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Colin Dickey | Longreads | October 26, 2023 | 15 minutes (4,149 words)

Let me tell you a ghost story.

My street—East 21st Street in Brooklyn, on the border of Flatbush and Ditmas Park—is filled with ghosts. A block up from me, in late 2020, there began to appear a series of strange signs in the Japanese elms that line the street. They were made from tile of marble, 6 by 18 inches, strung around the limbs of the trees that lined the block. Someone had used a Dremel to carve words and pictures on them. One in white marble read simply, COVID took you. May l❤️ve keep you forever. In the corner, a small heart with the street name, 21st, superimposed on it. Another, in blue marble, had the faces of three middle-aged Black men, and read For the ones we lost, the two first. A third, in black, was hung vertically; on it, written in cursive: For the stolen ❤️s of COVID, for the ❤️s stolen by COVID of Two First, Amen. 

I walked by these memorials several times a day; I didn’t always need to, but I realized at some point I was altering my path to see them. They haunted me, in the sense that we often mean that word. “Haunted” as in a haunting melody, a haunting story—a thing that you cannot stop thinking about, that follows you like a ghost through your waking hours. Haunting like Hamlet’s father, reminding you what’s left undone, haunting like a vague blur, a noise or a whispered word, reminding you that the borders between us are porous, sometimes nonexistent. I saw the faces Dremeled into the marble—who were they? What stories did they leave behind?

By that point, I’d been thinking about ghosts, more or less nonstop, for months. In February of that year, I had been contacted by a magazine editor preparing a big summer issue on movies about New York City; would I, she inquired, be interested in writing about Ghost and Ghostbusters? I jumped at the assignment and the opportunity to write once more about this city I love and what haunts it. So I started writing about these two films. I wrote about them as the news each day got stranger and stranger, I wrote about them as a friend predicted “summer is going to be canceled,” I wrote about them as the city emptied out. I wrote about them after the magazine shelved its summer movie issue, I wrote about them after the editor stopped returning my emails. I kept writing; I wrote about them in cafés that were almost entirely empty, and I wrote about them at home when I realized it was no longer safe to write in cafés.

The usual idea behind a ghost is that they’re someone you shouldn’t normally see, someone who, due to some cosmic accident or injustice left unaddressed, has become visible again. The same, I understood, came to be true of pandemics: they are invisible until they suddenly become visible. The 1918 Spanish Flu had been more or less forgotten by history, a mere footnote to World War I, until we had our own pandemic and suddenly we couldn’t stop seeing the Spanish Flu everywhere. And watching these movies about ghosts as a new and terrifying reality loomed, I realized there were things there all along that I’d never noticed, that had, all at once, become all I could see.

So much lurks in the shadows of Jerry Zucker’s 1990 film, Ghost. At first, there is only Patrick Swayze’s character, Sam Wheat. The film’s title, after all, is singular. It’s hard not to root for him: he’s likable, successful, and has just started a promising ceramics internship before he’s tragically murdered by a hitman hired by his scheming business partner Carl Bruner. Once it’s clear his girlfriend (Demi Moore’s Molly) is also in danger, he enlists Whoopi Goldberg’s huckster psychic, Oda Mae Brown, to help save her from murderous  Carl. 

Sam sees himself as uniquely important. At first, he’s the only one Oda Mae can see, but after he unlocks her “gift,” she’s beset by ghosts, all trying to reach loved ones. (At one point she barks at him, “Did you tell every spook in the world you met about me? I got spooks from Jersey coming in here.”) But Sam can’t see beyond his own problems, even in death, and forces her to shoo these other souls (almost all of whom are Black or Latino) so she can focus on his problems. 

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In those early, terrible days, it became harder and harder not to see what Oda Mae saw, or forget these other ghosts as simply extras in Sam’s story. Who were they? What were their stories? We never truly know. The only other ghost whose story we get is Vincent Schiavelli’s subway ghost, who tells Sam, “Yeah someone pushed me. . . . What, you don’t believe me? You think I fell? You think I jumped? Well fuck you! It wasn’t my time! I wasn’t supposed to go! I’m not supposed to be here!” Beyond that, though, all we’re left with is the tantalizing idea of a city of ghosts, none of whom will get a chance to tell their stories.

In addition to the spirits that make brief cameos in Ghost are still others, even more obscured but no less vital. Sam Wheat, after all, is not the first to haunt 104 Prince Street, the loft he and Molly share at the beginning of the movie. In the film’s opening credits, a camera pans through the dusty, as-yet-undiscovered attic space: soft light catches dust in the air as we see dress forms and covered furniture, draped with sheets to suggest ghosts waiting to be found. Who might they be?

By 1990, the year the film was released, it was clear who these spectral traces belonged to—even if moviegoing audiences did not want to name them outright. A block from Sam and Molly’s fabulous loft is the former home of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art. During the AIDS pandemic of the ’80s, Charles Leslie and Fritz Lohman worked tirelessly to rescue and safeguard LGBTQ art—including, likely, the same detritus that Molly and Sam toss out to make way for her own sculpture. Indeed, clearing SoHo of its longtime gay population lurks in the background of Ghost like a ghost haunting Manhattan. As Sarah Schulman writes in The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Generation, “The process of replacement was so mechanical I could literally sit on my stoop and watch it unfurl. . . .Many died in their apartments. It was normal to hear that someone we knew had died and that their belongings were thrown out on the street. I remember once seeing the cartons of a lifetime collection of playbills in a dumpster in front of a tenement and I knew that it meant that another gay man had died of AIDS, his belongings dumped into the gutter.” You can watch Ghost now and feel this presence, even if it’s never named as such—how did Sam and Molly luck into such a cavernous loft in SoHo, its previous owner apparently vanishing, leaving a lifetime of possessions still lingering in the attic?

In 1990, though, no one wanted to think about this, especially not in an Oscar-winning major motion picture. If these ghosts are referenced at all, it’s as a joke. In an early scene, Sam and Carl do a routine in a crowded elevator: Carl begins coughing (visibly not covering his mouth), and complains to Sam about some mysterious but highly contagious illness that’s affected his penis. AIDS isn’t named outright, but it’s clear from the horrified looks of the others in the elevator what they’re afraid of catching—all to the delight of Sam and Carl as they exit the elevator and laugh their way down the hall.

It’s just a joke, but it became hard to unsee, particularly as I thought more and more about uncovered coughs, about social distancing, about the proximity to illness, about the dead left behind who would go uncounted and un-remembered.

Lucy Sante notes in Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York that the “ghosts of Manhattan are not the spirits of the propertied classes.” Rather, “New York’s ghosts are the unresting souls of the poor, the marginal, the dispossessed, the depraved, the defective, the recalcitrant. They are the guardian spirits of the urban wilderness in which they lived and died. Unrecognized by the history that is common knowledge, they push invisibly behind it to erect their memorials in the collective unconscious.” To watch any ghost story set in a city like New York requires this kind of sensitivity, an awareness that every building is haunted, and that these hauntings happen in layers: as much as each generation tries to wipe out the traces of those who’ve come before, those memories are always there. Ghost is a story about haunting that’s haunted by a pandemic just out of sight—and to watch it as the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded was to be reminded that cities have always been made and unmade by their plagues and epidemics, and it will always fall to the spirits to tell the whole story.

Ghost stories always used to work like this: the ghost lingered because something was left undone, or because the living forgot something or someone that should not have been forgotten. Ghost is atypical in this regard; it follows the same track as A Christmas Carol, Lewis Allen’s 1944 classic The Uninvited, and the 1980 George C. Scott vehicle The Changeling. These stories have their moments of terror, but they’re ultimately comforting stories about making the past whole. A justice is rectified, a wrong avenged, a restless spirit comforted at last. The ghost story ensures that even if one doesn’t have a satisfying conclusion in life, there may yet be narrative resolution waiting after death.

This works well for a single ghost, but what about a city? How to make each and every one of these stories whole? What do we do when there are whole cities full of ghosts, each one with their own unique story to tell, each one with something left undone? There is so much left undone when it comes to the dead. They bustle and jostle, they howl and they carouse and they interrupt and demand your attention. They never sleep, the dead. How to imagine the work of Oda Mae, beset with spooks, each with their own unfinished narrative, needing a slow and careful expiation to make the past whole so they can rest? 

One death is a tragedy, but as the bodies pile up, the ghosts and their stories become a problem to be dealt with en masse rather than one at a time. Ghost is rare as a New York City movie about a haunting that doesn’t stress exorcism, since usually ghosts are evicted against their will, like so many poor, queer, black, and brown tenants, their presence erased and their homes disinfected. It’s perhaps why the city’s most famous ghost story focuses not on ghosts like Sam but on the janitors sent to clean them out: 1984’s Ghostbusters.

Ghostbusters is the perfect fairytale of New York: a libertarian fantasy from the Reagan ’80s where the main villain is an EPA official and the all-powerful mayor has to turn to ordinary working Joes to save the city. (And after the bumbling government official shuts down the containment grid and unleashes these imprisoned spirits back into the air above Manhattan, you’re reminded that this, too, is a story about an airborne plague threatening to wipe out the city.) Their iconic coveralls are meant to remind us that the dead of New York are nothing more than pests to be exterminated. The fledgling start-up gets its start ridding the upscale Sedgewick Hotel of its iconic green ghost (later named “Slimer”), and much of their clientele appears to be the affluent, as they cleanse Central Park West condos. The moral of Ivan Reitman’s blockbuster is that the best thing for the city is to let unregulated small businesses wreak havoc and extort payments, mafia-style. (Who are the Ghostbusters, but a protection racket? After all, when the Sedgewick Hotel manager balks at the exorbitant fee, Bill Murray’s Venkman offers to release the ghost back in the now-destroyed ballroom.)

As befitting pests and vermin, hardly any of the ghosts in the Ghostbusters franchise get a backstory; they are nameless squatters and vagrants, marginal figures to be vacuumed up and put in deep storage. Who, for example, was this green gluttonous ghost in their previous life? Presumably someone with a soul, with a family, with a place in New York’s history? Like Patrick Swayze, someone capable of feeling love and longing even in the afterlife, someone with regrets and rage and confusion—someone who deserved an end more dignified than being trapped in a box by three fools. It feels absurd to try to empathize with this gross green thing, but why not? Ghosts were people, too. 

Our two options, it seems: the individual drama or the infestation. The solitary tragedy, the individual whose life we rescue from oblivion. Or: the mass to be removed, as quickly as possible. Ever since February 2020, as I’ve revisited these two movies a dozen times, I’ve asked myself in a hundred different ways: is there any way to write about death that is not as a single tragedy or as a mass cleanup operation? I care about ghost stories because I believe in them another possibility for storytelling, for understanding the past, and for processing grief. The ghost, perhaps, need not be exterminated or expiated. The ghost may not be a problem to solve. The ghost might be merely a gift.

Sam Wheat’s ghost is the kind Hollywood prefers: translucent and a little gauzy, but with a definite shape, features, and personality. They’re easy to visualize and demonstrate, and this form allows a star like Swayze to continue to be on-screen without being disfigured in some way. But as paranormal investigators (along with anyone else who’s ever reported an experience with the supernatural) will tell you, such a manifestation is exceedingly rare in the world of ghost hunting. What people describe instead again and again are invariably sounds, words, maybe a blur of color. Presence without shape. The ghost is disembodied: it does not have discrete form. It is not singular. 

In Ghost and Ghostbusters, the city and its multitudes are just the backdrop from which the narrow few protagonists emerge. But the reason I’m drawn to ghost stories is precisely because by its very nature the ghost blurs the edges of the individual. It flickers. It is and is not any kind of identity. It is and is not the subject of its own story. There’s possibility there.

To say I neither believe in ghosts nor fully embrace skepticism is also to say that I no longer believe that each of us is a discrete entity unto ourselves. The boundaries that separate you and I are porous, our lives not entirely our own. There is a line in John Berger’s 1972 novel G. that’s used as an epigraph in Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion, and again in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. In Berger’s G., the Casanova-esque protagonist is in the Alps as a friend attempts to pilot the first solo flight over the mountain range, but G is hardly paying attention, instead attempting to seduce a housecleaner. In Berger’s description of the seduction comes this line: “Never again will a single story be told as if it is the only one.”

I found the line first in Ondaatje’s novel, then traced it back to Berger, only to see it reappear in Roy’s when I read it after it won the 1997 Booker Prize. All three novels move between characters as they traverse past and present, reminding you that you can never tell the story of a single life without also telling the stories of all the lives that intersect. 

But ever since late winter 2020, whenever I read a story of a single individual in a novel or an essay or a news report, all I can think about are the ghosts at the margins, those begging  to speak. Every story of a single person is already embedded in a larger story, one where the writer has decided—consciously or not—to reveal or hide those other layers. It’s still the case, of course, that writers will attempt to tell a single story as though it is the only one. But having lived in this pandemic, I now see how impossible it is to read a single story as though it were the only one. Our duty these days is to enter the world of story aware of the ghosts in the background, to always be seeking their stories as well, coaxing them out.

More and more, to write solely about oneself these days has begun to feel to me like Sam Wheat bypassing the other ghosts in Oda Mae’s waiting room. A “post” pandemic means going back to our old ways when we could imagine ourselves as discrete individuals. But we are never going back; our lives are too interlaced now. Surely, by now, there are other ways to tell stories, other ways to acknowledge the other souls in the room alongside you and me, writer and reader, ghost and medium?

I went back, day after day, to the block where the trees were strung with memorials. The white one, which reads COVID took you. May l❤️ve keep you forever, called to me, demanding to be witnessed again and again. A sentiment so simple, and yet it ached with pain and longing and a story that I did not know, could not know. The first time I saw it, I broke in two. I stood there on the sidewalk and started to cry, crying for all that loss, all the grief from the entire year spilling out of me. In ways I still can’t put into words, it changed me, changed how I saw the city, changed how I saw those years. Not a day went by when I didn’t think of those signs, and the stories—unknown to me—behind them. This is what I mean by haunted. This is what I mean by a ghost story.

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And then, in early 2023, I was walking home one night and discovered to my horror that the white sign had been split in half, its two marble halves dangling from the wire that bound it to the tree. It was hard to imagine such an act—to imagine vandals so unthinking, so malicious, that they would destroy such a thing. Perhaps to console myself, I imagined it was some sort of horrible accident, that someone had backed up against it, or perhaps a fight where someone had been thrown against the tree. These objects were sacred. I couldn’t imagine anyone doing such a thing on purpose.

The blue one came down not long after. I don’t know if it was also broken, or if its creator feared for its safety. The vertical one remained; it would be months before I would learn why. 

How will we ever be the same again? To treat a death in isolation, to treat a story as though it is the only one—these are choices. They are forms of active denial, active forgetting, active erasure. You cannot tell a narrative of those years—of these years—as a single story, as a personal narrative of an individual. Our lives have always been intertwined, but “how to live?” is no longer a question that one can answer solely for oneself.

As the world tries to move on from a pandemic that has left us all scarred and traumatized, you can expect more ghost stories, because they’re one of the few available modes we have for dealing with the unresolved. Expect a language that allows us to see grief as a fleeting shadow out of the corner of one’s eye, there and beckoning, waiting for us to be ready. But beware the sleight of hand that would use a ghost to tell a single story, a homogenized or sanitized version, a discrete narrative. 

It was sometime in the summer of 2023 that I saw the fourth sign—not on a tree, but on the stoop of a brownstone on the same block. A larger slab, but the same carved sentiment: For the ❤️s stolen by COVID-19 of the Two-First. Leaning on the steps, nearly obscured by a garden in full bloom. Suddenly, it felt like I had the key to it all. An address, perhaps the artist behind the signs I’d come to know so well. On a late summer day, I happened by while the building’s occupants were out front, gathering herbs from their garden to give to a neighbor who was standing on the street with a granny cart. I asked them—their names were Emily and Andy—if they were the ones who’d made the signs that were hung from the trees.

“No,” Emily told me. But they knew who made them. Amber had lived in one of the apartment buildings on the block but had since moved to California. The mosque on the corner, they explained, was undergoing a renovation when the pandemic halted construction. That was where the marble tiles had come from: discarded building materials. Amber had taken a few of them and carved the memorials, and then hung them on the trees. 

“This block alone lost 13 people to COVID that first summer,” Andy told me. “And all while people on the television were saying it was made up.” One woman, he said, pointing to a house near the end of the block, survived both World Trade Center attacks, and then died of COVID, her first year into retirement.

He kept on gathering parsley while his neighbor waited patiently, happy to talk but focused on this act of generosity. Emily was picking spinach for a friend; she offered to let me have some as well, anytime I wanted to pick the leaves I was welcome. Our conversation was punctuated by the matter at hand: “Do you want some mint as well?” he asked the woman on the street, who nodded. Emily explained that the sign on their own stoop was not Amber’s work; Emily had made it herself, inspired, a way of keeping the story going, a way of keeping the ghosts alive.

I felt sheepish interrupting them at their work, this act of care for the living that is just as vital as the care we offer the dead, so I left shortly thereafter. But at the end of our conversation, Andy explained to me how the memorials had broken. It hadn’t been vandals as I’d feared, or even an accident. When they’d been hung around the tree limbs, Amber had bound them tightly with wire. But it had been over two years—the trees had grown, slowly, steadily, stretching the thick wire until something had to give, and the marble broke in half. The one hung vertically stayed only because the wire was looser and there was less tension on the brittle marble. What I’d thought was carelessness, or desecration, had been instead the stubborn reality of life going on, even at the expense of our memorials to the past. When I went back to the trees the next day, I saw how thoroughly the limbs had grown around the wire, still there—a vestigial remnant now bound inextricably to this living, growing thing. There may come a time when no one knows the story of that wire, how it got there, what it once held. But it will remain there nonetheless, a presence without a shape.

A slender thread—thin and sharp as a steel wire—connects each of us to these lives we lost, people we don’t know, will never know, but who stay with us every day. It connects you to the ghosts all around us, the ones that remind you that you are not singular, that you are not just the protagonist in your own story, that your own story is a part of a million other stories. That’s what makes a city a city—it’s that slender thread that holds us, the living and the dead, holding us even after we break.

The slender thread that reminds us that never again will a single story be read as though it were the only one.

Colin Dickey is the author of five books of nonfiction, including Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places, and, most recently, Under the Eye of Power: How Fear of Secret Societies Shapes American Democracy.

Editor: Krista Stevens
Copyeditor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

Colin Dickey | Longreads | March 2022 | 24 minutes (4,226 words)

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Two men are dead in a cabin on the side of a mountain — how did they die?

There is a whole host of questions like this — riddles that get grouped under the category of “lateral thinking puzzles.” Another: A man walks into a restaurant and orders the albatross soup. After finishing the soup, he leaves and commits suicide. Why? Or: There is a dead man, naked in the desert, holding a straw. How did he die? You can only ask yes-or-no questions, and the goal is to figure out the precise story. Many of these involve a dead man in one form or another. There is a dead man with a hole in his suit — how did he die?

Sometimes, the mechanism of the answer is something ludicrously complex, a thing that must be pieced out bit by bit. Several people were in a hot air balloon that drifted into the desert and started to lose altitude because of the heat and air pressure. They threw everything they could overboard, including their clothes, but when that wasn’t enough they drew straws to see who would jump overboard to save the others. Other times, though, the solution is simpler, but requires retooling your perspective. You hear “hole in his suit” and you think of a three-piece suit and your mind goes to a bullet wound. Once that image is set in your mind, it can take some work to dislodge it. You don’t necessarily think: “space suit.”

You hear “cabin on the side of a mountain” and you think of a small building built of wood and brick. Smoke out of the chimney from a pleasant fire. You don’t necessarily think: “airplane.”

***

Cabin is one of those words that seemed unremarkable to me until I spent some time thinking about it. It is a small room, a compartment, but beyond that it splinters in different directions. A cabin is a thing in the woods, remote, isolated — a place to escape to or where one goes to live simply. It is also a compartment on a ship, a private room in a large, more complex vessel. Or it is the main body of an airplane, where all the passengers (as well as the crew, if it’s a small aircraft) sit together. The kind of thing that you might find strewn on the side of a mountain.

Knowing the reason those two dead men are in that cabin on the side of the mountain answers some questions but not all. It doesn’t tell us why the crash happened, who was responsible, or anything about the lives of these two dead men. The lateral thinking puzzle is not truly interested in these questions.

***

I separated from my wife of 20 years at the end of 2019. We had previously lived in Brooklyn but had moved upstate to Dutchess County, New York, for several years — when people asked me why we moved, I often replied that it was the result of “a series of irrevocable decisions.” There, everything had fallen apart, and at the beginning of 2020 I moved back to Brooklyn, to an apartment a few blocks from where we’d lived together before. Upstate, we’d had a large house and plenty of room; now I was on the fifth floor of an apartment building, once again sharing walls.

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I wanted very much to focus on myself. Now that I was, for the first time in decades, not bound by another person’s decisions and wants and happiness alongside my own, I could look inward and try to understand what I needed and what I wanted. The old me had died, I told myself. I could now be whomever I wanted. I made a decision to live more deliberately, to take some control over my life that I felt had been lacking. I was going to spend some time and really focus on figuring out exactly what had gone so wrong, how things had turned out so poorly. But I also decided to be more open to experience, to consider possibilities, to let myself be carried along by the moment if it meant new chances, new ways of being.

I only had about a month of this before the world came crashing to a halt and I found myself largely trapped inside for the next few months. Trying to merely stay alive, I made decisions that would have lasting impacts out of sheer reaction. I saw my day-to-day life as from a distance, a sort of eerie remove, as though it was happening to someone else. I established new patterns as a way of asserting some kind of order on the chaos and anxiety I felt, then watched myself as though someone else was going through those motions.

To be in a cabin on a plane, together with your fellow passengers, or to be in a cabin on a ship, alone by yourself, is to be a passenger of some kind. To be in a cabin in the woods is to be going nowhere at all — though, at least since Thoreau, to be in such a cabin is to be, on some level, on some kind of introspective journey, learning about yourself and how to live. I see now that at some point in those early months I began moving along three separate timelines. I was a hermit, ensconced in a cabin, trying to find myself; I was a passenger, moving along into the future without agency; and I was alive amidst a wreck — everything around me crashed, everything broken.

