Settling Accounts
By Jerry Lieblich
On the ground
it’s just
more water. This
is the edge
of the porch—
no language
is a clearing
house. No,
language is
a clearing house,
the corner where
the lawn begins
A New American Start: Korean Orphan Comes ‘Home’, Gets Fresh
By Chaelee Dalton
Note: This piece takes excerpts and makes erasures from "A New American Comes Home," a Life Magazine article from the November 30, 1953 Issue, and “Korean Orphan, 9, Gets Fresh Start,” a New York Times piece from January 21, 1958.
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________ Lee Kyung Soo was ________________________________
_______ pushed aside ____________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
_____________________ made _______ with _________________________________ out ____
_______________________________________ family. _________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
________________ to go _________________________________________________________
____________________________________ to _______________________________________
__________________ America ___________________ to ___________________
______________________________________________________ leave ___________________
______ only ___________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________ 4 ½ years old _______________
_________________________________________
I Google his English name first.
Google sends me to his “father,” or his father’s father, who is also his “father.” How language works like this: in its failure to capture the complexity of the truth, it illuminates it. Google tells me to connect with other Lees on Facebook. Google gives me a list of obituaries, a short Google Books preview.
Google shows me pictures of him as a young boy, four or five years old. As a boy, he has a sweet smile and a seriousness about him. He wears a military uniform, a cowboy hat, is fitted for a miniature suit-vest. He holds fake pistols, an ice cream cone, a lit cigarette butt, his “father’s” arm, feet dangling by his “father’s” knees, floating.
Google has no pictures of him after the age of seven. Not that I can find, at least, with my careful research practice built through a proliferation of Tinder dates. I find an array of his relatives– his simultaneous “father” and “father’s” father, his simultaneous “uncles” and “brothers,” what was once written as his “ready-made family of 32 grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins.” I study them for clues, hints at where Lee could be.
After landing on a list of Lee Paladinos on publicdatausa.com, I check whether each one is the Lee I am looking for by comparing them against Lee’s age: today Lee Kyung Soo is 72, maybe 73 years old. A young old man. An 아저씨. While I cannot imagine him at this age, cannot link the childhood photos, dispersed across LIFE, STARS AND STRIPES and LA TIMES, to a person, I can instead imagine my grandfather.
I check my interview recording with my grandfather and, after listening to it a few times and clumsily translating the date he gives me, I confirm that he is 74. A young old man. An 아저씨. I imagine Lee doing the small things my grandfather does: climbing up mountains with a backpack full of beer and 김밥. Belting along to trot music and oldies in the car or the 노래방. Feeling lonely, intensely lonely.
In the same interview, my grandfather tells me that besides his granddaughter, I am also his daughter coming back to him– my aunt, who I never knew, who died the year I found my Korean family. “Granddaughter, granddaughter,” he calls out to me using the few English words he knows. Sometimes, he forgets, and reaches out, clutches my fingers, calls me “daughter,” a small incorrectness that to him feels right. “Fate was what brought you back to me,” he tells me, even though I had never met him before and therefore could have never left him behind.
I know Lee could never have lived the life of my grandfather. But he could have.
_____________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________ disarming ________________________
______________________________________________________________________ Lee was ready. He had learned ____________________________________________________________
_______________________________ only the right words ______________________________
_________________ cowboy ___________________________America ____________________
____________________ want_____________________________________________________ pistols._________________________________________ at_____________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________
___________________
____________________ the __________________ taste of ________________________ his new country._______________________________________________________________________
Lee turned _________ and gravely replied, “Yes, sir.” ____________________ made ready _______
to __________________________________________________________________ come into a
ready-made family ________________________________
I first began searching for Lee two years ago. I wanted to trace the beginning of transnational adoption, to find this institution, so often rendered domestic, outside of or beyond the realm of the home and the country. Locating adoption in womanhood, in motherhood felt like too easy a narrative.
Locating masculinity in the military felt like too easy a narrative. Locating mascots, the Korean boys informally and, later, formally “adopted” by U.S. military troops felt like too easy a narrative. Locating mascots, like Lee Kyung Soo, like Lee Paladino, feels impossible. Or maybe the issue is that it feels too easy, too easy to find Lee Kyung Soos, Lee Paladinos. His identity split, his identity multiplied, each multiplying out further: too many versions of who Lee could be.
I, too, am a version of a Lee. This is what Lee and I share– a Korean name transliterated and physically translated from first name to first name, which in its literal correctness is incorrect. This correct language un-languages us, says: this is no longer a family name, a name passed down generationally to you. No, this is the name we have given to you. This is how we have made you ready-made.
And still, in the making, the model fails, has possibly been designed to fail. What, or perhaps more saliently, who makes a Korean boy turn to an American woman and reply “Yes, sir?” What, or who, makes this boy the butt of a joke?
Korean is a language where pronouns are often dropped, sidelined, where instead, markers are made not from an individual identity, but from relation. In this case, the answer is made incorrect by the English language. The answer is not a what or a who but a mode of relation: a “sir.”
_____________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________ America ___________ was _
___ making ____________
______________________________________________________________ Lee ____________
______________________________________________________________________________
_____ into ________ a _________ faith _____________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
_______ and _________________________ Friction ___________________________________
__________________________ a ____________ half- _________________ place ____________
_ a ________ foster home. ________________
I Google his Korean name second.
Google sends me to: a former South Korean football player, a minor K-drama actor, Hyundai’s CEO. Google recommends I narrow my search by adding exo, radiology, weightlifting fairy, Vincent Paladino. Google gives me ten pages of results without a single mention of the Lee I am trying to locate.
Korean is a language where names are short and standardized, where a name’s specific history can only be found in the Chinese characters, 한자, not the Korean characters, 한글. In other words, there are many Lees whose lineages can only be distinguished by the Chinese characters to which each is attributed. Neither Lee nor I know the Chinese characters for each of our “Lees.” In our cases, we are made multiple by this incomplete knowledge, fitting into many and therefore no histories. We are not a “who” or a “what” as much as an “else.”
Every few months, I return to Google Lee, and Google shows me the same articles, the same non-linear narrative, the same non-narrative line, in which family, father, and self are lost, translated, made incorrect, made a joke. In which both Korean and English hold too many meanings for anything certain to be found.
And still, I check for Lee. I check the same articles for clues: names of those 32 family members, cities where he might have possibly lived. I wonder whether Lee, in his second adoption, may have assumed a new name. I wonder whether I am chasing the wrong person altogether.
I check the same articles, one titled “A New American Comes ‘Home,’” and the other “Korean Orphan Gets New Start.” Both articles chronicle Lee’s adoption, both articles chronicle one family lost and another ready-made. Both articles could have the other’s title, incorrect in their simultaneous correctness.
What, or who, makes Lee “A New American,” as opposed to a “Korean Orphan?” What, or who, makes Lee multiple, not just in his dual American and Korean identities and names, but within and beyond America and Korea?
The answer is not in a what or a who but in a mode of relation: a way of being made, a way of being made incorrect.
_____________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________
_w___ here ___________________________is_______________________
Lee _____________ and is _____________ he ________________________________________
__________________________happy _______________________________________________
Thomas Jefferson
By Jessica Laser
I said I was a horse
because I like to be compelled.
You said it when you called
adulthood learning
to live according to your values.
Could you have a value
that says it is my value
to have values that do not conflict?
A horse just carries
obedience gracefully,
like that one choice you made
without deliberating.
Thomas Jefferson invented
the swivel chair, apparently
desiring to build all sides
of an argument into a piece
of furniture, and even if,
with that reading, I wouldn’t
at first agree, I could see
swiveling my way there.
I said I was a horse but
of course I was a chair.
And the chair I was is the horse
I will be, that’s how I get
all the legs I need.
Who hasn’t once or twice
said the wrong thing?
Who hasn’t said something right?
Sometimes the right words lag
behind you, and you are their horse
for a season, for a season
you are their transportation.
Edward Thomas
By Jessica Laser
Sometimes I read you for anger
To see in your face
The confines of a medium.
What wouldn’t I think
To be a thought in your head?
The youngest and most beautiful
Love no one, but still I love
Everyone I’ve loved.
“I love roads”
Unlike a governmental body,
Mine can be shot
In the street in the broad
Daylight of democracy.
I’d leave this country
But democracy loves me.
Etiolated Temporalities: An Experimental/Critical Exploration of the Ana-Grammatical Temporality of the American Chestnut Tree, Parts 4-6
By Louise Akers
PART 4: ABSENCE MANAGEMENT
With days left in the semester, the realization that I’ve never consciously been in the presence of an American Chestnut Tree becomes a physical sensation. To my surprise, I feel myself succumb to an urgent longing to see one, be present to and with the tree in a way I find almost embarrassing; the tree and I seem, from this distance, vulnerable to one another in such a way attendance might take advantage of, make worse.
