Cyanotypes
Comments Off on Cyanotypes
Yale Daily News
New Haven, Connecticut •
Thursday, April 18, 2024 •
Vol. CXLVI
“Everything in here was found in the dumpsters,” Jason Bischoff-Wurstle says, pointing to a blown-up image of Dimitri Rimsky’s art studio. In the photo, a mustachioed man in a fedora pokes his head past the edge of a convex mirror, casting his expectant gaze across a room strewn with a joyous excess of furniture: a disco ball; a bamboo plant; a microphone; several barbershop chairs. This is a photo of the inside of the New Haven Clock Company Factory at the corner of St. John and Hamilton Streets, east of Wooster Square, taken sometime in the 1980s. The image hangs on the orange walls of Bischoff-Wurstle’s FACTORY exhibit at the New Haven Museum.
The exhibit takes visitors through the history of the factory, from life to afterlife. To say the factory has an eventful history would be reductive. Clocksmith Chauncey Jerome, who helped turn clocks from luxuries into everyday consumer goods, built the factory in 1842. It was bought by the New Haven Clock Company in 1853. In the early 20th century, it came under the direction of Walter Camp (better known for revolutionizing American football) who launched the factory into the production of wristwatches. Half the factory was destroyed during New Haven’s urban renewal of the 1950s and 1960s, when much of the surrounding housing was razed and population displaced to make room for a highway.
But when the Clock Company went out of business in the 1950s, the building’s activity didn’t cease. After a couple decades of holding companies leasing individual rooms, Tony Yagovane, a New Haven resident, bought the building in 1980. Here the building was born anew: out of a deteriorating semi-vacant space arose a lively home for artists and weirdos of all stripes.
Yagovane offered the space to people on the cheap (Dimitri Rimsky reports paying 100-200 dollars a month for 1400 square feet) as long as the occupants took care of installing gas, water, and electricity. The low rent attracted an eclectic mix of tenants. Yale School of Architecture students hosted an annual “sex ball” in the factory, complete with murals of intersex people. A mime troupe (Rimsky’s “Petaluers”) worked there, as did Paul Rutkovsky and Beverly Richey’s Papier Mâché Video Institute (a dissident activist art group). Brick ‘n’ Wood (an R&B club) and Kurt’s (a gay bar) also operated from the building.
In later years, the Bad Ass White Boys (a white supremacist biker gang) took up a wing on the second floor, and a cockfighting ring sprung up in the other wing. Traffic slowed through the 2000s, especially in the wake of Yagovane’s death in 2005. In 2011, Occupy Wall Street’s New Haven branch briefly considered taking over parts of the factory. The last official tenant (a strip club) was finally evicted after a court battle in 2019. These last few years, according to Bischoff-Wurstle, are the longest the building has ever been vacant.
Listing the history of the factory building like this usually elicits interest, but it’s a rather boring way to tell a story, as Bischoff-Wurstle well knows. The challenge, he says, was to find a way to bring out the history vividly without devolving into chronological narration. Bischoff-Wurstle worked urban renewal and the factory’s history as, well, a factory, into the exhibit. But he designed the exhibit to celebrate the factory’s afterlives. He dug up images of the factory, documents from the urban renewal period, and artifacts from the various inhabitants, and by interviewing Rutkovsky, Richey, and Rimsky at length: an attempt to move the factory’s more recent (and more off-beat) stories into the realm of official “history.”
What is displayed in museums has been deemed worthy of exhibition. In a way, museums, by assembling records and lending institutional weight to what they display, decide what is and is not history. The factory’s post-clock history isn’t all that old, but Bischoff-Wurstle thinks that by bringing it “into the canon,” it will prevent this “weird nexus place” from being lost forever. Bischoff-Wurstle described the factory as a “place of encounter” and “accidents.” The exhibit, though curated, sought to capture the factory’s spirit of spontaneity, which Bischoff-Wurstle feels has slowly drained from the world we live in.
Photos by Etai Smotrich-Barr
Bischoff-Wurstle is the Director of Photo Archives at the New Haven Museum. He began arranging the FACTORY exhibit in 2018 in collaboration with Gorman Bechard, who helped found the NHDocs documentary film festival, and Bill Kraus, the owner of a firm that focuses on redeveloping historic buildings. Kraus has worked in commercial real estate for over three decades, primarily dealing with rundown buildings that haven’t delivered on their economic potential. The exhibit, which opened in February 2020, was supposed to be the last of three major factory-related projects spearheaded by Bechard, Kraus, and Bischoff-Wurstle. Bechard and Kraus were jointly working on a yet-to-be-released documentary about the factory and its afterlives. At the same time, Kraus was working with the Oregon-based Reed Development Corporation to turn the space into affordable housing for artists.
What exactly “artist housing” meant was a bit of an open question. In the early 2000s, Kraus spearheaded the conversion of an old department store in downtown Bridgeport into 61 “affordable artist live-work” units, which, he said, has been the “catalyst for a renaissance in downtown Bridgeport,” drawing in “hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars in follow-on development.” It’s not public housing—it’s the “private market with public subsidies.” At the time, this kind of reuse project wasn’t in fashion: cities preferred to clear the sites and build something entirely new. But Kraus, who had nearly a decade of experience restructuring failed real estate projects at Citicorp, understood that these old buildings have potential: he saw economic potential where others saw impediments to economic development. But, Kraus explained, it’s not just business: “I fell in love with old buildings when I was 10, and it’s stayed with me as a passion,” he said. “My mother was a preservationist. I do this in part because I love these buildings and all these stories.” When Kraus came to New Haven and learned about the factory, around 20 years ago, he saw similar potential. He found that the factory had both the right historical significance and physical dimensions to be his next project.
Back in the museum, Bischoff-Wurstle vouched for Kraus: “Bill’s not full of shit,” he said. And indeed, Kraus has probably been more committed to seeing the building through the next phase of its life than anyone else. After the death of their father, Tony Yagovane’s daughters sought Kraus’ advice in doing “artist live-work as an homage to [Yagovane].” Kraus described Yagovane as an “outgoing and fun kind of guy” who had been aiming to convert the building into something like artist live-work housing since the 1990s. Yagovane’s dream, and the work he’d started in 1980, was to create horizontally organized spaces cared for and lived in by artists free from institutional pressure and high rent. From the start, Kraus was a believer in preserving that legacy of the building as much as the building itself. Over the years, he’s tracked down the former residents of the factory to figure out coolness. Kraus is largely responsible for reconstructing its latter-day history based on the memories of the Yagovane children and on physical artifacts found in the building.
After determining that a redevelopment project was feasible, Kraus conducted a survey of artists to gauge interest in living in the converted factory. The survey, distributed by the Arts Council of Greater New Haven and the New England Foundation for the Arts, among others, received 300 respondents. Kraus called it the “biggest, most successful artist survey [he’d] ever done.”
When looking at the survey results, however, Kraus was surprised to find that only ⅓ of the respondents were artists of color in a city with a population that was ⅔ people of color. What Kraus found is that New Haven’s established arts institutions, often affiliated with Yale, were alienating to artists of color. “There really is a lot of racism in New Haven around arts and culture, which was a surprise to me because I had not encountered that elsewhere,” Kraus said. He envisioned targeted outreach to artists of color to secure housing for and promote visibility of the non-white arts scene in New Haven. The goal was for the area and its eventual residents to make themselves known as an alternative to the New Haven arts establishment. “No one,” Kraus said, “[would] ever…be able to say ‘we don’t know where the artists of color are.’” They would be in the factory.
To understand why people live where they do, it is helpful to look at histories of local development. The area around the clock factory didn’t used to be a distinct neighborhood. In the 19th century, Wooster Square was a broad term that included both sides of what is now I-91. The area around the central green, what we now call Wooster Square, was home to several businessmen and shop owners, including James English, a major financier of the clock factory. Wealthy and influential men like these lived in homes designed by prominent New Haven architects like Henry Austin. Because it was convenient to have labor near the factories, Italian and Irish immigrants were housed in the area when they came to New Haven. As wealthier residents moved away to escape what had become New Haven’s industrial center, Wooster Square transitioned into a fairly dense “little Italy.” By the mid-20th century, it retained its architectural heritage—but not the wealth that came with it. When urban renewal became the order of the day, highway construction was imagined as a way to connect New Haven to a new commercial network and to revitalize the city in the face of industrial collapse. Faced with this supposed imperative, New Haven had to decide: which areas would be sacrificed on the altar of economic progress? Where would the highway be built?
When the area was slated for clearance after World War II, residents began to organize around Wooster Square’s architectural heritage. In the late 1950s, Ted DeLauro (father of Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro) worked with Yale architecture students and the newly formed New Haven Preservation Trust to make a case for Wooster Square’s historical value. The NHPT succeeded in routing federal funding for urban renewal into home repair in Wooster Square. That is to say, “redevelopment” money that had for decades been used to clear housing was used to maintain and renew the older townhomes. The townhomes on the other side of I-91, as both Kraus and Bischoff-Wurstle said, were often no different from the majority of the ones in Wooster Square. In the 1971 form nominating Wooster Square for the National Register of Historic Places, the delightful homes on Court Street were described as “tenements which were the worst housing in the area.” But because wealth was inscribed architecturally in the homes of men like James English, the residents of Wooster Square were able to move the highway a few feet east, and spare their own neighborhood.
Because the homes on the wrong side of I-91 were razed, they never got the chance to become “historic.” While what gets deemed historic (as opposed to say, shabby and expendable) in the housing market has everything to do with profit, these designations emerge from a historical process that unfolds along class lines. If the exhibit and the documentary use the language of historical preservation, then, so too does the housing market. Pointing to a picture of the neighborhood around the clock factory before urban renewal, Bischoff-Wurstle identified a row of now-destroyed homes as a place that today would be deemed “historic” and make the landlord a pretty penny. “Who picks what a slum is?” Bischoff-Wurstle asked rhetorically. “The banks and the government do.”
This is a short and simplified version of events. It can be read as a victory: the Preservation Trust modeled the economic potential of saving rather than destroying old buildings. But ultimately, what was demolished and what survived is telling. “History” is associated with wealth. Historical preservation is also self-perpetuating: when Wooster Square was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1971, part of the reasoning named this very historical preservation effort as a reason Wooster Square was a historically significant place.