***

There is a specific cabin on the side of a specific mountain that I think about often. It is the cabin of a McDonnell Douglas DC-10-30, Air New Zealand Flight 901, which sits on the side of Mount Erebus, as it has for over 40 years. In 1977 Air New Zealand began operating sightseeing tours over Antarctica: The flight would leave Auckland at 8:00 a.m., fly a loop over the continent and return to Christchurch at 7:00 p.m., refuel, and return to Auckland. An experienced Arctic explorer on board would act as a guide during the trip, pointing out landmarks and features of the continent.

The approved flight plan involved flying directly over the 12,448-foot Mount Erebus on Ross Island, the second-highest peak in Antarctica, but due to a transcription error, the actual flight path used by most of the sightseeing flights involved flying down the length of McMurdo Sound, some 27 miles west of the mountain. A few days before the accident, another pilot noted this discrepancy, leading Air New Zealand to update the flight plan, albeit incorrectly.

On November 28, 1979, Flight 901 proceeded along a route that the pilot and copilot believed to be along McMurdo Sound, descending to 1,500 feet. Despite the crew being aware of visual landmarks all around them, they did not realize that their new path put them on a course to Mount Erebus and they did not see the mountain directly in front of them. A condition known as “flat light” or “sector whiteout” had occurred, where the mixture of snow on the ground, clouds, and light conditions caused the pilots to lose depth of field; they were unable to distinguish the mountain from the horizon all around them.

At some point, in those final moments, that horrifying trick of perspective revealed itself: The empty white horizon was in fact, a mountain. It was too late to pull up. At 12:49 p.m. the plane crashed into the side of Mount Erebus. All 257 people on board were killed.

Because of the expense and feasibility of a large-scale salvage operation, most of the wreckage is still on Mount Erebus. The bodies have been removed, but the cabin remains on the mountain.

***

Mount Erebus is an active volcano, and one of the more geologically important sites on the planet. It was named by Sir James Clark Ross, who named it after his ship, the HMS Erebus. Built in 1826, the Erebus had begun its service as a warship, but after two years it was refitted for Arctic exploration, alongside the HMS Terror, which had shelled Baltimore during the War of 1812. The two ships left Tasmania in November of 1840 and spent the winter exploring the island that would later be named for Ross; the two ships would make several subsequent expeditions back to Antarctica in the ensuing years. Then in 1845, both ships were outfitted with steam engines and used by Sir John Franklin in his doomed expedition in search of a Northwest Passage in the Canadian Arctic. Franklin sailed in the Erebus, in command of the entire expedition, while Francis Crozier captained the Terror. The two ships were last seen by Europeans entering Baffin Bay in August of 1845 by whalers, wherein they disappeared into the Canadian Arctic. The mystery captivated the British public, and multiple expeditions were launched in search of the Franklin Expedition. Eventually it became clear that all 129 men on board had been lost.

Those men died beholden to a fantasy of British imperialism, sleepers all sharing the same dream. But as the reality that no one had survived the Franklin Expedition sank in among the British populace, it became increasingly important to understand how they died. Local Inuits who had witnessed the Franklin Expedition reported that they had descended into cannibalism near the end, an accusation met with widespread condemnation tinged with racist vitriol. Charles Dickens accused the Inuits of having murdered the sailors themselves; “We believe every savage to be in his heart covetous, treacherous, and cruel,” he wrote. Britons refused to believe that these men, bereft, starving, lost, and hopeless, could behave as anything but stalwart embodiments of British ideals. It was important that the people of England be able to tell themselves that these men had died well. To believe in this neat and tidy fiction, it seemed, was more important than any reality — that they had died well meant that the expedition wasn’t a total loss, that there was still something that could be learned from it: about stoicism in the face of despair, heroism in the face of defeat. The truth was far less important than the lesson.

As for the doomed Flight 901, investigations would later suggest that the pilot and copilot of Flight 901 were not entirely in command. The original accident report cited pilot error as the cause of the crash, blaming the pilot’s decision to descend below the customary minimum altitude and his willingness to continue at that altitude after it became clear that the crew wasn’t entirely sure of their position. But a subsequent inquiry by Justice Peter Mahon cleared the crew of blame, and instead blamed Air New Zealand for altering the flight plan without advising the crew. This second report also blamed the whiteout conditions, what Mahon termed “a malevolent trick of polar light.” Mahon also accused the airline of a conspiracy to whitewash the inquiry; he charged it concealed evidence and lied to investigators.

This conspiracy accusation was subsequently dismissed by New Zealand’s Privy Council, but it still seems fair to say that the pilot and copilot of Flight 901 were not entirely in charge of what happened that day, constrained, as they were, by faulty information, flight plans, data and computers, to say nothing of the weather — all of which conspired to prevent them from fully understanding what was happening as they flew into the Antarctic wilderness. Most importantly, the inquiry failed to ascertain how the crew and passengers of Flight 901 died; it attempted to provide a narrative, one that could perhaps lead to some kind of closure — instead what it found were contradictions, lies, and ambiguity.

***

In those early months of the pandemic one of the few things I learned was how a single life can split into a series of paths simultaneously. There were times I felt absolutely in control, and times like I was swimming through an endless chaos. I remained in my tiny cabin of an apartment while I hurtled through space, both in and out of control at once. I learned that there is not a single narrative; that at some point in your life your story can splinter and divide and run in parallel tracks. Elements from one of your stories can affect all the others. At some point, you hope, these tracks will combine again. Often this can take years. Often it never happens at all.

The lateral thinking puzzle, on the other hand, only works if there is a single solution. The cabin is an airplane cabin, it is nothing else. If it is this then the solution is evident. If it is not, then the question — how did these men die? — becomes more urgent. Bear attack? Starvation? Cabin fever? We don’t know, cannot know.

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As we sped into the unknown in those early days, all we wanted to know was who was spared, and for how long? Who died and how did they die? We knew there was a disease but we didn’t understand how it worked. We knew there were precautions that could keep you safe but we didn’t know which ones worked and why some people who followed them still got sick. Lives were wasted and lost less because of the disease itself and more because of a fealty to a broken set of ideas, a belief in a certain way the world worked that could not be altered. That the economy should be our primary concern, that businesses should stay open at all costs. That it wasn’t the government’s job to intervene. That personal choice was more valid than collective action. That change was not required. And tens of thousands of people were carried along to their graves in service of these beliefs.

***

You come outside your Brooklyn apartment one morning in April 2020, and the entire street is roped off in police tape. Across the street from your front door, there is a woman’s body in the trash. How did she die?

April 2020 is when everything seemed to have crashed, when there was nothing but wreckage. Through the middle of March, I had watched warily at the unfolding news, still trying to cling to some measure of hope; by the end of March the reality had begun to set in and everything seemed strange and emptied. It began a period when I literally could not imagine life beyond the next two weeks — I couldn’t see ahead in my life, as though I had entered a fog that obscured the future entirely. By April, there was nothing but the monotony of days, the litany of body counts and infection rates, and whatever grim rituals could be done to ward off despair and hopelessness.

And then on a bright, spring Wednesday morning I came outside to find that a body had been discovered across the street: a woman who’d been wrapped in a black and white tarp and left in a pile of trash.

The cops were still on the street, and I approached the one wearing a mask, speaking loudly so he didn’t have to get close. When I asked him what happened, he replied, “They’re doing an investigation.” “Did someone die?” I asked him. “Honestly,” he replied, “the news knows more about it than I do. It’ll be on the news.” It seemed to be his job not to know anything, to studiously avoid knowing anything. “Can you tell me anything? Should I be worried?” I asked him. He repeated the line. “They just have to do an investigation.”

Behind my question was not merely idle curiosity; it was of utmost importance at the time to know how people were dying. Was this a homicide? Was I at risk for my safety? Did I need to change my patterns of behavior when I was outside — avoid certain street corners or neighborhoods or times of night? Was it a COVID death? Had the outbreak spread so far and wide that people were just simply giving up, dumping bodies willy-nilly? Was this body a harbinger of a complete breakdown in the city?

I walked a bit away, out of earshot from the first cop, and put the same question to another cop. “It’s just that it’s suspicious, is all,” he told me. “So they have to do an investigation.” There was, I’m sure, a low note of panic in my voice. “But what was it? Someone was murdered? Was it homicide?”

“It’s just suspicious,” is all he would say. Neither officer was willing to even state the basic fact that I already knew. Neither was willing to name the antecedent to that pronoun, “it.” The death itself. Neither would even cop to the basic fact that there was a body.

A few days later, I learned from the news that it had not been a homicide, nor had it been related to COVID-19. The woman was believed to have overdosed and the man she was with had panicked, dumping her body rather than calling the paramedics. This man was later charged with concealment of a corpse — a law passed in New York in 2015, referred to as “Amanda Lynn’s Law,” after Amanda Lynn Wienckowski, a 20-year-old woman who was found dead in the trash in Buffalo in 2009. (Wienckowski’s death had also been ruled an overdose, but a private autopsy paid for by the family concluded that she had been strangled, leaving unresolved the question of how she died.) After that, the story dropped out of the news.

Having the solution to the puzzle solved nothing for me. It was, on a brutal level of reality, the best case scenario for discovering a body in the trash: It wasn’t a homicide, and it wasn’t related to the ongoing pandemic (at least not explicitly so). The fact that it was neither meant that my personal safety wasn’t any more or less impacted by this gruesome discovery. And yet, very little changed for me. I wasn’t reassured. Knowing the cause of death changed nothing. Could she have been saved? Did he try to save her? Why was she there? Was it all a terrible accident? Did she want to die? Why did he panic? Why couldn’t he have tried harder?

How did she die?

***

My own life went on. I tried not to think about her, that body in the trash, that woman whose name was never revealed. But she remains there, carried with me, nameless but insisting. I still pass the spot where her body was found several times a day. There is no memorial there, nothing to commemorate what happened; you’d have to have been there at the time to know it happened at all.

My street is filled with ghosts. There are memorials for others up and down the block: piles of candles and fading flowers, graffitied “RIPs” on the sides of buildings, laminated sheets of paper with smiling faces above dates tacked to trees. So many ways to be confronted with the same questions: Who was saved, and who was doomed — and how did they die?

For the families, and sometimes the police, there is nothing academic about these questions — they need to be answered, one way or another. But what about for the rest of us — the bystanders, who know a death has happened but aren’t involved directly? We who are too far removed personally to ever know the story, but also too close in physical proximity to ever forget that something has happened?

To live in a city like New York during a catastrophe is to be reminded a hundred times that you will never know the answer to these riddles, that the work of living through such times is to carry these unanswered questions with you, to never dismiss them. Sometimes the work we do for the dead involves fighting for justice. Sometimes it involves remembrances and testimonials and obituaries. Sometimes it involves asking questions that you cannot answer. Our obligation to the proximate dead is both very little and more than we can possibly hope to achieve; we ask the questions knowing there are no permanent or stable answers, only the questions themselves and the endless attempts to answer them.

***

The term “lateral thinking” was first coined by Edward de Bono in 1967, where he argued that the key was the switch from familiar patterns of thinking to different and unexpected perspectives, allowing for new insight. Rather than using critical faculties, reasoning out the true value of statements and attempting to understand and correct errors, lateral thinking is designed to radically break one out of established patterns and broaden one’s tools for problem solving.

De Bono published multiple books on his concept. He made a name and a career for himself, but he could never quite articulate how the process worked. He offered inspiring examples from the world of business and culture but hesitated to provide a roadmap for how the reader could imitate such successes. “No textbook could be compiled to teach lateral thinking,” he wrote in 1970’s Lateral Thinking: A Textbook in Creativity. As with other self-help gurus like Malcolm Gladwell, de Bono mainly offered a satisfying narrative built around sudden eureka moments that ignored the way solutions are usually found: communal problem-solving, trial and error, and dogged work. Less a significant contribution to cognition and more likely a pseudoscience that appealed to the CEOs who hired him to give presentations at their Fortune 500 companies, lateral thinking is a buzzword and a magic trick, obfuscating the stubborn work of thought behind ersatz epiphanies.

Lateral thinking presents itself as finding a novel solution — you reframe your perspective and you see it, there it is: The proper way to go. But sometimes there is no proper way to go, there is no trick of perspective that makes everything clear. I imagined, in those early days — and in the many, many days since, that if I spent enough time looking at what had happened to my life, if I turned around the question in my mind long enough, the answer would come clear and a simple solution would present itself. But I have never found this to be the case.

When I teach beginning students how to write a personal essay, I usually tell them there is a standard structure they can follow. There is a past self, the one who experiences the events in question, and a current self, the one writing about these experiences afterward. The essay is a dialogue, I tell them, and it is built around the difference between these two selves. The current self has learned something, understands something, and is communicating that takeaway to the reader.

The essay tries to answer the question: How did you live? You went through something, you were changed in some way, you came out the other side. How did you do it? What did you learn? The perspective, the reframing has happened, and now the writer sees clearly. What was ambiguous or uncertain is now resolved.

It’s a neat structure and makes for a satisfying read, but most of the time it’s a trick. You write a triumphant essay about getting over an ex and you’re still thinking about them months later. You write about meeting the love of your life and by the time the essay is published you’ve broken it off with them. You write an essay about what you’ve learned about yourself and you’re the same enigma the next day.

I’ve always distrusted the form of the personal essay because I recognize the lie here, recognize how easy it is to put together a satisfying narrative conclusion about an incident in my life, one that delivers on a certain promise made to the reader — a satisfaction entirely built on smoke. These neat, pat resolutions at best can only describe one facet of one’s life, at one particular moment. Meanwhile the rest of you — these parallel lives — remain messy, untidy, ambiguous, complicated.

Enough time has passed since those early days of 2020 — and I’ve spent more than enough time thinking and puzzling on them — that by now I assume I should know something, I should be able to offer a takeaway of some kind. What those days meant to me. What I see now that I couldn’t see then. How I was changed. How I was saved. How I lived.

But none of this is true. All that I find I can do is keep adding new layers to the same question, one on top of each other. The only thing that feels true about myself is the series of questions I’m constantly asking myself, that never get answered fully but get asked again and again in an ever-evolving light. How did they die? How did I live?

***

The mountain reveals itself and the plane crashes. The ship reaches its destination and the passenger disembarks. The hermit, enmeshed in solitude for long enough, has an epiphany. The inquiry is finished, the cause of death announced. The pandemic winds down. The essay reaches its conclusion.

You think that something has ended here, but it’s just a trick of perspective.

***

Colin Dickey is the author of four books of nonfiction, including Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places, and The Unidentified: Mythical Monsters, Alien Encounters, and Our Obsession with the Unexplained.

Editor: Krista Stevens

Copy Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

Fact checker: Julie Schwietert Collazo

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Colin Dickey | Longreads | October 2019 | 14 minutes (3,729 words)

“The daimyō’s wife was dying, and knew that she was dying.” So begins Lafcadio Hearn’s uneasy and unsettling ghost story, “Ingwa-Banashi,” gathered first in his 1899 collection, In Ghostly Japan, and republished this year in a new Penguin Classics anthology edited by Paul Murray. As the daimyō explains to his wife that she is dying and preparing to leave “this burning-house of the world,” he offers her any final rites she may request. She asks him to summon one of his concubines, the nineteen year-old Yukiko, whom, she reminds him, she loves like a sister.

Yukiko arrives, and the dying woman tells her that one day she will rise in rank and be made the honored wife of the daimyō, a fortune that the low-born Yukiko cannot believe. As her last request, the daimyō’s wife asks Yukiko to carry her out to the courtyard to see a cherry tree in bloom — obligingly, Yukiko lowers her back and allows the old woman to wrap her arms around her, to carry her. Once she has grasped hold of Yukiko, though, the old woman laughs, clutches tight, and, with her dying breath tells Yukiko: “I have my wish for the cherry-bloom — but not the cherry-bloom of the garden! … I could not die before I got my wish. Now I have it! — oh, what a delight!”

Yukiko soon discovers that the woman’s corpse has somehow attached itself to her own body; doctors cannot pry it loose for fear of tearing Yukiko’s skin. They ultimately decide to cut it free, leaving only the corpse’s hands, which are cemented fast to young Yukiko’s breasts. “Withered and bloodless though they seemed, those hands were not dead. At intervals they would stir — stealthily, like great-grey spiders. And nightly thereafter — beginning always at the Hour of the Ox — they would clutch and compress and torture. Only at the Hour of the Tiger the pain would cease.”

“Ingwa-Banashi” is one of Hearn’s stranger tales, something that sticks with the reader long after you’ve put it down, fusing to your memory like a disembodied hand. It isn’t just the horrific state Yukiko is left in; it’s the baffling lack of any real reason offered. What accounts for Yukiko’s fate? She is a concubine, to be sure, but just one of many, and nothing in her personality singles her out for such treatment, nor does the story offer anything incriminating about her that might justify this monstrous calamity.

Hearn offers this in a footnote: “Ingwa is a Buddhist term for evil karma, or the evil consequences of faults committed in a former state of existence. Perhaps the curious title of the narrative is best explained by the Buddhist teaching that the dead have power to injure the living only in consequence of evil actions committed by their victims in some former life.” Whatever Yukiko’s crimes, they predate this life, and lie outside the borders of this short narrative. Nonetheless, she is bound to them and by them.

*

The stories in this new Penguin anthology (titled Japanese Ghost Stories) are why Hearn (who also went by the name Koizumi Yakumo) continues to have a lasting legacy in both America and in his adopted homeland, Japan. As Zack Davisson, author of Yurei: The Japanese Ghost, wrote, “When talking about yurei, all roads eventually lead to Lafcadio Hearn. In Japan, the two are almost synonymous. Say ‘yurei’ to a Japanese person, and the response is almost always ‘Lafcadio Hearn.’ Got to a bookstore in Japan, and ask the clerk for a book about yurei, and the first thing put into your hand will almost always be a copy of Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things. Any discussion of the history and cultural impact of Japanese ghosts would be incomplete without understanding the man who so diligently collected and published the mysterious legends with which he found himself surrounded.” As Davisson explained to me over email, “Hearn was instrumental in collecting and preserving Japanese folklore at a time when the Japanese government was actively attempting to eradicate superstition from the common people in favor of the new tools of science and industry.” Gathering up scraps and half-remembered tales, he forged them into an enduring corpus of eerie stories that have continue to linger.

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Throughout his writing, Lafcadio Hearn was fascinated by a recurring sense that we are but one step away from a massive precipice, and that we never know truly when we might misstep. In his earliest journalism, which made him famous and notorious, he focused on the underbelly of city life, the marginal spaces that were being suppressed by cities desperate to appear modern and forward-looking — it was here that Hearn sought out the secret gears of urban life, and brought them forth for his readers. Civilization, Hearn understood, could not exist without its uncivilized double, its underbelly that kept the wheels or progress in motion. And Hearn set out to find and write about those places where the veil between these two worlds was the thinnest.

Born in Greece and raised in Ireland, Patrick Lafcadio Hearn came to the United States in 1869, when he was nineteen years old. Penniless, his left eye disfigured from a teenage accident, it was clear, as one friend later put it, “that Fortune and he were scarce on nodding terms.” But his dogged work ethic and the curious charm of his writing style eventually got him a job at the Cincinnati Enquirer, one of the city’s two biggest newspapers. Starting with literary reviews, Hearn quickly caught the attention of the public after a deeply reported story that detailed a shocking murder in the tannery district, a gruesome a lurid mystery in a dingy part of town that most of the Enquirer’s readers had no real notion of. Catapulting to fame on the strength of this piece, he was given more or less carte blanche to write about whatever captured his one good eye.

With a wide and varied curiosity, he sought out the butchers, undertakers and spiritual mediums of the city, reporting on the strange comings and goings of a city bursting at the seams. Ultimately fired from the Enquirer for marrying a biracial woman, he found a job with a rival paper, but eventually headed south to New Orleans, where he remade himself once again. He spent another ten years as a journalist there (interviewing famed Voodoo queen Marie Laveau, among other subjects), before heading to Martinique for a spell and churning out two novels, Chita and Youma.

Throughout it all, he was never far from his fascination with the supernatural. Terrified of ghosts as a child, alone at night in his bedroom he would become convinced ghosts were reaching out for him in the dark. He would scream ferociously until an adult would come to check on him, a disturbance that inevitably resulted in being whipped. But, as Hearn would later recall, “the fear of ghosts was greater than the fear of whippings — because I could see the ghosts.” This sense of being surrounded by spirits never left him; and spirit mediums and other ghost stories were a recurrent feature in his journalism. Along with his stories of murder and mayhem, and his interviews with undertakers and butchers, Hearn built a corpus around that thin line between life and death, and our fascination with what lays on the other side.

His first attempt to seriously capture the allure of ghost stories came with his book Some Chinese Ghosts, written in 1887 while he was still living in New Orleans. A lifelong collector of folklore, he’d cobbled together the book primarily from secondary sources; he would later call it the “early work of a man who tried to understand the Far East from books — and couldn’t, but then the real purpose of the stories was only artistic.” It wasn’t until he came to Japan and immersed himself in its culture that he began to forge a style that united his prose with his interest in ghosts and folklore.

*

Five years after a series of well-received articles on the Japanese exhibition at the New Orleans Exposition in 1885, an editor at Harper’s asked him offhandedly if he’d be interested in writing about Japan. Now 40 years old, broke and in need of a change, Hearn jumped at the chance: he relocated to Yokohama, and eventually Tokyo, where he took up a post as Chair of the English Language and Literature department at Tokyo Imperial University.

Supporting himself with a series of travelogues and observations about a country that fascinated Western audiences, Hearn became increasingly fascinated with the country’s ghosts. As the Meiji Restoration rapidly industrialized and modernized Japan, Hearn increasingly turned to out-of-fashion folktales and old stories of Yūrei: unfortunate souls that linger between the worlds of the living and the dead, and who return to torment the living.

Hearn gathered material from old sourcebooks that often contained only incomplete fragments, stories of strange demons and lingering visitations that sometimes made little sense. Having long taught English to make a living, he gradually recruited his stronger students to act as informants for him, gathering up folklore for him.

