Krista > Books: 2022‎ (107)

I sat in the easy chair. “Aftab,” I said, “would you like to join me for a cup of tea?” My anxiety did not respond. I waited a while, picturing its

I sat in the easy chair. “Aftab,” I said, “would you like to join me for a cup of tea?” My anxiety did not respond. I waited a while, picturing its face. It had an egg-shaped head and small, dark eyes on the sides rather than at the front. A long, slim nose and a narrow mouth beneath. Its skin was pale and smooth, except for a wrinkled frown on its brow and more wrinkles around both eyes that made it appear older than it should. Perfectly bald, it had no facial hair or eyebrows either. “Aftab,” I repeated. Still, my anxiety did not come out to meet me.

I continued to read, despite the Thing. No, not despite the Thing. I had a word for the Thing now. Anxiety. Naming my tormentor didn’t make things any easier. Maybe that would change if I found out more about the condition.

I held onto him tightly, as his body wracked with the force of his sobs. After a moment, I wept too. If I had looked deep into myself, I would have known why, but I didn’t. I didn’t want to face the thing I had kept hidden since the first day I came to India.

I sat in the easy chair. “Aftab,” I said, “would you like to join me for a cup of tea?” My anxiety did not respond. I waited a while, picturing its face. It had an egg-shaped head and small, dark eyes on the sides rather than at the front. A long, slim nose and a narrow mouth beneath. Its skin was pale and smooth, except for a wrinkled frown on its brow and more wrinkles around both eyes that made it appear older than it should. Perfectly bald, it had no facial hair or eyebrows either. “Aftab,” I repeated. Still, my anxiety did not come out to meet me.

I continued to read, despite the Thing. No, not despite the Thing. I had a word for the Thing now. Anxiety. Naming my tormentor didn’t make things any easier. Maybe that would change if I found out more about the condition.

I held onto him tightly, as his body wracked with the force of his sobs. After a moment, I wept too. If I had looked deep into myself, I would have known why, but I didn’t. I didn’t want to face the thing I had kept hidden since the first day I came to India.

He motored slowly down the point and along the south shore of the island. The gulf was calm in the last of the light and lights had begun to come u

He motored slowly down the point and along the south shore of the island. The gulf was calm in the last of the light and lights had begun to come up along the shore to the west. He swung the boat around and twisted the throttle slowly forward and headed north, taking his bearings by the lights along the causeway. It was cold out on the water with the sun down. The wind was cold. By the time he got to the marina he thought that the man who’d gone ashore on the island was almost certainly the passenger

Here is a story. The last of all men who stands alone in the universe while it darkens about him. Who sorrows all things with a single sorrow. Out of the pitiable and exhausted remnants of what was once his soul he’ll find nothing from which to craft the least thing godlike to guide him in these last of days.

There were people who escaped Hiroshima and rushed to Nagasaki to see that their loved ones were safe. Arriving just in time to be incinerated. He went there after the war with a team of scientists. My father. He said that everything was rusty. Everything looked covered with rust. There were burnt-out shells of trolleycars standing in the streets. The glass melted out of the sashes and pooled on the bricks. Seated on the blackened springs the charred skeletons of the passengers with their clothes and hair gone and their bones hung with blackened strips of flesh. Their eyes boiled from their sockets. Lips and noses burned away. Sitting in their seats laughing. The living walked about but there was no place to go. They waded by the thousands into the river and died there. They were like insects in that no one direction was preferable to another. Burning people crawled among the corpses like some horror in a vast crematorium. They simply thought that the world had ended. It hardly even occurred to them that it had anything to do with the war. They carried their skin bundled up in their arms before them like wash that it not drag in the rubble and ash and they passed one another mindlessly on their mindless journeyings over the smoking afterground, the sighted no better served than the blind. The news of all this did not even leave the city for two days. Those who survived would often remember these horrors with a certain aesthetic to them. In that mycoidal phantom blooming in the dawn like an evil lotus and in the melting of solids not heretofore known to do so stood a truth that would silence poetry a thousand years. Like an immense bladder, they would say. Like some sea thing. Wobbling slightly on the near horizon. Then the unspeakable noise. They saw birds in the dawn sky ignite and explode soundlessly and fall in long arcs earthward like burning party favors.

Listen, Ducklescence, he whispered. You will never know what the world is made of. The only thing that’s certain is that it’s not made of the world. As you close upon some mathematical description of reality you cant help but lose what is being described. Every inquiry displaces what is addressed. A moment in time is a fact, not a possibility. The world will take your life. But above all and lastly the world does not know that you are here. You think that you understand this. But you dont. Not in your heart you dont. If you did you would be terrified. And you’re not. Not yet. And now, good night.