One of the only other things to survive the clearances of the 1950s and 1960s was a public housing development known as Farnam Courts. Farnam Courts was built by the then-newly established Housing Authority in the 1940s with money from the federal government. This form of public housing began “as a big housing production program post the world wars,” said Karen Dubois-Walton, the Executive Director of the Housing Authority. “It was supposed to be federally supported middle-income housing,” until the federal government shifted tactics and began pushing for suburban housing.
The result? What was at first a nominally racially integrated development with hot water and built-in community space saw its better-off (and often white) residents leave for West Haven and Hamden. The construction of the highway right next to Farnam cut it off from what had been its neighborhood and left it as some of the (if not the) only housing between I-91 and the Mill River. As the federal government pulled more and more money away from traditional public housing efforts like Farnam Courts, they fell further and further into disrepair. In 2012, the Housing Authority, through the nonprofit Glendower Group, relocated the residents and began tearing down Farnam Courts to rebuild it as the mixed-income Mill River Crossing.
Kraus argues that the practice of tearing down old buildings is counterproductive. Not only does it destroy something of historical value, it also stymies further economic growth. “These [historic] buildings are the engines of development,” he argued. In this sense too, Kraus is seeking to restore the factory—if its first life was as an industrial economic engine, its next one can be an economic engine as a housing development.
But Kraus’s vision of affordable housing for artists of color fell apart a few years ago, as Reed Community Development and its affiliated holding company, Taom Heritage New Haven LLC, began to neglect the site. A 2016 report found that the factory had unsafe levels of radium attributed to the paint used in wristwatches during the Walter Camp era. Connecticut’s Brownfield Municipal Grant program has set aside $700,000 for cleaning up the factory site. In 2018, the city of New Haven approved a redevelopment project with money for environmental cleanup and a tax abatement for construction, but since then, the city has claimed that Reed failed to pay what taxes it did owe and allowed the site to fall into further physical disrepair. In August of 2023, the city agreed to buy the foreclosed property from Taom Heritage.
Now, the city has passed the site to the Housing Authority of New Haven, which is hoping to recover the site with “most of the remediation done.” Karen Dubois-Walton, Executive Director of the HANH, is eyeing the site for conversion into up to 100 units of mixed-income housing. Dubois-Walton explained that the present-day model of housing began in the late 1990s with the demolition of Elm Haven, then the oldest public housing development in the city. Elm Haven was replaced by Monterey Place, a mix of market-rate, partially subsidized, and low-income housing.
This mixing, Dubois-Walton said, creates “more vibrant” communities and “doesn’t just segregate poverty” in the same way traditional low-income housing like Elm Haven and Farnam Courts does. Crucially, mixed-income housing is easier to get funding for. “Lower income public housing ties the Housing Authority’s hands on funding,” she added, noting that you can’t raise capital via federally backed mortgages for these developments—the federal government will not back projects that are composed solely of affordable housing.
In an astonishing reversal from the urban renewal period that saw highway construction and home demolition as an economic winner, today’s vision casts housing as the catalyst for community development and economic growth. Dubois-Walton described the process as a sort of spillover effect—when housing gets built, it can “spark and spiral out and pull in other investments,” according to her. The clock factory site sits diagonally across from Mill River Crossing, a 2018 HANH development of just under 100 units-cum-retail space. Dubois-Walton is hopeful that connecting the new factory housing with the existing Mill River Crossing can create “synergy” and turn “one product into so much more.”
New Haven needs more housing—according to Dubois-Walton, the city faces a severe “underproduction of units”—but the institutionalization of housing and its centralization under a government agency seems to run counter to the ethos that Yagovane and then Kraus sought to implement. Instead, issues of plausibility and financing dominate discussions and low-income housing tax credits and historic restoration tax credits cover the costs. Kraus admits that if he “could have waved a magic wand, what he would have liked to do, what the family would have liked to do, is create artist condominiums…and sell them so it really belongs to the artists.” But we’re short on magic wands, and so all that’s left of the vision is “millions and millions of dollars” in the red column on the balance sheet. If the “dream” was artist-owned co-op-style housing, it was always, given the need to create a well-financed sustainable project at-cost, impossible.
At this point, everyone’s hoping the building stays standing. “Time beats the hell out of these things,” Bischoff-Wurstle said, and he’s right. Parts of the building that were functioning businesses five years ago are now crumbling brick walls with giant holes. The building has survived improbably, impossibly, even when there was no one to defend it. The factory, as both Kraus and Bischoff-Wurstle have it, played host to the best days of some people’s lives. The latter spoke bleakly of what he called the “ouroboros,” the snake eating its own tail, the process by which coolness springs up in shady places, hidden from power—only to be consumed by wealth, time and time again.
Separating history from wealth is a difficult task. But for Bischoff-Wurstle, that’s the point. The factory is a weird, skeevy, unsanitized place, a “place of innovation and fermentation,” and it is that spirit of innovation and irregularity he wants to preserve. It is the spirit of hiding the bed in the wall when the fire marshal comes by because you couldn’t have residences in an industrially zoned area. It is the spirit of being able to make art without worrying about paying the bills: as Bischoff-Wurstle said, “New Haven has been called the cultural capital of Connecticut. If people can’t afford to do culture, what are we?” It is a spirit of youthfulness, instability, care, and spontaneity. But all of those things, at least in the context of the factory, are history now.
I had been ready to die, pretty much. To close my casket from the inside. To entomb myself in a little plastic pod filled with saltwater and float in darkness for an hour and a half, sightless, soundless, senseless—to sink into shadow and succumb to the void.
Ripple Float & Wellness Center keeps the tone light, though. They’ve got beanbags and watercolor paintings and potted aloe vera. In the lounge, there’s a bookshelf with titles like Gracefully You, Global Bohemian, and The Art of Happiness (by the Dalai Lama). The tea is ginger-spiced and gut-healthy, the candles are scented, the couch cushions are macramé.
The man at the front desk, Bryan, hands me a laminated sheet to pick the color lights for my tank. I ask if anyone ever actually chooses red lights, my eyes widening at one photo where the water glows like it’s on fire. “We get a lot of veteran floaters that ask for them, actually,” he says with a laugh. “Red causes less dilation on the eyes.” I try to imagine floating in red water and can already hear the Jaws theme—I go for a calm aquamarine instead.
Eli picks aquamarine, too. He’d asked to tag along about a week ago. He didn’t know much about floating either (he was imagining a fifteen minute affair with clothes on, for starters), but he was hoping it might put his life into perspective, removing himself from it all for a while. “I want to see what the nothing can tell me about the something,” he quipped.
Me, I’m much more interested in the nothing than the something. The real world, all its messy particulars and contingencies, it’s okay. It’s just so specific. I’ve never been good with details, Mondays and Tuesdays and so on. I first heard about sensory deprivation tanks in my philosophy class last semester. We were talking about Descartes—are we minds beyond matter? Simple, indivisible, pure? Do it, doubt the world, doubt your body, all the sharp angles, the rough patches, strip it all away. What’s left? I figured the questions were hypothetical until our professor told us about the tanks—he said he floated in one about once a month, in a spa by the Omni Hotel.
I went down a Googling rabbit hole that night, head full of demons and dreamers, selves without senses, pure essences and lofty abstractions. Turns out, more and more people have been seeking out sensory deprivation tanks over the past decade, to help them sleep better, to stress less, to chill all the way out. Some of them come out rhapsodizing about cosmic oneness and nigh-on nirvana. Praise piles on praise: it’s rejuvenating, it’s psychedelic, it’s ‘meditation on steroids,’ a shortcut to the deepest levels of mindfulness anyone can reach, monks aside. It’s also great for your skin. What can I say: I was a fish eyeing a hook. I bit.
Once Eli and I make our light and music selections, Bryan leads the way to the corridor with the float tanks. I take my coat off as we squeeze into one of the rooms, hot and humid. There’s a little space to undress, a shower, and a white plastic door in the wall leading to the flotation tank. Bryan runs through the pre- and post-float instructions, gives us a smile, a thumbs up, and lets us get on with it.
I say the tank door looks like a spaceship, and Eli laughs, though it wasn’t very funny. He says he’s nervous, and we both laugh, though that wasn’t very funny either. He crosses the corridor to his own room and starts closing the door. “See you on the other side.”
After shutting my own door, I take off my clothes, put on earplugs (salt in your ears, very crunchy, not fun), and shower as Bryan instructed. And then I open my tank. It’s more of a room, really, tall enough to stand in: the water glows a soft aquamarine, and the rainforest track I chose turns on, greeting me with faraway bird calls, creaking frogs.
I step inside. The water is slow to move through, thick with salt. I lower myself, slowly, slowly, careful with my eyes, fearing the decidedly unrelaxing burn of hundreds of pounds of Epsom salt. Then, I close the door behind me. I shut off the aquamarine lights, mute the music, silence the frogs. And I let myself float.
I’m breathing too quickly. I can hear myself sucking the air through my nose, feel the whoosh of it through my chest. I try to calm down. I tell myself it’s all fine and normal, being naked in a strange tank in the dark and hearing your heartbeat in your ears and tasting salt in the thick air. I focus on my breath. The in and the out. With each exhale, my muscles slowly start to loosen, and I let myself sink deeper and deeper. My neck softens, my head falls back, and, soon enough, my body has completely let go. When the saltwater hovers just an inch below my eyes, I discover that I can’t bring myself to worry about it.
I’ve settled in now. All that’s left is to lie still, stare into the darkness, and wait. I’m ready to forget my body, to cast off my senses and enter some Cartesian consciousness. Only, the longer I float, the more sensations I start noticing. I feel my lower ribs jutting out from the surface of the water. I feel the water from the shower tickling the hairs on my face, above my mouth, hardening my skin as it dries. I blink—I can feel my eyelids. Am I supposed to stop feeling my eyelids? How do I stop feeling my eyelids??
After a while, I admit it to myself. It’s just not going to happen. I had been holding out hope for an out-of-body experience, but ultimately I can feel everything I would’ve expected from floating around in some salty water in the dark for ninety minutes. Wet, warm, and a little silly.
Still, I keep on floating. I wonder how much time it’s been. I listen to my breathing, watch purplish blobs appear against the black. And I’m right—I never forget my body. But then I hear an echo from something outside, and I realize with a start that, for a moment, I had forgotten that there was an outside. I just hadn’t been thinking about it. My thoughts are all darkness and water and salt. I didn’t catch when, but at some point life beyond the tank had slipped away from me—right now, my whole world is just this little tank. I have nobody waiting for me, nothing to do, nowhere to go.