I type “presence” into the inauspicious Thesaurus app on my MacBook desktop and come up with a few dozen hits. I don’t look any further; association finds priority over precision. I cherry pick the ones I like:
1. presence of a train on a section of track was indicated electrically: existence, being there. ANTONYMS absence
2. I would like to request the presence of an adjudicator: attendance, attending, appearance, residence, occupancy; company, companionship; informal turning up, showing, showing up. ANTONYMS absence
5. she felt a presence in the castle: ghost, spirit, specter, phantom, vision, wraith, shadow, poltergeist, manifestation, apparition, supernatural being.[9]
Anyway, this year, presence has been catastrophic. Life-saving absence giving way to life-attenuating apprehension. A city is itself until it isn’t, just like I’m myself until I’m simply not. Maybe I’m apprehensive about what a blight-likely sapling will look like after a year of avoiding inflection myself. Maybe I’m scared I won’t recognize it at all. Either way I pick a day and tell my girlfriend I’m going to Prospect Park in the hopes that the dependable pressure of witness will provide real incentive.
The weather is sensational. My dog Hank cries if I don’t let the window down low enough to stick her long face out into the breeze. She’s a terrible companion for a contemplative journey, but with fresh stitches in her side from her latest tumble, I don’t have the option of leaving her alone.
I arrive at the LeFrak entrance and have no idea what to look for. It’s busy with strangers and Hank quivers, pulls on the leash when they pass close to us.
Hito Steyerl writes: “The idea of presence invokes the promise of unmediated communication, the glow of uninhibited existence, a seemingly unalienated experience and authentic encounter between humans...Presence stands for allegedly real discussion, exchange, communication: the happening, the event, liveness, the real thing––you get the idea.”[10] Presence is irreducible to the present, as a tense. In fact, it has more to do with the conditional hospitality of a moment, explosive with histories and antihistories, hostile to no futurity and any future. In “The Terror of Total Dasein: Economies of Presence in the Art Field,” Steyerl argues that in the age of reproducibility inaugurated by the ubiquity of technologies of mediation, “presence is...an asset with inbuilt scarcity.”[11] Rather than a single moment of shared physical space, it becomes a mode of relation, a “reserved element for potential engagement” that establishes a method of temporal investment.[12] The demand for presence denotes an investment in an epistemological inheritance that presupposes the ability to produce a moment as nominative, a single object that can be co-inhabited, whose hospitality can be shared or coerced. If my body and the tree’s body touch, do we co-create a single, occupiable moment? Or does an infinite set of relations continue to unfold for and in spite of us?
Hank’s apprehension gives way to squirrel hunting; mine seems to escalate as I continue my own search. I pass trees of varying ages and emergent foliage; I try to consult my phone for clarity or directions, but Hank’s prey drive demands more of my attention than the quiet trees. It occurs to me, the trees are here, somewhere, and through my wavering intention to find them, the American Chestnut Tree and I are somehow linked. Beyond Hank-management and Google Maps pins, a sliver of my attention is devoted to the same present as the trees.
Barad argues against a geometric understanding of the present, i.e., a now is not a sliver or “slice,” but rather “an infinitely rich condensed node in a changing field diffracted across spacetime.” This move, from geometry to physics, gets us away from objects and into their relations, away from nouns and into verbs. What began as a simple subject (Louise) searches (predicate) for tree(direct object) (with Hank(prepositional phrase)), transforms into an infinite temporal field of dynamics between searching, growing, smelling, seeing, and dying. For me, the tree becomes study, curiosity, and self-admonishment for not coming sooner. For Hank, it’s inaccess, squirrel-flight. For the squirrels, it’s escape, home.
I think I find a tree, and my friend Jeff finds me. He’s just been playing basketball with his buddy and is sweaty and happy to take Hank’s leash for a while so I can draw. He asks me if I think two dudes playing basketball could be queer or a queering of the sport in some way, even if they’re straight, because what they really want is contact. Distracted, I channel Sara Ahmed and counter: why do straight people always want to sever orientation from the object of desire? He laughs and Hank lunges, almost dislocating Jeff’s shoulder. “Fair enough,” he says, and we stay quiet for a while.
Sitting in the park, Hank-time and tree-time cleaving my presence, diverting my imperative: to look, find—I wonder how I am oriented around the American Chestnut Tree? How do I orient myself to it? For Ahmed, orientations “are about the intimacy of bodies and their dwelling places.”[13] They are as much about identifying the familiar, the beloved, as they are with “finding our way” to them. When we think of bodies as subject to, rather than subjects of, relations that move them towards and away from one another, orientation becomes a set, or history of responses that assume a temporal dimension. When I orient myself to the Chestnut Tree, my body facing its, and I respond to its girth, its apparent robustness that a better trained eye might identify as fraying or even fictive. I respond to the possibility of that fictional health as well: the blight I know through study, the awareness of what Ahmed calls a “background”—the “conditions of emergence of the object...[and] also the act of perceiving the object.”[14] A product of arrival and response, the “toward” of orientation also demands a tense in excess of the present.
As I attempt to map my orientation toward the tree, I find myself slipping, again, away from it. A tree is not abstract; it is a haptic, living knowledge. It waits, spreads, succumbs, or thrives independent of my feeble attempts to map discursively the wax and wane of intimacy and alienation with and from one another. My desire to be present with the tree, to be in its presence is, as Steyerl suggests, a consequence of not in opposition to a semester of mediating technology orienting me toward it. She writes, “the point is that technology gives you tools that allow for remote and delayed presence, so that physical presence becomes the scarcest option among a range of alternatives.”[15] The Chestnuts of the archive, my Google pin, the ether of our course’s conversations produce an urgency to be, to have been present to and with it.
If I’m being honest, the overwhelming sensation of the tree’s presence is my gratitude for Jeff’s. Not simply because he freed up my hands and attention, absorbing the greater impact of Hank-time, but because his arrival mediated my presence with the tree, tempered its absence once we turned and walked away.
I realize the drawing I’ve finished of the Chestnut is actually of a photograph I found on the internet. The bark is smooth with a ridge like lips across the center, dark gray like graphite. I think, momentarily, I should go back to Prospect Park alone. I don’t. I imagine I will always be oriented toward the tree, and always turning away. The American Chestnut and I exercise our practices of absent/ce management.
PART 5: PHANTOM
With the right experience, you can look at a tree and tell if it’s doomed. This projection of futurity, certain death by blight, can either appear as an acceleration of a linear timeline, or McSweeney’s “dynamic challenge to continuity.”[16] The haunt is full, the blight is present. Both operate according to their own design; there is no reason the blight should function differently.
Before the blight, Susan Freinkel reminds us of those who really loved the tree, who suffered heartbreak at its disappearance. “Those who did bear witness to the tree’s disappearance... were the rural poor, people whose stories were passed down through oral rather than written accounts.”[17]
Elided into this broad category of “rural poor” with “oral traditions” is the indigenous population of the Northeastern region of the continent. Among many tribes in the Northeast of the continent, the Indigenous word for chestnut was similar: chinkapin, chinquapin, chincapin, chincopin, and chechinquamin, as they were translated into a European alphabet.[18] This brings me back, finally, to Neil Patterson’s revelatory question. What is the word that will get us closest to the tree? I emphasize “closest” to exaggerate the sense of positionality and directional movement Patterson’s language implies. The word “transgenic” inscribes a cosmology of tree-ness under human mastery, unnatural origin. Walter Benjamin, in “The Task of the Translator,” writes:
Translation is a form. To understand it as such means going back to the original. Because the original, in its translatability, contains the laws that governs the translation. The question of a word’s “translatability” is two-fold. It can mean: will the work ever find its proper translator among all its possible readers; or—and more to the point—does it, by its nature, permit translations and therefore, given the significance of the form, demand it?[19]
What is the condition of the form when an “original” describes a modified genome? Is it the signifier of the scientific methodology or the way that method affects or works upon a body that demands translation, here? Given the divisiveness of transgenic trees’ contested presence, who is the proper translator? If the language we produce to describe our material reality does not follow, but cocreates the objects that inhabit it, then this project of translation is tantamount to an embrace or interdiction of the new American Chestnut by the human beings implicated in its presence.
We can understand this process of translation as a movement from Western ontological categories to non-Western epistemological relations. Walter Mignolo and Catherine Walsh write: “A world-sense that privileges relations cannot be understood ontologically because relations are not entities (they are relations among entities). To name ontology a world-sense constituted by relations and not by entities (objects) is a Western misnomer equivalent to Hernán Cortés naming “Mosques” the buildings where the Aztec carry out their rituals.”[20] Such a world sense demands a different set of conjugations to accommodate its verbs.
According to Neil Patterson Jr. of the SUNY Center for Native Peoples and the Environment, the Tuscarora language has five verbs for every noun. The proper names for things are typically assemblages of the things’ relation with its surroundings. There are 54 pronouns, denoting not only gender but temporality. “There is a “we” he says, “for the us here, now; a “we” for the generation that will live out the present we’s decisions, the “we” who determined our origins hundreds of years ago. Tenses shift from fixed categories to generational approaches and removes. “Instructional moments” serve as nodes in a moving historical assemblage, one in which mourning, condolence, grief and response are in constant elastic negotiation. Our job at present is not to rewrite histories but to “requicken our minds out of loss.” Generational rather than historical knowledge provides a method of epistemological map expansion that, rather than de-linking relational epistemologies from harmful ontological consequences, recognizes that those links represent incomplete chains that can not only be expanded upon but pulled across temporal fields in new directions.