In his dreams of her she wore at times a smile he tried to remember and she would say to him almost in a chant words he could scarcely follow. He knew that her lovely face would soon exist nowhere save in his memories and in his dreams and soon after nowhere at all. She came in half nude trailing sarsenet or perhaps just her Grecian sheeting crossing a stone stage in the smoking footlamps or she would push back the cowl of her robe and her blonde hair would fall about her face as she bent to him where he lay in the damp and clammy sheets and whisper to him I’d have been your shadowlane, the keeper of that house wherein your soul is safe. And all the while a clangor like the labor of a foundry and dark figures in silhouette about the alchemic fires, the ash and the smoke. The floor lay littered with the stillborn forms of their efforts and still they labored on, the raw halfsentient mud quivering red in the autoclave. In that dusky penetralium they press about the crucible shoving and gibbering while the deep heresiarch dark in his folded cloak urges them on in their efforts. And then what thing unspeakable is this raised dripping up through crust and calyx from what hellish marinade. He woke sweating and switched on the bedlamp and swung his feet to the floor and sat with his face in his hands. Dont be afraid for me, she had written. When has death ever harmed anyone?

When the onset of universal night is finally acknowledged as irreversible even the coldest cynic will be astonished at the celerity with which every rule and stricture shoring up this creaking edifice is abandoned and every aberrancy embraced. It should be quite a spectacle. However brief.

He motored slowly down the point and along the south shore of the island. The gulf was calm in the last of the light and lights had begun to come up along the shore to the west. He swung the boat around and twisted the throttle slowly forward and headed north, taking his bearings by the lights along the causeway. It was cold out on the water with the sun down. The wind was cold. By the time he got to the marina he thought that the man who’d gone ashore on the island was almost certainly the passenger

Here is a story. The last of all men who stands alone in the universe while it darkens about him. Who sorrows all things with a single sorrow. Out of the pitiable and exhausted remnants of what was once his soul he’ll find nothing from which to craft the least thing godlike to guide him in these last of days.

There were people who escaped Hiroshima and rushed to Nagasaki to see that their loved ones were safe. Arriving just in time to be incinerated. He went there after the war with a team of scientists. My father. He said that everything was rusty. Everything looked covered with rust. There were burnt-out shells of trolleycars standing in the streets. The glass melted out of the sashes and pooled on the bricks. Seated on the blackened springs the charred skeletons of the passengers with their clothes and hair gone and their bones hung with blackened strips of flesh. Their eyes boiled from their sockets. Lips and noses burned away. Sitting in their seats laughing. The living walked about but there was no place to go. They waded by the thousands into the river and died there. They were like insects in that no one direction was preferable to another. Burning people crawled among the corpses like some horror in a vast crematorium. They simply thought that the world had ended. It hardly even occurred to them that it had anything to do with the war. They carried their skin bundled up in their arms before them like wash that it not drag in the rubble and ash and they passed one another mindlessly on their mindless journeyings over the smoking afterground, the sighted no better served than the blind. The news of all this did not even leave the city for two days. Those who survived would often remember these horrors with a certain aesthetic to them. In that mycoidal phantom blooming in the dawn like an evil lotus and in the melting of solids not heretofore known to do so stood a truth that would silence poetry a thousand years. Like an immense bladder, they would say. Like some sea thing. Wobbling slightly on the near horizon. Then the unspeakable noise. They saw birds in the dawn sky ignite and explode soundlessly and fall in long arcs earthward like burning party favors.

Please do not get lost. If you haven’t had an Ear Check, don’t come here. Level Forty-Two will be open tomorrow. Come back then. Remember you have

Please do not get lost. If you haven’t had an Ear Check, don’t come here. Level Forty-Two will be open tomorrow. Come back then. Remember you have seven moons. You must reach The Light before the last one rises.

Lankans can’t queue. Unless you define a queue as an amorphous curve with multiple entry points. This appears to be a gathering point for those with questions about their death. There are multiple counters and irate customers clamour over grills to shout abuse at the few behind the bars. The afterlife is a tax office and everyone wants their rebate.

• The Afterlife is as confusing as the Before Death, the In Between is as arbitrary as the Down There. So we make up stories because we’re afraid of the dark.

• You hover above him, more like a mosquito than angel. The mosquitoes are said to have killed half of everyone who has ever lived. A lot more than angels have saved.

• You used to make cracks about death when you considered it an unlikely event, as we all do, until we don’t.

• Magic isn’t evil or good. Or black or white. It is like the universe, like every missing God. Powerful and supremely indifferent.

• All stories are recycled and all stories are unfair. Many get luck, and many get misery. Many are born to homes with books, many grow up in the swamps of war. In the end, all becomes dust. All stories conclude with a fade to black.

You think of dead lakes overflowing with corpses, of police stations where the rich lock up the poor, of palaces where those who follow orders torture those who refuse to. You think of distraught lovers, abandoned friends and absent parents. Of lapsed treaties and photographs that are seen and forgotten, regardless of the walls they hang on. How the world will go on without you and will forget you were even here. You think of the mother, the old man and the dog, of the things you did, or failed to do, for the ones you loved. You think about evil causes and about worthy ones. That the chances of violence ending violence are one in nothing, one in nada, one in squat.