I start fighting to keep my eyes open, but then I can’t give myself a reason why. It doesn’t matter whether I fall asleep or not in here—any worries about wasting the experience, or not having anything to write about, are too faint, too far away, for my mind to get a grip on. I try to care. I can’t quite pull it off. Instead, I listen to my breath and my heartbeat, and I just exist there, in the darkness and the nothing, not thinking about much of anything but that breath, that beat. And then I fall asleep.
A few hours ago, I woke up on a couch in my friends’ suite. We had stayed up until 2 AM the night before and I didn’t want to walk back in the cold. The day came to me slowly, the golden light, the heater humming, the bad breath, a ghost of yesterday’s pizza. One friend was already awake, and another woke up soon after, and they both decided it was a great idea to try and all fit on the couch at once. I felt someone’s elbows poking into my stomach as they piled on top of me, and there were ows and oys, and my laughter squeezed against someone else’s ribcage, and my leg went numb, and my arm got stuck between the cushions, but none of us had any intention of leaving. We lay there, talking about nothing, until the others woke up and we went to brunch. I could’ve stayed like that for longer, so warm and weighed down.
When I wake up in the darkness again, I’m wet and alone. I feel strange, a quieter thing, hollower, almost. I know I’m just in the tank, but, after waking up inside it, thinking about the world before I started floating feels like recalling a dream. The memories are vague, hazy. So I just keep floating, like I did before, like it feels like I’ve always been doing. I don’t even have to try to clear my mind—it’s been emptied out. Nothing is urgent enough to concentrate on. Thoughts drift by; I let them go.
Suddenly, a woman’s voice cuts through the silence, telling me that my float is over and if I could please step outside so the self-cleaning process can begin. Her voice is low, harsh. I hate her. I squint when the blue lights turn on. When I recover, the first thing I see are my legs, and they surprise me—I had forgotten my body would look like anything. I draw them tight to my chest and stay there, curled up in the warm water, not wanting to leave my cocoon, not even wanting to think about it. After a few minutes more, the water starts churning like a jacuzzi—this tank is going to self-clean, with or without me. I force myself to stand up and push open the door to the bright-white room.
The air I thought was clammy before is now far too cold. I drag myself out of the tank, step into the shower, compel myself to turn it on. The water hits me harshly, stripping off what’s left of the thick salt solution I had been swaddled in. I remember I still have my earplugs, and pull them out—all of a sudden, sound becomes as sharp as sight, too high, too grainy. I want to put them back in. I hear Bryan talking to Eli outside. “Oh, I know that face—that’s the oh, shit face!” Eli laughs out loud, light and easy. I have no idea how he can do that—the thought of trying to talk to anyone right now exhausts me. I pat myself dry and put clothes over slightly damp skin, socks on slightly damp feet. It all feels very wrong and scratchy. Trying to ignore the water from my hair seeping into my sweater, I force myself out the door.
Eli is standing over the kettle in the lounge. He had a great time. He had been spinning around, bobbing here and there, positioning his arms every which way—at his sides, behind his head, starfished. At some point, he even started trying on different accents—he realized that he could be anyone, not just in the tank, but outside of it, too. “I was thinking about the narrative of my life,” he said. “How I could change it.” I say that’s so exciting. I hope I sound excited. He asks me how my float went, but all I’m thinking about is my cold hair, my itchy sweater, the warm quiet I want to crawl back to. How did my float go? I’m still floating. Well Eli, I didn’t feel human, and honestly I don’t feel quite human right now.
But I don’t say that. I fiddle with my mug. “Really weird.”
We steal some organic tea bags and go outside. As we’re walking back to campus, Eli says he’s remembering how happy it made him in the tank to think about going back to his life. “I was thinking, like, this is great, and I’ll be here for ninety minutes and enjoy it, but I’m excited to go back into the world.” He had thought a lot about his friends—he had felt like hugging everyone as soon as he saw them.
I hadn’t really thought about my friends in the tank. Definitely not about hugging them. I think about them as he says it, though. And the more we walk, whatever strange, vacant creature I was in the tank begins to fall away. I savor the strength of my legs, pushing down against the pavement. My arms cutting through the air. The moon comes out from behind an apartment complex, a motorcycle roars by, a little girl tugs her mother into Ben & Jerry’s, giggling. A hug sounds nice, I tell him. Really nice. Eli says something funny, and I tip my head back to laugh.
This semester, I’ve learned a new and exciting term in my architecture courses: Pin-Up, a relatively informal presentation of architectural drawings, designs, and renderings. The term comes from architects’ tradition of pinning their designs up on the wall for critique and discussion. I am understanding Pin-Ups as disjointed chunks of printed material on the wall—an explanation will bring them together. I am not an architect, though, and this is not an architecture studio. Everything is fair game for my Pin-Ups—the chair I’m sitting in now, what I ate for lunch, a song, a sculpture, a book, The Pietà… I admit that I am appropriating this term for my own ends—I just like to write in vague chunks. I will be ‘pinning up’ things that I have been seeing around, hearing around, and thinking about, and I will present them all to you in a chunky, vignette style. I am open to relevant criticism and conversation. I would even welcome it: chela.simon-trench@yale.edu
Mary Louise Boyle Tarantino, a birch tree lover from Pennsylvania turned Connecticut mother, died in New Haven on April 23, 1968. She was sixty.
Her unknown cause of death could have been something slow. A long illness, a killer vice. She died at 166 Cold Spring Street, New Haven, Conn. She was survived by her husband, daughter, and three sons.
Born to salesman George Boyle and housewife Martha Robertson (insert city if found), Mary Louise was the youngest of five. At twenty-three, she married Louis Gerald Tarantino in the Church of the Savior, West Philadelphia, on Dec. 27 1930—a year after their first child, baby Helen A Crossen, was born. Neither of the newlyweds listed their parents nor any witnesses on their marriage certificate. They had eloped: Louis and Louise. They went on to have three other boys: Louis Gerald Junior, Peter Ayers, and Thomas Howard Tarantino. The family lived in Bridgeport and New Haven; they were Espiscopalian. Mary was a homemaker—she never had a wage job, but she volunteered for the Visiting Nurses Association of New Haven.
She was buried in Grove Street Cemetery following an 11 a.m. funeral service at St. Thomas Episcopal Church on April 25. Her grave is at 42 Central Ave. Look for the tall, white birch tree.
—
I grew up in Larchmont Village, Los Angeles. In the middle of the sprawling city, Larchmont feels like a suburb: family homes with lawns, lemonade stands, street lights that go on at 6pm, people who know your name, neighborhood fairs, a main street. Larchmont Boulevard: home to the butcher, the barber, the toy shop, the grocer, a diner, the bookstore, and the weekly farmers market since the 1930s.
I grew up, and the butcher became a Blue Mercury. The barber became a bespoke perfume boutique. My toy shop became a laser facial spa. A transplant from New York replaced my bookstore with another coffee shop–the third in the neighborhood. Time passes so tangibly on Larchmont. Every time I come home, parts of my street have died.
Last summer, powerless against the floods of Westside millennials pretending to work on their computers, I sought something ridiculous and performative to remind them that Larchmont was mine, and the butcher’s, the barber’s, the farmer’s.
So I started buying the paper. I spread myself way out on their coffee shop tables, reading for as long as I was patient. A big, fold-out New York Times felt like the oldest thing I could get my hands on anymore. And so began my love for the Obituaries section.
Better than Arts and Culture, than Reviews, lighter than the headlines, Obituaries are the only part of the paper I love. Lives in 800 words—retrospective, historical, formulaic but tender. Obits have so little to do with death and everything to do with life. The accomplishments of the deceased trace their outline. Every obit has one line that fills in the soul:
Suzanne Shepherd, Actress Known for Playing Mothers, Dies at 89
Recently, Mr. Capotorto said, Ms. Shepherd had told him: “There are plenty more mothers to play. I want to play them all.”
Kevin Wynn, Choreographer of Complex Movement, Dies at 67
“The complex layered movement dialogue was more than a movement language. It was a rainforest, a bustling metropolis, it was fantasy and nightmare. It was ultimately the freedom to dream, and to create a world as I’d want to see it.”
David Del Tredici, Who Set ‘Alice’ to Music, Dies at 86
Flamboyant and gregarious, Mr. Del Tredici cultivated a reputation as a beloved scamp who did what he wanted.
Vincent Asaro, Mobster Acquitted in Lufthansa Heist, Dies at 86
As he left the courthouse and got into a car, he giddily joked, “Don’t let them see the body in the trunk.”
Park Seo-Bo, Whose Quiet Paintings Trumpeted Korean Art, Dies at 91
“One day,” he said in an interview this year, “I witnessed my 3-year-old son trying to recreate the writings of his older brother. It was an impossible task for his small, chubby fingers, but he tried again and again with little success. Finally, frustrated, he unleashed a tirade of zigzag patterns all over his notebook with the pencil and admitted defeat. My son’s experience felt close to my own.”
Louise Glück, 80, Nobel-Winning Poet Who Explored Trauma and Loss, Dies
“The poets I returned to as I grew older were the poets in whose work I played, as the elected listener, a crucial role,” she said in her Nobel acceptance speech. “Intimate, seductive, often furtive or clandestine. Not stadium poets. Not poets talking to themselves.”
—
I don’t always mourn when I read obituaries. I mostly admire their perfect line—something finally made complete, something tied with a ribbon at the end. Obituary writers are so cautious, thoughtful, methodical, emotional; theirs is a tender craft, heavy and filled with responsibility. The weight of their task lands on the page in that perfect line. When I find the line, the weight moves from the page to my stomach, where it lives for as long as I remember it.
In the documentary Obit (2017) about the New York Times Obituary desk, the writers spoke about their careful craft:
“You are trying to weave a historical spell, in a way, and enchant the reader, and do justice to a life. You have the chance that you can’t repeat. It’s a once-only chance to make the dead live again.”
“I always think about the stilled voice, the fingers that don’t move anymore, the fact that you’re not gonna hear anything more that they could’ve said.”
I am a terribly self-critical writer, and I am always trying to use barely any words. I have, unfortunately, read stuffy German theory about the implications of language and the act of ‘to speak.’ More words means more associations and contexts that are out of my control, that stray my sentence further and further from its meaning. How can I say just enough?
This is why I love Obituaries.