What would become a hallmark in Hearn’s ghost stories was that omnipresent sense that something was not quite right, even in the telling itself. He instructed his research assistants to “never try to translate a Japanese idiom by an English idiom. That would be no use to me. Simply translate the words exactly, — however funny it seems.” In doing so, Hearn may have helped further the notion of Japanese culture as somehow inscrutable or untranslatable — a not uncommon move by foreigners writing about Japan. But Hearn also managed to tap into something that resonated in his adopted country; Shimane University professor Yasuyuki Kajitani has said that while there have been many foreign authors who’ve written about Japan, “no man of letters before or after Lafcadio Hearn … revealed the beauty of Japan or the Japanese heart, or introduced Japan in such a beautiful style and with such understanding, observation, and deep insight based on a heartful love for Japan’s landscape.”

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In addition to his students, Hearn also turned to his wife. He had married a much younger woman, Setsu, out of convenience — marriage into her family gave him citizenship and legal status, as well as someone to care for him and keep house; in exchange, he was obligated to provide financially for her family. And though he had confessed to a friend at one point that all he wanted in a partner was “some simple, quiet creature who would look after his domestic comfort and stay meekly outside of his realm of thought,” Setsu’s own memoir (published after Hearn’s death) revealed a different relationship altogether. According to Setsu, her husband would ask her to tell ghost stories that she remembered from her youth, always in search of new material. “Hearn would ask questions with bated breath, and would listen to my tales with a terrified air,” she wrote.

When I told him the old tales, I always first gave the plot roughly; and whenever he found an interesting place, he made a note of it. Then he would ask me to give the details, and often to repeat them. If I told him the story by reading it from a book, he would say, “There is no use of your reading it from the book. I prefer your own words and phrases — all from your own thought. Otherwise it won’t do.” Therefore I had to assimilate the story before telling it. That made me dream. He would become so eager when I reached an interesting point of a story! His facial expression would change and his eyes would burn intensely … .

From these dreams and memories he forged some of his most enduring tales — writings that not only resurrected lost folklore in an era of Meiji modernization, but also created fully-fleshed stories out of mere fragments. Among his most famous, “The Story of Mimi-Nashi-Hōïchi,” tells of the blind musician Hōïchi, approached one night by a stranger who hires him to perform for his lord. Entranced by his music, they instruct him to return each night for a full week. One night, friends discover Hōïchi, alone in a graveyard, singing to the oni-bi, or “ghost-fires,” pale remnants of demons. Realizing he is bewitched, they drag him against his will to a priest who explains that, by once obeying the commands of the dead, he is beholden to them; if he obeys them again, they will tear him to pieces. The priest and his acolyte cover his body with prayers to render him invisible to the demons, but the acolyte forgets Hōïchi’s ears, and when the oni-bi return that night, they can find only Hōïchi’s ears, which they tear from his body, giving him the name Mimi-Nashi-Hōïchi, “Hōïchi the Earless.”

The story of Hōïchi the Earless is one of four tales that director Masaki Kobayashi chose for his 1965 horror anthology film, Kwaidan — a film based not on the original Yūrei stories but Hearn’s retellings. It is a testament to the power of Hearn’s writings that this foreign-born writer has earned a place in the canon of Japanese literature — his work is still celebrated in Japan to this day.

This celebration of Hearn is not uncomplicated: scholar Rie Kido Askew has traced the various iterations of Hearn’s reception in Japanese culture over the past 100 years and suggests that he is often held up as a critique against Japan’s rapid modernization. As a character in Uchida Yasuo’s 1991 book Kaiden no Michi argues, Hearn, “though a foreigner, seems to have understood the proto-scenery of Japan and the subtle parts of the Japanese spiritual structure better than the Japanese. We can indeed learn from Yakumo’s works about the ‘heart’ of the Japanese that [modern] Japanese have forgotten.” Askew argues that Hearn is often evoked “as a symbol to restore the ‘true’ Japan — the simple and innocent pre-modern Japan which … was lost in the process of modernization.” But regardless, it remains the case that for many native readers, when they imagine the ghosts of their culture, it is Hearn’s versions that come to mind.

*

Like Hōïchi, Hearn himself often worked like an artist bewitched. His effortless style and his command of a storyteller’s art — the assuredness of his prose, the careful construction of suspense and mood — all stand at odds to the unsettled nature of many of these stories. A good many horror stories are, at their roots, simple morality tales. The promiscuous, drunk teenagers get serial murdered; the greedy rich man comes to a bad, ironic end. Such stories can be horrific, but they are ultimately reassuring — they present a rigid moral order, even if maintained in gruesome ways. The truly terrifying tales are the ones that follow a logic beyond our grasp, and Hearn’s best ghost stories lie in this strange abyss — the same abyss that we are perpetually and delicately suspended above.

Take “The Sympathy of Benten”: a young poet named Baishū is visiting a shrine of the goddess Benten when a sudden gust of wind blows a long strip of paper towards him, on which a poem about love has been written. Baishū is entranced by the calligraphy on the scroll, imagining the young, beautiful woman who must have written it, and prays to Benten that he might be allowed to meet this writer. His prayer is answered, and, through the intercession of the Old-Man-Under-the Moon, the god of marriage, a young woman appears — the writer of the poem — and they are soon married.

Baishū’s new wife does not talk about her past or her family, and he does not ask, afraid of angering the gods who bequeathed him this gift. “But,” Hearn continues, “neither the Old-Man-Under-the Moon nor any one else came — as he had feared — to take her away. Nobody even made inquiries about her. And the neighbors, for some undiscoverable reason, acted as if totally unaware of her presence.”

Some time later, Baishū is walking through a remote quarter of the city when he is summoned by a stranger, who confesses that he is acting under “an inspiration from the Goddess Benten.” This man has a young daughter who is a talented calligrapher, for whom he has sought a husband; Benten had come to him in a dream the night before predicting the arrival of Baishū, who is to be her husband. The man’s daughter, of course, is identical to the woman Baishū had already married: “She to whom he had been introduced by the Old-Man-Under-the-Moon, was only the soul of the beloved. She to whom he was now wedded, in her father’s house, was the body. Benten had wrought this miracle for the sake of her worshippers.”

This is the end of the tale, but not of Hearn’s telling, as he goes on: “The ending is rather unsatisfactory. One would like to know something about the mental experiences of the real maiden during the married life of her phantom. One would also like to know what became of the phantom, — whether it continued to lead an independent existence; whether it waited patiently for the return of its husband; whether it paid a visit to the real bride. And the book says nothing about these things.” He then quotes a Japanese friend who suggests that something of the girl’s spirit had flowed into the writing, and thus that the “spirit-bride was really formed out of the tanazaku.” Which explains some things, but not others, and doesn’t really get at Hearn’s original questions. The tale is told exclusively from the perspective of the Baishū, so it doesn’t concern itself with the real woman during the phantom maiden’s appearance, or the phantom’s life after the real woman appears. But Hearn is right: the echoes of these other lives ricochet into the main story, leaving unanswered questions.

Stranger still is “The Corpse-Rider,” which first appeared in Hearn’s idiosyncratic collection, Shadowings. “The body was cold as ice,” Hearn begins; “the heart had long ceased to beat: yet there were no other signs of death. Nobody even spoke of burying the woman.” Having died in anger, the townspeople fear that the dying wish of such a person can lead the corpse to “burst asunder any tomb and rift the heaviest graveyard stone.” So her body is left there, as the people wait for the man she was waiting for: the man who divorced her.

The hapless ex-husband soon returns home, and discovers the situation, terrified. “If I can find no help before dark,” he thinks to himself, “she will tear me to pieces.” So he seeks out the help of a Inyōshi, a holy man, who agrees to help him. He leads the ex-husband to the corpse, which is lying face down, undisturbed, and instructs the man to get on the back of the dead woman’s body, like a horse, taking up her long black hair in his hands like a bridle. “You must stay like that till morning,” the inyōshi instructs the man. “You will have reason to be afraid in the night — plenty of reason. But whatever may happen, never let go of her hair. If you let go, — even for one second, — she will tear you into pieces!”

He does as instructed, and the inyōshi leans forward and whispers some magic into the ear of the dead woman, and then tells the man that — for everyone’s safety — he has to depart, leaving the man astride the corpse of his ex-wife. For hours he sit upon the corpse of his dead wife, as the night turns black and strange around him. Then, without warning, the body springs to life, rising up as if to cast him off, the dead woman crying out, “Oh, how heavy it is! Yet I shall bring that fellow here now!” Reanimated, the she leads him on a horrifying night journey:

Then tall she rose, and leaped to the doors, and flung them open, and rushed into the night, — always bearing the weight of the man. But he, shutting his eyes, kept his hands twisted in her long hair, — tightly, tightly, — though fearing with such a fear that he could not even moan. How far she went, he never knew. He saw nothing: he heard only the sound of her naked feet in the dark, — picha-picha, picha-picha, — and the hiss of her breathing as she ran.

At last she turned, and ran back into the house, and lay down upon the floor exactly as at first. Under the man she panted and moaned till the cocks began to crow. Thereafter she lay still.

When the inyōshi returns at sunrise, he’s surprised that the man has lasted the night, and that he never let go of her hair. “But the man, with chattering teeth, sat upon her until the inyōshi came at sunrise. Pleased, he tells him, “That is well … Now you can stand up … You must have passed a fearful night; but nothing else could have saved you. Hereafter you may feel secure from her vengeance.”

So that, more or less, is the end of the story. But Hearn adds a small endnote in which he confesses that he does not find the conclusion of this story to be “morally satisfying.” He complains: “It is not recorded that the corpse-rider became insane, or that his hair turned white: we are told only that ‘he worshipped the inyōshi with tears of gratitude.’”

Hearn’s feeling of dissatisfaction with these tales runs alongside his clear love of the tales himself, and the gusto with which he throws himself into the act of storytelling. He has no answers, only tales. He speaks with a storyteller’s authority, plying all his trade from years of being a journalist, novelist, translator, and folklorist. But what gives Hearn’s yūrei their strange aura, their sense of discomfort is his own uncertainty about the stories he’s telling. In Hearn’s tales, the eerie landscape is the voice of the storyteller itself — it moves under its own power, guided by some unknown and unseen motivation.

Hearn, like his corpse rider, can do more than hold on for dear life.

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Colin Dickey is the author of Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places, along with two other books of nonfiction. He is currently writing a book on conspiracy theories and other delusions, The Unidentified, forthcoming in 2020.

Editor: Dana Snitzky

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Colin Dickey | Longreads | August 2019 | 21 minutes (5,681 words)

The question of “craft” is central to the new anthology Shapes of Native Nonfiction: Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers, edited by Elissa Washuta and Theresa Warburton. It’s there in the title itself, with its emphasis on shapes and shaping, but beyond that, throughout the anthology there is a recurrent interest in the question of craft and crafting, both in the sense of the writers’ craft and in the relationship between writing and other kinds of crafts.

In early June I reached out to Washuta and Warburton about doing an interview with them about the book. In the conversation that follows, we talked about the form and style of the twenty-seven essays that make up the book, as well as how European and non-Native attitudes towards literature and craft can hamstring an understanding of Native storytelling and writing.

Among other things, we discussed the idea of the basket as a figure for the essay — the book is organized around four sections, each of which takes its name from a term related to basket weaving: “technique” (for craft essays), “coiling” (for essays that “appear seamless”), “plaiting” (for “fragmented essays with a single source”), and, finally, “twining” (for essays that “bring together material from different sources”).

But in Shapes of Native Nonfiction, the basket is not only a metaphor; as Warburton notes below, is also often intimately related to storytelling and genealogy. Throughout our conversation, we returned again and again to a distinction between metaphor and literal meaning. It’s a distinction that in non-Native writing informs a long-standing and durable binary, but is for many of the writers here, a binary that’s not only unproductive but actively reductive.

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This is only one of the various binaries that these essays break down or reconfigure. The twenty-two writers featured in Shapes of Native Nonfiction present a wide range of approaches, each one both sui generis and part of a long, interwoven tradition. In what follows, Washuta and Warburton discuss how the book came to be, how they arranged it, and how the various pieces in the anthology connect with one another.

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Colin Dickey: Starting with the title: that word “shapes” seems to be doing a lot of important work here — this isn’t simply an anthology of creative nonfiction by Native writers, so much as it is an anthology focusing on the different kinds of shapes that such writing might take. Can you talk about how the idea for the book came about, and how you wanted to differentiate it from a more “traditional” (for lack of a better term) anthology of nonfiction?

Elissa Washuta: I found my way into nonfiction writing through form. I read a good amount of fairly conventionally structured nonfiction before I began writing it, but it never occurred to me that I might write nonfiction, because I didn’t think I had any interesting facts to communicate. In graduate school, I read formally innovative essays, and focusing on the shape of the essay and the style of the sentences appealed to me. My memory-stuff became, in a way, just batting to give shape to the essay. This was in 2007. I was looking for essay models to admire. Of course, I looked for nonfiction by Native writers, but the anthologies were few and far between, and they were lacking in the formally inventive work I was reading from Native poets and fiction writers.

Around the time I began teaching creative nonfiction, I read an article by Tim Bascom, “Picturing the Personal Essay: A Visual Guide,” in which he illustrates a few narrative structural approaches with little diagrams. My MFA students at the Institute of American Indian Arts really took to that essay, and I began thinking and speaking in material comparisons — to furniture, to buildings, to baskets. I had visited the master basket weaver Ed Carriere at his home at Suquamish, and the more I looked at baskets, the more I thought about experimental essay structures.

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The idea for this collection came to me before my first book, my first grand formal experiment, was published in 2014. I wanted someone to create an anthology of formally innovative nonfiction by Native writers, and it became clear that I couldn’t just wish for it, I had to make it. Craft, experimentation, and innovation were always central to the idea of the anthology for me. I didn’t care what the essays would be “about” in the traditional sense — they would be about their shapes. This collection began with consideration of form, just as my essays so often do.

Theresa Warburton: For me, this anthology came out of two related needs that I saw as a person who teaches Native and Indigenous literatures: first, the need for a collection of contemporary nonfiction writing by Native authors and, second, the need for a framework for Native nonfiction that emphasized the practice of craft in writing. In the first case, there’s been amazing work by folks like Robert Warrior and Lisa Brooks that demonstrate how foundational nonfiction writing is to Native literatures, how far-reaching it is, and how intimately related it has been to political, social, and economic practices as well. A lot of that work emphasizes early writing, so texts and documents and objects from the 17th to early 20th centuries. So, we wanted to create something that underscores the continuity of nonfiction writing by Native authors into the present moment. In this, I think there’s also a pretty obvious commitment to resisting the assumption that Native people (writers included!) only exist in the past.

In the second case, it seemed important to have a text that was both a road map and the road, in a way. We didn’t want these essays to be read in a way that mined them for authenticity, for the consumption of stories of pain, or for insight into “Native culture” (big quotes around that one). Previous collections have really been interested in some of these things, especially the assumption of autobiography as a metonym for all nonfiction and the subsequent use of nonfiction as an supplementary tool to gain more insight into fiction. We both needed, for a bunch of different reasons, a collection that did more than that.

The word “text” comes from the same root as “textile,” implying that all texts are, in a sense, “woven.” You also use the metaphor of weaving to talk about the essays in this anthology, but instead of textiles, you talk about it in terms of a basket. “As a both utilitarian and creative form that is connected to community and the individual,” you write in your introduction, “we see the basket not as a metaphor for this collection but rather as a structure (or form) through which to understand how the pieces included here come together in this space.” Can you talk more about how the image of the basket informed the collection?

Washuta: What first came to mind when I read this question was the tule mat, which is used on the Columbia River plateau and elsewhere. Tule reeds are corded together to make a flat mat. And then this question later came to mind when I was in the Waikato Museum last week in Aotearoa/New Zealand, looking at a long woven mat placed at the bottom of a massive waka (canoe). Now I’m thinking about cedar hats, cedar bark capes, and other woven clothing, made using similar techniques to the weaving of baskets. In our introduction to the anthology, we quoted Caroline Levine’s book Forms, in which she argues that organizing principles are portable, and usable in different contexts. Weaving techniques can be used for vessels, for clothing, for the home; the concept of weaving is portable. We have placed the essay, a story-carrying vessel, alongside these other kinds of vessels (clothing holding the body, baskets holding things a person needs), and in invoking the language of weaving, we’re trying to show the care these writers have taken to craft the vessels that hold their stories. I don’t really think of textile as flat — I mean, that’s how it begins, but when you drape it over a shoulder or cut and stitch it into, say, the form of a hat, it takes a different shape.

Warburton: I would say that I don’t really think of textiles as flat, either literally or figuratively. Textiles are immensely three-dimensional, I think, they can cover, sure, but they can also wrap, drape, fold. So, I don’t see as strong a distinction between textiles and baskets. Both are often woven.

Once we decided to organize the book this way, I think we both started to see its implications and relations everywhere. I saw some amazing baskets made by Indigenous peoples throughout the Pacific on a visit to the Auckland War Memorial Museum while I was also in Aotearoa/New Zealand. I sent Elissa a picture of them, like I always do now when I see baskets. It always makes me think, though, of how these baskets are positioned within archives and displays like that. It really serves to sever their craft from that of literature, even though lots of the craft of baskets across a variety of communities is related to storytelling and genealogy. So, in that sense, we actually specifically didn’t want to invoke weaving as a metaphor at all, but as a material practice that connects a variety of forms of storytelling. The basket isn’t a metaphor for the kind of practices we’re trying to emphasize with the collection — the basket is an example of it. The craft involved in each essay as well the craft we practiced in weaving this collection together is in relation to the practices involved in conceptualizing, producing, using, and reading baskets. So, we really wanted to interrogate the assumed division between literature and material objects in the study of Native literatures.

Much of creative nonfiction these days broadly falls into two categories — journalism and personal essay. Yet, you caution that both of these forms can be problematic when applied to Native stories, in that they, at their worst, can perpetuate “an ethnographic approach to Native literatures, which assumes a methodological framework grounded in a desire for cultural authenticity that can easily be translated to and for a non-Native reader.”

Warburton: I think a more general description of our argument is that the typical genre divisions or categorizations simply don’t work for understanding the histories or practices of Native literatures. This isn’t because they are fundamentally different in an essentializing way (that is, that Native people just inherently write differently) but rather because those forms of categorization and descriptions of genre are bound up in particular ways of thinking about power, place, history, and narrative that attempt to universalize non-Native formulations of how to relate to the land and to each other. What we’re trying to do is emphasize, instead, the fact that the authors practice craft not only to tell a story but also to evidence the shape of the multiple worlds in which that story interacts.

The alternative, and the focus of much of this anthology, is what non-Native writers like John D’Agata and Deborah Tall have called the lyric essay, which eschews traditional forms of creative nonfiction. Is it fair to say that here, the use of the lyric essay form is distinctly political?

Washuta: I think the lyric essay is always political, and not just in the way that I think all art is political, although I do think that. My inclination is to unpack the word “political” here, and I just went down a Google rabbit hole to try to find a precise and fitting definition, but, interestingly, I could only find language around governance. Is the lyric essay related to institutional power structures? Yes. The first personal essay I wrote was in a form that I now know would be called “lyric essay,” with short, braided fragments of memory and research. I wouldn’t have called it a lyric essay because I had never heard that term and, as far as I recall, had never read anything that would be called “lyric essay.”

Now, though, with my full participation, my work has been placed in that context, even though it’s not the lineage that I followed into the essay as my entry point. For literary/academic career purposes, it’s been beneficial to me to not only adopt the label as a way of identifying similar work, but also to situate my work within the power structure that is the lyric essay, a “serious” subgenre. I’m rethinking that, though, because, while I did read Manguso and D’Agata at the beginning of my academic instruction in nonfiction, and they definitely influenced me profoundly, work labeled as lyric essay was not my way into starting the work that would eventually be given the label of lyric essay. I don’t know whether most of the writers of the essays in the collection would describe themselves as lyric essayists, or these works as lyric essays.

In talking about what we’ve called the exquisite vessel, we did need to identify the lyric essay, which is absolutely a form that negotiates with power structures in some ways. A lyric essay (like all writing, but in its own way) is formed through decision-making about what to put in and leave out; about silence and text; appropriation and assimilation; a sort of kinship between ideas, established where there perhaps was none. But many of the writers most successful in publishing lyric essays for years were white academics. Whiteness gets to act apolitical, to pretend to be the center of everything, and academia does, too. In saying the name of the lyric essay and re-conceiving of the concept from within the epistemologies of peoples whose existence is politicized, we’re showing ways in which the form can reinforce or break power structures.

Warburton: Yes. Elissa said it perfectly. The only thing I want to do here is to really highlight this important point she’s making and to make sure that people hear it: investments in whiteness, settlement, anti-blackness, misogyny, are always political. Decrying a rejection of those things as “political correctedness” or the centering of Native self-determination as “identity politics” is an attempt to depoliticize these structures as a way to ensure their continued existence. For instance, I’d push against the term ‘traditional creative nonfiction’ here — traditional to whom? Whose tradition is that and what structures is that tradition meant to uphold? A lot of the practices evidenced in the collection are part of very long traditions of literary production. Our use of the basket as our organizing sense of craft is an easy example here — this isn’t a diversion from “traditional” literary practices, but is rather an attempt to honor the practices in which these essays are entering into relation.

One way, its seems, that writers in the book get at that relation between form and the political is through the idea of metaphor. Anglo literary tradition depends on a fairly stable binary between literal and figurative language, yet throughout Shapes of Native Nonfiction the reader finds instances where this binary is rejected. Most singularly in the case of water; Elissa, you write of the difficulty of getting your writing students to understand the motifs of the river and fish in James Welch’s Winter in the Blood, and then add, “How can we speak in metaphor when we need the river to be seen as literal?” Do you see these writers as pushing back against the traditional ways we understand symbols in literature? What might a literature that rejects the binary of literal/figurative look like, especially written in a language like English?

Washuta: I think it’s useful to look at the OED definition of metaphor: “A figure of speech in which a word or phrase is applied to an object or action to which it is not literally applicable.” Its utility is in using what the reader knows to acquaint them with the unfamiliar, or in developing lyricism or character through the nature of the figurative language. But, yes, in some of these essays, including “Apocalypse Logic,” the figure in question is actually very much related to the concerns of the essay.