Rey Chow conceives of the imposition of the colonizer’s language at the loss of the language of the colonized as an introduction of a kind of prosthesis.[21] This sets up an optimistic, if mournful tension between the new limb and the original. What becomes of the original for those whose bios and mythos are sustained by it? Who benefits from the interventionist attempt to recuperate the American Chestnut’s biocultural genealogy? How do we mourn that which is forcibly replaced? Can the production of a new word begin to enact the kind of new science Aimé Césaire believes will fulfill us where we have been starved?
Castanea dentata translates vaguely to “toothy chestnut,” referring to the spikey husks that surround the seeds. The blight has a Latin name, too: Cryphonectria parasitica, an airborne canker pathogen capable of colonizing any open wound suffered by the tree from animal, human, or environmental intervention. Language is as foreign an object to the tree as the Cryphonectria parasitica. Aphasia thus becomes a mode of revelation. The quiet of the tree translates into a demand to listen to futures beyond the human or human-made.
I return here to the etiolated wild, the American Chestnut as stump, persisting in its perennial experiments in regrowth despite the near certainty of failure. This Chestnut stump allows us to conceive of the mature wild Chestnut as a phantom limb within the forestland. What does not grow is felt in the space between the high canopy and indeterminate undergrowth. Karen Barad writes: “the indeterminacy of time-being, and this gives rise to the fact that nothingness is not empty, but on the contrary, it is flush with the dynamism of the in/determinacy of time-being, the play of the non/presence of non/existence.”[22] The half-illuminated space of the absent tree itself evinces every temporality it’s lived and given way to; it is “in contact with the infinite alterity that it is.”[23] Thus it exceeds its human-made future in its forest memory, inviting us to listen to the now it will have been and may never be.
Mapping a discursive web between my ‘experimental criticism’ and Bob Powell’s transgenic experiments, I feel, again strangely abashed. But then I think, who are the real experimentalists? The scholars and geneticists, or the trees themselves. The refusers of Enlightened notions of innovation and origin in favor of light, blight, and shit, the wild trees stake their loamy claims and fail and fail again, without deterrence or regret.
But a transgenic tree is not a zombie, but an imperative futuring—what will have survived, what will have been resurrected, what will have flowered. The subjunctive of etiolation is superseded by the imperative of genetic determination; risk is managed, temporalities prescribed. If we could hear the silent frequencies of the wild and transgenic chestnuts, would they be different? How would we respond?
PART 6: OUTFUTURING
When the tree died the moth died, too.
I take the train from Queens back to Prospect Park alone and walk without looking. Or maybe I should say, without searching. I think about sedimentary logic that displaced whole histories, the multidimensional fields in which those histories persist.
The question of futurity is inextricable from the historical impact of extraction. The American Chestnut Tree has transformed from a natural phenomenon into a locus of national and scientific identities; stripped of its original modes of production, it becomes a sieve-like repository of discursive and metaphorical wealth.
In her groundbreaking 1987 essay, Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” Hortense Spillers exposes the “capture” of the Black feminine in a web of “overdetermined nominative properties.”[24] This accrual of nouns with attenuated meanings and mythologies threaten to suffocate the body they purport to define. To extract the self out from under the layers of nominatives, a verb must appear, armed with tenses resistant to the deafening clatter of mythos being shed. The event of this clattering is always, urgently occurring now, which denotes a moment hospitable to every articulation of itself, elastically capacious to ‘when’ and ‘was’ and ‘still’ and ‘soon.’
Tina Campt expands on this notion of ‘now’-ness in her articulation of Black feminist futurity. She evokes the future perfect tense, “it will have been” in its real condition “it will have had to be.”[25]
Campt demands the immanence of a Black feminist futurity by using the imperative mood, the mood of “must,” “should,” and “let it be.” Of course, it is impossible and counterproductive to try to graft Black feminist thought onto morphologies of the nonhuman, but I take my cue from her movement away from “hope” into “tense,” and her proposition of a “grammar of possibility that moves beyond a simple definition of the future tense as what will be in the future.”[26]
Campt demands a now that furnishes itself with the inevitable flourishing of the future. Where Campt calls for this move from hoping to tensing future self-determination through the imperative, I return to the subjunctive of etiolation.
The imperative is bright clear, “real condition,” shoring up survival by setting its protocols and parameters in advance. The subjunctive leaves endless room for error, contradiction, outright lies. It demands an altogether radical shift in our understanding of survivance of organisms that undermines imperatives by loosing imaginations. Compost becomes as seductive an archive as a photograph, genres of being become unsturdy and disposable, futurity sinks deeper into the muck of indeterminacy. “No longer an independent parameter relentlessly marching forward into the future,” Barad writes, “time is neither a continuum nor a series of discrete moments that follow in succession. Time is diffracted, imploded/exploded in on itself: each moment made up of a superimposition of all moments (differently weighted and combined in their specific material entanglement). And directly linked to this indeterminacy of time is a shift in the nature of being and nothingness.”[27] The will-ful imperative to outfuture the Chestnut trees, to ensure through coercion the hospitality of their hosts, to sediment the grammar of its temporal ontology becomes inoperable in the face of such indeterminacy. Where we think we are outfuturing the nonhuman with our narrow imperative gaze, we are in fact outfutured by its subjunctive eternities.
Works cited:
Ahmed, Sara. “Orientations: Toward a Queer Phenomenology.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 12, no. 4. (2006): pp. 543-574
Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology. Durham: Duke University Press. 2006.
Barad, Karen. “After the End of the World: Entangled Nuclear Colonialisms, Matters of Force, and the Material Force of Justice.” Theory & Event 22, no. 3, (July 2019): 524-550. (Johns Hopkins University Press)
Barthes, Roland. The Rustle of Language. Trans. Richard Howard. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.
Benjamin, Walter. “The Task of the Translator.” Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn; ed. & intro. Hannah Arendt (NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1968), pp.69-82.
Campt, Tina. Listening to Images. Durham: Duke University Press. 2017.
Césaire, Aimé, translated by A. James Arnold. “Poetry and Knowledge.” Lyric and Dramatic Poetry 1946-82. (The University Press of Virginia: Charlottesville). 1990.
Chow, Rey. Not Like a Native Speaker: On Languaging as a Postcolonial Experience. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014.
Farmer, Sarah. “When American Chestnuts Return to the Wild: Seedling size and breeding affect blight resistance.” USDA Southern Research Station CompassLive. May 10, 2016. Accessed May 19, 2021. https://www.srs.fs.usda.gov/pubs/49856
Freinkel, Susan. American Chestnut: The Life, Death, and Rebirth of a Perfect Tree. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.
Hale, Dan. “Indigenous Habitat /Ecosystem/Conservation: The American Chestnut Tree.” A.T. Journeys. (Winter 2021): 48-50.
McSweeney, Joyelle. The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2015.
Mignolo, Walter. “The Conceptual Triad: Modernity/Coloniality/Decoloniality.” On Decoloniality. Durham: Duke UP, 2018.
Spillers, Hortense J. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (Summer 1987): 64-81.
Steyerl, Hito. “The Terror of Total Dasein: Economies of Presence in the Art Field.” Dis Magazine. Accessed May 19, 2021. http://dismagazine.com/discussion/78352/the-terror-of-total-dasein-hito-steyerl/
Wolfe, Patrick. “Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native.” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4. (2006): 387-409.
[1] Wolfe, Patrick. “Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native.” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4. (2006): 387.
[2] Césaire, Aimé, translated by A. James Arnold. “Poetry and Knowledge.” Lyric and Dramatic Poetry 1946-82. (The University Press of Virginia: Charlottesville). 1990: 43.
[3] McSweeney, Joyelle. The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2015: 41.
[4] Ibid, 43.
[5] Farmer, Sarah. “When American Chestnuts Return to the Wild: Seedling size and breeding affect blight resistance.” USDA Southern Research Station CompassLive. May 10, 2016. Accessed May 19, 2021. https://www.srs.fs.usda.gov/pubs/49856
[6]Barad, Karen. “After the End of the World: Entangled Nuclear Colonialisms, Matters of Force, and the Material Force of Justice.” Theory & Event 22, no. 3, (July 2019): pp. 535.
[7] Ibid, 536.
[8] Barthes, Roland. The Rustle of Language. Trans. Richard Howard. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. p. 14.
[9] New Oxford American Dictionary (Second Edition)
[10] Steyerl, Hito. “The Terror of Total Dasein: Economies of Presence in the Art Field.” Dis Magazine. Accessed May 19, 2021.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomonology. Durham: Duke UP: 8.
[14] Ahmed, Sara. “Orientation: Toward a Queer Phenomonology.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 12, no. 4. (2006): 546.
[15] Steyerl.
[16] McSweeney: 41.
