Category: Reviews

For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets to dissect the poems they’ve published in our pages. Sara Gilmore’s poems “Mad as only an angel can be” and “Knowing constraint” appear in the new Fall issue of the Review, no. 249. The poem she discusses here, “Safe camp,” is published on the Daily.

How did this poem start for you? Was it with an image, an idea, a phrase, or something else?

Originally this poem began with the lines “Delay and pressed the reeling available / Would-be constant down this inhabited suddenness.” It never troubled me that the words together didn’t make sense or that I didn’t yet know what they were pointing to—I thought of them as an assembly of beautiful raw material to work with.

As I continued to work on the poem, the image that rose to mind was a ditch along a narrow country road I often strolled down with my son near Mairena del Aljarafe when we lived in Spain. It was filled with trash and reels of unwound VHS tapes. We walked by it hundreds of times. The poem began to grow around the word “reeling”—the “real” along with everything the real is not, the dizzying motion of “reeling,” Anne Carson’s notion “under this day the reel of another day.” This figure of reeling gave into the poem’s circuitry as a whole—the way it shorts out as if its webbing could open to reveal layers underneath, suggesting a kind of sinkhole that either delivers us from or constricts us into a frame of reality that runs along our lives eternally. For me, these sinkholes are dangerous and fascinating.

This is one of the poem’s anxieties—the possibility of a circularity of circumstance or time in which what I’m living today could be the actual present, or a day I lived long ago, or a day I haven’t lived yet at all.

The poem surfaced into clarity in the lines that, in the version published here, appear first. “I was still but tried, in a burst it’s all lit up by.” I like to think the original lines are still there—what my friend Timmy calls the rungs of the ladder that we’re no longer standing on but got us here.

What were you listening to, reading, or watching while you were writing?

The day I started writing, I read Wallace Stevens’s “A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts” for the first time, my son’s stepbrother was born an ocean away, and I went on a walk with my son in Hickory Hill Park in Iowa City. It was April Fools’ Day, a year into the pandemic. My son made a set of cardboard claws to wear. That’s the day the poem emerged, but of course many other days and markers are also embedded into it. I date all the poems I write, maybe to have some anchor in what feels like a sway. I take pictures with my phone of the passages I read, the places I go, people I’m with. With all this underneath, the finished poem can seem like a little white flag waving surrender over a frighteningly infinite and invisible mountain—how do you get at that? I don’t know. I keep trying. What I like about “A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts” is the strength it finds in intimacy. It’s not afraid to say things like “In which everything is meant for you / and nothing need be explained.” In “Safe camp,” I think I got a little closer to conveying strong emotion and feeling outside explanation—strong love, strong belonging, without a tether to fixed place or meaning, the resistance to have those things outside any formal permission.

How did writing the first draft feel to you? Did it come easily, or was it difficult to write? Are there hard and easy poems?

Writing a poem is the easiest and hardest thing in the world to do. Easy in the sense that it’s a human impulse, like singing in the shower, and difficult as far as the huge emotional and intellectual toll it takes. I wrote “Safe camp” quickly, first in my head and then on my phone. I repeated its lines over and over to myself. Two days later I had my second COVID vaccination in Washington, Iowa. When I drove back home, I had a sense of calm, and I knew the poem was good.

How did you come up with the title for this poem? Were there other titles you thought about? Why didn’t you go with them?

“Safe camp” belongs to a cycle of serial poems written around the symbols that itinerant communities have historically used in the U.S. After the Great Depression, as people (many of whom were teenagers) moved across the country looking for work, they would leave scratch marks or markings in chalk outside the places they visited, to tell others what those places were like. For many years I’ve had a copy of Ernst Lehner’s Symbols, Signs and Signets, which includes a catalogue of these visual symbols and verbal descriptions of their meanings: “Owner is in,” “Keep quiet, “Bad dog,” “Safe camp.” There’s something flat and solid about these descriptions that contrasts with the way I write.

So, I would write as I do but title the poems in the order the symbols appear in Lehner’s book. And I knew where I was. Placing any material or element next to one another generates a force field, which can be very unexpected and wonderful—like a safe camp, in fact. But that notion of safety also signals the privilege of authority, signage, the ability to grant permission. I think that bled into the line “In the quiet permission / I took my unit of heart and wondered if it was enough.”

I was also influenced by Joyelle McSweeney’s The Red Bird, which includes many different poems with the title “The Voyage of the Beagle.” This is something I stole from her—I actually have several poems titled “Safe camp.”

When did you know this poem was finished? Were you right about that? Is it finished after all?

This iteration of the poem is probably finished. I read Benjamin Krusling’s Glaring many times around the time I wrote “Safe camp.” He has a gorgeous poem at the end of that collection that begins, “first there’s love…then there’s synchronized time.” And, in Triple Canopy, another poem that begins “it’s love , but there’s no time.” In both poems, variations on the lines are repeated in different orders. I asked Krusling, during a Q&A after one of his readings, about the relationship between these two poems, and he had this beautiful idea of a poem’s mutability—that it should never become an artifact, closed-off, museum-displayed. And that the most important things must be said many times in many ways. I’m interested in how this idea contrasts with the fixity that the page and publication provide.

Poems can also gather great force in their immutability, like the transformations produced by the repetition in chant. That’s what I was thinking about in the lines “An artifact // Gathered and became immobile, and even so / Changed year to year until its recognition fell to wind itself.” “Fell” then shifts to “felt” in the lines “I felt myself. I felt myself inhabiting it so I felt myself.”

Did you show your drafts to other writers or friends or confidants? If so, what did they say?

I workshopped this poem with ten other poets one week after I wrote it. My notes from that session have fragments like “voice of poem hears ‘self’ and is startled outside of itself” and “memory as we perform it for ourselves, and disintegration,” “whirring in contained location.” There is something about an “animal mind” and reference to the “weight of mammal body” and the “underside of gristle.” There are recommendations for other poets, like Wyatt and Petrarch, who wrote poems including deer. Talking about this poem with those poets was like becoming aware of the aliveness of a shared mind.

Sara Gilmore is a poet and translator. She teaches at the University of Iowa and works as a phlebotomist.

The following entries came from notebooks the writer and psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas kept between 1974 and 1977. These notebooks were not written or edited for publication–Bollas says they were more like “mental scratch pads where the author simply writes out what he is thinking in the moment without, ironically, thinking about it.” The entries touch on things Bollas was reading at the time, scenes he saw in London, what he was observing in patients–and, more often than not, the ways these all intersected in his thoughts. We selected these entries in part because they cover a period of time when he was reading and thinking on and off about the work of Herman Melville, alongside many other questions about character, the self, and others.

Undated entry, 1974

Let us imagine that all neuroses and psychoses are the self’s way of speaking the unspeakable. The task of analysis is to provide an ambience in which the neurotic or characterological speech can be spoken to the analyst and understood. It is not so much [a question of] what are the epistemologies of each disorder but what does psychoanalytical treatment tell us about them? We must conclude that it tells us that all conflict is flight from the object and that analysis restores the structure of a relation so that the patient can engage in a dialogue with the object.

The style of the obsessive-compulsive, for example, is in the nature of a closed cognitive and active world. If obsessive-compulsive behavior is memory, what is being recalled? It seems to me that obsessive-compulsive behavior is a mimetic caricature of rigid mothering. It is caricatured self-mothering which [may] recall [interpret] the mother’s handling of the child.

How else can we account for the shifts in disorders if we don’t take into account the paradigms which generate them? Insofar as we know that patterns of mothering vary historically, can’t we assume that each disorder remembers the primary object relation? Indeed, why else does psychoanalysis go back to childhood when presented with conflict? Because it is understood by most to be functionally derivative of infancy.