Warburton: Again, with this question the word that’s really pounding in my head is “traditional.” And, I guess, “we.” What literary practices are traditional and to whom? If this stark distinction between literal and figurative language is a definitive part of an Anglo American literary tradition, why are we inclined to read Native literatures as being in response or reaction to that? Part of what I wanted to do with this collection was push against, or maybe push past, the assumption that what Native authors are doing is always responding somehow to the contours, canons, and, concepts of American literary traditions, especially those that seem ubiquitous or are naturalized as universal in some way. This is not to say that the work can’t be, in some way, in relation to this canon and its practices — but I always want to be careful about how we understand the terms of engagement. To me, a more powerful and compelling reading might ask: how does the stark division between literal and figurative language in the American literary tradition speak to the concomitant establishment of other binaries that have been essential to the structure of settlement? For instance, how might they be related to the constant reinscription of the gender binary and the normative nuclear family as constitutive of Americanness and of American letters — and, thus of settlement? And how might the refusal to invoke literal and figurative language as a binary (if even a productive one) show us methods of understanding the purposes of storytelling within a framework that centers Native cosmologies and traditions rather than Anglo or American ones? I guess, in more basic terms: how might we understand that distinction in the Anglo American literary tradition as arising from a need to create a structure of power contra Native traditions, which already existed in this place?

Two of the pieces that stood out to me in this regard were Tiffany Midge’s “Part One: Redeeming the English Language (Acquisition) Series” and Alicia Elliott’s “A Mind Spread Out on the Ground,” two essays that focus on learning, unlearning, and re-learning language as a means to discuss historical and personal trauma. Were these kinds of questions forefront in your mind when you put this anthology together? What went into the collection and arrangement of these particular essays?

Washuta: As far as I can recall, I wasn’t really thinking about that, and I don’t remember us having conversations about it. The way we conceive of the essay in this book, as an exquisite vessel whose shape is suited to what it’s meant to hold, is really how I conceive of the essay generally, and how an essay I love comes to mind for me when I recall it: I think about the way Tiffany’s essay enters the form of a student language learning book of some kind, and makes her own space there, which she fills with researched, remembered, and reconstructed material. When I think of Alicia’s essay, I think of the way space and breakage allow for pivots from tense moments, jumps from melancholic troughs into research, and propulsive launchings from one realization to another. For me, essays are about — concerned with — structure as much as subject. I don’t think my brain would have allowed me to organize a book thematically.

Warburton: Yeah, looking back at my notes from the proposal stage, I agree that we weren’t primarily concerned with possible themes or subjects that we wanted to be included. Though, I will say that I think we did talk a bit about not wanting to play into the desire for trauma porn that is so prevalent in mainstream engagement with Native literature. I’m always talking to Elissa about this essay by Audra Simpson called “The State is a Man” that looks at both mainstream and governmental treatment of Attawapiskat elder Theresa Spence’s hunger strike in 2012 and 2013 and Inuk student Loretta Saunders’ murder in 2014 to talk about how settler governance requires Native women’s bodies to be suffering, to be dead, to be disappeared in order to recognize them as indigenous since this is the only possible recognition that does not put claims to settler sovereignty into crisis.

We want to put settler sovereignty into crisis. This doesn’t mean that we rejected essays that dealt with trauma or violence (obviously, since there are many in the collection), but we also were careful with our framing. We don’t want any voyeuristic indulgence in suffering, we didn’t want the authors to have to perform any of that for a wide readership in order to garner praise, attention, and recognition. These essays might contain these things but they are not only about that.

So, I think that at the beginning what we were really concerned with as editors framing the book in a way that allowed these essays to be what the authors wanted them to be. To write an introduction that guided the reader in paying attention to the craft of the essays, how they were shaped, and how they moved. To be clear that entering into it with a desire to parse out authenticity or find something that could fuel a pitiable lament isn’t doing justice to the work. The question of how we could do that was at the forefront of our discussions, so what went into it from the outset was really figuring out how to do this work responsibly — both how to take responsibility ourselves for laying out an interpretive framework and how to provide readers with what they needed to engage with the essays responsibly.

All of this emphasis on the lyric essay and non-traditional forms of creative nonfiction notwithstanding, the anthology as a whole does seem — broadly speaking — to move from essays that employ a more traditional narrative mode to more experimental essays. Each section is named for a different term related to basket weaving, and we move from coiling, “for essays that appear seamless,” to plaiting and twining, for essays with more explicitly fragmented approaches. Can you talk about how the sections relate to one another, and the arc of the reader as she moves through the book as a whole?

Washuta: When we were determining what kinds of essays were going to be right for the book and what kinds weren’t, we began to realize that what we were looking for didn’t always match up with what people generally seemed to recognize as the lyric essay, but to us, the wovenness of the essays made their form-consciousness apparent to us, even when the essays didn’t announce themselves formally the way lyric and experimental essays do. Notions of what’s experimental shift, but the work of conscious shaping is enduring. We were both looking at and thinking about different styles of basket weaving, and I remember that while my earlier thinking about essays as vessels had me focused on the baskets themselves and what they were used for, after we began working together on the book and really thinking about materiality, we began looking at technique and thinking about the way the weaver’s hands work with the materials they combine. I thought about Ed Carriere in his living room, splitting a cedar root, showing us warp and weft, and pointing out the intricacies of different approaches to construction. The essays looked like baskets: they were made of materials — memories, strands of research, cultural criticism — deliberately twined, plaited, or coiled, depending on what the essay was meant to do and how it was meant to look.

I don’t really remember much about the ordering process — I believe after we decided on the section titles, I printed out all the essays, put them on my desk at work, and put them in order. It was a largely intuitive process that I can’t explain. It wasn’t haphazard or without intention; it was felt. I’m thinking now of my former colleague (and great influence) Dian Million’s 2009 article “Felt Theory: An Indigenous Feminist Approach to Affect and History,” in which she writes about First Nations women’s first-person narratives and their refusal to be limited to colonial notions of disembodied objectivity: “Indigenous women participated in creating new language for communities to address the real multilayered facets of their histories and concerns by insisting on the inclusion of our lived experience, rich with emotional knowledges, of what pain and grief and hope meant or mean now in our pasts and futures.” This, I think, describes a narrative weaving.

“Pain that continuously haunts the edges of all such narratives is not rational,” she writes in reference to remembered personal histories of sexual violence. She writes about Native women creating personal narratives using “their sixth sense about the moral affective heart of capitalism and colonialism as an analysis.” Felt analysis, she writes, creates a certain complexity in the telling. History is felt; colonialism is felt; violence, of course, is felt, and that feeling is knowledge.

I developed felt theory by listening to my “inappropriate pain” (Million) that resulted from sexual violence and medical mishandling, and the stylistic and structural characterstics of my personal literary aesthetic are really manifestations of concepts within a felt theory — my particular methods of creating a felt scholarship of pain, the essay.

I bring this up because I now understand this to be not only how I write, but how I serve as an editor, a collector and arranger. By the time we began working on this book, I had written two of my own, and I had developed a felt theory that was, in limited but significant ways, transferable to collection-building, allowing me the freedom to pay attention to what I felt as a reader and trust that it was knowledge that could be used to arrange a book without logical justification. Each of these writers operates with their own felt theory. As a reader, I experience my own feelings, some of which will likely be shared by other readers. These essays made me feel sorrow, elation, peace, hope, dread, delight, and all sorts of other things. The emotional experience of the essays gave me a way of creating a sort of arc for the book based on building and releasing tension.

Warburton: The distinction that Elissa is making between haphazardness and intuition is really important. We relied a lot on intuition — both trusting each other’s and our collective intuitions. So much so that most of what we did didn’t feel haphazard but it is also didn’t feel operose either. It really felt completely intuitive, like we could immediately tell when what we were doing felt right and when something felt askew. I think a big part of that is that we came into it with clear ethical and political commitments. Having that barometer made it easy to make decisions about what was right and what wasn’t.

We listened to each other and we listened to the essays. We chose to put craft essays first not because they were more “traditional” essay forms but because doing so felt intuitively like what we should do, not only in the service of the book but in the service of our responsibilities to the relations through which this book came about. Ernestine Hayes is an elder and the story she’s telling is about stories, so her essay needed to be first. As she and other master storytellers have pointed out, stories give you the tools to understand the story. Her essay is a beautiful example. The collection works on that scale — we give you craft essays first because those are the stories that give you the tools to read the book. There was no other choice, that was the right way for it to be. And having Alicia’s essay be the final word wasn’t really a choice either; we knew it had to be that way, especially given the final line “Things that were stolen once can be stolen back.” That was how the book ended, it just was.

I think the path through the book is more spiral than an arc, which is indicated not just through the invocation of the basket but through the image on the cover as well. In this sense, we want readers to see the connections between essays in each section and how they are shaped, but also how they call back and forward to other essays in the collection in order to create a strong whole. In some ways, I think we were also trying to reimagine the charge of “utilitarian” as a concept that defined artistry like basket weaving or other forms that are considered “folk art.” Each of the sections is, in a way, arranged in order to emphasize something utilitarian — a particular tool that serves a practical purpose in the creation of the essay. But this doesn’t mean it isn’t a form of artistry or that there are no aesthetic dimensions. In organizing the essays the way we did, I think we really wanted to dispel the idea that something’s utility demeans its artistry.

Lastly, I wonder if you can comment on how this book relates to the time and place in which it’s appearing — this land has been host to an endless series of traumas, it seems, but in our current moment those traumas are resurfacing in acute ways, including the reactionary nostalgia for a genocidal Andrew Jackson, David McCullough’s deeply problematic new history of Anglo explorers, and a general culture of weaponized misogyny and racism. Where do you hope Shapes of Native Nonfiction enters this conversation? As tactics for resistance? Historical perspective? Solace in a time of trouble? All or none of the above?

Warburton: I wonder if it’s actually a resurfacing though — I feel like that shit has always been right on top. Yeah, McCullough’s ridiculously laudatory eulogy for the character of settlers is cringeworthy, but part of the reason it feels that way is because that’s actually the entire narrative of the United States so his need to defend it feels absolutely absurd. And he’s been doing it for decades, so it’s not surprising either. Has there been a time in the past where white people actively collectively hated Andrew Jackson? I don’t think that the nostalgia is new or reemerging. It’s been here. What we’re seeing is the intended outcome of the structure of settlement, not its bastardization. I’m not sure when misogyny or racism are ever non-weaponized. Again, we had very clear political and ethical commitments from the beginning. So, it was important to us, then, to make clear that Native nonfiction has been an important, unbroken part of the history of Native literatures for centuries and that, following Robert Warrior, if we take this understanding of Native nonfiction, the history of Native literatures extends way further back than people often assume. This aligns with our commitment to make clear that this is Native land, that Native land should be returned to Native people, and that that relationship to land has existed since time immemorial

In lifting up this genealogy, though, I also don’t want to downplay the fact that, yeah, totally — something is happening. Native authors are getting recognized, awarded, and written about in ways that are really exciting and, of course, long overdue. I think it would give mainstream media and readers too much credit to say it’s because they are finally paying attention, though. Personally, I view this as the result of the work that Native authors and artists have been doing to cultivate communities so that they can do the work on their own terms, rather than those set by structures and institutions like schools, publishers, MFA programs, prestigious grants, and other funders. I hope that one thing this collection does is evidence those communities, to show the depth and breadth of the work that’s being done rather than tokenizing or minoritizing Native authors. I hope that Shapes enters the conversation by showing that Native writers are masters of their craft, that the innovations and practices they engage are pushing the field in ways that it hasn’t been pushed before and that this has implications for all of us. More than solace, I hope that the reader feels radiance — I hope it feels like sunlight on their face, eyes closed, face up, smiling in the heat.

Washuta: When My Body Is a Book of Rules came out in 2014, I was obsessively checking its Amazon rankings in the categories it had been wedged into (because so much of the conversation around the “success” of a book has to do with visible suggestions of sales/popularity), and I always saw that it was included in the “Native American & Aboriginal Biographies” along with books like Empire of the Summer Moon, The Heart of Everything That Is, and Crazy Horse and Custer. Nonfiction books by Native writers have long had to compete with white men’s popular histories, and we’ve been set up to enter a literary marketplace they dominate.

I agree with Theresa, though: something is happening, with attention and access. It is overdue: many of us have been pulling up to gates that would only open to a certain kind of presentation of Indigeneity, if at all, and while the mainstream of the literary world has been looking away, we’ve kept up our excellence. I’m thinking about the word “resistance,” which means different things to different people. I think #TheResistance, with its short memory and failures in truly understanding pre-2017 U.S. oppression, could benefit from meaningful engagement with these essays, not just because genocide (alongside slavery) was foundational to the formation of the U.S. and non-Native attention to this is past due, but because the formal methods of engagement (especially with narrative time) can be instructive. Not now more than ever but now, as ever. I hold these essays close as strands of that forever.

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Colin Dickey is the author of Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places, along with two other books of nonfiction. He is currently writing a book on conspiracy theories and other delusions, The Unidentified, forthcoming in 2020.

Editor: Dana Snitzky

Colin Dickey | Longreads | June 2019 | 13 minutes (3,573 words)

I remember my first encounter with the work of Félix González-Torres, even though most of the details are fuzzy. I don’t remember which museum we were at, nor which piece, exactly, it was. I don’t remember the year, though it was sometimes in the early 2000s. Sometimes the way memory works is through a very tight precision that exists in a sea of imprecision.

It was one of his many takeaway pieces, one of the stacks of paper — a heavy stack of large, poster-size paper, each printed with the same image — and the public was invited to take a sheet. I remember Nicole explaining to me how the weight of the stack of paper was the same as González-Torres’s lover, and slowly, one by one, the stack would be diminished by visitors taking sheets away one at a time. González-Torres’s lover, who had died of AIDS, as would, eventually, González-Torres himself. The stack would wither and diminish but it could be replenished by the museum’s curators. Nicole took one of the prints — I can’t remember what was on it, which image or block of text — and we moved on.

The weight is the important part — the idea of a body. Félix González-Torres made work about the physical space of a body, and how that body could change and wither by disease, or how it could be reconstituted in different ways. So many of González-Torres’s works involve subtraction. Perhaps most famously were his mountains of candy — often the exact weight of his lover Ross Laycock, or the weight of González-Torres and Laycock together — where viewers would be invited to take a piece of candy and eat it, this small thing that made up the weight of the body of González-Torres’s dead lover becoming part of the bodies of the audience.

The stacks get replenished, the candies get replenished. Unlike actual dying bodies that waste away and never come back, in González-Torres’s work there is a constant, if false, sense of renewal and regeneration. Meanwhile the thing you take away, that stays with you. I don’t remember the details, but I remember the physicality of this thing, Nicole rolling it up into a cylinder, cradling it so it wouldn’t get bent or damaged, taking it back home with us to our apartment, this object that now was with us. I remember the weight of something so small, a piece of paper, that could accumulate in a pile to equal the weight of someone. How bodies are heavy but they can waste away, a little at a time, losing weight in increments no bigger than a piece of paper. I remember us carrying home that piece of paper, and I remember thinking about everyone else throughout the city carrying their own prints from that same stack, how we were carrying this ideal weight of Ross Laycock through the city as we went about our lives.

In the wake of death, the beloved becomes the only addressee, the only public.

Today, you can buy prints from González-Torres’s takeaway pieces on eBay: things that people once picked up for free are now listed for $80, $250, $8,000, even $12,000. Because anything offered in a spirit of generosity or in a spirit of grief will always be eventually converted into capital. That print that Nicole picked up out of a pile almost two decades ago might now, I realize, be “worth something,” with all the contradictory implications of that phrase.

At some point, though, Nicole got rid of the print, because we never got around to hanging it on the wall, or maybe we just didn’t have space. Every so often you have to go through your clutter and throw out the stuff that doesn’t matter, stuff you don’t have space for anymore. You can always get another print at another museum exhibit, after all. Or maybe Nicole didn’t throw it out, maybe it’s still rolled up in cylinder somewhere, locked away in storage, as good as forgotten. Who’s to say? Where are all these pieces of our past, bits of shiny and beautiful and temporary and fragile things, where are they now, these dead, inert, lifeless things that are also the fragments of the loved ones we’ve lost?

*

I am thinking about all this now, again, in the wake of reading T Fleischmann’s book, Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through: An Essay. It is a memoir of sorts, but it is also an engagement with González-Torres’s work, which emerges as a vein that runs through the body of the book. It exists in a continuum of books like Bruce Boone’s Century of Clouds, or Robert Glück’s Margery Kempe, books that navigate using a constellation of objects of desire or longing, a constellation that they keep returning to from different points of access. Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through follows, vaguely, two relationships, and — just as Glück uses Margery Kempe’s religious devotion as a lens for his own desire and experience — Fleischmann’s memoir-ish passages are counterpointed by lyric passages about González-Torres, whose work acts like a refrain, an anchor, a motif, and a point of departure.

That being said, Fleischmann recently told Mattilda Sycamore in Bomb, “If you’re reading my book to learn about Gonzalez-Torres, for example, you’ll probably be disappointed. I want to engage with his work, and a number of other topics, without necessarily suggesting that I have something definitive to say about them, pushing against some forms of knowledge.” So that’s maybe important to say up front, that this not a book of scholarship, or a book with an argument per se. As its title indicates, Fleischmann’s book is about bodies moving through time — how they crash into each other, how they fuck, how they move apart, how they lie still next to each other, sleeping.

The opening image is undeniable: Fleischmann on a bus from Buffalo, New York, checking the dating app Scruff, “where the hills and plateaus offer just blips of men. Most of them are stationary, so the bus’s crawl puts them at steadily increasing or decreasing proximities, of two hundred miles and then one hundred and eight, of one hundred and eighty and then one hundred and sixty, of eighty and then ninety. One guy seems to travel a similar path, a similar speed, either following me or preceding me, thirty-one miles away, thirty, thirty-one.” It is an image that defines the movement of the book, the way bodies get close, then far apart, then disappear, to be replaced by other bodies that likewise come and go. One thinks of E. M. Forster’s “Only connect!” There can be no you, no me, not given the impermanence of our bodies. The only thing immortal is connection itself.

Early on, Fleischmann offers an aesthetic manifesto of sorts for the work to come, writing “I’ve been getting bored of metaphors anyway. I’ve decided that I don’t like them because one thing is never another thing, and it is a lie to say something is anything but itself; it’s ontologically and physically impossible in fact, not even apple and apple can be each other.” This rejection of figurative language runs through the entire book, creating a language that’s pure, precise, and stubbornly insistent. Things exist as they are, rather than being over-dressed by ersatz artistry. Which is not to say that their sentences are not striking in their poetry: “At the orgy I touch my hair, I go and pee, I feel a nipple hard against my own. My inclination is to say something about a door here, a metaphor of a door, but instead I’ll say that when I lick Jackson’s thigh his sweat tastes like Jackson’s sweat.”

This prose stands in contrast to González-Torres’s work, much of which was deliberately, explicitly metaphorical: candies for bodies, lights for bodies, prints for bodies. Anything and everything except the body itself, the body of Ross Laycock, whose body is gone. Fleischmann’s working method circles González-Torres’s like a double helix, two very different means of navigating loss and longing.

*

For González-Torres, loss and longing began and ended with Ross, who was not only the subject of much of his work, but also, he explained in interviews, its audience. “I think at times my only public has been my boyfriend, Ross,” he told Robert Nickas in 1991, the year Laycock died. Four years later, he reiterated this to another interviewer, Ross Bleckner, who asked, “So are you in love now?” González-Torres responded, “I never stopped loving Ross. Just because he’s dead doesn’t mean I stopped loving him.” When Bleckner suggested that “life moves on, doesn’t it, Felix?,” González-Torres asked him what he meant. “It means that you get up today and you try to deal with the things that are on your mind.” To which González-Torres responded, finally, “That’s not life, that’s routine.”

To insist on the universality of grief, after all, is to insist it has no politics.

On its face, this reaction seems natural enough. In the wake of death, the beloved becomes the only addressee, the only public. All that matters is the person you can’t reach, the person who can’t respond. You who are reading this, you who have also lost someone, you, too, are thinking only of that person you lost, and as long as you are under the siren spell of grief, that is the only person you’ll ever speak to.

It’s why every culture has its own prohibitions to keep the dead from coming back, to keep ghosts at bay, to keep revenants in the ground. Rest in Peace is not just a wish for the dearly departed, it’s also a command: Please don’t come back. Behind this superstition is a desperate desire to be allowed to move on, to be allowed to finally let go.

But Félix González-Torres didn’t let go. He never let go. He followed Ross.

The utterly insular, hermetic nature of González-Torres’s work makes it both urgent and disorienting, like happening upon a stranger sobbing and lost in their own grief. As Fleischmann writes,

The spare nature of Gonzalez-Torres’s art is not just an opportunity to face the power of our own imaginations,
to extrapolate what we will from the taste of a candy,
but also an occasion to honor that part of the artist’s life that
I’ll never know.
He makes something of his desires, but that does not grant us
any right to those desires,
only to the specific thing he has shared with us.
You can’t touch the dancer.
Why did you think you could?
Who told you that you have that right?
Just love people for who they are, and for all the things they’ve
chosen to keep away from you.

González-Torres’s work, like grief, is that which is insistently public at the same time that it’s intensely private. It invites association, empathy, connection, while violently refusing all these things at once. Yes, you too have lost someone, but how you dare you compare that loss to mine?

This dual motion, of being welcomed in and pushed away, runs through much of González-Torres’s pieces. In Untitled (Perfect Lovers), a pair of identical battery-operated wall clocks are mounted next to each other. Though they start out synchronized, inevitably one battery will run down at a different speed than the other, and the clocks will slowly fall out of sync. Eventually, one clock will die even as the other continues to tick on.

More and more I’ve come to see this piece as emblematic of the way grief works: there are two clocks, the one which is the time of the regular world, and the one that is the time of your grief, and they are not in sync, and even as one slows down, the other keeps on, mechanically, unstoppable. Even as you want to bring everything to a halt, this other clock does not stop.

So I identify with González-Torres’s clocks. I feel a kinship. But this is dangerous, because this art is not only about grief, nor it is not about just anyone’s grief. When Ross Laycock died in 1991, he was one of some 130,000 Americans who had died from AIDS, many of whose deaths might have prevented if not for the criminal negligence of the government. It’s dangerous to denude González-Torres’s work of its context: the AIDS epidemic and the deaths not just of anyone, but of gay and queer and trans people in particular. One can be deep in mourning and still understand that González-Torres’s depictions of death are not for you. To insist on the universality of grief, after all, is to insist it has no politics.