[17] Freinkel, Susan. American Chestnut: The Life, Death, and Rebirth of a Perfect Tree. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007: 3.
[18] Hale, Dan. “Indigenous Habitat /Ecosystem/Conservation: The American Chestnut Tree.” A.T. Journeys. Winter 2021. pp. 48
[19] Benjamin, Walter. “The Task of the Translator.” Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn; ed. & intro. Hannah Arendt (NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1968): 69.
[20] Mignolo, Walter. “The Conceptual Triad: Modernity/Coloniality/Decoloniality.” On Decoloniality. Durham: Duke UP, 2018:135.
[21] Chow, Rey. Not Like a Native Speaker: On Languaging as a Postcolonial Experience. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014: 17.
[22] Barad: 528. [23] Barad, 531.
[24] Spillers, Hortense J. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (Summer 1987): 65.
[25] Campt, Tina. Listening to Images. Durham: Duke University Press. 2017: 17. [26] Ibid.
Invisalign
By Cleo Abramian
I brush my teeth with my thumb
like a good American
feeding you a cucumber
in bas-relief, it feels so good
to wear an updo to the yard sale
a lime green wrap dress
to my vows, I wake up
to the blooming harps
alarm, the crease
of a digital hand
I like it when
what to do
crepuscular wanting
sunset on my breasts
you’re gone, what
an erotic gesture
to leave
with your teeth
like a pile of cranes
at the party
my butt is a thick curd
I stand and shape
my cuticles
telepathically
I fear the highway
I fear biology, I want
a popsicle
I like it when
you move
me across a sown
field
& In the Baroque Night We Lie Down
By Cleo Abramian
My aunt misses her flight
she is too busy arranging her Tupperware
of kotlet along the windowsill of Terminal B
& when she hears her name on the loudspeaker
she just hears hey you & goes & turns on
her megachurch like a ceiling fan in the dark
like a pike in brackish weeds & she won’t
circumnavigate her bad tooth & when she
touches her forehead to the computer
she won’t say motherboard she’ll say
where Noah finally landed his ship
& with rollers in her hair say come sip
on this peeled cantaloupe Jana & I have
never been back to climb the mountain
& I have never used the word lacunae
without hearing Ofra Haza singing
Shecharchoret my skin was pale & like a wave
I watch it like a graph not the moment
when it crashes but when it begins to lose
its breath & in Yerevan they mail dried
honeydew & say where have you been
& in Isfahan they say it’s still too soon
& in the Powerball mashup the Christmas
spirals chirp and coo & in the motel
my felt box swallows every baptism
& in Tel Aviv in Tel Aviv I am sent
into the breakout room with the men
with the paranoid beards & we are touched
& we go out with our white tongues
Grief
By Patrick Nevins
The last time I woke up with aphasia, I was alone. It was Cheryl’s day to pick up donuts for the nonprofit she works for, and she’d let me sleep in. Don’t judge me, but I tend to talk to myself when I’m alone, and after my shower that morning, I couldn’t talk myself through getting dressed, which I tend to do when Cheryl’s not there to help me, which, God bless her, is just one of the things she bears about me since I had the stroke. I couldn’t get out the words for choosing a polo shirt or encourage myself as I struggled into my jeans or judge that my sneakers weren’t Velcroed too tight. I’d woken up with Broca’s aphasia before, and it had gone away within minutes, so as I stared at the bathroom mirror working my jaw, trying to force out words, it wasn’t hard to deny that this time it might be different.
I figured the aphasia would wear off by the time my intro to sociology class met later that morning, so on the drive to campus I tuned in NPR and tried not to think about it. But here’s something else, either from the stroke or just getting older: My reaction time’s not what it used to be. There was a pickup in front of me at a four-way stop, and, I don’t know, it seemed like it was moving, so I started to move, but it wasn’t, and I rear-ended it.
This great big guy gets out of the truck, young guy with tattoos, camo cargo shorts, Second Amendment tee shirt, all the signs that he’s a guy you don’t cross. Sees me, middle-aged professor in a Subaru. Starts yelling, “What the hell, man! You fuckin’ blind?” He’s spewing this stuff, and my first instinct is to meet this lunk’s anger with my own. But by the time I work myself out of the car (it’s not easy for me), it’s not him I’m angry with—it’s me. I shouldn’t have been tailing the guy so close. I know better. I know my reaction time has slowed down, like everything else about me, except in this moment, how pissed off I get at myself. Idiot!
Of course, I can’t say any of this. My head-shaking and the exaggerated furrowing of my brow doesn’t convey what I want, “I’m so sorry, that was totally my fault, I’m such an idiot.” What the driver gets is, “Not my fault, asshole.”
“Don’t you have anything to say?”
I walk closer to him, hoping that at close range he’ll understand that I’m sorry, and he sees my dragging foot and bent arm, and all his rage dissipates like steam.
“Oh, shit. I didn’t realize….”
When I get up to him, I open my mouth, but the aphasia’s still got me in its grip.
“You can’t talk, can you?”
I tap my chest with my finger and nod, like, “Yeah, this is on me.”
I get my wallet out for my insurance card, but he says, “No, man, don’t worry a thing about it. It’s just a scratch. Look, where’re you headed? I ought to follow you, make sure you get there okay.”
It’s not necessary, but I figure I owe it to him to assuage his guilt over raging on an old, disabled guy, right? So I give him my card.
“Okay, Professor Landes, let’s get you to campus.”
The driver allows me to pass him and follows me to campus, and it’s the most painfully self-conscious I’ve been behind the wheel since taking my driver’s test in 1971.
There were fifteen minutes until my class started. My teaching style hasn’t changed much in thirty years: I lecture, get them discussing some articles, there’s a midterm and a final. Upper-level courses have a paper. But whatever the course, whatever day it is, my voice is an indispensable teaching tool. It’s not vanity, it’s the way I was trained. So you can imagine I was pretty panicked that students were already in their seats, killing time on their phones, and my voice was absent.
But I reasoned that the aphasia was temporary and I had only to bargain with my students for one morning. I walked into the classroom, nodded at the twenty-odd undergraduates, and wrote on the whiteboard, WRITE 5 MIDTERM QUESTIONS W/ ANSWERS. QUIZ 3 CLASSMATES. TURN THEM IN WHEN YOU LEAVE.
“Like, questions we think might be on the midterm?”
I nodded.
“You have laryngitis or something?”
I nodded again. This was in an old building with old furniture, those desk/chair combos, and I pulled one from the front row and sat down, as I often did during lectures. I could usually keep a class’s attention, but without my voice, I felt ridiculous up there. They slowly opened their notes and a few students began to write. And I just sat there regretting that I didn’t cancel class. What kind of deal was this, exchanging my lecture for busywork?
“You all right, Professor?”
“He can’t talk. Don’t be stupid.”
I remembered that I was supposed to get a haircut that afternoon, so I stepped out of the classroom and texted Cheryl.
Lost my voice this morning. Would you call ray and cancel my appointment?
When?
1:00
No, when did you lose your voice?
Woke up this way.
Anything else wrong? Should I call dr Armstrong?
Please cancel my haircut.
What are you doing now?
Class.
?
I’ll explain later.
When I got back into the classroom, something had happened. The students had turned their seats toward each other and were asking their questions. I floated around the room, listening in, giving a thumbs up to the better answers, shrugging when someone was off the mark. Everyone seemed to be enjoying the class; I heard the voices of students who’d never spoken up. Maybe I’d been overestimating the value of my voice in the classroom. Did I even need it at all? What about outside the classroom? Did I ever need to speak again? Cheryl and I had just had a perfectly adequate conversation over text. I texted with my sons. Hell, soon enough I’ll be texting with my grandkids! To whom did I need to communicate? The barista in the union? I could point at the size coffee I wanted. My barber, Ray? He knew what to do. I don’t go many places. There aren’t all that many people I talk to. When I earned tenure and stopped striving so much, a calm settled over me, a peace with the clock running out on my relevance. When that happens, there’s a lot less need to talk to people outside of your family. It was settled, then: If the aphasia didn’t wear off, no big deal!
The peace I had come to with my aphasia was short lived. Cheryl surprised me after class on the steps of the social sciences building, ruining it. I couldn’t text, nor can I adequately express now, the way I felt in that moment. I was aggravated that she’d shown up unannounced, needlessly worried about me. My anger with myself was back, too, for the misstep of texting her. And guilt, always guilt, for burdening her. Not that I chose to have a stroke, but who else am I going to blame? But—and here’s the thing—all that negative stuff was just one side of what I was feeling—the ugly, stiff, dragging-down side, if you will. The other side was all love and gratitude for this person who has always outclassed me and with whom I can be vulnerable in ways I’ve never been with anyone else. I wanted to tell her that, even though I was certain my words wouldn’t convey the depth and complexity of what I was feeling. I certainly didn’t want to text it.
I met her at the bottom of the steps and, rather than even try expressing what was in my heart, I made a scissors motion with my fingers around my temple. (What the hell is wrong with me?)
“No, I didn’t cancel your haircut.”
She could tell I was pissed then.
