for a little while longer.

I left after a month, and returned to the rhythm of my life in Tokyo, feeling the shiver of the ground underneath my feet. Out in the universe, even mud shines beautifully.

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SPECIAL THANKS

The Harvard Advocate is committed to publishing the most accomplished student art and writing at Harvard College. This would not be possible without the generosity of our donors, whose contributions support not only the quarterly printing of our issues, but also our broader mission to promote the arts and letters on campus.

The Advocate’s winter issue, TRIAL, was launched in March at Cabinet magazine’s location in Brooklyn. We would like to thank Sina Najafi and the staff of Cabinet for hosting us. We are especially indebted to D.T. Max, who moderated a panel at the event on the role of criticism in the arts. We are grateful to panelists Ruth Franklin, A.O. Scott, Tom Scocca, Casey Cep, and Adam Kirsch for lending their strong and engaging voices to this debate. TRIAL would not have been possible without the financial, logistical, and emotional support of Dr. Michael Coppola and Mrs. Ann Zumwalt. We would also like to express our gratitude to Dorothea Rockburne for her extraordinary cover design.

The Advocate would like to extend a special thank you to the student organizations that co-hosted events with us this March. The spoken word poets of Speak Out Loud collaborated with us on a joint reading and performance, and members of the Nigerian Students Association and the African Students Association helped put together a moving tribute to Chinua Achebe, followed by a discussion of Achebe’s work and legacy with Professor Jacob K. Olupona. Both of these events were part of the Advocate’s new event series Excerpts, an initiative which invites other student organizations to co-host arts events with our membership. We would also like to thank the writers and artists who have visited and read with us this Spring, including Hilton Als, Terrance Hayes, and Harmony Korine.

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Your contributions have supported the maintenance of our website (www.theharvardadvocate.com) and our blog, Notes from 21 South Street (www.theadvocateblog.net). Your support will continue to be vital as we rebuild our website, explore the narrative possibilities of digital essays, and make our magazine available on phones, tablets, and beyond.

In 2016, The Harvard Advocate will celebrate its 150th Anniversary. Contributors at the highest level of support will be recognized in the special anthology which is in the works for this historic occasion.

PATRONS Office for the Arts at Harvard, Dr. Michael Coppola and Mrs. Ann Zumwalt, Joseph Hearn BENEFACTORS Anna Sui DONORS Odyssey, Morgan Hitzig FRIENDS Cody Carvel, Tamara Richard

All gifts to The Harvard Advocate endowment fund are fully tax deductible according to 501(c)(3) nonprofit donation guidelines. Gifts will be acknowledged in the four issues following receipt according to the giving categories of Patron ($1000 and over), Benefactor ($500 and over), Donor ($200 and over), and Friend ($50 and over). For a limited time, Patrons will receive a copy of the Advocate’s Winter 2014 issue signed by Dorothea Rockburne, whose design, Focus, adorns the cover. All contributors will receive a complimentary year’s subscription to the magazine.

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Thank you for supporting Mother Advocate.

THE HARVARD ADVOCATE 47

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CONTRIBUTORS’ NOTES Everything about Noah Pisner is a dog, except he’s a human. Ethan Pierce is a recovering painter. His favorite color is naples yellow hue. Isaac Dayno licks envelopes, but they do not stay closed. Wanjiku Mungai has had enough of roads diverging in the yellow woods. There stood up, once, a thing on Daniel Schwartz’s head. Bianca Vázquez is something witty and clever recently returned from a porn-star friend-funded trip to teach basic English in Thai grade schools, leaving records at http://goo.gl/W2MRp4.

Don’t talk to me about Kevin Hong. Mindy Yi is online now: mindyi.weebly.com. Bailey Trela enjoys philately a little too much. Paul C. Taylor is a philosopher and a member of the Affrilachian Poets, and has been punched in the chest by Nikky Finney for crimes against literature. Sarah Rosenthal dedicates this to the unnamed guinea pig her mother gave away. Miles Hewitt owes it all to the Pundits.

Victoria Baena might be. Moeko Fujii’s vengeance will be threefold.

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