Obit writers have mastered the art of boiling down, of saying just enough, and still getting to the essence. The writers leave so much unsaid. That perfect line is the proof of this reduction process: always so simple, but filled with essence. Obit writers at the New York Times write about people who they never really knew. And yet they are able to write that line that feels so inside the icon, so true, so whole. I don’t understand how they write that perfect line.
—
Maybe you find me crass for admiring obits for their structure. Maybe I need more time spent with obits to access that sadness for strangers. Maybe it’s not about death or sadness at all. Maybe an obit is a portrait, a list of a life well lived. Maybe when the fifth transplant coffee shop from New York lands on Larchmont Boulevard, I will write an obituary for my beloved main street. Maybe then I will mourn. Maybe I will learn how to write that perfect line. Maybe I will write for the New York Times Obituary desk. But I would settle for finding someone who would share the paper with me, so the headlines, reviews, and interviews don’t go to waste.
—
Mary Louise Boyle Tarantino’s gravestone is my favorite in Grove Street Cemetery. I found her in the snow during my freshman year. I was the first to put footsteps in the fresh three inches from the night before. The scum over her epitaph was momentarily cleared by the storm. I visit her often, and thought I would write her an obituary. I found national census records, marriage and birth certificates—just her outline, or maybe even less. I wish I knew what her girlhood was like in Pennsylvania, what she liked to do, why she landed in Connecticut? I didn’t have to write her the perfect line to fill in her soul. She wrote it herself; not in her obituary, but in her epitaph: “If in reincarnation, I do appear, how lovely is the birch.” Right next to her grave grows a lovely birch tree.
“The Afterword” is born from scribbles buried between cracked book spines, from the creased corner of a well-thumbed novel. Through this coming-of-age column, I hope to use the literary bildungsroman to make sense of my real-life experience of growing up — and to write the afterword on the texts I most treasure.
My first memories of writing were not of my own.
As I lolled about in the tepid waters of my bathtub, my mum would perch on a wooden stool, her open laptop balanced precariously in her lap. I’d relish her sentences in soap splashes, the bubbles of a buoyant turn of phrase dribbling down my bare back. Wading in the warmth of the water, in the warmth of her words, I’d watch her day’s work unfold before me, chapter by chapter, sentence by sentence. And when the finality of the last full stop was on the watery horizon, I’d savor an extra inch-full up to my chin, before the soapy slurry of an incomplete story drained coolly past my knees.
For my mother, a published author of children’s fiction, the story was over—at least for the night. For me, it had only just begun.
Later that night, I’d wait tip-toed at our home printer for a copy. It would stutter out, stalling at each textual disgorge, the smell of still warm paper and printer’s ink growing heavier in my hands. Crayons astray, I’d make amateur edits that only childhood’s playful naïveté could have gulled me to believe that my mother needed.
I’d spend the next day at primary school coaxing the clock, waiting for my mother to climb the cliffhangers she’d abandoned me at the night before. To scale her story’s rising action, pen against paper, chisel against stone, and meet me armed with a new chapter by the time I got home from school.
Only in the stuffiness of academic geek-speak did I get confirmation of what I’ve always innately known: that reading and writing, as Sartre puts it in What is Literature?, is a “pact of generosity between author and reader.”
As a child, our pact was bargained over dinner, for another bite of the stringbeans; it trailed behind us on car-rides, our ever-trundling wagon wheel; it slipped in and out of picturebooks, as naturally as a bookmark. My mother was the quiet hand, slipping kisses into the pockets of my denim dungarees on my first day of school. We’d thumbed through the pages of Angela McAllister’s A Pocket Full of Kisses the night before. My mother had breathed words into the pictures of Digby the Mole, emboldened to face similar kindergarten anxieties with his mother’s kisses tucked away in his pocket. She was the compass for my wonky pencil’s journey across the paper, my small hand wrapped inside her larger one, climbing the beanstalk of each letter and sliding down its slippery end.
And in her spare time, among the many other things my mother did, she wrote — and that was as wondrous a thing as any other.
As a teenager, our pact was an economy of words. I wanted her generosity to show itself in the stingiest sentence. An unthinking text home about how I would be staying out late prompted run-on responses, often about the perennial anxiety of being a parent, of the untimely difficulty of severing the umbilical cord. I’d groan at her perfectly worded reply, several sentences longer than mine, several inches deeper than I was looking to dig at 10 PM on a Friday. Or other times, when I would go on my evening walk with her, pausing to capture the sun-streaked Bombay sky. I was unaware, then, that as I watched the sunset, she watched me: the subject of her next prose poem, still only in its nascent beginnings.
Now, as someone who writes, I understand my mother in her visceral impulse to pin down the wandering thought, in her perception of the world through the word, in her ability to see in twenty-six-letter vision. Writing is that unbreakable pact woven into the fabric of my everyday life and my relationship with my mother.
For as long as I can remember, I have been addicted to that strange discomfort of watching the cursor blink on the empty screen until the fray ends of an idea assemble, of living in that state of suspension occupied by readers and writers. I’ve realized that my mother understands me as a reader of her most polished chapter and her most disjointed sentence; and that I, in turn, understand her by writing my own.
For the unspoken “pact” of both motherhood and writing is a willingness to suspend our disbelief, to drop it carelessly like a toffee for the promise of a generous childhood — and the promise of a generous story.
Writer and reader; mother and child.
I want to write the novel that ties up all the ends that have ever been loose. The story that makes my own trajectory clear, that gives meaning to the years I’ve sat around anxious, lethargic, waiting for answers—that affirms, declares me a human being, materialises the most scattered parts of my idea-centric mind into something you can hold and love and know. But I don’t know what free indirect discourse is, so I’m taking a short story writing class. Over the course of a semester, the class asks its students to write a single sto- ry and revise it twice. It is taught by a Pulitzer-Prize winner who mumbles his guidance. Under ruffling leaves and the heat of the sun, the wind drowns out his words: “There will always be a gap between the greatness we can imag- ine and the approximation we can write down. This is only the beginning.”
This column is about the process of writing my story: the false starts, the revisions, the manufactured ends. This essay is about how language got in the way.
The French language belongs to intellect. It is a tool for thought. It is Beauvoir’s, Sartre’s, Camus’s, Voltaire’s: used to rearrange the world, to work out who we are, why we’re here; when the struggle ends, where it begins, and how, how did I end up tainting this? The French language is not for the menial. It does not belong to me. I’ve been taking Elementary French for the last three months, which is to say that I’ve been feeling bad about myself in a second language. In the semester I was supposed to dedicate myself to ideas, to writing, to my story, my damn short story, I’m learning how to introduce myself in a language I’m bitter to have met. I’m tired. I’m angry. I want to tear the pages out of my textbook and watch the simple sentences rain down on me, but I’m implicated—the class is on my transcript; my pride is on the line—I have to speak French every goddamn day and the only language I have to express my frustration is: c’est terrible.
I came into the class like a bull raised on Parisian grass: pretentious, loud, thrashing around to stake my claim. I’d taken a year of French as a child, and then two more in early high school. I knew how to introduce myself, and pronounced each syllable of en-chan-té like I was parodying the language. Two weeks in, my professor gave me a pamphlet for the French Certificate. He chuckled as I read it. He is the kind of man who talks as he laughs and laughs as he talks to the point where the laughter is all he wants to say, and I felt those sounds were his way of saying that he believed in me.
I put in the work. I spent hours every afternoon tackling quizlets and building a foundation. I flew through greetings, colors, professions, and meals, but when we circled back to introducing ourselves, and my name is became I am from and I am from became I am going, I became tired and felt like I was going to die. I’ve never been one for schedule. I struggle with maintaining a practice. I like the new, the ever-expanding, so when I realized that it would be years before I landed upon a thought in French that I was yet to have in English, I decided to put the language away.
My progress stagnated. My passion waned. After a month of lessons, when people asked why I was taking French, all I could say was, “Je ne sais pas.”
I was bitter. I told myself that intelligence had nothing to do with rote learning, but each time someone in class said a word I didn’t know, I felt jealous, inferior, further from French than I’d ever been. I used writing as an excuse for not focusing on French. I used French as an excuse for doing less writing. I sat in my room cursing all French culture: Antoinette’s frivolity and the radicalism that contended against it. I didn’t have my cake. I couldn’t eat it too.
Three days before our midterm, a friend sent me a four-hundred-word Quizlet. Lying in bed each night, I opened it and stared without flipping a single flashcard.
Our exams happen on the ground floor of an economics department building: a glass dome where no one feels like they’re wasting their life. On four hours of sleep—not because I was up studying, but because I was kept awake by the shame of not—I sat down at a computer and completed the soundcheck. As always, the exam’s first section involved an oral response. A cheery French voice asks you a multiple-part question. You’re supposed to be given two turns to listen, thirty seconds to think, and one shot to tape your answer. But when the high pitched voice swung up even higher, punctuating its question with a little twirl, the computer refused to play the recording again. I whipped around, signaling over my professor, and tried to stake my claim.
“Monsieur,” I said, “la question– la– the question only played once.”
Again, his laugh. “Yes,” he said.
“It’s supposed to play twice.”
“No,” he said.
“But it says here,” I said pointing at the screen, “it says here it’s supposed to play twice.”
Already receding, speaking through a snigger, my professor said, “Alright. The question is about the events of your life. It wants to know what you have done with your past.”
I turned back around to a flashing red microphone icon on my screen and fifteen seconds left to record. Trying to push the words through my brain, I cursed quite involuntarily into my headphones’ mouthpiece. J’ai (I have)… J’ai (I have) I said…the icon went gray.
The first draft of my short story ended up being about a Jehovah’s Witness who, while rattling along London’s Northern line, between chance encounters and unending consumption, reflects on how he came to religion and why he came to be. In his feedback, my fiction professor wrote that it felt less like a story and more of a rant and a riff, “which is what it wants to be.” Even when I’m not writing about a pseudo-religious man on a train, I want my stories to remain vehicles for thought; spaces that I can sit in until ideas walk through the door.
My frustration with French is that it’s stopped me from thinking. I spent all that time trying to build a vocabulary, and, still, it amounted to nothing. I have no history in the French language. When asked what I’d done with my past, I truly believed that there was no answer: that I was thrown into the world without the ability to say that I have lived a life of value.
In English, I have packed my life into boxes and moved across the world, twice. In French, I have. In English, I have known love, great and small, and heartbreak, always great. In French, I have.