“I’ll take you to lunch, then the barbershop.” She put her hand on my chest, softly, looked in my eyes. She was looking at me with affection, but she was also studying my face for any extra droopiness. She’s vigilant. “I’m not worried,” she said, “but I do want to keep an eye on you.”
She drove us across the bridge to downtown where Ray’s is and there’s a barbecue place. Good one-handed dining. Cheryl ordered at the counter while I made a show of finding us a place to sit. Now that I was out of the classroom, where I had the authority to not speak, and out in the world, I didn’t want anyone knowing that I didn’t have a voice. I shoveled barbecue and mac-and-cheese in my mouth while Cheryl talked. I think we got out of there with no one the wiser.
There was no keeping up the façade in Ray’s, though. Ray gives me a big, “Hey, Walt!” and I give him a wave and figure I’ll read National Geographic while he finishes up with his customer. But Cheryl says, “He doesn’t have his voice today.”
Judas! I’d never been so betrayed by that woman in thirty-six years of marriage!
“Oh,” says Ray. “That a side effect of the stroke? I know it’s not the same, but with my diabetes, some days, whew! Can hardly make it through the day.”
Now everyone in the barbershop knew my affliction. And, no, Ray, it isn’t the same. I know that wasn’t very charitable of me, but I was too depressed at that point to love company in my misery.
When it was my time, I slumped in the chair and let Ray put the cape on me and talk about—I have no idea what he was talking about—and snip away. After the stroke and a lot of hashing things out with Cheryl, I faced up to needing to reduce my commitments to the university. There were too many ad hoc working groups of subcommittees of task forces to run to on one good leg, so I retired and became an adjunct. Being close to retirement age made the transition easier to take. But if the aphasia were permanent, I’d probably have to give up my classes, too. I imagined myself shrinking in that barber’s chair, pieces of me falling away like loose hairs. Confined to a wheelchair, eating everything through a straw. Mind gone. That husk, that was once Dr. Walt Landes. Scholar. Husband. Father. You know he was a star point guard in high school? Took the team to state twice.
“You’re all done, Walt.”
I know. I know.
If you’ve been following along, you know this is the part where I come to an acceptance of my aphasia. But mercifully I was spared that—for the time being, anyway. The next morning was one of those rare mornings that I was up before Cheryl. My sleep (and hers) gets interrupted by my changing the side I’m sleeping on, which takes time and a lot of moving of pillows. In the morning, I roll on my back and check in with my body, mapping where new pain has flared up, where the borders of numbness lie. Some mornings, instead of practicing this bodily cartography, I try to forget that I’m a physical being. I close my eyes and let everything soften, try to melt into the bed. Inasmuch as I can disconnect from pain and numbness, it’s peaceful; but then I wonder if that’s what dying is like, and I’m thrust back into my body and all my worries about its failing. But on this morning, I checked in with myself quickly and got out of bed. There was something I needed to do that morning, though I couldn’t remember what it was.
What I needed to do was to see if I could speak. But before I remembered my aphasia, I’d started the coffee and walked out front for the paper. We must’ve had a sub deliver the paper that day, because it was on the driveway; the usual guy knows to put it in the box, because it’s difficult for me to bend over and pick it up.
“Dammit.” That’s when I remembered the aphasia. I laughed. “Dammit, dammit, dammit!”
When I got back inside, Cheryl was up.
“Can I pour you some coffee?” I asked.
“Sure,” she said. “Your voice is back!”
I shrugged. “I knew it would be.”
Except I didn’t know it would be. And I don’t know that it won’t leave me again. I’m still haunted by the image I’d drawn of myself as I was sitting in the barber’s chair, that vision of me shrinking to nothing. Sure, we all know our ultimate destination is a pile of dust; it’s just that I can imagine getting there better than most, having gotten a head start. Have I made peace with that? I don’t know.
What I have accepted is this: For every loss—and the next one was driving; Cheryl convinced me not to get behind the wheel again after I told her about the accident at the four-way stop—I have to practice grace for my denial, forgiveness for my inevitable anger, reason when I try to bargain my way out, and courage when darkness comes, when I lie awake wondering when I’ll finally lose all sense of body and spirit.
Standing Outside The Fire: Garth Brooks and the Weaponization of That’s Not Country
By Tzipporah Shapiro
Garth Brooks is a man with an astronomically successful career. He’s the biggest selling Country artist in history, and he’s also been saddled with “that’s not Country” quips since his debut in 1989. He’s Schroedinger’s Country singer, if you will—simultaneously the saviour and downfall of the entire genre, living or dead with the turn of a dial. But that label never really hurt him, it couldn’t; instead it catalyzed “that’s not Country” against all those who came after, allowing the genre to regress culturally and setting a precedent that if an artist’s politics don’t align with industry mandates, they don’t belong. To be clear, “that’s not Country” was always about gatekeeping. It was always meant to draw a line in the sand between who gets to have a career and who doesn’t. But it wasn’t always a weapon.
So, to understand how we got here, how I got here, really, we have to go back to the beginning, or my beginning. I was born a fully formed yenta. My greatest joy in life is, and has always been, digging up personal information that doesn't involve me; in my heart of hearts, I think if I had been alive in the ‘70s I could have figured out who ‘Deep Throat’ was in, like, a month tops. I live for scandal and gossip and intrigue and a poorly orchestrated cover up—if you can't keep a secret, come sit next to me. There is nothing I love as much as other people's business.
Which brings us back to Garth Brooks, a man with no poker face and several very public scandals. As you can imagine, I was hooked immediately. I did not grow up a Garth Brooks fan, not assigned Country music at birth. I was aware that Garth Brooks existed because I lived in the world, but I’m a Jewish lesbian from New York, so I never stood in the Country music crosshairs. I don’t think I can accurately explain how I went from a casual Google to an Encylopedic knowledge of this man’s musical and personal oeuvres, the weird and wonderful alchemy that brough about this hyperfixation. The best that I can offer is that he represents a way for me to feel connected to a world I have long been excluded from, a world I adored but didn’t seem to adore me back. What I learned during those early days was that Garth Brooks is both the platonic ideal of a Country singer, and also “not Country” at all. This is important.
Depending on the day, Garth Brooks could easily be described as a love sick simp, a gunslinging cowboy, a mama’s boy, an egomaniac, a country hick, a rock groupie, a regular guy, a millionaire superstar, a liberal dad, an old school Republican, a philanderer, a slavish devotee, a cry baby or a jock—and they would all be completely accurate. He is, in a sense, always the bride and never the bridesmaid—a man who can’t miss even when he misses. He’s the only man I would ever even consider being straight for, which is mortifying both in its accuracy and in its scope.
At his peak, he was the American music industry lingua franca—no matter what you normally listened to, you also listened to Garth. That’s not hyperbole; Garth Brooks’ career by the numbers is absolutely incomprehensible: the most commercially successful solo artist of all time with more than 170 million records sold, 9 Diamond certified albums, a truly breathtaking number of industry awards (including artist of the decade, twice), RIAA award for artist of the century, The Gershwin Prize for Popular Song, induction into the Grand Ole Opry, induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame, induction into the Songwriters Hall of Fame, Kennedy Center Honors...the list goes on. He once had the number one song on three different Billboard genre charts at the same time, and even his worst-selling album had two number one singles and went platinum. In 1993, he personally delayed the Super Bowl. To say he was once-in-a-generation Big Deal is an understatement.
So why, with that kind of legacy and unprecedented superstardom, was Garth Brooks “not Country”?
Because Country artists were, and are still, expected to adhere to a sort of unspoken morality code that involves public displays of Christianity, a picturesque family, staid performances, no politics or only bedrock conservatism, whiteness, heterosexuality, and a reverence for The Way Things Were. Garth Brooks though, had no gods and no masters—he created the mold in his own image and then broke it.
“That’s not Country” was never about his music, which is as Country as anything Trace Adkins or Travis Tritt ever did. It was about him. He was liberal, he was loud, he was messy, and he opened Country’s door to the outside world. He put on shows like he was auditioning for KISS, cried in public all the time, and was so aggressively ambitious and monomaniacal that he held his entire record label captive until he got the deal he wanted. He released pro-gay marriage and anti-racism songs as early as 1992, and he publicly discussed his support of the rioters in Los Angeles. Years before he sang at Joe Biden’s inauguration, he wrote his loyalties in major chords.
But the worst thing he did, the thing he’ll never be forgiven for, is make Country music accessible to everyone. Suddenly people who didn’t fit the straight, white, conserative criteria were interested in Country, and what they saw was an industry dominated by intentional iniquity.
Country music wasn’t always as close-minded as it came to be. It wriggled away from its history of pro labor/anti cop sentiment, Latinx and Black music and musicians, women with opinions, and early Rock and Roll, and turned instead towards good ol’ boys fetish and untrammeled self-mythology. By the time Garth Brooks came along, the Country music industry already had its entrance closed to anyone that resembled the genre’s roots.