The only problem is that the philosophical assumptions of this hypothesis remain unappreciated, to wit, all disorders speak the individual’s past and they ultimately speak the subject’s interpretation of the past and therefore are a form of remembering. The advantage of this to the person is to value his disorder as a statement, not simply a dysfunction. This is the difference between the hermeneutic and functional traditions of psychoanalysis.

A symptom is a way of thinking. Remembering is a way of thinking. Symptoms are some form of the subject’s thinking about himself. Psychoanalysis is a way of two people thinking together about one person’s thinking.

A patient brings a mood, thought, confusion, a blank—collages of himself—and the analyst provides the space. The therapeutic alliance is simply: we are thinking and working together. The transference and countertransference: we are feeling for each other together.

Undated, 1974

“American literature”

American writers speak the true self, while the country doesn’t listen. Melville tries to identify with this American false self—the external explorer and conqueror—but fails and the true self breaks through.

Undated, 1974

“Ahab”

What is absolutely essential is to keep in mind that Moby Dick is an invention, a projected object. The horrid irony of Ahab’s effort to break through the “pasteboard mask” is that he is the object behind the mask! He is the originating subjectivity. Does Melville make this irony specific?

The five phantoms loosed in chapter 47 are the loosening of Ahab’s internal objects: or the objectivization of internal selves. Rage permits the dissociations to be loosed though never integrated. Rage—especially in the search for the whale—is a loosening of or an exorcism of internal objects. The whole point of the trip is to exorcise the phantoms and to put them into the whale.

Undated, 1975

It is one of the ironies of existence that you can love the other only after you have lost the other. With ego development the fusion with the other is lost, a necessary precondition for recognizing the other’s separateness, but nonetheless a losing of one’s [fused] self.

Undated, 1975

“Melville’s ethics”

At a time when the other is sought outside, as a deity, an idea, or history, Melville’s hero points toward the struggle to find other as the unconscious self. In a sense as man has destroyed culture (collective dream/play space) he then assumes the responsibility of it and comes to a point of wisdom: culture always reflected him; he created it, it came from him. The sacred, profane, shared, etc., all experienced as outside; Melville says we must experience an inside other.

Thus he has in Mardi and in Moby-Dick a transitional metaphysical and psychical moment between other as outside (the whale) while Melville gently proves it to be inside the self. It is important to see this as Melville’s ethic. Outside, there is neither solution nor absolution; nor is either ever possible. Insight, the seeing into the self, to witness and behold the other as inside is the shock of re-cognition that Melville asks of us. It is the venue of the psychoanalyst as well, but the psychoanalyst after Freud’s metapsychological works processed the other and ethically disowned it.

Free association, which was a way of access, against the resistance of man, became a means of disowning the other by processing it. A novelist like Melville searches inside himself, comes to the point of seeing and holds the fundamental fact of the internal other.

December 10, 1975

“On good interpretation as poetry”

It is the form of an interpretation that is most effective. We must know that our best interpretations are poetic in their structure and delivery, so that the form holds words in such a way as to deeply affect the patient. In the same way, poetry rather than prose gets to us in a deeper way.

January 22, 1976

Out of the debris of our dying culture (early twentieth century) comes a new mythology and a new language. We see this early in Baudelaire who finds the symbolic inside the city; we discover it in Barthes (Mythologies) who creates a new mythology. It is godless. It is ordinary. As Barrett points out in Irrational Man, cubism is the ontologizing of the banal object, because out of the debris only objects are left.

The psychoanalytical experience is, in free association, the use of the ordinary (i.e., trivial language) to remythologize the person, to find his myth, his culture, through the debris. From the debris of his own words, which up till now he has found barren, a wasteland, he discovers meaning and then his own myth.

The analyst is the person, par excellence, who carries the person through the wasteland of the self, and who holds.

Where has the debris come from?

From an explosion in the nineteenth century of human value and belief. We are commodities, objects-to-ourselves, defined by use or function.

The death of culture. Debris. Playing with debris (Dadaism). Creating a new language.

The analytic process: death of the old self; debris and the sense of dislocation; playing with the debris; searching in anger, despair; through reflection, finding one’s self.

Barrett says that before man is a being, he is a “being-in” (111): taking Heidegger’s point about Being in the World. In modern man this Being in, or the essence of our being, has been lost. It can be re-found in psychoanalysis.

In Coleridge’s “Dejection: An Ode” and in Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts we see man expressing his sense of loss of being-in the actual world. We have seen this earlier with Pascal, though in his situation it was as much the losing of a spiritual world: being in a world of spirit. Being-in spiritually (mythically) and Being-in actually (materially) have been severed. It is this loss which writes the “Wasteland” and founds existentialism.

Out of this comes man and world as debris, cut up in Dada and Joyce, and now a new myth of man emerges. What is the new man?

The silence of the patient comes after despair over the word. They have said, perhaps, a great deal, but begin to have a feeling of despair over the word. This despair sponsors a silence; it is silence in the face of the unthinkable; the absence in the core of a person over a truly spontaneous sense of being-in the world. Their speech has been a narrative account, a construction, often beautifully or bravely rendered.

The patient of today can speak only for so long. Speech is an effort. It is an attempt to hold off the void. (Pascal.) The silence denotes emptiness and the absence of the other. The analyst must be absence coming eventually into presence through holding.

We focus on the mother as the cause, but in fact, she is all that is left of one who gives meaning, breathes life into the other, and so we focus on her. She can never make up for the void in the culture. Our search into this relation, solely, is a misdirected one.

Character and creation. Our being does have voice through character. To hear it is a task, painful, awful. It is the voice of our emptiness yet through the transference—the analytic paradigm—our character changes.

In Moby-Dick the myth explodes (capitalism, Protestantism). We are left with Bartleby, mute among the debris—dead letters. The Confidence-Man remythologizes by manipulating the ordinary into the fantastic. He picks up debris and maps the fantastic.

After 1914 man learns, according to William Barrett, that the solitude of being a self is irreducible regardless of how completely we seem to be part of a social milieu. Man is no longer contained in a social fabric. But with our patients the tragedy is that each must fashion a life out of a wasteland.

In the sixties, politics, group movements, the therapies, communes, etc., were all attempts to fashion cultures. The Beatniks (Kerouac, etc.) were the first.

It is silly to say “counterculture” as there was no culture there in the first place.

Each of us carries within our own debris. It is our past: a past not held within a familial, social, and cultural container to be given recurrently back to us. We don’t know our past. We only have images, memories, pictures etc. We bring this flotsam to the analyst who gathers the pieces; he gives form to our content—if we can trust him to do this—we find our past. This is the analyst as the transformational object: the one who gives form to our content and thereby transforms the content itself, by giving it meaning.

Out of the debris of our past emerges our own mythology. Why have I been so moved when on one bright day I witnessed from a 10,000-ft. peak of the Sierra Madre a tiny train thousands of feet below crossing the California desert? Why should this experience be so close to me, seem to hold me? It was a question, in fact, that I had never asked at the time. Its essence evaporated into the diversions of my life, though now and then I recovered it.

In analysis I found two things about myself. One was that, as my father had gone off to war when I was three months I did not see him until I was nearly two. I was overly eager not to see my mother disappear as well. At nursery school, it was my fate to stand up high on the steps of the slide—not to go down—in order to watch in the distance for the first sight of my mother who would come to collect me.

So being up high and searching for something vital and joyful was part of my personal idiom: the creation of my myth of significance and order.