Death is at once an intensely personal, private thing that belongs only to the dying and those that love them and a public event. The deaths of the people in Fleischmann’s life, “more and more every year, always,” are, they write, “not singular, but the toll of capitalism and hate, which accrues.” Even a death of old age, of natural causes, one that does not involve massive health insurance bills that can’t be paid, a death that does not come at the hands of racist cops, a death that doesn’t happen in an ICE detention center — these deaths, too, are political, because they only exist only for a certain subset of us. The so-called Good Death is a privileged death.

Death is the moment when our relationship to power is finalized.

González-Torres’s insistence that his work was only for Ross Laycock is a means of reclaiming the politics of Laycock’s death and González-Torres’s own work. This work is not for you, because loss is not universal, no matter how much grief may try to trick you into thinking that death is the great equalizer.

It’s a difficult lesson to heed, even for those who knew González-Torres and remain supporters of his work. In a 2010 article for Representations, Adair Rounthwaite traced the steady depoliticization of González-Torres’s art as his posthumous fame continued to grow. The focus of Rounthwaite’s essay was the Venice Bienniale of 2007, where the American Pavilion was devoted to González-Torres, a feat that came about through the work of curator Nancy Spector, who worked with González-Torres during his lifetime, and who put together the proposal for the show, Felix González-Torres: America. In her proposal, Spector de-sexed and de-queered González-Torres’s work, presenting him instead as a defender of “the integrity of our democratic system,” an artist whose works “defy simple categorization.” As Rounthwaite suggests, the State Department ultimately chose González-Torres because he was “widely recognized as a politically correct choice, whose place as an influencer of younger generations and as a politically engaged artist is already secured, but whose art is framed as totally flexible in its meaning, and whose biography is reduced to a narrative trajectory that falls reassuringly within homophobic cultural narratives about gay men and AIDS.”

The clocks of Untitled (Perfect Lovers) are also keeping time for political death, for political grief. “The AIDS epidemic is over” is a thing you hear people say; they mean that it is no longer a political concern, it is not a thing that merits discussing or mainstream activism. (“At this point,” González-Torres said in 1991, “to recall history seems impolite.”) After a while, the clock that marks the urgency of a death runs down, and the specifics of that person’s relationship to power is lost. What’s left is the other clock, which originally bore only half the meaning: a canonical artist, a figure whose death has been stripped of context, ticking on and on.

Given enough time, any ghost can be depoliticized.

*

Compare this to Fleischmann’s use of the concrete, of language devoid of metaphor, and the insistently physical nature of their descriptions. There is no misreading of figurative language or rhetorical artifice in Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through because, by and large, Fleischmann avoids such techniques. The problem with metaphor is that it’s imprecise, and it’s subject to manipulation and misuse. Many of González-Torres’s works can be made a metaphor for freedom, or self-reliance, or democracy with the right kind of blinders on. Fleischmann’s words resist the seduction of metaphor. Jackson’s sweat is not a door of any kind.

For Fleischmann, existence is political; simply being a body is a form of resistance. “The police state wants me dead to make sure their children don’t end up like me, so I guess every time I fuck and I’m happy and I do what I want I would like to call that an anti-state action. The people I love alive — yes, we weaken the state.” It is both enough by itself and also not enough: “But also every time after I have felt pleasure and played pool with a bunch of transsexuals and smoked weed and then eaten a taco and gone home, when my body is at its best, then I need to set myself to contributing to the coalition, which is already underway, which has kept me alive, the work of liberation being one of the ceaseless things.”

Jackson’s sweat is not a door of any kind.

It is this spirit of generosity that makes Fleischmann’s book so luminous — a generosity towards the queer body and its existence, a generosity towards the work of activism, a recognition both of the work that needs to be done and the work that is being done. A generosity towards language, the generosity borne of reciprocation:

When Gonzalez-Torres speaks of infecting power, he speaks of power spreading.
An individual viewing his art can be transformed, having been implicated and involved in it,
taking home a sheet of paper, tasting sugar, feeling.
A person in the world who has been affected by the pain of another is an agent of change.
A person in the world who has been affected by the joy of another is an agent of change.
A person in the world is an agent of change.

Throughout Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through, longing, absence and grief are counterpointed by moments of ecstasy and joy. In an amazing moment, Fleischmann collaborates with the artist Benjy Russell on a project, involving a mirror set on a card table in Russell’s yard: “The mirror shows sky, and beside it we set a ladder and his photography equipment.” Then, the pills: “We dump all our prescription drugs onto the reflective surface, bottle after bottle. The pills are tan, light yellow, two shades of blue, one of red, a pale pink, and a paler pink with a purple hue. When they are all mixed together they look like pills, generically, unlike when they are in the bottles and seem direct references to our survival.” In the context of their individual pill bottles, this medicine has economic value and signification, but poured into a pile, the individual pills take on a new meaning. “We are here to shape the pills into letters,” Fleischmann continues, “which takes time, and so we chat all morning about them. Thousands and thousands of dollars worth of medication, they are the most expensive material we have used to make an image.”

Chatting and moving at a slow pace, punctuated by digressions that, the two decide, “are the most important part of our process,” eventually a word emerges. “Benjy and I use maybe one hundred pills. Post-Scarcity, they spell out. The word is multihued and large…. The image shows only pills and sky, and it appears as though the word is floating above us. Post-Scarcity, it says, composed of more than one body like all bodies are.” Formed by an insanely expensive cocktail of drugs, the words, reflected against the clouds above, suggest that it might be possible to take the raw materials of this world, currently contextualized around capital and accumulation, and pour them out and re-arrange them into something more liberating. It’s a fleeting moment — the pills, after all, have to be collected and re-sorted, with Fleischmann commenting that categorization “isn’t how we acknowledge difference, but rather its enforcement, difference leveraged to keep things apart that could well be together.” But still, even fleeting, it’s one of many moments in Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through that suggests some other world, some other reality that might be possible.

In one of Gonzalez-Torres’s works, Untitled (Go-go Dancing Platform), a platform for a dancer is set up in the gallery, a small plinth ringed with lights, and once a day a dancer arrives, unannounced, wearing silver lamé shorts, to dance for five minutes to music of their own choosing, wearing headphones so only the dancer can hear the music. A private dance that is not for the audience.

After five minutes, the dancer leaves. You never know when the dancer will arrive; part of the piece is not knowing. Which means that most of the time you’re in the gallery you’re waiting, consciously or not, for the dancer to arrive. You hope to arrive at the museum in time, and you hope not have to wait too long. Without the dancer, it doesn’t feel like a full work — it’s just a platform, a space for a body that’s absent. So you stand there, waiting, in an empty room.

And then after a while you realize that this is all wrong, the way you’ve been thinking about things. The room isn’t empty. You start to realize that the piece is also about you, about how you inhabit the space — and that yours is the body you’ve been waiting for.

* * *

Colin Dickey is the author of Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places, along with two other books of nonfiction. He is currently writing a book on conspiracy theories and other delusions, The Unidentified, forthcoming in 2020.

Editor: Dana Snitzky

Colin Dickey | Longreads | March 2019 | 15 minutes (3,788 words)

A month after we bought our first house in 2009, our friend Vanessa came over for her first and only visit. She was moving with great difficulty by then, and the three steps up to our front door were treacherous. When she made it to the chair closest to the door she sat down with visible relief. Scleroderma is a perverse disease where the body manically over-produces collagen: it gets in your joints, making moving painful, and at its worst overtakes the body’s organs themselves. It makes one’s movements slow and measured, as though suffering from advanced age or arthritis — and yet, as Vanessa was fond of pointing out, it also makes one’s skin smooth and radiant. It is as though one is simultaneously aging forwards and backwards at once.

“Is that a linden tree?” she asked, looking out the window. Now having sat down again, her eyes were flashing around the room — she was still very much alert and alive, still very much a moving part of this world.

I told her I didn’t know — I’ve never been good at identifying or remembering trees. I couldn’t tell you the difference between an oak and an elm, a maple or a poplar.

“I’m pretty sure,” she said, “that it’s a linden.”

She died a few weeks later. In the months that followed, I spent a good deal of time looking out the window at the linden tree.

***

The linden’s leaves fell. They fell everywhere. In fall of course, but also in summer, in spring, in winter. They fell to make way for new leaves, and the piles gathered on the concrete of the side yard, nowhere to decay into. We’d rake them into piles or into the compost bin and then more would fall.

Only belatedly do I recognize that many of my early memories of Vanessa involve her dancing. Dancing was the first thing she lost.

As new homeowners Nicole and I were quickly learning that without almost constant attention, the trees, the plants, the weeds, all would cover over us entirely. Keeping the kind of manicured foliage I used to take for granted is an almost Herculean effort. It was our first home, and the first time we understood that the plant life contained within the lot of our house was our responsibility, for good or for ill. And we could not keep up with it — leaves fell and accumulated, branches shot out over neighbors’ property lines, the weeds and the grass in the backyard would, if not attended to, overtake the flagstone path and everything else within weeks. The plants could not be contained.

The overgrown yard usually signifies some kind of neglect, of a homeowner having given up on appearances. It’s odd that we’re trained to not see it as it really is: the bursting of life, the overflowing of living things whose vitality can’t be stopped.

Later that fall I watched Fritz Lang’s Siegfried for the first time — the first of two films he made in the ’30s that borrow from the same source material as Wagner’s Ring cycle, films that Weimar film critic Siegfried Kracauer would later take as an almost exemplary foreshadowing of the Nazi’s Nuremberg aesthetics. After slaying the dragon, the hero, Siegfried, touches its blood and discovers he can hear and understand the language of the birds of the forest, who bid him to bathe in the dragon’s blood to become invincible. As Siegfried moves to immerse himself in the dragon’s blood, a single linden leaf falls from the trees above and lands on his back, leaving one spot vulnerable — it is here, in this one spot covered by the linden leaf, he will ultimately be murdered by Hagen, his betrayer.

Do the birds not know this will happen? How can they not see the leaf fall and warn Siegfried? Do they know full well? Do they lie to Siegfried about his invulnerability, promising him immortality only so that he’ll lower his guard later, stabbed in the back?

In birdsong we are promised immortality; it is the slow decay and excess of the vegetable world that undoes this.

***

“Tilias, especially the species of western Europe, have for centuries been favorite shade and ornamental trees, particularly in Europe at the period when the formal style of gardening, under the inspiration of Le Nôtre, prevailed,” writes Charles Sprague Sargent in The Silva of North America, published in 1890; “and avenues of Lime-trees were long considered an essential feature in every park and town of central and northern Europe. The ability of the Lindens to thrive with severe pruning renewed year after year fit them for the decoration of formal gardens, and their free habit when allowed to grow naturally makes them desirable park and roadside trees.”

Perhaps it is this facet of the linden — its adaptability to human intervention, and its ability to engage and respond to human aesthetics and popular taste — that have led to humans imbuing the tree with so many different symbolic meanings. It’s not just Siegfried; linden trees have had a long history in literature and mythology, particularly in Germanic folklore — the tree, art historian Michael Baxandall reports, has long been “an object of magico-religious interest.” Lime groves were treated as holy places of pilgrimage, their seeds eaten by pregnant women, their bark applied to the body to enhance both strength and beauty.

Its role is often standing at the literal center of town and culture: ancient lindens were planted in the center of Germanic towns, dedicated to the fertility goddess Freya before later being re-consecrated to the Virgin Mary. In time they would be the center around which local politics and law revolved, where courts and executions were held. As they aged, unchanged, they became symbols of longevity, a symbol of nationalism and of old Germanic culture. This location of the linden tree, both the literal and figurative center of town, offers it seeming endless possibilities of signification. As Baxandall concludes, the lime tree also had “broadly speaking, festal associations: as Hieronymus Bock said, it was a tree to dance under.”

***

I’d gone to graduate school with Vanessa’s twin sister Chandra, but how we really all got to know each other was via the bar down the street from our apartment, which in the summer of 2006 had an inexplicable happy hour where all drinks were $2.50 from 5 to 7, so Nicole and I, and Vanessa and Chandra, and whoever else was available would meet after work and each drink four Manhattans (even with a generous tip only $15) in two hours and then make dinner together. Nicole and I were getting married and were trying to keep our wedding small but somewhat last minute invited Vanessa and Chandra because they were good people and fun to drink with and knew how to have a good time. They’d also connected us with their friend, a wedding photographer who gave us a steep discount, which is also why perhaps they’re in so many of the photos from that night. Except for maybe my mother, no one at that wedding had more fun dancing than the two of them.

The first time I understood that there might be something wrong with Vanessa was a year later at a concert at the Hollywood Bowl, where live musicians performed classics from Bollywood cinema. I can no longer remember the performers but I remember how jubilant the crowd was through the whole night. At first it was kind of a nervously contained tension, but when the band broke into A. R. Rahman’s “Chaiyya Chaiyya” the audience erupted into motion, spilling out into the aisles, as though the entire place had been afflicted with St. Vitus’s Dance. The moment was infectious, the entire crowd undulating with joy. Only afterwards, during the intermission, when I saw Vanessa visibly struggle with the Bowl’s gentle concrete steps, did I have the first inkling that the soreness she’d lately been complaining of was something far more serious. And only belatedly do I recognize that many of my early memories of Vanessa involve her dancing. Dancing was the first thing she lost.

***

Ian Bostridge notes that the linden tree — or at least its derivatives — also plays an important role in perhaps the most famous scene in all of literature, in Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, at the heart of the literature of memory and remembering. Proust’s famous involuntary memory has long been associated with the madeleine, but the cookie alone is not enough. Marcel’s memories are triggered by the madeleine dipped in tea, and while we think of it as the “madeleine scene,” the true star is the tea: “Clearly, the truth I am seeking is not in the drink, but in me,” he explains after it has first triggered the hint of memory. “The drink has awoken in me, but does not know this truth, and can do no more than repeat it indefinitely.” Bostridge explains that the tea in question is actually tilleul, an herbal tea made from the blossoms of linden trees, a word that has no clear English translation (thus translators render it sometimes as “lime-blossom tea”), and that we might include Proust’s masterpiece among those other cultural artifacts inspired by the linden tree.

But it’s not entirely clear to me whether or not that’s accurate. Proust repeatedly uses the word thé in his famous Madeleine passage, not tilleul, a kind of tisane, or herbal infusion. Only as his memories start to come into focus does the lime blossom make its appearance: “And suddenly the memory appeared. That taste was of the little piece of madeleine that on Sunday mornings at Combray…[that] my aunt Léonie would give me after dipping it in her infusion of tea or lime blossom.” What to make of that “or”? Were there two distinct beverages, tea and tilleul, sometimes one and sometimes the other? Or is Marcel suggesting that it could have been either, that he doesn’t quite remember?

By the next paragraph, we have moved from thé to tilleul: “And as soon as I had recognized the taste of the piece of madeleine dipped in lime-blossom tea that my aunt used to give me.” But then, in the final line of the passage, there is a reference only to “ma tasse de thé,” “my cup of tea.” It seems as though Proust uses these two words — thé and tilleul — as interchangeable synonyms, in the way Americans treat herbal infusions as the same as tea itself. Later, though, he will clarify: normally his aunt drank tea, but if she was “agitated,” she would ask for the herbal infusion tilleul instead. Yet his slight imprecision, and the way that one beverage gives way to another, hints at some deliberate obfuscation on his part. These questions, I suppose, are a bit trivial, and probably irrelevant — but then again, this is the most famous passage in the history of literature on the subject of memory, so perhaps a question as to what, exactly, Marcel remembers about that famous beverage is actually of great importance.

***

I learned all this about lindens only much later, some of it through research, some of it just happenstance, the way random facts and folklore tend to gather in the eaves of memory. I have no idea how much of this Vanessa might have known herself, had I asked her on that day more about linden trees. She was not an academic but moved among them, and had the same intellectual curiosity. What she knew of trees, their morphology and taxonomy, their cultural history — I never thought to ask.

As new homeowners Nicole and I were quickly learning that without almost constant attention, the trees, the plants, the weeds, all would cover over us entirely.

I began to research information about the history of the linden tree, its various appearances in literature and folklore, almost as a means of recapturing that moment with Vanessa, keeping it alive. Delving into the tree’s history, something I’d never otherwise given much thought to, became a way of remembering a friend looking out the window on a late spring day. This was not, as Proust would have it, in some kind of memoire involuntaire, but something deliberate.

This work has not been constant or all-encompassing; I have not devoted myself to understanding this tree. Rather, it’s something I take up in spare moments, between projects or when I’m otherwise idle — a few facts here, a book unearthed there. Only after I’d been working in this way for a few years did I understand that it was a way to recall that moment, something that otherwise might have easily slipped away: research as a means of actively remembering.

In fact, while I’d been keeping notes about linden trees for several years, it wasn’t until I came across the English translation of César Aira’s The Linden Tree that it finally seemed time to gather them all into one place. Aira’s slim novel opens with a description of the plaza in the Argentine town of Pringles, where there sits, among lines of linden trees, one in particular that by some quirk has grown to gargantuan size, “a monument to the singularity of our town.” Like that centuries-old Germanic tradition, there is an invocation of the linden tree as the center of town, the town’s identity. In Aira’s novel, though, it is also a story of Peron and a political landscape unique to Argentina: in the novel’s opening pages the tree is cut down, “in an irrational act of political hatred.” A boy whose family is associated with Peronistas is pursued by a band of fanatics and takes refuge atop the Monster Linden Tree; enraged, the mob below cuts the tree down. “‘The Peronist Boy’: how absurd! Children can’t be identified politically; they don’t belong to the left or the right. He wouldn’t have understood what he was representing. The symbol had infected him like a fateful virus.”

True, also, of the linden tree itself, which has come to bear all manner of symbolism implanted on it, while itself remaining ignorant to each and every last one of these uses. The tree itself has no use for magico-religious meaning, modernist films and novels, nor of the vagaries of politics, be it fascism or Peron’s populism. The tree has no relation to, nor interest in the research I’ve done, the memories that I associate with it. But then, without these human symbols, would we have so loyally planted so many linden trees in Europe and in the Americas? If the tree was not so adaptable to human needs, would it have flourished as readily as it has?

And certainly there are aspects of the linden which are not symbolic, which are instead chemical, pharmacological. In Aira’s novel there is (as there is with Proust) the tea: the narrator’s father collects the blossoms from these linden trees, using them to make the same tea that helped trigger Proust’s memories.

But unlike for Proust, in Aira’s novel the tea is not an occasion for remembering so much as it an occasion for confusion. “The linden’s calming properties are universally acknowledged, but I’m not sure that they reside in the flowers, which grow in little bunches and are yellow in color, barely distinct from the green of the leaves. I seem to remember that the flowers close to form a fruit, which is like a little Gothic capsule. Or maybe it’s the other way around: the capsule comes first and opens into a flower… Memory might be playing tricks on me…” This initial confusion, this misremembering, is met with a further desire not to know, as though there is also in the linden something about forgetting. “It would be easy to clear this up, because linden trees haven’t changed, and here in Flores, where I live, there are plenty that I could inspect. I haven’t (which shows how totally unscientific I am), but it doesn’t matter. I can’t remember if my father used the flowers or the leaves or the little capsules; no doubt he did it in his own special way, as he did everything else. Perhaps he had discovered how to extract the maximum benefit from the linden’s well-known calming properties; if so, I have reason to regret my distraction and poor memory, because whatever the recipe or method was, it died with him.”

The linden, for Aira, seems to invoke remembering at the same time it distorts and eschews it — no sooner has memory been triggered than there is some part of us that doesn’t want to know, that prefers the calm of forgetting.

***

I began writing this essay two years ago, but struggled with it, because at some point I realized it needed to be about Vanessa, not linden trees. And I realized that I didn’t have very many specific memories, anecdotes, or stories I could tell about her. The reason the Hollywood Bowl memory is clearer than others, perhaps, is because it was the first time I noticed something was wrong, but the rest of the memories were of a more ordinary kind, the simple and mundane acts of living life. These memories don’t have much of a point, or a story too them, and they don’t make for interesting things to write about in an essay. But nonetheless, they happened.

Inevitably, as someone leaves your life your memories become fragmented, little glimpses of memories, little shards you try hard to grasp. You try to build these into little narratives, because the telling is always easier to remember than the memory itself. Storytelling is the best and only mnemonic we have against death, but it is also a betrayal. The story distorts those memories, eventually taking them over entirely, but it’s what you have, and what you manage to keep as the other things recede. So when I tell you stories about Vanessa, understand that they are not memories; they are stories.

Inevitably, as someone leaves your life your memories become fragmented, little glimpses of memories, little shards you try hard to grasp.

During those last few years she kept losing weight. We’d meet semi-regularly on Saturday afternoons for ice cream at Scoops, which is legendary among Angelenos for its endless variety of flavors. Butterscotch green tea, smoked gouda melon, maple horchata. There’s a whiteboard on the wall where people can post ideas. No one eats at Scoops without sampling as much as possible. Scoops was one of those few unabashed pleasures she could indulge in, worth driving crosstown for, the perfect Saturday afternoon activity no matter the season. And every week a little smaller, her skin a little brighter.

Scoops is on a mostly residential street behind a community college, which is to say parking is scarce at best. Los Angeles is a city of cars, but it is also a city of hunting for parking. Even if you don’t walk as much as you do in other cities, you can end up walking a few blocks from wherever you’re able to find parking and wherever you’re trying to get to. Which is a thing you don’t notice until you can’t move more than a few feet without immense difficulty.

This is how a disease overtakes your life: one at a time, it robs you of pleasures. At first the big things, but soon it’s the simple things, too. The little gifts you give yourself that help you to keep on going. Scleroderma took these from Vanessa, too. One at a time, until they were all gone.