This I have come to believe: when a boat goes down, it’s only the shell of things — the hull and the bodies — that vanish. When there are no surviv

This I have come to believe: when a boat goes down, it’s only the shell of things — the hull and the bodies — that vanish. When there are no survivors and no meaningful recovery of wreckage, there’s only speculation, the barest possibility of ever knowing what happened, and the legacies of unresolved grief. The absence of the dead shapes the story of the living.

For years, I blithely summarized the accident and its aftermath in careless shorthand to others: My parents, Lori and Larry Conover, grandparents, Harvey and Dorothy Conover, as well as family friend Bill Fluegelman, drowned during a freak storm in the Bermuda Triangle. My parents left behind two young orphans — my sister Aileen, almost three at the time, and me, eighteen months old. People would look to me for some clue as to how I felt but would find little in my affect to guide them. I’d been schooled in dissociation and numbness: no Conover ever spoke of the perishing. None of my parents’ generation could bear this cataclysmic break in their lives.

What is an orphan’s story if she has no memory of her origins? Say the word aloud: or-phan. The mouth warms and wombs the first syllable, or, possessing it momentarily. Then, teeth against the bottom lip while squeezing the diaphragm hard. Phan. The word pushes into the surrounding emptiness, landing nowhere.

We become the people we think we are — that’s why stories can be dangerous and even self-defeating. Other people can also become who we think they are and that’s why stories can be disastrous. We can’t help but use stories to connect, but beware, stories will use us. They did me, that is, until they didn’t.

Shortly before midnight Bruno Perzenowski and Heinrich Busch climbed up the thirteen steps. Once there, Branchaud led each man, his final stride pl

Shortly before midnight Bruno Perzenowski and Heinrich Busch climbed up the thirteen steps. Once there, Branchaud led each man, his final stride placing him above one of the two steel trapdoors. As December 17 ended and the new day began, the hangman still waited, but no telegram arrived with a reprieve. At 12:10 a.m., the hangman with practiced hand “pinion[ed] their legs, dropped the hoods [over their faces], adjusted the ropes and pulled the lever.” Twenty minutes later, Perzenowski’s and Busch’s bodies were cut down, examined by the coroner, pronounced dead, and carried directly to the common grave they had been forced to dig the previous day. At 12:45, Walter Wolf and Willy Müeller were executed. Their bodies too were brought to the common grave. The child murderer, Donald Sherman Staley, was hanged at 1: 30 p.m., bringing an end to what would be the last mass hanging in Canadian history.

Opened early in 1943 and representing a sizeable increase in employment and economic activity for the city, Camp 132 was welcomed by Hatters. That the prisoners were available for farm labour and the occasional hockey game only made their presence more welcome. The locals treated the captives with courtesy, and their manners were reciprocated. The existence of Camp 132 was as positive an experience as could be expected for both sides, except for the shocking killings of Private August Plaszek in 1943 and Sergeant Dr. Karl Lehmann a year later.

The government’s intention and the appeals court’s decisions may have settled the matter in 1946 but they do not do so today. The violation of the Geneva Convention and the War Measures Act may seem to be technical legal points. They are not. For, by trying the POWs in civilian court, Canadian authorities deprived them of something vitally important: jurors of their peers, that is jurors who understood military ethos.

Everyone knows this is a dangerous business, but, between you and me, being a woman is a dangerous business, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwis

Everyone knows this is a dangerous business, but, between you and me, being a woman is a dangerous business, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Oh, those men would talk about how they fight Indians and wrestle cattle and climb the masts and look for justice, and indeed they do, but they do it for themselves, if you ask me. And what they want of women, they want for themselves, too.

When the first of “the girls” disappeared, no one thought a thing of it. Folks disappeared from Monterey all the time, mostly because there was more going on in San Francisco, or even San Jose. Or people took their families and moved down the coast because they thought they would find better hunting there, or some land with more rain. If they were lucky, they came back, gave up on the idea of owning their own farms or ranches, and went to work the way everyone else worked. In fact, Eliza knew that her mother would say that she had disappeared, and that thought was a bit of a prickle to her conscience, but not enough to get her to answer those letters her mother had sent. She thought there was a lot to be said for disappearing, and so she didn’t think much of the disappearance of that girl, except to note the day, May 14, her very own birthday. Twenty-one now, and wasn’t that strange?

Brutes! As soon as a man sees a rule, he strives to flout it, whether he sees it in the Bible or a constitution. That prohibition runs around in his head, and he can’t stop it. Then there he is, transgressing, and you ask him why, and he says that something was unfair or he was provoked, but what he really means is that he kept having thoughts, and then those had to turn into action, and he could not stop them.