The other mythical object was the train, which has always filled me with sadness and, strangely, contentment at the same time. So it was in my analysis that I discovered that it was by train that I left my birthplace and my father and also it was to the train station that every day my grandfather took me to see the train go by. Perhaps he did it out of his own love of trains or perhaps it was because I indicated my desire to see trains and he, in kindness, facilitated this wish. What the myth of trains gave to me in analysis, with the understanding of the essence of the aesthetic experience on the mountaintop, was how an experience visualised for me a deep myth: searching for recovery from my mother, longing to be reunited with my father. The experience of looking on the mountaintop was me.

May 9, 1976

“Metaphysical psychology”

Is it the eventual affirmation of the negative? Is Moby-Dick an affirmation of brotherhood, through the destruction of isolated fanaticisms? Ishmael lives to share a narrative with others, unifying men through discourse, while Ahab uses men to fulfill the fantastic demands of his private culture.

November 4, 1976

“On a character serving in a restaurant”

I am watching a young woman who is the waitress (wife) in an artificially lit Italian café that serves sandwiches to the English. The surroundings are without character, rather like the set of a television film, suggesting its impermanence. There is little here, except the come and go. The first time I ate here, she paid me no attention—flung the food on the table. Yet, tonight, I have discovered her use of herself as a character. She dissociates from the surroundings, defying the anomie by being a character. She throws her hands through her hair, punches out the orders, laughs or teases the locals—yet she is totally self contained. I find this interesting as I am reminded of Marx’s theory of alienation. She deals with it all by laboring her character: it becomes the surrounding of the self, and she looks no further.

Undated, 1977

“The text dreaming”

The text would have to undergo an experience of its own dream. Like the dreamer, the text would have to be confused. It is not simply the author who has the dream as the dream elements are already in the text at hand. With Stubb’s dream I must see what holds up to the dream and then what occurs after the dream.

The point is to establish the composition of the dream space, in literature or in life. It is an area of

1. Wonder or terror
2. Actualization
3. Enigmatic meaning
4. The place where the thinker is the thought of himself, or, the thinker the participant in the thought

The dream in literature must be a region of wonder, separate from yet reflexive to the rest of the text. It must be the dream’s text, as it must use and pit itself against the text, in order for us to consider it as a dream. A space in relation to the context of events in the fiction. Is it an allegory within an allegory?

What is the difference between a vision and a dream?

I am concerned with a text which has a dream, a moment when the continuity of its presence of mind is interrupted by a dissociation in its consciousness, in a space that I have called the dream space. The text can have its own dream if at this moment the cumulative experience of imagery-making, of plot construction, of characterization, breaks down into a self-reflexive dream process. This is rather like a breakdown, but a breakdown of a very special kind. In such moments the author yields, under the demand of the text’s unconscious logic, to the text’s (and his) need to share a dream with each other. (So, the author shares a dream with his text!) We could say that this moment will be more available in the modern novel, where the author already has found an intimacy of rapport with the text, where he uses more the idioms of his own internal psychic structures than the conventions of literary creativity. Even so, few authors—as Poulet insists—achieve a level of sincerity toward their own text. I should say, an intimacy where the text is the container of unintegrated subjectivity, and where the author’s Other is not an alienated moi, but a subjective object.

To the person writing or dreaming, writing (or textualization) and dreaming are processes of thinking about being, not products. We must, as E. Said argues, reacquaint ourselves with writing as a process, not a finished product.

This can also happen because an author, like Melville, needs to dream within the text; though the experience of the dream will be in the textual space, will use the history of the text for the dream material, and, as such, will be the text’s dream. If an author, like Melville, yields himself to the text, then we can say that the text will dream him, or dream about him.

April 26, 1977

“Melville”

The core fantasy seems to be of a desire for an object to be plundered. In Moby-Dick this was the whale, but this leads to annihilation. In “Bartleby” there is a desire for the experience to be provided by the other (the employer), with a dead ending in the brick-wall prison. In “I and My Chimney” there is an attachment to the object as inanimate and under the fantasy control of the self.

What can we call this cluster? It is a private phantasy: an autistic phantasy that materializes within the fiction, but isn’t made explicit as such. In “Bartleby” it is addressed to the other. In Pierre what do we make of the episode when the character crawls under the rock, to be born again? Is that another cluster? Is the fictional space a place where Melville can have this phantasy? An autistic voice?

May 2, 1977

“Melville”

Literary perversion.

Idiot event.

Burlesque.

Are there certain fantasies of the text that are not thoughts per se but ritual enactments of ego structures? Deep memories, paradigms, of the subject’s experience of the other?

Is an allegorical personification a character? Insofar as this structure speaks structurally, it is.

The idiomatic arrangement of character structures is the voice of character: the interpretation of self.

Does character speak in fiction more uniquely as the other becomes a phantom (death of God) eliciting a mute yell from the subject—as the voice of character? All character is utterance to an absent other, and with the death of God, this absence provokes deep language cries.

In some characterizations—especially sagas—we must ask, What is left out? The character may be noble, set against a surrounding world that is very violent. This is the split-off voice of character, which in the nineteenth century is joined to the self. Character defends the self against the internal world.

How does character relate—i.e., to us, the objects around it? Such use, does it reveal idioms?

The absence of a specific character language, particularly the person who seems to be strong and induces our projective identifications, creates a dream space for us. Character is the container of the reading subject’s pure self. We are Other.

May 3, 1977

“Character in fiction”

Does character in fiction depend on what the hero deals with or transforms? Where are the events of being? Character has to do with the idiom of transformation: an interpretation of the self. Where is the locus of transformation in fiction: in the author, or, is it yielded over to character?

What is the relation of character to the author’s use of character?

Character in fiction is a type of speech which may or may not occur in fiction. It is an interpretation of the self. If it is only a rhetorical device, it will only be interpreting the self as a rhetorical act. However, if the self experiences an internal world and relating, then character speech may occur as a reading of that self.

Rhetorical versus psychological character.

How do we experience the character in fiction? Or, how do others [other characters in a novel] experience the character in fiction? He is set up in others and in the reader. Is the text, the Other for the character? Does it reply to him or hold him?

Does character reflect the mental process of the text? Is character an interpretation of being inside the text? Where text is the psychical process, does character interpret this?

Undated, 1977

“Character”

Character in a text expresses something. Invariably, it is the discourse of structure, of handling by a self, and is a different hermeneutic. A character may say “I love you” but the formality of his being may say “Only at a safe distance do I love you.” This speech is the discourse of character and is a subjective interpretation of the self rather than the professed themes uttered by the subject. Think of Heidegger’s notion of the existence-structure of the self. Ishmael and Ahab transform the subject “I will hunt the whale” in different ways. Their style of handling is an interpretation of the self. It will speak fundamental paradigms of transformation of need, desire, fear, etc., of instincts and relating to the object. When an author releases different characters into fiction he is releasing varying ego structures in himself, different selves, to personify aesthetics of being.

“The Aesthetics of Being: Character as Discourse on the Self.”

We cannot decenter character from the crucial reality that there is an interpretive presence in character. The structures of character are idiomatic internalisations of self-object (and self as instinctual presence as object) relations. These are matters of choice. Ishmael and Ahab make choices derived from their different ego structures.

By releasing character the author uses different styles of transformation of desire and relating to the other.

In fiction, each character embodies a character memory.

Does any of it have to do with the experience of the text? In the sense that an author may release his internal world into the text, characters are different modes (ego structures) of handling and interpreting these themes. This handling (transformation) is the aesthetic of character.

Ego structure. The infant experiences the mother. On the basis of the infant’s experience of the mother he makes choices about handling the mother.

In Moby-Dick Melville puts one ill and one healthy ego structure alongside one another, in the juxtaposition of Ahab and Ishmael.

The mother’s handling of her infant is an aesthetic and points the way to her notion of the baby’s body and self. Her handling complements the baby’s emergent ego (handling) functions. As the mother handles instinct and impulse, so the baby internalizes her paradigms. This is the internalization of an interpretation of the self.