My professor gave me back my midterm with a frown on his face: “We have a problem, don’t we,” he said as I flipped through my failure. He had no idea.
A problem suggests a solution, and I believed one might be found in analysis. I wanted to measure the gulf between my proficiency in both languages, to find out how far the tightrope I had to walk extended. I remembered that over the summer I’d taken an (English) vocabulary test that told me I knew 23000 words and had the vocabulary of a successful 30-year-old American businessperson. When I told my father, who’s terrified of having a writer for a son, he smiled and went, “here’s hoping.”
Thinking that it’d be impossible to replicate the programming of the test, I decided to manually catalog my vocabulary. Beginning with single-letter words and working my way up, I wrote down what I knew in the two languages I claimed to speak.
a and i in English
a and à and y in French.
I got as far as bus (le bus) and decided to call it a day.
When I do have time to sit down and write my story, what I’ve realized is that language is an uncontainable thing. I’m never going to write down the 23000 words I supposedly know, and yet they’re the whispers that lead me through the dark. On a primary level that means that the rhythm of a passage drives me to plot points I’d be unable to imagine myself, that the first draft of my story ended with an exorcism because I was writing about a proselytizer caught amongst a dance troupe and the final move in the dance routine felt like it had to be the taming of the devil. But beneath that it means that anything I’m able to conceive of—the pillars of my selfhood and world—rests upon the foundation of the words, and only the words, that I have been given. All I know is all that I can speak to, and, excuse my French but, fuck, that’s terrifying.
In a quiz between my French midterm and final I had to write about my favorite day of the week. I wanted to say that I liked Sundays because they were when I could rest, but I could only remember rest as a noun. So I pulled the scraps of my vocabulary together, and out came: I like Sundays because it is the day I can see the world for what it is. A sentence I’d never write in English, one that I was forced into by a lack of French vocabulary, and yet a string of words that sends a tiny chill down my spine, one that I don’t have the words to explain.
For two days after the quiz I told everyone I saw that learning a foreign language was one of the most worthwhile things a person, particularly a writer, could do. I said that the constraints would guide you to sentences that you could only dream of, and the history would introduce you to customs that opened up your world. I mentioned that in the skits we prepared for class, two scene partners held each other’s hands as they marveled at how beautiful the Swiss Alps were in May, how beautiful in May, how beautiful in May, over and over again. I said that wasn’t something you saw in English.
On Thursday my professor assigned an hour’s worth of homework.
On Friday I emailed my dean asking to drop French.
He told me that I’d have to take another language.
“Russian.”
“It’d be just as hard.”
“ASL.”
“That, too, Eli.”
I clasped my hands together, begging for mercy. I wanted him to know that I was a fast learner.
That evening, I sat around anxiously waiting for a follow-up email from my dean. My phone buzzed, and I picked it up, only to realise that it was a message from my father. He’d sent me an essay by Jhumpa Lahiri. I texted back that I’d read it already. I can be cruel. The essay was about Lahiri’s struggle to find a language that was entirely her own. She was raised in Bengali and schooled in English; she taught herself Italian as a means of escape. I doubt I’ll ever be free from English. I have neither the talent nor the patience to bring a new language into my life. I run circles around the one I do know and it runs circles around me; it constricts my way of thinking in ways I’ll never know. I’m writing a short story about religion because I’m concerned with religious ideas but I’m concerned with religious ideas because the language I think in grew out of them. I was raised in a language that has a thousand different ways to say want, desire, wish, demand; a language that was used to pray before it was used to pillage. Good Lord.
Lahiri wrote her essay in Italian then translated it back to English. No one escapes their words.
Take a look at Mark Rothko’s Untitled (1968) – the blue background displays a deep sapphire shade that, although obstructed by large black blocks, nonetheless hypnotizes and radiates an overwhelming, solitary gravity. The colors wash over and swallow the viewer. The work draws the gaze in, appearing as a diveable well into the infinite and unknown. One feels empty, subsumed by the void before them.
At least I feel that way, but maybe the blue doesn’t do it for you. Maybe you think Rothko’s color fields are just a bunch of paint blobs. Or maybe he’s just one of the many great abstract expressionists. Many, if not most, view Rothko in these latter ways, not leaning towards a more emotional interpretation. It makes me question if I invented my interpretation from nothing, and if my experience is legitimate. Since Rothko’s color-fields reduce two-dimensional art to its most fundamental elements – shapes, textures, and, crucially, colors – his works are the perfect basis to explore the effect of color in its most primal form, as simply the shade, the pigment. Can color, specifically blue, because I find its depth uniquely powerful, limn the ecstasies and tragedies of life and elicit real, justifiable emotions? Or am I playing a trick on myself, divining something out of nothing? Am I just unbearably pretentious?
“Blue” is what we say to refer to 450 to 495 nanometer wavelength light, sandwiched between “green” and “indigo”. It appears occasionally in nature: in certain minerals, hydrangeas, and the iridescent rings on a blue-ringed octopus, but it’s rare. For things in nature to appear blue, an organism’s cells must absorb longer-wavelength, lower-energy light, which demands more energy from the organism; only niche evolutionary paths can produce an organic blue.
Early humans didn’t employ blue at all, with primeval cave paintings only marked by charcoal blacks, and clay reds and yellows mixed with fat and fire. Ancient Egypt made the first-known blue, “Egyptian blue,” from mixing copper, sand, and calcium in a furnace. Out of that crucible came a glassy material of copper silicate, which, when ground up, gave the new power of a previously-unattainable pigment to the surfaces of the world. Blue became part of the human palette.
Egyptian blue, however, would be lost between the exchanging hands of history, as the Romans didn’t know how to make it. They used alternative methods: ancient sources detail a week-long process of mixing efflorescent copper-mash, violet petals, fat-based soap, and urine to obtain “azure-blue,” which can be purified by adding lime, other flowers, or sealing it in a process similar to wine fermentation. New shades of blue popped up in the human lexicon.
Until the 19th Century, these intensive copper-based methods persisted. Blue pigment would cost artists and patrons greatly, while people throughout the ages sought finer and more efficient methods. Semi-precious minerals, azurite and lapis lazuli, were the other primary sources of blue pigment, demanding significant labor and cost to extract and make usable. Azurite was relatively common and contained dark and light-blue specks, with a greenish hue. Lapis lazuli, on the other hand, bore a deep, weighty blue that waxed purplish. More expensive than gold, lapis lazuli, also called “ultramarine blue” (a deeper blue than the sea), was highly valued for its luster and pure deep-blueness. Ultramarine was found in the Ajanta Caves in India, decorating the colossal Buddhist monuments. In Renaissance Italy, it was almost exclusively reserved for depictions of the Virgin Mary and Jesus. This blue, the deepest blue, was only used in religious and regal imagery due to its rarity and cost. It’s rumored that Michaelangelo left The Entombment unfinished because he couldn’t procure the funds for ultramarine pigment. Blue maintained a lofty, opulent quality that projected an august gravity.
The 19th and 20th Centuries brought new techniques for pigment synthesis, which brought down the cost of color, especially blue. Synthetic ultramarine and a new “Monastral Blue,” another deep shade, began to be industrially produced. Blue of all kinds was no longer only for kings and Christ. Blue can be found from Monet’s plein-air impressionism to Rothko’s color fields. No longer exorbitant and widely unusable, it could become and mean anything.
The Yale University Art Gallery offers blue in many flavors and fragrances, particularly with their modern works. We have Braunes Mädchen (Brown Girl) (1921-3) by Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, an oil painting of a glancing girl wearing a brown headscarf, almost shrugging (is she diffident or indifferent?). Brushes of blue occupy the tilted walls in the background, and the shades of blue reach over to her cheeks and eyes.
Rooms by the Sea (1951) by Edward Hopper shows the interior of a lonely sea-side room: the threshold at the left hints at a living room with velvet couches and an obscured photo, and the right opens up to the sea, as if the room were in the middle of it. The sapphire water contrasts with the muted blue of the sprawling shadows. When I saw it, the solitude desolated me, as if I could be swallowed by the sea, menacingly edging into view.
Untitled (1954) by Rothko – not to be mistaken for the 1968 one – is brighter, mostly orange and red, but a faded field of sky-blue sits on the bottom third. It’s a monolith, ninety-three by fifty-six and three-sixteenths inches, and the lightness of the blue held me for a while: the shade was in its dissipating moment, and if I looked away for even a second, it would be gone.
Modern blue can be the shadows on an oceanside inn, the walls and air surrounding that encapsulate us, and even a formless field, marking a revolution in color. Were modern artists conscious of this revolution? The historical record offers nothing specifically, but modernist movements obsessed over the use of vivid colors. Picasso had a “Blue Period,” then a “Rose Period,” largely referring to his palettes during the respective eras. Matisse had his Blue Nudes, made shortly before his death, lithographic cutouts of abstract women in classical poses, colored ultramarine against white backgrounds.
Interior at Le Cannet (1938) by Pierre Bonnard could offer a commentary: vivid lapis flowers sit at the compositional center, as if the blue constitutes a distinguished rarity, but it subtly lies elsewhere throughout the painting: in the floor patterns, on the walls, in one splotch in the top-left corner. Maybe Bonnard was being satirical: this once-revered pigment is now everywhere, profaned. Did modernity profane blue? Once rare and elevated, it now signifies nothing concrete or specific, almost at risk of entirely losing meaning – are we just to derive sadness or solitude from looking at the pure blue of a Rothko? Perhaps blue possesses its own meaning, somewhere between 450 to 495 nanometers, or maybe we killed it.
“Depth, trust, loyalty, sincerity, wisdom, confidence, stability, faith, and intelligence” is what comes up on the first website (supercolor.com) when you Google, “what does blue mean.” “The color blue represents both the sky and the sea and is associated with open spaces, freedom, intuition, imagination, inspiration, and sensitivity,” continues supercolor.com. But, doesn’t the sea also represent danger and peril as in, for example, the Odyssey? Blue can mean cold, since it’s the color of ice, but fire, when extremely hot, becomes blue. So can’t blue also mean hot? Essentially, the invented symbolisms of blue are barely inherent to its hue.
The site claims that blue “calm[s] and release[s] feelings of tranquility,” which enters the world of chromotherapy, a practice which posits that colors inherently have therapeutic and even medical applications. Chromotherapist Samina Yousef Azeemi offers that simply seeing colors can treat “cancers, SAD, anorexia, bulimia nervosa, insomnia, jetlag, shift working, alcohol and drug dependency.” It should be well noted that scientists believe that chromotherapy is pseudoscience, with any emotional effects from color likely placebos, though color does elicit basic reactions for most people. If the inherent symbolism of blue is undefined, then certainly its visceral effects (which I felt with the first Rothko) are even more doubtful.