You committed yourself here.

At Stella Maris.

Yes.

If you get committed you get certified but if you commit yourself you don’t. They figure you must b

You committed yourself here.

At Stella Maris.

Yes.

If you get committed you get certified but if you commit yourself you don’t. They figure you must be reasonably sane or you wouldnt have shown up. On your own. So you get a pass as far as the records are concerned. If you’re sane enough to know that you’re crazy then you’re not as crazy as if you thought you were sane.

The problem with the unknowable absolute is that if you could actually say something about it it wouldn’t be the unknowable absolute anymore. You can get from the noumenal to the phenomenal without stirring from your chair. In other words, nothing can be excerpted from the absolute without being rendered perceptual. Bearing in mind that to claim reality for what is unknowable is already to speak in tongues. The trouble with the perfect and objective world — Kant’s or anybody’s — is that it is unknowable by definition. I love physics but I don’t confuse it with absolute reality. It is our reality. Mathematical ideas have a considerable shelflife. Do they exist in the absolute? How is that possible? I said to myself. But then myself became another self. No more than right. It took the math with it. The idea. A long period of uncertainty. When I recohered I was someplace else. As if I had escaped my own lightcone. Into what used to be called the absolute elsewhere.

I dont understand.

I know. Me either. It’s just my view that you cant fetch something out of the absolute without fetching it out of the absolute. Without converting it into the phenomenological. By which it then becomes our property with our fingerprints all over it and the absolute is nowhere to be found. Now I’m not so sure.

I look unhappy? Tougher mettle is called for I suppose. I’m all right. For a long time I’ve suspected that we might be simply incapable of imagining the epochal evils of which we stand rightly accused and I thought it at least a possibility that the structure of reality itself harbors something like the forms of which our sordid history is only a pale reflection. I thought that it was something Plato might have considered but could in no way bring himself to express. I see by your look that you have at last beheld the very incubation of lunacy.

I am not a pessimist or an optimist, I am a scientist. There is no agenda in understanding how the world really works.

I am not a pessimist or an optimist, I am a scientist. There is no agenda in understanding how the world really works.

Inevitably, this book — the product of my life’s work, and written for the layperson — is a continuation of my long-lasting quest to understand the basic realities of the biosphere, history, and the world we have created. And it also does, yet again, what I have been steadfastly doing for decades: it strongly advocates for moving away from extreme views. Recent (and increasingly strident or increasingly giddy) advocates of such positions will be disappointed: this is not the place to find either laments about the world ending in 2030 or an infatuation with astonishingly transformative powers of artificial intelligence arriving sooner than we think. Instead, this book tries to provide a foundation for a more measured and necessarily agnostic perspective. I hope that my rational, matter-of-fact approach will help readers to understand how the world really works, and what our chances are of seeing it offer better prospects to the coming generations.

Global production of these four indispensable materials claims about 17 percent of the world’s primary energy supply, and 25 percent of all CO₂ emissions originating in the combustion of fossil fuels — and currently there are no commercially available and readily deployable mass-scale alternatives to displace these established processes.

Some prophecies claim that we might only have about a decade left to avert a global catastrophe, and in January 2020 Greta Thunberg went as far as to specify just eight years. Just a few months later, the president of the UN’s General Assembly gave us 11 years to avert a complete social collapse whereupon the planet will be simultaneously burning (suffering unquenchable summer-long fires) and inundated with water (via a rapid sea-level rise). But, nihil novi sub sole: in 1989, another high UN official said that “government have a 10-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effect before it goes beyond human control,” which means that by now we must be quite beyond the beyond, and that our very existence might be only a matter of Borgesian imagination. I am convinced that we could do without this continuing flood of never-less-than-worrisome and too-often-quite-frightening predictions. How helpful is it to be told every day that the world is coming to an end in 2050 or even 2030?

Crises expose realities and strip away obfuscation and misdirection. The response of the affluent world to COVID-19 deserves a single ironic comment: Homo deus indeed!

In the past, this tendency toward dichotomy was often described as the clash of catastrophists and cornucopians, but these labels appear to be too timid to reflect the recent extreme polarization of sentiments. And this polarization has been accompanied by a greater propensity for dated quantitative forecasts. You see them everywhere, from cars (worldwide sales of electric passenger vehicles will reach 65 million by 2040) and carbon (the EU will have net-zero carbon emissions by 2037). Or so we’re told. In reality, most of these forecasts are no better than simple guesses: any number for 2050 obtained by a computer model primed with dubious assumptions — or, even worse, by a politically expedient decision — has a very brief shelf life. My advice: if you would like a better understanding of what the future may look like, avoid these new-age dated prophecies entirely, or use them primarily as evidence of prevailing expectations and biases.