In the years since the Garth Brooks explosion, things have actually gotten worse. Women make up only 10% of Country airplay, and less than 3% of those women are women of color. Even more damning is that men like Morgan Wallen, who was caught on camera saying the N-word in February and had his album sky rocket to the top of the charts within a few days of the video going viral, staying in the number one spot for eleven weeks as a direct result, can continue to thrive in the industry. The implicit “you don’t belong here” aimed at Black artists and other artists of color is now an explicit “you don’t belong here”. The genre’s viler fans regularly harass and attempt to intimidate the few artists of color that do manage to have some success. LGBTQ artists don’t fare much better; it was recently breathless front page news for several days that Trisha Yearwood stood on the stage at the Grand Ole Opry and changed the pronouns in her biggest hit to be about two women, saying “love is love”.
Throughout all of this, “that’s not Country” has been used as a way to silence those who don’t fit the criteria, be that politically, racially, or otherwise. It’s often a racist dog whistle meant to say “I know you’re singing a Country song, but you’re Black so that doesn’t belong to you”, or a sexist refrain of “this would be a Country song, but I don’t like this woman’s opinions, so no it isn't”. “Country” has come to mean a very specific way of life represented in music that prioritizes the false authenticity of white men over all else. So the music itself belongs, in their own minds, to people who don’t see different perspectives as a good thing, only an attack on something that they truly feel has only ever been theirs. But what exactly does the music of Hank Williams have in common with the music of George Strait that it doesn’t have in common with the music of Mickey Guyton? Hank Jr. famously said “I’m proud of my daddy’s name but his music and mine ain’t exactly the same '' so why is he real country but Orville Peck isn’t? Why is Brantley Gilbert’s latest synth heavy ode to Nickelback Country but Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” not? These questions aren’t rhetorical so much as they are already answered: the conservatism in the Country music industry is intentional. There are three Black members of the Country Music Hall of Fame, out of 159—none of them women. There are currently four Black executives in Country music.
32 years after his debut, Garth Brooks is still a man with an astronomically successful career. He’s still the biggest selling Country artist in history, and he’s still taunted with “that’s not Country” by purists and executives alike. That label never did hurt him though, it couldn’t. He was too big, too immediately successful, and he checked enough of the boxes to get through the door in the first place. But once it became clear that “that’s not Country” was aimed at him because of his politics rather than his music, the floodgates were opened and a once toothless gatekeeping phrase was weaponized to curtail the careers of artists of color, artists with left leaning politics, LGBTQ artists, and most women.
Garth Brooks seems like a nice guy; he cries a lot, but he loves his wife and he’s good to his fans. And there is no way to know what the industry would look like if he hadn’t come along and blown the doors wide open, but he did and he did it as a liberal, so “that’s not Country” became a weapon.
I Love Juice, I Hate Almost Dying
By Peter Soucy
I have a friend named Guev
he lives in a house with a dirt patch
imprint of a swimming pool
his mom’s been dying for four years
she gave him kombucha starter
on his birthday, symbiotic organisms
growing in her memory
while my brother and his
girlfriend jumped into our emerald pool
with Guev, we played soccer
Guev kicked the ball so hard at my head I
passed out, fell into the water
I remember closing my eyes, everything turning dark
my friends saying, he’s out, but in my head
it felt like I was faking it
Woke up in my brother’s bed in our shared room
I was in the hospital for two days
now in my house, I shouldn’t get up
there was the girl from my poetry class
then she was my friend Guev, they explained
to me that they kicked a ball at my head
their gender dripping back-and-forth
I got up. The house was filled with orange light
like someone was about to commit murder
my brother told me I should join him next time
Guev’s mom was there in a wheelchair
Guev cried, why is this so hard, mom
she looked at him and told him to close
his eyes and feel his hand—really feel it
without touching it, just feel it was there
then his foot in the same way
he did this for an hour
his body produced green ribbons
ribbons ran around his blue eyes
every inch of his body, he froze
on the living room couch for three days
I tried to catch his tears in my
kombucha jar, his mom looked at him thrashing
he nearly fell off the couch, she took
his head in her hands, it’s so hard
because you’re still gonna be here
but you can feel me in the ribbons
from your blue eyes, when you see
the sunlight shine through the front
window, the cat stretching out
T H E R E A N D B A C K
By Brandi Kruse
When Dad finally got out of bed after the divorce, he moved in with Arch. My sister and I stayed there everyotherweekend. His house looked fancy but felt hollow—the living room as empty as the fridge. It was a bachelor pad, but I didn’t know that phrase yet. The house felt most unfamiliar on the first floor in the dark—in winter months and on late summer nights, it seemed to grow more lonely and unused.
My sister and I would wait 30 years before texting that time at Arch’s house was so strange. And yet, we were in a pool.
Compared to most of our travels across our hometown, the car ride to Northville took forever. Being the first one to holler shotgun on the way to the car became our secret way of claiming the backseat—so we could go to sleep instead of talking to Dad. We weren’t mean or out of love, we were growingbodiesandtired. Especially me.
It was the summer before third grade, and I was already on Weight Watchers with Mom. She was tired of watching me cry in dressing rooms. And I was teased so much at school that I regularly hid in the bathroom. I hid because I hated how my shorts rode up between my thighs when I walked, and because in gym I couldn’t climb the rope without knots, and Mr. Ziegler said it was because I was too fat.
One morning at Arch’s house, I woke up to go jogging through the neighborhood, before Sis and Dad got up, but I realized I didn't even know how to pull my hair up into a ponytail. I decided to do my best with my banana clip. I might have made it through a block before I gave up. It was so much easier in my head. Just like how, until I was hungry, I could easily imagine adhering to all manner of dietary restrictions, like filling up on a quarter cup of cottage cheese or plain canned tuna fish. At Dad’s, I wasn’t able to measure things out the way I was supposed to, so I would eat meals as slowly as I could, and then skip dessert while Dad and Sis ate ice cream. Dad would tell me how strong I was for refusing sweets on the same days he made me feel like I shouldn’t trust my body. He said, You can’t be hungry. I’m not hungry. And then, You don’t want to look like me, do you?
I never really felt like a kid unless I was in the pool.
At Arch’s house, we swam like we were young because we were, and it was not a hassle to be wet, to smell like chlorine, to let our wet hair dripandtangleanddry as it would.
Arch was never around until we were swimming. He would surface in his khakis, button up, and sweaterinanyweather. He loved to pull me from the pool by my ponytail. Somehow it didn't hurt, which no one believed, but no one ever stopped him, either. He had a southern accent and laughed louder than the joke. He thought his pool trick was hilarious.
Me and my sister’s pool trick involved disappearing underwater for worrisome amounts of time, trying to make it to the far end of the pool without coming up for air. We would hold our breath as long as we could, and at one point we could go thereandback in one gasp.
I remember occasional dolphin dives with Dad, powered by a twolegtail kick that pulled my arms tight around his neck, my body gliding underwater just above his—coarse cheeks and soft floaty body hairs. I would open my eyes just in time to see us goingupforair—the clouds in summer blue sky becoming clearer as we broke the surface—then close them before we plunged back under again.
I remember waking up one Sunday morning and crawling into bed with Dad to ask him why he cheated on Mom. He cried, and I don’t remember what he said, or if he ever answered. I’m fairly certain that question is what kept him in bed, at his parents house in the bedroom he grew up in, so long after the divorce.
The only memory I have of a family dinner at Arch’s—all of us around the table, tv off—was when Dad surprised us with octopus, but one sight of tentacles turned our stomachs. Maybe they reminded us too much of our swimming arms and legs. We preferred the more familiar special treat of veal parmesan from a restaurant downtown. Many years later, learning how calves become veal, I never ate it again. Dad had a taste for things that were expensive. I definitely inherited this from him—this craving for things that are not just costly but ludicrously overpriced. Years later, he would fill his own refrigerator with gourmet food that would rot before he ever had the energy or company to use it.
One morning I woke before everyone, hungry. I went downstairs quietly and searched for something to eat. I thought I would find bread to make toast, peanut butter to spoon, cheese to slice, Captain Crunch, Triscuits, bologna, or leftover anything to tide me over until everyone woke up. There was nothing but condiments, so I unwrapped a cloudybrownblock from the freezer. This was the closest thing to food I could find. I grabbed a butter knife from the drawer and started to chisel away at the icey lump, mostly unsuccessfully. I ate the weird shaved ice chunks I managed to free from the whole. Dad's later laughter was way worse than the metallic bite of brine shrimp meant for Arch’s basement fish.
Kurt Rohde with Solar Editors Christine Degenaars & Grayson Wolf
Kurt Rohde is a violist and composer. He has been the recipient of several awards and fellowships, such as the Rome prize, the Berlin Prize, and a Guggenheim fellowship. A recipient of a 2021 Creative Capital Award, Kurt is currently working on a collaborative project with artist Marie Lorenz and writer Dana Spiotta. Their new piece, Newtown Odyssey, a floating opera on the Newtown Creek, addresses environmental catastrophe and justice.