It’s easy to feel the awe of God in the Sistine Chapel or intense agony in an El Greco painting, as faces and scenes we see as our own are present, but, in a modernist world, when elements of art become abstracted, when forms and components no longer have the firm anchors of traditional realism, color itself may not fill the vacuum of meaning that traditional and realist art left. I worry that we lost emotion in pre-modern art, and that we cope with modern art, especially the more abstract, through inventing loftier, more erudite (and even more elitist), and less relatable concepts with which we nonetheless attempt to relate. I sometimes think that I feel about the 1968 untitled Rothko the way that I do because Rothko is “important,” and I should be feeling something more than what’s on the canvas. Perhaps the ultramarine blue captivates me only because I wish to be captivated.
But I won’t ruin Rothko for myself. Maybe blue doesn’t have any inherent meaning, and it has to rely on human-made cultural contexts: it must be rare to feel special, and it must only be used with Christ or Mary to feel divine. But, what if “meaning” and “interpretation” are besides the point? What if we allow ourselves, in spite of the instinct to glean validating “meaning,” to simply feel the work and embrace whatever comes up? I say go to the YUAG’s Modern and Contemporary Art section and pick out a work that’s interesting (it doesn’t have to be blue). Don’t read the blurb next to its description, and just look at it for as long as it keeps you. Let the experience be for you. Indulge in it.
I mean, consider the Ancient Egyptians. They didn’t need to invent Egyptian blue – there was potentially no precedence for the synthesis of blue pigment. But, the shimmering blue of the Nile and the deep sheen on the shells of scarabs must have called forth something deeper within them, the recognition of something that so perfectly limned aspects of their being not yet depicted or even depictable. They had to make it for themselves.
As I waited for a library employee to grab a book for me off the holding shelf, I contemplated for the first time the process that took place between my request for the novel and its physical copy being transferred to me. I looked around at students sitting at desks, library staff shuffling by in invisible concentration, security staring off into the right angles of the ceiling panels. The room seemed smaller all of a sudden, its title—library—fading into obscurity as I examined the mundane.
The student employee slid the book over to me.
“Thank you,” I said and walked away. How strange, I thought, that I spend so much time here and yet never think about it. The rows of bound pages seemed to make themselves known at that moment— as if I had never truly seen them before. It was one of those instances where the beautiful absurdity of the everyday pronounces itself without explanation. The complexity of a space we infrequently question, where the terrestrial becomes the center of extraordinary purpose, where you can ask for a book and 48 hours later it appears at a desk. The absurdity of so much learning yet so much silence.
I brought my thoughts on libraries up with my friend Hannah Szabó. I told her I find libraries a little existential. They are monuments to a scale of knowledge no single person can ever hope to grasp. Libraries stand at the nexus of temporality and knowledge, as guardians of information I know I will never fully realize. They taunt me. Perhaps it is this paradox, the ability to access some of the knowledge in a library but never being able to access it all, that truly stand out to me.
Hannah added that libraries are spaces where we students go to be surrounded by knowledge, even if we don’t access that knowledge directly. Often we study in places dominated by books, but most of us never actually pick one up. And the ones we do access usually come from a request, not from impulsive inquiry. Again I couldn’t help but feel a sense of curiosity in it all. An inspiring sense of finitude, of ignorance. It filled my mind with questions.
Hannah supposed that there is a level of paradox about the way most students interact with libraries, but that is part of what makes a library a library. She said that being a person, especially one who engages with learning in the way Yalies do, is in some way to be able to access an encyclopedic level of knowledge. Hannah believes that people desire a vast body of information that is already organized, making the unimaginable accessible. “I think that’s one of the things that makes me feel most alive. It [helps] make life feel most meaningful because without that we are kind of swimming in ignorance.”
She also drew my attention to libraries as more than just physical locations. As a native New Haven resident, Hannah grew up studying in different parts of Sterling Library. She looks back at these moments as integral to her current relationship with education. She noted that she finds “Sterling a very important landmark, not only to the university but also to the city. And I think it does a great job straddling the line between a public monument and a private space for study.”
Hannah’s words helped me understand libraries as both physical structures and symbolic institutions. So much of ‘the Yale experience’ is tied into libraries. It is impossible to separate the various libraries from Yale as a monolithic institution of higher education. I had never thought about the way the libraries had influenced others until they began to influence me. I was filled with a sense of wonder at the power of four stone walls, endless rows of books, the papers written there, and the truths revealed by a library only when one stops looking at its contents.
But, if I was going to understand the way libraries entrench themselves in our daily lives while simultaneously being spaces of extraordinary purpose, I had to know the system going on behind the scenes.
In an interview with Barbara Rockenbach, the Stephen F. Gates ’68 University Librarian, I learned that libraries see themselves as serving two primary functions: “the preservation of materials and [being] a space where people come to learn.” Rockenbach explained that libraries are designed to help students and faculty with their research, while also being a space of community. She noted that post-COVID the driving force for people to engage with the library, may not be books and journals, but rather the space itself. This is why libraries are a place of community.
I think Rockenbach’s notion of ‘community’ is similar to the way Hannah expressed the importance of libraries to members of Yale and New Haven at large. Libraries are the manifestation of people’s desire to unite in their curiosity for knowledge. Not only are libraries physical locations that enable people to learn, but they also stand as reminders of the great history of people who have devoted themselves to the same effort. They combine the task of learning with a sense of historic grandeur. They combine the importance of the everyday with the powerful abstract.
Equally important to the community libraries foster are the books they hold, but strangely enough, the majority of the books owned by Yale aren’t held in any single library. Instead, they are kept at an off-campus warehouse, the Library Shelving Facility (LSF). According to Yale’s digital records, the LSF is “an off-campus complex, comprised of an 8,000 square foot processing area, as well as six modules containing 63,810 square feet of shelving space.” LSF comprises “twenty-eight aisles, containing over 50,000 shelves, and currently houses approximately seven million items.”
Michael Bell, the Associate University Librarian for IT and Administrative Services, corroborated this in our interview: “[LSF] functions like a large warehouse. The stacks go up 30 feet high. A library employee will go up on a kind of forklift to grab a book and then transfer the item from LSF to a library truck. These trucks then move these items all around campus.”
It’s not just the scale of the LSF that is astounding either. The facility has enabled library spaces on campus to be used for more than just storage. Because the LSF houses more than twice the number of books as Sterling, the buildings on campus have more room to make collaborative and private study spaces. Both at the LSF and on campus, there is a lot of invisible labor that goes on behind the scenes. The Yale library system employs over 500 people across campus and is the single largest employer on campus.
Yale libraries are far more than just physical buildings too— they are also digital repositories used for accessing a different form of knowledge. As technology comes to dominate much of the way education functions, so too is it impacting the institutions that hold knowledge. Rockenbach noted that “librarian work has changed because technologies have changed. Gone are the days when we would pore over print catalogs and make decisions one by one.” Now, libraries have rebalanced that time to collections of service. Individual librarians now have more time to go out and talk to students and faculty.
I learned that in the past few years, there has been a strong push within the Yale libraries to advance technological access to information. There has also been an increase in the university’s acquisition of digital resources such as online publications. This has made it possible for students to request digital copies of books or ask library staff to create digital scans of material.
However, the role libraries play in accessing knowledge doesn’t end there. Rockenbach expressed the paradoxical transformation libraries have undertaken in the last few years because of widespread access to internet search engines. “The issue used to be a scarcity of information, you went to a library to find information. Now the problem is abundance, there is simply too much.”
Originally it was the scale of libraries that prompted my inquiry, but I learned that libraries offer a reprieve from endless pages of information online. How could it be that libraries feel so inaccessibly large when they provide much-needed order compared to everything online? Perhaps it’s because the internet is intangible. Because we are unaware of the volume of content within the internet it feels smaller, reduced to the various screens we allow it to inhabit. Whereas a library is a physical structure that proclaims its grandiosity from its inception; after all, it takes a lot of space to house millions of books (as demonstrated by Yale’s LSF). Perhaps this makes libraries another kind of paradox: they reduce the quantity of information into one physical location for easier access, but by instantiating this knowledge libraries make it feel even less accessible than it did before.
This would, in some sense, explain why the library pronounced itself to me in that unremarkable moment in Bass. Only when one begins to think about the paradoxes of a library does the library itself come to one’s attention.
Let us return to the physical nature of libraries. Unfortunately, even when books are scanned digitally and multimillion-dollar warehouses store books off campus, the issue of space remains. Libraries are forced to decide what information is valuable and worth preserving, bringing libraries into conversations about access to knowledge more broadly.
When Yale gets rid of books it’s called “deaccessioning.” This most frequently takes the form of donating such books to local libraries or other universities around the country. While some books have become outdated, there is still a sense of obligation to this knowledge. Rockenbach noted that deaccessioning may occur “in the case of duplicates, but we are really careful about getting rid of books. What we are trying to do is think about this idea of ‘access not ownership.’”
Yale libraries don’t exist in a vacuum, but instead in an intricate web of electronic databases shared across several academic institutions. The most prominent is the Borrow Direct system, which unites all the Ivy League as well as MIT, Stanford, University of Chicago, and Johns Hopkins. Over the past decade or so the Borrow Direct schools have moved to reduce the number of copies of books each holds and instead make digital versions of these items more widely accessible. Rockenbach summarized it best when she expressed that “libraries have come to realize that space is a finite thing, so the answer is to decrease the number of print books but ensure we have access to them.”
Daniel Dollar, the Associate University Librarian for Scholarly Resources, noted that “collections are a service, but they are also a network in terms of trying to preserve bibliographic diversity.” Dollar stressed that libraries exist to ensure people have access to a diverse range of knowledge. This diversity is only made possible by combining the resources of several universities and investing in the infrastructure to maintain it. Bibliographic diversity is part of what defines libraries, and it enables “our stacks to hold up the building,” Dollar said with a wink.
Bell added, “An important role of [libraries] is preservation. We are in the cultural heritage space as a part of Yale. Just like museums and art galleries.” While preserving physical texts in a building is one thing, preserving that information online is an entirely different struggle. Bell emphasized that it is the libraries’ “role to preserve what we can in a world where preservation outside of libraries is not considered, if at all. It is essential because there is so much out there and most for-profit companies have no reason for preserving things.”