***

In Schubert’s Winter Journey, the song “Der Lindenbaum” returns again to the linden tree, the rustling of the leaves a reminder to the singer of a gentler time of youth (“I dreamt in its shade / So many a sweet dream. I cut into its bark into its bark / So many a word of love; / In happiness and sadness it drew / Me back to it again and again”). In this, nothing too surprising, just the simple nostalgia of youth. But the song goes on: a dark, winter night (“even in the dark / I had to close my eyes”), the singer once again passes the old linden trees, whose branches rustle, calling out to him: “Come here to me, old chap, / Here you find your rest.” The singer refuses this call (“My hat flew from my head, / I didn’t turn back”) but the message is clear. Schubert’s linden calls out for death, to encourage you to lie down in the snow in the dark, dark of winter, to give in to its narcotic embrace. To finally give up. But it also does so by asking you to remember, to return those old memories, to keep them alive even as you give up on your own life.

“Words, in fact, are incidental,” Aira writes; “they are formulae for remembering things; we manipulate them in combinations that give us an illusion of power, but the things were there first, intractably.” The linden tree on our property, like our other trees, grows ferociously. Those who prefer to think of Los Angeles as a waterless desert wasteland have little conception of how ruthlessly plant life grows here, how slick the streets can get with the sap of dropped seedpods.

There is another tree next to our driveway that grows freakishly fast — its limbs spread out over our neighbors’ car park as well, and it drops fat, sticky bombs of sap that stick to cars and eat gradually into the paint. After the neighbors politely complained, we had it cut it back, stripping it so bare it became an eyesore — but within a few months it had grown back, as though we’d never touched it, a monster of foliage bursting out into the street. That life could flourish so incessantly here is anathema to many people’s conception of Southern California, and one of its many hidden pleasures.

Because our lot is small, it means the trees on our property are always pushing up against our house and the neighbors’ house. It’s illegal in California, land of wildfires, to have a tree actually touching a structure, which means at least once a year we have to pare back the trees. So after a few years of doing it ourselves we hired a tree surgeon to prune the trees, hoping to redirect them so their growth wouldn’t be so dangerous or destructive. When he arrived, he identified the three trees: the olive in the back, the Chinese elm in the front yard — and, of course, the linden tree. Which, he told me, was not actually a linden tree at all.

“Are you sure?” I asked him. “I was pretty sure it was a linden tree.”

No, he corrected me, it’s not a linden. He gave me the actual name of the tree, but I’ve long since forgotten what it was; to be honest, I forgot it almost as soon as he told me it. In the years since I’ve never thought of that tree as anything other than a linden tree. It is, after all, in these little acts of misremembering, in the not wanting to know, that we keep alive the memory of those who’ve left us.

* * *

Colin Dickey is the author of Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places, along with two other books of nonfiction. He is currently writing a book on conspiracy theories and other delusions, The Unidentified, forthcoming in 2020.

Editor: Sari Botton

Colin Dickey | Longreads | August 2017 | 14 minutes | 3380 words

We had come to a place muted of light. Every day felt like a potential backsliding, the news unrelenting, as though the nation had finally given up pushing back against its own savagery — and every day felt like the held breath before the fall. I thought increasingly of Stefan Lux, a Jewish journalist from Slovakia: Aghast at the rise of anti-Semitism during the 1930s, and at the inability of Europe’s bureaucratic governments to respond, Lux walked into the General Assembly of the League of Nations and, before the gathered diplomats, fatally shot himself. His last words were “C’est le dernier coup.” This is the final blow. It was only July 3, 1936; the blows would keep coming long after Lux’s death.

The center was not holding; there hadn’t been any center for decades. It was a country of bankrupt politicians, of killings by police so commonplace they barely made the news. It was a country in which families were routinely broken up by early morning immigration raids, where men abducted for traffic violations and women arrested for misdemeanors were sent off to countries they hadn’t known for decades. It was a nation where young white men found solace drifting through rage and irony, and felt alive only by terrorizing others. It was not a country in open revolution, but more and more its people felt revolution would at least be the exhalation they’d been waiting for. It was a country waiting for the final blow.

Whatever rough beast Yeats had seen had already slouched its way out of the desert, laying waste to everything that fell under its pitiless, blank gaze. The body of a lion and the head of a man, the indignant desert birds circling around its slow thighs, it has laid waste to the veneer of civility and decorum that had once been papered over the country.

The sphinx comes speaking of horrors and monstrosities: What is it that walks on four legs, then two, then three? Again and again, no one has an answer for the sphinx’s riddle; no one can imagine something so strange and mutable — and again and again it devours its victims when they fail. Only Oedipus sees that the answer is a human and not some strange creature. Everyone before him has failed to recognize his or her own humanity in the riddle; only Oedipus sees himself in it.

For decades, America has relied on subtext and dog whistle, and in all that time the sphinx has laid waste to us. Now we see ourselves — and now, like Oedipus, our problems are just beginning. It has become easy to look at the wreckage and imagine it only getting worse, and because little else seemed relevant I decided to go to Mount Auburn Cemetery, just outside Boston, to see the sphinx.

***

In May, the city of New Orleans tore down four monuments to the Confederacy: an obelisk honoring the Crescent City White League, long a rallying point for Klansmen and white supremacists; a statue of P. G. T. Beauregard on a horse; a statue of Jefferson Davis; and a bronze statue of Robert E. Lee. “These statues are not just stone and metal,” the city’s mayor, Mitch Landrieu, said. “They are not just innocent remembrances of a benign history. . . . After the Civil War, these statues were a part of that terrorism as much as a burning cross on someone’s lawn; they were erected purposefully to send a strong message to all who walked in their shadows about who was still in charge in this city.”

Landrieu’s words had a ringing finality to them, even though his speech was far from the final blow. As I drove up from New York City towards Cambridge, I listened to talk-radio pundits commend the great Robert E. Lee, a figure who deserved respect and reverence, they claimed, and whose statues, they felt, ought to be left standing. Their arguments bore the hallmarks of empty ritual; they were clichés that had been espoused for decades without conviction or meaning.

Monuments in America have always embodied a fraught paradox: They are meant to seem as though they’re merely reflecting the past, instead of shaping it. “Monuments attempt to mold a landscape of collective memory, to conserve what is worth remembering and discard the rest,” writes Kirk Savage in his history of post–Civil War monuments, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America. They appear to arise out of thin air, a popular and acclaimed expression of the people, when in fact their design and creation are deliberate political acts. As Landrieu told the city of New Orleans, “There are no slave-ship monuments, no prominent markers on public land to remember the lynchings or the slave blocks, nothing to remember this long chapter of our lives: the pain, the sacrifice, the shame . . . all of it happening on the soil of New Orleans.”

As I listened to the voices on the radio, I realized that to be white in America is to constantly forget, to live in a permanent fog. There is no way to contain the promises of equality with the realities you see before you. You cling to amnesia; you forget the details of slavery, of Jim Crow, of the civil rights movement. They could have equality if they wanted it, you tell yourself, if they worked for it instead of complaining. When you believe such lies, you look to the statues of Robert E. Lee. The general, who broke up nearly every slave family on his Arlington estate, was whitewashed as an apolitical soldier, a gentleman hero of a depoliticized South. No figure embodies our national amnesia like Lee, resplendent in marble astride his horse Traveller, whose name is known by every white Southerner despite its meaninglessness.

Winding my way through the rural highways of upstate New York, past houses still adorned with Confederate flags, I thought of a story I’d read recently involving Lee’s horse. While raising money for a statue of the general in Richmond, Virginia, boosters spread the story that in 1871 Traveller had refused to allow a young black boy to mount him — an apocryphal piece of propaganda meant to suggest that the horse, as all of nature must, understood the superiority of the white man. Enlisting a horse as a symbol of racism spoke to a particularly dark impulse in our country’s humanity, and Lee has become so inextricably linked to his horse that the pair seemed to have fused in statues around the country, a centaur standing once and for all for the stain of American slavery.

Heading east along the turnpike in Massachusetts, I passed a giant quarry just off the freeway, a gouged-out wound in the earth from which, no doubt, the raw material of many of these statues was birthed — plunging down into the depths, these quarries, the scars of which will long outlast even our greatest architecture, are perhaps a more fitting monument to human history. The statues created by the North are not without their problems either. Looking to commemorate emancipation, abolitionists and white Northerners could never easily reconcile the body of a freed slave with their inherited tradition of classical statues and monuments. Whites could envision the body of the enslaved American only as scarred, broken, and humiliated.

Instead, Northerners commemorated the war and abolition with statues of Abraham Lincoln: Often alone, holding a pen to symbolize the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation — or in the case of Thomas Ball’s garish statue near the National Mall, standing over a subservient freedman, debased beneath his white savior. Commemorative monuments portrayed anonymous Union soldiers — cheap, mass-produced statues made with molds identical to those used in the South for Confederates. Writing in The Atlantic Monthly in 1866, William Dean Howells warned of filling our parks and cemeteries with “bas-reliefs of battles, and statues of captains, and groups of privates.” But multiple Lincolns, along with the nameless white privates of the Union army, rose up, a ghost army in bronze, erasing America’s black population in the North as it had in the South.

[pullquote align=”center”]Looking to commemorate emancipation, white Northerners could never easily reconcile the body of a freed slave with their tradition of classical monuments. Whites could envision the body of the enslaved American only as scarred, broken, and humiliated.[/pullquote]

As I arrived at Mount Auburn there was a funeral service at the main chapel by the entrance. Not wanting to interrupt, I began a slow, ambling drive around the perimeter of the cemetery, assuming that I would be able to chance upon the statue eventually. In these lazy concentric circles I worked my way toward the middle of the cemetery, a gradual spiral that took me finally to a rising hill in the center of Mount Auburn, where I found the great Sphinx.

The giant block of granite quarried from Maine exerts its own gravitational pull, dominating the landscape even as it is partly shrouded by maple boughs. The Sphinx wears an American military medallion; its headdress is crowned with the head of a bald eagle. On the southern end of the pedestal is an Egyptian lotus, while the northern end features an American water lily. Other than the medallion, there’s little indication it’s a war memorial, aside from an inscription on its base, in both Latin and English: American union preserved, American slavery destroyed, by the uprising of a great people, by the blood of fallen heroes.

*** 

The Sphinx was the vision of Dr. Jacob Bigelow, a Harvard botanist and physician who was one of the founders of Mount Auburn Cemetery. In the wake of the Civil War, he wanted a monument that would honor the sacrifices of the Union army and point the way toward a more integrated America. A figure from Egyptian mythology, the sphinx represents the fusion of both “American” and “African” motifs, a perfect union between black and white.

Bigelow had dreamed up the statue and designed it entirely himself. Egyptian motifs had associated in nineteenth-century America with mourning and grief, but these had never included a sphinx. Bigelow’s monument was to be his own, ex nihilo and sui generis. Bigelow’s dreams swam with hybrid monsters. The Elgin Marbles, he noted, “to which the whole world pays homage,” consist of depictions of centaurs and other strange creatures; and the winged steed Pegasus, “on which poets in all ages have sought recreation,” was also an amalgamation of different beasts. “Even angels,” he concluded, “the accepted embodiments of beauty and loveliness, are human figures with birds’ wings attached to their shoulders.” Why, then, not revere another hybrid, why not create a new mythology?

Bigelow tried to envision a nation beating its swords back into plowshares, commending “a great, warlike, and successful nation, in the plenitude and full consciousness of its power, suddenly reversing its energies, and calling back its military veterans from bloodshed and victory to resume its still familiar arts of peace and good-will to man.” Believing that the final blow had at last been struck, he asked, “What symbol can better express the attributes of a just, calm, and dignified self-reliance than one which combines power with attractiveness, the strength of the lion with the beauty and benignity of woman?”

Bigelow enlisted sculptor Martin Milmore to craft his legacy, and the sculpture bears both Bigelow’s and Milmore’s names on its pedestal. Rather than Lincoln and an emancipated slave, Bigelow made the African component symbolic, attempting to establish a language of aesthetic beauty and still indicate Africanness — as though he might give white America an oblique lens by which to glimpse the black body. In envisioning a hybrid featuring a white, Anglicized face and the body of an African animal, Bigelow re-created a standard American racism, under which the “African” part of America could be expected to do physical labor, guided by the “intellect” and “beauty” of the white head. It is dismaying that, for all his originality, Bigelow could not see beyond this blind spot, so that despite the grandeur of Milmore’s work, what remains striking about the Sphinx is that it is composed of insufficient half measures, an aesthetic that fails on its own merits.

Bigelow’s Sphinx is far from perfect, far from above reproach. But if it has a saving grace, it is the strangeness of this nearly illegible beast. While Bigelow was alive, he could explain the statue, put it into context for onlookers and critics. With his death the Sphinx began to change. Visitors to Mount Auburn gradually became less confident about the purpose of the statue. It was still imposing, still a work of singular art, but its meaning began to elude those who met its placid gaze. The inscription did little to remind visitors of the Sphinx’s purpose. Rather than representing Bigelow’s vision of a united America, more and more visitors saw the enigmatic destroyer of Greek myth.

Charlotte Fiske Bates’s 1879 poem “The Sphinx at Mount Auburn” recasts Bigelow’s masterpiece as the tormentor of Thebes:

How grand she is enthroned among the dead,
The graves like trophies all about her spread!
Have these not perished as in fable old
With some unfathomed riddle in their hold?

In one of the few scholarly articles on the Sphinx, historian Joy M. Giguere writes that most Civil War monuments have endured because of

the sheer repetition of their designs over the cultural landscape. The creation of similarly-styled monuments, whose designs were agreed upon by monument committees or memorial associations, conveyed a broad cultural consensus as to what the war’s significance and legacy entailed.

But those same monuments — even those in the North — also maintained a racial separation, portraying “the heroism of white soldiers, the appreciation of emancipated slaves, but never the kind of racial cooperation or fusion expressed by Bigelow’s Sphinx.”

A strange outlier without an immediate referent, the Sphinx would become obscure within a few decades. In 1905, the Presbyterian minister Daniel Edward Lorenz spoke for many when he confessed his confusion and horror about it.

Was it erected in ignorance of its meaning? Or was it an intentional insult to all our fondest hopes? Does it mean that death is like that Greek monster? What does it mean? In the Necropolis of a pagan people, to whom life and immortality had never been brought to light, that statue might not surprise us, but what right has it to cumber the ground in the burial place of a Christian people?

Bigelow’s vision had quickly become inscrutable, and while visitors still heaped praise upon Milmore’s artistic genius, the work itself remained misunderstood.

As I spent the late morning and midday in the cemetery with Bigelow’s great Sphinx, I too gradually felt I could no longer make sense of it — the meaning of the statue, once clear to me, grew more and more inscrutable the longer I gazed at its empty stare.

***

Riding a wave of acclaim on the back of the Sphinx, Martin Milmore seemed poised to reshape the entire landscape of the city of Boston. Born in Ireland in 1844, Milmore came to Boston in 1851 and within ten years was already a rising star. Educated as a stonecutter by his older brother Joseph, the teenage Martin was taken on as an apprentice by Thomas Ball. Reports quickly emerged of an “unusually fine talent” in Ball’s studio, a young man whose artistry was quickly outstripping his peers’. Ball recommended his pupil for a significant commission: three allegorical statues for the Boston Horticultural Hall. Depicting three Roman goddesses of agriculture (Ceres, Pomona, and Flora), the statues’ success enabled Milmore to open up his own studio. Within a few years of the horticultural allegories he was sculpting marble busts of Massachusetts’s luminaries: Longfellow, Emerson, and the abolitionist Charles Sumner among them. In 1877, after the success of the Sphinx, Milmore completed his most well-known work: Boston’s Soldiers and Sailors Monument — the only official monument in the city proper honoring Boston citizens who’d died in the Civil War.

The only thing stopping Milmore was his own health: Cirrhosis of the liver killed him at the tragically young age of thirty-eight, and with his death the meaning of the Sphinx would fade behind yet another layer. After Milmore died, Daniel Chester French carved a funerary monument to him, which would in time be erected on the other side of the city, at Forest Hills Cemetery.

While it had been sunny and clear that morning, by afternoon a diffused gloom had set in, compounded by the grim crosstown commute through Boston’s labyrinthine streets, meaning that I arrived at Forest Hills tense and anxious, and it took a moment, sitting in an idling car at the gates, to recompose myself. As a local friend told me later, while Mount Auburn is best experienced on a bright, warm day, Forest Hills is best seen amid the gloom; somehow on this front the weather had participated beautifully. And after a few turns through avenues all named for trees — Maple, White Oak, Linden — I returned back to the gates, only to see the monument almost directly in front of me.

French’s memorial display is of a youthful sculptor — said to be Milmore, but evoking more a cherub than an adult artist — working on his creation, a chisel in his left hand and a mallet in his right. As his right hand raises the mallet to strike another blow, his left hand is stopped by the robed personification of death, her face heavily obscured by folds of a hood. Because of the sharp delineations of the sculptor and Death, it can be difficult at first to see what the sculptor is working on — particularly in the sculpture’s original bronze, the object of his toil recedes into darkness, but as you approach the relief it becomes clear that there is a fading third figure of this drama: the Sphinx.

While the Sphinx perches atop a central hill in Mount Auburn, French’s sculpture lies at a remove, at the far end of a small lawn. He implies that Death has interrupted Milmore’s work on the Sphinx, that the latter is somehow incomplete — a nod, perhaps, to the fact that even by then its meaning had grown ambiguous.

French would later make several copies of his monument in marble, including one that ended up in Chicago for the World’s Columbian Exhibition, a work that inspired the poet Horace Spencer Fiske to write,

O Death thou canst not touch him thus apace
With thy remorseless, petrifying hand!
For e’en already at his sweet command
The Sphinx grows gentler, breathing to the race
The mystery of life, and all the grace
That crowns it in the fear and shadowed land.

There is another copy in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Well lit in an airy courtyard, the marble reproduction has a clarity the original lacks. Devoid of its original context as a funerary monument, there is little to indicate that it marks either the dead sculptor or the Union troops whom he once himself honored. The American Wing of the Met, after all, is not too far from its Egyptian collection, a proximity that seems to complete the circle, drawing Bigelow’s inspiration back toward this copy of an homage.

Shortly after the museum’s acquisition, Preston Remington noted that the angel of death “is the very embodiment of the static forces of the ages — the Great Mother from whom all energies are given out but to whom also they must ultimately return.” But is this not also true of the Sphinx, which stands behind both figures, watching silently over both Death and humanity? As art critic Royal Cortissoz, would write in the Atlantic Monthly, what French hoped to symbolize “was the curtailment by death of any manly life dedicated to plastic art, and to recall in the Sphinx upon which the sculptor is engaged, not the well-known monster which Milmore himself once produced, but the insoluble mystery which stands forever between life and death.”

***

In the wake of Charlottesville, statues have come down in Baltimore, in Los Angeles, in New York City; they have been torn down in Durham, North Carolina, the metal crumpling after a short fall, a reminder of the cheapness by which they were made. With any luck, they will all come down, either by vote or by force. The problem with sculpture is that it attempts finality. It attempts once and for all to cast our country’s history in stone and bronze and then to let it rest. It resists the realization that there is no final blow, that America’s future lies in its slow and bloody progress. Such monuments to terrible finality must always be distrusted, for a racist country will take any object of permanence and bend it to its ends.

Whatever meaning Bigelow hoped people would take from his opus, the Sphinx calls to me because it is monstrous — it asks a riddle about humanity’s monstrosity that must be answered by each generation anew. To be white in America is to have this obligation. The Sphinx demands that you recognize yourself, as the strange beast of its riddle.

Perhaps this is the only work that remains to be done — to sculpt figures that point to the great tragedy of our country with no promise of hope, to put hammer to chisel, blow after blow, forging monsters that beckon with an endless gaze. To create riddles that cannot be undone, riddles that will outlast us unsolved and echo into future generations. To toil against the stone until Death arrives to still our hand.

***

Colin Dickey is the author of Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places, along with two other books of nonfiction. He is also the co-editor of The Morbid Anatomy Anthology.

***

Editor: Michelle Legro
Illustration: Katie Kosma
Fact-checker: Ethan Chiel
Copy-editor: Ryann Liebenthal

Colin Dickey | Longreads | August 2017 | 14 minutes | 3380 words

We had come to a place muted of light. Every day felt like a potential backsliding, the news unrelenting, as though the nation had finally given up pushing back against its own savagery — and every day felt like the held breath before the fall. I thought increasingly of Stefan Lux, a Jewish journalist from Slovakia: Aghast at the rise of anti-Semitism during the 1930s, and at the inability of Europe’s bureaucratic governments to respond, Lux walked into the General Assembly of the League of Nations and, before the gathered diplomats, fatally shot himself. His last words were “C’est le dernier coup.” This is the final blow. It was only July 3, 1936; the blows would keep coming long after Lux’s death.

The center was not holding; there hadn’t been any center for decades. It was a country of bankrupt politicians, of killings by police so commonplace they barely made the news. It was a country in which families were routinely broken up by early morning immigration raids, where men abducted for traffic violations and women arrested for misdemeanors were sent off to countries they hadn’t known for decades. It was a nation where young white men found solace drifting through rage and irony, and felt alive only by terrorizing others. It was not a country in open revolution, but more and more its people felt revolution would at least be the exhalation they’d been waiting for. It was a country waiting for the final blow.

Whatever rough beast Yeats had seen had already slouched its way out of the desert, laying waste to everything that fell under its pitiless, blank gaze. The body of a lion and the head of a man, the indignant desert birds circling around its slow thighs, it has laid waste to the veneer of civility and decorum that had once been papered over the country.

The sphinx comes speaking of horrors and monstrosities: What is it that walks on four legs, then two, then three? Again and again, no one has an answer for the sphinx’s riddle; no one can imagine something so strange and mutable — and again and again it devours its victims when they fail. Only Oedipus sees that the answer is a human and not some strange creature. Everyone before him has failed to recognize his or her own humanity in the riddle; only Oedipus sees himself in it.

For decades, America has relied on subtext and dog whistle, and in all that time the sphinx has laid waste to us. Now we see ourselves — and now, like Oedipus, our problems are just beginning. It has become easy to look at the wreckage and imagine it only getting worse, and because little else seemed relevant I decided to go to Mount Auburn Cemetery, just outside Boston, to see the sphinx.

***

In May, the city of New Orleans tore down four monuments to the Confederacy: an obelisk honoring the Crescent City White League, long a rallying point for Klansmen and white supremacists; a statue of P. G. T. Beauregard on a horse; a statue of Jefferson Davis; and a bronze statue of Robert E. Lee. “These statues are not just stone and metal,” the city’s mayor, Mitch Landrieu, said. “They are not just innocent remembrances of a benign history. . . . After the Civil War, these statues were a part of that terrorism as much as a burning cross on someone’s lawn; they were erected purposefully to send a strong message to all who walked in their shadows about who was still in charge in this city.”