What initially drew us to Kurt Rohde is his particular relationship to collaboration. He has worked with musicians and visual artists, as well as transformed the works of a number of authors into music. Among what is astonishing about Kurt's collaborative work, to our untrained ears, is how it reveals of the source material that which we didn’t realize was essential. It achieves this without ever slipping into translation or impression — allowing the music to have its own vitality.
In this conversation we cover a range of topics, among them, his approach to collaboration, process, and what it means to fail. Because talking about music just isn’t the same thing as listening to it, we thought it would be nice to preface our conversation with It Wasn’t a Dream, the first part of his song cycle based on Diane Seuss’s poetry collection Four-Legged Girl.
— Editors Christine Degenaars & Grayson Wolf
Solar: You’ve worked in collaboration with a number of authors and artists — Diane Seuss, Donna Masini, Scott Hunter, Dana Spiotta, and others — has collaboration always been a central part of your practice?
Kurt Rohde: Let me put it this way — it has always been central, but I just didn’t know to what extent or begin to accept it as such until about twelve years ago when I was in Rome at the American Academy. For a lot of reasons that year was a real shift, a real choice to change things regarding my mental health and my creative life.
More recently, I read Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming by Agnes Callard, and it resonated immediately. Callard’s ideas about self-creation and its connection to our values, has allowed me to recognize the amount of agency involved in the acceptance that I DO deeply collaborate with others as a part of my process.
Much about my life (our lives) really is out of my (our) control, but the power to change ourselves (or not) is something we do have some say in. It’s certainly not a straight line, and it can go quite badly at times, but it is possible. The smallest possibility is still a possibility.
My creative life started (and remains) as a violist. I trained as a classical musician but I ended up playing a lot of very new music; composing music developed in tandem with playing. Collaboration (that generative process that occurs when people come in contact with one another intentionally or unintentionally and form a “third space” for making) is the core to the practice of musicking. Or at least I think it is; it certainly is for me. Even the most “soloed” performers have, at some point along the way, had to encounter and engage with others in order to create. They may be alone but they’re not in a vacuum. Isolation is not a vacuum; it is “removal from,” but never reaches complete absence. Being alone is not being in a vacuum, it is not emptiness — there is always the possibility for connection with… possibility.
I am a pretty quiet person, perceived by others as an extrovert but in fact I’m deeply introverted. Listening, being present, considering, and acknowledging others feels organic to me. And it is exhausting. That being “in the presence of” asks me to be patient and take the time to process. Listening feels like proto-collaborating, and since I love to listen, I love this initial stage.
Engaged listening with presence makes my mind whirl, spinning towards possible interactions with others. It took me years to understand this is how I make my music, and even longer to accept it as a valid process — seeking out, acknowledging, honoring the relationships with others, looking for beauty. Working with others is a beautiful thing for me.
Years ago, Paul Mann (an astounding, uncelebrated poet who taught at Pomona College) gave me a copy of Elaine Scarry’s On Beauty and Being Just. Scarry observes that when we encounter something of beauty we want to capture and “reproduce” it. In that encounter, we are captured by the beauty, and this brings us outside ourselves — a “radical decentering” — and we feel the need to preserve the beauty so it can be shared with others. Scarry’s observation is far more involved than I’m explaining here but suffice to say it marries the urge to create (to reproduce and share) with the desire to collaborate (to decenter ourselves and work with others with compassion and equality) so simply.
The world of contemporary new music can place a lot of currency on notions of the individual and the singular. I am not that. I need others, and it has nothing to do with being ostensibly a very private, solitary person. I want work to bring people together (by the way, there’s nothing wrong with moving or drifting away from one another; each relationship has its own life cycle) and to be a part of a shared space where really odd, weird, intimate, and touching stuff happens. I’ve said all of this and now I must be honest; being this connected and close with others scares the shit out of me; a conundrum, one of many. I have a very messy brain.
Solar: You based your chamber piece It Wasn’t A Dream on a selection of poems from Diane Seuss’s book, Four-Legged Girl. You also make an appearance in several of her poems. In one poem from Diane’s book Frank: Sonnets, there’s this great exchange between you and the speaker:
Music, Kurt says, is not a language, though people
say it is. Even poetry, though built from words,
is not a language, the words are the lacy gown,
the something else is the bride who can’t be factored
I’m fascinated by that statement — music is not a language — what did you mean by that?
Kurt Rohde: Ah yes — the language thing … Diane gets it right! (I am still amazed that she remembers all our conversations.) I consider Diane to be an emotional genius. Mythmaking and MacArthur Fellows aside, genius in our culture feels assigned to a certain type of intellectual for whom there is a specific social utility and assigned value to their work. I feel there are emotional geniuses who incorporate the intellectual prowess of a scientist or scholar, but whose utility is mightily different. The currency for emotional intelligence is vastly undervalued and often dismissed as being less than. I also think it is more difficult to talk about, hence, art. Diane’s work does not adhere to the hierarchy of more or less, it just is what it is (remarkable & rigorous) and I believe that’s what makes her writing potent and lingering. (Lingering…please read her I can’t stop thinking of that New York skirt, turquoise sequins glued onto sea-colored cotton.) Onto the question…
What do we mean by language? Speech, written word, rhythm, syntax, the way the brain is hardwired? Becoming competent at verbal communication, using the agreed upon meaning of things called “words,” organized with this thing called “grammar,” adhering to basic cognitive functions surrounding repetition and recognizability — only then do we have the starting point for a common understanding of what we mean by “language.” And we have not even talked about utility, culture, or place. Much of the time, I feel like language is not more than metaphor operating on a spectrum of specificity. We can get so fucking close to a commonality of unified understanding and yet there are still these grey areas.
Then one hears that “music is a language.” Music is ALL grey area! And music’s grey area is not metaphoric in the way language’s is. Music feels like communication because it resonates. It can make us feel something unlike anything else (that singular experience only music can generate). But it isn’t. It is connection. Music achieves more often what language strives for over and over: connection. Let’s leave the communicating to language.
And there is the conundrum of songs — words put to music or music put to words or utterances that are sung — all so fascinating. A song assumes that the words matter to the listener; of course, they do to the composer/musician/singer. But I believe they matter differently. I believe the words become un-worded when music is attached. Songs have a potential for connection and meaningfulness, they become something other than communication. This same potential simply cannot be realized through words alone.
Perhaps this is why poetry is my go-to language art. The nothingness of poetry is astounding because it is really everything that non-poetry is not. The economy, the twistedness, the abstractions, and the simple revelations — all of it can jolt us in a way that is so, so close to the musical experience — “the lacy gown, / the something else is the bride who can’t be factored…” We so want music to be a language because it fills in the gaps where language fails. Poetry is a bridge between those worlds of music and language. Yet still, they are not even close. But what do I know?
Solar: You’ve described your creative process as an act of imagining a composition through the medium of another art, whereby you account for your experience of the source material but also consider and incorporate the formal techniques that have allowed the source to create that experience. This sounds like a wonderful way to not only create new work, but also to understand the work of others. Could you talk a bit about that process?
Kurt Rohde: I received great feedback from a mentor about what I was thinking when I did something of interest to him in my music. He said, “Turning a non-musical idea into music — that act of transformation, of alchemy and invention — that is where the spark of new understanding and knowledge occurs.” It’s spot on.
I have always been far more interested in imagining spaces outside myself, especially those spaces I have no expertise in.
I am not a visual person, but I love the image and the infinite approaches a visual artist can undertake to render this physical form of art.
I love reading but I am not a writer, and how any poet or novelist or scholar can synthesize potent meaningfulness through words — they are only marks on a page! — astounds me.
I don’t dance and my relationship to my body is problematic, and it is the dancer that sweeps through a space or stops time who can make me weep or howl.
These surface points of contact allow me to imagine musicking using tools from another medium. I can look at a chair, figure out how it was assembled, and find unusual analogs to assembling a piece of music. Considering the function of the individual parts of an unfinished chair and how they can fit together allows me to ask: Can I make a piece of music as if it were a chair?
Perhaps an example of this would be through program notes for a new piece for solo double bass and effects pedal I just finished:
auf einer wellenlänge / (navigating the distance)
The process used to create this piece is the painting technique of pentimento, whereby the presence of earlier images or strokes are changed by being painted over. For a piece that uses sound, not pigment nor paint, I needed to identify the features of the material that were (to my ears) sonic analogs to the physical materials of painting.
My closest friends who are creatives are not composers but writers, poets, and painters. My research involved conversations with these people, all of whom are so dear to me. They were able to help guide me towards thinking not as the composer of sound, but as someone making a figure with a stroke and then covering or smudging it up.
By identifying the qualities I wanted to bring into this piece, I recognized I needed to be talking about these ideas inside the same space as my non-composer friends. We needed to try to get onto the same wavelength (hence the idiomatic German phrase), and figure out how to navigate the distance between us that was made of modal differences and experiences. We needed to acknowledge the unknown. The revelation that we needed to get as close as we could get, and then get by with the stuff we didn’t know, became the crux of my decision to use the pentimento technique as the actual form of the piece.