Being agnostic about the distant future means being honest: we have to admit the limits of our understanding, approach all planetary challenges with humility, and recognize that advances, setbacks, and failures will all continue to be a part of our evolution and that there can be no assurance of (however defined) ultimate success, no arrival at any singularity — but, as long as we use our accumulated understanding with determination and perseverance, there will also not be an early end of days. The future will emerge from our accomplishments and failures, and while we might be clever (and lucky) enough to foresee some of its forms and features, the whole remains elusive even when looking just a generation ahead.

I’m in the ICU with my dying mother and the thing that I’m sure will get her to wake up is the fact that in the days since Mom’s been hospitalized,

I’m in the ICU with my dying mother and the thing that I’m sure will get her to wake up is the fact that in the days since Mom’s been hospitalized, my fear and sadness have morphed into the perfect anorexia-motivation cocktail and, finally, I have achieved Mom’s current goal weight for me. Eighty-nine pounds. I’m so sure this fact will work that I lean all the way back in my chair and pompously cross my legs. I wait for her to come to. And wait. And wait.

I’m more convinced than ever that I need to quit acting. That it doesn’t serve my mental or emotional health. That it’s been destructive to both. I think about what else has been destructive to my mental and emotional health…the eating disorders, of course, and the alcohol issues. And then I realize that, as much as I’m convinced that I need to quit these things — acting, bulimia, alcohol — I don’t think that I can. As much as I resent them, in a strange way they define me. They are my identity. Maybe that’s why I resent them.

I had put her up on a pedestal, and I know how detrimental that pedestal was to my well-being and life. That pedestal kept me stuck, emotionally stunted, living in fear, dependent, in a near constant state of emotional pain and without the tools to even identify that pain let alone deal with it. My mom didn’t deserve her pedestal. She was a narcissist. She refused to admit she had any problems, despite how destructive those problems were to our entire family. My mom emotionally, mentally, and physically abused me in ways that will forever impact me.

My mom didn't get better. But I will.

He took Gaspar’s face in his hands, leaned down to look him in the eyes, and caressed his hair, the box on the ground between them, and he said, yo

He took Gaspar’s face in his hands, leaned down to look him in the eyes, and caressed his hair, the box on the ground between them, and he said, you have something of mine, I passed on something of me to you, and hopefully it isn’t cursed, I don’t know if I can leave you something that isn’t dirty, that isn’t dark, our share of night.

It was easy to get out of the city on a Sunday morning in January. Before he knew it the tall buildings were behind them, and then so were the low houses and tin lean-tos of the shantytowns on the city’s outskirts. And suddenly the trees of the countryside appeared. Gaspar was asleep by then, and Juan’s arm burned in the sun just like any regular father’s on a weekend of pools and picnics. But he wasn’t a regular father, and people could tell just by looking into his eyes or by talking to him for a while. Somehow, they recognized the danger: he couldn’t hide what he was. It wasn’t possible to hide something like that, at least not for long.

Florence didn’t tolerate that kind of rebellion. She had rocks tied to the woman’s feet, and she was thrown into the Paraná River. Let her join the many dead hidden along Argentine river bottoms. The dictatorship’s crimes were very useful to the Order, providing it with bodies, alibis, and currents of pain and fear — emotions that were easily manipulated.

Ghosts are real. And the ones who come aren’t always the one you’ve called.

On its surface the constancy of women’s place in society is depressing, but the thing about social constructs is that they are just that — construc

On its surface the constancy of women’s place in society is depressing, but the thing about social constructs is that they are just that — constructs. Fundamentally if we have created these strictures, then we can deconstruct them and make new ones. Seeing the past and rejecting it allows us to imagine new futures and make the changes that are necessary to create a more equitable world. It’s time to start constructing that different future.

One way or another, though, when we consider the way women are conceptualized in the global north, we can ultimately start laying the blame back to the ancient Athenians. They have a lot to answer for.

All in all, medieval society spent a long time concocting a beauty ideal for women that was possible only for wealthy women to live up to, and then furiously policing it when commoners tried to emulate it. At every opportunity women were told that they must be beautiful, and that that made them desirable, lovable, and holy. However, attempting to live up to this rigid standard, especially if one was poor, was called sinful and at times was illegal. The Church thrust women into an impossible quandary: If they were not born with looks that accorded with the beauty standard, should they lose status and perhaps remain single? Or should they use subterfuge to get closer to that exacting standard, even if it meant they might face an eternity in Hell?

To be honest, the likelihood that medieval women inserted live fish into their vaginas and then fed them to their husbands was probably low. It cannot be ruled out, but all in all it seems unlikely, no matter how lacking their sex lives might have been. However, actual practice mattered less than the fact that Burchard found such behavior plausible and enough of a worry that he advised clergy members to interrogate female parishioners about it. The idea that women were horny enough to suffocate a fish in their genitals if it meant more and better sex was one thing. It was another that they were willing to do occult magic and endanger their soul.