Bell noted that, compared with the space issue, the topic of digital preservation “is a bigger challenge because the electronic and digital are largely ephemeral. The electronic is subject to change.” When a book is placed in a library it is incredibly hard to change, but electric versions are much easier to alter. Not only does the alteration of digital texts pose an existential threat to the mission of libraries, but it also threatens the integrity of these places as monuments to history.
Part of my fascination with libraries began with their seemingly eternal essence. The prospect that libraries— serving an important role in a digital sphere— are in some way unable to continue their mission of preservation was deeply frightening to me. Bell reassured me that the Yale libraries are fully equipped to deal with these issues, however, the thought still nagged at me. I suppose that as finite monuments to history libraries choose what history to store and what not to. Therefore, my fear that this history may get lost or distorted is also contingent on larger decisions made by librarians as to what history is worth remembering in the first place.
The endless rows of books at the LSF now seemed darker in my imagination. Not that they had lost their value, but that the truth of their value was revealed to me as contingent— not eternal. This is a fact that I had known all along, yet refused to confront. A final paradox contained within the beauty of a library’s mission: in striving to preserve knowledge for as long as possible, libraries reduce the transcendental nature of knowledge to a series of finite, pragmatic, and unremarkable decisions. We would be lost without libraries, yet we may never know what we have lost because of them.
What all started in Bass when I grabbed a book was really a struggle with something I believe all people contend with. Beyond libraries, there is an impasse within our minds when attempting to grasp both the scale and depth of any topic. We can focus on the far-reaching relationships of something, on the way it connects to so many other parts of our lives. Or we can focus on its impacts, the casual and effect it creates, following the chain of events down into the hypothetical. But we can’t do both, not at the same time at least. Libraries stood out to me because at the moment I questioned their depth— how they work— I could no longer see their scale. And when I tried to realize just how many parts of my world libraries came to affect, I could no longer understand the system going on behind the scenes. The library was a reflection of my ignorance, my own paradox.
Libraries are beautiful reminders of this human truth. They are the center of the extraordinarily mundane that must be celebrated. They stand as monuments to the limits of human knowledge by promising us that we can surpass it. They are the manifestation of paradox and absurdity. They are a mirror of endless pages that invite us to reflect on the truths we take for granted, and the ones that we have yet to discover.
[after Louise Gluck’s “Grandmother in the Garden”]
The dirt below your tomb
has bloomed
with earthworms, and the sun
still keeps time
in lines and lines
of wind-smoothed stones,
elf-cap moss slow tip
toes over me
as I mourn you.
My lifelong flame,
I sit here with last words.
I close my eyes,
and all my offerings burn,
blue breath curls
into wings, unfurls:
You are still angry with me.
I can still see the lining of your soul,
bright like mother-of-pearl,
crying, lighter than air.
As I listen to the first knee play of Einstein on the Beach, I struggle to make out the words.
Would it get some wind for the sailboat. And it could get for it is.
It could get the railroad for these workers. And it could be were it is.
It could Franky it could be Franky it could be very fresh and clean.
It could be a balloon
The chorus and two solo voices chant over slow, shifting chords played by an electric organ. The libretto seems indecipherable until I realize that it is not meant to be deciphered. One voice reads numbers. The other recites confusing, repetitive, impossible poetry. The chorus sings solfege.
This continues for five minutes. It’s confusing and intriguing, and most of all boring — a seductive sort of boredom. I continue listening.
I am listening to Einstein because of Susan Sontag. Her essays is the reason I love art. In Against Interpretation she imagined a new way of thinking about art. An “erotics,” rather than a “hermeneutics” of art, she called it. To strip the experience of art from its obsession with interpretation and ultimately with “content” was the erotics of art. Art, Sontag thought, should aim to provide an experience that evades interpretation. To aim for art as she imagined it to be during the earliest creation of art: “incantatory,” “magical.”
A great deal of art produced in the sixty years since Sontag published her essay has attempted to shed itself of the notion of “content,” that is, the meaning of a piece as separate from its form. Visual artists followed this road of abstraction into oblivion, shifting from directly representative art to less concrete representation, not expressing any experience of emotion or consciousness but rather intending to evoke a specific, transgressive experience in viewing the art. Music soon followed suit: minimalism, as it was aptly named, distilled and abstracted the composition and performance of music until “content” was lost and only a turbulent sea of notes and rhythms remained.
That is the artistic world Einstein finds itself in. The piece is an ultimate abstraction of the musical experience.
Philip Glass’s opera — if one can even call a piece with no plot or character, aria or recitative an opera — is five hours long, performed without intermission. I remember this fact as I contemplate rising from my couch thirty minutes in to use the restroom.
I remain seated.
It’s separated into scenes and “knee plays” — connectors, like the human knee. The scenes are simple and, like the music, repetitive: Field. Train. Trial. Night Train. Trial. Prison. Spaceship.
For twenty minutes, I listen to the same motif. Two musical lines that repeat and interchange, slowly modulating and altering themselves. Their change is subtle and impermanent—phrases return just as soon as they change. Dancers race across the stage in frenetic, repeated patterns. Watching this scene has me simultaneously bored and terrified. The music feels strangely ominous, but I struggle to identify what the music itself is.
All these are the days my friends and these are the days my friends.
It could get some wind for the sailboat. And it could get for it is.
It could get the railroad for these workers. And it could get for it is were.
It could be a balloon. It could be Franky. It could be very fresh and clean.
It could be those ways.
The musical and physical landscape only becomes more turbulent. The chorus continues to repeat, growing louder, their voices straining against the score as the dancers grow frenzied and a sole voice continues to chant his impenetrable libretto over it all. Until, when you least expect it, everything stops.
The lights go out. The stage is silent for a split second.
From the chaos a sole saxophone plays and it is transcendent.
While listening to Philip Glass I think about the ocean. The music is like unrelenting waves, crashing on my ears. I picture the tide coming in and out as the music swells and sinks.
Maybe that’s why when I listen to Philip Glass I think of my mother. My mother is in love with the ocean. She swims from the minute it is warm enough to bear to the minute it is too cold to stand. I’m not sure why. I’ve always figured she enjoys the exercise, but have started suspect there is more to it than that.
When I was a child, she used to drag me to the beach. I did not like the ocean. It was cold and dirty and not fun.
Somewhere along the line, I fell in love with the ocean, too. I have learned to appreciate the simple ritual of our visits. Now, over the long summer months, I swim out until it feels as though I am on the horizon and I float. I feel the gentle rocking of the waves and little else. I stare up at the sky or my eyelids and think nothing. In the winter, I stand on the sand, shivering, and stare at the waves. I like to focus on the smaller ones, those small bumps on the surface. They’re in constant motion, homogeneous and random.
Will it get some wind for the sailboat and it could get for it is it.
It could get the railroad for these workers and it could get for it is.
All these are the days my friends and these are the days my friends.
Put these days of 8 8 8 cents into 100 coins of change.
In the minutes that drip away, I find transcendence.
Nearly an hour into Einstein on the Beach, I consider giving up. What once was novel and exciting has grown boring. I feel like I am unable to stand any more synthesizer and saxophone. But I continue. I’m not sure why. Obligation, maybe. To the ocean, or to my mother.
I am struck by the cave paintings from Lascaux, France because their animals flow like waves. The rich, earthy streaks of color give the impression of animals up close but look like one mass of beauty from afar. The walls suggest a pre-civilizational world so abundant with livestock that the cattle could be mistaken for an ocean. The walls evoke both mystery and boredom, much like the glacial chord changes of Einstein.
The act of creating these paintings was itself ritual. They were likely created to pray for an abundance in the hunt. The spiritual labor of creating the art was as vital to the physical labor of slaying beasts. Einstein is, in some ways, also a ritual. The opera will never be performed again: it is so intricate and physically demanding that, once its original director decides to not direct it again, it will be lost. To endure Einstein is to labor in the service of art. To seek, like a fresh kill, sustenance.
Now hours into the opera, I feel like I am being violently shaken. The tempo oscillates between extremes. The soundscape finds neither balance nor resolution. With each shake I wonder when Glass will latch onto the next motif and move on.
But then I remember the ocean. I let the waves rock me.
Mark Rothko painted to make people cry. His works are dense masses of shape and color — pinnacles of abstraction. They intend to express, as he put it, “tragedy, ecstasy, doom.”
I wanted to know for myself whether his method worked. I sought out a Rothko at the Museum of Modern Art and waited to cry. I didn’t. But it fascinated me: I felt as though I could keep looking and continue finding new layers of shape and color. It was almost moving before my eyes, but never changing.
I felt that I understood what Rothko intended. I entered a trance, staring up at these massive canvases, trying to make sense of the minutiae of color and shape. I experienced the erotics of art.
There was ecstasy in Rothko’s painting — and agony, too. But mostly there was boredom.
It was an ocean.
This love could be some one
Into love
It could be some one that has been somewhere like them
It could be somewhere like like liiiiike them
I’m listening to Einstein on the Beach because I was told it, too, would put me into a trance. I chase these artistic experiences, like I did with Rothko. I relish the light-headed feeling I get walking out of a museum where I did nothing but stand and stare. Like stepping out of water, emerging from entrancing artistic experiences allow me to re-experience the sensual world as novel and exciting.
And, a few hours into Einstein, it works. I am completely enraptured by the sound. It is repetitive, yes, but it is divine. It’s unlike anything I had experienced before. The ardor of pure boredom forges an entirely new aesthetic and sensory experience.
Philip Glass composed Einstein on the Beach to bore. He was a minimalist: composing beyond content in the service of a new experience of art. In the opera about him, Albert Einstein appears only once, as a violinist He composed an ocean of music: so massive that each bit of movement and turbulence is gone in an instant, replaced by another, nearly the very same. The experience of listening to Einstein is analogous to the psychological experience of watching the ocean. It is boring, but in its repetition it becomes entrancing.
Rothko and Glass are perhaps some of the few artists who truly achieved the paradigm Sontag laid out in Against Interpretation. They created an art that was meant to be experienced, not interpreted. An art that was erotic and visceral and in some ways magical. Like the handprints and flowing bison on the cave at Lascaux, this art points to an experience free of the structures we create to explain “art.”As hand paintings of bulls and horses bring us as close as art may to the earth, Einstein on the Beach brings us to the edge of the shore of the blank blue ocean.