Undated, 1977

“Metaphor as secret”

Metaphor takes a word which applies to one thing and transfers it to another because it seems a natural transfer. This occurs in Melville’s pyramid fantasies where clusters of metaphor sequester hidden meanings. The chimney has hidden spaces and is a metaphor of secret places. Such an act is at the root of fiction. Keeping the source a secret, yet communicating from it. Is it some deep ego structure that finds symbolic equations for itself?

Undated, 1977

“Character versus subjectivity”

Character is memory. It is an aesthetic of being that forms and transforms experience according to an unconscious hermeneutic. It is mute in the sense that the receiver is absent (except in analysis) and the subject who enacts his character is blind and deaf to his aesthetic.

In a sense, character reserves an interpretation of being that may be at variance with the person’s subjective notion of their essence. It is a clash between the discourse of character—which speaks through the aesthetic of being—and the voice of desire: the subject’s play of the imaginative possibilities of self.

This is, perhaps, best illustrated in a person who is (as existent-structure) a certain way. He handles himself and others in a certain style. A syntax of being and relating. Now, all this may be unknown by the subject and, indeed, at wild variance with his own “internal world” or, at least, his experience of the world.

It raises the question: What is subjectivity? Or, can there be a genuine subjectivity without hearing from the discourse of character? I think the discourse of character is a mute speech. It means “listening” to one’s silent speech, almost as if we bear with us a shadow self who prints in an aesthetics of being a dialogue with an absent object. In psychoanalysis, this absent object may reappear in the transference.

In fiction, at least the modern novel, character may exist alongside consciousness; in particular, the consciousness of the author … or the world of the novel. What is the discourse of the self? Does the consciousness of the author grapple with the violence of character; or, is it remedied by superficial placing in indexical tongues (sociological matrices) rather than as an idiomatic—unconscious—discourse of the ego: the impersonal self?

What novels do I know of where the subject grapples with character? Moby-Dick, Crime and Punishment. It means a conscious confrontation with the mute determinacy of one’s idiomatic discourse. Character is autistic, in that the receiver of the discourse is absent (the object of all characterological defenses) and the language is, thereby, a dead language. It is the fact that character is a dead language—a language no longer spoken between the original speakers—that gives critics the sense that character is conservative, or inhibiting.

Most novelists understand only the effect of character—that is, linking it with mute determinacy—and this principle is then reprinted in a novel, in social terms (cf. Goffman), but that is not the truth of character, which is deeply enigmatic and aggravating.

Many novels are an attempt to escape the enigma of character by a manic-omnipotent staging of character, giving to themselves a control over character—“characterization”—that is a denial of the very experiences of one’s character.

Recent psychoanalytical studies of the self—in particular, the borderline and narcissistic—are concerned really with a patient whose primary speech is character, whose “subjective” life is blank or chaotic and who refuses to be informed as a subject, of themselves as a character.

Character is destiny if understood, and fate if not understood.

Few authors permit this determinacy to be with them. Their act of omnipotent creation defies destiny. Yet some writers do: Melville, Shakespeare.

December 15, 1977

“Denial and paranoia”

A patient denies memory and both severs and dissolves linking, so he has no internal, accrued sense of self. He has no tradition upon which he can rest. His unconscious motivation is to deny the absence of a transformational object and to reject what is, to use the semiology of the self as a reproach to the other, who must feel guilt.

But, the attack on linking leaves him without structured psychological means of living-in-the-world. To survive, he uses paranoid vigilance—to scan the environment—instead of psychic insight, to know the self. Hence, paranoid thinking is a defense against anxiety surrounding survival of the self, that occurs when there has been an unconscious subversion of psychological insight. That is why he is not concerned with knowing himself or with insight, but only with how I feel about him and whether he is in trouble or not.

Christopher Bollas is a psychoanalyst and writer whose books include The Shadow of the Object, Cracking Up, and Meaning and Melancholia, among others. This extract is adapted from Streams of Consciousness: Notebooks, 1974-1990, which will be published by Karnac Books in England in October.

I did not have a good time reading Vigdis Hjorth’s novel If Only. I felt, in fact, kind of abject—but something about the novel compelled me forward, in a way that sometimes actually confused me. I found myself reading fifty pages, putting it down, picking it up a week later and once again being unable to stop reading, then abandoning it for another week. It was a discomfiting instance where in returning to the bleak narrative world of the novel I felt almost like I was mirroring the behavior of its main character, Ida, who returns again and again to a love affair that seems to offer her nothing but pain. Why was I reading this book that made me so angry, uncomfortable, irritated? Because it was, maybe, the kind of discomfort that can reconfigure certain aspects of the way you see the world, whose insights or the shadows of them seem to recur long after you’ve closed the book—and so they have, as I thought last night of an image from it, Ida and her lover at a restaurant in Istanbul, gorging on champagne, telling the waiter they were just married even though they weren’t. 

If Only—published in Norwegian in 2001, but published in English translation by Charlotte Barslund for the first time this month—is a novel about obsessive love. It is one of a spate of recent novels that take all-consuming desire as a theme: Miranda July’s All Fours and Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos both deal with a passion that veers into misery at times, the kind of passion that is transformative only because it shatters lives. But If Only is by far the bleakest of these; in fact, it is one of the bleakest depictions of a relationship I have ever encountered. The affair obliterates Ida; it cuts her off from the people around her, including her young children; it makes her act erratically and occasionally dangerously. The relationship has many of the same qualities as prolonged substance abuse—and it is no coincidence that Ida and her lover constantly binge on alcohol, too. The novel offers neither redemption nor transcendence as its resolution. And yet Hjorth makes this relationship and its aftermath legible to us as a part of the human experience—one that we can’t extract from the type of love we do consider desirable or healthy. At the end of the book, we might find ourselves wondering, as Ida does: “If only there was a cure, a cure for love.” And we might realize, even as we wish this, that we don’t actually mean it at all. 

—Sophie Haigney, web editor

I want to recommend the final, fourth volume of Michel Leiris’s autobiographical project, The Rules of the Game: Frail Riffs, recently published by Yale’s Margellos series. Lydia Davis—whose fiction, essays, and translations of Proust and Flaubert amaze me—rendered the first three volumes; volume four is excellently translated by Richard Sieburth. Alice Kaplan has written an incisive essay on Leiris, and Frail Riffs, for the current issue of The New York Review of Books. Alice K. is another international treasure whose books will be known by anyone who reads The Paris Review, I would guess. Especially, but not only, The Collaborator, which summons so much about the political winds of the twenties and thirties blowing through the Parisian literary world, and about the postwar epuration in France, which Céline eluded by fleeing to Denmark, and which Robert Brasillach didn’t. Elude, I mean. (Whether this “fine literary writer” should have been executed for treason or not is, for me, a question one could settle one way at breakfast and the other way at dinner. Sartre or Camus, take your pick.) Anyway: Leiris, who writes the most pellucid and persuasive sentences. Whose abjection I welcome more than anybody’s egotism. His writings a bonanza of formidable insights conveyed with the unrushed elegance of a Saint-Simon. Leiris is incomparable, a Vermeer in a world of Han van Meegerens. Frail Riffs is pure pleasure, in the way Proust is pure pleasure—you can open to any page and just surrender yourself to the music of time that saturates it. The early entry in Frail Riffs, describing the prologues of Goethe’s Faust and their effect upon him as a teenager, is enough to turn any reader into a Leiris devotee.