Landrieu’s words had a ringing finality to them, even though his speech was far from the final blow. As I drove up from New York City towards Cambridge, I listened to talk-radio pundits commend the great Robert E. Lee, a figure who deserved respect and reverence, they claimed, and whose statues, they felt, ought to be left standing. Their arguments bore the hallmarks of empty ritual; they were clichés that had been espoused for decades without conviction or meaning.

Monuments in America have always embodied a fraught paradox: They are meant to seem as though they’re merely reflecting the past, instead of shaping it. “Monuments attempt to mold a landscape of collective memory, to conserve what is worth remembering and discard the rest,” writes Kirk Savage in his history of post–Civil War monuments, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America. They appear to arise out of thin air, a popular and acclaimed expression of the people, when in fact their design and creation are deliberate political acts. As Landrieu told the city of New Orleans, “There are no slave-ship monuments, no prominent markers on public land to remember the lynchings or the slave blocks, nothing to remember this long chapter of our lives: the pain, the sacrifice, the shame . . . all of it happening on the soil of New Orleans.”

As I listened to the voices on the radio, I realized that to be white in America is to constantly forget, to live in a permanent fog. There is no way to contain the promises of equality with the realities you see before you. You cling to amnesia; you forget the details of slavery, of Jim Crow, of the civil rights movement. They could have equality if they wanted it, you tell yourself, if they worked for it instead of complaining. When you believe such lies, you look to the statues of Robert E. Lee. The general, who broke up nearly every slave family on his Arlington estate, was whitewashed as an apolitical soldier, a gentleman hero of a depoliticized South. No figure embodies our national amnesia like Lee, resplendent in marble astride his horse Traveller, whose name is known by every white Southerner despite its meaninglessness.

Winding my way through the rural highways of upstate New York, past houses still adorned with Confederate flags, I thought of a story I’d read recently involving Lee’s horse. While raising money for a statue of the general in Richmond, Virginia, boosters spread the story that in 1871 Traveller had refused to allow a young black boy to mount him — an apocryphal piece of propaganda meant to suggest that the horse, as all of nature must, understood the superiority of the white man. Enlisting a horse as a symbol of racism spoke to a particularly dark impulse in our country’s humanity, and Lee has become so inextricably linked to his horse that the pair seemed to have fused in statues around the country, a centaur standing once and for all for the stain of American slavery.

Heading east along the turnpike in Massachusetts, I passed a giant quarry just off the freeway, a gouged-out wound in the earth from which, no doubt, the raw material of many of these statues was birthed — plunging down into the depths, these quarries, the scars of which will long outlast even our greatest architecture, are perhaps a more fitting monument to human history. The statues created by the North are not without their problems either. Looking to commemorate emancipation, abolitionists and white Northerners could never easily reconcile the body of a freed slave with their inherited tradition of classical statues and monuments. Whites could envision the body of the enslaved American only as scarred, broken, and humiliated.

Instead, Northerners commemorated the war and abolition with statues of Abraham Lincoln: Often alone, holding a pen to symbolize the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation — or in the case of Thomas Ball’s garish statue near the National Mall, standing over a subservient freedman, debased beneath his white savior. Commemorative monuments portrayed anonymous Union soldiers — cheap, mass-produced statues made with molds identical to those used in the South for Confederates. Writing in The Atlantic Monthly in 1866, William Dean Howells warned of filling our parks and cemeteries with “bas-reliefs of battles, and statues of captains, and groups of privates.” But multiple Lincolns, along with the nameless white privates of the Union army, rose up, a ghost army in bronze, erasing America’s black population in the North as it had in the South.

[pullquote align=”center”]Looking to commemorate emancipation, white Northerners could never easily reconcile the body of a freed slave with their tradition of classical monuments. Whites could envision the body of the enslaved American only as scarred, broken, and humiliated.[/pullquote]

As I arrived at Mount Auburn there was a funeral service at the main chapel by the entrance. Not wanting to interrupt, I began a slow, ambling drive around the perimeter of the cemetery, assuming that I would be able to chance upon the statue eventually. In these lazy concentric circles I worked my way toward the middle of the cemetery, a gradual spiral that took me finally to a rising hill in the center of Mount Auburn, where I found the great Sphinx.

The giant block of granite quarried from Maine exerts its own gravitational pull, dominating the landscape even as it is partly shrouded by maple boughs. The Sphinx wears an American military medallion; its headdress is crowned with the head of a bald eagle. On the southern end of the pedestal is an Egyptian lotus, while the northern end features an American water lily. Other than the medallion, there’s little indication it’s a war memorial, aside from an inscription on its base, in both Latin and English: American union preserved, American slavery destroyed, by the uprising of a great people, by the blood of fallen heroes.

*** 

The Sphinx was the vision of Dr. Jacob Bigelow, a Harvard botanist and physician who was one of the founders of Mount Auburn Cemetery. In the wake of the Civil War, he wanted a monument that would honor the sacrifices of the Union army and point the way toward a more integrated America. A figure from Egyptian mythology, the sphinx represents the fusion of both “American” and “African” motifs, a perfect union between black and white.

Bigelow had dreamed up the statue and designed it entirely himself. Egyptian motifs had associated in nineteenth-century America with mourning and grief, but these had never included a sphinx. Bigelow’s monument was to be his own, ex nihilo and sui generis. Bigelow’s dreams swam with hybrid monsters. The Elgin Marbles, he noted, “to which the whole world pays homage,” consist of depictions of centaurs and other strange creatures; and the winged steed Pegasus, “on which poets in all ages have sought recreation,” was also an amalgamation of different beasts. “Even angels,” he concluded, “the accepted embodiments of beauty and loveliness, are human figures with birds’ wings attached to their shoulders.” Why, then, not revere another hybrid, why not create a new mythology?

Bigelow tried to envision a nation beating its swords back into plowshares, commending “a great, warlike, and successful nation, in the plenitude and full consciousness of its power, suddenly reversing its energies, and calling back its military veterans from bloodshed and victory to resume its still familiar arts of peace and good-will to man.” Believing that the final blow had at last been struck, he asked, “What symbol can better express the attributes of a just, calm, and dignified self-reliance than one which combines power with attractiveness, the strength of the lion with the beauty and benignity of woman?”

Bigelow enlisted sculptor Martin Milmore to craft his legacy, and the sculpture bears both Bigelow’s and Milmore’s names on its pedestal. Rather than Lincoln and an emancipated slave, Bigelow made the African component symbolic, attempting to establish a language of aesthetic beauty and still indicate Africanness — as though he might give white America an oblique lens by which to glimpse the black body. In envisioning a hybrid featuring a white, Anglicized face and the body of an African animal, Bigelow re-created a standard American racism, under which the “African” part of America could be expected to do physical labor, guided by the “intellect” and “beauty” of the white head. It is dismaying that, for all his originality, Bigelow could not see beyond this blind spot, so that despite the grandeur of Milmore’s work, what remains striking about the Sphinx is that it is composed of insufficient half measures, an aesthetic that fails on its own merits.

Bigelow’s Sphinx is far from perfect, far from above reproach. But if it has a saving grace, it is the strangeness of this nearly illegible beast. While Bigelow was alive, he could explain the statue, put it into context for onlookers and critics. With his death the Sphinx began to change. Visitors to Mount Auburn gradually became less confident about the purpose of the statue. It was still imposing, still a work of singular art, but its meaning began to elude those who met its placid gaze. The inscription did little to remind visitors of the Sphinx’s purpose. Rather than representing Bigelow’s vision of a united America, more and more visitors saw the enigmatic destroyer of Greek myth.

Charlotte Fiske Bates’s 1879 poem “The Sphinx at Mount Auburn” recasts Bigelow’s masterpiece as the tormentor of Thebes:

How grand she is enthroned among the dead,
The graves like trophies all about her spread!
Have these not perished as in fable old
With some unfathomed riddle in their hold?

In one of the few scholarly articles on the Sphinx, historian Joy M. Giguere writes that most Civil War monuments have endured because of

the sheer repetition of their designs over the cultural landscape. The creation of similarly-styled monuments, whose designs were agreed upon by monument committees or memorial associations, conveyed a broad cultural consensus as to what the war’s significance and legacy entailed.

But those same monuments — even those in the North — also maintained a racial separation, portraying “the heroism of white soldiers, the appreciation of emancipated slaves, but never the kind of racial cooperation or fusion expressed by Bigelow’s Sphinx.”

A strange outlier without an immediate referent, the Sphinx would become obscure within a few decades. In 1905, the Presbyterian minister Daniel Edward Lorenz spoke for many when he confessed his confusion and horror about it.

Was it erected in ignorance of its meaning? Or was it an intentional insult to all our fondest hopes? Does it mean that death is like that Greek monster? What does it mean? In the Necropolis of a pagan people, to whom life and immortality had never been brought to light, that statue might not surprise us, but what right has it to cumber the ground in the burial place of a Christian people?

Bigelow’s vision had quickly become inscrutable, and while visitors still heaped praise upon Milmore’s artistic genius, the work itself remained misunderstood.

As I spent the late morning and midday in the cemetery with Bigelow’s great Sphinx, I too gradually felt I could no longer make sense of it — the meaning of the statue, once clear to me, grew more and more inscrutable the longer I gazed at its empty stare.

***

Riding a wave of acclaim on the back of the Sphinx, Martin Milmore seemed poised to reshape the entire landscape of the city of Boston. Born in Ireland in 1844, Milmore came to Boston in 1851 and within ten years was already a rising star. Educated as a stonecutter by his older brother Joseph, the teenage Martin was taken on as an apprentice by Thomas Ball. Reports quickly emerged of an “unusually fine talent” in Ball’s studio, a young man whose artistry was quickly outstripping his peers’. Ball recommended his pupil for a significant commission: three allegorical statues for the Boston Horticultural Hall. Depicting three Roman goddesses of agriculture (Ceres, Pomona, and Flora), the statues’ success enabled Milmore to open up his own studio. Within a few years of the horticultural allegories he was sculpting marble busts of Massachusetts’s luminaries: Longfellow, Emerson, and the abolitionist Charles Sumner among them. In 1877, after the success of the Sphinx, Milmore completed his most well-known work: Boston’s Soldiers and Sailors Monument — the only official monument in the city proper honoring Boston citizens who’d died in the Civil War.

The only thing stopping Milmore was his own health: Cirrhosis of the liver killed him at the tragically young age of thirty-eight, and with his death the meaning of the Sphinx would fade behind yet another layer. After Milmore died, Daniel Chester French carved a funerary monument to him, which would in time be erected on the other side of the city, at Forest Hills Cemetery.

While it had been sunny and clear that morning, by afternoon a diffused gloom had set in, compounded by the grim crosstown commute through Boston’s labyrinthine streets, meaning that I arrived at Forest Hills tense and anxious, and it took a moment, sitting in an idling car at the gates, to recompose myself. As a local friend told me later, while Mount Auburn is best experienced on a bright, warm day, Forest Hills is best seen amid the gloom; somehow on this front the weather had participated beautifully. And after a few turns through avenues all named for trees — Maple, White Oak, Linden — I returned back to the gates, only to see the monument almost directly in front of me.

French’s memorial display is of a youthful sculptor — said to be Milmore, but evoking more a cherub than an adult artist — working on his creation, a chisel in his left hand and a mallet in his right. As his right hand raises the mallet to strike another blow, his left hand is stopped by the robed personification of death, her face heavily obscured by folds of a hood. Because of the sharp delineations of the sculptor and Death, it can be difficult at first to see what the sculptor is working on — particularly in the sculpture’s original bronze, the object of his toil recedes into darkness, but as you approach the relief it becomes clear that there is a fading third figure of this drama: the Sphinx.

While the Sphinx perches atop a central hill in Mount Auburn, French’s sculpture lies at a remove, at the far end of a small lawn. He implies that Death has interrupted Milmore’s work on the Sphinx, that the latter is somehow incomplete — a nod, perhaps, to the fact that even by then its meaning had grown ambiguous.

French would later make several copies of his monument in marble, including one that ended up in Chicago for the World’s Columbian Exhibition, a work that inspired the poet Horace Spencer Fiske to write,

O Death thou canst not touch him thus apace
With thy remorseless, petrifying hand!
For e’en already at his sweet command
The Sphinx grows gentler, breathing to the race
The mystery of life, and all the grace
That crowns it in the fear and shadowed land.

There is another copy in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Well lit in an airy courtyard, the marble reproduction has a clarity the original lacks. Devoid of its original context as a funerary monument, there is little to indicate that it marks either the dead sculptor or the Union troops whom he once himself honored. The American Wing of the Met, after all, is not too far from its Egyptian collection, a proximity that seems to complete the circle, drawing Bigelow’s inspiration back toward this copy of an homage.

Shortly after the museum’s acquisition, Preston Remington noted that the angel of death “is the very embodiment of the static forces of the ages — the Great Mother from whom all energies are given out but to whom also they must ultimately return.” But is this not also true of the Sphinx, which stands behind both figures, watching silently over both Death and humanity? As art critic Royal Cortissoz, would write in the Atlantic Monthly, what French hoped to symbolize “was the curtailment by death of any manly life dedicated to plastic art, and to recall in the Sphinx upon which the sculptor is engaged, not the well-known monster which Milmore himself once produced, but the insoluble mystery which stands forever between life and death.”

***

In the wake of Charlottesville, statues have come down in Baltimore, in Los Angeles, in New York City; they have been torn down in Durham, North Carolina, the metal crumpling after a short fall, a reminder of the cheapness by which they were made. With any luck, they will all come down, either by vote or by force. The problem with sculpture is that it attempts finality. It attempts once and for all to cast our country’s history in stone and bronze and then to let it rest. It resists the realization that there is no final blow, that America’s future lies in its slow and bloody progress. Such monuments to terrible finality must always be distrusted, for a racist country will take any object of permanence and bend it to its ends.

Whatever meaning Bigelow hoped people would take from his opus, the Sphinx calls to me because it is monstrous — it asks a riddle about humanity’s monstrosity that must be answered by each generation anew. To be white in America is to have this obligation. The Sphinx demands that you recognize yourself, as the strange beast of its riddle.

Perhaps this is the only work that remains to be done — to sculpt figures that point to the great tragedy of our country with no promise of hope, to put hammer to chisel, blow after blow, forging monsters that beckon with an endless gaze. To create riddles that cannot be undone, riddles that will outlast us unsolved and echo into future generations. To toil against the stone until Death arrives to still our hand.

***

Colin Dickey is the author of Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places, along with two other books of nonfiction. He is also the co-editor of The Morbid Anatomy Anthology.

***

Editor: Michelle Legro
Illustration: Katie Kosma
Fact-checker: Ethan Chiel
Copy-editor: Ryann Liebenthal

Colin Dickey | Longreads | April 2017 | 12 minutes | 3000 words

On Monday night, Oscar Munoz, the CEO of United Airlines, sent an internal email to his staff regarding the incident on Flight 3411 in which members of Chicago Aviation Security forcibly removed a customer who refused to give up his seat when asked. In the note, Munoz offered an explanation of events and a defense of both his employees and law enforcement. The email ended up on Twitter where its contents were roundly excoriated.

Munoz’s email is, in its own way, a work of art; a triumph of the willingness to pass the buck. It misstates objective facts and shifts responsibility onto the passenger, David Dao, who ended up bloody and dazed after the encounter.

As you will read, the situation was unfortunately compounded when one of the passengers was politely asked to deplane refused and it became necessary to contact Chicago Aviation Officers to help.

What struck me as I read the email is how a careful and consistent use of syntax, grammar, and diction is marshaled to make a series of points both subtle and unsubtle. On Twitter, I referred to it as a “master class in the use of the passive voice to avoid responsibility,” and followed with a few tweets that highlighted its use of language to shift the blame on to the victim.

The thread landed, at some point, in the Twitter feed of a British writer named Oliver Kamm, the author of Accidence Will Happen: A Recovering Pedant’s Guide to English Language and Style. Kamm responded that my grammatical analysis was “way out,” and over several tweets accused me of misunderstanding the passive voice and its usage in Munoz’s email. (Kamm was right in many of his criticisms: I used the phrase “it became necessary” as an example of the passive voice, which is incorrect, and in my haste I referred to “passive verbs” rather than the passive voice.)

What became clear to me in this exchange is that the passive voice is itself unsuited for the lexical landscape of United’s email, which itself is part of a larger world we now find ourselves in, where corporate and government bureaucracies rely heavily on language to shape our perception. Munoz’s email relies heavily on the passive voice to evade culpability, but he also employs a host of other rhetorical moves that collude to put the blame on the man who was assaulted and carried out on a stretcher. Like a well-trained bureaucrat, Munoz used an array of syntactical choices in a predictable, quantifiable, and deliberate manner, and it’s time we recognize it for what it is.

***

When George Orwell wrote “Politics and the English Language” in 1946, he began by arguing that the English language was “in a bad way,” decaying decadently due to jargon, cliché, and imprecise thought. His examples of poor writing exhibit two main faults: “staleness of imagery” and a “lack of precision.” “The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not.” Orwell saw the writing of his day as consisting in “gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug,” and saw its decline as directly traceable to its lack of imagination.

The English language today is not, I would argue, in decline; it’s vibrant and flowering in multiple directions. For all its shortcomings, social media has allowed for a wide range of inventiveness of linguistic expression—the dizzying speed at which slang moves on the Internet is a testament to the continued vitality of language’s ability to capture an increasingly wide array of emotional contours of daily life.

But as users become more creative in crafting language to reflect new kinds of expression, bureaucrats get more creative in using that expression to hide the levers of power. In Orwell’s time political writing was bad because it never strayed from the party line: “It is broadly true that political writing is bad writing…. Orthodoxy, of whatever color, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style.” In the twenty-first century, political writing is bad because it spews bullshit in new directions, always expanding its inventiveness and the reach of its perfidy. The success of politicians like Nigel Farage and Donald Trump come from their ability to reject the party line in favor of surprising constructions of speech, even as these creations drink from the same poisoned well of dull thought.

Just as rhetoric should no longer be memorized by rote and passed down to students, bureaucracy no longer moves along predictable party lines. Political speech continues to be, as it was for Orwell, largely the defense of the indefensible, but there is no longer a one-to-one correspondence between evil thought and uninspired diction—ensuring fresh diction among students will not ensure fresh thought. We think of “Orwellian” as a shorthand for dystopia, but a more accurate definition might be a form of language whose fidelity is to institutional power at the expense of objective truth: Expect it to be constantly in flux, particularly in a landscape where political power is itself nebulous.

It’s time to move beyond the debate between passive and active voice in favor of something more responsive to the fluid nature of contemporary political language. Discussions of the passive voice have been bogged down in a war of style guides, each jockeying for supremacy in the coveted slot of required college composition textbook.

As I’ve written elsewhere, the thrust of these style guides falls back to a weird kind of masculine virility. The terms themselves—“passive” and “active”—rely heavily on received tropes of gendered norms, and for that reason alone we should be suspicious of them. So while I’m in agreement with that composition teachers and style guides should refrain from unyielding denunciations of the passive voice, there is a difference between a first-year college student’s essay and an email from the CEO of a multi-billion dollar corporation, just as there is a difference between our responsibilities as writers and our responsibilities as readers.

***

I’ll admit now that Munoz’s email is not, as I suggested on social media, a perfect use of the passive voice. What it is instead is a perfect example of the bureaucratic voice. The bureaucratic voice makes use of both active and passive constructions, but its purpose is uniform: to erase and efface any active agent on the part of the bureaucracy. Reading through his email, numerous sentences leap out—their syntax varies, but their purpose does not.

To begin with, the bureaucratic style works to erase cause. Here is Munoz’s description of the start of the incident: “On Sunday, April 9, after United Express Flight 3411 was fully boarded, United’s gate agents were approached by crewmembers that were told they needed to board the flight.” Setting aside the passengers for a second, in this sentence there are two named actors: the gate agents and the crewmembers. You might expect, then, that this all started when the crewmembers approached the gate agents and told them they needed to board the flight. However, a closer reading of the syntax implies this is not the case; the crewmembers themselves “were told they needed to board the flight.” Who told them? The sentence does not make this clear, even though it is this unnamed actor, presumably a supervisor, who set this entire chain of events in motion. Deliberately pushed back as far off the stage as possible, there is no one here to responsibly hold accountable for subsequent events.

Munoz repeatedly makes reference to established procedures: “Our employees followed established procedures for dealing with situations like this.” Here we have what seems to be a nice use of the active voice: We have actors (“our employees”) and they are doing something specific. But the figures responsible for establishing procedure are nowhere to be found. Whenever possible, bureaucratic style will shift responsibility to immutable rules and directives that appear spontaneously from the ether.

When bureaucratic agency is absolutely unavoidable it will be couched in a simpering use of adverbs to clear any wrongdoing: “We politely asked” a customer to deplane, to whom “we approached… to explain apologetically,” and so forth. Only with the utmost reluctance does the state ever act, and even then it does so patiently, politely, apologetically.

Add to this the free use of obvious falsehoods. Munoz states that employees told Dao “was being denied boarding,” when in fact he was already sitting on the plane. Munoz claims employees were following United’s “involuntary denial of boarding process,” but their Denied Boarding Compensation rules cover oversold flights, and this flight was not oversold or overbooked.

In contrast, Dao himself is portrayed with a dynamic and active voice. The passenger “defied Chicago Aviation Security Officers,” he “raised his voice and refused to comply with crew member instructions,” he “repeatedly declined to leave,” and after he was forcibly removed, “he continued to resist—running back onto the aircraft in defiance of both our crew and security officials.” While the bureaucratic voice works to present governments and corporations as placid, apologetic, and unmovable, it also works to make their victims as active and vital as possible. The point, of course, is to make clear that a victim like Dao did this to himself.

Munoz employs the passive voice at key moments to make it clear that there are no other actors in this drama other than Dao. In a one spectacular sentence, Munoz writes of Dao, “He was approached a few more times after that in order to gain his compliance to come off the aircraft, and each time he refused and became more and more disruptive and belligerent.” There is clearly a series of confrontations happening here, yet he is the only individual identified in the entire sentence. No one did the approaching and no one tried to gain his compliance; instead, the passenger just sat there on the plane, becoming more and more belligerent all by himself.