Women have always been a part of the world’s economy writ large. In fact, women’s work in the premodern world is generally ubiquitous. The idea that women largely existed in a domestic bubble wholly removed from the realities of labor and work would have seemed laughable to medieval people. In all classes of society, women worked and were expected to do so.

He dreamt of the days of glory when Jidada was such an earthly paradise animals left their own miserable lands and flocked to it in search of a bet

He dreamt of the days of glory when Jidada was such an earthly paradise animals left their own miserable lands and flocked to it in search of a better life, found it, and not only just found it, no, but found it in utter abundance and sent word back for kin and friends to come and see it for themselves — this promised land, this stunning Eldorado called Jidada, a proper jewel of Africa, yes, tholukuthi a land not only indescribably wealthy but so peaceful they could’ve made it up. His Excellency also saw himself in his dream as he’d been back then — beautiful and brimming with unquestioned majesty, a horse that stepped on the ground and the earth agreed and the heavens above agreed and even hell itself also agreed because how could it disagree? Tholukuthi lost now in Jidada’s past glory, the Old Horse nestled deeper in his seat and began to snore a sonorous tune that the Comrades around him identified as Jidada’s old revolutionary anthem from the Liberation War days.

Don’t even be fooled by how things may appear right now — I mean the terrible roads that kill people, the potholes, the broken sewer systems, the decrepit hospitals, the decrepit schools, the decrepit industrial sector, the decrepit rail system, or should I say a generally decrepit infrastructure. Then of course there’s the poor standard of living, the millions who’ve crossed and still cross borders in search of better, the misery and such things that may look depressing at first glance, that’ll make you think you’re maybe looking at a ruin. All these things happen to countries, it’s a fact of countryness, but rest assured we were in top form once. Plus, the point is not to judge a book by its cover. Because what remains is that Jidada is still a jewel, Africa’s jewel. And that right there is the Father of the Nation’s God-given legacy, reigning over a real gem. And moreover, he liberated and has protected that jewel so that Jidada will never be a colony again!

We heard and told stories of pain, stories of the Seat of Power’s violence so impossible sometimes animals simply tilted heads up and stared into the glowing Nehanda bones — reeling. Tholukuthi through these tales we learned there were in fact many untold narratives that were left out of the Seat of Power’s tales of the nation, that were excluded from Jidada’s great books of history. That the nation’s stories of glory were far from being the whole truth, and that sometimes the Seat of Power’s truths were actually half-truths and mistruths as well as deliberate erasures. Which in turn made us understand the importance not only of narrating our own stories, our own truths, but of writing them down as well so they were not taken from us, never altered, tholukuthi never erased, never forgotten.

When those who know about things say there is no night ever so long it does not end with dawn, tholukuthi what they mean is that there is no night ever so long it does not end with dawn.

It’s not always a pretty story, and shouldn’t be presented as such, but it’s the only one we’ve got: the history of humans as a culture-producing s

It’s not always a pretty story, and shouldn’t be presented as such, but it’s the only one we’ve got: the history of humans as a culture-producing species. It’s the story of us.

All creators put their trust in the future by trusting that the future will not destroy their works despite the differences in value they know will inevitably arise. Culture: The Story of Us aims to offer its readers the breathtaking variety of cultural works that we as a species have wrought, in the hope that we will carry our shared human inheritance into the next generation, and beyond.

In evaluating culture, we tend to overemphasize originality: when and where something was first invented. Claims of origin are often used to prop up dubious claims of superiority and ownership. Such claims conveniently forget that everything comes from somewhere, is dug up, borrowed, moved, purchased, stolen, recorded, copied, and often misunderstood. What matters much more than where something originally comes from is what we do with it. Culture is a huge recycling project, and we are simply the intermediaries that preserve its vestiges for yet another use. Nobody owns culture; we simply pass it down to the next generation.

Cultures thrive on the ready availability of different forms of expression and meaning-making, on possibilities and experiments, and to the extent that cultural contact increases those options, it stimulates cultural production and development. Those invested in purity, by contrast, tend to shut down alternatives, limit possibilities, and police experiments in cultural fusion. By doing so, they impoverish themselves while condoning or encouraging the neglect and destruction of those aspects of the past that do not conform to their own, narrow standards.

Do you feel normal now? is the question I get most often from my readers. Almost, I say. Nearly normal.

Do you feel normal now? is the question I get most often from my readers. Almost, I say. Nearly normal.

The hardest things to write about were the times in my life I felt I didn’t matter, that I wasn’t heard by my family, that I wasn’t allowed to feel shame or modesty or have an opinion that differed from my freedom-obsessed family. Trying to navigate my way through the minefield of Person beliefs — homeopathy, astrology, health food, artificial mood enhancers, freedom, nonconformity — and non-beliefs — religion, politics, consumerism, attachment, guilt, regret, expectation, obligation, education, authority, government, discipline — had left me with little room to form my own opinions other than “whatever’s the opposite of theirs.”