—Gary Indiana

Emily Witt’s Health and Safety begins in Gowanus in 2016, where the Future Sex author is set to give a lecture called “How I Think About Drugs.” She speaks from a Google slide about Wellbutrin, which she used to take, and the distinction between “sort-of drugs” (pharmaceutical) and “drugs” (illegal). After quitting Wellbutrin, at thirty-one, Witt broke a yearslong illicit-substance fast by smoking DMT at Christmastime. This was the beginning of a drug journey of sorts, one involving ayahuasca retreats in the Catskills with her then boyfriend, a sensory-deprivation-tank attendant, and a large dose of mushrooms taken in a Brooklyn apartment. After her speech she meets Andrew, a Bushwick DJ. He soon introduces her to another context for and type of drug-doing: raving. She falls in love. They soon move in together at Myrtle-Broadway.

“Being in love made me happy,” begins chapter five, “and I lost interest in channeling all of my knowledge about nutrition, disease, and medicine into a life of perpetual risk management.” Witt began to see her former orientation toward health and wellness as narrow and individualistic, whereas raverly values were collectivist, abolitionist, and harm reductionist. To be one of techno’s real appreciators meant thinking through its lineage in Black American Detroit and how it morphed in Berlin clubs; it meant learning about Afrofuturism, Deleuzian metaphysics, and Narcan administration. It could all feel overly theoretical, because the real point of doing ketamine at Nowadays is having fun, but even the most pretentious scene fixtures were interesting in their own ways. Witt is intrigued by techno’s embrace of pessimism as praxis: a deep-house artist named DJ Sprinkles uses part of their set to drive home why they use the term transgendered instead of transgender, then tells their audience they’re all a bunch of normie losers. Sprinkles is compelling because their unapologetic manner gets at realer issues than does the tone-deaf #Resistance-era small talk that was unavoidable at the time in New York.

Witt’s partying coincides with Trump’s election, the beginning of the #MeToo movement, Parkland, Kenosha, the protests in the wake of George Floyd’s killing, January 6. The Trump administration disturbed many Americans’ sense that we shared a definite political reality; our widened Overton window, at least, began to reveal the racial and socioeconomic injustices that white, middle-class liberals had claimed ignorance of. During this period, Witt joined The New Yorker as a staff writer while attending Black Lives Matter protests on the side with Andrew. Health and Safety poses sharp questions about what it means to watch history unfold versus to participate in its making, and about what it means to write about brutality when your friends are in harm’s way. These questions don’t resolve, as if to remind that discourse has little impact on the machinations of capital and state violence.

Witt’s reflections on the loop of reporting assignments—like being sent to watch Lizzo play a Shake Shack–sponsored set at a D.C. March for Our Lives rally—and sleepless nights at Bossa Nova Civic Club that comprised her pre-pandemic life are spectacular. So are her extremely specific notes on tripping: “I just saw some patterns that faintly buzzed in the marker colors of my childhood—the ‘bold’ jewel-toned spectrum that Crayola started selling in the early 1990s.” While reading Health and Safety, I couldn’t stop thinking about how the defamiliarizing effects of psychedelics are not unlike those of a well-constructed sentence, the kind that catches you off guard with its accuracy.

—Signe Swanson

The Kármán line, in astronomy, is the definition of the edge of space: the line at which Earth’s atmosphere ends and outer space begins. It’s a geopolitical rather than physical definition—it’s about fifty miles above sea level, though it is not sharp or well defined, and below the line, space belongs to the country below it, while above it, space is free. Daisy Atterbury’s new collection of poetry, The Kármán Line, to be published by Rescue Press next month, describes the line’s psychological import, characterizing it as a clearly defined yet impossible-to-name boundary between the known and the unknown. From the poem “Sound Bodily Condition”: “I want to learn how to get at the thing I don’t yet know, the blank space in memory, the experiences I should have language for and don’t.” Atterbury’s book is at once a math-inflected lyric essay; a rollicking road trip; a field guide to Spaceport America, the world’s first site for commercial space travel, located near Truth or Consequences, New Mexico; and a collection of intimate poems.

Atterbury spells out how you can, in a few steps, arrive at a relatively simple equation for calculating the latitude of the Kármán line for any planet, (2𝑚𝜌(𝑟)𝐴𝐶𝐿𝑟=1), but though the math might be legible in the abstract, things get more complicated in concrete terms: “To work out the Kármán line on an extraterrestrial planet I suspect you’d need to know the temperature.” The book’s energy comes from its application of the idea of the Kármán line to borders of all kinds. “We are thinking a lot about mindset,” says a man on the radio in the poem “Uranium Yellow”: the distinction between thought and the mind is a kind of Kármán line between reality and metareality. “I think he calls himself a neurobiologist,” recalls the speaker: the blood/brain barrier is the Kármán line of the body. The Kármán line might even be the signature line that the speaker deletes “when writing / personal emails,” tracing the edge between the public and private virtual versions of the self.

In the poem “What the Boundary,” I hear in the title an echo of William Blake’s “The Tyger” (“What the hammer? what the chain? / In what furnace was thy brain?”). The Kármán line divides space into a Blakean fearful symmetry that makes the known world seem safer—we can measure it, mark its delineations, perhaps even explore all of it—but also makes the unknown that much more vast and wild. As much as we crave the escape beyond the Kármán line into the infinite, Atterbury writes, we fear in exact parallel what lies beyond what we can measure. The formula for the Kármán line is simple—having the variables to plug into the equation to get an answer is the impossible part.

—Adrienne Raphel

It was Christmas in July at the Morgan Library. No sooner did the small lobby gallery open with the Eveillard gift of drawings from several restless centuries than Santa was back in town. Eighty drawings from the Clement C. Moore collection are a promised gift—but more on him and Santa in a moment.

Through September 22, it offers a chance to assess just what the great age of Dutch art meant for the Dutch. It may not be a compendium of stellar names and stellar prints, but that seems only right for an emerging nation. It suggests a collective enterprise tied up in the Dutch republic while reaching across Europe with its influence.

Moore, I can only presume, descends from Clement Clarke Moore, although the Morgan does not say so. It must wish him to stand on his own as a scholar and now donor. The older Moore, of course, wrote “A Visit from Saint Nicholas,” about “the night before Christmas,” and that seems right, too. No one did more to convert a religious holiday to a secular one—and a gift to all mankind to a bag of toys for children. (Trust me, a Jew who benefited.) And no nation did more to assert a secular purpose for art.

It stays all the truer to that purpose in drawings. In The Hundred Guilder Print (nicknamed for its one-timer cost and extravagance), Rembrandt shows Jesus preaching, healing the sick, and reaching out to all. A quick sketch isolates a sick woman and a still more haunting face. The poor really will always be with us. A boy from Adriaen van de Velde, who could easily be their companion, catches what rest he can leaning on the jug that must have helped put him to sleep and given him what small pleasures he could claim. The angel of the Annunciation for Samuel van Hoogstraten seems to have dropped by just to say hello.

The show opens with Mannerism in the late 1500s, to show the emergence of a new art and a new century, although dates jump wildly back and forth. It has an alcove for what a past show at the Morgan (also with work from Moore) called “Rembrandt’s World,” but with more of his school than the man itself. It cares more for results than for chronology or artist, in an arrangement largely by subject. That includes France and Italy, where Cornelis van Poelenburch found inspiration for Dutch landscape in towering, glistening rocks. It includes close observation of butterflies and tulips, with none of the moralizing in still life as fresh but dying for Flemish artists of the time. It includes the Flemish themselves, like Jacob Jordaens, Peter Paul Rubens, and Anthony van Dyck.

Mostly, though, it describes a land and people. It unfolds during their long war of independence from Spain, but without a battle in sight. The royal fleet puts on a show in panorama, but not half so memorably as fishermen for Hendrick Avercamp, a lone man crossing a bridge for Guercino (an Italian), or the banks of a stream for Jacob van Ruisdael. A Roman general comes home to a public welcome, but it could be just another village festival. And gatherings are everywhere, only not so easy to tell from chance encounters and private outings. Hendrick Goltzius fills a sheet with nudes, as prelude to painted myth. They might have gathered for an afternoon in the sun.