All of this builds towards the arrival of the Chicago Aviation Security officers. These figures are inevitably portrayed as accomplices, never direct initiators: United called them to “assist in removing the customer from the flight,” and they were only there “to help.” Even though one officer has already been placed on leave following the incident, none of them will at any time be held responsible, since their purpose here is only in “assisting” the bureaucracy.

In Munoz’s entire statement, this sentence stands out as the most chilling: “Our agents were left with no choice but to call Chicago Aviation Security Officers to assist in removing the customer from the flight. He repeatedly declined to leave.” The phrase, “left with no choice” is calculated and deliberate, and every rhetorical move of the preceding paragraphs is leading up to this moment. The bureaucratic state never acts of its own volition; it is always reactionary, and it always acts because the victim leaves it no choice. The mind, of course, reels with all of the choices available to United’s management in this instance: offering a higher compensation figure until someone agreed, transporting the crew to Louisville on another plane, acceding to Dao’s request that, as a doctor, he had patients to see the following morning and deserved priority, or simply waiting. But once this became a display of power and authority, they were left with no choice but violence.

The effect of United’s email is the onslaught of evasion to create an overall impression that the actions of the airline and its employees was out of their hands; that Dao, as the only autonomous and culpable figure in the drama, brought this on himself, and that the ensuing violence, while regrettable, was unavoidable. The more violence done to an individual, the more active agency he or she will be given by the bureaucratic voice, and the more removed and abstract the bureaucracy itself will become. When descriptions of violence are unavoidable, they will emphatically be in passive constructions: dissidents “were executed,” their bodies “were later found” and subsequently “were buried.”

An uninformed person could read this email and think that nothing United did was wrong—because it appears United did nothing at all.

***

Yesterday, Munoz released a second email, one which was far more direct and apologetic. Whether this will stem this news cycle remains to be seen, but either way, the point is not Munoz or United Airlines, but the way this simple email exemplifies a rhetoric that has infected our language at every level. If there is a singular, shining example of this emergent style of language, it’s to be found not in the language of the corporate world (even though corporations like United freely make use of it to their benefit), but in the tortured and reprehensible term “officer-involved shooting.” The term has crept into the lexicon only recently (around 1989, according to Google’s ngram viewer), and quickly became a hallmark of American policing. It exists for one reason only: to obfuscate the circumstances surrounding police killings of civilians, whether justified or not, and to efface any agency among law enforcement for the use of deadly force.

The term “officer-involved shooting” is a perfect example of bureaucratic speech: It invariably is paired with an active verb (“an officer-involved shooting occurred”) and yet the entire purpose of the construction is to imbue the scene with passivity. Police did not kill anyone; a shooting just occurred and it happened to involve officers. There is no actor in an officer-involved shooting, and not even any real actions. We don’t even technically know who was shot, only that an officer was somehow involved. An entire syntactical arrangement consisting of a subject (“police”), a verb (“shot”), and an object (“a civilian”) are transmuted into a noun (“shooting”) with a compound adjective (“officer-involved”) attached. It’s almost as if nothing took place at all.

Not only is it venal, you can tell a great deal simply by the syntax of sentences in which it’s employed: “Police chased the suspect into an alleyway; once cornered, the suspect appeared to draw a weapon, and at that point an officer-involved shooting took place.” Agency is granted to both the police and the victim through a series of dynamic verbs, creating a sense of action and suspense, right up until the moment of the shooting, when all agency mysteriously vanishes. The awkwardness of the syntactical construction, the strange wrenching of the sentence from the active voice to this bizarre passivity—all these are hallmarks of the bureaucratic voice, in that it will go to such lengths to avoid culpability that it will distort and pervert language itself.

***

We tend to think of the purpose of style guides as helping students to write clearer and more effectively. But increasingly, the far more important side of composition pedagogy is teaching students how to read. And teaching students how to spot and decipher the bureaucratic voice must become an essential skill.

Readers need to know, for example, that journalists who use phrases like “officer-involved shooting” in any context other than a direct quote from law enforcement are derelict. It is law enforcement’s prerogative to use spin and dissimulation to obtain favorable coverage; it is the media’s role to resist this. And yet, this is a role the media has almost wholeheartedly abdicated.

On Monday night, after a police officer killed a man in a Houston suburb, local station ABC 13 reported “Man Shot Dead in Officer-Involved Shooting in Northwest Houston.” Another station, CW39, more accurately reported the event with the headline, “HPD: Officer Kills Man After Responding to Noise Complaint in Acres Home,” though the first line of the story defaults back to police PR: “An officer-involved shooting has led to the death of an allegedly armed man in Northwest Houston.” The night before, police killed another man in Fremont, California. The ABC affiliate reported “1 Dead After Officer-Involved Shooting in Fremont, Cause Under Investigation,” the Fox affiliate headlined their story “One Dead in Fremont Officer Involved Shooting,” and the East Bay Times uncritically repeated the term in two separate pieces.

Compare this to the local NBC affiliate, KNTV, who reported the incident as: “Man Shot Dead by Fremont Police After Firing at Officers,” and only used the term “officer involved shooting” in quoting or paraphrasing law enforcement. In addition to not doing law enforcement’s PR work for free, the NBC story’s headline is clearer conveys more pertinent information, and is far more impactful. (In the ABC and Fox headlines, it’s even clear if the person killed was a cop or civilian.) Clarity such as this is often a dead giveaway as to the merits of the writing. Readers need to be trained to understand that, when it comes to bureaucratic sources, ugliness in prose is usually not entirely aesthetic, but usually is covering up something far more egregious than style.

The fact that I was able to find numerous examples of this egregious failure in the past few days alone indicates the degree to which American journalism is compromised by bureaucratic style. If the supposedly objective journalists we rely on to report facts are so hopelessly smitten by the language of violence, what hope do the rest of us have?

After all, the purpose of the bureaucratic voice is less to shape our thoughts or how we see the external world, but to reward incuriosity. The citizen who reads of an “officer-involved shooting” is invited to not think too hard about things and fill in whatever preconceived notions they may already hold about law enforcement, the use of violence, and the prevalence of criminality among racial minorities or those with mental health issues. United’s use of language in its email to employees does not itself shape our perception; rather it offers soothing pabulum to those whose minds are already made up, or who are predisposed to support bureaucracy and its use of force. Watching the cell phone videos of the assault has, for most people, the immediate effect of provoking outrage and awakening a desire for justice. The purpose of bureaucratic speech is to dull these responses. It suggests your outrage is not worth it, that it’s fine to go back to what you were doing, that it’s best to move along and mind your own business.

After all, bureaucracy whispers in your ear, the guy probably had it coming.

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Colin Dickey is the author of Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places, along with two other books of nonfiction. He is also the co-editor of The Morbid Anatomy Anthology.

Colin Dickey | Longreads | April 2017 | 12 minutes (3,060 words)

In the opening pages of Austerlitz, W. G. Sebald describes the Antwerp nocturama, a zoo enclosure of simulated darkness designed to allow visitors to watch nocturnal animals in their natural environment. Sebald finds himself fixated on a raccoon compulsively washing a piece of apple, an animal whose work goes “far beyond any reasonable thoroughness,” he writes, as though this “would help it escape the unreal world in which it had arrived.” In the same way, perhaps, I’ve been reading Sebald compulsively for the past few months, as though through this act I might find the means to escape the unreal, topsy-turvy world of this grim winter.

Sebald is often called a Holocaust writer—all his major works deal with the Nazi genocide, some more explicitly than others. But his writing is often more concerned with a crisis in European modernity, one that can be traced back as far back as the Napoleonic Wars—a crisis in which the Holocaust was a horrifying, but nearly inevitable by-product. No historical tragedy arrives, ex nihilo, like Athena from her father’s forehead. Rather, Sebald traces and patterns that are laid out decades, perhaps centuries in advance, often in plain sight. They ostentatiously draw attention to themselves, though we have no desire to recognize them. Rather than focus on cartoonish depictions of Nazism as some anomalous evil, Sebald looked for the ways that fascism grew from the innocuous and banal aspects of European culture—from textile manufacturing, to psychotherapy, to architecture.

It was in architecture that Sebald saw the most telling indicators of the inevitability of the camps, often in the most unlikely of places. In Austerlitz, Sebald’s narrator meets up with the novel’s eponymous protagonist in Brussels’ Palace of Justice, reputed to be the largest courthouse in the world. Built in the 1880s, the Palace is a massive accumulation of stone organized haphazardly, such that many of its corridors and stairways lead nowhere. Sebald sees a paranoid logic in such a building, meant as an awe-inspiring monument to justice,  yet containing a lawless rabbit warren of hallways—a belief that marble and brick can forestall death itself. There was an anxious psychosis in the late-nineteenth century that led to greater and greater structures, each trying to outdo the last, further exacerbating a death drive. “At the most,” Jacques Austerlitz tells the narrator about this palace, “we gaze at it in wonder, a kind of wonder which in itself is a form of dawning horror, for somehow we know by instinct that outsize buildings cast the shadow of their own destruction before them, and are designed from the first with an eye to their later existence as ruins.”

This motif of grandiose architecture recurs throughout Austerlitz. In the opening pages, Sebald turns to the ever increasing complexity of European fortresses, which eventually adopted a star-shaped dodecagon plan, one which strikes the layman “as an emblem of both absolute power and of the ingenuity the engineers put to the service of that power.” But it is of course the case that “the largest fortifications will eventually attach the largest enemy forces, and that the more you entrench yourself the more you must remain on the defensive, so that in the end you might find yourself in a place fortified in every possible way, watching helplessly while the enemy troops, moving on to their own choice of terrain elsewhere, simply ignored their adversaries’ fortresses, which had become positive arsenals of weaponry, bristling with cannon and overcrowded with men.” The result of such thinking and such buildings, and of what Austerlitz refers to in passing as a sort of “paranoid elaboration,” was that “you drew attention to your weakest point, practically inviting the enemy to attack it,” to say nothing of the increasing expense and time to build such outsized buildings, whose efficacy and technology are quickly overtaken by modern developments before they are even completed.

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Increasingly our attention has turned to the building of great walls—walls that will rise up from the desert to protect the nation. Already architects are salivating over the prospect, eager to imprint their own ideas on to these structures; they see it, perhaps short-sightedly, as a means of securing a legacy, a project so immense it will stretch into the distance farther than the eye can see.

But walls—even very great ones—rarely protect the lands they encircle. One has only to look to the eastern countryside of France, where ruins of the Maginot Line still lurk. Built between the wars at great expense, the Maginot Line, was to consist of great fortresses of poured concrete, hardened into the landscape and stocked with provisions and armaments, connected by underground railroads, all to protect the country from Germany’s armies. Of course, they succeeded only in drawing attention to the country’s most vulnerable frontier, which the Nazis were able to traverse easily, leaving the battlements of the Maginot Line untouched. Now, decades later, abandoned, the ruins continue their slow rot—gray, shambling monsters half-emerged from the pastoral landscape. But despite their decay, the fortresses appear at any moment, given the blast of trumpets, to rise and set loose across the countryside.

In Austerlitz, Sebald’s narrator travels to the Breendonk fort near Antwerp, whose fate was not terribly different than the Maginot Line. Built to withstand a German invasion during the First World War, the Germans avoided it entirely, moving past Antwerp towards France via a southern route, turning to Breendonk only later and sacking it easily. In the next war, it would be again occupied by German forces, who used it as a concentration camp to prisoners before they were shipped to Auschwitz and other locations. As Sebald’s narrator walks around the fortress’s edges, he remarks,

From whatever viewpoint I tried to form a picture of the complex I could make out no architectural plan, for its projections and indentations kept shifting, so far exceeding my comprehension that in the end I found myself unable to connect it with anything shaped by human civilization, or even with the silent relics of our prehistory and early history. And the longer I looked at it, the more often it forced me, as I felt, to lower my eyes, the less comprehensible it seemed to become.

Built to withstand the onslaught of armies, such buildings can become uncanny without their enemies. “When I studied the symmetrical layout with its outgrowth of limbs and claws,” the narrator continues, “the semicircular bastions standing out from the front of the main building like eyes, and the stumpy projection at the back of its body—I could not, despite its now evident rational structure, recognize anything designed by the human mind but saw it, instead, as the anatomical blueprint of some alien and crab-like creature.”

On the other hand, the beauty of a wall, at least as we imagine it, is that it will have none of these contortions and digressions—it is a line, straight, pure, and simple. Cutting across the desert, it will exude simplicity and purity, a strong and noble sentiment. Its appeal seems to lie less in its efficacy than in its symbolism. There has even been some discussion that the Wall will be paid for by cutting funds from other border patrol organizations—the Coast Guard, or the Transportation Security Administration that guards the country’s airports—as if to make clear to anyone confused that the goal here has nothing to do with safety or security, and everything to do with monument-building.

We should not be so sure of the symbolic simplicity of monumental walls—even the greatest, it turns out, can be difficult to find or remember. When the North African traveler Ibn Battuta came to China in 1436, he enquired repeatedly about the famed Great Wall he had heard of from other Muslim merchants; he referred to it as the “obstruction of Gog and Magog.” But after repeated interviews, he confessed that he could find no one who had seen the Great Wall, nor even anyone who knew anyone else who had.

The Great Wall of China, Kafka tells us, is not one continuous, unbroken line, but is instead riddled with openings. His 1917 short story, “The Great Wall of China,” told from the vantage point of a scholar in Peking, reimagines this architectural monstrosity as a meditation of national identity. He begins by discussing how the Wall had to be built in small sections of no more than 500 meters at a time, leaving large holes that could be traversed by invading armies. Because it was so monstrous, he explains, builders would have never in their own lifetimes experienced the satisfaction of seeing it finished. Even after completing a 500 meter section, the scholar tells us, those supervising the construction were “as a rule quite exhausted and had lost all faith in themselves, in the wall, in the world,” and had to return home to their families, leaving other sections to be finished by later generations. Reading Kafka’s story, one does wonder how those young architects, so eager to make their marks on such a monumental process, will feel once it is completed, and their dreams and visions are so permanently welded to something that reeks of despair.

As a parable, Kafka’s story tries to understand how we, as citizens of a country, participate in something larger than ourselves and our immediate communities. The Wall the scholar describes gradually comes to stand for that work of nation-building and sovereignty that all countries must develop—work that is wasteful, exhausting, and serves the vanity of a sovereign who cares nothing of his people. But, Kafka’s scholar notes, while such walls may seem to serve the vanity of the sovereign, they do not actually serve him; rather, such things are dreamed of, conceived of, and implemented by murky leadership forces that exist before and after the king who demands a Wall. “Honest, unwitting Emperor,” he exclaims, “who imagined he decreed it! We builders of the wall know that it was not so and hold our tongues.”

[pullquote align=”center”]After completing a 500 meter section, those supervising the construction of the Great Wall were “as a rule quite exhausted and had lost all faith in themselves, in the wall, in the world,” and had to return home to their families, leaving other sections to be finished by later generations.[/pullquote]

The real reasons for such great walls, the scholar confesses, have little to do with the blustery egos who announce and slap their names on them. And yet it is the belief in the myth of the Emperor and his Wall that holds a people together. Buildings, Kafka suggests, build themselves. Perhaps this is why Sebald too often sees in them an alien and alienating logic that has nothing to do with human life.

Reading Austerlitz, I have come to see these days, in many images of tall and imposing buildings, not grandeur but menace—now even the most innocuous photographs of skyscrapers and government buildings seem to radiate this. My mind often returns to an image by Akira Aimi, a photographer whose work is little known and long forgotten, but whose photographs were used in the liner notes of an album by jazz musician Keith Jarrett, where I first came across his work. In one of Aimi’s photos, skyscrapers rise up into a pure, white fog, the black and white image both grainy and sharp in that manner of 1970s photography. In the foreground, a few sparse trees, their leaves bare for winter. They are sharply delineated, these trees, but nonetheless menaced by the looming towers behind them—as though a reminder that sooner or later these ominous works of humanity will blot out what’s left of our fragile environment.

Last November, I walked out onto the Brooklyn Bridge thinking of the enormous challenges required to build such a monument—not just technical challenges, though there were many, but the significance of how its designers anticipated and accounted for human failure.

The bridge’s architects, John Augustus Roebling and his son Washington, designed the structure to be twice as strong as standard bridge specifications, precisely because of an expectation that somewhere during the process, graft and incompetence would weaken it. Despite great vigilance, a corrupt contractor snuck in faulty cable, so that somewhere, even to this day, the bridge contains around 220 tons of faulty cables—rotten, festering metal that can never be safely removed, so that at best we can only hope the other elements of the bridge can contain them. It’s a reminder that even in a structure as magnificent as the Brooklyn Bridge, we are one short remove from the catastrophes that befell the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, the I-35W bridge failure in Minneapolis, and the collapse of the skyway at the Kansas City Hyatt Regency in 1981, killing more than 100 people during a party. Perhaps, if there was some way to locate one of these hidden, faulty cables, deeply entwined with the rest of the bridge’s infrastructure, it could be singled out to passersby and tourists, a reminder that even something so seemingly strong as this has its rot.

But this is not our nature. The structural engineer and writer Henry Petroski writes in To Forgive Design: Understanding Failure that we should expect to see a massive structure like a bridge spectacularly fail somewhat regularly, every four or five decades. This is not due to the faultiness of materials, as building material technologies continue to advance and become safer each year, rather because architects and contractors fail to learn the lessons of the past. Once a design is proven successful, subsequent architects look for ways to refine it, to make it lighter, cheaper, and more ambitious, always pushing at the edge of what is acceptable in terms of cost and safety. Because they rarely keep in mind previous disasters, eventually this need to improve leads the builder to overlook any faults and repeat the mistakes of their forebears.

Petroski notes that this rate of failure more or less mirrors the turnover rate of generations. A generation that witnesses a tragedy firsthand takes from it sober lessons, resolving never to repeat its mistakes. But in time this resolve becomes mixed with nostalgia, reduced to meaningless catchphrases—never again, never forget. The next generation, eager to make its own mark on history, take these stories as given, mistaking as a bedrock foundation what is in fact only the most tenuous of vigilances. The history of a country shouldn’t chronicle its generals and politicians, but rather its industrial failures, its corner cutters, its grifters and hacks—a reminder not of what we have achieved, but what must be resisted every single day in order to achieve anything.

From my vantage point on the Brooklyn Bridge, I looked across the East River towards the skyscrapers of Manhattan. Built to exude strength and confidence, they radiated only anxiety and vulnerability. No one who has threaded their way through the concrete barricades, metal detectors, and endless layers of security these buildings can fail to notice the sense of desperation that is the modern skyscraper—an awareness of its physical tenuousness, the overwhelming desire of its bones to return to earth.

As I leaned against the great bridge’s railing, pigeons wheeled above me in their idle frenzy, and like all city dwellers learn to do, I instinctively shifted my position to avoid any potential droppings. From this new vantage point, looking north, I could see the Citibank building with its distinctive, slanted roofline, like a knife cutting up out of the city. The tower was a marvelous feat of engineering, rising as it does on four massive pillars, each a hundred feet high, the building’s structure cantilevered over tiny St. Peter’s Evangelical Church that stands at the northeast corner.

But the grace and wonder of Citibank’s knife-sharp design was, as it happened, something of a fiction; because of a deficient manner of construction, the entire building was susceptible to destruction in high winds. The architect, in what seemed like a stunning oversight but was really just common laziness, had calculated the stress of winds from each of the cardinal points, but not from winds coming at a diagonal angle. In order to save money, the design had been further changed during construction: Joints designed to have been welded together were bolted instead, saving on time and money. This in turn reduced the structural integrity of the building, such that a moderate-sized storm could potentially topple it. Once discovered, designers hid this secret flaw from the public—even the surrounding neighbors who would likely have been killed should the skyscraper collapse—and over the course of three months worked feverishly each night to fix the problem before it was discovered or the building collapsed. The tower, itself built as a monument to global capital, was, quite like that capital, equally arrogant and tenuous, inviting its own ruin.

Perhaps I had read Aimi’s photograph of trees, fog and towers wrong. It wasn’t the trees that were endangered, menaced by the buildings behind them, it was just the reverse: The towers drifting into the opaque fog were themselves slated for imminent disaster, and the trees, threadbare and withered, were going to outlast us, once we are finally overtaken by our own follies.

It would have been interesting to ask Aimi himself what he thought of this question, but the photographer died tragically on June 28, 1981. He had also been on the Brooklyn Bridge, in the evening around 5 p.m., waiting for the light to die down so he could take some photographs, when a high-tension cable snapped and fatally struck him. The cable had failed because of years of accumulated pigeon shit. The acidity had slowly eaten through the steel.

This desire of all things—skyscrapers and great bridges alike—to fail and return to the earth may explain why Manhattan’s high-rises are increasingly empty, filled only with paper ghosts. Recent studies of the most exclusive addresses in the city have found that up to a third at any given moment are unoccupied, owned by foreign businessmen, politicians, and criminals. A place like the recently-completed 432 Park Avenue, the tallest residential building in the western hemisphere, which juts out of the skyline with ill-concealed pathos, is mostly occupied by people who don’t live there, investors who can say that they own a piece of this ostentatious wealth without having to face the terror of inhabiting such a monument. Architecturally, 432 Park Avenue resembles nothing more than a series of storage lockers, stacked one on top of another into the stratosphere. It has no name or identity other than its own address—fitting for the new urban landscape in which residences are nothing but deeds on paper and insurance forms. The Manhattan skyscraper, it would now seem, has become a symbol, first and foremost of decadent decay—emptied out of its purpose, propped up by ghost capital and absent tenants.

It is impossible to see in these towering behemoths anything but the most delicate fragility—yet a vulnerability that must be hidden and protected at all costs. It is hardly a wonder, I thought as I turned to walk back to Brooklyn, that when fascism came to America, it came not, as James Waterman Wise, Jr. prophesied in 1936, “wrapped up in an American flag,” but as a real estate developer.

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Colin Dickey is the author of Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places, along with two other books of nonfiction. He is also the co-editor of The Morbid Anatomy Anthology.