The music and the physical motions of the performer are presented on the canvas of the instrument and stage. These strokes and images are smeared, turned and overdrawn (oversounded); the piece becomes thicker, layered, sunken. The qualities of sound — the sonic paint — I ultimately limited myself to are:
Thinness
Viscosity
Blurring
Bleeding
Revealing
SUNG TEXT:
Here I am/Here/am I Here
Here/We go/Here
Go
Solar: Recently, you've been working with the poet Donna Masini on creating a micro-opera based on the Water Lilies section of her collection, 4:30 Movie. How did this project come about? What interested you about this collection? How did you identify the micro-opera as the best form for this new collaboration?
Kurt Rohde: Small clarification: I am using all of the [deleted scenes] poems, and only one of the Water Lilies poems from Donna’s 4:30 Movie for the micro-opera. I have started a series of solo soprano works using the full collection of her luminous Water Lilies poems.
The micro-opera project came about after I read 4:30 Movie. I was struck by the range with which Donna tells the story of her sister’s battle with cancer. It’s disarming; the humor, the shades and shifts in tone, the gravity of the sadness by the writer, but also of her sister who is fully aware of what is happening and kind of pissed because she’s doing all she can to survive while knowing she won’t. Donna’s work is so unpretentious and loving; it’s so clearly grounded in the need to be fully honest and open. That is a beautifully difficult thing to do. After thinking about the design of her collection, I considered the nesting of different narratives at work throughout. The [deleted scenes] poems feel especially ripe with opera-land potential. These poems are parenthetical to the full collection, and yet the story would not be as powerful without them. They feel performative.
And since I brought it up, a micro-opera is a relative new subcategory in the genre. Micro-operas tend to be short in duration (no Götterdämmerung), highly portable (no Götterdämmerung), for only a few singers and instrumentalists (no Götterdämmerung), all while allowing for unusual and atypical narrative exploration (OK — Götterdämmerung does have some unusual narrative innovations). In many ways, a micro-opera can be everything a fully staged grand opera is not. It is the focused intimacy that might be the micro-opera’s most powerful feature.
Poems are enigmas, they tell stories through deft acts of deception and manipulation. But it is the great poem that does this because it is the only way to tell that story honestly. The great poem is minimally synthetic but it maximally synthesizes. I love that Donna uses the commonplace act of watching movies as the place for sharing, togetherness, being simple with intimate quietude. All while cancer is sitting there, watching the movie as well, working in silence, an act of intimate devious magic.
I have been living with cancer since 2017. It is under control and simply needs to be managed until I die. I’m very lucky to be able to do this. My cancer didn’t surprise me. I’ve been thinking about my own ending my entire life. I had a brother who died from leukemia, a brother who died in a house fire which I survived, a parent who died in a car accident at age 48, and immediate family members who have struggled with mental illness and suicide. Death has always been in my front pocket, observing and participating in my everyday life; I’m intimate with Thanatos. My cancer activates the friction between my humility and my “oh shit – what am I doing and why isn’t it more…?” buttons. We are built to fail; our bodies will fail, and our death is our worst, most personal, commonplace and fully boring catastrophe.
Solar: I was curious about something mentioned on your site. It noted that you've been interested in the codification of failure in current culture — can you elaborate on this? How have you tried to incorporate notions of failure and catastrophe into the way you make your work?
Kurt Rohde: Failure and catastrophe… this obsession of mine has really permeated everything I do. Art is about the pursuit and ongoingness of beauty in life/lives/living. Breakdowns in systems, knowledge, and understandings are a part of failure. When things work, we have the vocabulary to describe that process. Vocabulary begins to fall short when the breakdowns — the failures — become more severe. Failure can be benign. Catastrophe cannot. The enduring impact of catastrophe can consume us because it can destroy. One can imagine continuing after failure; this becomes more difficult with catastrophe.
We are made to fail, beginning with our bodies. We live and we die because of a physiological failure to continue living. I do not imagine most failure as being attached to ethics; I imagine catastrophe as the space where the stakes surpass failure and move toward having profound ethical consequences.
As such, the way we assess, understand, or judge success implies a world of failure for which there is very little vocabulary, and the vocabulary that does exist typically is pejorative and lacks nuance. This crude vocabulary demonstrates a real lack of curiosity about how failing inhabits a work of values — values that are largely assumed to be about destruction and shortcomings.
This blindness about failure in part feeds what I think is a pretty dark, pretty unconstructive understanding of the role failure has in our life. Failures guide us, not just away from a place of unworkability, but (if one is open to imagining it) towards real insight, real revelation. My path has often been a linkage of failures. It has taken extreme patience and humility for me to wade through it all and recognize paths forward.
If language is communication, music (art) is connection, and beauty stirs the urge to stare and capture and reproduce and share, then failure is the opportunity to look at ourselves with humility and occasionally be brave enough to try to aspire to something more.
Contributors
Cleo Abramian lives and writes between Colorado and Western Mass.
Louise Akers is a poet living in Queens, NY. They earned their MFA from Brown University in May of 2018, and received the Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop Prize for Innovative Writing in 2017 and the Confrontation Poetry Prize in 2019. Their chapbook, Alien year, was selected by Brandon Shimoda for the 2020 Oversound Chapbook Prize. Akers’s work can be found in the Berkeley Poetry Review, MIDTERM, Bat City Review, Fugue Journal, Confrontation Magazine, bæst journal, and elsewhere.
Chaelee Dalton (이채연) is the author of the chapbook Mother Tongue (Gold Line Press 2021). You can find their work published or forthcoming in The Offing, Pinwheel, and the Penn Review. A poet, zine maker, and educator, they have presented their work at arts and activist events in Seoul, Los Angeles, and New York. Born in Uijeongbu, South Korea, they currently live in New York.
Brandi Kruse (b. 1979 Ypsilanti, Michigan) is an artist and educator working in Portland, Oregon. Spanning multiple disciplines, Kruse’s artwork addresses expectation and sensitivity within real and imagined spaces. Her artwork has shown at numerous institutions in Portland and beyond including the Center for Contemporary Art & Culture, Fuller Rosen Gallery, Fold Gallery (LA), and Worksound International (Mexico City). She is also co-founder of KC, a writers’ collective publishing poetry zines since 2013.
Jessica Laser is the author of two books of poems, Planet Drill (Futurepoem Books, forthcoming this year), winner of the Other Futures Award, and Sergei Kuzmich from All Sides (Letter Machine Editions, 2019). At the moment, she lives near Lake Michigan in Indiana and is a PhD candidate in English at UC Berkeley.
Patrick Nevins is the author of The Commission of Inquiry: Stories (forthcoming from Cornerstone Press). His writing has appeared in HAD (Hobart After Dark), Schyulkill Valley Journal Online, and other places.
Jerry Lieblich writes plays, poems, and operas in Williamstown MA, and Brooklyn NY. Plays include D Deb Debbie Deborah (Clubbed Thumb – Critic’s Pick: NY Times, TimeOut NY), Tongue Depressor (The Public Theatre, Brooklyn College), Nostalgia is a Mild Form of Grief (Playwrights Horizons, Vineyard Theater), Ghost Stories (Cloud City - Critic’s Pick: TimeOut NY), Your Hair Looked Great (Abrons Arts Center), and The Barbarians (New York Theatre Workshop, Dixon Place, PRELUDE), A Discourse on the Method… (Ensemble Studio Theatre), and Everything for Dawn (Experiments in Opera).
Jerry has held residencies at the MacDowell Colony (2020 Peter Wirth Fellow), MassMoCA, Blue Mountain Center, SPACE on Ryder Farm, UCROSS, and the Edward F. Albee Foundation. They have received a EST/Sloan Commission and the Himan Brown Creative Writing Award (twice), and are an alum of the Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab, Page 73's I-73 Writer's Group, and Pipeline Theater’s Playlab group. BA: Yale, Philosophy; MFA: Brooklyn College (Mac Wellman and Erin Courtney, chief instigators). www.thirdear.nyc
Violist and composer Kurt Rohde is a recipient of the Rome Prize, the Berlin Prize, a Radcliffe-Harvard Institute for Advanced Study Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lydian String Quartet Commission Prize, and commission awards from the Barlow, Fromm, Hanson, and Koussevitzky Foundations, and New Music/USA. He has received the Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies. Recent projects include new works for the Lydian Quartet, Brooklyn Art Song Society, cellist Rhonda Rider, pianist Genevieve Lee, cellist Michelle Kesler, and Ensemble Échappé.
Rohde is Artistic Advisor of and plays viola with the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble. His CD Oculus—Music for Strings with the New Century Chamber Orchestra was released on the Mondovibe label, and his CD ONE: Chamber Music of Kurt Rohde was released by Innova Recordings. A forthcoming CD featuring Treatises for an Unrecovered Past for String Quartet and his song cycle It wasn’t a dream… was released on Albany Records in 2019.
Tzipporah Shapiro is a New York City-based writer and graphic designer with enough plants to constitute a medium sized jungle.
Peter Soucy was born in Rhode Island. He is a graduate of the MFA at CUNY Brooklyn College, where he edited nonfiction for the Brooklyn Review. He received the 2020 Himan Brown Award in Creative Writing.