Individuals come off as smart, casual, and vulnerable, with not a touch of Flemish bravura. A man from Peter Levy, quite possibly himself, might be dreaming or showing off. He also shares his dignity with herdsmen for Paulus Potter and Jan Lievens, who also supply the herd. The nation was built on their collective labor. It was built, too, on wind power, but windmills are just one landmark in a layered landscape. Aelbert Cuyp uses lighter strokes in chalk to deepen and distinguish the layers.

You can, if you like, tease out how he and others constructed a world. Esaias van de Velde replaces the aerial perspective of Harvesters for Pieter Bruegel with a close view. Moore has continued to collect past the Baroque, too, and a postscript carries him through Thomas Gainsborough, John Constable, and J. M. W. Turner with their greater confidence and drama. Then again, you can stick with the spirit of a plainer art. When Vincent van der Vinne sketches the Grote Kerk in Haarlem, he leaves family emblems on pillars at peculiar angles. The might show a lesser artist at work, human neglect, or the ravages of war.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

The evening is balmy on Little Island. Already, I’ve forgotten that there’s a highway just on the other side of the slope, beyond which programmers are riding scooters home from the Google offices and tourists are taking selfies with a globally migrating installation of rattan elephants meant to symbolize “coexistence.” The carefully overgrown fauna, maximalist and faintly tropical, is still lush here in early September, and it’s been a long time since the Meatpacking District felt more like a neighborhood than a novelty.

It’s an impression, I’m learning anew, that gets stranger with repetition. I’m standing in the same place I was last night when the authorities canceled the performance of Anthony Roth Costanzo’s The Marriage of Figaro for a rainstorm that never quite materialized. The crowd then had exhibited all five stages of grief at the news: The Marriage of Figaro is sold out for the entirety of its nearly four-week run, and there is no rain date. Returning to the pier tonight, having been granted a reserved seat by the gracious staff, I have a vague sense of traumatic reenactment, that retracing my steps like this and expecting a different outcome might be a sign of my impending insanity.

Behind me in line for the show, a professor from the NYU Stern School of Business is holding forth on the strategies his digital marketing class will have to leverage this term so that their mock businesses might maximize fake shareholder value; in front of me, two women are debating whether the headshot on a CEO’s bio page does, in fact, match another photo one of them has open on her phone, of a man on vacation in a rainforest. The skyline glimmers before us here on Barry Diller’s $260 million pleasure park, on stilts in the Hudson River, and one man wears a fedora with an ace of spades tucked into the ribbon. The opera’s three-and-a-half-hour running time has been cut to an Ozempic-thin ninety minutes, and the exquisite Italian libretto is being projected in internet-speak English subtitles accented with the occasional emoji. The show promises to be art in line with that great contemporary ideal: frictionlessness. (more…)

From the April 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.

London’s BT Tower is a strange phenomenon: a landmark with no location. To be clear, it does have a location, in Fitzrovia on the northern fringe of the West End. It even has an address, on Cleveland Street. But it always seems to be observed at a distance, never from directly beneath. The Fernsehturm in Berlin, completed in 1969, four years after the London tower opened, has a monumental place at the centre of the rebuilt Alexanderplatz. London’s more modest totem to the invisible spectra is only half the height of its Berlin cousin, just enough to peek over north London’s line of hills. It hardly has a base at all. It floats above the city like a Fata Morgana.

The Post Office Tower – from a time when the General Post Office (GP) had a much wider remit over all forms of British communications – was designed by Eric Bedford, chief architect to the Ministry of Public Building and Works. Its original purpose was to provide a signals backbone for the expansion of London’s telephone network and the introduction of colour television. For 15 years it was the tallest building in London, before being surpassed by the NatWest Tower. Today, however, it is largely obsolete, and BT has announced that it will be sold for conversion into a hotel, to be designed by Thomas Heatherwick, the elite’s favourite outsider.

A dramatic insertion in a low-rise city, wearing its high-tech purpose on its sleeve, the BT Tower was an unmistakeable symbol of modernity. It did not historicise. But it was immediately popular, including with John Betjeman, even if he could hardly believe it himself. The design, Betjeman wrote in 1970,

had a stormy passage behind the scenes with the Royal Fine Art Commission, being modified again and again so that, like Wren’s St Paul’s, it completely changed its appearance several times. The result is an improbable triumph for the pragmatism of the committee system: a slender campanile surprisingly similar to one of Wren’s in its disposition, with revolving restaurant in place of belfry.

Slender, yes, although not as slender as it might have been. A curious feature of the tower, absolutely central to its appearance and to its strange success, is the part that people look at least: the bland stack of floors below the transmitter levels. These are offices, and there’s nothing unusual about that. But if you look at photographs of the tower under construction, you’ll see that these uniform office floors conceal something. At its base, the concrete core of the tower is almost as wide as the visible diameter, and then tapers towards the top. This shape is typical of such towers and provides the stability needed for the clearest possible signal. In other places – such as Stuttgart’s television tower, completed in 1956, apparently a model for the Ministry’s planners – this concrete stalk is left bare, making a much more dramatic landmark. That wouldn’t do in Fitzrovia.

In other words, it is furniture, not sculpture. Its hybrid nature gives it an urbane air, with a twist of frump. The ‘white heat’ was behind a fireguard. Fondness is the vibe, not awe. It was immediately at home in a capital that simply cannot do the Grand Manner. Trafalgar and Parliament squares are fudges. The Mall is grand but the city turns its back. Kingsway, London’s answer to the Champs-Elysées, is a muttered excuse. You have to go to Greenwich for spectacle. And we’re better off for it. From its beginning, the tower had a purposeful solidity, an air of permanence. At the end of Maureen Duffy’s strange, history-spanning novel Capital (1975), the remains of the structure protrude from a deserted and overgrown flood plain, and are the only marker of London’s former location.

Popular affection was, sadly, always at a remove. For the greater part of its life, since 1981, the tower has been closed to the public, originally for security reasons (a bomb was once detonated in the toilet of the revolving restaurant). When I was young, this closure was a common cause of regret and embarrassment – part of the general sense, in the later 1980s and early 1990s, that London had something a bit wrong with it, and struggled with things that other cities found quite straightforward. Since then, the city has regained its swagger, and now has a wide selection of viewing platforms, sky gardens and observation wheels. But it was always a pity that this particular building was off limits, and no doubt contributed to that sense of it always being just over there, never here. Now it is almost quaint – a reminder that modern telecommunications, for all their astounding contributions to life, have caused very little in the way of public architecture. Fibre-optic cables are invisible, masts and dishes are distributed and utilitarian, data centres are out of the way and sunk in sullen, paranoid anonymity.

Conversion into a hotel will at least allow a modicum of access, at a price, but it will in no way be a public building. What are the prospects for the scheme? Extraordinarily – reflecting its erstwhile function as workaday infrastructure – the tower is only Grade II listed. But there is no automatic cause for concern. Possibly the most modern aspect of the tower is its adaptability. It is a platform rather than a device, and it has changed appearance quite dramatically more than once in its life. The scrolling LED screens on its uppermost level were a shock when they appeared near the turn of the century, but have since become a familiar feature in keeping with the tower’s landmark futurity. The earliest transmitters mounted on its operational levels were shaped like art deco wall sconces. Later these were replaced with circular microwave dishes. Since 2011 these levels have, rather sadly, been left bare.