Despite the madness of my early years, there was no doubt that I’d learned some unique and valuable lessons. And if I were to acknowledge that my family had put me in danger because they were too selfish or lazy or crazy to care, it seemed even more important to me that I find the positive in those experiences. So maybe it all evened out. Maybe in some weird way, all the hardship had set me up to be the pattern-breaker of dysfunction in my family. Because I knew that those who continued their family’s patterns of destruction not only hurt themselves but also admitted defeat to those who had damaged them, intentionally or not.

Looking back, I can see that it all started to fall apart with my first marriage. Until then, I had marveled to myself almost smugly about how unaf

Looking back, I can see that it all started to fall apart with my first marriage. Until then, I had marveled to myself almost smugly about how unaffected I was by my crazy past and family. Even as my career took off in my late teens and early twenties, I fell into none of the typical pitfalls that many survivors of challenging childhoods did; I never did drugs, I had a healthy relationship with food, I didn’t engage in casual sex, and I only drank as much as my friends did. But for me, it was my craving for normal — that dangling carrot that seemed always just beyond my reach — that would be my undoing.

The idea that had been brewing in his mind since his teens was pulling at him stronger than ever now. He had heard talk about a movement up north in Canada, a land known for its harsh climate and gentle handling of disillusioned Americans. But a new country was only the start of my grandfather’s plan. He knew how to hunt, how to survive in the wild, and he had some exciting ideas about shelter. What his kids needed was fresh mountain air and dirt between their toes. If he could just get them away from the city and into nature, back to the basics of food, water, clothing and shelter, they might still stand a chance.

When I got back to my room, I stood gazing at the collage over my bed. I had found the frame in our back alley, and spent hours pasting into it pictures of models cut from magazines. I took a deep breath and stood up tall. The idea that had been in my head for so many years now suddenly seemed a lifeline. There was one way to escape my crazy family, and all I had to do was grab hold of it.

Dr. Najjar saw tears gather at the corners of my eyes. I sat up and threw my arms around him. For him, it was another crucial moment in my case: he

Dr. Najjar saw tears gather at the corners of my eyes. I sat up and threw my arms around him. For him, it was another crucial moment in my case: he could sense that I was still in there, somewhere. But it was just a blip. After that outpouring, I lay back down and dozed off, exhausted by the brief display of emotion. But he knew I was there, and he would not give up on me. He motioned for my parents to follow him outside the room.

“Her brain is on fire,” he repeated. They nodded, eyes wide. “Her brain is under attack by her own body.”

From here on, I remember only very few bits and pieces, mostly hallucinatory, from the time in the hospital. Unlike before, there are now no glimmers of the reliable “I”, the Susannah I had been for the previous twenty-four years. Though I had been gradually losing more and more of myself over the past few weeks, the break between my consciousness and my physical body was now finally fully complete. In essence, I was gone. I wish I could understand my behaviors and motivations during this time, but there was no rational consciousness operating, nothing I could access anymore, then or now. This was the beginning of my lost month of madness.

If he found that I had anti-NMDA-receptor autoimmune encephalitis, it would make me just the 217th person worldwide to have been diagnosed since 2007. It begged the question: If it took so long for one of the best hospitals in the world to get to this step, how many other people were going untreated, diagnosed with a mental illness or condemned to a life in a nursing home or a psychiatric ward?

What makes our parties doubly unruly, and therefore doubly spectacular, is the fact that a clown god lives inside us. A spirit half-human and half-

What makes our parties doubly unruly, and therefore doubly spectacular, is the fact that a clown god lives inside us. A spirit half-human and half-god, as is the case with all superheroes in all world mythologies. The difference is that our Trickster has a sense of humour and a concupiscence that know no limit.

For me, after having pored through every single word and syllable of its verbal fecundity, and comparing it to the many other languages I have tried on my world travels, I find English to be the world’s quintessential language of the intellect. It’s brilliant. When I need money, I speak English faster than the speed of sound. And generally get it. When I try to make money in Cree, by comparison, I go hungry. Cree is terrible when it comes to making money. But laughter? Hysteria unzippered, unbound, uncorked? That’s Cree’s genius.

If the marriage between the sky god Zeus and his wife, the Earth goddess Hera, was violent, then it was nothing in comparison to the moment when the one Christian God met Mother Earth on these shores and the aggression was total — he almost killed her. But didn’t. The culture could have disappeared. The figure of the Trickster could have disappeared forever. The culture came close to disappearing. The figure of the Trickster came close to disappearing. But it didn’t. It hung on by a hair. And hung on and hung on and hung on, if by one spark. And that is the spark that Indigenous artists stoked to life. Not least of which did these Trickster stories they tell make us laugh, and laughter is medicine. In fact, never before has laughter saved an entire race of people in quite this manner.