After five long hours, I rise from my couch. I think about my mother again, and in my mind I am staring at the waves.
I owed Mike seven more than I was good for.
“And if you don’t pay me next week? No. Now.”
We’d begun betting a few months ago, when the sweat of summer labor cooled and our fathers left for one of two places after working the fields: the bars, or the races. None of us were ever brought along, probably to save face when they lost a buck, but we always knew what had gone down by the fury that returned home. A ten-dollars-richer man is a happy one, I had learned. Any the poorer, it’s best not to find out. Most of us bet against our fathers so we’d cut a win either way the coin flipped.
“I just told you, I don’t got it.”
If only that damned stallion hadn’t cowed to pressure, last minute. Usually we’d hash this all out over chips, but things changed. All the boys had become cheap. They wanted their debts paid, and they wanted them at recess. There were three of us. Mike, Pig, and me, Bird.
Michael was the lucky kind of beautiful. Tall, ginger, and freckled. He played every sport at Fresno Middle School—soccer, football, and sometimes hockey—so he was all bruised everywhere, all the time. You’d have to think those injuries damaged past the skull. His habits made him a little sticky, like he’d woken up late and was just getting to wherever he was supposed to be, spitting into his palm to smooth down his hair. His bones gnarled, at a few junctures, but it inexplicably made him more charming and got me red it was so unfair.
None of his clothes fit his bulk, and he was too poor to ever size up so the leather of his shoes stretched at each of the toes and his pants cut off at the ankles. His left ear stuck out, the other tucked below his cowlicks. He had a short neck. When he smiled, his lips would thin too much. Nothing about him was exceptional except in its totality, like a piano with all its keys. His father was a carpenter, his mother cleaned houses, and he did nothing. It was all he was good for.
“What if I pay three now, and then another next week, and we call the last one even?” I haggled, “Let’s play this cool.”
Pig wanted to help. He came from a legacy of negotiators, mostly Spanish-speaking devils, my father intuited. With black curls and dirty fingernails, Pig never convinced anyone of his intentions. His family arrived at Ellis Island, cut the line, came out West, and never stopped swindling after. My mother called his mother a tart. I thought her sweet.
Pig tried to mediate. “Pay half now, and he’ll give you a two-dollar discount. You can pay him back in G.I. Joe collector’s editions.”
“That works.” I chimed, eyeing Mike to see if he bought it.
“No.”
“What if I gave you my cap gun and paid you five next week?”
“No.”
“And I threw in a Rubik’s?”
“I’ll kill you.”
“Try it.”
“Go fuck yourself.”
Mike lived a few houses down, in a smaller place. Shabby, my mother would say, so sad. We are so lucky, just so lucky, aren’t we, Henry? And my father would grunt. Our family wasn’t much better off than Mike’s but we were richer in our minds, it gave us peace. My father hated Mike because he was better than me. I just couldn’t make any of the teams, even when I slaved over weights, weeks before tryouts. I didn’t have it in me. Sometimes my father would see Mike playing flag football on our block, or just kicking around with the high school kids, and opened our window, enraged.
“GET TO THE FUCKING PARK! GET OUTTA HERE!”
Then, to me,
“LEAVE THE FUCKING BOOKS! GET OUTTA HERE!”
After the Depression my father had taken to philosophizing ethnicity, as a way of explaining the whole thing, my mother told me. Why he lost his work in the mines. How dust managed to coat the insides of closets, unopened cereal boxes, cans of tuna or sardines, eggs they cracked at breakfast. Why he moved to California, restarted without his family, broke. Why he married my mother and not a lady. My father wanted me to know that All Things Happen This Way and there wasn’t much to do about it, but wait the curse out. The good would return eventually. Us People always got the good, in the end. By that point in the sermon he would buzz into sleep on the couch.
If he saw me with the boys he’d make sure to remind me how shit they were, how shit I was. He liked to mention Mike’s stink, a key characteristic of the Polish, he said. Mike was too brown and too red and too hairy. Mike was big-boned and that gave him an advantage in sports, it was so unfair. Mike had no clue. I was ashamed of my father and his jealousy. I knew Mike was made of something, whereas I was cheap and plastic. Everyone knew it.
Mike shoved me.
“Yeah? I can push too, fatass!”
Now I’d gotten him.
“Take it back,” he said, stepping closer.
His hair and face blended in one. The big ear grew, it quivered. It became big and purple and throbbed with fury. I knew I didn’t look much in comparison. I was too small. Impish skin, dimples, and little hands. What wasn’t a lovely shade of pink on my body was just sparrow brown. Like sapling wood, my mother told me. Like pigeon crap, my father would say.
“I won’t. Suck my cock, pol–”
Mike shoved me. “I AIN’T Polish!”
“My ass you ain’t.”
“Guys please, please,” begged Pig, “we can’t solve this before Science, just leave it for after school!”
I spat on him. Mike followed. We didn’t give a shit, we were ready to really problem solve. Pig sat with his fingernails in his mouth. He didn’t want trouble, he didn’t want me or Mike. He was afraid and I wanted to sock it out of him.
I raised a fist. “Quit thumb-sucking!”
“I’m not sucking my thumb…” said Pig.
“I’m watching you!”
“Oh yeah? How about I thumb you?”
Pig was thick, with a gut and whiskers at ten years old, I knew I couldn’t take him. I was worried. I was sad. The guys had never gotten this bad.
I lunged at him. “I’ll smash your skull in! I’ll jerk you! I’ll bitch you!”
I went to swing but Mike held me back. Jared from the class above, walked over.
“Hey, hey! Alright! Bird, Pig, quit it!”
Jared’s shoes had no laces and were four sizes too big because they were hand-me-downs from his father, as were his glasses, pants, shirt, and socks. Jared would tie his shoe-laces into a rope-belt that fell every time we played Cowboys and Indians. When he got pantsed we’d titter after where he got his underwear, but that he wouldn’t admit to. He had moles splattered across his chin which he told us grew hair, and meant he was the first to grow a beard. Jared was the son of a veteran and desperately wanted to kill Africans someday. Or the entire country of Japan. Jared was smart and would probably go to college instead.
He wanted us to reason through the thing: “One talks first, while the other holds his breath, and then he can respond once the first is done. NO interruptions! NO insults.”
“But what if the first one’s wrong?” I prompted.
“You wait.”
“And if he’s stupid?” Mike asked.
“You gotta prove it. Otherwise you’d just fight again. It’s called de-escalation.” He reminded us his father had been in the army, and had taught Jared about conflict resolution. I told him his daddy had taken it up the ass in that case, and the whole crowd fell to the floor.
“Cock-sucker!” he yelled, oblivious, as he moved towards me
Now Mike was with me. We escaped, Pig was left behind. The sacrifices we make in battle are the scars we carry, Jared’s dad would’ve reflected. Jared was screeching too loud to care for our dash to the slide.
We laid flat on our guts, underneath the spout, which must’ve been the position Jared’s father took in the trenches.
“Ywant?” Mike offered gum.
“Yeah.”
“Whabout this?”
I watched, my mouth slotted open, as Mike pulled out treasure.
“How?”
“My dad’s lazy. Leaves these Newports and naked women all over the house. My mom hates him.”
“Do they work?”
“Yeah, you can eat it. Does the same thing as smoking.”
“No shot. You got a light?”
He reached back down, into his pants, and into his underwear. His fingers dallied and I got suspicious until he pulled out just an empty hand.
“I ran out.”
“Oh.”
“It’s O.K., we can smoke later. If you want.”
“Yeah, maybe.”
A truce.
“Shit!”
We heard vulgarities, the horrid cries of eighth graders. We were really in for it: their recess had overlapped with ours. Jared was cheap shit now.
“I won’t look,” Mike said, turning to me. “You first.”
I couldn’t refuse. Being the second coward, that’s always worse than being the first. “O.K.”
I let my fingers creep out. We were hiding at the base of the slide, at the lip, and I could fit my head just underneath it to peek. God, they were animals. Big and thick, even the girls. Everyone was hairy. Everyone was monstrous. I liked the short skirts girls wore, with pink and pretty pantylines, but really they were a freakshow all the same and I couldn’t appreciate it. I could vaguely figure a hoard of them squealing. Next to the monkey bars, in leaves and grit, two squirrels screwed.
“Mikey, I dunno what we’ll do. It’s them.”
He turned to me and craned his neck to disfigure his forehead on the steel. We both knew what’d happened to the boy who’d knocked his head sliding down and ended up in a hospital, later a home for imbeciles. It was better to take risks you cared for. I turned too.
“If we give it up, they’ll take us. If we hide, they’ll sniff us. There’s no game here.”
The end of the world was approaching, and I was in tatters.
“Bird, this isn’t about the guys. It’s about honor.”
Well, he didn’t have to go and do that.
“What if I don’t have it in me to die?” .
“You know it’s coming, might as well make it a big bang.”
I tallied all the noble reasons I had to remain among the living. Playboy. Horses. Smokes.
“But, my show comes on in an hour,”
“And?” Mike rolled his eyes.
“And my mom might make apple pie if I ask her…”
“So?”
“So I’ll have my apple pie and I’ll watch Popeye and things might be good again.”
“My father told me to never get soft. He said dysfunction decapitates you later in life.” Mike was getting angry, his big ear grew.
“Your head falls off?”
“What?”
“Decapitation?”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
The end was nearer, now. Shouts, cheap earrings glinting in the yellow afternoon like bullets. I saw a Mary Jane skip past my fingernails and shuddered.
“Forget it.”
Our noses touched and we tried not to blush at the femininity of doom. We were men with brave faces.
“We have to go out,” he said.
“Face them?” I shivered.
“Yeah.”
“Alone?”
“No.”
Mike and I got along fine, mostly. I wondered why he wouldn’t settle the bet, earlier, why he always pitched fights with me. I had to ask if he knew it was my father who threw bottles, who’d gotten Mike demoted from class president because of his “egregious commitments elsewhere,” who’d rumored at the watering hole that Mike’s family stank like their sausages. I wanted to say I didn’t know much about that, but I’d exchange a comic book for dinner with meat, and that I was sorry. I didn’t take my chance. I wanted freedom.
“Alright. Let’s shoot.”
“Get ready.”
We bent our knees into crouches.
“Mikey?”
“Yeah?”
“Can we call it even?”
The bell rang. Saved by a cunthair.