A conversion that maintained the spirit of the tower, without pickling it, might follow this plug-in model. The profile could be kept much as it is, with new modules added to the transmitter levels to fill the currently empty space. The modules could even be interchangeable and ever-changing, providing continual gentle variety on the skyline and giving the tower an avant-garde Metabolist edge. We must hope that Heatherwick uses the commission to celebrate the tower, rather than using it to celebrate Heatherwick.

From the April 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.

For just twelve months, in a more optimistic decade, nations came together in a spirit of peace, understanding, and mass entertainment. It was the 1964 World’s Fair, and it left in its wake the New York City pavilion, today the Queens Museum.

Now the museum is once again suitable for children, with a place to add their own drawing at the end of a long brush. Thanks to Cas Holman, the paper, with a bump in the middle, doubles as a sliding pond. Childhood memories continue, along with the optimism, with Cameron A. Granger, Catalina Schliebener Muñoz, and Nsenga Knight. Together, they remember the divisions that a world’s fair must overcome. So through September 22 does Lyle Ashton Harris. His Shadow Works pick up where he left off at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2011—and I refer you to my review then for more.

I came as a child to the World’s Fair for the rides, and I would not have settled for a slide. Still, grown-ups get to draw and to slide, too. They can also appreciate the curved wall outside the museum’s scale model of New York. As ever, the side facing out serves as a ground for large-scale work, and Caroline Kent makes the most of it. As I reported before, she mixes painted shapes with relief elements against black through December 29. They play gently but firmly with the flatness of the wall.

Not everyone looks back fondly to the fair. Barely a year ago, Charisse Pearlina Weston saw its raid on Flushing Meadow Park as coming at the expense of its neighbors and the Queens Museum as forever tainted. Perhaps, but a black community has long since given way not to state and corporate interests, but to Latin Americans and Mets fans. And the museum does its best to respond to the diversity with its artists in residence. This year’s crop does come in peace. For them all, art is a family affair as well as a global one, through January 19.

For Cameron A. Granger, it is downright childish. Remember when “I come in peace” was a stock line in approaching space aliens? A 2022 Studio Museum artist in residence, Granger sees a tool for the “liberation for black communities” in video games. I might believe it had I not seen too many gamers buried in their cell phones on the subway out. I might believe it, too, if a nook dedicated to a half-forgotten black magician had a few tricks up its sleeve.

Catalina Schliebener Muño gives her Buenos Vecinos, or “good neighbors,” a politically correct history. She also throws a party, although her painted birthday gift comes in plain brown paper. She has blob-like sculpture to brighten the affair in red and a mural featuring Donald Duck and Goofy. They serve, she swears, America’s global interests, if only for children. A second mural has a row of cartoon birds, in profile and of increasing height. Could it be her take on a much-derided image—the passage from apes on all fours to men?

Nsenga Knight mixes memories with a welcome to all. Is this a tough time to speak of peace, with the right wing in Israel and supporters of Hamas out to wipe out their enemies? Knight notes that the United Nations met in this very building when it settled on states for both sides. A 2017 Drawing Center artist in residence, she recreates settings in which she has lived, including a table set for a meal and cushions for eating while seated, Islamic style, on the floor. Both lie past glass patio doors looking out and looking in. Painted paper floats overhead as paragliders and parachutes.

Knight calls herself an Afro-Caribbean American Muslim. She cannot speak for both sides in a bitter war, and she does not pretend otherwise. She could easily have denounced the UN and its resolutions. She might see bitter echoes of Palestinian refugees in community displacement for the World’s Fair. Instead, she takes the UN’s motto, “Peace Through Understanding,” as her own. Art takes understanding, too.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

Jean Arp and Sophie Taeuber-Arp were quite the power couple: he was one of the founding artists of Dadaism, adept in several media, while she was an accomplished painter, dancer, sculptor, designer, architect and puppeteer. The two met in 1915 and their importance in the landscape of 20th-century art is the subject of this exhibition at Bozar in Brussels (20 September–19 January 2025). It is the first show in Belgium to be dedicated to the prolific pair and features more than 250 solo and collaborative works produced throughout their careers. Highlights include Arp’s intricate woven creations, such as Composition (c. 1929), Taeuber-Arp’s geometric oil paintings, and the minimalistic ink work Duo-Drawing (1939), credited to both.

Find out more from Bozar’s website.

Circle Picture (1931), Sophie Taeuber-Arp. Photo: Martin P. Bühler; © Bilddaten gemeinfrei – Kunstmuseum Basel

Duo-Drawing (1939), Jean Arp and Sophie Taeuber-Arp. Photo: Stiftung Arp e.V., Berlin/Rolandswerth; © SABAM Belgium 2024

Ask an artist about what went into a work, and you may hear quite a story about myths and memories. You will have your own stories at that—of what you have experienced, seen in the art you love, heard from your parents, and read. And curators attuned to matters of gender and culture eat it up.

Ask again, though, about what the artist had in mind, and you may hear something far more modest. I just want to make art, some might say, to see its color and the light. The seven artists in “Overflow, Afterglow” get to have it both ways, the stories and the light, and the Jewish Museum wants it all. It sees, as the show’s subtitle has it, “Chromatic Figuration,” through September 15, and it sees a trend. With two artists in their mid-twenties and just one much past forty, it hopes to lead the way to the future. But will the afterglow fade all too quickly, and is the overflow a bit much?

Chromatic figuration may sound more like color charts and color wheels than an afterglow. It may not, in fact, sound much like figuration. Yet the wall between abstraction and representation has been crumbling for years now, as geometry has given way to excess. With “Overflow, Afterglow,” regular shapes are nowhere in sight, but everything else is, and the break with Minimalism’s white cube begins with the installation. Each artist gets a bay of angled walls, each at a different angle and painted a different color. Together, they fill a single room, with sightlines from one to next.

Figuration, too, can be elusive, although Rosha Yaghmai insists that sheer color is figurative. Portraits by Sasha Gordon look conventional enough, but notably short of joy or affection. Others may tell stories, but the stories are hard to hear. Sara Issakharian includes hands, snakes, charioteers, and an eastern goddess in mortal combat, but who knows who is winning this war? Austin Martin White throws in a “hypothetical” African sculpture, but his heart is in chaos. Sula Bermúdez-Silverman promises a take on colonialism, but it never extends beyond work with actual rubber and sugar.

Color itself enters in different ways. It comes brushed on wildly, layered on beeswax, and squeezed through a nylon mesh. It can have what the museum calls “supernatural color” or the paleness of skin tones. It comes shining from resin and uranium glass. It all but bleeds out of a silicon trans figure by Chella Man, with the scars of multiple operations in its crotch. It lies nude on its back, ready for more.

The artists do share strategies. Ilana Savdie imagines narratives of hunters and their prey, while Gordon’s women train their rifles on a bird, the only thing separating or connecting them. Issakharian has her scenes of combat and celebration, White his Bacchanalia. Rosha Yaghmai paints on cotton and organza, creating moiré patterns, much like White’s nylon mesh. These are Yaghmai’s “afterimages,” and they appear and vanish before one’s eyes. The curators, Liz Munsell and Leon Levy, see “uncanny luminescence” everywhere, and at last they get it.

Not all the artists are Jewish, and those that are come with hyphens, like Issakharian, an Iranian Jewish immigrant, and Man, Jewish Chinese. For Bermúdez-Silverman, a hyphenated name and her dollhouse alike speak of home. They suit a time of pride in shifting identities. They are also new to New York museums (although one has showed with an upscale dealer and museum veteran, Jeffrey Deitch), but are they the future? They occupy the same exhibition space as “New York: 1962–1964” in 2022, which looked back to a time when the Jewish Museum introduced an entire generation, from Pop Art to formalism. Can it happen again?