Some nights, Furlong lay there with Eileen, going over small things like these. Other times, after a day of heavy lifting or being delayed by a pun

Some nights, Furlong lay there with Eileen, going over small things like these. Other times, after a day of heavy lifting or being delayed by a puncture and getting soaked out on the road, he’d come home and eat his fill and fall into bed early, then wake in the night sensing Eileen, heavy in sleep, at his side — and there he’d lie with his mind going round in circles, agitating, before finally he’d have to go down and put the kettle on, for tea.

What was it all for? Furlong wondered. The work and the constant worry. Getting up in the dark and going to the yard, making the deliveries, one after another, the whole day long, then coming home in the dark and trying to wash the black off himself and sitting into a dinner at the table and falling asleep before waking in the dark to meet a version of the same thing, yet again. Might things never change or develop into something else, or new? Lately, he had begun to wonder what mattered, apart from Eileen and the girls. He was touching forty but didn’t feel himself to be getting anywhere or making any kind of headway and could not but sometimes wonder what the days were for.

He found himself asking was there any point in being alive without helping one another? Was it possible to carry on along through all the years, the decades, through an entire life, without once being brave enough to go against what was there and yet call yourself a Christian, and face yourself in the mirror?

The cell’s occupant was one of the most notorious criminals in eighteenth-century France. He had spent the bulk of his forty-five years reveling in

The cell’s occupant was one of the most notorious criminals in eighteenth-century France. He had spent the bulk of his forty-five years reveling in depravity: engaging in blasphemous acts with a prostitute, torturing a beggar, poisoning whores, hiding in Italy in the romantic company of his sister-in-law, locking away girls and boys in his château for his own sexual designs, and narrowly surviving a bullet fired at his chest. For years, he had evaded the law — breaking out of an Alpine prison, dodging a military raid on his home, absconding from the clutches of a police squadron, and eluding his own public execution. His name was Donatien Alphonse François de Sade, but most people knew him as the Marquis de Sade.

Was Sade a revolutionary, working to expose the rotten core of the aristocracy to which he had been born? Was he a radical philosopher, aiming to lay bare humanity’s most cruel and twisted desires? Or was he simply an unrepentant criminal, chronicling his own atrocities, committed or simply dreamed of? There is also the puzzle of the manuscript itself. Sade worked on the text from seven to ten o’clock each evening, since its content was far too scandalous for him to be caught composing it during the day. When he reached the end of a sheet of paper, he pasted another below it, creating an ever-lengthening roll. After twenty-two nights, he flipped the document over and continued to write. The result, after thirty-seven days of work, was a scroll formed from thirty-three sheets of paper fastened end to end, measuring just over four inches wide and stretching nearly forty feet. Both sides were covered with words — 157,000 in total — the text so tiny it was nearly illegible without a magnifying glass.

Lhéritier insisted that he wasn’t France’s Bernie Madoff. Madoff’s Wall Street firm hadn’t been selling anything tangible; Aristophil, meanwhile, had traded in real manuscripts with real value. The truth, declared Lhéritier, would emerge when he finally had his day in court. When asked how many years in prison he thought he’d receive, he flashed his roguish smile and made a circle with his fingers: zero.

We had begun so long ago with our poems after Sappho, carefully styled in fragments, our paintings and blushes all done in likeness. Perhaps at las

We had begun so long ago with our poems after Sappho, carefully styled in fragments, our paintings and blushes all done in likeness. Perhaps at last the future of Sappho would be delivered into our hands like a packet of books knotted up with string. For example we might open a seemingly ordinary biography, its chapters neatly partitioned, and find that it was webbed throughout with the most extraordinary filaments of a life. A life after all did not happen by itself, in discrete units. Thus this biography would be bound together with all of our lives, twined through from preface to index: curling, animate, verdant. In the end we might become the readers of our own afterwords.

We longed for writing tables that were not in the kitchen, stained with onions; we wanted to read the novels kept from us because they were decadent and suggestive; we wanted to exchange the finger-pricked linens of our trousseaus for travel guides and foreign grammars; we wanted to meet each other in rooms and discuss the rights of women, we wanted to close the doors to the rooms and lie in each other’s arms, the light pouring in the window, the curtains drawn back, the view over the bay running in cerulean and azure swaths into the open sea. We dreamed of islands where we could write poems that kept our lovers up all night. In our letters, we murmured the fragments of our desires to each other, breaking the lines in our impatience. We were going to be Sappho, but how did Sappho begin to become herself?

Readers according to Colette were like lovers. The best were attentive, intelligent, exigent, and promiscuous. She urged us to read widely and well, to seek out precisely the novels prohibited to us and lie down for hours in bed with them. We should read to gorge and sate ourselves, Colette enjoined us; after a good book we should lick our fingers.