The artists, the museum argues, “take on and take in the oversaturation of our contemporary moment,” but do they merely succumb to it? When “color is flexible and amorphous,” can it stand for anything at all? To think back to 1962, more than one critic looked at the dizzying designs of Bridget Riley and saw a movement. It must have seemed the next big thing, where in retrospect it was the field of play for little more than a singular talent. Could “chromatic figuration,” with all its failed narratives and optical activity, be the Op Art of today? It could be just as passing and a lot tackier.

I’ve been reading Nate Lippens for years. I think this is the third time I’ve read My Dead Book and I’m finally getting a grip on what kind of machine his writing is. I think it’s a poetic instrument and also some kind of natural phenomena. I went to Joshua Tree one night in the aughts with a gang of people to see the Perseids. I’ve been thinking about that. We had sleeping bags and some people had drinks and their drugs of choice and then we all laid down flat looking up the sky waiting for the show. There wasn’t much. Like almost nothing. There’s one. And then in maybe about seven minutes another. Then another one. And nothing for a while. Then wham and all of the sudden we were screaming, giddy as kids because we were getting inundated with meteors making the sky like this crazy vibing net and we were ancient people animals lying there looking up in naked awe. It was the best. Start to finish I think that’s what Nate Lippens has done. Let me lay it out here. My Dead Book starts off with a fairly sentimental recitation, a recollection of one of his dead friends from the past. And then another one. I mean of course I like the way he writes. It’s clean, it’s fairly direct, and conceptually I am reminded of how practical friendship is to a lost child which this narrator definitely is. If you don’t know who you are then you make yourself up with bits and pieces of your friends. And losing them means continually losing yourself who never existed except what you got from them and what’s constant in these evocations and recollections is the trashy elegance, swarming and specific bravado of a collection of souls who are lost and living antithetical to the values of the culture itself. Young rent boys and old rent boys and the people who collect them. We have books of course that are memoirs by particular people living in particular times but My Dead Book will have none of that. These are no ones mostly. Self-declared. It’s a midwestern book. Going to New York or LA to trick, even living there for a while but always coming back. Maybe there’s one kind of someone but he doesn’t value that. And it turns out he’s invented. He’s mostly me, Nate said. So we’re on the fringe, the fringe of the fringe. So what we have is loss and a compounding of loss, more and more. People age out, bodies get found in the river. People jump in the river. The cup spilleth over. So what’s the story. It’s a rhythmic trick. Like poetry. Like God is. And a queer one. His narrator tells about Gore Vidal saying that there are no homosexual people, only homosexual acts. So wise in a late-night-talk-show way (and Nate is not from that generation (mine) who stayed up late to see Truman Capote and Oscar Levant and Gore Vidal preen and pontificate on swivel chairs, but he’s entirely of it and Oscar Wilde too, definitely the Oscar Wilde of De Profundis but funnier) but the joke I want is how our narrator finds that quote funny because Gore Vidal was such a faggot. Rich as he was and toney and all he nonetheless handed them that joke. He was one of the boys. So he knew he’d be laughed at when he left the room or when the teevee went off for the night. So imagine reality being that place then. So we retreat into language here. Some of the jokes are just quietly squeezing the repetition. Almost with your fingertips. If money weren’t a factor somebody, a friend with money, begins a speech. What follows is a very conversational sequence of if-money-weren’t-a-factors but thinky, inside oneself. Which is also one of the main soundstages here. The narrator can’t sleep so he’s prone to long conversations with himself. If money weren’t a factor he asks finally (alone in bed) would we even know each other? It’s a quiet laugh followed by further critique of the wealthier friend but he has displayed his sword, his wit so we roll along for the next skein of thoughts. Nate takes huge risks with our capacity to suffer with him. And I like being pushed to that edge which is like watching your single mom clean the house and never knowing (it might take forever) when she is going to say something disarmingly filthy or just informative—something you’d never known about her before.

Of his class of boys Nate Lippens tells us:

We remembered social workers, outreach volunteers, and youth counselors with their advice, programs, groups, condoms, free anonymous screenings, and clean syringes. They trained us to be vigilant. No exceptions. They saved our lives and taught us to trust no one.

It’s a revelation. These dark comedians were “built” in so many ways. By social programs that saw everything but them. These are the kids who had the shit kicked out of them in school, whose dads beat them up for being fags—Dear Officer Krupke fuck you—but gay. The inside strikes back with a ton of young and not-so-young death. Thud, then everyone returning for encores throughout the text while the bodies keep landing on the deck like fish. Thump. And that’s the story.

There’s no rules when you’re not telling a story but stories. For me that’s the most redemptive thing of all. And because the narrator always loved Shane, perhaps the most recurring burnished tragic figure here, he ends a passage explaining that he wanted to save him with a kind of Diamond Dogs flourish:

I pictured us like salamanders, emerging from the fire with bright iridescent scales. Always the “just before” creates the very swirl of this. I imagine such lines bursting forth from hours of listening to music high for hours, and beauty and excess stepping out to dance just like humor always puts a stop to things and gets us out of the room. As I read My Dead Book again I was increasingly in awe at Nate’s timing and intuition. He was a poet first before anything else and you can smell it here. Most machinically, his bits and pieces are generally just a third of a page, a procession of them. This is a book full of asterisks for sure. Just when we’ve hit bottom with a character’s absolute inability to have intimacy with anyone other than his listening friend (and including him) the story races off to consider a world where “all the people who called ‘us’ bitter in the ’90s are now”—guess!?—“at the Whitney’s David Wojnarowicz exhibit.” Point being they would eat our dead bodies if we were famous. Turned out like this, the despair that floods this book like an abandoned car feels more like everybody’s problem and it is.

Humor is a kind of disordering, like ten, nine, eight, seven, three! and three tears a hole in your expectation and you crawl out laughing from a trap. Sometimes it’s ta-dum, sometimes a line noodles in like the moment when he’s talking about a show of matchbooks from “now-defunct gay bars and sex clubs.” His tone slightly shifts maybe lowers before explaining that the show refers to “a time that is an intermittent blinking on some abandoned shore, maybe.” I love the maybe. A whole era could be vast as in a movie about it, or infinitesimal like a kind of distant unforgettable light. But honestly it’s almost more than the beauty of the line, its noodling, its refusal to be major as another way of honoring what’s past. We were and now we are not. That’s all it means to say. It’s antimonumental. I feel I’m in danger of saying things I’ve said before, swooping Nate’s work into a wave of praise for things I’ve categorized before. If he’s related to that he shines most as the most uncategorizable, a poet of adamantine failure who while he’s experiencing the heft of his own declaration teases himself and us with vows of love, pledges to specific beauties, rages against conformities of comfort in relation to wealth and ideas and who’s declared valuable by “the community” (a phrase which he sneers at, delightedly) that wants to embellish our gay or queer love with the cozy and warm fragrance of home (and—at last—acceptance).

The spiky poetic homelessness of My Dead Book is in relation to a devotion to not fitting in, not anywhere ever. I haven’t read this yet before, not anywhere at all, though he’s moved by a literature I know that is never fiction or nonfiction but poetic fact unraveled with unparalleled and sidestepping skill.

Whatever his truth is he’s willing to die for it, woulda, but didn’t. And there’s one final effect which I’ve got to mention which is that once I’ve gotten used to the erratic flicker of his prose, the effects that randomly lighten his dead load, as the book comes to its final curve and it feels a bit like the narrator is a survivor after all and is mourning his loves and his own life and his family in recollection, what I’ve experienced in this book is formal somehow, the lights begin to stay and the final passage is bright as hell like one star stayed, yup, and got us home as well. It says hello. And man, can you write.

Excerpt from Eileen Myles’s introduction to My Dead Book by Nate Lippens, to be published by Semiotext(e) this October.